Ep 89 | Running with Scissors: The Enterprise AI Reality

Cloudera, Inc.

Sep 9, 2026

Enterprise AI loves a shiny object. Sol Rashidi would rather talk about procurement.

After years of leading AI deployments, Sol has learned that some of the biggest wins come from the decidedly unglamorous parts of the business. Her favorite function to transform? Procurement.

Recorded at EVOLVE26 Singapore, this conversation brings host Paul Muller together with Sol Rashidi, CEO of ExecutiveAI, the world’s first Chief AI Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer of AI Governance & Security at Cyera. A two-time bestselling author and Senior Fellow at Harvard, Sol brings a practitioner’s perspective to what actually happens when enterprise AI meets operational reality.

Sol shares lessons shaped by years of enterprise AI deployments and the postmortems she kept along the way. She challenges the way companies prioritize AI use cases, arguing that business value means little without a realistic path to production.

The conversation turns to:

Why so many AI projects remain stuck in proof-of-concept mode
What procurement can teach us about practical AI transformation
How to choose AI use cases that have a realistic path to production
Why top-down and bottom-up AI adoption can both stall
What trust between employees and leadership means for AI adoption
Why speed is outpacing governance and security
The hidden trade-offs behind convenient AI tools
How leaders can keep human agency at the center of AI

Her vision for what comes next is human-led, AI-supercharged. AI can give individuals capabilities that once required entire teams, but Sol believes people still need to protect the creative judgment and agency that make those capabilities valuable in the first place.
As Sol puts it, the goal is to build a world where “AI happens with us and not to us.”

Stay in touch with Sol:*
Sol Rashidi’s website: https://www.solrashidi.com
Sol Rashidi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sol-rashidi-mba-a672291/
Your AI Survival Guide on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJGBY1YY

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