CTO2CTO

As AI makes building software easier, the hard thinking is shifting to product. In this episode of CTO2CTO, Lucas Hendrich, CTO at Forte Group, sits down with Piyum Samaraweera, Chief Product Officer at L2L (Leading2Lean), to explore what that shift looks like on the plant floor.

Piyum explains why L2L's goal has never been to eliminate downtime, but to recover from it as fast as possible. He unpacks the "dashboard fallacy" behind years of manufacturing tech investment that never moved productivity, and why context is what finally turns plant data into action. The conversation covers lean principles and the Gemba walk, why the operator is still the secret sauce, working with 50-year-old machinery instead of replacing it, the line between deterministic and probabilistic decisions, and why AI recommendations must be bookended with learning. They close on energy consumption as an emerging KPI and what a Chief Product Officer actually does: making sure everyone is climbing the same mountain.

In this episode, Alex Lukashevich, CAIO at Forte Group, sits down with Tina Liu, CPO at Local Infusion, to explore what it actually means to become an AI-first organization.

Mike Kinloch, SVP of Engineering at Xceptor, joins Alex Lukashevich, CAIO at Forte Group, to discuss AI adoption, engineering leadership, governance, and building AI into software delivery.

Sarah Timms, Chief Product and Technology Officer at InTick, on merging product and tech roles, earning trust in confidential markets, and why AI can't replace listening

Joel Karr, CTO at Keller Postman, on custom software in mass torts, AI-powered medical record extraction, and why deliberate practice matters.

Garret Fitzgerald, CIO at Salute, on token economics, agent identity, and why you shouldn't put an LLM where a rules engine belongs.

Eashwer Srinivasan, CTO at Sonny’s Car Wash, on NASA lessons, industrial automation, and building software for the physical world

Kit Colbert, Platform CTO at Invisible Technologies, on vMotion lessons, the half-pizza team, and why AI agents will run for a week by year-end.

Robert Stewart, CTO at Arbital Health, on transforming healthcare payments, empowering actuaries to code, and running inclu.sive hackathons

Anoop Tripathi, CTO at Sauce Labs, discusses how AI is reshaping software development, and why quality, simplicity, and engineering judgment matter more than ever.