Think AI is about automating what you already do? That's the same mistake companies made moving to cloud, and FICO's Mike Trkay says you're about to waste millions proving it.

Mike is Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at FICO, an analytics software company that processes billions of decisions per day and powers 80% of fraud detection.

In this episode, Mike explains why 95% of AI projects never reach production, why companies are already repatriating workloads from large language models, and what really separates automation from transformation.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction

1:23: Why FICO's CIO Is Also the Chief Customer Officer

4:52 The Office Space Problem: Why CIOs Are Really Translators  

6:02 "Conduit in Chief" — The CIO's Real Job  

6:45 How CIOs Accidentally Become Cost Centers

7:40 What FICO Actually Does (It's Not Just Credit Scores)

12:59 How Missile Guidance Tech Became Fraud Detection

17:59 When LLMs Can't Meet 150-Millisecond Latency

21:32 Why AI Strategy Is Harder Than It Looks

24:50 The Cloud Parallel: 5% Alignment and Why AI Projects Stall

27:08 "You're Just Doing a Bad Process Faster"

31:44 LLM Repatriation Is Already Happening

37:40 A FICO Score for AI Decisions

43:10 Global Regulation and Staying Ahead of Compliance

45:22 The Australian Banking Example: Focused Language Models in Practice

52:08 From Cost Center to Innovation Driver

54:40 What's Next: Agentic Architecture and Focused Sequence Models

57:49 "What's the Opportunity Today?" — The CIO Mindset Shift

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