IT Visionaries

If AI is better than your developers, why are your best engineers still writing code?
Software engineering is the only engineering discipline where we make the engineer also turn the wrenches. Nicky Pike, Field CTO at Coder, argues that AI is finally letting your best engineers become architects while agents do the mechanic work — and lays out exactly what has to change about how you hire, govern, and provision your teams to make it real.
Nicky has 20+ years in developer infrastructure — Xbox Live, private cloud at CVS Health, Cloud Foundry at VMware/Pivotal, and now the 'first mile' problem at Coder. He's a self-described 'platform guy, not a developer' who's watched this pattern play out through four platform shifts and sees the same arc happening faster.

What you'll learn
• Why the developer laptop is the worst possible endpoint for running AI agents
• The identity split that fixes 'AI slop' overnight — human vs. agent permissions
• Why Uber blew through their entire AI budget in four months (and how to avoid it)
• How the software bottleneck moved from the inner loop to the outer loop — and why GitHub can't keep up
• What to actually tell junior devs asking 'am I cooked?'

Connect
Nicky Pike on LinkedIn
Coder

Chapters
• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:15 From Air Force crew chief to platform CTO — the 'works on my machine' problem
• 2:44 Why this is the most interesting moment in tech since the cloud
• 4:46 AI is Home Depot for software — the citizen developer reframe
• 8:33 The homegrown-app problem coming back to bite us
• 10:16 How Minecraft kids built Coder — and the 'first mile' problem
• 13:00 Why the developer laptop is your biggest AI security hole
• 16:17 AI is a Mensa student on caffeine — the identity fix that changes everything
• 19:31 Uber blew through their AI budget in 4 months — the tokenomics trap
• 20:36 Sovereign AI, open weights, and self-hosting the future
• 29:02 The bottleneck moved — why GitHub can't keep up
• 31:46 The airplane magazine trap — why bolting AI on will destroy you
• 36:33 Software engineers have been doing two jobs this whole time
• 40:27 GTG 1002 and why the disease is also the cure
• 43:02 What happens to open source when AI writes the code
• 48:19 What to tell junior devs asking 'am I cooked?'


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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

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IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Would you trust AI at only 80% accuracy? What about for your enterprise?

KPMG Chief Digital Officer Kelle Fontenot explains why AI success cannot be measured by headcount reduction alone - and how synthetic data can help companies test agents safely, protect sensitive information, and focus on the moments that matter most to employees.

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you tell your AI NOT to delete your database you’re good right?

In this episode of IT Visionaries, Chris Brandt sits down with Daniel Meyer, CTO of Camunda, to explore why prompts alone are not enough to govern AI.

They discuss the difference between governance by instruction and governance by structure, why enterprises are struggling to turn AI investments into meaningful outcomes, and why adding agents to legacy processes often creates faster versions of the same old problems.

Daniel also explains how one company reduced a four-day process to just 17 minutes—and why results like that only happen when organizations fundamentally rebuild how work gets done.

Highlights:

• Why enterprises need guardrails AI cannot override

• How orchestration connects people, systems, and AI agents

• Why process redesign matters more than simple automation

• How businesses can safely enable non-technical teams to build with AI

• What the orchestrated enterprise could look like over the next five years

Connect

Daniel Meyer on LinkedIn

Camunda

IT Visionaries

 

Chapters

2:16 Why Business Processes Are Enterprise Algorithms

2:40 Why AI Investment Isn’t Delivering Bigger Outcomes

4:29 What Real AI Leverage Looks Like

6:35 Rebuilding the Software Development Process Around AI

11:19 Why Companies Struggle to Understand Their Own Processes

15:29 How Harmony Made a Process 90x Faster

16:40 How ProcessOS Reengineers Business Processes

19:54 Building AI Agents You Can Actually Trust

21:49 When an AI Agent Deletes the Database

22:28 Governance by Instruction vs. Governance by Structure

25:03 What AI Governance Can Learn From Human Access Controls

38:45 How to Test and Switch Between AI Models

45:00 Is Enterprise Software Becoming Headless?

46:51 The Rise of the Orchestrated Enterprise

--
This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Does AI watch your network? Read-only of course!

In this segment from IT Visionaries, Chris Brandt and John Capobianco discuss where AI agents can create real value for network teams before they ever touch production infrastructure. Instead of jumping straight to full automation, John makes the case for read-only AI: agents that document the network, compare changes over time, run tests, support compliance, enrich tickets, and help engineers understand what changed when something breaks.

They also explore why networking may be uniquely suited for AI-assisted operations. Networks are deterministic, but the problems can be difficult to spot - especially when outdated documentation, configuration drift, and human error pile up over time.

Before AI changes the network, maybe it should learn to watch it.

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6zZmgPOW7I

Chapters

0:00 - Why AI Should Watch the Network

1:03 - Finding What Changed

3:51 - Beyond Config Management

7:15 - From Detection to Safe Remediation

--
This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Your people aren't tired of change — they're saturated. There's a difference, and it's the difference between an AI rollout that lands and one that bounces off your workforce entirely.

Kelle Fontenot is the Chief Digital Officer at KPMG US, where the CIO, the CTO, and the Chief Data Officer all report to her. She owns internal innovation, architecture, platform, engineering, and data across a 40,000-person workforce — and she's spent the last four and a half years steering that organization through cloud, data, and now an AI wave reshaping how every one of her people does their job.

In this conversation, Kelle reframes 'change fatigue' as 'change saturation,' reveals that KPMG employees built 25,000 AI agents in the last six months alone, walks through the synthetic-data acquisition powering regulated AI testing at scale, and explains the brand-new Anthropic partnership turning a 140-year-old services firm into a products company.

 

What you'll learn

• Why 'change fatigue' is the wrong diagnosis — and what 'saturation' changes about how you roll out AI

• Why KPMG refuses to use AI as a head-count lever — and why that decision is actually accelerating adoption

• How 40,000 KPMG employees built 25,000 AI agents in six months — and what that means for who counts as a 'builder'

• Why the CIO, CTO, and CDO all report to one person — and what would break if they didn't

• How synthetic data lets a regulated firm test AI at scale without the breach risk

• What KPMG's Anthropic partnership signals about the future of professional services

 

Connect

Kelle Fontenot on LinkedIn

KPMG US

IT Visionaries Podcast

 

Chapters

0:00 AI Change Has Become AI Saturation

1:29 Why “Change Fatigue” Is the Wrong Diagnosis

3:27 Prompting Like It’s November

4:46 Giving People Space to Innovate

6:38 AI Is Not a Headcount Lever

10:07 Building AI in a Regulated Business

11:24 The Risk Container Around AI

14:12 The AI-Augmented Auditor

17:21 The Agent Governance Problem

20:59 Why Digital, Data, and Tech Sit Together

22:59 Building an Inside Startup

30:04 Innovation Has to Happen at the Edge

36:48 The ROI Math for AI Agents

38:50 Why KPMG Bought a Synthetic Data Company

44:09 KPMG’s Anthropic Partnership

51:03 Shipping AI at Scale

52:10 Kelle Fontenot’s Advice for Leaders

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.