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Parul Saini has spent enough time in serious IT leadership roles (Splunk, Zuora, Uber) to know the difference between organizations that are genuinely building AI capability and those that are performing it. Her read? The governance assumptions that barely held together in the SaaS era are already being outpaced by agent deployments. The executives making AI strategy calls often haven't built anything themselves. And the boards mandating AI fluency are not getting results.
This episode is a direct conversation about what it actually takes to close that gap — from why Parul believes every executive needs to personally build, break, and debug an agent before making another strategic call, to what responsible AI adoption looks like when the security tooling hasn't caught up with the technology.
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3 Takeaways:
- Every executive needs to personally build an agent, watch it fail, and understand why
- The same governance gaps that took years to close in the SaaS era are already compounding in AI agent deployments
- The most important thing Parul would do immediately in a new CIO role: rebuild how people experience work, starting with what she calls personalized productivity
Chapters:
[00:00] Hands-On AI Mandate
[01:53] Career Journey & Uber Lessons
[04:20] Scaling Trust & Partnerships
[07:20] Founding AI AllyWorks
[11:07] Managing AI Budgets
[16:09] Operationalizing Agents & COE
[21:13] The New CIO Playbook
[23:43] Agent Security & Governance
[25:30] Board Fluency & Leadership
About Parul:
Parul Saini is the Founder of AI Ally Works, where she serves as a fractional AI and technology advisor for small and mid-size businesses navigating the shift to AI-driven operations. She brings deep enterprise experience from leadership roles at Uber, Splunk, and Zuora, where she built IT organizations that moved from reactive support functions to proactive business partners. At Uber, she led technology operations across a 30,000-person global company and drove early AI adoption starting in 2023. After stepping away from full-time executive life to prioritize her health, she recognized that the small businesses forming the backbone of the U.S. economy had no one with real CIO-level expertise in their corner on AI — and built AI Ally Works to change that.
Guest Highlights:
"I always thought my job was to take that cognitive overload that stakeholders have with regards to technology and take that on myself, so they can focus on their primary jobs and be a hundred percent successful."
"The things that will prevent catastrophe are not moving as fast as the technology enabling these agents. Even now when I talk to my peers, I don't think the answer is clear."
"Unless the agent you've built breaks and you have no idea what broke it—unless you understand what your teams are working with—you won't be able to make the right decisions or the right strategic moves. It's absolutely critical for us to have that hands-on experience right now."
Get Connected:
- Yousuf Kahn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yousufakhan/
- Parul Saini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parul-saini-it-management-leadership/
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