The Forward Slash Podcast

June 2026: the month AI stopped being a tool and became actual infrastructure. Covering the 19-day Fable 5 regulatory blackout, GLM 5.2's un-censorable open weights, and the supply chain attacks that made self-hosting the security team's problem. The /hotfix from The Forward Slash — a short-form read on the AI news engineering leaders actually need to track.

What if AI adoption didn't have to mean layoffs? Diane Weaver, co-founder and COO of Baryons, joins James to explore the "uncomfortable middle" of enterprise AI — the gap where jobs are being reshaped but new ones haven't arrived yet. They dig into why top-down AI mandates breed shadow work and sabotage, how IKEA turned 8,000 at-risk support reps into a $1.5B new revenue line, and why the organiza...

Most companies are buying AI tools before they've decided what they're for. James Carman, Callibrity CTO, and Jason Swafford, founder of Drag6, make the straight-talking case for the other way around. From there they cover why "failing" at AI is often just R&D in disguise, how to reframe shadow IT as innovation instead of a threat, why governance should feel like a head start rather than a tax...

Bubble about to burst, or a wave you can't sit out? In Part 2, James and Sid Dutta go from technical to strategic: why AI is a wave, not a bubble; the "harvest now, decrypt later" threat and what's just hype; the "Kardashian effect" drowning real expertise on LinkedIn; and why you won't compete with AI — you'll compete with peers who use it better. Perfect for the leaders who'd rather learn from o...

Your AI agent inherits your permissions. It doesn't inherit your intent — and that's the gap nobody's watching. James sits down with Sid Dutta — founder of Privaclave and a 24-year data protection executive (Amex, Worldpay, Microsoft Gaming) — for a two-part series on why being compliant doesn't equal secure, the single prompt that exposes data across silos, and the shift from static inventories t...

Leadership mandated AI. Now they want the return — and your pilots have nothing to show for it. James sits down with Bob White, a 20-year ed-tech and SaaS operator (Cengage, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, VPG) who now advises companies on AI adoption, for an honest teardown of why most enterprise AI never pays off: escaping "pilot purgatory" with a problem-first funnel, why nobody being on the hook is...

Five AI stories from the same week. One thesis: AI just moved from pilot to production. The first /hotfix from The Forward Slash — a new short-form read from James Carman on the AI news engineering leaders actually need to track. ~20 minutes covering EY and Microsoft's billion-dollar forward-deployed engineer concession, the 83/29 agentic AI security gap, Anthropic overtaking OpenAI on enterprise...

Is your AI strategy replacing people, or amplifying them? James sits down with Mike Hruska — founder of Baryons, former NIST material scientist, and TEDx speaker on what magic teaches leaders — for a human-first tour of AI leadership in 2026: the two kinds of executives this market is creating, why high-performing teams shrink to two or three when AI joins the room, what AIQ — Authentic Intelligen...

Is your enterprise AI actively shipping, or just sitting pretty in a deck? James sits down with John Capobianco, head of AI and Developer Relations at Itential and former senior network architect for Canada's House of Commons, for an engineering leader's tour of what's actually shipping in 2026: spec-driven development with Ralph loops, MCP as the next generational protocol, agents built like org...

The hardest question in enterprise AI isn't "can we build agents?" — it's "how do we let them act on our behalf without losing the company?" In Part 2 of our conversation with John Willis, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, James gets concrete about what agent guardrails actually look like in regulated environments: delegated authority, read/write/execute permissions, kill switches, and the Andon C...

The AI agent horror stories your vendors aren't telling you — and what to do before they happen to you. John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook and one of the original pioneers of the DevOps movement, joins James for part one of a two-part conversation on what autonomous AI agents are actually doing inside enterprise infrastructure right now. From vault secrets dumped to open source to entir...

Is your enterprise ready to run AI agents in production — or just in demos?  Logan Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Waxell AI, joins us to explore why deploying autonomous AI agents at enterprise scale is a fundamentally different challenge than building them. From runaway costs and unpredictable agent behavior to PII exposure and AI governance, we break down what actually breaks when agentic systems...

Is your biggest cost reduction opportunity hiding in your energy bill?  Josh Dorfman, CEO of Supercool and climate entrepreneur, joins us to explore why the smartest companies have stopped treating clean energy as a sustainability initiative — and started treating it as a CFO conversation. They break down how AI is compressing diligence cycles, optimizing fleets, and unlocking business models that...

What does it take to survive a 20x traffic spike?  Part two concludes our chat with Matthew McDole. This week, he shares how Yum! Brands scales systems for Super Bowl Sunday—plus lessons on performance, resilience, and AI in engineering.

How do you grow your engineering career without chasing titles?  This week, we have a two-parter! Matthew McDole joins James Carman to break down platform engineering, build vs. buy decisions, and why working on the right problems matters more than promotions.

How do you keep your workforce competitive when the skills they built two years ago are already expiring?  Ben Tasker leads an AI academy upskilling 36,000 employees in the public utility sector. This week, he joins us to unpack why 95% of organizations are getting AI adoption wrong — and why the problem is almost never the technology. They explore what skills-based workforce design actually looks...

As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, how do you move fast without introducing new security and compliance risk?  Cordell Robinson, CEO of Brownstone Consulting Firm, joins James to explore why AI governance and cybersecurity can’t be an afterthought. They break down the risks behind shadow AI, data leakage, and weak vendor oversight — and why organizations that build governance early will be bet...

What happens when AI becomes better than the average designer?  This week, Hikari Senju, founder and CEO of Omneky, joins James to explore how generative AI is transforming advertising from an art form into a measurable, automated system. They unpack how AI is redesigning enterprise workflows, why advertising may replace large portions of traditional sales, and what it means when attention itself...

As AI accelerates software development, how do you keep complexity from accelerating with it?  This week, Mike Spiegel of SpotOn joins us to examine how platform engineering must evolve in an AI-driven development era. As code velocity increases, testing discipline, reliability, and governance become even more critical. They explore how internal developer platforms create organizational clarity, w...

Why do so many well-funded products still struggle with adoption? Mark Brehaut, Head of Design at Clair, joins us to unpack how design directly impacts activation, retention, and business performance — especially in high-stakes industries like FinTech. From onboarding friction and time-to-value to validating assumptions before they hit production, Mark explains how human-centered design moves beyo...

If AI is already embedded in your teams’ workflows, are you leading it — or reacting to it?  This week, Holly Laiveling, CTO at FEG Investment Advisors, shares what enterprise AI adoption really looks like inside complex, regulated environments. As generative AI moves from experiment to everyday tool, we break down how technology leaders can shift from gatekeeper to enabler through practical AI go...

If AI is the future of infrastructure, why does production still feel experimental? Joel Vasallo, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at TAG (The Aspen Group), joins us to explore what AI adoption actually looks like inside real production environments. From agent gateways and MCP servers to AI-assisted monitoring, we discuss the operational tradeoffs, why many pilots never scale, and what it...

What happens when AI adoption becomes a leadership challenge, instead of a technology change? This week, James sits down with Nikki Barua, CEO and co-founder of Flipwork, to explore why AI progress often stalls even after real investment. They unpack the growing gap between executive expectations and team readiness, why traditional change management no longer works, and how leaders can rethink ide...

When everything feels urgent, how do you make progress instead of just reacting? In this episode, we talk with Erkang Zheng, founder of JupiterOne and Ariso, about why so many leaders get stuck in reactive mode and what it takes to build systems that hold up under pressure. They explore proactive leadership, lessons from scaling companies, and how AI and better structure can help teams move from c...

If AI is so powerful, why hasn’t it changed your organization the way you expected? In this episode, James sits down with strategy advisor Justin Trombold to unpack why GenAI progress feels slower than promised and why the biggest barriers usually aren’t technical. They explore what organizational readiness really means, how small workflow wins create momentum, when agentic automation is worth the...