DataFramed

As agents take over more of the actual coding, the nature of technical work is shifting from producing software to judging it. Engineers increasingly spend their time specifying what should be built and then checking whether an agent's output actually solved the problem, rather than writing every line themselves. That changes what skills matter for a career in data and software: problem-solving and evaluation start to outweigh knowing today's specific tools or syntax. It also raises a harder question for teams — if agents can generate work this fast, how do you know which of it is actually worth shipping?
Ledion Bitincka is Co-Founder and CTO of Cribl, where he leads the engineering organization with a first-principles approach to product delivery. Before Cribl, he was an Advanced Development Architect at Splunk, where he worked on Search-Time Schema, Hunk, and SmartStore, and before that founded Triangulus Communications. Nikhil Mungel is Head of AI R&D at Cribl, based in San Francisco, with over 15 years building distributed systems and AI teams at companies including Substack, Splunk, and ThoughtWorks — he now leads teams building LLM-powered systems for IT and security data.
In the episode, Richie, Ledion, and Nikhil explore AI agent disasters and cost shocks, software telemetry fundamentals, using agents to analyze telemetry, AI-powered software factories, the shift from knowledge work to judgment work, skills for the agentic era, avoiding runaway AI spend, and measuring product value through growth metrics, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• Jocko Willink's book, Leadership Strategy and Tactics: A Field Manual
• Cribl
• Cribl AI (Copilot)
• Claude Code
• AWS Graviton
• NVIDIA
• Connect with Ledion: LinkedIn
• Connect with Nikhil: LinkedIn
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: AI Agents at Work: What Actually Breaks (and How to Fix It)
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Hypergrowth companies rarely scale on strategy alone — they scale on how fast decisions get made and how much risk employees feel safe taking. A recurring idea in high-growth environments is treating decisions differently depending on whether they're reversible, and rewarding people for making an impact rather than simply avoiding mistakes. For managers and individual contributors alike, that shift changes what "good work" looks like day to day. Which of your team's decisions actually need a leader's sign-off, and which ones would move faster if people just tried something and adjusted?
Jon McNeill is CEO and co-founder of DVx Ventures, a venture studio that has launched 12 companies. He previously served as President at Tesla, where revenue grew from $2B to $20B in 30 months, and as COO at Lyft through its IPO. A serial entrepreneur, he's founded and sold six companies, sits on the boards of Lululemon and Asurion, and wrote The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula that Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors and SpaceX.
In the episode, Richie and Jon explore the algorithm behind Tesla's 10X hypergrowth, why automation should always come last, how to find and delete unnecessary process steps, building a culture of curiosity and urgency, one-way vs. two-way door decisions, small-team organizational design, changing the currency of promotion, and running effective meetings, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula that Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors and SpaceX by Jon McNeill
• Incorruptible by Eric Ries
• Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
• Eleven Madison Park
• Jensen Huang on LinkedIn
• Karim Bousta on LinkedIn
• Connect with Jon
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: How to Thrive in a World of Continuous Transformation
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Across the data and AI industry, infrastructure that once served dashboards and human analysts is being rebuilt to serve autonomous agents instead. That shift changes what "AI-ready data" actually means, pushing teams to rethink documentation, governance, and the semantic layer so agents pull consistent, trusted definitions rather than guessing. Day to day, this shows up as pressure to clean up gold-layer tables, eliminate duplicate metrics, and formalize business logic that used to live only in someone's head. It raises real questions: how clean does data need to be before agents can safely act on it, and who ends up owning that definition?
Tristan Handy is President and Co-Founder of Fivetran + dbt Labs, the company formed by the June 2026 merger of Fivetran and dbt Labs. He founded dbt Labs in 2016 (originally as Fishtown Analytics) and spent a decade as its CEO before leading the company through the merger, and has worked in data for 23 years.
In the episode, Richie and Tristan explore the dbt and Fivetran merger, building an open and modular data stack, using data to power trustworthy AI agents, the growing importance of semantic layers, how data team structures are evolving, career advice for data practitioners, context engineering for AI-driven research, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• Simon Willison's blog
• dbt MCP server
• Apache Iceberg
• Apache Polaris
• LookML / Looker's semantic layer
• The Vaccine Education Center (CHOP)
• Connect with Tristan
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
Related Episodes:
The Data Team's Agentic Future, with Ketan Karkhanis, CEO at ThoughtSpot
Towards Self-Service Data Engineering with Taylor Brown, Co-Founder and COO at Fivetran

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AI capability in mathematics jumped before most people noticed, tackling Olympiad-level problems and unsolved research questions that had resisted attack for years. But the pattern of where AI succeeds and where it stalls is uneven and worth understanding. It's much better at grinding through cases to disprove something than at constructing an elegant, original proof. Anyone working with AI in a technical field runs into this same asymmetry. Where exactly is the boundary between tasks AI can already do reliably and ones that still need human judgment and creativity?
Tudor Achim is the co-founder and CEO of Harmonic, an AI company building toward mathematical superintelligence. He previously led the machine learning team at Quora and co-founded and served as CTO of the autonomous driving company Helm.ai. Under Tudor, Harmonic's Aristotle system achieved gold-medal performance at the 2025 International Math Olympiad alongside systems from OpenAI and Google DeepMind — with every proof formally verified.
In the episode, Richie and Tudor explore why AI is starting to outperform humans at advanced mathematics, the shift toward formally verified proofs using the Lean language, where AI already beats humans (finding counterexamples) versus where it still falls short (building elegant proofs), how human mathematicians' roles will change, why math capability gains spill over into better AI reasoning generally, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• Tudor's TED Talk: "The Path to Mathematical Superintelligence"
• Aristotle, Harmonic's reasoning system
• Harmonic
• The Erdős Problems
• American Institute of Mathematics
• Rich Sutton, "The Bitter Lesson"
• Connect with Tudor: LinkedIn
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: Why AI Agents Haven't Taken Over Knowledge Work Yet, with Jennifer Smith, CEO of Scribe (exact URL pending — episode published Aug 17, 2026, too recent to be indexed yet; confirm link on datacamp.com/podcast before publishing)
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Technology is now moving faster than the organizations trying to adopt it. A model can be tested in an afternoon, but the approval to test it can take half a year, and that gap is where most transformation budgets quietly disappear. The structures that made companies safe and predictable — layers of sign-off, centralized control, standardized processes — were built for a world where getting things wrong was expensive. That world is gone. So what actually has to change inside a company for AI to deliver value? Which habits are holding things up? And where do you start when everything needs fixing at once?
Phil Le Brun is an Executive in Residence at AWS and previously spent over 25 years at McDonald's Corporation, where he was VP of Global Technology Development and International CIO. Jana Werner is an Executive in Residence at AWS, where she leads the Financial Services Practice in EMEA and advises Fortune 500 executive teams on transformation, having previously scaled a tech start-up to acquisition by HP, led digital transformation at Tesco Bank, and advised DHL on global change. Together they are the authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation (Harvard Business Review Press).
In the episode, Richie, Phil and Jana explore why AI transformations stall, the Tin Man organization and its anti-patterns, the octopus as a model for adaptive companies, why AI adoption metrics mislead, being data informed rather than data driven, making fast reversible decisions, hiring and onboarding, embedding learning into daily work, and much more.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
• The Octopus Organization (book)
• Through the Looking-Glass — Lewis Carroll (the Red Queen)
• Goodhart's law
• Annie Duke on "resulting"
• Linda Hill, Harvard Business School
• A Seat at the Table — Mark Schwartz
• Connect with Phil
• Connect with Jana
• AI-Native Course: Intro to AI for Work
• Related Episode: Your 90 Day Blueprint for AI Success with Charlene Li
• Explore AI-Native Learning on DataCamp
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• Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile app
• Empower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business