Interview #62 - Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant

David Wong, Chief Product Officer at Thomson Reuters, breaks down why the hard part of putting AI on a tax return was never the math. He explains that any model can run the calculation in Python, that the real constraint is authority over which year's rule applies, and that the line a general purpose model cannot cross is information sufficiency: asking whether a contract is self-consistent is a closed problem, while asking whether it is enforceable in California demands the case law behind it. David also dives into why coverage, not capability, is the adoption threshold, arguing that a system handling 50 percent of returns is useless to a firm in an unforgiving busy season, and that liability never moves because the professional still signs the line. Finally, he predicts that within five years no human checks every line, because AI prepared returns will be verified by AI, inside the firms and likely at the IRS.

Ben Goertzel, the father of AGI, breaks down why the frontier labs calling for a slowdown were never making a serious proposal. He explains that he launched the term AGI with a 2005 book of that title, why a global pause is unenforceable when no crisp line separates AGI from ordinary advanced software, and why he reads the safety push as regulatory capture of the kind that let banks and pharma end up owning their own regulators. Ben also dives into the agents that escaped a misconfigured sandbox to hack another lab, arguing the failure was not malevolence but the absence of moral agency, and comparing bolted-on guardrails to giving a child a book on how to be good and then using a cattle prod when they ignore it. Finally, he argues that a model trained only on music written before 1900 would never produce hip hop, and that the real answer to the cybersecurity crisis is replacing critical software with formally verified code.

George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran and dbt Labs, breaks down why most companies are paying a 10 to 20 times markup to process data that would fit on a phone. He explains the benchmark he ran on an iPhone 17 Pro that kept pace with a cloud cluster renting at $17 an hour, why the cost of compute has fallen 10x in a decade while prices have not, and the distinction most buyers miss: companies have large data but small queries, and a single query almost always fits on a single machine. George also dives into why wiring AI agents directly into every system of record through APIs is too slow to work, why he treats knowledge graphs as a trivial relabeling of what a clean schema already does, and why vendors that lock customers out of their own data always lose that fight. Finally, he argues the cost of intelligence is halving every month, and that no company should ever hand back the copy of its own data.

Jeff McMillan, founder of McMillanAI and former Chief AI Officer at Morgan Stanley, breaks down why most of today's 70,000 AI companies will not survive: anyone can build a polished product in a weekend, so the only durable edge is proprietary data and deep domain expertise. He explains why AI will reprice traditional software rather than kill it, and why handing out Copilot and expecting ROI is like giving fifth graders calculators and asking why they aren't accountants yet. Jeff also dives into why over 90 percent of enterprise problems could run on a model from two years ago, comparing frontier spend to driving a Ferrari in circles in a Walmart parking lot, and why token leaderboards are as absurd as rewarding whoever used the most electricity. Finally, he shares why human in the loop breaks down at 20,000 agents, and what managers must learn to supervise people and machines working side by side.

Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM of Splunk at Cisco, breaks down why intent is never enough to control an AI agent: agents are ruthless goal seekers, and asking one to free up 3 percent of disk space can end with 97 percent free because nobody said keep the rest. He explains why trust means verification rather than instruction, and why it includes the invoice, comparing it to hiring a contractor you trust to build a house that stands without emptying your bank account. Kamal also digs into why the rush toward air gapped and local AI is driven less by distrust of frontier labs than by cost, with specialized small models running 97 percent cheaper and 95 percent faster than frontier calls, and why the real threat is the unknown unknowns, agents nobody cataloged acting inside a state of perpetual breach. Finally, he argues agents are the new apps, and every job starts to look like a software developer's: tell the agent what to do, inspect the work, and iterate.