AI & Talent in Games Engineering: Hype Meets Reality – Live at Pragma OSS

Oct 14, 2025

Serge Kynstautas, Head of Engineering at Gardens Interactive, and Meir Wasserman, Head of Engineering at 2K Technology, explore the future of AI in gaming. They discuss exciting AI use cases like community moderation and developer productivity, while sharing amusing AI mishaps. The duo also tackles talent dynamics in a challenging economic landscape, questioning if teams prefer proven tech over innovation. Insights on teaching reluctant engineers to embrace AI tools round out their engaging conversation, making it a thought-provoking listen for game development enthusiasts.

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ANECDOTE

AI Hallucination Killed A Fun Project

Serge used ChatGPT to summarize Perforce changelists and gamified “best commit” but it hallucinated a nonexistent author.
The project was killed after the AI confidently invented a person and change.

ANECDOTE

Cover Letter That Claimed A False Co‑Founding

Meir shared a friend’s cover letter where GPT-4 falsely claimed he co-founded Activision.
The hallucination repeated on re-runs, highlighting model overconfidence.

INSIGHT

Three Practical AI Game Uses

Gardens uses AI for community moderation, data science NLQ, and developer productivity.
The tools speed designer validation and let non‑data teams query telemetry faster.

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Are AI games right around the corner? In our second-ever live audience show, host Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Serge Kynstautas, Head of Engineering at Gardens Interactive, a venture-backed startup building a social online shared fantasy adventure game, and Meir Wasserman, Head of Engineering at 2K Technology.

Shooting live from the 3rd annual Pragma Online Services Summit, the trio dives into two critical topics impacting the predominantly technical engineering audience: AI and talent. They discuss AI use cases and tool stacks, how they balance context, security, and flexibility, and how they guide engineering teams in a rapidly changing environment. They also discuss talent in engineering in the new economy – given pressures to do more with less, is the engineering scope and team size being shaved down? Are teams opting for safer, proven tech or looking to innovate? How are engineering leaders bringing along those who may be more reluctant to adopt AI tools in their workflows?

That and so much more – including a contentious lighting round and spicy audience Q&A. If you want perspective on the future of AI in games and the subsequent cascading effects on talent, this episode is a must-listen.

We’d also like to thank Lightspeed Venture Partners for making this episode possible! With its dedicated gaming & interactive media practice, the firm invests from an over $6.5 billion pool of early and growth-stage capital. If you’re interested in learning more, go to https://gaming.lsvp.com/.

We’d also like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.

If you like the episode, please help others find us by leaving a 5-star rating or review! And if you have any comments, requests, or feedback shoot us a note at podcast@naavik.co.

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Sound design by Gavin Mc Cabe.