There are three questions we keep hearing from engineering leaders this year, whether directly, in conversations at conferences, or in the subtext of the pitches landing in our inbox. What is this actually costing us. Are we testing it well enough to trust it. And who’s responsible when it gets something wrong.
Those three questions are the organizing idea behind our fall Supercast lineup. Over eight weeks, from mid-October through early December, SD Times Live! is running three sessions that take those questions head-on: the economics of AI adoption, the next chapter of our “AI in Test” series, and a new look at code security in an age where a growing share of what ships was written by a machine. Together they cover the arc most engineering organizations are living through right now, from budgeting for AI, to trusting what it produces, to owning what happens when it’s wrong.
Here’s what’s coming, and why we built the series this way.
October 15: Economics of AI – The Hidden Multiplier Behind Your AI Bill
It’s a story we hear a lot lately. The AI bill comes in, and it doesn’t match what anyone expected, and nobody on the team can fully explain why.
That’s the gap this session is built to close. The truth is, your AI spend isn’t one number, it’s the product of several smaller decisions stacking on top of each other. How much context you’re feeding the model on any given task, how many back-and-forth turns it takes to land on a usable answer, and which model tier you’re routing the work to all compound, and a small inefficiency in any one of those areas can quietly double or triple a bill that looked reasonable on paper.
The session will use that framework to work through the questions coming up most often for Engineering Managers, Directors, and Leaders: how do you set an AI budget at the team level that actually survives contact with real usage. When does it make sense to build your own cost-governance tooling, and when are you better off relying on what the cloud-native platforms already give you. And how do you have that budget conversation with finance without either underselling the value or getting blindsided by the invoice.
David Rubinstein, SD Times Editorial Director, will host, with a guest speaker to be confirmed. Organizations with a real point of view on AI cost governance are encouraged to reach out.
Register: event.sdtimes.com/supercast-economics-of-ai
November 5: AI in Test, Session 4 – The Strategic Future
This one closes out a series we’ve been building all year, and it’s worth taking a moment on the arc before getting to where it lands.
“AI in Test” opened on February 5 with the foundation, what AI-driven testing actually looks like once you get past the demo. May 27 turned to the ROI conversation, how you measure and justify the investment once the pilot is over and someone’s asking for numbers. August 6 got practical, the tools and skills testers need to actually work alongside AI day to day, not just talk about it in a planning meeting.
November 5 is where the series zooms out. David Rubinstein will be joined by Clint Sprauve, Head of Platform, AI, and Quality at Leapwork, who’s sponsored this session and the August installment before it, for a conversation about where all of this is actually headed. What does organizational structure look like once autonomous agents are handling a meaningful share of QA. What are the ethical questions nobody wants to be the one to raise, bias in AI-driven test coverage chief among them. And what does human-AI collaboration look like in practice once the human isn’t running the tests anymore but is overseeing the system that does.
For readers who’ve followed the series from the start, this is the payoff session. For those coming in fresh, it stands on its own, though catching the earlier three installments is worth the time if you can.
Date/Time: November 5, 2026, 11:00 AM ET
Register: event.sdtimes.com/supercast-nov-5
December 3: AI Code Security – Who’s Accountable When the AI Wrote the Vulnerable Line?
It’s a question we hear a lot and see answered rarely. AI writes a chunk of code, that code ships, and six months later a vulnerability traces back to it. Who owns that. Is it the engineer who accepted the suggestion, the team that approved the PR, the platform that deployed the agent, or something else entirely.
Most organizations don’t have a clean answer yet, and that’s exactly the gap this session is meant to address. It will get into what an actual ownership and escalation model looks like when the “author” of a vulnerable line is an agent rather than a person, what guardrails are worth putting around coding agents before they ship rather than after, and the buy-versus-integrate question that every AppSec team is quietly wrestling with: do you bring in dedicated AI code security tooling, or build that coverage into the AppSec workflow you already have.
This session is built for Engineering Managers and Directors sitting alongside AppSec and Product Security managers, because the honest answer to “who’s accountable” usually involves both rooms talking to each other, which doesn’t happen nearly often enough. David Rubinstein will host, with a guest speaker to be confirmed.
Date: Thursday, December 3, 2026
Register: event.sdtimes.com/supercast-ai-code-security
Why We Built It This Way
None of these three sessions is really a standalone topic. They’re three cross-sections of the same underlying shift, engineering organizations trying to figure out how to run AI responsibly at scale, not just adopt it. Economics of AI is the budget conversation. AI in Test is the trust conversation. AI Code Security is the accountability conversation. If you’re an engineering leader right now, you’re probably having all three, whether you’ve named them that way or not.
More on speakers and sponsors for the October and December sessions will be announced as they’re confirmed. In the meantime, registration is open for all three.
How do I register for the SD Times Fall 2026 Supercast sessions?
Registration links for all three sessions are listed in the article. The October 15 Economics of AI session is at event.sdtimes.com/supercast-economics-of-ai, the November 5 AI in Test session at event.sdtimes.com/supercast-nov-5, and the December 3 AI Code Security session at event.sdtimes.com/supercast-ai-code-security.
What topics does the ‘AI in Test’ series cover?
The SD Times ‘AI in Test’ series spans four sessions in 2026. Sessions one through three covered foundational AI-driven testing concepts (February), ROI measurement (May), and day-to-day tooling and skills (August). The final session on November 5 focuses on the strategic future: autonomous QA agents, organizational structure changes, ethical concerns like bias in test coverage, and human-AI collaboration models.
