ON DEMAND
Ankur Manake, Honeywell & Dinesh Kabaleeswaran, Quantiphi
In this interview from Phi Moments @ Google Cloud Next 2026, Ankur Manake, Honeywell Forge data and AI leader at Honeywell, joins Dinesh Kabaleeswaran, regional sales leader for North America at Quantiphi, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight about the journey from AI experimentation to enterprise-scale production in complex industrial environments. Manake describes the challenge of "legacy spaghetti" — a sprawling mix of sensor data, asset metadata and unstructured content across heterogeneous industrial systems — and explains why layering AI on top of existing processes inevitably produces stalled pilots. True transformation, he argues, requires rethinking workflows alongside domain experts, treating AI not as an added tool but as the new standard way of working. The north star, he notes, is reliable AI that is consistent, trustworthy and transparent enough for industrial teams to act on with confidence.
The conversation also explores how Kabaleeswaran and Quantiphi approached the Honeywell engagement as a unified team, drawing on Safi Bahcall's "Loonshots" framework to maintain a dynamic equilibrium between aggressive innovation and operational stability. Kabaleeswaran breaks down how running tightly scoped sprints — measured in weeks, not months — surfaced early wins that turned skeptics into believers and built the trust needed to scale. Both guests reflect on their Phi moments: for Kabaleeswaran, it was seeing real outcomes emerge mid-sprint; for Manake, it was watching customers experience a genuine breakthrough with technology that changed how they operated. Looking ahead, Manake outlines a vision of an "intelligence neural network" — individual nodes of AI capability that must be intelligently connected to eventually drive autonomous industrial outcomes. From starting with the right-sized problem rather than the technology to leveraging crisis moments as catalysts for change, the discussion offers a practical roadmap for executives navigating their own AI transformation journeys.