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

The future of CTOs with AI -- Stephan Schmidt // Amazing CTO

·17 min·1 clip

Stefan Schmidt warns CTOs: if you haven't started with AI six months ago, you're already too late.

This episode features host Etienne de Bruin and returning guest Stefan Schmidt, a CTO coach and former CTO, discussing how artificial intelligence will reshape the role of Chief Technology Officers. Schmidt argues that any CTO who hasn't started exploring AI applications within their business is already "too late to the game." He compares the current AI landscape to the early internet in 1995, a period of undefined potential where the ultimate use cases were not yet clear. Schmidt advises CTOs to immediately hire at least one dedicated person, even an intern with an "AI" title, to focus full-time on how AI can be applied to their specific business. He references a company that fed all its CEO's Slack messages into a local LLM to create a bot that could respond in the CEO's tone and style. The conversation shifts from simply integrating AI into existing software to a future where "AI is the software," akin to the conversational computer in Star Trek. Schmidt and de Bruin speculate that future generations will find our concept of downloading discrete mobile apps as puzzling as finding a payphone is today. A significant insight is the shift from traditional programming to training models, using the example of a company using thousands of historical budgets to train an AI on what constitutes a "good" budget. Schmidt believes AI will act as a catalyst to "unblock" a tectonic shift in software team sizes, noting he sees solo developers on Hacker News achieving more than some of his coaching clients with 50 engineers. He suggests one reason for bloated engineering teams has been a venture capital strategy viewing engineers as valuable assets for "acqui-hires." The discussion posits that in a long-term future where general AI handles tasks directly, the CEO might bypass human intermediaries and simply tell the AI what to do, fundamentally altering management roles. Schmidt states the near-term "end game" is not AI writing software, but AI *being* the software that executes high-level commands. The tone is conversational and forward-looking, blending personal anecdotes with strategic advice for technology leaders. Listeners interested in the strategic implications of AI for leadership and software development will find this episode thought-provoking. Those seeking highly technical implementation details or a skeptical view of AI's near-term impact might find it less applicable.

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