SE 30: Todd Barr, CEO at Axonis | Live from Ai4 2026

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Todd Barr is the CEO of Axonis and has spent his career in high growth software infrastructure, living through the shift from Unix to Linux, the rise of DevOps, and the blockchain era before landing in AI. Axonis was built by technical founders with 25 years each in large scale infrastructure across government, defense and intelligence, where sharing the underlying data was never an option. 

Recorded live from the floor of Ai4 2026, this lightning round explores why you do not have to centralize your data to start doing AI, and what it takes to make a decision you can defend later.

Todd and host Dan Turchin dig into what an auditable decision actually records, how governance can live at the data node instead of the application layer, the distance between collecting sensor data and acting on it, and why Todd believes decisions themselves are about to become a category of data.

What You'll Learn

Why centralizing your data is not a prerequisite for AI, and how a federated architecture holds up when nodes go offline and come backWhat an auditable decision captures: the data used, the model and its version, the reasoning, and the person who attested to itHow attribute based access control decides what each operator or agent is allowed to see, enforced at the data itselfThe sensor to decision gap, and how a flood management team went from raw readings they could not interpret to acting on them in real timeWhy collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closesWhat becomes possible once decisions are stored as data, from the cost of each decision to who in the organization decides better

🎙️ Part of our Ai4 2026 compilation series. Listen to the full compilation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/19816277  

Resources

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