The Forward Slash Podcast

Your engineers are shipping code faster than ever with AI — so why hasn't your time-to-market moved? Thanos Diacakis's answer: the bottleneck just moved with it. The fractional CTO who led Uber's JUMP bikes integration joins us to discuss why faster code doesn't mean a faster business — the real constraint jumps to deciding what to build and whether customers even want it — and what the teams actu...

Loving a technology and trusting it are two very different things — and Tamara Laine would know. She's the founder of MPWR, where her team builds policy-bound, audit-ready AI for highly regulated financial-services work. She joins James Carman to get specific: on the highest-stakes calls — like whether someone gets a loan — AI should never decide. It does the grunt work and hands a human the file....

Your AI costs keep climbing, and the power bill climbs with them. The usual answer is just "buy more compute." But what if the real ceiling is the 80-year-old design inside every chip? Steve Brunker, a 30-year enterprise CIO now CEO of Brain CA Technologies, joins us to explain why a fruit fly runs on a fraction of a watt while our data centers strain the grid, and why the next leap in AI may come...

Your AI bill went up this year, so why does it feel like you're paying to ask the same question twice? Ilan Man's fix: stop using AI everywhere and start using it on purpose. The founder of Paradox Machines and former data lead at Squarespace joins James Carman with a test any leader can run. Let AI move fast where being wrong is cheap, keep a human where it's costly, and once you know the answer...

Who's actually reviewing the open source code your business runs on? Rich Bowen — Apache Software Foundation member since the late '90s, six terms on its board, now an open source strategist at AWS — tells host James Carman that maintainers are drowning in AI-generated pull requests that fix problems nobody has. He calls them "pizzas I didn't order." James and Rich cover what AI slop means for the...

Nearly every company is "using AI" now — but for most, it still isn't showing up in the P&L, and boards have noticed. Todd James says that gap is a leadership problem, not a technology one. The former Chief Data & Technology Officer at 84.51° and head of AI at Kroger — now advising leaders through Aurora Insights — joins James Carman to unpack why AI stalls after the first pilot, why the f...

When an AI agent starts writing and shipping code inside your platform, who is it — and what is it allowed to do? Host James Carman sits down with Ajay Chankramath — CTO Platform Engineering Consulting, and former head of platform engineering at ThoughtWorks — on the questions IT leaders are wrestling with right now. They get into agent identity and governance: should an agent get a login like a d...

Your company just gave everyone a Claude or ChatGPT seat — so why isn't the ROI showing up? Host James Carman and YNDR founder Chris Thomas break down why handing out AI licenses isn't a strategy, why tokenmaxxing and prompt engineers won't deliver results, and how homegrown AI agents you actually own beat seven-figure SaaS contracts.

Cancel the SaaS contract and vibe code it yourself? In this episode, host James Carman talks with Kendra Ramirez, CEO of KR Digital and a global Claude ambassador who's been building bots since 2018, about where AI actually earns its keep for business leaders. They find the line between a fast prototype and production-grade software, when off-the-shelf tools like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT are a...

Cancel the SaaS contract and vibe code it yourself? In this episode, host James Carman talks with Kendra Ramirez, CEO of KR Digital and a global Claude ambassador who's been building bots since 2018, about where AI actually earns its keep for business leaders. They find the line between a fast prototype and production-grade software, when off-the-shelf tools like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT are a...

If you're running AI on Kubernetes, you've probably hit this question: does the cluster actually help with inference, or is it just where everything ends up? Host James Carman gets a straight answer from William Morgan — the engineer who coined "service mesh," created Linkerd, and now leads Buoyant. Two people who've built this infrastructure for a living talk through where Kubernetes earns its ke...

June 2026: the month AI stopped being a tool and became actual infrastructure. Covering the 19-day Fable 5 regulatory blackout, GLM 5.2's un-censorable open weights, and the supply chain attacks that made self-hosting the security team's problem. The /hotfix from The Forward Slash — a short-form read on the AI news engineering leaders actually need to track.

What if AI adoption didn't have to mean layoffs? Diane Weaver, co-founder and COO of Baryons, joins James to explore the "uncomfortable middle" of enterprise AI — the gap where jobs are being reshaped but new ones haven't arrived yet. They dig into why top-down AI mandates breed shadow work and sabotage, how IKEA turned 8,000 at-risk support reps into a $1.5B new revenue line, and why the organiza...

Most companies are buying AI tools before they've decided what they're for. James Carman, Callibrity CTO, and Jason Swafford, founder of Drag6, make the straight-talking case for the other way around. From there they cover why "failing" at AI is often just R&D in disguise, how to reframe shadow IT as innovation instead of a threat, why governance should feel like a head start rather than a tax...

Bubble about to burst, or a wave you can't sit out? In Part 2, James and Sid Dutta go from technical to strategic: why AI is a wave, not a bubble; the "harvest now, decrypt later" threat and what's just hype; the "Kardashian effect" drowning real expertise on LinkedIn; and why you won't compete with AI — you'll compete with peers who use it better. Perfect for the leaders who'd rather learn from o...

Your AI agent inherits your permissions. It doesn't inherit your intent — and that's the gap nobody's watching. James sits down with Sid Dutta — founder of Privaclave and a 24-year data protection executive (Amex, Worldpay, Microsoft Gaming) — for a two-part series on why being compliant doesn't equal secure, the single prompt that exposes data across silos, and the shift from static inventories t...

Leadership mandated AI. Now they want the return — and your pilots have nothing to show for it. James sits down with Bob White, a 20-year ed-tech and SaaS operator (Cengage, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, VPG) who now advises companies on AI adoption, for an honest teardown of why most enterprise AI never pays off: escaping "pilot purgatory" with a problem-first funnel, why nobody being on the hook is...

Five AI stories from the same week. One thesis: AI just moved from pilot to production. The first /hotfix from The Forward Slash — a new short-form read from James Carman on the AI news engineering leaders actually need to track. ~20 minutes covering EY and Microsoft's billion-dollar forward-deployed engineer concession, the 83/29 agentic AI security gap, Anthropic overtaking OpenAI on enterprise...

Is your AI strategy replacing people, or amplifying them? James sits down with Mike Hruska — founder of Baryons, former NIST material scientist, and TEDx speaker on what magic teaches leaders — for a human-first tour of AI leadership in 2026: the two kinds of executives this market is creating, why high-performing teams shrink to two or three when AI joins the room, what AIQ — Authentic Intelligen...

Is your enterprise AI actively shipping, or just sitting pretty in a deck? James sits down with John Capobianco, head of AI and Developer Relations at Itential and former senior network architect for Canada's House of Commons, for an engineering leader's tour of what's actually shipping in 2026: spec-driven development with Ralph loops, MCP as the next generational protocol, agents built like org...

The hardest question in enterprise AI isn't "can we build agents?" — it's "how do we let them act on our behalf without losing the company?" In Part 2 of our conversation with John Willis, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, James gets concrete about what agent guardrails actually look like in regulated environments: delegated authority, read/write/execute permissions, kill switches, and the Andon C...

The AI agent horror stories your vendors aren't telling you — and what to do before they happen to you. John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook and one of the original pioneers of the DevOps movement, joins James for part one of a two-part conversation on what autonomous AI agents are actually doing inside enterprise infrastructure right now. From vault secrets dumped to open source to entir...

Is your enterprise ready to run AI agents in production — or just in demos?  Logan Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Waxell AI, joins us to explore why deploying autonomous AI agents at enterprise scale is a fundamentally different challenge than building them. From runaway costs and unpredictable agent behavior to PII exposure and AI governance, we break down what actually breaks when agentic systems...

Is your biggest cost reduction opportunity hiding in your energy bill?  Josh Dorfman, CEO of Supercool and climate entrepreneur, joins us to explore why the smartest companies have stopped treating clean energy as a sustainability initiative — and started treating it as a CFO conversation. They break down how AI is compressing diligence cycles, optimizing fleets, and unlocking business models that...

What does it take to survive a 20x traffic spike?  Part two concludes our chat with Matthew McDole. This week, he shares how Yum! Brands scales systems for Super Bowl Sunday—plus lessons on performance, resilience, and AI in engineering.