Build From The Dock: The Real Talk on Enterprise AI Adoption with Shikha Mittal

About Everyone's talking about AI transforming the enterprise. Fewer people are talking honestly about what it actually takes to get there. Shikha Mittal, Senior Director of Product Management at ServiceNow, is building and delivering autonomous IT for enterprise and commercial organizations. That means agents that don't just suggest a fix to the IT team but resolve the issue on their own. She'll sit down with Vinod Paniker, COO of Venture Dock and founder of TigressAI, to explain what autonomous IT looks like in practice and share a few moments where an agent did something nobody expected. From there, the conversation gets into the hard parts. Can companies adapt the systems they already have for an AI-first setup, or do they need to start over? And once agents are running in production, how do enterprises decide how much autonomy to give them before a human has to step in? Shikha will also talk about where she tells companies to begin when they're moving past chatbots, and what she's seeing from enterprise buyers who are weighing whether to trust an agent with real work. If you're building AI products for the enterprise, this is a working conversation, not a highlight reel. Bring your questions. Featured Speaker Shikha Mittal, Senior Director of Product Management, ServiceNow Shikha leads product strategy and go-to-market for ServiceNow's AI-powered ITSM and ITOM solutions, helping drive the company's shift from AI-assisted workflows to autonomous, agentic outcomes. Her recent work has shaped ServiceNow's next-generation agentic ITSM offerings, influenced roughly $1.6B in pipeline, and helped define growth strategy for AI-native solutions targeting a $122B market. Before ServiceNow, Shikha spent nine years at VMware, where she built and scaled a Gen-AI powered customer experience platform across a $1.5B digital workspace and security portfolio, and grew the Horizon SaaS business to $300M in ARR with 75% year-over-year growth. She started her product career at Cisco, where she brought cloud and SaaS services to market for small and mid-sized businesses. Shikha is also an Advisory Council Member for Cal State East Bay's Program on Transformative Leadership and a frequent keynote speaker, including sessions at VMware Explore in Korea and India. Vinod Paniker, COO, Venture Dock Vinod is COO at Venture Dock, where he oversees operations and partnerships. He's also the founder and CEO of TigressAI, which builds agentic AI systems that automate risk and compliance work for financial institutions. At TigressAI he designed the evaluation setup the team uses to catch hallucinations and keep human reviewers in the loop, so questions about how much to trust an agent are ones he deals with every week. Before that, Vinod headed Prudential Financial's Silicon Valley office and led its digital product management team. He co-founded Sooryen Technologies and grew it from 2 to 150 people in under two years before its sale to Indecomm, and later led platform product at Paceline. Earlier in his career he held engineering leadership roles at E*TRADE and Pricelock. Everyone's talking about AI transforming the enterprise. Fewer people are talking honestly about what it actually takes to get there. Agenda 10:00 AM – Doors open, coffee and networking 10:30 AM – Fireside chat: The Real Talk on Enterprise AI Adoption 11:30 AM – Open Q&A with Shikha 12:00 PM – Founder networking and working session 1:00 PM – Wrap About Build From The Dock Build From The Dock is Venture Dock's weekly fireside chat series, where founders get direct access to operators and investors who've actually built and scaled the businesses they're now advising on. No panels, no pitch decks. Just an honest conversation and time to ask the questions that matter. What Venture Dock Offers Founders Venture Dock is a founder-first community and fund built to give early-stage founders the access, mentorship, and infrastructure they need to grow. Members get: Weekly…