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NEW EPISODE EVERY WEEK

preethi & mani present

BUILD
& BET.

where a technical decision is a business decision

Build & Bet cover art
Mani Khanuja
Principal GenAI Specialist SA, AWS

The show

Two sides of the same table.

Most leaders are not short on AI opinions. They are short on the right questions. One of us sits on the technical side, one on the business side, and every episode lives at the point where the two meet. No hype, no jargon.

Preethi Ravula

The business side

Preethi Ravula

20+ years across architecture, product engineering and go to market, now building AI innovation strategy with multiple organizations.

Mani Khanuja

The technical side

Mani Khanuja

Principal Generative AI Specialist SA at AWS. Scaling AI agents safely, governance, and getting research to survive production.

Episodes

Every episode, newest first.

Build & Bet episode 01

Episode 01 · 29 min

What leaders actually need to know?

The five pressures every leader is feeling about AI right now: the pace of growth, competitive pressure, what resources actually exist today, how to control cost, and how to deliver results instead of activity.

Watch the episode
What we cover
  • Why enterprise tech adoption used to be slow and deliberate, and why AI compressed years into months
  • The two failure patterns: freezing and waiting, or chasing everything. Neither works.
  • How "our competitors are doing something with AI" quietly turns a business problem into an AI story for the board
  • Build versus buy versus partner, and why the instinct for control costs you speed
  • Why AI cost is usage driven rather than fixed, so traditional software budgeting does not survive contact with it
  • Staging investment instead of handing over a blank check after a good proof of concept
  • Why impressive pilots never reach production: success was never defined in the first place
  • Two way doors, checkpoints, and a definition of done for AI projects
Chapters
  • Welcome to Build & Bet
  • The pressures every leader is feeling
  • Growth: why AI breaks normal planning cycles
  • Two failure patterns: freezing versus chasing
  • "Our competitors are doing something with AI"
  • What is available today that was not three years ago
  • Build versus buy versus partner
  • Table stakes versus real differentiation
  • Cost: why AI spend does not behave like software spend
  • Staging investment instead of a blank check
  • Visibility, reversibility and two way doors
  • Activity versus results: why pilots stall
  • Defining success before you start
  • The five questions to take into any AI decision
  • The elephant in the room: will AI replace us?
  • Coming in Episode 2

The five questions

Take these into any AI decision.

From Episode 01. Take these into any AI decision.

  • What business outcome are we actually trying to move, and by how much?
  • What is the smallest version of this we can test before committing real budget?
  • Where does this need to be proprietary to us, versus built from existing building blocks?
  • How will we see cost relative to value as this scales?
  • What would tell us clearly to stop?

Lines worth stealing

From episode 01.

Build for the pace of change. Do not chase the pace of change.
Urgency is fine. Vagueness under urgency is what is going wrong.
The leaders who win here are not the ones moving fast. They are the ones asking the sharpest questions before they commit.

New episode, every week.

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