CTO Unfiltered | Digital Transformation & AI Impact

We're at an inflection point. Agentic AI can now produce code faster than most teams can validate it — and some companies are already using that as justification to skip building junior developer pipelines altogether. In this episode, Mike makes the case that this is one of the most consequential mistakes tech leaders can make right now. Software engineering was never just typing. It was always ab...

Elite performance in engineering organizations isn't about finding rock stars — it's about building the systems that produce them. In this episode, Mike Schubert breaks down two Harvard Business Review research pieces that share a single underlying thesis: team performance is a design problem, not a talent problem. From the three levers that produce organizational excellence (talent, team, routine...

What does it mean to lead through uncertainty when the technology underneath you is moving faster than your governance, your metrics, and your comfort level? Mike Schubert digs into four things: Harvard research on why sharing uncertainty builds trust; Microsoft Agent 365 and the shadow agent problem; IBM Bob 1.0 for the COBOL/RPG world; and Jensen Huang's token consumption metric. Three stories,...

Most tech podcasts talk about technology. This one talks about what actually makes or breaks a technology leader: people, change, and the gap between what organizations want and what they can absorb. In this opening episode, Mike lays out his case — who he is, what this show is, and why the conversation he wanted to have didn't exist yet. Takeaways • The technology is rarely the hard part — leadin...