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AI In Production: Hack the Stack

C42 Services

Hack the Stack is the weekly show for senior IT and AI leadership who actually have to deliver, govern, and maintain AI in production. Vladimir Cvijanovic breaks down what's real and what's hype across the stack, joined by Kate on technology and data architecture and Zoltan checking every claim against decades of hype cycles. New episodes every Tuesday. If you're building or scaling AI infrastructure and want to work through a delivery or governance bottleneck, book a call at https://calendar.app.google/YH7SA6Rrs3CbZRaw5, message Vladimir Cvijanovic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimircvijanovic/), or reach us at podcast@c42.services.

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  • 5 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 24 min
  • English

Episodes 5

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  • S1 · E4
    Today · 32 min

    Hack the Stack #004: Same AI Spend, Opposite Outcomes

    Gartner projects $207 billion in enterprise spending on AI agent software this year, up 139% from $86.4 billion in 2025. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April and still can't say whether its coding agents paid for themselves. This week, Vlad, Kate, and Zoltan dig into why: [Uber](https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/companies-are-spending-millions-rewiring-how-ai-gets-used-almost-none-can-prove-its-working) capped AI coding spend at $1,500 per employee per month after the money was already gone, while [Everlaw](https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/companies-are-spending-millions-rewiring-how-ai-gets-used-almost-none-can-prove-its-working) turned a $3,500 token spend into a 9.5-to-2.5-engineer-month reduction on a Java infrastructure project by measuring before it spent. Then, a five-part architecture for making retrieval-augmented generation systems auditable, from structured retrieval logging to treating retrieved content as data instead of instructions, [from The New Stack](https://thenewstack.io/building-trust-agentic-rag/). And [Figma's](https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/09/figma-security-agents/) security team explains how three specialized AI agents, built around institutional memory and a "precision before recall" tuning discipline, deliver 70% faster alert resolution, a 20% drop in on-call pages, and over 100 previously unknown vulnerabilities caught. Voices in this episode are digitally rendered. If you're building or scaling AI infrastructure and want to work through a delivery or governance bottleneck, book a call at https://calendar.app.google/YH7SA6Rrs3CbZRaw5, message Vladimir Cvijanovic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimircvijanovic/), or reach us at podcast@c42.services.

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E3
    September 1 · 24 min

    Hack the Stack #003: Why Only Six Percent of Companies Are Turning AI Into Real Earnings

    McKinsey just surveyed over seventeen hundred business leaders worldwide, and the headline number hasn't moved in a year: 37% of companies attribute any EBIT impact to AI, flat versus 2025. Only 6% clear the bar for what the report calls a high performer. This week: what that 6% is doing differently at the data and governance layer. Three engineering teams, Grab, Airbnb, and Booking.com, independently converged on the same fix for data readiness in the same week. And a sharper debate: should AI governance live in the pipeline, or get pushed all the way down into the database itself, where a misbehaving agent physically can't act outside its lane. Voices in this episode are digitally rendered. If you're building or scaling AI infrastructure and want to work through a delivery or governance bottleneck, book a call at https://calendar.app.google/YH7SA6Rrs3CbZRaw5, message Vladimir Cvijanovic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimircvijanovic/), or reach us at podcast@c42.services.

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E2
    August 25 · 35 min

    Hack the Stack #002: Why the Companies Winning With AI Agents Are Narrowing Autonomy, Not Widening It

    Gartner expects forty percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027, and the companies bucking that trend aren't the ones giving their agents the most freedom. They're the ones narrowing it. This week: seven diagnostic signs your data isn't AI-ready, straight from practitioners at Capital One and EY. Thomson Reuters' forty-million-dollar bet on its own legal AI model, and the honest limits the company admits sit underneath it. How Cloudflare turned its engineering standards into a system that's already flagged 230,000 violations. And the research explaining why narrow scope, pre-execution checkpoints, and real traceability, not more autonomy, are what separate a surviving AI deployment from a canceled one. Voices in this episode are digitally rendered. If you're building or scaling AI infrastructure and want to work through a delivery or governance bottleneck, book a call at https://calendar.app.google/YH7SA6Rrs3CbZRaw5, message Vladimir Cvijanovic on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladimircvijanovic/), or reach us at podcast@c42.services.

    • Transcript
  • S1 · E1
    August 3 · 31 min

    Hack the Stack #001: The Governance Gap Nobody Priced In

    A CEO doubles his company's AI spend, doubles revenue in the same stretch, and still won't say the two are connected. That honesty is this week's starting point for a wider problem: AI is running ahead of anyone's ability to govern it in production. This episode: Temporal's internal AI rollout and its very real spend caps, the coding-agent budget overruns hitting Replit, Kilo Code, and Symbotic, five startups racing to solve agent-to-agent trust and auditability, and why mainframe modernization is really a data problem wearing a legacy-code costume. Voices in this episode are digitally rendered. New episodes every Tuesday.

    • Transcript
  • S0 · E0
    July 23 · 48 sec

    Hack the Stack — Trailer

    Senior IT and AI leadership keep hitting the same wall: the pilot works, the board gets excited, and six months later nothing's actually shipped to production. Hack the Stack is the weekly show that closes that gap, breaking down what it actually takes to run AI in production: architecture, governance, and data readiness, the parts nobody puts in the vendor pitch. Voices in this episode are digitally rendered. New episodes every Tuesday.

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