Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually sticks.

Shawn and Ganesh walk through why senior leadership presence is non-negotiable for the process to matter, and why fully automated reporting is the difference between a meeting that sustains and one that dies. They cover golden signals, SLOs, and how error budgets help teams balance feature work against reliability investment. They also discuss how AI coding assistants are introducing new operational risks around code review quality and flaky tests, and why AI agents may eventually act as a chief of staff—surfacing the why behind the metrics so teams can act on patterns instead of just observing them.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Engineering at Okta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the relationship between platform engineering, SRE, and security.

Dinesh explains why platform teams must treat engineers as users and run real discovery before building. They get into how paved paths have evolved from code scaffolding to guardrailing AI-generated code, controlling token usage, and approving models. Dinesh also makes the case for meeting AI-generated threats with AI defenses, and explains how he sees platform, SRE, and security converging into a shared safety function at organizations shipping at AI speed.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain.

Matt and Ganesh discuss why compliance can be mostly automated rather than a mandatory bottleneck, how to turn 30-day approval processes into continuous audit readiness through controls as code, and why treating platform teams as product teams drives natural adoption. They also explore decision latency as a core organizational problem, the importance of stakeholder management as a DevOps skill, and how AI agents may shift infrastructure drift management from prevention to embrace.