The CTO Podcast · Insights & Strategies for Chief Technology Officers Navigating the C-Suite while Balancing Technical Strategy, Team Management, & Innovation

Ksenia Palke, Head of AI at Airspace: AI in Time-Critical Shipments

·59 min·3 clips

Ksenia says Airspace stops at RAG and does not train its own large language model.

Etienne de Bruin opens with Ksenia Palky and the CTO Podcast. Ksenia leads AI at Airspace, where the work centers on time-critical shipments that cannot slip, whether the cargo is a kidney, an airplane part, or a tiny microchip needed for high-stakes production. The stakes are plain and immediate. That gives the conversation its shape, because the focus is never AI in the abstract; it is whether systems can hold up in real operations when minutes and reliability matter. Ksenia brings a wide background. She walks through earlier work on San Diego startups, fraud detection, vehicle collision detection, natural language processing for customer feedback, and location intelligence before landing at Airspace. The throughline is practical. She and Etienne then get into the do's and don'ts of LLMs, including the urge to wrap too much magic around AI when the harder work is usually system design. That is the warning. Ksenia says teams can end up trying to boil the ocean, and that the better question is what the product actually needs to do. The real bottlenecks sit elsewhere. She points to prompts, agents, decision trees, and the infrastructure around them as the places where most of the work lives. The model race is there, but it is not the main event. They discuss benchmark tests, how models are compared, and how the field reacts when a new release is said to be better than the rest. Ksenia is measured about it. She explains that Airspace chose Gemini and Google because Google is likely to keep putting resources into areas where it is behind and catch up over time. The useful bar is lower than the hype. For her team, the models are already good enough for the job, and the gains now come from how the system is built around them. That keeps the episode grounded. The conversation closes with the same practical note that runs through it all: in this part of AI, operational judgment matters more than drama.

As heard by us

A grounded AI conversation that puts system design ahead of model hype.

Ksenia Palky treats AI less like a grand promise than a system under strain. As Director of AI at Airspace, she keeps the focus on time-critical shipments, from a kidney and an airplane part to other mission-critical products. That narrower lens works.

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Why you'd press play

When AI has to work before the package lands.

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