The power of the command line: A conversation with Nate Berent-Spillson

In this episode of Catalyst, Tammy welcomes back Nate Berent-Spillson, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Launch by NTT DATA. Nate has led engineering teams at organizations like Thomson Reuters, Ford and Pfizer, but his love of building started way earlier, on a Commodore 64. He and Tammy dig into why the way we interact with computers is fundamentally changing, how working closer to the machine unlocks better results and what it all means for the future of work.

Highlights from the episode include:

• We’re at an inflection point. Nate frames the current moment as the biggest change in how humans interact with computers since Windows. AI-augmented development tools have progressed from fancy autocomplete to full agentic workflows, and the “task horizon” of what an AI agent can accomplish on its own keeps getting longer.
• More context is not better. Tammy shares a real frustration: long-running chat threads degrade over time and stop “remembering” what mattered. Nate unpacks why. Stuffing huge amounts of text into a model can reduce quality because attention gets diluted. Smaller, tighter context keeps you in the model’s “smart zone.”
• “AI access to tools” is the enterprise unlock. Nate argues the big step for enterprise ROI is not getting everyone to prompt better. It is connecting AI to the systems people already use: SharePoint, Jira, Confluence, HR systems, finance systems. Today, people export to Excel and upload files into chat tools. That is extra work and it leaks context. With connector-style access, the assistant can fetch what you are allowed to see inside your existing permissions, without the UI detour.

Check out the full episode to hear Nate’s practical take on why AI is a power tool, not a magic wand, plus the real examples he built to remove toil, including automating personal idea capture and simplifying compliance follow-ups.

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Please note that the views expressed in this episode may not necessarily be those of NTT DATA.