Mid-Market AI is brought to you by Paragon, a Managed Intelligence Provider (MIP) to mid-market enterprises across the private equity portco ecosystem. Designed for C-suite leaders, PE operators, portco managers and trusted channel partners navigating the rapidly changing world of AI transformation, automation and AI agents, each episode features interviews with industry experts and leaders alongside the most relevant insights, tools and developments in AI and ML. Our CAIO/CIO-led team brings deep hands-on experience implementing AI and ML across healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, software and managed solutions. Whether you are leading a portfolio company through digital transformation or advising clients on AI adoption, this is your resource for clear intelligence that drives real business outcomes.
Host Ariel Jalali, CEO and CAIO of Paragon, sits down with Yaniv Yaakubovich, founder of Verve-PM, on the question AI just forced on every company: everyone can build software now, so who decides what gets built? Yaniv brings 15+ years of product leadership from Google, PayPal, and SurveyMonkey across payments, developer platforms, and enterprise products, plus startup years at OneStep, TruLocal, Zume, and Kontera. He advises dozens of startups through Verve-PM, teaches product management at ...
13 Jul 2026
What is the AI Control Plane? And Why Yours Should Be Federated | Mid-Market AI | Episode 111
The control plane is the token cost controller is AI sovereignty is AI security is the ROI unlock. It's all the same conversation. I called the SaaSpocalypse hype. Then in a single week, several clients and partners told me they're building custom CRMs or already run one, and on July 1 Gartner priced the trend at $234 billion in enterprise software spend at risk. When software goes headless and agentic, the interface stops being where you govern it. Every vendor, from the hyperscalers to a cr...
6 Jul 2026
Happy AI-ndependence Day: Why AI Sovereignty Matters | Mid-Market AI | Episode 110
Recorded on America's 250th, this episode is about what independence means for your AI stack. Not throwing every proprietary model into Boston Harbor and going fully self-hosted, and not handing your data and your future options to whoever priced their tokens lowest this quarter. Ariel Jalali, CEO of Paragon, walks through what AI sovereignty actually is: the ability to make autonomous choices about dependence, and the layer that makes those choices real and enforceable. What's covered: The A...
30 Apr 2026
The Great MCP vs. CLI Debate | Mid-Market AI | Episode 109
There's a war happening inside every major technology company about how AI agents should connect to the tools they use. This week Stripe dropped 288 product announcements including MCP support for their financial infrastructure. OpenAI shipped four CLI versions in eight days. Google launched an Agents CLI. Shopify open-sourced MCP plugins. The Linux Foundation took over the protocol. And a developer benchmark went viral claiming MCP is 10-32x more expensive than CLI and already obsolete. Your...
21 Apr 2026
What is Headless AI? | Mid-Market AI | Episode 108
Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce, stood on stage at TDX this week and asked publicly: "Why should you ever log into Salesforce again?" That question is what this episode is about. Headless AI means your software is about to start working whether a human touches it or not. But this is not about building autonomous agent fleets or ripping out your stack. It is about AI-driven actions delivered to the systems already doing the acting - one workflow at a time, with a dial that lets you dec...
19 Apr 2026
What is an AI Harness? | Mid-Market AI | Episode 107
What is an AI Harness? $200 billion invested in AI. 6% meaningful impact. The gap has a name -and it's not the model. In this episode, Ariel Jalali breaks down the most practical concept in AI right now: the harness. The infrastructure layer that sits between your business and the raw model - and the reason most AI projects work in a demo and die in production. You'll learn the formula every operator needs to know (Agent = Model + Harness), why nearly half of enterprises are completely blind ...
17 Apr 2026
Should You Put All Your AI Tokens in One Claude Basket? | Mid-Market AI | Episode 106
Description: Uber's CTO just blew through the company's entire 2026 AI budget - and it's only April. Claude was named as the main driver. So if Uber can't afford it, should you even be trying? In this episode, Ariel Jalali, CEO of Paragon, breaks down why going all-in on a single AI vendor is a one-door decision you may not be able to walk back. He covers the three types of AI (productivity, vertical, and efficiency), five frameworks for making smarter vendor decisions, and a four-layer refer...
9 Apr 2026
Cutting Through the AI Clutter with Ron Kim, Former Global CTO at Merck
Host Ariel Jalali, CEO and CAIO of Paragon, sits down with Ron Kim, former Global CTO at Merck and founder of Ron Kim Advisory, to tackle the question every C-suite leader is asking: is your organization actually ready for AI, and is AI actually ready for you? Ron brings 35 years of hard-won perspective from global enterprise technology. He recently completed a five-year tenure as Global CTO at Merck, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and has previously served as CIO at Exe...
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