Eye On A.I.

51:14

The Coordination Tax: Why AI Is Burning Out Your Best...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/10/06

Everyone assumes AI in customer operations means fewer people and lower costs. The data from 700 customer operations leaders is more complicated, and more honest. Dan O'Connell, CEO of Front, joins Craig Smith with findings from a survey of customer support, service, and account management leaders that reveal what's actually happening as enterprises deploy AI at scale, and the central finding is a problem nobody has named yet. For every hour of actual customer resolution, organizations spend

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33:54

Ukraine's Secret Weapon: The Points System Winning...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/10/02

Ukraine tracks every confirmed drone kill with video evidence, deduplicates the data to prevent double-counting, converts verified strikes into e-points, and delivers newly ordered weapons to frontline units in two weeks instead of twelve months. Andrii Hrytseniuk, CEO of Brave1- Ukraine's government defense innovation agency - joins Craig Smith to explain in precise operational detail how what started as a consumer loyalty program concept became the most consequential military procurement reform

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01:01:59

Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/30

One in four patients currently being considered for life support withdrawal may actually be fully conscious, they just can't signal it. That single finding, from a landmark New England Journal of Medicine study, is the practical stakes behind one of the most philosophically rich conversations in this series. Dr. Christof Koch - former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 25-year collaborator with Nobel laureate Francis Crick, and founder of the startup Intrinsic Powers - joins Craig

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19:09

The Technology for Fully Autonomous Attack Is Already...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/24

The AI systems guiding Ukrainian combat drones aren't running on expensive Nvidia chips. They're running on a Raspberry Pi Zero - a $15 hobby computer - and that single detail tells you more about how Ukraine's drone war is actually being fought than any headline about AI weapons. Craig Smith sits down with Alex Liannoy, CTO of NORDA Dynamics, for a technically specific and operationally candid conversation about what autonomous drone guidance looks like from inside the team building it. NORDA

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01:05:49

Inside Ukraine's Drone War: Maj. "Phoenix" of Lasar's...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/21

The first armed drone Ukraine ever fielded wasn't built in a factory or procured from a defense contractor. It was built in four months by a network engineer using a Starlink terminal and a large agricultural quadcopter frame, and the man who built it, Maj Phoenix, co-founder of Lasars Group, joins Craig Smith in Kyiv to explain exactly how it happened and what the battlefield looks like now. The conversation traces the full arc from that first prototype - with its two-person crew of pilot and

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58:49

The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/14

Most companies investing in AI visibility are optimizing for the wrong thing. Being cited by an AI response and being recommended by an AI response are completely different outcomes, with click-through rates that differ by a factor of 70. Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer of G2 and executive fellow at Harvard's AI Institute, joins Craig Smith to explain the hidden mechanics behind how ChatGPT and Gemini actually decide which software to recommend, and why the answer has almost nothing to do

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55:19

The Reason 30 Years of Cybersecurity Has Failed - and...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/10

Every major data breach in the last 30 years shares the same root cause: the data inside the wall was never protected, only the wall. And AI frontier models are now making that wall easier to breach than ever, scanning codebases externally to discover undisclosed vulnerabilities and write exploits before anyone knows the hole exists. Trent Telford, Chairman, CEO & Founder of Qanapi, joins Craig Smith to explain why the entire architecture of conventional cybersecurity is structurally broken, and

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54:45

86% of What Coding Agents Do Is Just Reading — Not...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/08

Every AI model in production today has the same hidden tax: doubling the context window quadruples the compute. That's what quadratic compute complexity means in practice, and it's the reason enterprises are spending most of their AI engineering budget on context management rather than on the actual problems they're trying to solve. Alexander Whedon, co-founder and CTO of Subquadratic, joins Craig Smith to explain how SubQ's sparse attention mechanism eliminates that tax, achieving 40 times faster

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38:17

From 10 Drones a Month to Nearly 100,000 — Inside...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/09/03

In 2023, General Cherry started making 10 drones a month. Today they're approaching 100,000. Marko Kushnir, communications director of one of Ukraine's top-five drone manufacturers, joins Craig Smith for one of the most operationally specific conversations available about what drone warfare looks like at industrial scale, from the daily feedback loops with front-line units that drive product iteration, to the $2,000 interceptor drone that can destroy a $100,000 Shahed, to the on-device AI targeting

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53:10

In 5 to 10 Years, Using Weapons Without AI Will Be...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/31

A Ukrainian entrepreneur who spent 14 years building cameras for pets pivoted to building cameras that down Shaheds, and is now building the autonomy software that could define how wars are fought for the next generation. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, co-founder of Fourth Law, joins Craig Smith in Kyiv to explain why Ukraine has become what he calls the Defense Valley or the Florence of Defense: a dense, fast-moving ecosystem of founders, engineers, and military operators who are building, testing, and

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41:48

Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/27

The most consequential arms race in the world right now isn't nuclear, it's software. Craig Smith speaks with Alexander Palamarchuk, an engineer in the R&D department of Ukraine's Azov Brigade, calling in from approximately 18 kilometers from the front line in the Pokrovsk region. What emerges is one of the most technically candid accounts available of what drone warfare actually looks like from the inside: how Ukraine went from homemade reconnaissance drones in 2014 to AI-guided systems being

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01:01:49

95% of AI Agent Projects Fail to Reach Production....

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/24

It takes a few hours to build an AI agent. It takes six to seven months to get it into production. Manoj Saxena - the executive who commercialized IBM Watson - built TrustWise around one thesis: intelligence without control is not deployable. In this episode, he joins Craig Smith to explain why 95% of enterprise AI agent projects are stalling between pilot and production, and why the answer has nothing to do with the quality of the underlying models. The bottleneck, Saxena argues, is the absence of

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01:06:23

From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/19

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, with contracts across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, joins Craig Smith to explain why the race is moving

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50:46

Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI - and What That...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/17

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 inference where interactivity is the product, users pay ten times more per million tokens for instant

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58:43

American Companies Have 36 Months to Go AI-Native or...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/13

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, he joins Craig Smith to make a case that most enterprise AI strategies are fundamentally broken, not

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58:37

In 5 Years, 90% of What You Use AI For Will Run on...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/10

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 make a case that within five years, 90% of what ordinary people use AI for will run entirely on consumer

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50:46

Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI | Sid Sheth,...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/06

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 inference where interactivity is the product, users pay ten times more per million tokens for instant

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59:12

AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/08/03

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 Innovation at BMC Helix, and Ryan Manning, Chief Product Officer at BMC Helix, to explain how agentic AI is

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01:05:38

Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/07/30

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 work, not just what tools they use. The conversation opens with a striking data point: the average

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46:12

"According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not...

Eye On A.I. ·

2026/07/29

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 explain what her team built, why it matters, and what it will take to go from proof of concept to a

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