In this episode of Leadership Exchange, Danny Thompson talks with Rossella Vital, VP of Engineering at Sprout Social. They map the shift from building single models to designing intelligent systems with agents, evaluation loops, and strong data governance. The conversation covers how roles are changing for data scientists, analysts, engineers, and product managers, what enablement looks like inside a company wide AI platform, and why leadership structures are adapting with the rise of the Chief AI Officer. You will also hear practical advice on prototyping for executive buy in and the skills that help teams stay relevant.What you will learn • Architecting intelligent systems with agents and evaluation • Judgment and validation to manage hallucinations • Data quality and governance as a prerequisite for agent workflows • How AI product managers operate and what they must own • Practical prototyping to clarify strategy for executives • Why leadership is evolving toward a Chief AI Officer

Chapters

00:00 Intro

03:00 Role shifts for data scientists and engineers

06:08 Inflection point with LLMs and agents

08:31 Expertise, hallucinations, treat AI like a teammate

12:25 From single models to intelligent systems and evaluation

16:42 Enablement platforms to scale AI across teams

18:26 Agentic analysts plus data quality and governance

31:41 The Chief AI OfficerDanny Thompson on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dthompsondev/Rossella Blatt Vital on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossellavital/This Dot Labs Twitter: https://x.com/ThisDotLabsThis Dot Media Twitter: https://x.com/ThisDotMediaThis Dot Labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisdotlabs/This Dot Labs Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thisdot/This Dot Labs Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thisdotlabs.bsky.socialSponsored by This Dot Labs: https://ai.thisdot.co/