AI Impact

Most AI deployments stall because leaders treat the tool as the whole investment. Priyanka Vergadia, argues technology is only 20 percent of the equation, and the returns show up once you fund people, training, and change management. Priyanka, Senior Director of AI Transformation at Microsoft, breaks down her 10/20/70 budget split, why documenting processes beats chasing tools, and how hackathons...

Iain Hassall sorts AI spend into three buckets, and the trickiest is AI embedded in your own product, where cost basis and margins get murky. His warning to finance leaders is to lock in pricing and packaging before shipping AI features, or risk buying a dollar of inference and selling it for 80 cents. Iain tells Russ how Netlify went from 14,000 to 40,000 daily signups, why multi-year deals have...

Tope Iluyomade has been working in AI since 2004, starting with robotics and reinforcement learning, and has spent two decades advising and leading technology inside large enterprises as both CIO and CISO before moving into executive advisory work. In this conversation, he breaks down why most AI governance fails at the cultural level rather than the technical one, how the CIO-CFO conversation has...

Vertiv builds the power and cooling infrastructure that makes the AI boom physically possible — their hyperscaler customers spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure every year. So what does the CIO of that company think about AI inside his own organization? Russ Fradin talks with Mike Giresi, CIO of Vertiv, about what AI adoption actually looks like inside a company with 30,000 employees in...

Bask Iyer has held the global CIO seat at Johnson & Johnson, Honeywell, VMware, and Dell, and now advises over a dozen AI companies including Zoom and ThoughtSpot. In this episode, Russ gets into how enterprise technology decisions actually get made, and how AI is exposing the real cost of CIOs, CFOs, and heads of HR operating without a shared accountability model. Bask makes the case that mos...

Dan Zhang has been CFO of ClickUp for five years, with an unusually broad remit spanning finance, accounting, legal, HR, and operations. That vantage point shapes everything he shares here, from his 2x2 vendor evaluation framework built around autonomy and attribution, to his three-bucket system for measuring AI ROI across a finance team, to the exact methodology his team used to shift skeptical a...

Jesse Vincent is the creator of Superpowers, the most installed skills framework for Claude Code, with over 100,000 GitHub stars in its first five months. Superpowers isn’t a prompt or a collection of tips—it’s a complete software development methodology built for a world where agents do the building. Jesse has been shipping open source for 30 years—he created Request Tracker, led Perl 5, built K-...

Karl Mosgofian built his career in IT from the ground up, starting as a teenager and eventually serving as CIO at Gainsight, where he watched AI reshape what the CIO role actually means inside a company. In this episode, he and Russ Fradin get into the mechanics of how great CIOs operate, why the CFO relationship matters more than reporting lines, and what changes when agents start doing real work...

Ajay Sabhlok, CIO and Chief Data Officer at Rubrik, runs one of the more disciplined AI governance operations you'll hear about from a practitioner at this level. He set up a formal AI council with his CFO, co-founder, head of engineering, and general counsel to review every tool request coming into the organization, and he walks through exactly how that structure works in practice, including how...