John leads customer success, presales, and professional services across APAC at Workato and serves as Field CTO for the region. With more than twenty-five years of experience, including roles at Oracle and TIBCO and as co-founder of Rubicon Red, he focuses on helping enterprises unlock real, lasting value from AI and integration.

In this episode of KBKast, John joins KB to unpack why 42% of AI initiatives were abandoned in 2025, up from 17% the year before, and why the answer isn’t the technology. It’s trust.

John explains why AI is a bigger deal than cloud ever was: what used to be storage and processing is now decision and action inside core enterprise systems. He takes aim at “governance theater,” the steering committees and policy documents that create a feeling of control while nobody can actually see what an agent is doing. And he lands the warning every security leader needs to hear: you got away with over-provisioning access for humans, because humans never went looking. Agents will.

Also covered: the tokenomics panic, 700% month-on-month cost blowouts, why AI shouldn’t re-map a purchase order every single time, who owns the agent when things go wrong, and why a central control plane is the only way to govern agents at scale.

Keywords: AI agents, agentic AI, AI governance, governance theater, enterprise AI, AI security, control plane, observability, MCP, tokenomics, AI cost management, AI strategy, CISO, agent permissions, Workato, shadow AI, AI ROI, autonomous agents