In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioner Series, Anand Pradhan, head of the AI Center of Excellence and Mortgage Data Group at ICE, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the critical shift from AI strategy to enterprise execution. Pradhan shares how the Intercontinental Exchange is moving generative and agentic AI into production at scale within a highly regulated environment. He unpacks the realities of building with AI agents, emphasizing that they are simply another layer in the software stack that still requires rigorous evaluation and careful token economics. Pradhan also details ICE's unwavering commitment to security, highlighting how their infrastructure and InfoSec teams deploy strict controls, data loss prevention and continuous monitoring to safely harness both proprietary models and external LLMs.
The conversation also explores the pragmatic application of AI in enterprise workflows and its realistic impact on established SaaS platforms. Pradhan dispels the hype that AI will immediately replace complex transactional systems or systems of record, noting instead its power to enhance front-end interactivity, automate deterministic flows and dramatically improve data quality. By championing a culture of education and providing secure AI tools to employees, Pradhan illustrates how organizations can push the boundaries of innovation while strictly adhering to regulatory guardrails and maintaining essential human-in-the-loop oversight.
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Gamiel Gran, Mayfield
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioner Series, Anand Pradhan, head of the AI Center of Excellence and Mortgage Data Group at ICE, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the critical shift from AI strategy to enterprise execution. Pradhan shares how the Intercontinental Exchange is moving generative and agentic AI into production at scale within a highly regulated environment. He unpacks the realities of building with AI agents, emphasizing that they are simply another layer in the software stack that still requires rigorous evaluation and careful token economics. Pradhan also details ICE's unwavering commitment to security, highlighting how their infrastructure and InfoSec teams deploy strict controls, data loss prevention and continuous monitoring to safely harness both proprietary models and external LLMs.
The conversation also explores the pragmatic application of AI in enterprise workflows and its realistic impact on established SaaS platforms. Pradhan dispels the hype that AI will immediately replace complex transactional systems or systems of record, noting instead its power to enhance front-end interactivity, automate deterministic flows and dramatically improve data quality. By championing a culture of education and providing secure AI tools to employees, Pradhan illustrates how organizations can push the boundaries of innovation while strictly adhering to regulatory guardrails and maintaining essential human-in-the-loop oversight.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Practitioner Series, Gamiel Gran, chief commercial officer of Mayfield, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how AI is redrawing the boundaries of every business function and what that means for the next generation of AI-native companies. Gran argues that AI is far more than a technology trend — it is systematically rethinking every functional role, from the office of the CFO to sales to customer support, giving AI-first companies a rare chance to rebuild those workflows from first principles. He draws on Mayfi...Read more
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How is AI transforming business workflows and organizational roles across companies?add
How has the enterprise technology landscape changed since you founded SiliconANGLE/theCUBE, and what role is AI infrastructure (including the "agentic layer") playing today?add
How much of enterprise core application infrastructure is currently running on GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA chips), and what infrastructure changes are required as organizations shift from x86 CPU stacks to GPU-based systems?add
How does Mayfield leverage its practitioner/CIO network to inform investments and support portfolio companies, and what are CIOs currently reporting about AI adoption (for example, deployment of agents)?add
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here at theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is part of our practitioner series where we interview the leaders and then we have a friend in from Silicon Valley. Gamiel Gran is a chief commercial officer at Mayfield. Mayfield.com, Mayfield Fund, legendary, OG firm, continuing to do great deals, bigger fun, more action. In New York for a big dinner with a bunch of practitioners. Thanks for coming in. Good to see you again.
Gamiel Gran
>> Hey, John. So thrilled to be here. I love that you're here on the New York Shock Exchange floor. I know we've done a lot of work together over the years, but thrilled to see you out here. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Big fan of Mayfield. You guys are a great firm. High integrity, do good deals. Sharp deals on the frontier, but very strong returns. In the heart of Silicon Valley. Love to see Silicon Valley coming through Wall Street because technology's the market. I mean, the old back in the day, CNBC, the business, the market, the market opportunity. The market's tech and the convergence of tech and capital markets. Our new brand, the NYSE Wired brand kind of speaks to that. This is mainstreaming. I won't say cottage industry. Venture capital's been around for a while as an asset class.
Gamiel Gran
>> A long time.
John Furrier
>> But now every company, it's not just the FAANG companies on the board. Every company, public and private, are infused with technology as a key DNA element.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And we keep talking about technology, of course, because here we are in the Silicon Valley and all of that. But the truth is that AI, which of course is the topic of the day, is so transformative to every single workflow. So we're seeing the office of the CFO, the office of the supply chain manager, the office of sales, every functional role systematically being rethought. And I think we're at the beginning of AI-first companies really having a chance to go back to first principles on a customer support model, on a selling model, on a finance model. What if we didn't have all these legacy environments to work through and agentic themes and AI themes were able to really work through them? So we think we're at the beginning of, you're right, technology is more than just technology. It's the rest of the organization.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Yeah. This is our 17th year since I founded SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Back then, enterprise wasn't as sexy and hot. Now it's booming. AI infrastructure is the hottest category. I mean, the CapEx build-out, and some are saying... I mean, I talked to Crusoe, they were in our studio on Sunday prior to GTC for a special program we had. And this SVP of engineering, we need more investment. And I'm like, the mainstream America would say you have enough already. But he actually, he means it, and it's true. There's more investment coming in infrastructure. And as that comes in, that's going to open up more enablement, accelerate the enablement for all the AI natives and native companies. The agentic layer as an infrastructure looks a lot like DevOps, sits on top of cloud-native. So you have now a new... We've crossed the threshold. The new paradigm is here.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. Infrastructure is probably the first order opportunity in setting out this new opportunity. I think of us setting out a new freeway system, if you will, across the entire globe. And if you use baseball analogies, I don't think we're in innings yet. I think we're just getting to the parking lot of the game. For us, a Giants game, for you, a Yankees game, I guess.
John Furrier
>> I'm actually a Red Sox fan.
Gamiel Gran
>> Well, even better.
John Furrier
>> A Giants fan on the West Coast with this national league. American league, it's Red Sox. Here, it's the Yankees. They hate the Red Sox here.
Gamiel Gran
>> Either way, baseball analogy, we're just getting started. When I talk to CIOs, and I know you and I have spent time with CIOs a lot, I asked them this hard question. I say, "So how much of your core application infrastructure today is running on Jensen's Nvidia chips or GPUs in any sort of way?" And maybe two, three, 4% of their total mission-critical applications and often not tightly embedded into the rest of their organization. So we're just beginning to really rethink this entire application stack to make it an X86-based chipset to a GPU-based chipset. And that freeway system requires power and cooling and photonics and new forms of copper and new storage and new inference at the edge. So again, new road system being built, and we're at beginning of it.
John Furrier
>> And the AI factories are the substations.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> It's like the electricity. I want to point out, because a lot of people might not know this about Mayfield, but you do a lot of research. And you have a lot of practitioners connected. We've interviewed a bunch here today.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes. Yes.
John Furrier
>> You have a dinner tonight with practitioners you hold. Mayfield has a deep network of practitioners. You guys do a lot of research.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes, we do.
John Furrier
>> You're not a research firm, but you make investments. You got to be informed. Share that, because I think that's a notable point.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. I've always thought that the best way to understand how to help a portfolio company, one of our investments, is to give them ground truth. What do real buyers need? How do they want it described to them in a way that fits or hits a hair on fire problem that they really have, and in their language? And so the CIO community, we now have more than 8,000 people in this community all around the globe. And we've taken a let's bring value to you CIO, where our job is to look at innovation. Your job as an operator is to put it to work. We're a perfect bridge. We'll access innovation, share it with you. You give us feedback. Those are great ideas. Those won't fit unless they actually engineer their way into this sort of stack. So that push and pull, if you will, is this innovation network that we've been able to bring in. We do annual surveys and ongoing things. And some of the things that are quite interesting right now is these CIOs are saying, "We're actually fully diving in hard on this AI stuff." We were surprised in our annual survey that 47% came back and said, "We've already deployed agents. We have them in production and we're scaling them." Now there's a number of other problems and we can get into this, but they actually are fully in on this whole AI initiative.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And I think that was a bet that you made. Great bet, totally playing out. I'm seeing the same thing here at theCUBE and the NYSE Wired brand. It's an open community. I've noticed that the Silicon Valley language and Wall Street's merging. I mean, Silicon Valley, we speak roadmaps, architecture, velocity. Wall Street speaks, risk management, durability, returns.
Gamiel Gran
>> Right. Yes, yes.
John Furrier
>> What's in it for me? So those are coming together now.
Gamiel Gran
>> Wonderful.
John Furrier
>> And with the technology being the market, those languages are bridging. So having the Silicon Valley connection to Wall Street, I'm seeing a strong appetite for not just having good networks, but peer discussions.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes. Yes.
John Furrier
>> I mean, we're seeing a lot more peer-to-peer conversations like the dinner you're having tonight, because I won't call it group therapy, but it's kind of group therapy.
Gamiel Gran
>> Well, absolutely.
John Furrier
>> In a way, like, "Hey, what are you working on?" Because it's happening so fast. What's your reaction to that? Do you see the same thing?
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes. I think that most of the mature, well-seasoned CIOs that I talk to say, "Look, we've been through this journey before. We've driven innovation. We have digital, we had social, we had cloud conversions and all these things." This one's farther reaching. If there were five use cases before, there's now 50 or 500 use cases, meaning the innovation appetite is turned on, and it's broader, to my earlier point. But we got to do this as a learning journey, not a revolution. So let's take small steps in rethinking our organization, our workflow, our design. Let's make logical bets with core foundation providers, with core technology, and advance our workflow and redesign. And don't break the bank both on cost of infrastructure and on transition of our people, the change management side. So that's what I hear from the most thoughtful CIOs is a thoughtful way to deploy.
John Furrier
>> Larry Fitzpatrick was just in here. He's the CTO of OneMain financial who'll be at your dinner tonight. He had a great line, "Time to learning."
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> And he made an interesting point. If we're not learning fast enough, we fall further behind.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> So their operating cycles change. Certainly your business in VC, you're investing, you'll be behind too. But he also had another comment. He said, "If I don't know what the outcome is, which is run production workloads at scale," his words, "You don't have a north star." The old days of outcomes were kind of cliche-ish. Sell outcomes, because the processes were slower, but now they're faster. Outcomes now are relevant. All the most successful people have outcome-driven narratives, hiring process, no more tests, coding tests. I talked to a CTO in AI, he's like, "We don't do coding testing work. We know they're all cheating. We just give them our hardest problems." They use AI, and then they see what comes back.
Gamiel Gran
>> Show me how you use AI for that.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. We know you're going to use AI. Don't have to cheat and tell me you're a great Java programmer. Just use whatever tool you want. So everything's changing because now they're thinking about what they want. That's outcome-driven.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right. It's true outcome.
John Furrier
>> It's moved the needle.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. And I think what you just described is perhaps the guidance back to an entrepreneur who feels like they need to change their business model, their pricing maybe to be outcome-based, when in fact, what we're hearing is the buyer just wants to realize business impact. And outcome may be the term we're using, but they're trying to support that ROI initiative that says, "Hey, we're going to change our customer support organization to be more agentic so that our NPS score goes up and they renew contracts. Okay. So we just get some numbers here that I actually have as my outcome goal. That's my north star." So enable the right technology and the right risk-taking to get us to that.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, whether you're an entrepreneur or an investor, in tech, it was, "Oh, there's the IT department or whatever software you're selling to. " Now, and Ash just talked about this, he's going to be at the dinner too in your network. He said, "The budgets are changing." The old days was, "Here's your IT budget. It's going to go up next year," and it goes up-
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. Ratable network....
John Furrier
>> and they do stuff. Now they're segmenting the budgets to be, here's your run budget. And Ash pointed out that you can get that backstop by integrators, things like that, and then the growth budgets are emerging. Okay, now let's tie growth into it. So it's like, okay, run budget. By the way, it's not going up.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> So that's a reality.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's the secret.
John Furrier
>> But the good news is, you have a growth budget.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> So kind of back to this incentive of technology working on behalf of the business. I mean, Jensen Wong said to us in our private meeting where we weren't allowed to record it, but I wrote it down. He said, "If I'm going to pay an engineer $500,000, I'm going to give them a token budget. And if they don't use it, they're not doing their thing."
Gamiel Gran
>> Well, it's also a signal. Where's true innovation occurring? Those are driving most token usage in your organization, are probably the north stars of where innovation might be occurring. It brings the CFO into the conversation. I think what you just described a minute ago is the CFO needs to evolve from true line item budget to more of this outcome thesis that you described. Show me the impact against these things. And maybe I need to give you a growth number, you, IT leadership, you, line of business owner, versus just ratable 6% every year-on-year.
John Furrier
>> What's interesting, I want to preamble that, because one of the common themes I'm hearing with practitioners and other functional leaders in companies, whether it's a CFO or head of HR or technology and CISOs, is that there's a C-suite dynamic going on around teamwork. And the founders team, it's a founding team. The role of team, and VC is a team sport, as they always say, right? So teamwork is a huge deal right now. And not just as like a cliche or like, "Hey, work together as a team. Teamwork is great. Ra-rah." No, it's more like the designs of the systems of technology is going to teams where the token budget conversation is kind of a CFO thing because, okay, how does that work and it get enabled? It's also, agents also do work. That's an HR thing. IT has compliance, governance and all those things that make it all work. Every group has a thread.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> What's your reaction to that and what's your commentary on teamwork?
Gamiel Gran
>> This to me hearkens back to the entrepreneurial mindset that's often very product-focused, not go to market per se, but product-focused. And I think what we're seeing is go to market is being pushed into product in a much more aggressive way in this AI world where this outcome point that you made a moment ago is really what the buyer needs. They're unclear. Right now, there's so much noise and almost FOMO going on. There's announcements every day of yet another tool. So if you're the vendor that's helping me, you got to help me get to my goal. And we've seen this with forward design engineers and the term's context engineering, this outcome-based delivery. And another term we're hearing is service as the software. The idea that solutioning is actually more critical to that. So that's forcing the entrepreneur to design their team more around ultimate delivery, not feature set, not roadmap, but ultimate delivery to that buyer. And assurance of that makes you a strategic partner.
John Furrier
>> I love that delivery angle. I think that's very relevant because you get leverage with the technology.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes. Yes.
John Furrier
>> That makes service better.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> I mean, you could probably quote stats on how many service industries were invested by VCs-
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right....
John Furrier
>> over the past two decades. One hand, maybe.
Gamiel Gran
>> Right, right.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Where's the technology?
Gamiel Gran
>> Well, it was difficult. We always thought that was the low margin business, but it turns out that's perhaps the sticky factor here of really creating ultimate lighthouse customers that leverage the technology, not for its tool, not for its niche product, but for its realization of their outcome.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. There's no exponential scale unless you have technology.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah, there you go.
John Furrier
>> And you can scale labor and more people.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> That's not truly scalable and kind of a classic rocket ship venture, but now you go with the operating leverage, the software as a service's software is leveraged. That's economics.
Gamiel Gran
>> And we think that's the new moat too. Perhaps that's what's going to separate you from the next guy who says, "Hey, I have the same product, but no, I have a process. I have change management built into this. I have delivery. I have optimization, and ultimately, I am the dashboard of success for that customer."
John Furrier
>> I have to ask you this. I just wrote a post for the Linux Foundation, having an event in Amsterdam-
Gamiel Gran
>> Nice, nice....
John Furrier
>> KubeCon, which is .
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah, yeah. Sure.
John Furrier
>> You guys invest in cloud-native. HashiCorp, you guys know that market. My first line of the post was, "Cloud-native, meet AI-native." Almost like introducing, a blind date, two people, meet each other. And it was intentional, because both of them are relevant.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> They're not mutually exclusive. AI-native-
Gamiel Gran
>> They're intertwined actually. Yes.
John Furrier
>> And so the substrate of Kubernetes and all the work going on with things, what HashiCorp has done, they sold. Great deal with IBM. You guys were participating in that deal.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. Seed company of ours, many years.
John Furrier
>> Huge success. We covered that I think right out of the gate. Armand came on theCUBE, I think when we first started.
Gamiel Gran
>> That's right. Thank you for that support.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, it was obvious. They're going to win. But that's now standardized. That's matured. A lot of hard work went to it, but now in comes the AI-native. So I have to ask you, with all the feedback you're getting, what's the AI-native culture look like? What's the sentiment of the founders? And there's a little bit of DevOps in there too because the agentic infrastructure, the horizontal layer has a lot of feel... It feels like cloud-native, but it's not true cloud-native. It's leaning on cloud native. There's like this agentic layer that's infrastructure kind of guys doing it.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah, there's a number of points here. I mean, I think AI-first companies are in a frenzy of driving as fast as they can right now to achieve some sort of market leadership position. We as venture capital firms are investing in these firms with the objective that they need to become number one or number two in their category. So this race to top or leadership role, I think is the first burden that an entrepreneur has. It's not can I raise funding. Can I be a market leader? And how can I do that? I think the second thing goes back to the point I made before, which is now if you're at this early design win, early productization, can you realize real customer outcome? Can you realize customer outcome in a way that game-changes the market? And then the next question is, well, who do you want to have outcome with? Do you want to have outcome with AI-first companies or do you want to have it with traditional legacy companies? And right now there's a gravitation toward AI-first selling to AI-first because they're going to move super fast and they're going to be an indication or a signal of what the next generation will look like.
John Furrier
>> Well, I'm really excited that you came through and you got a great dinner tonight. You got a great network and a good bet and it's getting more active.
Gamiel Gran
>> All the time.
John Furrier
>> We're going to partner with you guys on .
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah. Thank you for your partnership on all this. Yes.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, we're super proud to partner with you again. Shared mission, shared open benefit, community. Final question for you is more on the VC side, because you had such a great history and you've seen pre, and now you're in the frontier of the AI-native. Remember the old expression, "That's a feature, not a company."
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> You're laughing, because that was kind of like a third rail.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yes, yes, yes.
John Furrier
>> Important. Partner review means, it's a feature, not a durable company. So the role of durability has come up, and more and more companies are breaking out in these vertical domains that are skyrocketing at scale.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> So scale is a wild card in this. What's the general thought process at Mayfield around the domain-specific? Again, another theme at Jensen, horizontally scalable, domain-specific AI. That was the same cloud story for AWS.
Gamiel Gran
>> We are a huge believer that there's vertical markets that have not been tapped with advanced technology, and AI democratizes market opportunities and unlocks value like never before. We're going to see new markets be transformed. We have a company, for instance, House Whisperer sells into the real estate industry, Numeral that sells into just simple taxation problem that is everywhere across every environment, Office of the CFO, a niche opportunity, in markets that were not reachable before, but in this market, they look like features, but they're truly a horizontal platform from a size and scale, a TAM standpoint. So there is magic happening right now in vertical markets, and we're going to see enormous productivity and enormous investment there. And we 100% agree with Jensen. We had this conversation with him only a few months ago as well.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.
Gamiel Gran
>> Yeah, great to see you as well. Thank you, John.
John Furrier
>> Silicon Valley connecting into Wall Street. Again, the two worlds of capital markets and technology, they speak different languages, but it's coming together, and this market's a great opportunity for entrepreneurs who are out there. Check out Mayfield. Great firm as well. Escape velocity is much faster to hit now with AI. So clearly great opportunities to grow, whether you're an enterprise or a startup. Entrepreneurial thinking will win, system thinking will win. We're doing our part here in theCUBE to bring that to you. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier