102: AI Transformation Starts With What You Don't Know You're Assuming — with Duri Chitayat
About this episode
Duri Chitayat discusses the importance of questioning assumptions in AI transformation and leadership.
Duri's father holds more than 100 patents, filed his latest one at 96, and gave him a one-line philosophy that now drives how his teams approach every problem: most people don't try. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Most CTOs think AI failures are technical problems. The data says otherwise, and the gap between a good idea and a great product is almost never where engineers expect it to be. My guest today is Duri Chitayat, CTO at CINC Systems, leading a 170-person globally distributed product development team across four continents with a background spanning AdTech, MedTech, Banking, and FinTech. What stood out for me in this conversation was how willing Duri is to question the assumptions other leaders treat as fixed. He grew up around an inventor with over 100 patents, and that shaped a way of thinking that strips problems down to first principles before touching a solution. The stakes here are real. Innovation tokens are finite. Spend them on the wrong assumption, and you lose the race before you knew…
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