CxC Ep36: AI Industry Rundown - with Benjamin Rogojan & Anand Pant
July 8, 2026 · 50 min
Why listen
A clear-eyed breakdown of the AI industry moves that will actually affect how enterprises build and hire.
Enjoy the episode?
Subscribe to Code and Connor
In this episode
- Why owning your own intelligence layer beats relying on AI labs
- What Microsoft's $2.5B engineering push signals for the job market
- How token efficiency and smaller models could reshape AI economics
- The real reason enterprises are struggling to adopt AI at scale
About this episode
This week on Code x Connor, we’re joined by Codestrap Founding Partners Benjamin Rogojan and Anand Pant to break down the latest developments shaping the AI industry—from OpenAI's proposed government equity stake and the future of open-source models to Microsoft's massive push into forward deployed engineering and the growing reality check around enterprise AI adoption.
In this episode, we discuss:
→ OpenAI's proposal to donate equity to a U.S. sovereign wealth fund
→ Why open-source is critical to innovation, national security, and enterprise sovereignty
→ The risks of AI censorship, model bias, and anti-competitive behavior from frontier labs
→ Meta's move into selling excess AI compute and what it means for the infrastructure market
→ Why token efficiency and smaller models could reshape AI economics
→ Microsoft's $2.5 billion investment in forward deployed engineering
→ The challenges of hiring thousands of AI engineers and the growing enterprise skills gap
→ The advantages of owning your own intelligence layer over relying on AI labs
→ Ford's decision to rehire employees after AI-driven workforce reductions
→ Augmenting human expertise with AI instead of replacing it
→ What these trends reveal about the next phase of enterprise AI adoption
Be sure to follow this channel for insights and perspective from industry leaders, and schedule a meeting with us through www.codestrap.com to learn more about our offering.
Codestrap
Codestrap (X): https://x.com/Codestrap_ai
CodeStrap (LI): https://www.linkedin.com/company/codestrap
About Code and Connor
Code & Connor is where Connor Deeks and Dorian Smiley ask the questions most AI podcasts won't. Two founders — one strategist, one engineer — in honest conversations with executives, builders, and practitioners about what's actually happening at the intersection of AI and the enterprise.
See all episodes →
