What Comes Next with Arun

Send us Fan Mail In mortgage lending, there's a saying: real underwriting doesn't happen until 72 hours before closing. By then, the borrower has paid for the appraisal, put earnest money at risk, and waited weeks — only to find out the deal never had a chance. Robert S. Stewart Jr., founder and CEO of CR Equity AI, built his company to move that moment to minute one. A former Air Force officer who came up through real estate sales and loan origination, Robert used the military's objective-ba...

Send us Fan Mail What happens to teams when everything around them gets automated? David Lengyel has spent more than 40 years answering a version of that question. As Managing Director of Venture Up, one of the first team building companies in the U.S., he and his team have worked with more than 8,000 companies and 500,000 people across a dozen-plus countries — from Procter & Gamble, McKinsey, and Caterpillar to Microsoft and HP. In this conversation, David traces Venture Up's unlikely st...

Send us Fan Mail Most leaders don't have a strategy problem. They have a noise problem. Executive coach Steve Barton spent 30 years as a florist, grew his business from roughly $200K to $2M serving high-end destination weddings in Maine, and then had an experience 34 years ago that changed how he understood human potential. Today he coaches founders, CEOs and high performers with The Game of Ten®, a registered coaching process built to help leaders let go of fear, self-doubt, guilt and shame ...

Send us Fan Mail AI has made it possible to build a product in six to eight months. So here's the uncomfortable question: if you can build it that fast, why can't your competitor? Christopher Hussain has spent more than 20 years answering versions of that question from the inside. He was the #1 mortgage originator in the U.S. for two consecutive years, co-founded Sindeo (one of the original modern online mortgage platforms), and founded RealKey, an AI and automation platform that grew to 3,60...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations aren't behind on AI. They're behind on the thinking required to use it. That's where this conversation with Frank Bravo starts — and it doesn't let up. Frank is a Bay Area technologist who spent more than three decades leading technology through disruption. For 32 years he was CTO of Embarcadero Media, home of the Palo Alto Weekly, where his team published an entire newspaper's editorial content to the web in 1994 — before Google, before Yahoo, before most ...

Send us Fan Mail Your AI agent can book a flight, move money, and open accounts on your behalf. But it can't take a selfie or hold a driver's license — so how does anyone know it's really acting for you? Arun sits down with Ravi Bijlani, founder and CEO of KYXStart.Ai, who is building the trust and verification layer for the agentic era. Ravi spent 24 years in identity and payments before betting that the real bottleneck in AI wouldn't be intelligence — it would be trust. In this conversation...

Send us Fan Mail High earners rarely lose money because they make bad decisions. They lose it in the gaps — between a financial advisor who only sees stocks and bonds, a CPA who shows up 60 days before the deadline, an insurance agent working a different angle, and an estate plan that's either missing or out of date. Nobody is coordinating the whole picture. In this episode, Arun sits down with Lord Munjal, Founder & CEO of Alpheva AI, who is building a financial operating system for high...

Send us Fan Mail Most conversations about AI in finance stop at "we use AI." This one goes deeper. Aidan McConnell started as a data science intern at Sezzle in 2019, worked his way up to Head of AI/ML, then left to build QuantLink AI — a vertically integrated data and analytics platform for investors. Think premium market data, quant workflows, and institutional-grade charts, made accessible enough that a first-time investor can actually use them. In this episode, Arun and Aidan trace the bu...

Send us Fan Mail In the finale of this series, Arunansu Pattanayak brings together every framework from the show into a single worldview — one he argues is the most important strategic idea for any leader heading into the next decade. The claim is simple and uncomfortable: the winners won't be the organizations with the best AI. They'll be the ones that build the most intelligent architecture underneath it. Tools are commoditized. Buying the same software as your competitor gets you the same ...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations aren't behind on AI. They're behind on the thinking required to use it. In this solo episode, Arunansu Pattanayak makes a prediction: if your AI strategy is built around specific tools, platforms, and vendors, most of that document will be obsolete within 12 months — not because your team planned badly, but because you built on the fastest-moving layer of the stack instead of the slowest. Arun breaks down why vendor-driven thinking feels like strategy but q...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations bought the AI. What they skipped was the thinking required to make it matter. In this solo episode, Arunansu Pattanayak sets aside the frameworks and tells one story — the moment, after 20+ years inside Merrill Lynch, Citibank, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, TD Bank, and Microsoft, when he finally understood what actually breaks in transformation. It was never the technology. He unpacks why technically excellent systems fail to change anything: people keep using...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations aren't behind on AI. They're behind on the thinking required to use it. In this solo episode, Arunansu Pattanayak makes an uncomfortable argument for anyone who has ever built a five-year strategic plan: future-proofing, as most people define it, is a myth. Complex systems don't behave predictably over multi-year horizons — and the further out you forecast, the more confident the prediction sounds and the less likely it is to be right. That combination of h...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations are not behind on AI. They are behind on the thinking required to use it. In this solo episode, Arunansu Pattanayak — ex-Microsoft Data and AI executive and CEO of Tipsora — makes an argument that might sound strange coming from someone who has spent his career in AI: more AI is not going to make your organization more competitive. The large language models, copilots, and agentic systems everyone is racing to adopt are becoming commodities. Your competitor ...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations don't have an AI problem — they have a sequencing problem. They're building layer four before laying layer one. In this solo episode, Arunansu Pattanayak, ex-Microsoft Data & AI executive and CEO of Tipsora, draws on 20+ years across financial services, enterprise technology, and beyond to lay out a five-layer framework for building an organization that actually wins in an intelligence-driven economy: Layer 1: Data governance and architecture — the unse...

Send us Fan Mail AI doesn't make humans less valuable. It makes the wrong humans — people doing the wrong work — less valuable, and the right humans dramatically more valuable. The question for every leader: are you designing an organization where your people are doing the right work? In this episode of What Comes Next, former Microsoft Data & AI executive and Tipsora founder Arunansu (Arun) Pattanayak takes on the future of work conversation — not the fear version, and not the hype versi...

Send us Fan Mail If your organization burned to the ground tomorrow and you could save one thing, what would you save? The most strategic leaders always give the same answer: the data. Everything else can be rebuilt — the data is irreplaceable. So why do most organizations treat it like a filing cabinet? In this episode of What Comes Next, former Microsoft Data & AI executive and Tipsora founder Arunansu (Arun) Pattanayak makes the case that the most valuable thing you can do with your da...

Send us Fan Mail Only 14% of CFOs report measurable ROI from their AI investments — yet 66% of business leaders expect significant AI impact within two years. Why is nearly everyone betting on AI while so few are seeing it work? In this debut episode of What Comes Next, former Microsoft Data & AI executive Arunansu (Arun) Pattanayak draws on 20+ years of building enterprise data and AI systems for organizations including EY, KPMG, Deloitte, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Credit Suisse to a...