Tom Chi has played many roles inside and outside the tech industry, including serving as head of Google X, where he helped develop Google Glass and self-driving cars. Now a founding partner at the environmentally focused venture capital firm At One Ventures, Chi has published a book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. The book offers dark warnings about the possible future of humans on Earth amid threefold crises in the environment, the AI economy, and geopolitics and also proposes a framework for change.

In this wide-ranging and provocative interview, Chi puts forth his opinions on why a world in which billionaires are building doomsday bunkers is one in which no one is really winning, and how that would could be re-imagined.

Featuring: Tom Chi, founding partner, At One Ventures

In today's episode, we'll cover…

References:

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Corey Sanders, Senior Vice President of Product at neocloud provider CoreWeave, leads product strategy and execution for the company. His mission: Gain enterprises' trust for CoreWeave's AI cloud services. The challenge: slower-than-expected enterprise AI adoption so far and skyrocketing demand for AI infrastructure, including data center power and water resources.

Featuring: Corey Sanders, Senior Vice President of Product at CoreWeave

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References:

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Microsoft corporate vice president and Kubernetes project co-founder Brendan Burns envisions a long-term transition in the industry from declarative cloud-native infrastructure to intent-based infrastructure, facilitated by AI. In the short term, the impact of AI on enterprise infrastructure will be strongest in two major areas, according to Burns: reducing toil through automation and improving data summarization with natural language-based infrastructure exploration.  As enterprises adjust to these changes, Burns emphasized that IT leaders should get hands-on, firsthand experience with AI automation tools.

Featuring: Brendan Burns, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.

Erwan Menard spent six years at Google, where he most recently worked as director of product management for Google's Cloud AI services. Six months ago, he left to join Crusoe Cloud as senior vice president of product management. Crusoe Cloud, which offers everything from hosted cloud services to renewable power sources, is best known for operating the Stargate 1.2 gigawatt data center campus in Abilene, Texas. In this interview, Menard discusses the advantages of designing cloud data centers from the ground up to support AI workloads, and how the industry can meet exploding demand for data center resources, including power, as technology evolves.

Featuring: Erwan Menard, senior vice president of product management, Crusoe Cloud

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References:

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Suzanne Livingston is vice president at IBM, overseeing product management for the watsonx Orchestrate AI agent platform. She says enterprises must strike between AI governance and trying to force every workload into one platform – or to be agentic at all. Going forward, managing AI agents will require new kinds of human-to-AI and human-to-human collaboration, according to Livingston, that the industry is just learning about.

Featuring: Suzanne Livingston, Vice President, IBM watsonx Orchestrate

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

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Renowned public speaker, industry commentator, technologist and open source ambassador Kelsey Hightower describes himself as an AI skeptic, but warns that platform engineers should take the threat of AI to their jobs seriously. In this episode, he explains the skills IT operations leaders must emphasize as they prepare for the question: "What value do you bring over the machines?"

Featuring: Kelsey Hightower, technologist, speaker and open source ambassador

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

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Last year in AWS with Corey Quinn

To paraphrase David Letterman, this next guest needs no introduction, at least for many people in the cloud computing world: Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills "by making them smaller and less horrifying," according to his website bio. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts and curates the weekly newsletter "Last Week in AWS." In this episode, he shares his thoughts on the biggest and most overlooked AWS stories in 2025 and his outlook for 2026.

Featuring: Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist, Duckbill

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

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Brett Smith, distinguished software developer at AI and data management software and services company SAS, has spent nine of his 13 years with the company focused on software supply chain security, managing DevSecOps and compliance for a 3,000-developer organization. He shares the good, the bad and the ugly of the journey to date, and his outlook for the future.

Featuring: Brett Smith, distinguished software developer, SAS

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References:

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You might recognize Rob Strechay from his appearances on TheCube livestreaming videos during industry conferences, but he's worn many hats in the industry over the years. In this wide-ranging discussion, he looks back at how AI data management evolved in 2025, and predicts that AI "governance, security and data quality are going to be all the rage in 2026."

Featuring: Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at TheCube Research

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

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As it rolled out AI and AIOps, Salesforce shunned the cloud repatriation route and instead expanded its public cloud presence with Hyperforce. Paul Constantinides, an engineering leader at Salesforce for more than 21 years, currently leads engineering for Hyperforce. In this episode, he details the evolution of the Salesforce internal platform over the years, what was behind the decision to launch Hyperforce, his team's extensive use of AIOps and his "NoOps" goals in the age of AI agents.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: IT Ops Query will be on a holiday break the next two weeks, returning Jan. 8 with all-new episodes.

Featuring: Paul Constantinides, executive vice president of engineering, Salesforce

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

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References:

To learn more about software development and platform engineering, check out Search IT Operations.

To watch clips from our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel, @EyeOnTech.