CIO Classified

Two words that make most engineers shudder: code refactoring. Now raise the stakes — refactoring decades of legacy systems inside a large enterprise.

A tech debt-heavy project of this scale needs a leader who has driven complex digital transformations, like Gayatri Narayan (formerly PepsiCo, Microsoft, Amazon). Now, as President of Technology at Builders FirstSource, Gayatri Narayan is achieving a 3–4x increase in engineering velocity since joining less than a year ago. 

Gayatri joins host Yousuf Khan to unpack the strategy behind those results, including how to deploy AI across the SDLC, how to rigorously evaluate ROI on AI investments, and how to lead change across complex enterprise tech stacks.

Key Moments:

01:30 – Why Construction Technology Is Ready for Transformation

04:05 – AI Strategy: Elevating UX and Customer Experience

08:20 – Evaluating AI Investments: ROI, NPV, and Operating Costs

12:45 – Achieving 3–4x Engineering Velocity

16:05 – Humans in the Loop: Craft, Code Review, and AI Amplification

18:35 – Where the Industry Gets AI Adoption Wrong

20:30 – Leadership Advice: Start with the Customer

About Gayatri: 
Gayatri Narayan is a general management executive with more than 15 years of experience leading product, engineering, data science, and operations across global enterprises, with full P&L responsibility and a track record of driving profitable growth through digital transformation. 

She currently serves as President of Technology at Builders FirstSource, where she leads enterprise technology strategy, modernizes legacy systems, and embeds AI into the software development lifecycle to accelerate innovation across the residential construction value chain. 

Previously, she served as Senior Vice President of Digital Products and Services at PepsiCo and held multiple general management roles at Microsoft, including leading Product and Engineering for Intelligent Communications across Teams and Skype as well as Enterprise PaaS and SaaS businesses; she also held leadership roles at Amazon spanning Marketplace Transportation and Logistics and several major retail categories.

Guest Highlights:

“We’ve seen a three to four times increase in engineering velocity — especially in refactoring legacy systems where historically there was very little knowledge of how the system actually worked.”

“With generative AI, companies that have existed for 20 or 30 years don’t have to get bogged down by legacy stacks. They can embrace emerging technologies without spending 18 to 24 months just refactoring.”

“It really comes down to efficiency of time. The developer’s surface area of impact expands dramatically — it’s not just about writing code anymore, it’s about delivering business value faster.”

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Our Sponsor: 

Want to accelerate software development by 500%? Meet Blitzy, the only autonomous code generation platform with infinite code context, purpose-built for large, complex enterprise-scale codebases. 

While other AI coding tools provide snippets of code and struggle with context, Blitzy ingests millions of lines of code and orchestrates thousands of agents that reason for hours to map every line-level dependency. 

With a complete contextual understanding of your codebase, Blitzy is ready to be deployed at the beginning of every sprint. Blitzy handles the heavy lifting, delivering over 80% of the work autonomously. The platform plans, builds, and validates premium-quality code at the speed of compute, turning months of engineering into a matter of days. It’s the secret weapon for Fortune 500 companies globally. 

To hear how engineering leaders are transforming the way they deliver software, visit blitzy.com. Schedule a meeting with their consultants to enable an AI-Native SDLC in your organization today.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On this episode of CIO Classified, host Yousuf Khan sits down with Ravi Thadani, Global Head of IT at Enphase Energy, a company powering over 5 million homes across 160 countries with clean, solar-driven energy. With 85 million microinverters producing 30 gigawatts of power, Ravi’s team is at the epicenter of a massive, real-time data operation—and every IT decision directly impacts the customer experience.
About Ravi: 
Ravi Thadani is a seasoned IT executive with extensive experience leading large-scale digital transformations across Fortune 500 companies. He has driven strategic initiatives across ERP, CRM, PLM, HCM, SCM, analytics, AI/ML, network architecture, cloud infrastructure, and M&A integration. With oversight of multi-$10M budgets and teams of over 300, Ravi has supported business units ranging from $2B to $70B in revenue.
Known for his strategic vision and execution, Ravi is recognized for fostering cross-functional alignment, driving agile transformation, and cultivating high-performing teams. His leadership approach is grounded in strong business partnerships, stakeholder governance, innovation, and a relentless focus on outcomes.
Timestamps:
01:50 – Enphase Energy's Global Operations
03:40 – Ravi's Role and Responsibilities
06:00 – Managing Customer Data and CRM
16:45 – Driving Change as a CIO
19:50 – The Role of Data in AI
20:55 – The Importance of Data Cleaning
21:20 – Effective Data Governance Strategies
23:45 – Architecting for Scalability
27:30 – Challenges in Hardware and Software Integration
Guest Highlights:
"AI isn’t replacing you—people using AI are. The adoption curve is about enabling people to do more, not just reducing headcount."
"The biggest failure point in IT projects? Treating them like IT projects. Every transformation has to be owned by the business."
"Your architecture should always assume 10x growth. Even if you’re not scaling today, you need a conscious plan for when you do."
Get Connected:
Yousuf Kahn on LinkedIn
Ravi Thadani on LinkedIn
Hungry for more tech talk? Check out latest episodes at ciopod.com: 
Ep 65 - Accelerating Software Development at Enterprise Scale
Ep 64 - How Autonomous AI is Solving the Enterprise Modernization Challenge
Ep 63 - How AI is Expanding the CIO Role
Learn more about Caspian Studios: caspianstudios.com
Our Sponsor: 
Want to accelerate software development by 500%? Meet Blitzy, the only autonomous code generation platform with infinite code context, purpose-built for large, complex enterprise-scale codebases.
While other AI coding tools provide snippets of code and struggle with context, Blitzy ingests millions of lines of code and orchestrates thousands of agents that reason for hours to map every line-level dependency.
With a complete contextual understanding of your codebase, Blitzy is ready to be deployed at the beginning of every sprint. Blitzy handles the heavy lifting, delivering over 80% of the work autonomously. The platform plans, builds, and validates premium-quality code at the speed of compute, turning months of engineering into a matter of days.
It’s the secret weapon for Fortune 500 companies globally. To hear how engineering leaders are transforming the way they deliver software, visit blitzy.com. Schedule a meeting with their consultants to enable an AI-Native SDLC in your organization today.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When you’re managing $60 trillion in assets across dozens of products and 30 global jurisdictions, technical debt isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s an existential risk.
Jason Adams, Interim CTO of Charles River, a State Street Company, leads 800 engineers building mission-critical trading platforms for the world’s largest asset managers. Joined by Sid Pardeshi, Co-Founder and CTO of Blitzy, he explains how State Street is using an AI-augmented SDLC to modernize decades-old systems, refactor legacy code, and dramatically increase developer productivity—without compromising the rigor required in financial services.
Jason frames the strategy around three pillars: 
AI for engineering (copilots and polyglot support),
AI for operations (APM, observability, and proactive monitoring), and
AI embedded in products (LLM-powered explainers).
Using Blitzy’s agentic approach—iterative context building, dependency mapping, and targeted code generation—State Street compressed months of work into weeks while maintaining strict quality gates.
About the Guests:
Jason Adams
Jason Adams is the Interim CTO of Charles River, a State Street Company. He brings deep expertise in modernizing legacy fintech infrastructure into scalable, cloud-native systems that support mission-critical financial services at global scale.
Previously, Jason was Head of Platform Product and Strategy at Charles River Development and CTO of Mercatus (acquired by State Street and now part of Charles River for Private Markets). He has led high-impact initiatives across engineering, product, and cloud infrastructure, with extensive experience guiding end-to-end delivery teams.
Today, Jason is driving a comprehensive SaaS transformation at CRD, focused on building resilient, future-ready architectures. From scaling global engineering organizations to delivering secure, high-performance platforms, he is committed to advancing innovation, agility, and long-term growth across Charles River, State Street Alpha, and State Street.
Sid Pardeshi
Sid Pardeshi is a technology leader and entrepreneur, currently Co-Founder and CTO of Blitzy. He holds a Harvard MS/MBA and previously served as a Software Architect at NVIDIA, where he built deep expertise at the intersection of AI, large-scale software systems, and product innovation.
At NVIDIA, Sid was recognized as a Master Inventor, earning the Inventor’s Jacket for driving AI-powered product innovation, with more than 25 U.S. patents filed across gaming, augmented reality, and virtual reality. He is also a seasoned software engineer with a strong track record in application performance optimization, delivering native client load-time improvements of up to 90%.
Beyond hands-on engineering, Sid has led and coordinated software design, framework requirements, and application architecture across global teams of 500+ engineers. Today, he applies this blend of innovation, technical depth, and organizational leadership to building autonomous software development platforms that help enterprises modernize at scale.
Timestamps:
00:30 – Jason on Managing $60 Trillion in Assets
01:55 – Challenges and Strategies in Financial Services
07:00 – Embracing AI for Modernization
09:10 – AI in Software Development Lifecycle
15:55 – Ensuring Quality and Compliance with AI
23:55 – AI in Operations and Incident Response
26:00 – Proactive Workflow Monitoring
26:20 – AI in SDLC: Creation to Operations
30:00 – Challenges in AI Recommendations
33:20 – Iterative Context Building with AI
36:00 – Human Side of AI Transformation
42:30 – Adopting AI Tools in Financial Services
Guest Highlights:
"One of the things that excites me the most right now is the ability to use an AI-augmented SDLC to drive modernization. Otherwise, with this many systems, it's too hard." — Jason 
"You have to invest in the non-attractive parts first. You have to build a foundation that's gonna support being able to bring on solutions and tools that could change your overall enterprise SDLC. That's a lot of work and that's a major investment." — Jason 
"We are unlocking by adding these additional capabilities and additional assurance that improves quality exponentially more than we could have in the past. Now I can have an agent swarm check itself—multiple agents doing code review at a level of depth we just don't have time to get to." — Jason
Get Connected:
Jason Adams on LinkedIn
Sid Pardeshi on LinkedIn
Yousuf Kahn on LinkedIn
Ian Faison on LinkedIn
Hungry for more tech talk? Check out latest episodes at ciopod.com: 
Ep 63 - How Autonomous AI is Solving the Enterprise Modernization Challenge
Ep 62 - Running IT Like a Growth Engine
Ep 61 - What Manufacturing Can Teach You About Scaling Enterprise AI
Learn more about Caspian Studios: caspianstudios.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most enterprises have roadmaps stretching 3-5 years out. What if you could compress that to 1-2 years? 
Brian Elliot is the Co-Founder and CEO of Blitzy, an enterprise-focused autonomous software development platform tackling one of technology's toughest problems: how do you modernize 20-100 million lines of legacy code when the developers who wrote it retired 15 years ago?
In this episode, Brian explores:
Why orchestrated AI agents can handle 80% of transformation work autonomously (and why humans still matter for the other 20%)
The realities of enterprise buying cycles and why embedded on-site teams accelerate change management
Why documentation and test coverage are the unsexy first steps that make everything else possible
About the Guest: 
Brian Elliott is CEO and Co-founder of Blitzy. A serial entrepreneur, former Infantry Officer with the 1st Ranger Battalion, and West Point graduate in Systems Engineering with a Harvard MBA, Brian brings a unique blend of military precision, engineering expertise, and entrepreneurial vision to transforming enterprise software development.
As CEO, Brian leads Blitzy's mission to empower systematic AI adoption across enterprises, transforming traditional development lifecycles into AI-native workflows. Under his leadership, Blitzy has developed an agentic platform where thousands of specialized AI Agents cooperate at inference to autonomously deliver enterprise-scale code that is tested, validated, and compiled.
Focused on operational deployment at scale, Brian architected the company's proven Agentic SDLC Accelerator—a structured methodology that systematically guides engineering organizations from technical validation to full-scale enterprise adoption. This framework unlocks autonomous capabilities across the complete software development lifecycle.
Timestamps:
01:25 – Understanding Blitzy's AI Capabilities
03:25 – Challenges and Solutions in Enterprise Software
06:00 – The Genesis of Blitzy
07:30 – Insights from Nvidia and AI Development
11:00 – Implementing AI in Enterprise Systems
18:00 – Change Management and Customer Collaboration
20:30 – Understanding Enterprise Security Needs
25:10 – Improving Code Quality and Test Coverage
28:15 – Blitzy's Mission and Market Direction
30:10 – Challenges and Opportunities in Enterprise Software
Guest Highlight:
"Code is beautiful in that it's verifiable. We're following enterprise best practices—everything goes to a dev branch where a human can look at it, review it, go through a typical QA process. The first thing we're gonna do is document their code so they know what's going on, then add test cases, then develop software at scale that's highly verifiable."
Get Connected:
Brian Elliot on LinkedIn
Yousuf Kahn on LinkedIn
Ian Faison on LinkedIn
Hungry for more tech talk? Check out past episodes at ciopod.com: 
Ep 62 - Running IT Like a Growth Engine
Ep 61 - What Manufacturing Can Teach You About Scaling Enterprise AI
Ep 60 - Why the Smartest CIOs Are Becoming Business Strategists
Learn more about Caspian Studios: caspianstudios.com
Our Sponsor: 
This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the Enterprise Autonomous Software Development Platform with Infinite Code Context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale codebases with millions of lines of code.
Enterprise Engineering leaders start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80%+ of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint.
Public companies are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their Pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-Native SDLC into their org.
Visit Blitzy.com and press book demo to learn how Blitzy transforms your SDLC from AI Assisted to AI Native.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Chetna explains how new automation strategies are evolving not only productivity, but the role of the CIO. Chetna emphasizes the importance of data quality and security when scaling a fast-growing company, as well as transparency and partnership in vendor relationships. 
About the Guest: 
Chetna is an award winning CIO, board member, and VC advisor with over 25 years of experience working in the Fortune 100 and serving as a 3X CIO for hyper-growth SaaS businesses. Chetna currently serves as CIO of Webflow, a hyper-growth Website Experience Platform SaaS company. Previously, she served as CDIO at Amplitude and ZoomInfo.
Chetna is an advisor to prominent VC firms including Sequoia Capital, Accel, Ridge Ventures, and Mayfield and serves on the Customer Advisory Board (CAB) at Veza and, Productiv and was formerly at Snowflake and Google Cloud Platform CAB. She served on the Tech Committee with Carlyle and Thoma Bravo, and on the Advisory Board of Ninja Focus and Women & AI.
She was a finalist and nominee for the Bay Area ORBIE, CIO award, a finalist for “2019 Markie’s Cultivator Award for Best Lead Management Program,” a recipient of the Delta Dental Women in Business Stevie Award of Excellence in Healthcare Transformation, and a Boeing Spirit of Excellence Award recipient. Outside of work, she enjoys traveling, hiking, and skiing and has a passion for exploring different cultures.
Timestamps:
01:41 - About Chetna
04:53 - Automation as a starting point
07:16 - Employee productivity and the CIO
11:25 - Discovering new AI tools
13:44 - Evolving revenue systems
22:47 - How will the CIO role evolve?
28:37 - Lightning round
Guest Highlight:
“ AI has really taken productivity at a whole different level now. It has really helped us drive the pace in productivity we couldn't have fathomed before the event of the content generation. It's not just content generation anymore. It's way beyond that. The velocity at which we are innovating on the product is huge.”
Get Connected:
Chetna Mahajan on LinkedIn
Yousuf Kahn on LinkedIn
Ian Faison on LinkedIn
Hungry for more tech talk? Check out past episodes at ciopod.com: 
Ep 62 - Running IT Like a Growth Engine
Ep 61 - What Manufacturing Can Teach You About Scaling Enterprise AI
Ep 60 - Why the Smartest CIOs Are Becoming Business Strategists
Learn more about Caspian Studios: caspianstudios.com
Our Sponsor:
This episode was brought to you by Blitzy, the Enterprise Autonomous Software Development Platform with Infinite Code Context.
Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale codebases with millions of lines of code. Enterprise Engineering leaders start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80%+ of the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint.
Public companies are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their Pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-Native SDLC into their org.
Visit Blitzy.com and press book demo to learn how Blitzy transforms your SDLC from AI Assisted to AI Native.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.