Show notes
Lillian Buziak runs an AI company in Silicon Valley, so you'd expect the cheerleading. Instead she opened with her Gen Z kids overruling her at home, and halfway through she laid out the squeeze her whole company lives in: if you don't adopt it, you fall behind, and if you do adopt it, you own all these new risks.She cites research (a Forrester or a McKinsey, she can't remember which, and I respect the honesty) that 88% of AI pilots never reach production. They die on governance and on getting the data somewhere the AI can actually see it, all the boring stuff nobody puts in a keynote. "That is real, and that is where you can either succeed or fail."Full disclosure, which I also make on the show: Lillian is the CEO of Caprus AI, which builds AI for finance teams, and I invested way back at the beginning. This episode is not why.Her model for trusting AI runs the same play she runs on actual humans: treat it like your newest intern. Small tasks first, more responsibility as it earns it. Caprus even has a literal internship program now, teaching college kids to use AI and, her words, to ask better questions. Her phrase for the whole thing is "whatever we learn, we teach."She also explained why every billboard on the 101 is AI now, including one that's just a person smiling in a log cabin (I have a theory), what advice 2030 would send back to 2026, what happens when vibe coding runs into enterprise security, and context engineering, which is the unglamorous work of building your company a brain.I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.The Caribbean AI Summit is October 9-10 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Come ask better questions with us: CaribbeanSummit.AILINKSCaribbean AI Summit (Oct 9-10, San Juan): https://CaribbeanSummit.AICaprus AI: https://caprus.aiLillian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lillianbuziak/BOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONEDThe 88%-of-pilots-never-reach-production stat (her citation, attributed on air to "a Forrester or a McKinsey")AgentCube, Caprus's product (the layer between your data and the AI)Also mentioned: ODTUG (she's the vice president), Oracle AI World, ChatGPT, Claude, AnthropicThis episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.Check how we empower the office of the CFO to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and revolutionize their operations.