Afleveringen
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Companies poured $30 to $40 billion into generative AI. MIT found 95% of it produced zero measurable profit. So is AI a bubble, or are we just measuring it wrong?
In this solo episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David takes on the number that's been used to declare AI dead. He doesn't dispute it, he does something more uncomfortable. He reads the footnotes. What counts as "failure" in that study turns out to be a very specific, very short-fused definition, and the answer underneath is less flattering to AI's boosters and its skeptics than either side wants.
What you'll hear:
The fine print in the MIT study that almost nobody quotesWhy more than half of AI budgets go to the place with the worst returnsThe strange finding that buying AI works nearly three times better than building itWhat Jamie Dimon said about AI profits that should worry every CEODavid's confession about the difference between a technology failing and a company failing at a technologyNinety-five percent of companies got nothing back. That's not a story about AI. That's a story about us.
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41% of all code written today is AI-generated. So why does the idea of vibe coding your company's ERP still sound completely insane?
In this solo episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David, a guy who genuinely loves how fast AI coding tools have gotten, sits with an uncomfortable question: if you can vibe code a landing page in an afternoon, why can't you vibe code the system that runs your entire business? The answer takes him somewhere he didn't expect.
What you'll hear:
Why 92% of developers use AI coding tools daily, but only 29% actually trust the outputWhat happens when "good enough for a demo" meets a system that runs payrollThe real reason enterprise vibe coding keeps hitting a wall named "SAP"Spec-driven development, the unglamorous fix nobody wants to admit is necessaryDavid's confession about the gap between building software and building a businessVibe coding didn't kill the ERP consultant. It just proved, very expensively, why they were needed in the first place.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review, and share this with the developer on your team who's a little too excited about "20,000 lines in 20 minutes."
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Only 15% of IT leaders are even piloting fully autonomous AI agents. And yet 40% of enterprise apps will ship with agents built in by the end of this year.
In this solo episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David sits with the question underneath every AI headline right now: will companies ever actually run themselves and if they do, what happens to the people who used to run them? As an optimist, David wants to believe in a future where agents free humans for better work. The numbers make that case… and complicate it in the same breath.
What you'll hear:
Why "40% of apps will have agents" doesn't mean anything close to a company running itselfThe real gap between task automation and true end-to-end autonomyWhat happens to 1.3 million new AI jobs alongside the ones quietly disappearingWhy most agentic AI projects are quietly getting cancelled before they scaleDavid's confession about the difference between augmentation and replacement and why he's not sure the line will holdWe're not building autonomous companies yet. We're building companies that need fewer people to run the same company.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review, and share this with someone whose job title didn't exist five years ago, or might not exist five years from now.
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SAP says the clock runs out December 31, 2027. Yet 85% of customers are still on ECC and a lot of them are betting the panic is a sales tactic.
In this episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David takes on one of the most contentious questions in enterprise IT with Marisol Greaves, a former SAP program lead turned independent ERP advisor who has guided more than thirty migrations and walked several clients straight into extended maintenance on purpose. David thinks the deadline is a healthy forcing function. Marisol thinks it's a meticulously engineered revenue event. Neither of them backs down.
What you'll hear:
Why "mainstream support ends" doesn't mean what most executives think it meansThe real math on extended maintenance and the third-party route SAP doesn't advertiseWhether a 12-to-24-month project timeline makes mid-2026 the true point of no returnThe consultant capacity crunch nobody's pricing in yetThe security-and-compliance argument that even the skeptic takes seriouslyA deadline can be real and a sales tactic at the same time. That's exactly what makes this one so hard to call.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review, and send this to the one person on your IT steering committee who keeps saying "we've got time."
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SpaceX wants to launch one million AI data centers into orbit. Not a metaphor. Actual supercomputers, in space, because nobody on Earth wants them in their backyard.
In this solo episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David unpacks the most science-fiction-sounding plan in tech right now, SpaceX's AI1 orbital data center and asks the uncomfortable question underneath it: are we solving the AI energy crisis, or just launching it where we can't see it? As an optimist, David finds the engineering genuinely thrilling. As an honest one, he can't ignore what the orbit-as-escape-hatch really tells us.
What you'll hear:
Why AI data centers are running out of power, water, and welcome on EarthWhat the AI1 satellite actually is — 70 meters wide, solar-powered, radiating heat into the voidThe seductive physics: 24/7 sun, infinite cooling, zero land useThe catches nobody markets — radiation, space debris, repair, and "disposable" computers in orbitDavid's confession about what it means when our solution to a problem is to launch it off the planetWe didn't fix the data center problem. We just found a place far enough away to stop arguing about it.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review, and share this with the person who still thinks "the cloud" is just a metaphor.
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SAP consultants bill $400 an hour. AI can read an entire system config in four seconds. So what exactly are we still paying for?
In this debut episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, your host goes head-to-head with Dr. Sarah Chen, enterprise transformation expert, S/4HANA veteran with 15 years across three continents, and someone who has told more clients uncomfortable truths than she can count.
The debate: will AI replace SAP consultants, or just make them more powerful?
What you'll hear:
Why AI automating the "documented stuff" might be the least of consultants' worries
The "throat to choke" argument and why enterprises still need a human to own the risk
Clean core, RISE with SAP, and why SAP itself may be draining the swamp consultants live in
The farm team problem: if AI kills junior consultants, where do future seniors come from?
The one argument that actually stopped the optimist in his tracks
No clean resolution. No easy answers. Just two people who disagree and one confession each at the end.
If your job flashed before your eyes during this episode… good. That means it worked.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review and share this episode with the SAP consultant in your life. Or the AI eyeing their job.
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Five billion passkeys are now in use worldwide. So why is the password, the thing every expert has declared dead for thirty years, still very much alive?
In this solo episode of Confessions of a Tech Optimist, David digs into the great passwordless revolution of 2026: the FIDO Alliance milestone, the eye-watering credential leaks, and the awkward gap between "passkeys have won" and "you still typed six passwords today." As a tech optimist, David wanted this to be a victory lap. It turned into something more honest.
What you'll hear:
» Why 90% of people now know what a passkey is, but fewer than half actually use one
» The largest credential leak ever recorded, and what it really says about passwords
» How Google, Amazon, and Microsoft quietly moved a billion-plus logins off passwords
» The uncomfortable catch nobody markets: what happens when you lose the device
» David's confession about why "the password is dead" was always a little too convenient
Passwords aren't dead. They're just dying slowly enough that we stopped noticing.
🎙️ Subscribe to Confessions of a Tech Optimist on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Leave a review, and share this with the person in your life still using the same password for everything.
