Insights from a Snowpal Podcast conversation between Krish Palaniappan and Viktor Popovics, co-founder and president of Avendo

Viktor Popovics has closed two very different kinds of impossible sales. The first was convincing an old-school pressure washer manufacturer, in 2003, that people would actually buy heavy equipment over the internet. The second, twenty years later, is convincing payment processors to compete against each other in real time for the same merchant. Between those two sales sits a masterclass in what it actually takes to sell something the market isn’t ready to buy.

Most “AI is changing engineering” content stays at the level of anecdote. This piece tries to go one layer deeper into four specific claims made in the conversation, each of which has concrete operational implications for engineering teams:

1. Cloud native’s definition is shifting under AI-assisted development,

2. Code review is becoming a two-stage, agent-then-human pipeline,

3. Model selection is a benchmarking problem, not a leaderboard-reading problem, and,

4. Token spend is emerging as a per-developer budget line that companies don’t yet know how to reason about. A closing section covers the SaaS market debate.

Krish Palaniappan sits down with Srinivas Chippagiri, a senior technical staff member with 15 years in software engineering, to unpack how AI is reshaping coding, code review, model selection, and the SaaS industry.

There is a meaningful difference between pasting a problem into ChatGPT and deploying an AI system that autonomously orchestrates multi-step workflows across a regulated enterprise. Karl has spent the last several years working in that gap — building what he calls “AI coworkers” for wealth management firms and manufacturers. This article unpacks the architectural decisions, engineering philosophy, and organizational implications behind that work.