Show Notes
Most conversations about artificial intelligence eventually return to the same concerns: is it going to replace my job, disrupt, and create an uncertain future? But what if we are looking at AI through the wrong lens? On the latest episode of Tech Transformed, host Trisha Pillay sits down with Kevin Surace, an author, AI expert and technology pioneer who has spent three decades working on technologies that helped lay the foundations for products such as Siri and Alexa. His perspective is very different from the usual debate. Rather than viewing AI primarily as a threat to human work, Surace sees it as a tool that can expand what people are capable of achieving. This shift changes the conversation from what AI might replace to what it could make possible. The discussion explores how AI can help people work faster, tackle problems that were previously out of reach and spend more time on areas where human judgment, creativity and experience still matter. For Surace, the question is not whether AI will change the way we work. That change is already happening. The more important question is what we choose to do with the capabilities it puts in our hands. Silicon Valley Author and AI Expert Surace holds 95 patents and is often credited as the father of the AI assistant. His work goes back to General Magic, an early-1990s Apple spinout where his team built the first digital agents and a programming language called Telescript. That early assistant technology had millions of users well before anyone was talking about chatbots. His upcoming book, The Joy Success Cycle, grew out of a question people kept asking him: Why does he seem to enjoy his work so much? The answer, he told Pillay, comes down to sequencing. Most people wait for success before they let themselves feel joy. Surace argues it works the other way. Joy has to come first, and success follows from it. How AI Brings Joy Surace's favourite example is presentations. He used to spend a full week getting slides right, not because the ideas took that long to develop, but because formatting, alignment, and design details ate up all his time. Now he outlines what he wants to say, hands it to an AI tool, and gets a polished deck back within the hour. The lesson he draws from that isn't about speed for its own sake. It's about separating the parts of a job that actually bring satisfaction from the parts that never did. Moving a font two pixels to the left never gave anyone joy, he says. Delivering an idea to a room full of people can. AI, in his view, quietly removes the first category and leaves more room for the second. AI and the Case for More Jobs Surace pushed back hard on the idea that AI shrinks the job market. He pointed to every major shift he's lived through from the PC, email, the smartphone, and the internet. Each one triggered the same fear, and each one ended up creating more roles than it eliminated. He sees the same pattern playing out with software development right now. Coders using AI tools are shipping features and fixing bugs far faster than before, and instead of trimming teams, many companies are hiring more developers to keep pace with the new demand their own speed has created. The job itself has changed. Writing code line by line matters less than guiding the output and checking it. But the need for people hasn't gone away. Rethinking Workflows With AI One point Surace kept returning to was how companies get AI wrong when they try to automate their existing process instead of questioning why that process exists in the first place. He used car insurance claims as an example. The old approach sends an inspector to look at damage, fills out paperwork, and routes it through several people before a check gets issued. An AI-first approach skips most of that. A customer photographs the damage, uploads it, and a payment can go out the same day. This kind of redesign, he argues, is where the real gains sit. Businesses that only bolt AI onto old workflows will see mod
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Envision this: A ServiceNow ticket arrives at a big bank, and 50 customers can't log into their accounts. All the dashboards show a red indicator. About 60 to 100 people end up in a war-room meeting and remain there for about two hours. They discover the problem was a slow SQL query in a database ten hops down the stack, a system neither the login team nor their monitoring system had originally identified. That is the situation which Anish Agarwal, CEO of Traversal, alludes to when explaining why incident response is becoming more difficult and why he believes the solution must be designed differently from the observability tools that most enterprises currently operate. In the recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, Dan Twing, President and COO of Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), sat down with Agarwal, also a professor at Columbia University. They discuss how code laid out by artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting production incidents. They also talk about what is needed to trace symptoms back to their causes within a portfolio of 5,000 applications, and how businesses decide when to switch from using AI suggestions to adopting autonomous remediation. In terms of reliability, Agarwal says that the enterprise has to question whether the task was not just initiated but completed. However, it's also possible for a job to finish, yet the answer might not be the one you want. Key Takeaways "Did it run?" no longer proves an AI-built system worked. Coding agents are trained on compile-and-run, so they can sideline the real goal. Same configuration, three runs, three different results. Engineers now write specs; agents write code, so code comprehension drops. Testing improves, but failures still happen at the seams between systems. Agents need to search far more data than dashboards were built for. Traversal's production world model maps entities, connections and live telemetry. Customers are using it to validate CMDBs, which was unplanned. Causal analysis separates upstream and downstream anomalies from spurious ones. Multiple paths converging on one cause builds confidence in a root cause. L4 cut a war room from 60–100 people to five to 10. Reported MTTR fell from two or three hours to 20–30 minutes. Coding agents now call Traversal's MCP to write production-aware code. Decide up front when to build in-house versus buy.
“Vibe coding is already present in your company,” according to David Hsu, CEO of Retool and governance is the only way to secure it. Let's put this into context. Think of a Fortune 500 company’s CIO who has recently come across a vibe-coded application spotted on the public internet. This app was developed by an employee of the Fortune 500 company in question. The developer obtained a data dump from Salesforce pertaining to customers, then fed this data to an external AI tool not part of the company’s set of AI tools. The employee prompted the tool to host the resulting application on a public URL. Since it was an external AI tool, a security review couldn’t be carried out, nor could the IT department view it. Without any internal visibility into a tool created by the employee, the actual customer data was live on the open web. It’s a scary situation, a breach of trust, so imagine the CIO’s wrath upon seeing it. This is why, in the recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, host Shubhangi Dua, Podcast Producer and B2B Tech Journalist at EM360Tech, sat down for a conversation with David Hsu, CEO and Founder of Retool. They talk about the repercussions of vibe coding in addition to examining why most enterprises have no conception of how much of it is already taking place within their own enterprise. The discussion then turns from the immediate issue of governance concerning uncontrolled AI app-building to Hsu's prediction that software engineering as a profession could vanish within two to three years. “All the CIOs that I speak to are genuinely frightened about vibe coding, and even if you don't want to admit it, vibe coding is already present in your company,” he tells Dua. This is partly why Hsu founded Retool. Retool secures vibe coding for enterprises. Hsu explains that Retool can be connected to a company’s Snowflake database, for instance or their Databricks data lake. “Users should be able to have access to particular tables only,” he says. Access controls are required at the group level. “If you're in this particular Okta group, you can only access this table, and it's read-only. Whereas if you're in this other Okta group, you can actually write back to this other Salesforce over here." So one Okta group could be granted read-only access to a particular table, while another group might be given write access to a connected Salesforce instance. All applications that are built on top of that connection automatically inherit the same restrictions. Once rules of such a nature are put in place, people could then be set free, explaining why he views governance as something that enables freedom rather than something that restricts. Takeaways Vibe coding is already happening inside most enterprises, sanctioned or not A Fortune 500 CIO found a vibe-coded app exposed on the public internet One customer's AI coding spend hit 30x their original budget estimate Two employees independently built duplicate apps that returned different numbers Hsu forecasts fully automated coding arriving by late 2027 or early 2028 By 2030, Hsu estimates 90% of company work will be done by AI employees The CIO's future role: a "chief people officer" governing AI agents, not humans
AI is reshaping how businesses interact with customers, from handling routine enquiries to delivering more personalised and responsive experiences. As organisations automate more of the customer journey, however, customer support is increasingly being reconsidered not simply as a cost to reduce, but as an important part of how businesses build lasting relationships with their customers. On this episode of Tech Transformed, host Christina Stathopoulos welcomed back Pranay Jain, CEO and co-founder of Enterprise Bot, to discuss what this shift means in practice. The conversation moves beyond the usual AI hype to consider how businesses can scale automation without losing meaningful human connection, while navigating growing regulatory expectations across Europe and the UK. Jain has been building EnterpriseBot for almost a decade, since, as he puts it, "artificial intelligence was more artificial than intelligent." This vantage point shapes a conversation that's less about what AI can do and more about how enterprises should think about doing it. Stop Treating AI as a Cost-Cutting Tool Jain sees AI as an opportunity to rethink how customer service teams work, using automation to handle routine tasks while giving people more time to focus on interactions where human judgement and empathy matter most. Password resets, invoice lookups and basic status checks can be handled instantly by AI, allowing human agents to spend more time with customers during moments that require greater care, such as a major life event or an insurance claim following an accident. He points to IKEA as a real-world example of this working. Rather than laying off staff as AI took over routine tasks, the company retrained employees to help customers plan their homes in a more personal, consultative way and saw sales increase as a result. It's a useful reframe that automation isn't about removing people from the equation; it's about repositioning them where their judgment and empathy are still needed. Jain also flags a metric that trips up a lot of contact centres, which is average handling time. Teams are often rewarded for keeping calls short, but a one-minute call with a 40 per cent resolution rate is worse than a three-minute call that actually solves the problem. His recommendation is to automate the parts of a call that eat time without adding value - identity verification alone can consume up to a quarter of a call, so agents can spend the time they save on getting things resolved properly, not just quickly. Why AI Needs Guardrails Given EnterpriseBot’s European roots, regulation naturally comes into the conversation. Jain explains how the EU AI Act, Spain’s new customer service rules and the UK’s FCA expectations are starting to shape what “autonomous” really means in practice. For example, businesses can track sentiment at a general level, but analysing an agent’s tone of voice or emotions crosses into much more sensitive territory. The same applies to financial transactions. An AI agent can’t simply be left to make those decisions on its own. There needs to be a clear workflow and defined controls around what it can and cannot do. His concern is that a lot of the AI tooling on the market is built with a US-first lens and simply wasn't designed with these boundaries in mind. This creates real exposure for enterprises that adopt a slick-looking solution without checking if it can actually operate within EU or UK rules. Jain sees these regulatory changes as a positive step, particularly as AI becomes more embedded in customer interactions. "I actually think it's very important that you do have the right regulation, and there's a very good reason why these things are there." This point extends into data sovereignty too. With geopolitical tension pushing some organisations to reconsider public cloud dependence, Jain suggests flexibility- the ability to run on-prem, in a private cloud, or across different regions depending on the customer; this is becoming o
For years, voice has been the channel most enterprises have quietly dreaded. The reason stems from it being harder to automate than chat. It's also harder to scale across markets, and far less forgiving if the experience is clumsy. Yet according to Pranay Jain, CEO and Co-founder of Enterprise Bot, that reluctance is exactly why so many businesses are still losing customers to frustrating IVR menus while their competitors move ahead with something smarter. In a recent episode of Tech Transformed, Jain sat down with Trisha Pillay to explore the changing role of voice AI in customer service. Together they unpacked the technological advances making it possible, right to the practical strategies businesses need to use it effectively. Jain, who built Enterprise Bot alongside his wife and co-founder after a detour through real estate, explained where agentic voice AI is heading and why treating it as a bolt-on to existing digital channels is a mistake. He pointed out that voice was never really solved; businesses simply learned to live with its limitations. As conversational AI becomes better at understanding intent, maintaining context and taking action rather than reciting scripted responses, the calculus for enterprise AI deployment is now changing. Why Voice Still Carries the Business The figures Jain cites indicate the shift is already underway. In much of Europe, somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent of customer requests still arrive by phone, while chat accounts for a sliver of total contact centre volume in markets like Switzerland. This may surprise people who think digital channels have already taken over. They haven't, especially when customers have complex or urgent problems to be attended to. Jain explains that customers choose their channel based on how important or difficult their issue is. A quick balance check or a password reset happens over chat or an app. But when something feels uncertain, urgent, or emotionally loaded, people still reach for the phone. They want to be heard, not routed through a flowchart. That's why a robotic voice bot can be more damaging than a mediocre chatbot. Customers often turn to voice when they want a more personal interaction, so a cold or scripted response can make them feel ignored and not valued rather than helped. This is also where the case for treating voice, chat, and email as one connected system rather than separate builds becomes obvious. Jain described meeting a client running a twenty-person team just to maintain their AI stack while only ten people handled actual customer service. This was a sign that channel-by-channel and language-by-language builds spiral out of control fast. A single underlying AI that can operate consistently across languages and touchpoints isn't a nice-to-have, in his view; it's the only version of enterprise AI that scales without collapsing under its own maintenance burden. Voice AI’s Real Value Jain says that the interesting thing about voice AI is not just that it sounds natural but what it can actually do. Most companies just use voice AI to answer questions. Jain says that about 80 per cent of customer calls are about transactions, not just information. Customers don't call just to ask questions; they call to get something done, like a refund or a change to their account. Enterprise Bots work with Generali Switzerland to show the difference between answering questions and actually resolving issues. When the AI could complete transactions on its own, customer satisfaction went up. When the AI couldn't complete transactions, it was still helpful by directing customers to the right person, which saved time and improved accuracy Scaling AI Starts With Governance Jain warns that none of this works without taking compliance and data privacy seriously. Companies in services have to follow rules about where they can use generative AI. The EU has rules about what data can be processed and how, and some things, like sentiment tracking, are allowed in
The fact that OpenAI has quickly adopted Temporal, a rapidly expanding AI ecosystem, and has even entered into a partnership with Crystal Palace FC shows that its business strategy is to pursue community-first innovation. For years, tech enterprises competed against each other on the grounds of innovative features. However, the competition has changed recently. Now the winners are those who build communities. In the recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, host Christina Stathopoulos, Founder of Dare to Data, is joined by Melissa Herrera, Senior Developer Advocate at Temporal, and Les Jackson, Staff Developer Advocate, to discuss the pivotal role of the community in technology. They further explore how Temporal's open-source philosophy fosters developer engagement, the impact of community feedback on product development, and the significance of partnerships, such as with OpenAI and Crystal Palace. The conversation emphasises the importance of authentic community relationships and the future direction of Temporal, highlighting the need for continuous integration and collaboration with developers. Takeaways Community is a central part of Temporal's growth. Temporal's philosophy is rooted in open-source software. In-person community interactions are invaluable for developers. Feedback from the community directly shapes product direction. OpenAI's adoption of Temporal led to significant scaling. Partnerships should focus on community engagement, not just transactions. Temporal's collaboration with Crystal Palace merges tech and sports communities. Investing in community fosters trust and collaboration. Continuous integration with developer tools is essential for success. Authentic community relationships drive technology innovation.