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Show Notes

Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs, the company's dedicated innovation group, after previously serving as its head of product. His career spans systems engineering on oceanic air traffic control at Lockheed Martin, where a new FAA system let controllers comfortably handle 30 aircraft instead of a stressful 7 to 15 by automating conformance checks and altitude probes, through CTO roles in both the US and UK, to four and a half years at Google's drone delivery program, where he built the platform that partners such as Walmart and DoorDash use to connect to a service that delivered about a quarter million packages across Australia, the US, and Finland. In conversation with host Alex Brooker, Hightower explores how AI is reshaping product development when build cycles collapse from months to days, shifting the key discipline from shipping to knowing when to throw work away. He introduces his three hour decision rule, explains how most aviation decisions run roughly eight steps with AI now capable of handling four or five before a human intervenes, and describes Cirium's aviation knowledge graph, which links aircraft orders, lessors, schedules, and tail swaps into analysis no single dataset can produce alone. He also addresses why multi million dollar data lake programs so rarely deliver usable value, and why AI will accelerate flow management and sequencing long before it touches safety critical separation systems.