Tech Talks Daily

Could your enterprise data support a reliable report and still leave an AI agent unsure what the numbers mean?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Saurabh Gupta, CEO of The Modern Data Company, about the difference between being analytics ready and AI ready.

Saurabh's background includes data strategy and governance work at Thoughtworks, Washington DC government, and international organizations. Our conversation focuses on the information around data that machines need when they begin consuming it directly.

A familiar reporting process can depend on human knowledge that never becomes part...

What happens when marketing software starts learning from customer behavior instead of following a campaign rule that someone wrote weeks ago?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Neha Mittal, co-founder and CEO of JustAI, about AI agents, reinforcement learning, and a different approach to personalization. Neha spent over a decade working on growth and retention at companies including Twitter and Pinterest. Her experience repeatedly brought her back to the same problem: teams were running sequential experiments while the interests and behavior of their users kept changing.

Neha describes how a series...

Is your company using AI to improve the buying experience, or to carry out the same processes faster?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Jonathan Kvarfordt, known as Coach K, about business strategy, go-to-market AI, and the relationship between people and automated systems. Jonathan introduces himself as VP of Marketing at 1mind and brings experience training revenue leaders and teams to assess where AI can support their work.

We begin with his framework for optimizing, amplifying, or reinventing a process. The point is to recognize the difference between making an existing...

What would change if your building could help explain what needs attention, why it matters, and whether the action you took actually worked?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome Bert Van Hoof, CEO of Willow, back to the show to discuss operational AI for buildings and infrastructure. Bert spent about 20 years at Microsoft, where his work included launching Azure Digital Twins. He now works with environments such as hospitals, airports, universities, corporate campuses, and data centers, where the condition of a physical space can directly affect the work happening inside it.

We...

How much damage can a proven leadership playbook cause when it is applied to the wrong company? Experience can give executives confidence, but Sameer Kazi argues that confidence becomes dangerous when it replaces diagnosis.

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome Sameer Kazi, CEO of the Pantheon Platform, back to the show for a conversation about copy-and-paste management, first-principles thinking, AI adoption, and the value of listening before making changes. Pantheon supports major websites and provides DevOps tools for agencies and enterprise web teams, placing Sameer close to the changing relationship between SaaS, web development...

What matters most when you land in another country and your phone has no data? The cheapest plan may have looked like the obvious choice before departure, but priorities change quickly when you need a map, a translator, a ride to the hotel, or a way to tell your family you arrived safely.

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Alfonso Mata Villa, Head of Strategy at Holafly, about the growth of travel eSIMs and why they have moved from a specialist product to a far easier alternative to physical SIM cards and traditional...

Could your board explain where the organization's most valuable data resides, who can control it, and how quickly it could be recovered

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Adam Gale, CTO for Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence at NetApp, about why digital sovereignty is moving from compliance teams into boardroom discussions.

Adam argues that data has measurable business value, so decisions about its location, ownership, protection, and recoverability should be treated with the same seriousness as other financial risks.

We discuss how the US CLOUD Act, Europe's sovereignty agenda, and...

Why do promising AI pilots struggle when they become services that real customers depend on?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by David Hughes, Chief Technology Officer at Stelia, to talk about the engineering decisions behind enterprise AI deployment. Dave's responsibilities cover networking, cloud infrastructure, and customer-facing products, giving him a view of what happens when an application meets the physical systems expected to support it.

We begin with a question that can get lost in the excitement around a successful demonstration. What problem was the system designed to solve, and what...

Can a hotel modernize its technology without turning hospitality into another automated transaction? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Mark Hollyhead, Chief Transformation Officer at Aven Hospitality, about the systems behind thousands of hotels and the operational decisions that affect both employees and guests. Mark brings experience from British Airways, Heathrow Airport, Expedia, and travel management before joining the company carved out from Sabre with support from TPG.

His argument begins with a distinction that many technology programs miss. Guests rarely remember the property management system, API, or data pipeline behind a stay...

When should an AI system be allowed to fix an IT problem without waiting for a human to approve the action?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Matt Tuson, General Manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at LogicMonitor, about the practical path from reactive IT operations toward autonomous IT. The promise is attractive: fewer repetitive tasks, faster incident resolution, less disruption, and systems that can correct familiar problems before users feel the impact. The difficult part is deciding when the available data, controls, and evidence are strong enough to trust an...

What has to change before an AI pilot can become part of a regulated financial workflow?

In this episode of AI at Work, I speak with Tom Carey, President of Broadridge's Global Technology and Operations Business, about the work required to move AI beyond personal productivity tools and prototypes. Tom brings an unusual perspective to the conversation. He studied AI in the 1990s, long before current computing power and language models made commercial deployment practical, and now works where financial market infrastructure, technology and operations meet.

Tom describes four levels of AI productivity. The first...

What if the most useful measure of workplace technology was not the number of tickets closed, but the amount of productive time returned to employees?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Kelly Candler, Global Offering Lead for Workplace and Business Process Services at DXC Technology, about moving digital workplace services away from activity metrics and toward employee and business outcomes. Kelly has worked on both sides of the managed services relationship. Before joining DXC, she was a customer of the company and several of its competitors, giving her a practical view of what...

What does cyber resilience look like when leaders must make a costly decision before anyone fully understands the incident?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Justin Henkel, CISO at SolarWinds, about moving the security conversation beyond prevention and preparing the wider business to respond, recover, and communicate under pressure. Justin brings 22 years of Air Force experience across intelligence, cyber operations, and special operations, alongside leadership roles in the public and private sectors.

His intelligence background shapes a simple but demanding approach to uncertainty. Technical teams may need time to establish exactly...

Can an organization control employee AI use without making the approved tools so restrictive that people simply work around them?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Steven Walchek, Co-Founder and CEO of Liminal, about shadow AI, enterprise governance, data privacy, and the growing tension between employee productivity and corporate security.

Steven's career includes leadership roles at FIS and AWS, along with involvement in three successful exits. His experience has given him a close view of how major technology adoption cycles begin inside companies, often before leadership has developed the policies, budgets...

How can marketers make better decisions for individual customers without spending their working lives designing, running, and maintaining separate tests?

Recorded at Braze Forge 2026 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, this episode of Tech Talks Daily features my conversation with George Khachatryan, Head of AI Decisioning at Braze. George describes leading product management for AI Decisioning Studio and shares the story behind OfferFit, the company he cofounded before it became part of Braze.

We begin with the practical limits of segmentation and A/B testing. George explains that smaller customer segments can make it harder...

How can marketers use AI to improve the customer experience without filling every channel with increasingly similar content?

Recorded at Braze Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, this episode of Tech Talks Daily features my conversation with Christy Poulos, VP of Product Marketing at Braze. We discuss the practical choices behind AI marketing, from deciding what a campaign should achieve to keeping creative work, compliance, and customer relationships under human direction.

Christy describes Forge as an opportunity for marketers to talk about their craft and the problems they face every day. Technology forms part of that conversation...

Can an enterprise move quickly with AI when the information it needs remains spread across business units, acquired companies, private data centers, multiple clouds, and systems governed by different privacy rules?

In this episode , I speak with Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO of Starburst, about the data architecture decisions now affecting how quickly businesses can turn AI investment into useful results. The conversation begins with a reality many established companies will recognize. Their technology estate reflects years of applications, acquisitions, regulatory demands, regional choices, and earlier infrastructure programs.

Justin argues that this history becomes a...

How should a business measure AI success when employee adoption tells leaders very little about revenue, savings, risk, or better decisions?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Thomas Robinson, better known as T-Rob, who recently moved from Chief Operating Officer to CEO of Domino Data Lab. After ten years inside the company, he has seen enterprise AI move through several phases, from specialist data science projects to generative AI tools available across the workforce.

T-Rob argues that businesses have become too focused on the technology itself. Generative AI has attracted attention...

What happens when artificial intelligence moves beyond helping marketers create content and begins making decisions on their behalf?

Recorded at Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, I speak with Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer at Braze, about how AI is changing customer engagement and what marketers should retain control over as more operational work is handed to software.

Astha explains why the long-standing promise of genuine one-to-one personalization has been so difficult to deliver and why she believes AI can finally help brands move beyond broad segments toward individual decisioning. We discuss Decisioning Studio Go, where AI...

What happens when attackers can discover and exploit a weakness faster than your organization can patch it?

Recorded at Barracuda TechSummit 2026 in Alpbach, Austria, this conversation features Arve Kjoelen, CISO at Barracuda. Arve is responsible for protecting Barracuda's systems, environment, and code, which makes him the person answering the familiar question of who checks the checker.

Our conversation begins with the collapse in response time. Security teams once had hours or days to investigate suspicious activity. Arve explains why they may now have minutes or seconds, while vulnerabilities can move from disclosure to exploitation within...

What if every market research project could continue contributing to business decisions after its original question had been answered?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Phil Ahad, Managing Director of Data at Cint, to discuss why he believes companies should move away from disposable research. For decades, the familiar model has been straightforward. A business asks a question, commissions a study, receives the answer and begins again when the next question appears. Phil argues that this process wastes useful information and repeatedly asks people for details that may already be available.

...

Why do increasingly capable AI models struggle to produce reliable answers inside large organizations?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Misti Vogt, SVP of Engagement at Orange Logic. Her career spans military intelligence, data science, and enterprise content technology, and she also teaches in the DAM and AI program at Rutgers University. That combination gives her an unusually practical perspective on how machines interpret information and why business meaning cannot be assumed.

Misti argues that enterprise AI reliability depends on the context surrounding company data. A model may be technically impressive...

What happens when employees begin using AI before their organization has prepared the data, training, controls and measurement required to support them?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, returning guest Denis O'Shea, CEO of Mobile Mentor, joins me to discuss the 2026 Endpoint Ecosystem Study. The research surveyed 2,500 workers across the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia to understand how employees experience their devices, applications, sign-in processes, support systems and workplace AI.

The findings show a gap between access and useful adoption. According to the study figures discussed in our conversation, only 29 percent...

Can security teams defend an organization when attackers are using AI to research targets, personalize messages, identify weaknesses, and launch campaigns at a scale no human team can match?

I returned to Alpbach, Austria, for Barracuda TechSummit 26 and caught up with Neal Bradbury one year after our conversation about being secure today and ready tomorrow. A lot has happened since then. Agentic AI has become a boardroom subject, employee AI use has spread across businesses, and attackers have gained access to tools that lower the cost and expertise required to launch sophisticated campaigns.

Neal explains...

What does a security operations center need when attacks are arriving at a speed and volume that human analysts cannot manage alone?

I recorded this episode with Adam Khan, VP of Global Security Operations and AI Security at Barracuda, during the 20th anniversary of the Barracuda Tech Summit in Alpbach, Austria.

Adam has spent over 25 years in technology and security. When we last spoke at the event, he used Home Alone and soccer to make complex security topics easier to understand. This year, expectations were high, and he arrived with Formula One.

The...

How should security leaders respond when AI-powered attacks compress detection and response windows from minutes to seconds?

At Barracuda TechSummit 26 in Alpbach, Austria, I spoke with Rohit Ghai, Chief Executive Officer at Barracuda. The conversation took place exactly one year after Rohit joined the company, giving us an opportunity to discuss what brought him to Barracuda, what he inherited, and how his first year has influenced his plans for the business.

Rohit explains that Barracuda's focus on smaller and resource-constrained organizations was an important reason he accepted the role. A cyber incident can threaten the...

What happens when enterprises spend trillions of dollars on AI but the systems underneath it still cannot provide the context those models need to make reliable decisions?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I reconnect with Christian Monberg, CTO at Zeta Global, to examine what separates AI experimentation from production systems that organizations can actually trust.

Our previous conversation focused on how businesses could use AI to scale marketing without losing the human connection with customers. This time, we move deeper into the technology underneath those experiences.

Christian explains why disconnected tools...

Why is employee AI use rising so quickly while measurable business value remains difficult for many organizations to find?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with David Martin, Senior Partner and Global Leader of People and Organization at BCG, about the firm's fourth annual AI and workforce report. The research surveyed 11,749 employees across 14 countries and points to a growing divide between companies that distribute AI tools and companies that give people a clear plan for changing how work gets done.

BCG reports that 74 percent of frontline and nonmanagerial employees now use AI...

What will customers remember about a business when the voice answering their questions becomes the main expression of its identity?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Ruth Zive, who leads marketing at Voices, about the business and human questions surrounding AI voice. Voices is an enterprise marketplace and platform where companies can find professional voice actors, license AI voices with consent, and source custom voice data for training models. The company says its global talent network includes millions of performers and has served brands including Microsoft, Shopify, and Cisco.

For years...

Can ideas developed thousands of years ago help leaders make better decisions about AI, data and digital transformation today?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Alfonso Asensio, author of Digital Wisdom: Leading Transformation With the Sophia Factor and head of data measurement for global clients at Google in Tokyo. Alfonso has spent his career working across data, digital business and global client leadership, but his latest work looks beyond technical capability. He asks what changes when organizations bring sound judgment, ethical reasoning and human purpose into the decisions that shape digital change.

Why is launching a consumer product easier than ever while turning it into a profitable global brand remains so difficult?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Omer Kaplan, co-founder and CEO of ZyG, about the operational gap between creating a product and building a durable ecommerce business around it. Omer previously helped build ironSource into an $11 billion public company before its acquisition by Unity. He explains how recognizing the move from desktop to mobile helped shape that company's growth and why the ability to adapt quickly matters even more when AI capabilities are...

Why do pet owners so often learn the limits of their insurance when an animal is already ill and the veterinary bill is growing? That trust problem sits at the center of my conversation with Hedda Båverud Olsson, co-founder and CEO of Lassie, a pet insurer that combines coverage with preventative health guidance, rewards, activity tracking, and AI-assisted claims.

Hedda's reason for starting Lassie is personal. Her mother is a veterinarian, and Hedda grew up around healthy pets without fully appreciating how much fear and financial pressure many owners experience. After working at McKinsey and EQT, s...

How much of construction's cost, delay, and waste begins with information that fails to survive the journey from design to delivery? That question runs through my conversation with Julian Geiger, Chief AI Officer at Nemetschek Group, as we look at the practical role of AI across architecture, engineering, construction, and operations.

Julian describes what he calls the industry's 90, 40, 20 problem. According to the figures he shares, 90 percent of projects are over budget or over time, the built world accounts for roughly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and around 20 percent of material is wasted. His argument is that many...

Why do businesses replace the AI model when the failure may have started somewhere else entirely?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Richard Shaw, Technology General Manager for Databricks in the UK and Ireland. Richard leads the field engineering organization that works closely with customers on data and AI problems, giving him a practical view of what happens when promising agentic AI projects meet production workloads.

Richard argues that the model often receives the blame because it is the most visible part of the system. The actual fault may come from...

How can businesses turn growing investment in AI infrastructure, cloud capacity and devices into outcomes that employees, customers and finance teams can actually measure?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Neil Sawyer, who manages HP's business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Neil works with companies across one of HP's largest global regions as they move from AI experimentation into wider deployment, making him well placed to discuss what happens when early enthusiasm encounters cost, security, governance and the realities of the workforce.

We begin with the gap between building...

What could your team achieve if a document that previously took two hours could be created in eight minutes?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Oskar Konstantyner, Chief Product Officer at Templafy, about the rapid adoption of AI agents across enterprise document workflows and what those productivity gains mean for knowledge workers.

According to Templafy's proprietary usage data, AI agent adoption among its enterprise users grew from virtually zero in October 2025 to 53% by June 2026. Its analysis found that documents created without agents had a median completion time of two hours and...

What happens when an AI system gives a customer the wrong price, misrepresents a product, or recommends a competitor using outdated information?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Alex Sherman, co-founder and CEO of Bluefish AI, about the growing influence of AI-generated answers on brand reputation, product discovery, and purchasing decisions.

Search once gave companies a reasonably visible path between a customer's question and the websites informing the answer. AI changes that relationship. Systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Rufus, and other assistants combine information from many sources into a single response...

What happens when an AI assistant becomes the first place a potential customer learns about your company, but the answer it provides is inaccurate, outdated, or influenced by a competitor?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Justin Seibert, founder and president of DOM, also known as Direct Online Marketing, about generative engine optimization, AI search visibility, and the brand narratives being assembled by ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI, and other answer engines.

Justin has worked in digital marketing since 2001 and founded DOM in 2006. He has watched search marketing develop from the early...

Can electricity grids built for an earlier era support AI data centers, expanding manufacturing, electric vehicles, severe weather, and rising customer expectations at the same time?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Mark Hollis, utility executive advisor at SAP, about the pressures reshaping the utility industry and the practical choices available to leaders today. Mark spent over 15 years at Duke Energy before moving to SAP, where his work gives him visibility into utility organizations across North America.

Mark describes a combination of load growth, disruption, long construction timelines, and regulation. Data...

What happens when an AI system moves beyond recommending the next sales action and begins running a connected revenue workflow?

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Abhijit Mitra, CEO of Outreach, about the operational work required to turn agentic AI into measurable revenue outcomes. Abhijit argues that adding another AI tool can create extra complexity when customer data remains fragmented and applications cannot share context. The starting point is the business process: what problem is being solved, which data supports it, what agents may do, and where human judgment remains necessary.

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