Keep Moving Forward

Many companies are having the wrong conversation about hybrid work — and it could be costing them their best engineers.

Dan Bladen, CEO of Kadence, has spent years helping organizations design smarter, more intentional ways of working. His take: the word "hybrid" has stopped being useful, return-to-office mandates are usually a leadership problem in disguise, and the distributed teams that built strong documentation habits for remote work are sitting on a structural AI advantage most of them haven't fully recognized yet.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Gemma Versace sits down with Dan to cover:

- The two patterns that break trust in every return-to-office push

- His heads-up/heads-down framework for engineering leaders

- Why attendance is the wrong metric — and what to measure instead

For most tech leaders, a bad call means a missed milestone. For Kevin Andrews, it means someone doesn't get paid.

Kevin is President of PrismHR and CTO of Vensure Employer Solutions, two companies handling payroll and HR for more than 160,000 small businesses and processing nearly $160 billion in payroll annually. In this episode, host Gemma Versace talks with Kevin about what responsible AI adoption looks like when the stakes are this concrete.

They get into the governance-first framework Kevin applies across his 400-person AI-enabled developer team, why no one actually has 20 years of AI experience and what to look for instead, the real gap in vibe coding at enterprise scale, and the leadership mistake he keeps watching tech leaders make heading into integration work.

Kevin also shares what he's learned from Vensure's 100-plus acquisitions, why he's currently pursuing a doctorate focused on AI and machine learning, and why the leaders who come through the current AI transition well won't be the fastest — they'll be the ones who know exactly what can't break.

Your team completed the workshop. They did the role play. They said it was amazing.

Then they went back to their desks and kept doing exactly what they were doing before.

Esha Joshi, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Yoodli, has spent years watching this pattern repeat inside some of the world's largest companies. She says the problem with most communication skills training isn't the content. It's that behavior change never gets built into the workflow — and when it doesn't, nothing sticks.

In this episode, Esha explains what actually drives adoption of AI-powered communication tools, why being available isn't the same as being effective, and how she learned that being a bottleneck is a systems failure, not a leadership trait.

If you lead a customer-facing team and wonder why training never seems to transfer to real work, this episode is for you.

Your transformation roadmap is set. The strategy looks solid. Leadership is aligned. So why does nothing seem to actually change?

Victoria Pelletier, global vice president at Kyndryl and keynote speaker, has led change through more than 40 mergers and acquisitions in some of the world's most complex technology environments. She argues that the biggest blocker to transformation is not technology. The obstacle is whether people believe in the change and whether the right leaders are in the right roles to carry it out.

In this episode, Victoria explains how organizations mistake busy delivery for real progress, why adoption fails when human-centered design is skipped, and how a 10-20-70 framework reframes where AI's value actually comes from.

If you are leading a technology transformation while still expected to deliver every day, this conversation will change how you think about momentum and belief-building.

Your enterprise AI agents are up and running. The outputs look polished. The answers sound confident.

So why do decisions still feel risky?

Richard Sonnenblick, Chief Data Scientist at Planview, has built decision systems in high risk industries where bad data leads to real consequences. He argues the biggest challenge with enterprise AI is not autonomy. It is data quality and human ownership.

In this episode, Rich explains how outdated systems of record quietly train AI on optimistic fiction, why garbage in still means garbage out, and what practical agent driven workflows can prove ROI in the first 60 to 90 days.

If you are scaling enterprise AI across your teams, this conversation will change how you think about accountability and execution.

Most AI adoption conversations focus on speed and capability. Raj Natarajan focuses on what those conversations skip: trust as a design requirement. In this episode, the global CTO of Gorilla Technology Group breaks down the five decisions that determine whether an AI system will be trusted long-term, and why sovereign AI is reshaping where data centers are built, how models are trained, and how systems are secured.

Great leaders aren’t just experts in their field—they’re mentors, problem-solvers, and collaborators who empower others to succeed. In this episode, we talk to Vishnu V. Ram, Vice President of Engineering at Credit Karma, about his career journey, leadership philosophy, and the innovations driving Credit Karma’s success. Vishnu reflects on his early experiences during the dot-com boom, shares insights into navigating challenges in data science, and emphasizes the importance of mentorship, collaboration, and continuous learning. Vishnu offers actionable advice for tech leaders looking to build resilient systems, foster team growth, and balance technical excellence with a people-first approach.

Your AI rollout looked fine on paper. The launch happened. The training got done. The metrics held.

So why is your team still running everything on spreadsheets?

Paul Gentile, former senior director of pre-sales engineering and architecture at Broadcom, has spent years inside some of the largest enterprise tech environments in the world, and he says most AI adoption failures aren't technology problems. They're trust problems. And by the time leaders notice, it's already too late.

In this episode, Paul breaks down the quiet signals that adoption is failing, why your highest performers are often the last ones to tell you they're drowning, and the single most common way leaders destroy trust without realizing it.

If your team isn't using the tools you rolled out, this episode is for you.

Most banks are using AI to cut costs and speed up workflows. Will Jung thinks they’re focusing on the wrong set of problems. As CTO of nCino — and a former bank exec himself — he’s looking for ways to reimagine the entire customer experience.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Will shares how his team is building explainable AI agents that augment expertise, why trust is the real unlock in regulated industries, and how engineering leaders can drive AI-native transformation through clarity, context, and culture.

Joel Hron, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters, shares the AI adoption strategy that his team used to achieve 80% uptake across a 5,000-person engineering organization.

In this episode of Keep Moving Forward, Joel explains how innovation becomes everyone’s job, how he pushed through early failures, and how grounding AI work in deep subject matter expertise creates lasting competitive advantage.