Released: The Story Behind the Software

AI adoption is accelerating, but more code and greater token consumption don’t automatically translate into business value. For enterprises, turning promising AI pilots into measurable progress takes changes to how teams plan, build, test, and deliver software—and how leaders measure success.

In this episode of Released, Derek Holt sits down with Rainer Heinold, CEO of knowmad mood Germany, to explore what it takes to scale enterprise AI. They discuss why coding is rarely the only bottleneck, how consumption-based pricing challenges traditional software economics, and why governance and human expertise become more critical as delivery accelerates. They also explore the potential of smaller, specialized models and the role of human creativity in building software that stands out.

AI-native companies are building faster, operating with leaner teams, and reshaping what customers expect. For established software companies, innovation is no longer just a way to get ahead. It’s becoming the cost of staying competitive. 

In the next episode of Released, Derek Holt sits down with Brian Goffman, Managing Director of AI at TPG, to explore how AI is changing company building, the economics of software, and the role of every leader – from executive to builder. 

AI agents are moving from experimentation to action—accessing systems, making decisions, and completing work on our behalf. But as their autonomy grows, traditional approaches to identity and access management may no longer be enough.

In this episode of Released, Derek Holt sits down with Art Gilliland, CEO of Delinea, to explore what it takes to secure and govern AI agents at enterprise scale. They discuss why organizations need to think beyond “front door” access controls to understand what agents actually do once inside, how machine-speed autonomy is reshaping identity security, and why trying to inventory every AI agent may be the wrong approach.

AI isn't just making attackers more effective — it's changing the economics of cyberattacks entirely. For decades, attackers were constrained by talent, time, and scale. AI has changed all of that. The attackers now have unlimited shots on goal.

Snehal Antani is one of the sharpest minds in offensive cybersecurity, and someone who has been in rooms most people never get access to. His path took him through leadership roles at IBM, GE Capital, Splunk, and ultimately to the most elite special operations unit in the world. He's now the CEO and Founder of Horizon3.ai.

In this conversation, Snehal explains the distinction every enterprise security leader needs to hear — the difference between vulnerable and exploitable. He breaks down what AI has actually handed every threat actor on the planet, why organizations that thought they weren't a target need to think again, why the only perspective that matters in cybersecurity is the attacker's — and what to do about it.

What happens to identity when the entity logging in isn’t a person? That’s the question at the center of this conversation between Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, and Chandra Shirashyad, Director of Engineering at Okta. 

As AI agents take on more autonomous roles inside enterprise workflows, the traditional model of identity — based on who you are and what role you hold — is giving way to something more dynamic: access based on intent, granted just in time, and revoked the moment the task is done. 

Chandra and Derek cover the shift from static authentication to continuous verification, why standing permissions are incompatible with an agentic world, and what it means to treat AI agents as a new class of identity. 

Chandra’s “over-eager intern” analogy is one of the most useful framings of AI risk you’ll hear. And his advice on unifying identity infrastructure before AI agents make the problem unmanageable is the kind of forward-looking take that makes this episode worth saving. 

What does it really take to deliver software at global scale in the world's most regulated industries? 

In the premiere episode of Released: The Story Behind the Software, Digital.ai CEO Derek Holt sits down with Eric Baran — who leads developer platform and Gen AI for Amazon Web Services's global financial services business — for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, agentic workflows, and what enterprise software delivery actually looks like in 2026. 

The takeaway most people aren't talking about: writing code faster is only a small part of the story. For the world's largest banks, insurers, and financial institutions, the real bottlenecks live in the release pipeline, in governance, in security — and AI is starting to change all of that. 

🎧 SUBSCRIBE to Released for new episodes featuring technology leaders from the world's most influential enterprises. 

Everyone's talking about AI transforming software development. But for global enterprises operating at scale, the reality is far more complicated than the hype suggests. Released: The Story Behind the Software is where those real conversations happen. Host Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai, sits down with the engineers and technology leaders doing the hard work — and gets into the stories, the hard-won lessons, and where they see things heading next.