The Forward Slash Podcast

/apocaloptimist: ai leadership in 2026

Is your AI strategy replacing people, or amplifying them? James sits down with Mike Hruska — founder of Baryons, former NIST material scientist, and TEDx speaker on what magic teaches leaders — for a human-first tour of AI leadership in 2026: the two kinds of executives this market is creating, why high-performing teams shrink to two or three when AI joins the room, what AIQ — Authentic Intelligence Quotient — actually measures, and what "apocaloptimist" leadership looks like when the calculus has changed under your feet.

/ai agents: more steak, less sizzle

* Is your enterprise AI actively shipping, or just sitting pretty in a deck? James sits down with John Capobianco, head of AI and Developer Relations at Itential and former senior network architect for Canada's House of Commons, for an engineering leader's tour of what's actually shipping in 2026: spec-driven development with Ralph loops, MCP as the next generational protocol, agents built like org charts instead of Swiss Army knives, and the open-source agent security stack. 21 minutes for engineering leaders ready to ship.

/agent guardrails: you can't blame the bot

The hardest question in enterprise AI isn't "can we build agents?" — it's "how do we let them act on our behalf without losing the company?" In Part 2 of our conversation with John Willis, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, James gets concrete about what agent guardrails actually look like in regulated environments: delegated authority, read/write/execute permissions, kill switches, and the Andon Cord for AI. Twenty-one minutes for engineering leaders who've been told to "go faster on AI" without a plan for what happens when an agent misbehaves.

/ai agents: don't be the next knight capital

The AI agent horror stories your vendors aren't telling you — and what to do before they happen to you. John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook and one of the original pioneers of the DevOps movement, joins James for part one of a two-part conversation on what autonomous AI agents are actually doing inside enterprise infrastructure right now. From vault secrets dumped to open source to entire repos deleted by a hallucinated command, John shares the real-world incidents every engineering leader needs to hear before they become the cautionary tale. Part two drops next week.

/enterprise ai: why your agents can't run without guardrails

Is your enterprise ready to run AI agents in production — or just in demos?  Logan Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Waxell AI, joins us to explore why deploying autonomous AI agents at enterprise scale is a fundamentally different challenge than building them. From runaway costs and unpredictable agent behavior to PII exposure and AI governance, we break down what actually breaks when agentic systems go live — and why engineering leaders are building guardrails and AI control planes around their agents instead of into them to move from pilot to production without losing control of what their agents do next.