AI @ Work: Open Garage Sessions

"We're taking entry-level programmers and laying them off. Ten years from now, where do you get the next layer of experienced programmers to manage the AI agents? You don't." Ralph Loura has been a CIO since before most people understood what that meant. Bell Labs. Cisco. HP. Clorox. He's navigated every major technology wave of the last four decades, and he has a specific, experience-backed warning about this one. In this Open Garage session with Lanai CEO Lexi Reese, Ralph gets direct about the AI problems CIOs are actually sitting with — and the one most aren't planning for at all. What they cover: · Why eliminating junior engineering roles today creates a leadership vacuum you won't feel for a decade · Why AI workload visibility is the most important unsexy problem in enterprise right now · The word Ralph banned from every organization he's ever run — and what he uses instead · What data sovereignty means when a handful of platform players control your AI stack · Why resilience, not efficiency, is the right thing to optimize for right now · How to use procurement as a governance tool without becoming the department of no An unusually candid conversation from someone who's been in the room for every technology transition of the last 40 years.

Fred Laury is Chief Information Officer at Xero: arguably the hottest, hardest role to hire for right now. He's responsible for technology across 4,500 employees and has figured out how to measure what actually matters. Hear why he uses both data and intuition, and the one metric that tells him if AI is working.

"There's data everywhere... like Candy Land. But what problem are we solving?" In this Open Garage session with Lanai CEO Lexi Reese, Zoetis Chief Data and Analytics Officer J.D. Williams, Ph.D. breaks down how the world’s largest animal health company is driving AI transformation at enterprise scale. From golden use cases in R&D and manufacturing to a grassroots army of AI champions, J.D. shares why successful AI isn’t about chasing hype: it’s about rigorous prioritization, business-first thinking, and the hard, human work of change management.

“You can’t just tell people to use AI and expect magic.” In this Open Garage session with Lanai CEO Lexi Reese, veteran CIO Karl Mosgofian (Gainsight, Harmonic) unpacks why AI transformation is really about trust, process, and people—not tech—and how the often-misunderstood CIO role is now at the center of it all.