What does it really take to turn bold ideas into real impact inside one of the world’s largest technology companies?

In this episode of Engineering in the Loop, Alec Harrison sits down with Taylor Black, Director of AI & Venture Ecosystems in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft, to unpack how internal incubators actually work — and why most innovation efforts fail before they ever ship.

Taylor leads Microsoft’s internal incubation studio, where early-stage, high-risk ideas are tested, validated, and scaled into products capable of generating hundreds of millions — and eventually billions — in revenue. Unlike traditional startups, these ventures must meet Microsoft-scale expectations while navigating enterprise constraints, long buying cycles, and strategic alignment across product groups.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What makes an idea “Microsoft-sized” (and why most aren’t)

• How internal incubators de-risk innovation before product teams invest

• Why $1B in revenue within five years is the bar — not the exception

• The biggest mistakes founders make when starting companies

• When not to take venture capital (and why most founders do it too early)

• How AI agents will reshape work far beyond chat interfaces

• Why the future may include one-person billion-dollar companies

Whether you’re an engineer, founder, product leader, or innovation executive, this episode offers a rare, inside look at how venture-style thinking works inside a global enterprise — and what you can learn from it.

In this episode Alec and Brian talk about AI, turkey, and AI turkey?

Alec welcomes Sakari Nahi, CEO of Zure, for a fun and thoughtful discussion that spans 25 years of tech evolution. Sakari shares how a single C# book jump-started his career, why he left a job he didn’t love to found a cloud-native consultancy, and what it’s like building a people-first engineering culture across multiple countries.

The two dig into real AI use cases that actually work today—vector search, customer service automation, field-tech knowledge retrieval—and explore how spec-driven development and tools like GitHub Copilot are transforming the way teams build software. They also get honest about shadow IT, geopolitics affecting cloud decisions, the future of Power Platform, and why AI feels “magical” even without AGI.

Whether you’re a developer, leader, or just AI-curious, this episode is packed with relatable stories and practical perspectives.