TechUnhinged

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Bob Berbeco, Chief Information Officer at Mahaska Health, a rural hospital in Iowa, and former informatics leader at Indiana University Health. Bob argues that AI strategies do not die because the technology fails, they die because nobody mapped the risk first. He explains why every modernization and AI decision at his organization runs through a risk matrix, why data governance and veracity must exist before a single model goes live, and how his team stopped accepting vendor pitches and instead built an AI center of excellence. He also shares the horror story of an aging billing system whose motherboard died and the vendor contract that saved it.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Tia Hopkins, founder of CTRL+EXEC and former Chief Cyber Resilience Officer & Field CTO at eSentire, where she spent nine years rising from solutions engineer to the executive team. Tia argues AI does not change what cyber resilience means, only how organizations build it: every AI agent should earn expanded responsibility the way a new hire earns trust, through a probationary period, not a blank check. She explains why resilience was never about preventing every breach, and why bolting AI onto a broken legacy foundation builds new failure on old failure. This conversation is a playbook for staying resilient when your attackers have the same AI toolkit you do.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Lydia, Chief Information Officer at Appreciation Financial, co-founder of Genie AI, and founder of the People's Accords, with over eight years in data and AI strategy across financial services. The conversation digs into the modernization paradox, where 92% of leaders call AI critical yet fewer than a quarter have systems ready to support it. Lydia unpacks why AI adoption really comes down to people, context, and junk data, how regulated industries must balance legacy storage against the cloud, and why not every task needs an LLM. She also reveals how her team keeps client data out of public models, and offers a candid look at the human cost of AI-driven layoffs.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, host Rabia Javeed sits down with Chris Colinsky, CTO and Principal AI Engineer at Howl, which has been building for the web since 2003 and is the creator of the open-source OpenArmature framework for LLM-powered pipelines. Chris cuts through the AI hype, arguing that large language models are pattern matching at scale, probabilistic, confidently wrong, and only as reliable as the engineering around them. He explains why most AI failures are really data quality problems, why legacy system modernization must precede AI adoption, and how his "calculate first, reason second" approach builds reliable AI systems on unpredictable models. From graph-based retrieval to self-hosted small models, this conversation is a practical playbook for taking AI from demo to production.

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Joel Grossman, CIO of IMG Academy and a 25-year veteran of technology leadership at Legacy.com, iProspect, and Leapfrog Online, explores what happens when frontier AI meets a 20-year-old recruiting platform and a 500-acre training campus. He argues that AI has erased the multi-year data-warehousing work once needed to make it useful, compressing it into weeks. Further, Joel warns the bottleneck in AI adoption is now organizational, not technical, legacy systems must be modernized without disrupting the families relying on them. His emphasis is to give domain experts direct AI access first, wrap it in production-grade security second, then scale safely. Speed does not equal judgment, and adversarial review must stay central, not a checkbox.

Barbara Pender has spent 25 years watching organizations bolt new technology onto old problems and call it transformation. In this episode of TechUnhinged, in conversation with Rabia Javeed, she draws a parallel between how social media scaled without guardrails and where AI is headed, arguing the stakes this time are considerably higher. Most companies are fixing the wrong thing, adding new tools to old problems and calling it progress. Her four-stage trust ladder, assist, execute, optimize, orchestrate, reframes the autonomy question entirely. The real test was never about what an agent can do but about what happens when it doesn't. On governance, if no single executive owns what breaks, you don't have governance, you have a process document. She also flags what most leaders skip, that running AI at enterprise scale burns serious compute, and if you are not measuring that cost alongside business value, you are only reading half the bill. 

Christopher Penn has spent over a decade watching marketers chase tools instead of outcomes, and his diagnosis is uncomfortable. On this episode of TechUnhinged, in conversation with Rabia Javeed, he explains how most social media strategies bleed money quietly because nobody measures soft costs like human hours. Organic reach is collapsing, SaaS products are becoming commodities that any skilled operator can replicate in an afternoon, and templated jobs are vanishing faster than companies want to admit. Penn's argument is blunt that if your entire role runs on standard operating procedures, you are already replaceable. His 5P framework, purpose, people, process, platform, performance, cuts through the noise for B2B marketers, founders and CTOs rebuilding stale marketing stacks. The sharpest takeaway is that measurement maturity separates growing companies from ones running on assumptions and hoping the numbers never get checked. 

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Luis Suarez, CTO of H.I.G. Capital, unpacks why AI is forcing tech debt onto the board agenda. Luis explains how AI instantly exposes legacy systems and unready data, noting that tech debt remediation takes four to five times as much effort as modern integrations, and why isolated island systems are a liability in today's interconnected ecosystems. He shares H.I.G.'s AI-first playbook, including top-down CEO mandates, 8 to 10 hours of annual AI training per employee, and AI-powered due diligence. From managing hallucinations to balancing speed with strategic foundations, Luis offers hard-earned lessons on modernization, leadership, and curiosity in enterprise technology. 

In this episode of TechUnhinged, Paul Bockelman, CTO of Qanapi and a 25-year veteran of AWS and Google's defense/intelligence cloud teams, explores the security challenges faced by modern organizations. He warns that AI adoption is outpacing data protection, and employees are bleeding sensitive data into public LLMs without guardrails. Further, Paul also sounds the alarm about post-quantum cryptography and predicts that Q-Day may arrive as early as 2027, noting that adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data to decrypt later. His emphasis is to protect data at the data layer first, build crypto-agile foundations second, then scale AI. Compliance does not equal security, and architects must design for the spirit of regulations, not just the checkbox. 

TechUnhinged brings you the most fascinating episode as we host Christian Stepien, founder of Experlogix and CTO at the National UFO Reporting Center, reveals what 30 years of tracking the unexplained alongside a corporate career actually looks like. What shapes his conviction is not a personal sighting because he has never had one, but decades of reports from ordinary people whose worldview changed overnight. He sees the field's turning point in the data, where AI analyzing 150,000 reports now surfaces patterns, such as triangles appearing 7x more often at night. He also digs into passive radar, citizen-led disclosure, and the 1960s nuclear missile shutdowns that left Boeing's best engineers completely stumped. Christian advises young engineers drawn to this space to follow their curiosity around UFOs, because the stigma is shrinking and the science is finally catching up.