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.

Frank Vitetta, is the founder and CEO of Orchid Box, LLM Scout, and CodeScout. LLM Scout monitors how brands are cited and represented across major AI platforms. Krish Palaniappan is the CEO of Snowpal, an API platform helping businesses build software faster.

Frank points to a striking statistic: roughly 18% of Google’s traffic today comes from LLM bots. When you ask ChatGPT or Claude a question they can’t answer from training data, they perform live Google searches to gather information. They break your prompt into multiple search queries — a process called “query fan-out” — then crawl the top results in real time to synthesize an answer.

If you’ve been losing sleep wondering whether your job will survive the AI revolution, congratulations: you’re already doing more strategic thinking than most C-suites. That, in essence, is the bracing message Dr. Kelly Monahan brought to a recent Snowpal podcast conversation with founder Krish Palaniappan. Kelly, who studies the future of work and has done time in the research trenches at Deloitte, Accenture, and Meta, has the rare distinction of having started her HR career by laying people off because of robotic process automation. It is, as career origin stories go, the equivalent of a firefighter whose first day on the job involves lighting a match. Twenty years later, the technology is more polite about it (chatbots are nothing if not cheerful), but the underlying question is the same: what is a human worker actually for?

Deploying AI in regulated, mission-critical environments is a challenge of a different order from shipping a consumer app. Where most AI practitioners enjoy the freedom to iterate quickly and fail cheaply, public sector software vendors must satisfy procurement regulations, legal liability constraints, and a profound obligation to public trust. Andrew Stockwell, VP of AI at Euna Solutions — a leading provider of cloud-based software for government bodies across the United States and Canada — has spent years operating at this intersection. In a wide-ranging conversation on the Snowpal Podcast, Stockwell walked through the technical decisions, architectural patterns, and organizational strategies his team uses to ship production-quality AI responsibly in one of the world’s most demanding verticals.

Jessica Perrone, founder of Her Financial IQ, shares insights on financial education for women, addressing unique challenges, investment strategies, and the importance of financial literacy. Discover how tailored education can empower women and transform financial decision-making.

A conversation between Krish Palaniappan and Asia Solnyshkina, founder of ProSense Digital — exploring what it means to build software in an era when the rules are being rewritten in real time.