The Tech Trek

An AI agent can be fast, available, and still get the answer wrong. That changes what engineering teams need to measure. Jeetendra Soneja, VP of Engineering, AI Platform at iHerb, joins The Tech Trek to discuss why AI observability goes beyond traditional software monitoring. Teams need to understand not just latency and errors, but also response quality, groundedness, cost, and whether an agent c...

What happens to engineering teams when everyone can code? Bali Raghavan, cofounder and CTO at Hero Safety, joins Amir Bormand to discuss how AI is changing team structures, engineering skills, and hiring. At Hero Safety, designers, product managers, and operations teams are using AI to build and solve problems that once required engineering support. That shift changes what companies need from engi...

Getting a voice agent to talk is one challenge. Knowing whether it can handle real conversations is another. Brooke Hopkins, founder of Coval, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how teams test, evaluate, and scale voice AI agents. Drawing on her experience leading evaluation infrastructure at Waymo, Brooke explains why testing voice agents shares surprising similarities with testing autonomous vehicle...

What happens when AI changes more than coding speed? Chris Merrick, Co Founder and CTO at Omni, explains how his engineering team is adapting around AI, autonomy, product ownership, and a lighter operating model. Omni has about 25 engineers working in groups as small as one to three people. Engineers are expected to make product decisions, move without waiting for detailed specifications, and show...

AI coding tools are helping engineers write code faster. But faster code does not automatically mean better business outcomes. Vitaly Gordon, cofounder and CEO of Faros, joins The Tech Trek to talk about the gap between AI adoption and measurable results. The conversation looks at why engineering teams are spending more on AI, how enterprises are thinking about ROI, and why existing processes can...

Technology teams are often asked to solve something before everyone agrees on what the actual problem is. Chad Carrington, CIO at Golden1 Credit Union, joins The Tech Trek to talk about listening to business partners, defining the outcome first, and resisting the instinct to jump immediately to a technology solution. The conversation also looks at how AI is changing this skill. As tools make build...

AI has learned from the digital world. Physical AI brings real world data into the picture. Doron Hazan, Director of Products and AI at Wiliot, joins The Tech Trek to explain how physical AI connects AI systems with objects, environments, and supply chains. The challenge is not simply processing data. It is collecting accurate, current information from the physical world. Doron explains how ambien...

Scott Hanson went straight from a PhD program at the University of Michigan to building a semiconductor company. Today, as Founder and CTO of Ambiq, he is working on the same core idea that inspired the company years ago: putting intelligence into the devices around us. What changed is what those devices can now do. Scott shares what it was like becoming CEO without prior industry experience, why...

Building an AI product is getting easier. Building an AI company that lasts is not. Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner at Recursive Ventures, joins The Tech Trek to explain what he looks for when investing at the earliest stages of AI companies. The conversation covers how lower development costs could change venture funding, why subject matter expertise matters more as software becomes ea...

AI coding agents can produce software faster, but they do not replace the judgment needed to understand the system. Shaun Patterson, CTO at Titan, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how agentic coding is changing problem solving, development workflows, project management, and technical hiring. Shaun explains why engineers still need a strong mental model of the systems they are building. AI can genera...

AI agents create a different security problem from traditional software. They can operate at software speed and scale while behaving in ways that are much less predictable. Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and cofounder of Teleport, joins The Tech Trek to discuss what happens when companies deploy agents into security systems designed around humans, applications, and relatively static organizational structures....

AI agents are moving beyond helping with individual tasks. The bigger question is how much of a company they can actually run. Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, joins The Tech Trek to discuss what happens when AI handles engineering, support, marketing, research, and other parts of company execution. Ben explains how Polsia uses specialized agents that can take direction from a founder or decide what t...

AI coding agents can help engineering teams ship more code. But the bigger change may be what engineers spend their time doing. Viren Baraiya, Co-Founder and CTO of Orkes, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how AI is changing workflow orchestration, engineering productivity, project delivery, and hiring. As agents take on more implementation work, engineers are spending more time on design, architectu...

AI is doing more than helping engineers write code faster. It is starting to change who can participate in software development, how teams divide work, and where technical talent creates the most value. Shaosu Liu, Co Founder and CTO at Loop, explains how his team is using AI agents across the software development lifecycle while also enabling highly technical people outside traditional software e...

AI can make teams faster, but it can also expose every weakness in the data underneath it. Elizabeth Stanford, VP of Data at PandaDoc, joins The Tech Trek to talk about what it takes to prepare a growing company to actually execute on AI. That means more than giving engineers access to Claude or Cursor. It means getting the data foundation, team skills, stakeholder expectations, and ownership mode...

AI is not just changing software. It may also change the economics of the services businesses built around it. Anirudh Sriram, CTO at Tessera Labs, joins The Tech Trek to explain how his company is using AI to take on enterprise transformation work traditionally handled by large systems integrators. Tessera focuses on migrations, ERP upgrades, code, data, and planning, but the bigger story is how...

AI changes more than the product roadmap. It changes how engineering teams build, how data flows through the company, and what a CTO needs to own. Andrew Rabinovich, CTO and Head of AI at Upwork, joins The Tech Trek to talk about his move from leading AI into the broader CTO role. His view is simple: AI is no longer just another component inside a software system. Increasingly, AI is the system, a...

AI is making software faster and cheaper to build. It is not making trust any easier to earn. Simon Wu, Partner at Cathay Innovation, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how AI is changing investment opportunities across healthcare, fintech, insurtech, legal services, and other regulated industries. The conversation looks at a major shift in software economics. Instead of simply selling seats, licenses...

AI can make individual tasks faster while leaving the organization with the same old coordination problems, or even making them worse. Sergei Sorokin, CEO and co founder of Highlight, joins The Tech Trek to discuss why faster output does not automatically mean better work. Teams can generate documents, code, notes, and analysis faster, then spend the time they saved reshaping that output, moving i...

AI is changing hiring in ways that go far beyond candidates using ChatGPT to answer interview questions. The harder problem is knowing whether the person on screen is actually who they claim to be, whether their answers are their own, and what happens if someone with malicious intent gets access to company systems. Yagub Rahimov, CEO and founder of Polygraf AI, joins The Tech Trek to discuss the g...

If AI can produce the code, what becomes more valuable for engineers? John Kuhn, CTO and cofounder of Integral, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how agentic development is changing engineering work, product ownership, experimentation, and hiring. Integral helps companies de identify and anonymize data for model training, including unstructured data. John argues that the value of an engineer is shift...

Sports organizations have more data than ever. The real advantage comes from knowing which problem to solve, which data matters, and whether people will trust the answer enough to change how they work. Rohan Nagi, VP of Strategy and Analytics at Sponsor United, explains how sports analytics is moving beyond basic reporting into AI supported decision making. He discusses how teams and brands can co...

AI is changing more than how engineers write code. It is changing what leaders hire for, how candidates are assessed, and which engineering skills may matter most. Raymond Wang, CTO and cofounder at Ease Health, joins Amir to discuss how an engineering team using agentic coding tools thinks about hiring, productivity, code review, token costs, and the future of software engineering. Raymond argues...

AI infrastructure is expanding faster than the power systems required to support it. A data center can be built in two to three years, while a new power plant or transmission line may take seven to nine years. That gap puts utilities at the center of the next phase of AI growth. Vik Chaudhry, cofounder and CTO of Buzz Solutions, explains how utilities are using visual AI, computer vision, drones,...

Machine learning teams are moving faster, but the hard part has not disappeared. The work is shifting from writing and debugging every line of code toward defining the right problem, setting requirements, reviewing outputs, and deciding what belongs in a durable platform. Niels Bantilan, Chief Machine Learning Engineer at Union AI, explains how machine learning work has changed, why coding agents...