The Tech Trek

AI is not just changing how engineers write code. It is changing who gets close enough to shape the work. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Robert Stewart, CTO at Arbital Health, joins Amir to talk about how AI is bringing actuarial subject matter experts closer to product and engineering teams, especially in healthcare and risk based contracts. Robert shares how his team is pairing technically mi...

Voice AI is moving from simple call routing into work that used to require trained human agents. The harder question is what happens when those conversations involve lending, collections, servicing, compliance, and real customer risk. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand speaks with Joshua March, founder and CEO of Veritus, about building AI voice agents for regulated financial services....

Joanne Chen, VP of Data and AI at SimplePractice, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what it takes to build AI data products in a regulated, sensitive domain where privacy, consistency, monitoring, and customer trust have to be designed from the start. This conversation gets into why AI product development feels different from traditional software, how teams should think about quality control, and...

Kevin Haggard, Vice President of Engineering at Barracuda, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how AI is showing up across cybersecurity products, engineering workflows, team adoption, and software delivery culture. He shares how Barracuda is approaching AI with guardrails, why adoption varies across teams, and what happened when the company ran protected AI dev days for the engineering organization...

AI adoption is no longer just a policy conversation. For many organizations, the bigger question is how to move faster without creating avoidable risk. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand sits down with Aimee Cardwell, CIO and CISO in residence at Transcend, to talk about responsible AI deployment, the tension between speed and control, and how leaders should think about security, compl...

AI agents are easy to demo. They are much harder to trust, maintain, govern, and put into production. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Amir Bormand talks with Lucas Thelosen, CEO and cofounder at Gravity, about the agent economy, AI analytics, and what changes when analysts move from doing every task themselves to managing AI systems that create more bandwidth. Lucas shares why Gravity built Orio...

Yahoo is not just adding AI on top of existing products. It is using AI across product experiences, internal tools, engineering workflows, and modernization efforts. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Lee Zen, CTO at Yahoo, joins Amir Bormand to talk about modernizing at massive scale, moving from on prem infrastructure to the cloud, rebuilding internal tools with AI, and how engineering organizati...

Mike Choi wanted to work at Apple for years. Then he got there and had the moment many ambitious builders eventually hit. Is this the thing I was sprinting toward? In this episode of The Tech Trek, Mike Choi, co founder at Koah, shares his path from Korea to the United States, mandatory military service, Apple, Twitter, and eventually building Koah, an AI monetization company helping AI app builde...

AI is moving fast, but the bigger question for companies and governments may be control. Who owns the data, the workflow, the output, and the risk? In this episode, Amir talks with Shaun Modi, cofounder and CEO of Capitol AI, about sovereign AI, shadow AI, model dependency, government use cases, and why organizations need repeatable, governed, auditable workflows before AI becomes part of core ope...

Most healthcare AI stories start with diagnosis. Edmund Jackson thinks that misses the real bottleneck. In this episode of The Tech Trek, Edmund Jackson, CEO and founder of Unity AI, joins Amir to talk about AI for healthcare operations. The conversation gets into why scheduling, staffing, follow up, payer coordination, and interoperability are often where healthcare breaks down, and why solving t...

Deepak Bapat, CTO and co founder at Tabs, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how his team is using tools like Claude Code and Cursor, where AI is helping, and why systems thinking may matter more than raw coding ability as engineering work shifts. Practical Takeaways • AI coding agents are already producing useful production work, but judgment still matters. • Tool choice may be less important than...

Agentic AI is not just a model problem. It is exposing gaps in how teams store, share, retrieve, and coordinate context across applications, agents, and people. In this episode, Amir talks with Karthik Ranganathan, cofounder and co CEO at Yugabyte, about why databases are under new pressure as AI moves from model serving into agentic workflows. They discuss Yugabyte’s evolution, the limits of toda...

Agentic coding is not just making engineers faster. It is changing how teams triage bugs, prototype features, involve product, and think about hiring. Scott Weller, CTO and founder at EnFi, joins The Tech Trek to talk about how his team is building around agentic software development while operating in financial services, where trust, accuracy, and human judgment still matter. EnFi uses AI agents...

AI adoption looks very different when mistakes can create legal, financial, and reputational risk. Vijay Gandra, Global CDO at Acrisure, joins The Tech Trek to talk about AI transformation inside a regulated industry, where explainability, data quality, governance, cost, and team readiness matter just as much as model capability. The conversation covers the trust gap in AI, how data teams are shif...

Leonid Belkind, co founder and CTO at Torq, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what changes when an engineering organization does more than experiment with AI tools. Torq builds agentic security operations, and Leonid shares how his team is using AI across engineering, product, hiring, customer success, and go to market work. This conversation gets past the shallow version of “AI makes coding faste...

AI coding tools are not just changing how software gets written. They are changing how teams work, how engineers are evaluated, and where bottlenecks show up. Scott Breitenother, CEO and cofounder of Kilo, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what engineering looks like when developers are managing multiple agents, work continues overnight, and the real constraint is no longer typing code, but judgme...

Tax is one of the hardest places to earn trust with AI. The work is complex, the stakes are personal, and being mostly right is not good enough. In this episode of The Tech Trek, David Kang, founder and CEO of Keeper, explains how his team is applying AI to tax workflows without pretending humans disappear from the process. He breaks down why tax is such a strong fit for language models, where AI...

What happens after you build a public company, spend nearly three decades at the helm, and then find yourself starting over? Rob Locascio, CEO and founder of Uare.ai, joins The Tech Trek to talk about that exact journey. Rob previously founded LivePerson, helped create web chat for customer service, took the company public, and later scaled it into a major conversational AI business. Now he is bac...

Snigdha Kumar, CEO and co founder at Bricco, joins The Tech Trek to talk about a part of fintech most people never see, state by state licensing. For any financial company trying to launch in the United States, licensing can be slow, expensive, and operationally painful. Snigdha explains why that barrier limits experimentation, how Bricco is trying to automate the process, and why better complianc...

Adam Kirk, CTO and cofounder of Jump, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what it really takes to build AI native products for people who do not want to think like technologists. Jump serves financial advisors, a market where ease of use, trust, workflow fit, and domain context matter as much as the model itself. Adam shares how his team validates product ideas, uses coding agents across engineering...

Krishna Sai, CTO at SolarWinds, joins The Tech Trek to talk about one of the biggest shifts happening inside IT and engineering teams: AI is moving people from operators to orchestrators. The conversation goes beyond faster code and automation. Krishna explains why AI is changing how teams think about systems, governance, validation, observability, and the skills technical leaders will need as wor...

Dan Wald, cofounder and chief AI officer at Sciemo, joins The Tech Trek for a sharp conversation about what AI can and cannot do inside real business workflows. The big question: can AI move beyond quick answers and actually support the messy, context heavy work that still lives in Excel, data teams, and functional expertise? Dan breaks down why consumer style AI has trained people to expect insta...

Most data teams do not have an AI problem yet. They have an operating model problem. Mike Doll, VP of Data at Guitar Center, joins The Tech Trek to talk about why analytics teams often become reactive ticket factories, and what it takes to turn data into a true business partnership. As companies push harder into AI, automation, and faster decision making, the foundation matters more than ever. If...

Cybersecurity is no longer just about keeping attackers out. It is about what happens when they get in. Andrew Rubin, CEO and founder of Illumio, joins The Tech Trek to talk about the speed of modern attacks, why AI changes the security equation, and how companies should think about breach containment, micro segmentation, and guardrails for agentic AI. This conversation gets into a practical shift...

Kenneth Schwartz, VP of Global Data and Governance at Genmab, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what happens when data teams start applying software engineering discipline to modern data work. As AI raises expectations across the business, the challenge is no longer just building more dashboards or models. It is building data products, governance systems, and engineering cultures that can move fro...