The AI Risk Boards Get Wrong — feat. David Subar (Interna)

The view from the board seat: why the biggest AI risk isn't a bad model — it's moving too slowly while your competitors learn faster. Alex Belotsky and co-host Kuba sit down with David Subar, founder of the LA consultancy Interna and a veteran board advisor, to unpack how AI is reshaping the decisions made in the boardroom. David argues that boards don't care which tool writes the code — they care about value creation and risk, the same math whether you ship in assembly or with Claude Code. He frames the product roadmap as "a series of bets" and explains why unconstraining development velocity forces companies to iterate faster while their risk surface balloons. The conversation digs into why stochastic systems are so hard to test (the boundaries "might be in the middle"), using Google's Gemini founding-fathers image fiasco as a billion-dollar cautionary tale, and why AI red teaming and reliability metrics now matter as much as pass/fail test cases. David and the hosts also tackle the "SaaS apocalypse," the flood of vibe-coded internal tools that smashes the QA problem across every department, Conway's Law and org design, Jevons paradox and developer jobs, and whether the real constraint on AI is TSMC and energy rather than talent. It's a candid, wide-ranging take on shipping reliable AI when the ground shifts every six months. \*\*In this episode:\** \- The Board's View: Value Creation vs. Risk Reduction \- Product Roadmaps As A Series Of Bets \- Why Stochastic Systems Fail At The Boundaries \- Lessons From Google's Gemini Image Controversy \- From AI Red Teaming To Reliability Metrics \- The SaaS Apocalypse And Vibe-Coded Internal Tools \- Conway's Law, Org Design And Fewer Middle Managers \- Jevons Paradox, Layoffs And The Future Of Developer Jobs \- Shift-Left (Even Lefter): How QA Tests Non-Deterministic AI \*\*Guest:\** David Subar — Founder, Interna (board advisor, ex-CTO/CPO) \*\*Host:\** Alex Belotsky (CEO, TestSavant.AI) with co-host Jakub "Kuba" Fiatkevich > "you saw a worm in the ground you stepped on it now there's worm guts everywhere and someone's got to clean that up" 🎧 \*Subscribe to Ctrl-Alt-Deploy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube for conversations on building and shipping reliable AI to production, QA, testing and AI governance.* \## Hashtags #CtrlAltDeploy #AI #SoftwareTesting #QA #QualityEngineering #AIGovernance #AIRiskManagement #BoardAdvisory #LLM #AIRedTeaming #ShiftLeft #VibeCoding #TestSavant #AIAssurance