Pluralsight

Treehouse.

And Pluralsight.

Plural site.

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I'm your host, Rabia Javeed, and my guest today is Eric Ross, a technology leader with over 35 years of experience.

Throughout his career, he has driven engineering transformations and software systems with major organizations, including the U.S. Navy, IBM, K-Force, Pluralsight, and RomTech, authoring seven books, including The Uncommon Engineer and co-founding the Tech Academy.

Today, he's the founder of Mad Wizard Marketing and a technology career advisor who has helped thousands of engineers transition into architecture and executive leadership roles.

Welcome to the show, Eric.

If I'm a CIO and I'm being asked to look at either an in-house, off-the-shelf product that's going to in any way touch my actual business data, my first question is, where's my data quality team? What does that data look like? When we stick an AI on top of this, garbage in, garbage out, what are we dealing with? I would want to know that first and then talk to me about the AI.

Even if the board is screaming that we have to be an AI-first company, that CIO in concert with if he or she has a chief data officer, that's where they need to put their attention before they go all in on AI.

You've driven engineering transformations at massive organizations like IBM and Pluralsight.

What is the biggest difference in how a Fortune 500 company approaches AI system architecture versus a lean enterprise? And where do the big players usually trip up?

Yeah, I think topic-based stuff has been decimated.

And this is something that I learned at the Pluralsight Author Summit, too, is frankly, demand has just fallen off a cliff for software development courses that are just traditional...

Your introduction to ASP.NET or fundamentals of React or blah, blah, blah.

Because people are able to get an LLM to get a good enough response to learn from it.

there's, there's so many things that like I would watch out here or I would maybe steer it this way or I'd, you know, I would actually, I wouldn't have it do this at all.

I would, I would make a script or a tool or, you know, There's a lot of nuance, especially across the vast cornucopia of programming and engineering.

Yeah, and this is something that I've witnessed firsthand too as a Pluralsight author.

Like my courses for traditional software dev have declined, right? Like the viewership.

AI makes it possible to sound informed about almost anything in seconds.

In Pluralsight's 2025 AI Skills Report, 91% of C-Suite's executives admitted to overstating their AI knowledge.

This isn't only a cultural problem, it's a strategy problem.

When confidence is performed, bad news travels up slowly and softened.

Good morning and welcome to the Pluralsight Podcast live from Unleashed 2026 here in beautiful Paris, France.

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I'm your host, Josh Burkett, and today I'm joined by Aaron Guidallo, Chief Executive Officer of Pluralsight.

Aaron opened Pluralsight Shift 2026, our flagship customer conference, last week with a keynote on the widening gap between the technology that companies are buying and the readiness of the people expected to use it.