The Guest – Priya Mishra, Director of Technology at Carelon
Priya Mishra is Director of Technology at Carelon Global Solutions Ireland, where she leads the design of transformative, cloud-native solutions that are reshaping healthcare systems. Honored with the Women in STEM – Technology award, she is passionate about people, culture, and reimagining how engineering teams work in the age of AI. With deep global experience in R&D, product development, and team leadership, Priya brings a practitioner’s perspective on scaling innovation and preparing organisations for the future of work.
Together, we unpack the move from rigid hierarchies to fluid, networked teams, the rise of “super generalists,” and why empowered experimentation, psychological safety, and observability matter more than ever. Priya shares her perspective on cognitive overload, the redefinition of software roles, and the real blockers to AI-enabled transformation – especially leadership reluctance and fear of failure. It’s a grounded, practitioner-led look at what the future of work actually requires, far beyond the hype.
Some highlights of this episode include:
- AI’s impact on team culture & ways of working
- The evolution of roles: From specialists to “AI orchestrators”
- Managing AI adoption: New KPIs & leadership challenges
- Training for the future: New literacies & AI fluency
- Change management & transformation strategy in the AI era
Q: Are we going to need significantly fewer software developers, significantly more, or will it stay the same?
“Whenever I think about this question, Ricky, I go back to the time when we were transitioning from waterfall delivery execution to agile delivery execution. Yes, there were different flavors of agile methodologies. New roles emerged — Scrum Masters, Product Owners, squads, boards — all of those fancy terms came in. But the ultimate goal was still delivery, and what we saw then is what I think will happen again.
We will see traditional roles being remagined all over again, driven by increased empowerment and higher-order rigor. A product leader, for example, may start to look more like a value architect — orchestrating strategic value and using AI-driven insights to sharpen trade-offs. With frameworks like A2A and MCP, developers are evolving into AI orchestrators, focusing more on integrating and curating AI systems.
So, I don’t think the niche skill sets of software development or the roles themselves are going away. It’s about repositioning and reimagining, and working in a way that creates new models of collaboration where humans and AI work together to deliver business outcomes.”
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