Ctrl Alt Podcast With Vida Patil

@Napster is back. But this time, it's not disrupting music. It's betting on AI agents. Napster CEO JohAcunto, joins @Vidyangi520 on the @Ctraltpod to discuss Napster's transformation from the music-sharing pioneer of 1999 into an enterprise AI company building conversational AI agents and digital customer experiences. Can Napster disrupt artificial intelligence the way it disrupted music? And can enterprise AI agents really operate for just one cent per minute? We explore Napster's acquisition, its Microsoft Azure strategy, AI agent economics, customer trust, and the leadership decisions behind one of tech's most unexpected reinventions. 🎙️ EPISODE CHAPTERS 00:00 Napster Is Back: From Music to AI 00:40 Meet John Acunto, CEO of Napster 03:25 Why Acquire Napster? The Hard Pivot 06:30 What Is the Napster Phase of AI? 09:40 Napster's AI Concierge at the Belgian Grand Prix 13:10 What Happens When AI Agents Make Mistakes? 1 6:15 Napster vs. Microsoft: What's the Competitive Advantage? 20:00 Can AI Agents Really Cost 1¢ per Minute? 23:50 Building a Sustainable Enterprise AI Business 27:10 AI, Customer Relationships & Human Intelligence 30:00 John Acunto's Contrarian View on AI Agents 💡 KEY TAKEAWAYS & QUESTIONS • Why did Napster pivot from music to enterprise artificial intelligence? • How does Napster's AI concierge Jack work in real customer experiences? • What differentiates Napster's AI agents from foundation model providers? • Can low-cost conversational AI become a sustainable business? • Who owns customer relationships when AI agents become the interface? • What can leaders learn from Napster's radical reinvention? ABOUT THE GUEST John Acunto is CEO of Napster, the iconic technology brand now pursuing enterprise AI agents and AI-powered customer engagement. ABOUT THE HOST Vida Vidyangi Patil is the founder of Ctrl Alt Productions and host of the Ctrl Alt Podcast, featuring conversations with CEOs, founders, investors, and technology leaders about AI, innovation, business strategy, and leadership. THE BIG QUESTION The first Napster changed how we consume music. Could the next Napster change how we work? Would you trust an AI agent to represent your business? Share your thoughts below. #Napster #AIAgents #CtrlAltPodcast -

How much does your business really know about its customers? John Acunto, CEO of @napster , says most companies claim the customer comes first but rarely capture what customers actually ask and want. Using a Grand Prix customer use case, he explains how conversational AI answered routine fan questions, guided buyers to a purchase, and turned conversations into customer insight. On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil, John Acunto walks through a Grand Prix customer use case. In his account, conversational AI answered simple questions like where the elevator is relative to a seat, then took fans from viewing their actual seat to placing it in the cart and completing the purchase. He then turns the lens on every business: if customer obsession is in the mission statement, who is actually taking notes in the store and on the website? "How much do you think that business really knows about their customer at all?" WHAT YOU'LL LEARN 0:00 A Grand Prix customer use case 0:13 Freeing staff from very simple questions 0:37 From seeing your seat to completing the purchase 1:01 Does your business really know its customers? 1:19 Who's taking notes in the store and on the website? KEY INSIGHTS * Conversational AI for customer service: John Acunto, CEO of Napster, says AI agents can answer routine questions, such as accessibility directions, that would otherwise take up staff time. * Assisted purchase journey: In the Grand Prix use case John describes, the AI showed fans visuals of their actual seat, added it to the cart and helped the transaction close. * Results, in John's words: He says the use case "cut hours of staff answering very simple questions" and that the metrics were "unbelievably better." He gave no figures. * The customer knowledge gap: John argues that companies say customers matter most yet often know little about them. * Capturing customer conversations: John's question for every business is who is taking notes when customers visit the store or the website. * Customer-led product building: His takeaway is to learn about your actual customer and build a real product around that. FAQ Q: What does John Acunto mean by "who's taking the notes"? A: He is asking whether a business actually records and learns from customer interactions in its stores and on its website. Q: What did conversational AI do in the Grand Prix use case? A: By John's account, it answered simple fan questions and guided customers from viewing their seat to completing a purchase. Q: What is his advice to businesses? A: Learn about your actual customer and build a real product around that. NAPSTER: napster.com/ EPISODE: youtube.com/watch?v=gTHRqSL6… CLIP: youtube.com/watch?v=DjYTC753… JOHN ACUNTO: linkedin.com/in/johnacunto CTRL ALT PODCAST: teapaw.org/CtrlAltpod VIDA PATIL: teapaw.org/Vidyangi520 | linkedin.com/in/genaivida/ BOUT THE GUEST John Acunto is the co-founder and CEO of Napster (formerly Infinite Reality), which builds AI agents with voice, video and memory for businesses. ABOUT THE HOST Vida Patil is the founder and host of Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil, where she interviews founders, investors and technology leaders from Silicon Valley. #CustomerExperience #ConversationalAI #AIAgents #Napster #CtrlAltPodcast Tags John Acunto, Napster CEO, Napster, conversational AI, customer experience, AI customer service, AI agents, customer insights, know your customer, Grand Prix use case, ecommerce AI, AI sales assistant, Ctrl Alt Podcast, Vida Patil, AI podcast

Think about how much of your data is sold. @napster shifted power from the music industry to listeners. John Acunto says data is next. Napster once shifted power from the music industry to listeners. Napster CEO John Acunto says the next fight is data: “our core message is for businesses, enterprise, and even individuals to own their data.” Listen to my full podcast with If ideas lead to innovation, who should own them?

Wishing you all a Happy Diwali!

There is a reason why @mmurph is rated the #1 AI venture capitalist in the 2026 by the Strebulaev-Jackson Venture Ranking from @StanfordGSB professor @IlyaStrebulaev ! read on 👇👇

Two companies, one week, both breached by AI agents. @okta 's CPO @ElyKahn told us exactly where to look first: "credentials". Check his warning from RSA conference earlier this year in video clip 👇 @CtrlAltpod with @Vidyangi520 Two crypto-industry companies disclosed breaches this week that they attribute to AI agents. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said attackers using "offensive agentic techniques" reached its systems and internal tools in October, accessing some customer names, emails, user IDs and role labels; it took products including Reactor offline while outside experts review security (Help Net Security, Nov 2–3). Documentation host GitBook said an attacker using AI agents got into some infrastructure credentials on Nov 2; it shut services down and revoked customer access tokens, and API tokens, integration and Git Sync secrets may have been exposed (Decrypt, Nov 3). Neither company has said exactly how the agents were used. Source: Decrypt, Nov 3 (also Help Net Security, Nov 2)

"LinkedIn is the most powerful job searching platform on the planet" Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, and author of the Product Growth newsletter, on why executives should post on LinkedIn instead of X, and what to post: the company's wins, not self promotion. The payoff, in his words, is more "surface area of luck" for the next job. On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

What stops enterprise AI from moving into fourth and fifth gear? Senior Advisor at Infiligence Kuno van der Post (@kunosaby) with CEO at Infiligence Ram Sathiya (@RamSathia) on why companies do not have a data volume problem, they have an evidence problem. Out now on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520).

Cost per token is the wrong way to judge AI CFOs judge it by the cost of the outcome and the total cost of ownership, says Kuno van der Post, Senior Advisor at Infiligence, an AI native platform engineering company for healthcare and life sciences. That total runs high at the start, he says, because everything is built from the ground up. With Ram Sathia, CEO of Infiligence. on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

Healthcare data is abundant but unsorted... What fixes the plumbing? Ram Sathia (@RamSathia) , CEO of Infiligence, an AI native platform engineering company for healthcare and life sciences, on why regulatory data and analytical data are collected for different purposes, and how a clinical research knowledge runtime brings data from many sources together. With Kuno van der Post, Senior Advisor at Infiligence, on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

"We've got to put ourselves out of a job as fast as possible. That should be the dream of this industry" Kuno van der Post, Senior Advisor at Infiligence, an AI native platform engineering company for healthcare and life sciences, on why AI in pharma and life sciences cannot be about preserving jobs. The goal is speed: getting remedies to patients faster than people and technical debt allow today. With Ram Sathia (@RamSathia) , CEO of Infiligence, on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

What is a forward deployed engineer? A forward deployed engineer (FDE) works shoulder to shoulder with a customer to build the AI outcome their business needs... Ram Sathia (@RamSathia) , CEO of Infiligence, an AI native platform engineering company for healthcare and life sciences. With Kuno van der Post, Senior Advisor at Infiligence. on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

Life sciences already went through one big tech shift. When Kuno van der Post started selling EDC, his biggest competitor was paper. Then the FDA's SDTM mandate came along, and paper was finished. AI is the next shift. The bottleneck isn't the data anymore, it's the evidence. @Vidyangi520 in conversation with Infiligence team. How do you move from AI pilots to real enterprise transformation? From Forward Deployed Engineers to knowledge graphs, agentic AI, and clinical trials, we unpack the architecture of AI-native enterprises. 🎙️ EPISODE TIMESTAMPS | Ctrl Alt Podcast People First. Process Next. Platform Always. ⏱️ CHAPTERS – Introduction – The Uber Eats analogy: Integration explained – AI transformation: Setting the stage – Interoperability: The biggest AI bottleneck – Workflow efficiency and AI roles – The rise of Forward Deployed Engineers – FDEs: Collaboration and vision – How FDEs transform enterprise sales – Selling into complex enterprises – Reducing the onboarding and integration tax – Hiring for curiosity in enterprise sales – People → Process → Technology – Lessons from FinTech and data contextualization – The data plumbing behind AI – Knowledge graphs and prompt-driven insights – Agent vs. Copilot: Which one wins? – Dry labs and the agentic AI debate – Evaluating AI: Safety and business value – The roadmap to AI-native enterprises – Why clinical trials move so slowly – Building platforms for agentic AI – AI optimism and market outlook – AI as a phenomenal liberator – Closing thoughts #LifeSciences #AgenticAI #CtrlAltPodcast #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI #LifeSciencesAI @RamSathia

What skills do product managers need in 2026? AI prototyping and AI evals, says Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, and author of the Product Growth newsletter. Writing has been cut from the PM job, he says, leaving aligning stakeholders, strategy and discovery. PMs who learn the new skills, in his words, "are still earning a lot." On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

Product builder vs forward deployed engineer vs forward deployed PM: who builds what? Aakash Gupta (@aakashg0), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, former VP of Product at Apollo.io, and author of the Product Growth newsletter, uses Salesforce to explain. Product builders build the core product, like Claudeforce, for every customer. Forward deployed engineers and PMs sit with one customer and customize it. On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

PRD vs AI prototype: how the product manager job changed Aakash Gupta (@aakashg0), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach,on what product managers write instead of a PRD in 2026 On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520)

Is the number of product managers still growing? Not anymore, says Aakash Gupta (@aakashg0), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, former VP of Product at Apollo.io, and author of the Product Growth newsletter. By his count, PM headcount grew 3 to 4% a year for 20 years, then flattened over the last 2 to 3 years. His bet for restarting it: forward deployed product managers. On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520).

Buyer vs user: who should a B2B product roadmap serve? Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, former VP of Product at Apollo.io, and author of the Product Growth newsletter, answers with Salesforce on Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520): build only for users and no new customers buy.

Why do most enterprise AI deployments fail? Not for lack of tools, says Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta), host of The Growth Podcast and a product management coach, former VP of Product at Apollo.io, and author of the Product Growth newsletter. Claude Code, Codex and MCP connections are about 80% of the work. The last 20%, adoption, is what holds companies back. On Ctrl Alt Podcast with Vida Patil (@Vidyangi520).