About this episode

Greg LaBlanc interviews Carlos Escapa about the organizational challenges of AI adoption and the importance of a talent flywheel in the digital age.

Carlos Escapa is a venture partner at Across Legal and Masia VC, an AI expert, investor, and former technology leader at Meta and Amazon AWS. He is also the co-author of The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Greg and Carlos discuss why AI adoption is primarily an organizational and talent challenge rather than a pure technology play. Carlos argues companies need a “talent flywheel” to complement their “data flywheel,” CEO-led change, and strong data culture; many pilots fail when organizations can’t adapt roles, workflows, and governance. They discuss continuity vs discontinuity in AI (transformers and reasoning as shifts), agentification vs automation, and the risks of vibe coding: including security, maintenance, and tacit-knowledge dependence. Carlos emphasizes that value accrues mainly to applications powered by proprietary data and better data infrastructure (catalogs, access, ontologies), not necessarily frontier model vendors, and has an optimistic view on the relevance of enterprise SaaS due to efficiency and cost. Their conversation also highlights burnout, mental health, and the need for more humanistic workplaces…

People in this episode

Host: Greg LaBlanc

Guest: Carlos Escapa

Topics covered

• AI adoption
• organizational challenges
• data culture
• enterprise SaaS
• humanistic workplaces
• mental health
• talent flywheel

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Across Legal, Masia VC, Meta, Amazon AWS

Books & works: The AI Driven Business: Leading, Competing and Thriving in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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