Spencer Penn, Co founder and CEO of LightSource, joins The Tech Trek for a sharp conversation on AI native procurement, agentic workflows, and what actually happens to knowledge work as automation gets better. This episode is worth your time because it moves past lazy takes about AI replacing jobs and gets into something more useful, how work changes, where human value holds, and why procurement may be more strategic than most companies treat it.

This conversation starts with procurement, but it quickly expands into a bigger discussion about role design, change management, and the pace of AI adoption inside real companies. Spencer breaks down why some jobs get redesigned while others disappear, how AI can elevate overlooked functions, and what people should do right now if their company is behind.

In this episode

• Why procurement is a strong fit for AI, especially where teams are buried in tedious process work
• The difference between job automation and job elimination
• Spencer’s idea of role plasticity, and why it matters more than most AI debates
• Why procurement teams may become more valuable, not less, as AI improves
• Practical ways professionals can start using AI before their company rolls out a formal strategy

Timestamped highlights

• 00:37 What LightSource does and why direct material sourcing is a high stakes AI use case
• 01:51 Why procurement teams spend too much time on transactional work
• 06:47 Which jobs get enhanced by AI, which ones get eliminated, and Spencer’s framework for role plasticity
• 13:44 What the next few years could look like for procurement professionals
• 26:18 Where to start if your company has not adopted an AI native workflow yet
• 30:07 How to learn more about LightSource and connect with Spencer

“AI will not replace your job. Someone who knows how to use AI will.”

A practical thread running through this episode is simple. Start using the tools now. Use foundation models for secondary work, reporting, summaries, and internal communication. Build familiarity before the workflow shift gets forced on you.

If you are interested in AI, procurement, operations, supply chain, or the future of knowledge work, follow The Tech Trek for more conversations like this.

Michael Fanning, CISO at Splunk, joins The Tech Trek for a grounded conversation on how the security leader role is changing in the AI era. This episode gets into the real tension facing modern CISOs, balancing risk without slowing the business down, hiring for technical depth over narrow credentials, and defining success in a field where perfection is not a realistic metric.

This is a practical conversation for security leaders, engineering leaders, founders, and operators trying to make sense of AI adoption inside the enterprise. Mike breaks down why security has to move from fear based messaging to business enablement, why many teams may be overlooking strong security talent hiding in adjacent technical roles, and where AI can either reduce burnout or make it worse.

In this episode

• Why the CISO role is becoming more engineering driven and more tightly tied to business outcomes

• Where AI creates real leverage for security teams, and where it introduces new operational risk

• Why the security talent gap may be as much a hiring mindset problem as a supply problem

• What actually causes burnout in security teams, beyond the usual talking points

• How to think about success in security when zero incidents is not a serious metric

Highlights

• 1:44, The CISO role is shifting from pure protection to business enablement

• 7:11, AI creates leverage for defenders, but it is also accelerating the attacker playbook

• 9:31, The biggest AI security risks, from developer copilots to agent driven decision making

• 14:15, Why security teams need room to experiment with AI or risk falling behind

• 16:58, Only 1 percent of CISOs surveyed prioritized technology to close the skills gap

• 22:16, AI can reduce burnout, but only if it cuts noise instead of creating more of it

Security is about assessing risk and finding a way to say yes in a way that is responsible.

A practical idea worth taking back to your team
Look beyond candidates with formal security titles. Mike makes the case that strong engineers, SREs, and cloud practitioners often already understand the systems, access models, and infrastructure realities that matter most. Security can be taught on top of that foundation.

Link to report: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/form/ciso-report.html

Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations with leaders shaping how technology actually gets built, secured, and scaled.

What does it really take to go from engineer to CEO?

In this Tech Trek Brief, Michael White, Co founder and CEO of Multiply, shares a few of the ideas that matter most from a broader conversation on founder growth, leadership, and the shift from building things to building a company.

What stood out most is that this is not really a story about title progression. It is a story about learning to operate with more uncertainty, taking on bigger challenges before you feel ready, and realizing that leadership at the highest level starts to look a lot more like influence than execution.

What we get into

• Why growth often starts before you feel ready

• Why strong founders are pulled by a real problem

• Why founder timing matters more than people think

• Why leadership becomes influence, alignment, and conviction

Timestamped highlights

00:00 The real shift from engineer to CEO

00:18 Growth starts before readiness

00:56 Leadership changes when execution is no longer enough

01:50 The best founders are pulled by a problem

02:35 The three ideas that tie it all together

Follow The Tech Trek for more conversations on leadership, company building, and the people shaping what comes next.

The full Michael White episode is also available.