Ajay Sabhlok, CIO & Chief Data Officer at Rubrik, spoke on the Larridin AI Impact podcast. Click to view the full episode.
Ajay Sabhlok, CIO & Chief Data Officer at Rubrik, sat down with Russ Fradin, CEO of Larridin, for AI Impact. Ajay's most surprising claim was about something he's stopped doing: focusing heavily on risks caused by AI.
Sabhlok sees the CIO as the connective tissue that lets the company move faster. With AI on every department head’s agenda, peers are seeking out IT rather than tolerating it.
Two years ago, he was preoccupied with hallucinations, rogue agents, and data exfiltration. Today, anxiety about risk has receded. Rubrik runs an AI council, made up of the CFO, the head of engineering, the general counsel, and himself, to review every tool request.
However, enforcement of Rubrik's rules is caried out by the company's internal Agent Cloud platform. For instance, Legal creates a list of conditions for each tool. Legal conditions are enforced programmatically by Agent Cloud, which can block an agent the moment it tries to step outside the boundaries Legal set.
Silicon Valley has led the way in churn of developer tools for AI. A year ago, everyone used Cursor. Then, Google’s model. Most recently, Anthropic. Sabhlok speculates that the next OpenAI release might flip this again.
So Sabhlok refuses to commit to long-term contracts, and instead prefers pay-as-you-go pricing. And he's not just dropping SaaS contracts en masse; he's entering design partnerships with vendors who are willing to adapt by upending their own pricing and packaging models.
Sabhlok does not favor layoffs as the first response to AI. He emphasizes faster roadmaps and the abandonment of old growth-by-headcount playbooks. High-growth companies scale faster; large companies contain headcount growth. He emphasizes productivity improvements over headcount reduction.
And he believes that sales and marketing is the next area for AI growth. With AI providing deep, structured research into prospects and customers, fast and at low cost, outreach gets sharper. Recipients get high-quality, relevant outreach instead of spam.
Sabhlok recommends improving data quality as the first step in AI implementation. Then create a governance and optimization council. Have the Legal group state its requirements, rather than make thumbs up, thumbs down decisions. Keep contracts short. Use governance to systematically reduce risk, and use AI to help you do more with less . Then hang on for the next steps in the ride.
View the full episode here.