LA CTO Forum Presents: The AI-Native Operating Model

AI is becoming a standard layer in how work gets done. The open question is no longer whether to adopt it. It is how we lead it: what we enable, where the guardrails go, and how we make sure it actually succeeds. We have three CIO and CTO leaders from very different kinds of organizations, all known for forward thinking on this. Not surprisingly, their approaches overlap in some places and diverge sharply in others. That is the point of the session: the same problems, three working answers, and the reasoning behind each. Topics include: • How to let business teams ship real applications without creating an unsupportable mess, and who ends up supporting and paying for it downstream • What guardrails you actually need, and where they should live • How to protect IP and sensitive data without becoming the department of no • How teams are choosing tools right now, and how to keep those choices reversible when the landscape shifts every few months • Whose identity an agent is acting under, and why that is about to matter • What success actually looks like, and how to make it repeatable across the organization This is a not-to-be-missed session for senior technology leaders who want a clear picture of what is actually working inside other organizations, and which of these approaches fits their own. Speakers Kathy Linares Vice President of IT & Customer Experience, Insulectro Kathy Linares is the Vice President of IT and Customer Experience at Insulectro, where she leads enterprise technology, cybersecurity, customer experience, and the company's national inside sales organization. Over nearly two decades leading IT organizations, including previously serving as Chief Information Officer for Orora Packaging Solutions, she has guided large-scale business transformations through ERP modernization, enterprise application implementations, and digital innovation initiatives. Today, she focuses on helping her organization operationalize AI through practical governance, secure adoption strategies, and measurable business outcomes that make AI part of everyday work. Sasha Siddhartha Co-Founder & CTO, Thrive Market Sasha Siddhartha is the Co-Founder and CTO of Thrive Market, a membership-based online retailer with a mission to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone. He leads the company's engineering, product, and data organizations, and is currently driving Thrive's transformation into an AI-native operating model across both engineering and business functions. Prior to Thrive Market, Sasha was an engineering leader at Microsoft and founded Little Black Bag, a venture-backed fashion technology company in Los Angeles. Amit Masaun Senior Director of Engineering, Tempus AI Amit Masaun is Senior Director of Engineering at Tempus AI, where he builds the agentic orchestration layer that runs hundreds of LLM agents over multimodal clinical data, matching millions of patients to clinical trials and identifying gaps in their care. He joined Tempus through its acquisition of Deep6 AI, where he built production agentic retrieval over unstructured patient records and led the post-acquisition integration. He also sits on the internal guild that sets Tempus's standards for how engineers work with agentic coding systems. He is currently focused on what it takes to run agents safely and at scale in a regulated environment, with guardrails enforced in the runtime rather than in policy documents, and he thinks a lot about how people reshape their skill sets once agents write most of the code. Tony Karrer (Moderator) Founder & CEO, TechEmpower Tony is the Founder and CEO of TechEmpower, a 20-person software and AI development services company. Tony has worked as a fractional CTO at over 40 different companies, including as the original CTO at eHarmony, helping them get to a $110M financing in their fourth year. Tony has worked on AI solutions for more than two decades across a wide variety of industries and is currently the fractional CTO of AI companies in healthcare, legal, and insurance. Tony is also cofounder of the LA CTO Forum, the largest CTO professional organization in the US.