Interview #80 Raj Shukla, CTO of SymphonyAI

Join Raj Shukla, CTO of SymphonyAI, as he discusses the critical distinction between AI demos and production-ready systems, revealing that enterprises consistently underestimate the "last mile" challenges of authentication, authorization, and data scalability that break POCs when moving to production. Shukla explains how SymphonyAI's vertical AI approach pre-trains models on industry-specific ontologies and knowledge graphs for retail, financial services, industrial manufacturing, and enterprise IT, enabling faster ROI by providing pre-built agents and domain-specific context rather than expecting generic LLMs to solve everything. He addresses the hidden costs that shock CFOs—not LLM inference which has dropped 1000x, but the expensive work of making data and APIs AI-ready through proper governance layers and MCP server implementations, while warning that enterprises overestimate the autonomy achievable in the short term and underestimate the infrastructure work required for real process automation at scale.