CXOTalk

Agentic AI has taken off in software engineering, but most CIOs still cannot make agents work in everyday knowledge work in the enterprise. Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, explains why that gap exists and what enterprises must change to close it. Drawing on what Box sees across its enterprise customer base, including 68% of the Fortune 500, Levie covers data access, verification, budgets,...

Most enterprises are renters, not owners, of their technology and AI. Raffi Krikorian, Chief Technology Officer of Mozilla, explains why dependence on a handful of closed model providers means losing control over model behavior, pricing, and your own data. In CXOTalk episode 920, Krikorian lays out where open-source AI actually wins in the enterprise, how lock-in happens quietly, and what CIOs and...

AI agents are entering enterprise AI faster than CIOs can govern them. Line-of-business users are vibe-coding their own tools, agents are operating with employee credentials, and foundation models are changing under running systems. In CXOTalk episode 919, Anthony Scriffignano, PhD, a prominent data scientist, and Tim Crawford, a strategic advisor to CIOs at the world's largest companies, exam...

Enrique Ibarra, CIO and Head of Business Transformation at GNP, Mexico's largest insurance company, walks through an enterprise-scale pilot of autonomous software development involving roughly 1,000 internal and external developers. The episode examines how agentic AI changes developers' roles from creators to editors and orchestrators. In CXOTalk episode 918, Ibarra explains why AI co-pil...

AI swarms are now considered the most dangerous influence weapons ever created, actively fabricating grassroots consensus and corrupting enterprise AI training data through disinformation. Daniel Thilo Schroeder, Research Scientist at SINTEF, and Jonas R. Kunst, Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, co-authored a study with 22 authors published in Science that maps this threat. They explain h...

Autonomous software development creates a dilemma for leaders in regulated industries: adopt AI coding at scale or fall behind on product velocity without compromising auditability and code quality. In CXOTalk episode 917, Kris Tokarzewski, Group Chief Technology Information Officer at Vitality, describes how a 14,000-employee multinational insurer is rebuilding its software development life cycle...

Agentic AI is reshaping enterprise software faster than most CIOs, CFOs, and vendors are prepared for. Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners, joins Michael Krigsman to examine the state of agentic AI in 2026: what works in production, what remains hype, and how sophisticated enterprises are now running more than 1,000 agents at scale. The conversation covers the engineering that...

Marie Myers, Chief Financial Officer of HPE, explains how she measures business value while deploying agentic AI across a 3,600-person finance organization. Her framework separates direct ROI from indirect value (speed, accuracy, fewer errors) and the operating requirements that make finance AI trustworthy at scale. YOU'LL DISCOVER ✅ How Myers separates direct ROI from indirect value, includi...

Pradeep Mannakkara (CIO) and Ben Mayrides (CISO) of Cvent explain how they govern AI agents at scale across their 5,500-person organization, which now has over 6,000 agents in production. In this fireside chat recorded at a Glean event in NYC, they walk through the AWARE framework developed by Glean's Work AI Institute with Databricks and Palo Alto Networks, and describe the practical tradeoffs of...

Bill Briggs, CTO of Deloitte, shares findings and advice for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from the 2026 TechTrends report: 93% of enterprise AI spending goes to technology and tooling, while only 7% of funding goes to culture, change management, and learning. Briggs explains why this imbalance drives failed pilots and runaway costs, and what leaders should do about it. 📌 KEY POINTS -- Your A...

A healthcare CEO once told former CDC Director, Dr. Tom Frieden, he had "a fiduciary responsibility not to provide good diabetes care" because the ROI takes 7 years and patients leave after 4. That's not a villain talking. That's our system working exactly as designed, without preventive medicine. Dr. Tom Frieden ran the CDC under President Obama, served as New York City Health C...

Cyberattacks that used to take months now take minutes. And your defenders still can't keep up. Rob T. Lee, Chief AI Officer of the SANS Institute, and David A. Bray, Chair of the Accelerator at the Stimson Center, explain why AI gives attackers a structural advantage. Attackers don't care if their AI breaks something. Your security team can't take that risk. That asymmetry changes eve...

Tim Crawford and Isaac Sacolick, both former Chief Information Officers and world-class CIO advisors, join Michael Krigsman on CXOTalk episode 909 to break down why enterprise AI strategies are failing, what separates transformational CIOs from those who are drowning, and why earning your seat at the table matters more than ever in 2026. You'll discover: ✅ Why Tim says both AI strategy AND IT exe...

MIT and Stanford professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland, one of the most cited researchers in the world with over 165,000 citations, explains why the real AI advantage isn't smarter models but collective intelligence. It's smarter humans working together with AI as the connective tissue. Drawing from his latest book Shared Wisdom, Pentland reveals the frameworks behind community intelli...

AI coding tools are writing more code than ever, but your software isn't shipping any faster. Welcome to the AI Paradox and the solution, intelligent orchestration. Bill Staples, CEO of GitLab, explains why AI-accelerated coding is actually creating massive downstream bottlenecks in code reviews, security checks, and deployment, and why adding more AI tools only makes the problem worse. GitLab...

Prashant Mehrotra, Chief AI Officer at US Bank, discusses how the bank evaluates AI initiatives and scales projects from pilot to production. He explains how to build customer trust through responsible AI design and prepare for the future of autonomous banking in CXOTalk episode 906. This conversation covers key aspects of AI in business and AI implementation within a large banking institution. ==...

An AI chatbot that hallucinates is annoying. A robot or physical AI that hallucinates can cause injury or death. Burkhard Boeckem, CTO of Hexagon, explains why the bar for physical AI is fundamentally higher than digital AI, and what it takes to deploy robots that actually work in the real world. All this in CXOTalk episode 905.\ In this conversation, we cover: → What physical AI actually means (a...

Nation-states are already harvesting your encrypted data, betting they'll crack it when quantum computers mature. It's happening now. In CXOTalk episode 904, Anand Oswal, Executive Vice President of Network Security at Palo Alto Networks, explains what business leaders need to understand about quantum security and how to address it. The impact of quantum computing on cybersecurity will be...

Most enterprises aren't ready for agentic AI, but ChristianKleinerman, Snowflake's EVP of Product, shares practical advice on what it takes to succeed: data readiness, governance, AI economics, and workforcestrategy. In this episode of CXOTalk, Kleinerman draws on 25 years ofenterprise technology experience to give leaders a realistic roadmap for AI adoption. He explains how to evaluate AI...

Can a digital replica of your heart save your life? In CXOTalk episode 902, Michael Krigsman talks with Dr. Joe Alexander, Director of the Medical and Health Informatics Lab at NTT Research, to explore the revolutionary world of Bio-Digital Twins. Discover how researchers are using mathematical modeling to build "computational replicas" of the human cardiovascular system. Dr. Alexander e...

How do you turn a 150-year-old industrial giant into an agile, AI-first organization? ======= Please support our sponsor Emeritus: Explore executive education programs from Emeritus, in collaboration with top universities: https://cxotalk.partner.emeritus.org/ ======= For Hexion CEO Michael Lefenfeld, the answer isn't just about technology, but about culture, safety, and rethinking value. In episo...

🚨 STOP treating AI like just another automation tool; you're missing the real transformation.   Most executives are approaching AI completely wrong. They're focused on automating tasks when they should be reimagining their entire business model. In this landmark 900th episode of CXOTalk, Sangeet Paul Choudary, advisor to 40+ Fortune 500 CEOs, reveals why AI is actually COORDINATION INFRASTRU...

Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. Amazon poured billions into Anthropic. The AI oligopoly is here. Lord Tim Clement-Jones and Lord Chris Holmes, architects of UK AI policy, reveal what business leaders must know about Big Tech's grip on AI - from vendor lock-in risks to circular funding patterns signaling bubble collapse.   🔷 Show notes and resources: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/...

Is your organization stuck in AI pilot purgatory? CIO strategic advisor Tim Crawford reveals how enterprise AI is fundamentally transforming the CIO role, and why the decisions you make today will determine which IT leaders succeed tomorrow.   ======= Please support our sponsor Emeritus: Explore executive education programs from Emeritus, in collaboration with top universities: https://cxotal...

Please support our sponsor Emeritus: Explore executive education programs from Emeritus, in collaboration with top universities: https://cxotalk.partner.emeritus.org/ ======= Will Grannis, Chief Technology Officer of Google Cloud, explains Google's vision for agentic AI and multimodel LLMs, including these key topics on CXOTalk #897: -- The latest AI news from Google -- Why "AI as judge&q...