Show Notes
Every enterprise leader has heard the numbers by now as billions poured into licences, seats and tokens, with productivity gains still trailing well behind the promise. On a recent episode of Tech Transformed, host Christina Stathopoulos sat down with Jay Richman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Multiverse, to unpack why so many organisations remain stuck in what he calls "tinker mode" and what it actually takes to move past it. Richman's view is shaped by a career spent at the sharp end of three separate technology shifts. A decade at Spotify saw him build out the company's advertising business and early subscription platform from scratch. Roughly four years at Amazon followed, working on agentic AI systems within the advertising division, effectively rebuilding the old-fashioned creative agency model using specialised generative media tools. Four months ago, he relocated from New York to London to join Multiverse, drawn by a mission he sees as almost the reverse of his previous work. Rather than using people to make machines smarter, the task now is training machines to make people smarter. That framing sits at the centre of this conversation. The AI Adoption Gap Richman suggests that the widely reported gap between AI spend and AI-driven output isn't really a technology failure; it's a human one. Tools sit unused, licences go unopened, and organisations struggle to move employees from curious onlookers to confident, habitual users. Multiverse's answer is what it calls the "adoption layer", which is a diagnostic approach that pinpoints where skill gaps actually sit across a workforce, builds tailored learning paths around them, then embeds coaching directly inside the tools people already use, whether that's Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT. Crucially, Richman distinguishes between what he wryly terms "token maxing" and value creation. Blunt incentives, leaderboards, usage dashboards and mandates to switch from manual coding to AI-assisted development. All this can help people over that first hurdle, and he admits to having used some of these tactics himself. But the real measure of success has to be defined customer by customer, tied to a specific business outcome, not simply how many prompts someone fired off in a week. As he puts it, the value of any given AI initiative can only be judged against what that particular organisation set out to solve in the first place. Human Skills AI Can't Replace One of the most interesting parts of the discussion explores how generative and agentic AI are reshaping team structures. Richman describes a flattening of traditional boundaries: product managers writing code, designers contributing to technical documents, and engineers drafting strategy papers. Functions that were once tightly specialised, such as a dedicated user-research team and a standalone copywriting role, are increasingly being absorbed as skills within more generalist, multi-hatted employees. At the same time, he notes, the opposite is happening at the model layer, with AI agents becoming ever more specialised. The result, in his telling, is smaller teams working with far greater autonomy and considerably less coordination overhead than in years past. Asked what he prioritises when hiring now, Richman is candid that mastery of a single discipline matters to him less than certain behavioural traits: curiosity, high agency, sound judgment. He shares an interview technique he relies on, asking candidates how they spent their time during the pandemic lockdowns, as a rough proxy for whether someone tends to seize initiative or simply wait for circumstances to dictate their next move. Moving Fast Without Cutting Corners On responsible deployment, Richman insists culture has to start at the top. Leaders, he argues, need to be visibly hands-on and honest about their own gaps in knowledge rather than issuing mandates from a distance. At Multiverse, that meant lifting caps on AI coding tools, resetting the expectation that new wo
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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.