Frontier models are getting smarter every quarter, but the bottleneck isn't the model — it’s the data underneath it. Ashwin Ramachandran, SVP of Product Management at Precisely, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to walk through the open-vs.-closed AI debate playing out across enterprise IT and why customers are loudly demanding openness over vendor lock-in. Ashwin explains why the smart bet right now is a harness strategy across Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, and emerging open-source models — not a permanent commitment to any one stack. He and Alan dig into why “AI hallucinations” are usually a symptom of bad data plumbing, how Precisely builds for everyone from z/OS systems programmers to modern CDOs, and how Customer Advisory Boards keep their roadmap honest. The episode closes on how AI has rewritten the job of the product manager — from writing requirements docs to sensing signal from noise in real time.