Beyond The Pilot: Enterprise AI in Action · 2026-06-10 · 36 min
If you enjoy these conversations, you need to be in Menlo Park this July. VB Transform 2026 is VentureBeat's flagship enterprise AI event, built entirely around one question: How do you orchestrate AI autonomy at scale? July 14 - 15, Hotel Nia. Real projects, proprietary research, no fluff. 50% off for listeners with code BEYONDTHEPILOT: _ He negotiated seat-based (unlimited) licenses before token costs exploded - and projects only a 20 - 30% spend increase when that changes. MassMutual's CIO rebuilt a COBOL mainframe app into a working web prototype in 7 days - work that used to take a 15-person SI team 90 days. That's not a pilot. That's a new build-vs-buy equation. Sears Merritt, CIO at MassMutual, runs AI inside one of America's most regulated legacy environments. In this conversation, he breaks down the architecture decisions, cost structures, and security posture behind real, production deployments - not roadmaps. On infrastructure: MassMutual routes all agentic tool calls through centralized API gateways with identity and access controls, using Amazon Bedrock as a proxy layer. That multi-harness design preserves model optionality while enforcing FinOps discipline.
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