A Thousand Patients and an AI Receptionist
What do I need to know about a business process before I let an AI agent run it?
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Keith Townsend writes and talks about AI infrastructure, private cloud, enterprise architecture, and the decisions that determine who stays in control.
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The podcast
Episode 703: Your AI Capacity Plan Depends on More Than GPUs
Calvin Hendryx-Parker, co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, is back with Keith Townsend to ask whether the AI bubble is bursting and who is left holding the bag. They start with Oracle's Stargate commitments and Keith's objection to funding that build-out with resources from its database and ERP customers, then get to the constraint underneath it all: power. Keith explains how colocation contracts went from floor space to power, why a rack now holds only a few AI servers, and what that means for ordinary enterprise clusters. From there, supplier continuity when your GPU provider is carrying heavy debt or gets acquired, why software teams abstracted from the hardware should still care, and what happened when Keith asked three clouds for GPU access for his labs. Keith closes with a warning about sticky services like CoreWeave's Weights & Biases tooling: plan for hybrid workflows, not just hybrid cloud. Calvin wraps with Six Feet Up's news and the XPRIZE Visioneering event.
Research
Layer2C is Keith’s research and testing surface: where the judgment in the writing gets formalized into assessments, models, and lab work. You can also query it directly.
Ask the Virtual CTO Advisor ↗ Governed answers over the Layer2C research system. Every answer carries its evidence, versions, and limits — and the decision records stay yours.- Layer2C ↗ Vendor authority assessments scored against the 4+1 AI Infrastructure Model and DAPM.
- The Fourth Cloud ↗ Function-by-function readiness scoring for on-prem control planes.
- Layer2C Labs ↗ Scoped builds on real hardware that validate where authority actually holds.
- Stack Builder ↗ Composes architectures from the assessed evidence.
About
The CTO Advisor is owned by The Advisor Bench LLC, wholly owned by Keith and Melissa Townsend. Keith is the practitioner voice: he founded the brand in 2016 and writes from the perspective of someone who has designed, implemented, and run the infrastructure he writes about. Melissa is co-owner and the creative innovator on the team — the CTO Advisor Road Trip is her brainchild — and she runs the business that keeps the brand accountable to its customers and community.
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