Why players notice failures, not reliability, with SOFTSWISS CTO Sergey Kastukevich

In iGaming, a software provider rarely gets a second chance after a failure, so reliability comes first. In this NEXT.io podcast interview, SOFTSWISS CTO Sergey Kastukevich explains why the company split tech leadership with a Chief AI Officer and what "AI transformation" means for software teams.

In this episode

• Kastukevich has been sole CTO for around six months after five years as co-CTO; he says AI adoption needed someone with full ownership, otherwise it would end up very late in the queue (1:17, 5:13).

• His two biggest leadership challenges are the crazy amount of AI-driven change, and a trade-off where working fast can hurt quality, leading to reliability or security problems (6:36, 7:58).

• He does not believe AI will kill SaaS: copying a product once is not the trick, repeating the same quality and scalability with every update is (10:45, 11:25).

• Behind reliability he lists security and reliability by default, a lot of duplication, heavy monitoring, and working with the best teams and vendors (16:13, 17:29, 18:19, 18:44).

• Adopting AI tools gives about 10 to 15%, citing statistics online; transformation means specs kept as code in Git and possibly moving off Agile and Scrum, towards a "dark factory" he guesses may be one or two years away (29:24, 29:57, 30:41, 31:48, 31:59).

• In hiring, SOFTSWISS now wants language-agnostic candidates who act more like managers than coders, working with agents (36:32, 37:01, 38:44).

Episode from the NEXT.io Podcast by NEXT.io, published on YouTube.