Podcasts · The Stack Overflow Podcast

You need quality engineers to turn AI into ROI

7 Jan 2026 · 29 min · Episode 904

SPONSORED BY MONGODB

Pete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI.

Episode notes:

If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post and paper yourself.

For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote from re:Invent 2025.

MongoDB provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data.

Connect with Pete on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Links in the notes 9

• https://openai.com/index/gdpval/
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04374
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y1G9najGiI
• https://www.mongodb.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/petecj2/
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/7478597/scheffs-cat
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61518284/error-non-const-static-data-member-must-be-initialized-out-of-line/61519399#61519399
• https://art19.com/privacy
• https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info