Meridian Point

How to Spot AI Hype Before It Burns Your Budget | Alex Brungardt | The Meridian Point Alex Brungardt sells automation into one of the most paperwork-heavy corners of technology: federal governance, risk and compliance. His advice to buyers is blunt. The fix isn't more AI. The fix is knowing where a human decision has to stay human. In this episode of The Meridian Point, Kumar Dattatreyan talks with Alex about automating the front end of compliance, building a culture of testing before you trust an agent and separating real AI progress from hype. Alex is Director of Business Development at Radus Software, the company behind the Metronome delivery and compliance platform. He came up outside engineering, with a healthcare background, and he says that outsider's eye is his edge with customers. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN Why compliance belongs at the start of planning and not at the end of delivery How Metronome turns uploaded GRC documents into backlog items that a person accepts or rejects Why Alex automates the research and documentation but keeps people on the decisions How a test-first culture decides when an organization can trust automated decisions Where a leader should point AI first without putting existing applications at risk What a governance and risk team looks like in three years Why Alex calls "artificial intelligence" the most overhyped phrase in the field KEY IDEAS FROM THE CONVERSATION COMPLIANCE SHIFTS LEFT Most organizations treat governance, risk and compliance as an afterthought, then scramble before release. Alex describes building GRC into planning and development the way teams moved security to the front. Teams upload internal, federal or municipal requirements. Examples he gives include STIGs, the authority to operate process, HIPAA and FISMA. Metronome then pulls compliance features into a backlog that the team accepts or rejects. AUTOMATE THE RESEARCH, KEEP THE DECISION Every feature or story that enters the backlog is accepted manually. The tool combines existing work with the GRC requirements. It doesn't invent random artifacts. Alex also points out that much of this logic runs on a plain rules engine, and AI adds speed when it scans large volumes of information. TEST FIRST IS A CULTURE Alex ties trust in automation to testing. He cites a DevOps coach who taught him that a bug is a test not yet written. Once testing proves a system meets your accuracy threshold, you can automate that decision. He pairs that with observability and near real-time data so a bad decision surfaces fast. START WITH THE TOOLS YOU ALREADY OWN His first move for AI beginners is to check the settings and new features in the productivity suite they already use, within company AI policy. He thinks program managers shouldn't hand-write status reports anymore. For deeper work he recommends R&D and new applications, where existing systems stay safe and customers face no learning curve. THE GRC TEAM IN THREE YEARS Alex expects teams of similar size with different skills. Automation frees time for work leaders kept pushing down the list, such as auditing, reducing technical debt and trimming overlap between federal requirements and an organization's own stricter policies. JOBS, SKILLS AND PROTOTYPES Alex calls himself an optimist. He likes the model where a product manager and an engineer pair with agents, because people keep their jobs and output grows. He wants young people to learn technical skills and also strong English language arts, including how to tell human text from machine text. He passes along a message from small business owners who work with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: send prototypes, not proposals. OVERHYPED AND UNDERHYPED Overhyped: calling generative AI "artificial intelligence." Alex says real intelligence arrives with AGI. Underhyped: the national race to reach AGI. Both hosts admit the idea makes them uneasy. A CONCERN FROM THE HOST Kumar raises the risk of leaning on AI for decisions and asks what decision you'd have made without it. That question sets up a follow-up episode on how people keep learning, and keep their skills sharp, when no one is watching. CONNECT WITH ALEX BRUNGARDT Email: [email protected] Company: Radus Software, https://radussoftware.com Product: Metronome delivery and compliance platform from Radus Software LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leanagilealexander/ Note: Radus's Metronome isn't the usage-based billing company that shares the name. Check the Radus site for the right product. CONNECT WITH KUMAR DATTATREYAN LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachkdat/ Book a call: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting Agile Meridian: https://www.agilemeridian.com ABOUT THE MERIDIAN POINT The Meridian Point is a live bi-weekly broadcast for executives and transformation leaders working through disruption and organizational change. Join us live on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. #MeridianPoint #AIHype #GRC #GovernanceRiskCompliance #Compliance #FederalIT #Automation #LowCode #AIAgents #HumanInTheLoop #DigitalTransformation #DevOps #Agile #FutureOfWork #Leadership

How to See Disruption Before It Wins | Glenn Marshall Guest: Glenn Marshall, energy and climate researcher based in Toronto Host: Kumar Dattatreyan Episode Date: October 6, 2026 Watch on YouTube Why You Need to Listen to This Episode A banker in 1903 told his client not to invest in Ford. The automobile was a fad. The horse was here to stay. We laugh now, but from inside that moment the call looked reasonable. That is the trap Glenn Marshall came back on the show to talk about. Exponential change is nearly invisible while you are standing in it, and by the time it is obvious the disruption has already won. Glenn makes the case that energy is where this is playing out right now, faster than almost anyone is pricing in. The spark was the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the overnight jump in oil prices. From there the conversation goes under the hood to Wright's Law, the rule that cost falls a fixed percentage every time production doubles. Solar has followed that curve for decades. It now supplies about 8.7% of global electricity, up from 1% in 2015. Texas is the proof on the ground, where 11 grid conservation appeals in 2023 became none the next summer after a solar and battery buildout. What You Will Learn in This Episode Why the 1903 Banker Was Not a Fool The banker who called the car a fad was not stupid. In 1903 the horse still made sense. Glenn uses that moment to explain why exponential growth is so hard to see from the inside, and why the same blindness is hitting leaders today who plan in straight lines while their industry bends into a curve. The lesson is not about cars or solar. It is about the pattern itself. The One Rule Behind Chips, Phones and Solar Wright's Law says that every time cumulative production doubles, cost drops a fixed percentage. For solar that drop is about 20% per doubling, and it has held for decades. Glenn traces the same curve through the computer chip, from a machine everyone lined up to use to the one in your pocket, then lands it on solar. Once you see the rule, you stop being surprised by what it does. Why the Forecasts Keep Being Wrong The International Energy Agency has underestimated solar growth for years. Glenn explains the distinction most people miss. The miss is about deployment, how many gigawatts get built, not the per-unit cost curve. Countries and companies make investment decisions on projections that have been provably low, and that gap is where bad capital allocation lives. How Texas Flipped in a Single Year Texas had 11 grid shortfalls in 2023. The next summer it had none, then so much midday solar that wholesale prices went negative. Glenn tells the story of technology-neutral competitive procurement, the market design that lets the cheapest source win without anyone picking favorites. It is the clearest real-world proof that this is not theoretical. Why Nuclear Runs the Curve Backward Solar and batteries get cheaper as we build more. Nuclear does the opposite. Glenn walks through the negative learning rate, the gas turbines back-ordered to 2030, and the data centers now bolting airplane engines to the side of buildings because they cannot get power any other way. The cost comparison is becoming impossible to ignore. What Nearly Free Energy Unlocks Glenn closes on abundance. Once the marginal cost of power falls toward zero, things that were too expensive become viable. Large-scale desalination. Cheap fuel for EVs and heat pumps. The harder industrial problems like green steel and cement. The takeaway for leaders is simple and uncomfortable. Costs are heading down, and your five-year plan should assume it. Best Quotes from This Episode By just 2030, solar electricity will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year, pretty much everywhere." (Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF, quoted by Glenn) "May the best technology win. Whoever can provide the cheapest electricity, that is who we are going with." "I just want free energy and I want it now. It is not a left or right thing." "It is really hard to see from the outside. In five years we will look back and say it was obvious. Right now we are in the thick of it." "If the sun doesn't come up, we're all dead. The sun's going to come up." Connect with Glenn Marshall LinkedIn: [confirm Glenn's preferred LinkedIn URL before publishing] Glenn is based in Toronto and digs deep into energy, climate and the economics of disruption. He is glad to keep the conversation going with listeners who want to dig into Wright's Law and the energy transition. Take the Disruptor Method Quiz Are you disrupting or about to be disrupted? Find out in under five minutes: https://www.thedisruptormethod.com/quiz Work with Kumar Book a 30-minute conversation: https://tidycal.com/coachkumar/30-minute-meeting

Agile Is a Verb, Not a Label: Tonya McCaulley-Slater on Coaching Transformation Without the Jargon The Meridian Point with Kumar Dattatreyan Listen to this one Tonya McCaulley-Slater runs agile transformations for a living. She just won't say the word "agile" out loud. Not at first. Not until the results earn it. Sounds backwards. It works. She walks into an organization, runs the demos, tracks the impediments, prioritizes the portfolio, and never teaches a soul what a sprint is. People buy in. Then they ask what this thing is called. That's when she tells them. Here's the part that stuck with me. She sits across from a leadership team that swears they tried agile and hated it. So she draws the whole framework on a blank piece of paper with every label stripped off. They look at it and say they love it. Same framework. Same everything. The only thing she took out was the word. We get into why the jargon is the thing killing your transformation. We get into Fannie Mae, where new leadership decided agile was a bad word and cut the whole thing. And then we get into her other job, the one you won't see coming. She coaches pro golfers on mental performance. The tool she uses on the first tee is the same one she hands a burned-out leader between meetings. You'll want to steal it before the episode ends. Why you'll want to hear it The word is the wall. People don't resist agile. They resist a word they can't picture. Tonya shows you what to say instead. The blank-paper test. Watch a rejected framework become a loved one with nothing changed but the label. The Fannie Mae autopsy. What happens to years of transformation work when leadership never bought the why. Why your training isn't sticking. People keep about ten percent of a two-day certification. She explains what actually teaches. Agile is a sport. The overlap between coaching an athlete and coaching a developer is tighter than you think. The Three R's. Recognize, release, reset. One tool for the first tee and the Monday standup both. The trigger for burned-out leaders. A single breathing pattern she gives every leader running on empty. About Tonya McCaulley-Slater Tonya is a Certified SAFe Program Consultant, a mental performance coach and the founder of MindDrive Performance. She spent fourteen years at Nationwide, then walked away to coach transformation full time at Cisco, Eli Lilly, JB Hunt and Fannie Mae. She is running an enterprise agile transformation at St. Thomas University now, all of it on the down low. She has a psychology undergrad and is finishing a master's in industrial-organizational psychology. She ran college track, played semi-pro soccer into her forties and now golfs. She is a certified mindfulness coach who works with university and pro athletes as well as leaders. In her words "The very first value of the Agile Manifesto is about people. And there's a reason for that. People make everything else work." — Tonya McCaulley-Slater "I draw the framework out on a piece of paper with no labels and explain it. And they say, oh yeah, we love that. It's the same exact framework they said they didn't want." — Tonya McCaulley-Slater "Anytime leadership changes, you have to get them to buy into the why so they understand the how. Otherwise they will dismantle the how, because they don't understand it." — Tonya McCaulley-Slater "I can go into an organization and snap a process around them in six months. The question is, will the people do it? Will the culture support it?" — Tonya McCaulley-Slater "The first ceremony I go to is the retrospective, because I can tell if they're a team just by attending their first one." — Tonya McCaulley-Slater "You get ten seconds to wallow in your grief. Then we reset and make an intentional action toward the next step." — Tonya McCaulley-Slater What comes up The Agile Manifesto, first value: individuals and interactions over processes and tools Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) The Tuckman model of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing Training from the Back of the Room by Sharon Bowman Event plus Response equals Outcome (E + R = O) The Three R's: recognize, release, reset, with a physical trigger for the release Box breathing: inhale four, hold four, exhale four or six, longer exhale to relax deeper The Disruptor Method, Agile Meridian's approach to stripping the jargon and doing the work Subscribe and follow New here? Subscribe to The Meridian Point on YouTube and follow on LinkedIn. We go live every two weeks with the people reshaping how work gets done, then post the audio to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you build teams, lead change or coach people, this is your room. Host: Kumar Dattatreyan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachkdat Agile Meridian: https://www.agilemeridian.com Connect with Tonya McCaulley-Slater Tonya coaches leaders and elite athletes on mental performance through MindDrive Performance. Reach out and keep the conversation going on agile, transformation and performance psychology.

The Meridian Point Podcast Episode: Why People Open Up to an AI Coach Faster Than a Human Air Date: September 8,2026 EPISODE SUMMARY Kumar Dattatreyan and his longtime collaborator Glenn Marshall sit down for a fireside chat that starts with a finding Kumar didn't expect. He ran the same product management cohort he's run several times. Same content, same kind of audience. The one new variable was a set of AI agents guiding the asynchronous work with Socratic questions. The AI-enabled group shifted their mindset faster, engaged deeper and produced better artifacts. People admitted to a bot what they wouldn't admit to a human instructor. The conversation works through why that happens. Kumar's working theory is psychological safety: the bot behaves like a peer with a narrow base of knowledge, not a positional expert, so people engage with the fundamentals they're embarrassed to ask about. Glenn's first reaction was closer to terror, and he talks through how he reframed it as the ideal learning partner rather than a threat. The second half turns to the collapse of the iron triangle when one person can vibe-code an application in an afternoon, the rise of the two-slice team of one human and several agents, and the ROI and token-cost questions nobody can answer yet. The recording cut off on a technical glitch before Glenn and Kumar reached two threads they teased at the top: organizational ecosystems and the Strait of Hormuz. Those are queued for a future conversation. KEY TOPICS COVERED The AI-enabled cohort experiment Kumar's team won work to train product managers, product owners, business analysts and product-adjacent roles. They convinced the client that a six-to-ten week cohort beats a two-day certification class. They built AI agents into the asynchronous portions to guide learners through ideation, the why behind the product, customer empathy, journey mapping, OKRs, their COBI variant (Customer Outcomes, Business Impact), and writing epics and stories. The AI didn't do the work. It interrogated, Socratic style, and pushed people to think. Same course, one variable Kumar ran the identical course several times in 2025 without AI. The story maps and journey maps came back rudimentary. With the agents added, the same content produced deeper engagement and real artifacts. Within three weeks, the AI-enabled group's mindset had shifted toward discovery, iteration and hypothesis testing far more than the group that used the agents less. Why psychological safety changes learning The bot doesn't judge, doesn't carry a title and doesn't hold a positional imbalance over the learner. Kumar's read is that people engage with a bot the way they'd engage with a trusted peer who happens to know a little more about one narrow thing. Glenn connected it to the ideal one-on-one teacher you could never afford to staff twenty times over. Gamification on steroids, or something more Kumar pushed back on calling it gamification. No badges, no quizzes, no points. The payoff is the artifact appearing through collaboration with the agent. Glenn granted the label "gamification on steroids" while Kumar argued it goes past that into personalized coaching. The listener bot and feedback at scale Part of the course used a listener bot that reads a submitted assignment, identifies the module and lesson, and returns feedback automatically. Some feedback came from Kumar and his colleagues, most from the agent. Learners couldn't tell the difference and took the feedback well either way. Because AI runs at a flat monthly rate rather than by the hour, that kind of one-on-one assessment scales in a way a human team can't match. The iron triangle collapse and the two-slice team Anyone can vibe-code an application in an afternoon with very little budget. Cost, scope and budget stop behaving like real constraints. Kumar floated the shift from the two-pizza team to the two-slice team: one human as the master brain, augmented by five or six agents. The open questions are ROI, token cost and where humans still belong. He noted Microsoft limiting Claude Code use over token costs and a client moving cautiously toward AI for fear of runaway spend. The five-year horizon Glenn split his outlook. The next couple of years look amazing and very useful. The next five look terrifying if the technology isn't managed well, and in his view it isn't being managed well so far. Kumar agreed the shape of future work is unclear, including which new jobs it creates. MEMORABLE QUOTES Kumar: "The bot was better at getting these people to engage with the basics, the fundamentals that maybe they were embarrassed to admit that they didn't know." Kumar: "It takes many sessions before the coachee will trust me enough to tell me things I think they might tell a bot in visit one." Glenn: "Emotions by definition don't make sense." (on why people feel safer with a bot that records everything) Kumar: "Instead of a two-pizza team, it's going to be a two-slice team. One human with several agents helping them do their work." Kumar: "The human is still going to be the master brain, aided and augmented by agents around them in whatever they do." Glenn: "It's amazing and terrifying. In five years, if we're not managing this properly, and so far we're not, this could very easily go to a very bad place." Peter Merel (quoted by Glenn): "AI is going to do all jobs, all work, except for the stuff that we want to do ourselves." KEY TAKEAWAYS Mindset shift is hard, and adding AI agents to existing course content produced one faster than the same course had before Psychological safety is the likely mechanism: people engage with a non-judging peer more openly than with a positional expert The value is additive, not a replacement. The agent gave learners something they never had, then the live sessions got better AI feedback scales one-on-one assessment that a human team can't afford to deliver at the same volume The iron triangle loses its grip when one person can build a working app in an afternoon The two-slice team is a real design question: how many agents per human, and what's the ROI once token costs are counted The near term looks useful, the five-year horizon looks risky, and the new jobs this creates aren't visible yet RESOURCES & LINKS Kumar's Work: The Disruptor Method: disruptormethod.com Take the quiz (disruptor or disrupted): thedisruptormethod.com/quiz Agile Meridian: agilemeridian.com Book a 30-minute conversation Referenced in the Episode: Peter Merel and the XSCALE Alliance: xscalealliance.org Next Level Co-Creation (Glenn's framework) CONNECT WITH GLENN Glenn Marshall is an XSCALE Business Agility coach and trainer based in Toronto. Reach him here: XSCALE Alliance coach profile LinkedIn ABOUT THE CO-HOST Glenn Marshall is an agile coach, Certified Scrum Master and XSCALE Business Agility coach and trainer with a software architecture and development background. He's certified across Kanban, Disciplined Agile, LeSS, SAFe and Management 3.0, and trained as a professional coach. He's the creator of Next Level Co-Creation, a bottom-up transformation method, and a frequent Meridian Point collaborator on XSCALE, permaculture and ecosystem thinking. SUBSCRIBE 🎙️ Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | LinkedIn 🔔 Weekly episodes on disruption, innovation and transformation 💬 Leave a comment: do you trust AI with things you wouldn't tell a person? #AICoaching #FutureOfWork #Leadership #AgileCoaching #ProductManagement #DigitalTransformation #Disruption #XSCALE

Why 80% of Features Go Unused: Gary Cohen on Building the Right Thing The Meridian Point with Kumar Dattatreyan Episode overview Gary Cohen spent twenty years building a delivery machine that shipped software on schedule almost every time. Customers liked the features. They showed up to every sprint review. Then a private equity board member asked one question that reframed his career: what additional revenue do we expect from all these features? The honest answer exposed a hard truth. The team had optimized for delivery instead of impact. In this episode Gary and Kumar get into why building the right thing is harder than building the thing right. They cover embracing uncertainty as a strategy, continuous discovery, why red, yellow, green status meetings turn into theater, and where product management goes once AI makes the build cheap. About Gary Cohen Gary Cohen is Principal Consultant at Practical Agility. He is an engineering and product leader who ran product and engineering groups in software product companies for two decades. He led an agile transformation for one of Google's customer support groups. Today he helps teams shift from optimizing delivery to practicing real product discovery, drawing on continuous discovery work and a hard-won view of how organizational change actually sticks. What you'll learn Why great delivery can still hide a bigger problem, and the board question that surfaced it Why teams get too incremental, and how the innovator's dilemma quietly caps ambition What embracing uncertainty means, and why uncertainty is where differentiation lives The poker trap of going all in on one solution at the moment you know the least How to hold multiple solutions open and test the critical assumptions behind each Why red, yellow, green status meetings become theater, and the watermelon project problem The generative questions that turn a status interrogation into real discovery How one question, "how can I help," changes the tone of the room Where product discovery goes when AI makes shipping code cheap, and the two levers that still create differentiation Key takeaways Delivery is not the same as impact. You can ship efficiently and still fail to move revenue or usage. Language matters. Until someone asks about business outcomes, teams optimize for the schedule they are measured against. Uncertainty is an advantage. When everyone can execute, execution becomes a commodity. The edge goes to whoever reduces uncertainty fastest. Kill solutions early. The faster you invalidate a weak idea, the sooner you reach the one worth building. Status meetings can be redesigned. Swap "why are we not green" for "are we still convinced this is the right opportunity." Cheaper building raises the stakes on discovery, not lowers them. More competition means finding the valuable thing matters more than ever. Memorable quotes "We can ship stuff people don't want a lot faster." — Gary Cohen "This is the beginning, when you just start working in an area, and it is when you know the least about it. So you are making a decision way too early." — Gary Cohen "You get these watermelon projects, which are green on the outside but really red inside. It is essentially theater." — Gary Cohen "It is that presence of uncertainty that creates the opportunity for differentiation in the marketplace." — Gary Cohen "When something gets cheaper, people do more of it. So product discovery becomes more important, not less." — Gary Cohen Resources and books mentioned Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres Opportunity Solution Trees, a framework from Teresa Torres The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Jardena London's leadership circle, and her work on polarities and organizational change The "how can I help" reframing, inspired by Max Goodwin on the NBC show New Amsterdam Connect with Gary Cohen LinkedIn Practical Agility Gary would love to hear from listeners. Reach out on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on product discovery and leadership. Connect with the show Host: Kumar Dattatreyan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachkdat Agile Meridian: https://www.agilemeridian.com The Meridian Point airs live every two weeks on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook, then posts to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. SUBSCRIBE Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | LinkedIn Weekly episodes on disruption, innovation, and transformation Leave comments and share your experiences #AIStrategy #CommunityBuilding #ProductManagement #Leadership #DigitalTransformation