TechUnhinged

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Erik Gross, Cofounder at The Tech Academy, a former US Navy nuclear reactor operator and instructor. Erik argues that AI rarely fails on its own; it fails when leaders hand it work that needs identical outputs, uncleaned data, or untrained staff. They cover enterprise AI readiness, deterministic versus non-deterministic systems, AI literacy for non-technical staff, and what AI coding tools take away from new engineers. Erik also explains why 96 percent of employees whose unused SaaS accounts his team soft-deleted never asked for access back.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with James Edgell, founder of SoftEXIT, a no-code application platform. James argues that AI is a strong coder but a poor planner, which makes clear requirements, data design, and architecture the work that now decides whether software holds up. They cover AI software development, feature drift in AI-generated code, the AI developer productivity gap, and the shrinking entry-level pipeline. James also explains why the DBA and the architect have become the most important people on a team once AI writes the code.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Ashar Samdani sits down with Andres Andreu, CEO of Constella Intelligence, an identity risk intelligence company. Andres argues that compliance doesn't make an enterprise secure, and that SOC 2 reports and written policies offer hope rather than protection once AI agents hold real privileges. They cover agentic AI security, AI agents as privileged identities, hybrid architecture for AI cost control, and deception engineering. Andres also describes how, by his account, Constella went from monitoring 400 Telegram channels to 11,000 using agents and without adding a single person.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Liza Adams, founder and AI advisor at GrowthPath Partners, a go-to-market veteran of five tech waves. Liza argues that AI adoption fails not because of the tools but because leaders skip the human change management that has to come first. They cover AI adoption, the mindset shifts that precede behavior change, risk matrix governance, and how AI search shapes buyer decisions. Liza also explains why the security team at PointClickCare became a co-builder rather than a blocker, and why that made every later workflow faster.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostAshar Samdani sits down withJoshua Nichols, Director of AI and Automation atCoorsTek, a technical ceramics manufacturer in Golden, Colorado. Joshua argues that access isn't adoption, and that people build confidence in AI through daily practice rather than license rollouts. They cover enterprise AI adoption, citizen development in Replit and Databricks, deterministic agents versus autonomous ones, and token budget caps. Joshua also explains why the biggest skill gap isn't prompting, but the willingness to reimagine a workflow around AI.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with David (DJ) Morimanno, Field CTO for North America at Xalient, who advises Fortune 500 companies on identity. DJ argues that an AI agent should be governed like a digital worker, judged on why it acted, not only what it can access. They cover AI agent governance, privileged access management, agent ownership models, and the first moves for a company going AI first. DJ also explains why buying a tool before sizing the problem stalls identity programs, and why every user, human or not, now counts as privileged.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Ashar Samdani sits down with Sriram Ramanathan, Group CTO at XBP Global, a workflow automation company operating in 20 countries. Sriram contends that software companies selling licenses are already in trouble, and only those selling outcomes survive. He explains why the gap between agentic AI vs RPA is the difference between a flow that breaks when a button moves and a system that figures things out, why enterprises can skip the API rebuild and point agents at the mess they already have, and how his team now measures agent productivity the same way it measures a human's. He also describes the cluster of nine agents that rewrote his own development process.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostRabia Javeed sits down withRisto Uuk, Head of European Policy and Research at theFuture of Life Institute, who has spent five years on the Act's general-purpose AI rules. Risto argues that the rules for the biggest models are not the weak point; the open question is whether anyone will enforce them. He explains why training compute is a proxy for danger rather than a measure, why the Code of Practice was built from the labs' own safety frameworks, and how the rules reach a company with no office in Europe. He also walks through the agent that broke out of a test environment and hacked third-party infrastructure.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Charath Ranganathan, Chief Technology Officer at CoreStory, which builds tools that pull specifications out of legacy codebases. Charath argues that AI has replaced coding and has not affected the discipline of engineering, and that conflating the two is the most misleading assumption enterprises bring into an AI rollout. He explains why a 1970s mainframe resists modernization because code records what was decided, not why; why evals belong in front of production rather than behind it; and how a flood of generated code produces cognitive surrender. He also goes back to the pixelated circle on a Sinclair Spectrum that made him learn trigonometry on his own.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Randeep S. Bhatia, the ex-CTO at Splash, which runs the largest music stage on Roblox. Randeep argues that AI pilots do not stall because the technology falls short; they stall because nobody gave them a metric and an end date, so they harden into permanent demos. He explains why a pilot with no date is a decision nobody admits to making, why one developer naming a station a playlist breaks AI faster than messy data does, and how a grocery receipt models the way an agent earns autonomy. He also tells the story of the AI workflow he told a legal tech company not to ship.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostRabia Javeed sits down withWes Bush, founder and CEO ofProductLed, who, by his own count, has advised more than 400 SaaS companies. Wes argues that AI spending does not fail because of the technology; it fails because most companies cannot say where their product creates value, so the money funds workflows and pricing that are never aligned with that value. He explains why the majority of AI spend that returns nothing is a tuition bill worth paying, why credit-based pricing has become the new seat-based pricing, and how AI native companies delete a workflow rather than speed it up. He also admits that almost none of his own AI automations yield any measurable results.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostRabia Javeed sits down withBob Berbeco, Chief Information Officer atMahaska Health, a rural hospital in Iowa, and former informatics leader atIndiana University Health. Bob argues that AI strategies do not die because the technology fails, they die because nobody mapped the risk first. He explains why every modernization and AI decision at his organization runs through a risk matrix, why data governance and veracity must exist before a single model goes live, and how his team stopped accepting vendor pitches and instead built an AI center of excellence. He also shares the horror story of an aging billing system whose motherboard died and the vendor contract that saved it.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostRabia Javeed sits down withTia Hopkins, founder ofCTRL+EXEC and former Chief Cyber Resilience Officer & Field CTO ateSentire, where she spent nine years rising from solutions engineer to the executive team. Tia argues AI does not change what cyber resilience means, only how organizations build it: every AI agent should earn expanded responsibility the way a new hire earns trust, through a probationary period, not a blank check. She explains why resilience was never about preventing every breach, and why bolting AI onto a broken legacy foundation builds new failure on old failure. This conversation is a playbook for staying resilient when your attackers have the same AI toolkit you do.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, hostRabia Javeed sits down with Lydia, Chief Information Officer at Appreciation Financial, co-founder of Genie AI, and founder of the People's Accords, with over eight years in data and AI strategy across financial services. The conversation digs into the modernization paradox, where 92% of leaders call AI critical yet fewer than a quarter have systems ready to support it. Lydia unpacks why AI adoption really comes down to people, context, and junk data, how regulated industries must balance legacy storage against the cloud, and why not every task needs an LLM. She also reveals how her team keeps client data out of public models, and offers a candid look at the human cost of AI-driven layoffs.

In this episode ofTechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down withChris Colinsky, CTO and Principal AI Engineer at Howl, which has been building for the web since 2003 and is the creator of the open-source OpenArmature framework for LLM-powered pipelines. Chris cuts through the AI hype, arguing that large language models are pattern matching at scale, probabilistic, confidently wrong, and only as reliable as the engineering around them. He explains why most AI failures are really data quality problems, why legacy system modernization must precede AI adoption, and how his "calculate first, reason second" approach builds reliable AI systems on unpredictable models. From graph-based retrieval to self-hosted small models, this conversation is a practical playbook for taking AI from demo to production.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Joel Grossman, CIO of IMG Academy and a 25-year veteran of technology leadership at Legacy.com, iProspect, and Leapfrog Online, explores what happens when frontier AI meets a 20-year-old recruiting platform and a 500-acre training campus. He argues that AI has erased the multi-year data-warehousing work once needed to make it useful, compressing it into weeks. Further, Joel warns the bottleneck in AI adoption is now organizational, not technical, legacy systems must be modernized without disrupting the families relying on them. His emphasis is to give domain experts direct AI access first, wrap it in production-grade security second, then scale safely. Speed does not equal judgment, and adversarial review must stay central, not a checkbox.

Barbara Pender has spent 25 years watching organizations bolt new technology onto old problems and call it transformation. In this episode ofTechUnhinged, in conversation withRabia Javeed, she draws a parallel between how social media scaled without guardrails and where AI is headed, arguing the stakes this time are considerably higher. Most companies are fixing the wrong thing, adding new tools to old problems and calling it progress. Her four-stage trust ladder, assist, execute, optimize, orchestrate, reframes the autonomy question entirely. The real test was never about what an agent can do but about what happens when it doesn't. On governance, if no single executive owns what breaks, you don't have governance, you have a process document. She also flags what most leaders skip, that running AI at enterprise scale burns serious compute, and if you are not measuring that cost alongside business value, you are only reading half the bill.

Christopher Penn has spent over a decade watching marketers chase tools instead of outcomes, and his diagnosis is uncomfortable. On this episode of TechUnhinged, in conversation with Rabia Javeed, he explains how most social media strategies bleed money quietly because nobody measures soft costs like human hours. Organic reach is collapsing, SaaS products are becoming commodities that any skilled operator can replicate in an afternoon, and templated jobs are vanishing faster than companies want to admit. Penn's argument is blunt that if your entire role runs on standard operating procedures, you are already replaceable. His 5P framework, purpose, people, process, platform, performance, cuts through the noise for B2B marketers, founders and CTOs rebuilding stale marketing stacks. The sharpest takeaway is that measurement maturity separates growing companies from ones running on assumptions and hoping the numbers never get checked.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Luis Suarez, CTO of H.I.G. Capital, unpacks why AI is forcing tech debt onto the board agenda. Luis explains how AI instantly exposes legacy systems and unready data, noting that tech debt remediation takes four to five times as much effort as modern integrations, and why isolated island systems are a liability in today's interconnected ecosystems. He shares H.I.G.'s AI-first playbook, including top-down CEO mandates, 8 to 10 hours of annual AI training per employee, and AI-powered due diligence. From managing hallucinations to balancing speed with strategic foundations, Luis offers hard-earned lessons on modernization, leadership, and curiosity in enterprise technology.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Paul Bockelman, CTO of Qanapi and a 25-year veteran of AWS and Google's defense/intelligence cloud teams, explores the security challenges faced by modern organizations. He warns that AI adoption is outpacing data protection, and employees are bleeding sensitive data into public LLMs without guardrails. Further, Paul also sounds the alarm about post-quantum cryptography and predicts that Q-Day may arrive as early as 2027, noting that adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data to decrypt later. His emphasis is to protect data at the data layer first, build crypto-agile foundations second, then scale AI. Compliance does not equal security, and architects must design for the spirit of regulations, not just the checkbox.