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Eye On A.I.

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith 362 Episodes Aug 19, 2026

Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. Each episode features conversations with people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.

Episodes

From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries
From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries Aug 19, 2026 01:06:23 Most humanoid robot companies are still running curated demos in replica environments. Foundation Future Industries is running 150 robots on real automotive production lines in Georgia, and heading to Ukraine this year to deploy on the battlefield. Mike LeBlanc, the co-founder of Foundation Future Industries - currently the only company supplying humanoid robots to the US Department of Defense, w
Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI - and What That Means for the Chip Market | Sid Sheth, d-Matrix
Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI - and What That Means for the Chip Market | Sid Sheth, d-Matrix Aug 17, 2026 50:46 The AI chip market looks monolithic from the outside - NVIDIA dominates, and everyone else is fighting for scraps. But d-Matrix's CEO Sid Sheth argues that the market is quietly splitting into two distinct tiers, and the one that's exploding right now is the one NVIDIA's architecture isn't built for. In this episode, Sid joins Craig Smith to explain the "premium token economy": a new class of AI
American Companies Have 36 Months to Go AI-Native or Get Left Behind | Drew Cukor, TWG AI
American Companies Have 36 Months to Go AI-Native or Get Left Behind | Drew Cukor, TWG AI Aug 13, 2026 58:43 The same tools that slowed the U.S. military down in Afghanistan (PowerPoint, Excel, email, and Word) are now slowing American businesses down in the AI race. Drew Cukor spent 30 years as a Marine intelligence officer, helped build Project Maven into a battlefield command and control system, served as Chief Data Officer at JP Morgan, and is now leading AI transformation at TWG AI. In this episode
In 5 Years, 90% of What You Use AI For Will Run on Your Smartphone | Paolo Ardoino, Tether
In 5 Years, 90% of What You Use AI For Will Run on Your Smartphone | Paolo Ardoino, Tether Aug 10, 2026 58:37 Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI data centers right now, and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - the company behind the world's most widely used stablecoin with 573 million users - thinks that investment is going to age very badly. In this episode, he joins Craig Smith to explain QVAC, Tether's open-source platform for running AI on smartphones, laptops, and edge devices, and to mak
AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know Something Broke | Erhan Giral & Ryan Manning, BMC Helix
AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know Something Broke | Erhan Giral & Ryan Manning, BMC Helix Aug 3, 2026 59:12 Most enterprise IT teams spend the majority of their time fighting the same fires repeatedly. BMC Helix is building the AI system that handles those fires automatically, detecting anomalies, tracing root cause through millions of asset relationships, generating remediation plans, and learning from every incident it resolves. Craig Smith sits down with Erhan Giral, VP of AI Strategy and Innovatio
Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio
Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio Jul 30, 2026 01:05:38 Most companies think they're transforming with AI. They're not, and the gap between what they believe and what's actually happening on the ground is costing them far more than they realize. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Chris Blackburn, founder and CEO of Liatrio, a consultancy that has spent a decade embedding directly inside large enterprises to help them actually change how they
"According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not Alive" - Why Nobody Can Define Life | Dr. Kate Adamala
"According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not Alive" - Why Nobody Can Define Life | Dr. Kate Adamala Jul 29, 2026 46:12 Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own genetic activity. Until now. Dr. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota, whose lab just published a landmark paper on what she calls "spud cells," joins Craig Smith to ex
Video Is About to Stop Being One-Way (and That Changes Everything) | Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia
Video Is About to Stop Being One-Way (and That Changes Everything) | Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia Jul 28, 2026 39:29 Every company is creating content that nobody reads, nobody watches, and nobody remembers, and the CEO of the AI platform that 90% of Fortune 100 companies use to fix that just explained what comes next. In this episode, Craig Smith sits down with Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, to discuss the $4 billion company that is now redefining what video communication means for the en
6 in 10 Enterprises Can't Find the Root Cause When Their AI Workloads Fail | Paul Appleby, Virtana
6 in 10 Enterprises Can't Find the Root Cause When Their AI Workloads Fail | Paul Appleby, Virtana Jul 15, 2026 44:32 Companies are spending billions building AI factories, but most of them can't tell you why their AI workloads are failing, whether their GPUs are actually being used, or what their infrastructure is going to cost them when agents start running at scale. Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, joins Craig Smith to discuss the findings of their AI Factory Reality Check study, a research report that reveals a
Inside the Enterprise Browser Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Bradon Rogers, Island
Inside the Enterprise Browser Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Bradon Rogers, Island Jul 13, 2026 55:37 AI is moving faster than enterprise security systems were designed to handle. In this episode of Eye on A.I., Craig Smith speaks with Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at Island, Island about how companies are struggling to govern the rise of AI agents, browser-based workflows, and unsanctioned AI tools inside the workplace. The conversation explores why traditional "block-and-control" secur
What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black
What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black Jul 10, 2026 23:02 Most AI is built for people sitting at desks. Kriti Sharma builds it for the people who work in refineries, aircraft hangars, and utility networks responding to wildfires at 4 a.m. and she spends weekends on-site with them to make sure what she builds actually holds up. In this episode, Kriti joins Craig Smith to discuss what industrial AI really looks like when failure genuinely isn't an option,
The Biggest AI Security Problem Isn't the Model. It's This. | Devvret Rishi
The Biggest AI Security Problem Isn't the Model. It's This. | Devvret Rishi Jul 7, 2026 47:40 What is an AI agent, really? Strip away the hype, and it's a model with access - to tools, APIs, databases, email, anything that lets it take real action instead of just generating text. That access is exactly where the risk lives, and Devvret Rishi, GM of AI at Rubrik, and former co-founder & CEO of Predibase, joins Craig Smith with a string of real-world incidents that make the case concrete: A

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