Your CEO Thinks AI is Working. Your Team Doesn’t. Here’s Why. | Annan Patel, VP Product (Tricentis)

Ask a CEO how their AI roll-out is going, and 81% will tell you that they're highly confident. Talk to the people doing the work, and that number drops to 56%.

Our guest today sits right in the middle of that gap. Annan Patel is VP of Product at Tricentis, a leader in enterprise software testing, where he builds AI products for companies where a bad release can cost tens of millions of dollars. He's spent over 15 years in product across ad tech, Microsoft, and WP Engine.

Tricentis recently surveyed more than 2,500 people across the tech industry. The headline: 83% of companies say they trust AI agents to make release decisions, while 60% admit they're shipping untested code. The unsurprising top reason why? Pressure from leadership to move faster.

Annan's take: AI gets sold as a tool you plug in. In practice, it's a new operating system for how work gets done.
In this episode, he shares:

• Why "plug and play" AI only gets you about 60% of the way there, and why the rest is context your team has never written down
• Why their first AI products stalled after a strong start, and how they rebuilt them around one key concept: the AI is never the one held accountable
• And why tokens spent and lines of code shipped tell you nothing about whether your AI initiatives are actually adding value

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annanpatel/
Tricentis: https://www.tricentis.com/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
01:53 Why executives and teams see AI’s capabilities differently
03:39 Adopting AI as a new operating system, not a plug-and-play tool
07:40 From coding assistants to unattended agent workflows
10:38 AI theater on LinkedIn vs. What advanced teams actually achieve
12:27 Enterprise risk and treating AI as a long-term investment
14:55 Survey findings on agent trust, untested code, and the wrong metrics
17:13 How product teams use AI beyond vibe coding
19:05 Why early AI products stalled and how to build tools people trust
22:44 Thinking like a CEO: Customer empathy and matching velocity to your market
29:20 Conclusion

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