Sam Charrington

Sam Charrington is the creator and host of the TWIML AI Podcast, originally called This Week in Machine Learning & AI. His work combines interviews with ML and AI researchers and practitioners with analysis of business and consumer applications, bringing AI-powered products to market, and the platforms that enable them.[2][3]

In his April 28, 2026 analysis of Google Cloud Next, Charrington welcomed a shift toward “the unglamorous but essential work of actually running agents in production.” He emphasized identity, policy enforcement, simulation, evaluation, and observability as practical requirements for enterprise deployment. He endorsed the integrated simulation–evaluation–observability–optimization loop, while warning that connecting MCP to enterprise identity, gateways, and policy enforcement remained a work in progress.[4]

Charrington distinguished brand simplification from developer simplicity. He supported retiring the Vertex AI brand in favor of Gemini Enterprise, despite criticizing the cost of repeated product restructuring. In a TWIML Briefing Room conversation, Google Cloud product-marketing director Riyaz Habibbhai told him that prospective Gemini Enterprise App customers were asking, “do I also need to buy Vertex?” Charrington nevertheless reported, citing Google sources, that the Gemini and Vertex AI APIs would continue to coexist. His example paired imports from google.adk.agents and vertexai.agent_engines, showing how the older terminology persisted in developer code.[4]

Availability also shaped his assessment: Charrington reported exploring the Agent Platform console and documentation during Next itself, contrasting that access with earlier announcements whose products were initially inaccessible or sales-gated. His favorable assessment retained a practical qualification: long-running agents with persistent memory and sandboxed execution would still need to prove themselves in substantial enterprise workflows.[4]

Charrington also participated in a Latent Space cross-podcast recording at Google I/O, published June 2, 2025 as an AI Engineer World’s Fair preview under the title “Gemini in 2025 and Realtime Voice AI.”[1]

His podcast and analytical work predate these enterprise-agent discussions: Charrington launched This Week in Machine Learning & AI in mid-2016.[2]

By February 2017, Charrington was founder and principal of CloudPulse Strategies, as well as TWiML’s creator and host. His speaking, writing, research, and consulting focused on helping the market understand and adopt “intelligent application” technologies, including machine learning, AI, big data, and cloud computing. That work provides context for his later attention to both AI platforms and the obstacles customers face in adopting them.[3][4]

Charrington holds a B.S. in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University.[3]