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Eye On A.I.

Eye On A.I.

By: Craig S. Smith
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Summary

Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast, hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. In each episode, Craig will talk to people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.Eye On A.I.
Episodes
  • Why Agentic-First Startups Won't Disrupt Enterprises as Fast as Everyone Thinks | Kris Lovejoy
    May 15 2026

    Kris Lovejoy, Global Strategy Leader at Kyndryl, has spent her career at the intersection of IT infrastructure and security. Right now, she's one of the people enterprises call when they want to move from AI experimentation to real deployment. Her diagnosis is clear: agentic AI is a bullet train sitting on tracks built for 30 miles per hour. The technology is ready. Most organizations aren't, and the gap between a successful pilot and a production system running at scale is far wider than the hype suggests.

    In this conversation with Craig Smith, Lovejoy walks through why IT service management is the smartest entry point for agentic adoption, how cost savings of up to 90% in that area can fund broader modernization, and why the security risks in agentic systems are less about sophisticated hackers and more about misconfiguration, bad context, and human error. She closes with a specific prediction: half of traditional IT administration tasks will be handled by AI agents by 2031, and a surprising take on who will actually thrive in the agentic era: not coders, but people trained to ask the right questions.

    For anyone making decisions about AI adoption, this is the most practical conversation available right now.

    Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

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    57 mins
  • Loris Degioanni: Why AI Is Breaking Cybersecurity, and What Comes Next
    May 6 2026

    AI has fundamentally changed the cybersecurity threat landscape, not by inventing new attack types, but by collapsing the timeline. The same tools that make software developers more productive are now being used by attackers to move from vulnerability disclosure to active exploit in a matter of hours. That shift, argues Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig, changes everything about how defense needs to work.

    In this episode, Craig Smith talks with Loris Degioanni about why human-centered security is becoming a structural liability, what "headless cloud security" means in practice, and why the coding agent (tools like Claude Code or Codex) may become the new operating system through which all enterprise security workflows run. It's a conversation about architecture, urgency, and what it actually means to fight a tank when you've been trained to use a baseball bat.

    If this conversation made you think differently about AI and security, subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and defending the future.

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    51 mins
  • #342 Andrew Thangaraj: The $5,000 IIT Degree: Can India Fix Its Broken Education System?
    May 1 2026

    What if the most competitive exam in the world is also the most destructive?

    In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Andrew Thangaraj, faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, to explore how one of India's most prestigious institutions is quietly dismantling the system it helped build.

    Andrew lays out the honest reality of higher education in India. Two and a half crore kids reach college age every year. Only 90 lakh make it to college. And the IITs, the most coveted institutions in the country, take just 17,000. The competition to reach those seats has become so extreme that students are losing their childhoods, their development is stunted, and even those who make it through are often unemployable because the system rewards knowledge over skills.

    Andrew walks through exactly how IIT Madras is responding. A full, IIT-branded undergraduate degree in data science delivered entirely online for under five lakhs, roughly $5,000. No JEE required. No elite school background needed. Just a 10th standard foundation and the willingness to do the work. The program flips the traditional model, putting hands-on skills and real projects before theory, building in multiple exit points for students who need to start earning before they finish, and scaling to over 40,000 active students through a hybrid of faculty-recorded lectures, full-time instructors, and a remarkably active student community.

    We also get into the bigger picture. Why India's AI talent gap is as much a culture problem as a numbers problem. Whether India can leapfrog into AI leadership the way China did after rebuilding its research ecosystem. Where AI tools are already being tested inside the program and where they still fall short. And how AI deployed in Indian languages, in agriculture, and in the courts could drive the kind of societal change that no corporate productivity tool ever will.

    Subscribe for more conversations with the people shaping the future of AI and emerging technology.

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    (00:00) Introduction and Andrew Thangaraj's Background

    (01:29) India's Higher Education Bottleneck

    (03:45) Designing a $5,000 IIT Degree

    (09:27) Why Graduates Still Lack Skills

    (12:31) When the Program Started and How It Got Approved

    (13:56) Program Structure, Diplomas and Multiple Exit Points

    (17:52) Who the Program Reaches and Surprising Student Stories

    (24:57) Older Students, Working Professionals and International Enrollment

    (29:55) Can India Leapfrog in AI

    (34:03) Data Centers, Power and Infrastructure Gaps

    (40:57) How Involved Are the IITs in India's AI Mission

    (46:00) AI for Languages, Farms and Courts

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    49 mins
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