We’ve all seen the flashy AI demos, but what happens when the hype meets your actual organizational debt?

In this roundtable, I’m opening up the floor for a raw conversation on the boring but decisive reality of AI adoption. I’ll kick things off by sharing a post-mortem of my own journey: rolling out AI tools across a 120-person engineering powerhouse versus a lean, high-pressure product team. The tools were the same, but the friction points like onboarding, delivery pressure, and tribal knowledge were worlds apart.

This isn't a talk about prompts. It’s a facilitated debate for leaders and devs to compare notes on:

The Scale Trap: Why AI strategies for big orgs often backfire in smaller teams.

The Learning Paradox: Is shipping faster actually killing our architectural understanding?

The Verification Tax: How to handle the mental load of reviewing AI-generated code.

Bring your battle scars and your failed experiments!