Beyond The Pilot: Enterprise AI in Action
AI gets real here. On “Beyond the Pilot,” top business execs share what actually happens after the AI proof of concept — from infrastructure and org design to wins, failures, and ROI. Not theory, but deep dives into how they scaled AI that works.
Episodes
Small Models, Massive Wins: The New Shopify AI Formula
Shopify's distillation pipeline cuts production AI costs by up to 30x — and in some cases, the smaller model outperforms the frontier model on the narrow task. That's not a trade-off. That's a win on accuracy, latency, and cost simultaneously.
Farhan Thawar, VP & Head of Engineering at Shopify, runs AI across one of the largest commerce platforms on earth. In this episode, he breaks down the exac
Weaponize Tokenmaxing: MassMutual’s ROI Engine
If you enjoy these conversations, you need to be in Menlo Park this July.
VB Transform 2026 is VentureBeat's flagship enterprise AI event, built entirely around one question: How do you orchestrate AI autonomy at scale? July 14–15, Hotel Nia. Real projects, proprietary research, no fluff.
50% off for listeners with code BEYONDTHEPILOT: https://bit.ly/4fK4F6z
_
He negotiated seat-based (u
Building a 30% Better AI: The Taste Graph Moat
Pinterest's open-source AI stack costs 90% less than frontier models — and their custom-trained recommender outperforms off-the-shelf alternatives by 30% in accuracy. Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal breaks down exactly how they did it, and what enterprise AI teams can actually replicate.
Madrigal walks through the full architecture behind Navigator 1, Pinterest's conversational shopping assistant bui
GPU Hoarding is Over. The $401B Reality Check
Enterprise GPU hoarding is over. LinkedIn CTO Erran Berger and VentureBeat analyst Rob Strechay break down what comes next — and the infrastructure math most enterprises are only now being forced to confront.
VentureBeat's Q1 research shows GPU availability anxiety dropped from 20.8% to 15.4% among enterprise teams, while cost-per-inference and TCO concerns jumped from 34% to 41% — a number that'
Agents Ate the UI: Data is Your Only Moat with LlamaIndex
The CEO who built one of the most-starred RAG frameworks on GitHub (47,000 stars) just publicly declared that frameworks like his are becoming obsolete — and then pivoted his entire company around that conclusion.
Jerry Liu, CEO and co-founder of LlamaIndex, joins Matt Marshall and Sam Witteveen to explain exactly what broke in the AI stack, why 95% of his team's code is now AI-generated, and whe
The Protocol Stack AI Is Missing
Cisco's OutShift deployed a multi-agent network configuration system that raised error detection from 10–15% to 100% and cut full change validation from 2–3 weeks to 6–7 minutes. The reason it worked — and why most enterprise multi-agent deployments still fail — comes down to a single gap nobody is talking about: agents can connect, but they cannot think together.
Vijoy Pandey, SVP and General Ma
100M Agents: Scaling the New Execution stack with Intuit
A QuickBooks customer discovered significant fraud by asking their AI assistant follow-up questions about transaction amounts that didn't add up. This isn't a demo — it's one of 3 million customers now using Intuit's AI agents in production, with 80.5% returning to use them again.
Marianna Tessel, EVP and GM of QuickBooks (formerly CTO of Intuit), walks through the architecture decisions behind o
The AI War For Your Personal Context
Major SaaS companies including Salesforce, Intuit, and ServiceNow saw stock drops of 45-50% as enterprises shift from bloated software suites to personalized AI agents that users can control directly. Microsoft just capitulated this week, opening Copilot to allow Claude Cowork-style functionality — a clear signal that the "build vs. buy" calculus for enterprise software has fundamentally changed.
LangChain: What OpenClaw Got Right (And Why Enterprises Can't Have It)
LangChain told employees they cannot install OpenClaw on company laptops due to "massive security risk" — yet this unhinged approach is exactly what makes it work. Harrison Chase unpacks why OpenClaw succeeds where AutoGPT failed, and why context engineering, not just smarter models, separates demo agents from production-ready systems.
The shift is architectural: Modern agent harnesses like Claud
LexisNexis on Why Standard RAG Fails in Law
On February 2nd, a single plugin wiped nearly $800 billion off the enterprise software market. Wall Street is terrified that AI agents are about to eat the legal industry's lunch. But LexisNexis isn't scared—they're building the moat.
In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Min Chen (Chief AI Officer, LexisNexis) reveals the sophisticated architecture they built to counter the "LLM wrapper" revolu
Mastercard's 160 Billion Transactions: AI's Biggest Test
While most of the world is still running GenAI pilots, Mastercard is running AI inference on 160 billion transactions a year—with a hard latency limit of 50 milliseconds per score.
In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Johan Gerber (EVP of Security Solutions) and Chris Merz (SVP of Data Science) open the hood on one of the world's largest production AI systems: Decision Intelligence Pro. They reve
Inside LinkedIn’s AI Engineering Playbook
While the rest of the industry chases massive models, LinkedIn quietly achieved a major engineering breakthrough by going small.
In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, Erran Berger (VP of Product Engineering, LinkedIn) opens the "cookbook" on how they distilled massive 7B parameter models down to ultra-efficient 600M parameter "student" models—scaling AI to 1.2 billion users without breaking the ba
Most enterprise AI agents are Slop - here’s why they fail
The "TAM" for AI Agents isn't software. And there is a $10 Trillion opportunity.
In this episode, Replit CEO Amjad Masad reveals why 99% of today's enterprise AI agents are just "Slop"—unreliable, generic toys that fail in production. We dive deep into the engineering reality of building autonomous agents that actually work, moving beyond simple chatbots to systems that can navigate the messy rea
How JPMorgan Engineered a 30K AI Agent Economy
Inside the 'Agent Economy': How 30,000 AI Assistants Took Over JPMorgan
While most enterprises were scrambling after ChatGPT launched, JPMorgan Chase was already two years ahead. 🚀
In this episode of Beyond the Pilot, we sit down with Derek Waldron, Chief Analytics Officer at JPMorgan Chase, to reveal how the world’s largest bank built an internal AI platform that is now used by 1 in 2 employees
How Booking.com Boosted Agent Accuracy 2x with Mini LLMs with Pranav Pathak
We built AI agents by accident... and it worked. 🤯
In this episode of VentureBeat’s Beyond the Pilot, we go inside the engineering brain of Booking.com with Pranav Pathak (Director of Product Machine Learning). Pranav reveals how they "stumbled" into agentic architectures before the term even existed, how a simple text box revealed a massive missed revenue opportunity (the "Hot Tub" story), and e
Beyond the Pilot - NOTION - Unpacking Ryan Nystrom's AI Journey: From Challenges to Custom Agents
In our inaugural episode, we sit down with Ryan Nystrom, leader of the AI team at Notion, to pull back the curtain on Notion 3.0. Ryan reveals the journey of integrating powerful AI agents into the productivity platform and draws fascinating parallels between the current AI era and the mobile revolution he witnessed at Instagram. He shares exclusive insights into the development challenges, the cr
Venture Beat in Conversation: MongoDB - From Lift-and-Shift to AI-Ready Data
Lift-and-shift isn’t enough. MongoDB’s Vinod Bagal breaks down how to modernize your data for AI — and why waiting could cost you your competitive edge.
Host: Sean Michael Kerner
Guest: Vinod Bagal
For more stories visit venturebeat.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
VentureBeat in Conversation: FBI Veterans on AI Cyber Threats & Future Defenders
AI is accelerating the cyber arms race — and former FBI agents Paul Bingham and Mike Morris say most enterprises aren’t ready. In this VB in Conversation, they break down the real-world threats targeting critical infrastructure, how AI is changing the attack surface, and why smart, layered defense starts with training the next-gen cyber workforce.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.
AI CHAT: 70% of Enterprises Adopt AI Agents: The Real-World Impact
Key Insights and Takeaways from VentureBeat Transform Event: AI and Enterprise Innovation
In this episode, Matt and Sam recount their experiences and insights from the recent VentureBeat Transform event, an annual gathering focused on enterprise AI. They discuss the significant takeaways, including the increasing adoption of AI agents in production, the lack of dominance by any single hyperscaler
VentureBeat in Conversation: Visa’s $3.5B Bet on AI
Visa’s SVP of Data & AI, Sam Hamilton, joins VentureBeat to break down the hidden costs, trade-offs, and infrastructure realities behind running over 400 AI solutions incorporating 300 AI models at global scale.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AI CHAT: Interview with Richard Seroter: Unveiling Google Cloud's AI Strategy
Google Cloud Next: In-Depth Discussion with Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter
Join us for an exclusive interview with Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist of Google Cloud, as he discusses the latest developments and insights from Google Cloud Next. Dive into conversations about AI advancements, the new agent development kit, and the multi-agent protocol, and how they are reshaping the future of cloud
VentureBeat in Conversation: The AI Surge Is Coming — Is Your Network Ready?
Cisco’s Anurag Dhingra joins VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall to unpack what it means to build a truly AI-ready network. From smart switching to agentic operations, Dhingra explains how enterprises must stay ahead of surging network demands — and why network intelligence is now foundational to scaling AI.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AI CHAT: The Future of AI Agents: How Napkin AI Is Redefining Design
Exploring Napkin.ai: Revolutionizing Graphic Design with AI Agents
Join Matt Marshall, founder and CEO of VentureBeat, and Sam Witteveen as they interview Pramod Sharma, CEO of Napkin.ai, and co-founder Jerome Scholler, about their innovative AI-powered graphic design tool. Discover how Napkin.ai has rapidly grown to 2 million beta users with its unique ability to transform text into compelling g
VentureBeat in Conversation: From RSAC 2025 - Inside the Cybersecurity-First AI Model & Built in, Always on
Part 1: Inside the Cybersecurity-First AI Model
LLMs are inherently non-deterministic — but more data isn’t always better. As Cisco’s Jeetu Patel explains, Cisco Foundation AI distilled 900 billion tokens down to the most relevant 5 billion to create the industry’s first AI model purpose-built for security.
Part 2: AI Security: Built-in, Always-On
Cisco’s Tom Gillis and Splunk’s Mike Horn rev
VentureBeat in Conversation: Credit Karma’s path to scalable AI
Originally published in September 2024
As orgs race to progress from proof-of concept to full, scalable production in AI, there are many lessons and resets. Key to these are choices made around infrastructure. Intuit’s Credit Karma, with over 100 million users, has been one of AI’s success stories. Vishnu Ram, Credit Karma’s VP of Engineering, spoke with VB about those lessons – and how the learn
VentureBeat in Conversation: Inside the Super Bowl’s cyber war: NFL CISO on AI threats, deepfakes and defending the big game
NFL CISO Tomás Maldonado speaks with VentureBeat about defending Super Bowl LIX from adversarial attacks that potentially include weaponized AI, endpoint attacks, deepfakes, and finely tuned social engineering – and require collaboration with the FBI and Secret Service.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
VentureBeat in Conversation: Gen AI: What the enterprise is getting right, and wrong
Originally Released in February 2024
In his role as Global Leader for Tech and Digital Advantage at the Boston Consulting Group, Vlad Lukic has overseen hundreds of AI deployments. Now working with scores of enterprise companies racing to embrace gen AI, he finds that critical considerations are often overlooked, such as readiness of data and pivotal financial factors. Missteps such as deploying
VentureBeat in Conversation: Handling Greater Demands in the Data Center with Kamran Ziaee, Verizon
Originally published in July 2023
Kamran Ziaee, SVP, Technology Strategy & Global Infrastructure at Verizon sits down with VB Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall to discuss how data centers now must handle greater and greater demands. While high-performance computing used to be reserved for exceptionally data-intensive applications, like gene sequencing or self-driving cars, every industry is seeing re
VentureBeat in Conversation: Payment giant Paypal tackles the data sustainability challenge
Originally published in October 2023
VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall talks with Archana Deskus, EVP & CIO of Paypal, on how the payment giant, with more than 400 million users, is meeting the need for more computation, more power and more storage, particularly during peak periods — all while committing to sustainability and greater efficiency. Deskus dives into bursting capacity, data c
VentureBeat in Conversation: Handling Greater Demands in the Data Center with Ken Spangler, FedEx
Originally Published in July 2023
FedEx handles 100 billion daily transactions, from tracking packages to routing flights. To keep up with this massive data demand, the company has invested in data center performance, especially in high-performance computing. Ken Spangler, EVP of IT and CIO of Global Operations Technology, FedEx, talks with VB Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall about how the company h
VentureBeat in Conversation: eBay doubles down on data efficiency
Originally published in October 2023
VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall talks with Mazen Rawashdeh, SVP & CTO of eBay, about how one of the world’s largest online marketplaces is using innovative technologies to power its data centers and reduce its environmental impact while meeting the growing demand for data processing in the age of generative AI. Rawashdeh explores the importance of fu
VentureBeat: Scaling Up with Databricks - Achieving the potential of generative AI
Originally Released in October 2023
How do companies identify the best uses cases for gen AI — and then navigate the complexity of AI-first products and tools to drive that innovation at scale? VB’s editorial director, Michael Nuñez, speaks with Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin and Vijoy Pandey, SVP at Outshift by Cisco, about the many factors that will determine how organizations succeed, or do
Recommended
The Austin Sessions : Art of Knowing
From Start-Up to Grown-Up
Learn Spanish a lo Boricua
Nailed It Ortho
ADHD Human Design
Central Line by American Society of Anesthesiologists - a podcast series for the anesthesia community
Leadership Sandbox: Strategies to Uplevel Workplace Communication, Team Collaboration, and Your Corporate Culture
Setting Boundaries in Corporate | Burnout, Work-Life Balance, Leadership, Structure, Prioritization
Ambitious Faith at Work | Performance, Identity, Corporate, Faith, Leadership
PeriOPtima - Anesthesia Audiobook
Romeo and Juliet
Memoirs of Jacques Casanova Vol. 1
