Building the Future of AI Infrastructure: Insights from Meltem Ballan, CEO of Concrete Engine

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming industries at a rapid pace, yet the infrastructure required to support AI innovation remains a significant bottleneck for many organizations. On this episode of the Product Led Growth Leaders podcast, host Thomas Watkins sits down with Meltem Ballan, CEO and Co-founder of Concrete Engine, to discuss how her company is reimagining AI infrastructure. Their conversation explores strategies to make AI deployment faster, more cost-effective, and accessible for startups, scale-ups, and enterprises alike.

Making AI Infrastructure Accessible and Scalable

Meltem highlights that most AI solutions today are designed for hyperscale organizations, leaving smaller teams grappling with complex, expensive, and fragmented infrastructure. Engineers often spend more time debugging infrastructure than developing models, and business teams struggle to justify high costs. Concrete Engine addresses this gap by providing a modular, managed approach that balances performance, cost, and usability.

The company’s infrastructure is designed for “physical AI”—running on edge devices, robots, and sensors—as well as hybrid cloud environments. This approach ensures real-time processing close to data sources while maintaining scalability for large-scale deployments. By offering flexible service models, including both customer-owned and Concrete Engine-managed hardware, the company allows clients to choose between CapEx ownership or OpEx pay-as-you-go models depending on their needs.

Meltem also emphasizes security and data sovereignty. Concrete Engine provides transparency on data location and computation, ensuring compliance with industry regulations for sectors like pharmaceuticals, finance, and manufacturing. Their unified stack—combining hardware, orchestration, dashboards, and optimized software—replaces ad-hoc solutions, enabling teams to deploy AI rapidly without deep cloud engineering expertise.

About Meltem Ballan

Meltem Ballan is CEO and Co-founder of Concrete Engine, where she leads efforts to make AI infrastructure accessible, scalable, and secure. With a background in software engineering and entrepreneurship, she helps organizations streamline AI deployment, reduce costs, and empower engineers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure. Connect with Meltem on LinkedIn.

About Concrete Engine

Concrete Engine specializes in AI infrastructure solutions that simplify deployment, reduce operational complexity, and enable faster time-to-value. Their managed, modular approach supports edge and hybrid cloud environments, offering both CapEx and OpEx options to meet diverse client needs while ensuring security, compliance, and efficiency.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

• Concrete Engine Website

• Meltem Ballan LinkedIn

Key Episode Highlights

• AI infrastructure should prioritize usability and simplicity to accelerate innovation.

• Physical AI and hybrid deployments enable real-time edge processing and scalable solutions.

• Flexible service models (CapEx vs. OpEx) allow organizations to optimize cost and control.

• Security and data sovereignty are essential for regulated industries.

• Managed, modular infrastructure replaces ad-hoc stacks, enabling faster deployment.

Conclusion

Meltem Ballan shares actionable insights for technology leaders looking to deploy AI efficiently, securely, and at scale. Concrete Engine’s modular, managed infrastructure empowers teams to focus on building AI solutions rather than troubleshooting hardware or software, enabling innovation to move at business speed.

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