Football franchises run on data. Jono Luk of Sumer Sports explains how AI is changing who wins — on the field and in the stands.

Full Show Notes:

Most sports AI coverage focuses on stats. Jono Luk, Chief Product Officer at Sumer Sports, is thinking about something harder: measuring what a player decided, not just what they did. Sumer's computer vision tracks all 22 players up to 60 times per second, generating probabilities for every moment of every play — not to describe what happened, but to evaluate whether the best decision was made.

That dept...

Neeraj Verma of NiCE on why AI pilots stall, building agents as small reusable units, and the scale problem personal agents are about to create.

Full show notes
This one was recorded live at NiCE World 2026 in Orlando, and Neeraj Verma, Head of AI at NiCE, didn't dodge the hard parts. We started where most enterprise AI conversations should start and rarely do: the outcome. If you can't name what the technology is supposed to pay you back for, you're experimenting for experimentation's sake, and that's the pattern I see stalling pilots everywhere.

Enterprises have agents. Most can't run them at scale. IBM's Suzanne Livingston explains what changes when you have hundreds — not two.

Full Show Notes

Scaling agentic AI is not the same problem as building it. At IBM Think 2026 in Boston, I sat down with Suzanne Livingston, VP of Product for IBM watsonx Orchestrate, to talk about where enterprise organizations actually are on this journey — and what it takes to move from a pilot to a production environment running hundreds of agents across dozens of departments.

Suzanne walks through the...

Dell's CTO built a 4-category agent framework from real production deployments. Most enterprises are ignoring two of the categories that matter most.

Full Show Notes

Enterprise leaders are mapping AI agents to org charts — building digital employees, agentic teams, AI workers — and then wondering why the results fall short. Dell's Global CTO John Roese has been running agents in production long enough to know exactly why that framing fails, and what to do instead.

In this episode, Roese shares a framework Dell developed from actual production deployments, not pilots. It iden...

Picking a use case, proving value, and expanding has been the standard starting point for enterprise AI. For organizations early in their AI journey, that advice still holds. But for large enterprises that are past the pilot stage and trying to scale across business units, geographies, and brands, it isn't enough.

At NVIDIA GTC, Cameron Davies, Chief Data Officer of Yum Brands, shared how his team is thinking about AI differently — and why they had to. With 63,000 restaurant locations, 100 million daily transactions, and 1,500 franchisees across 155 countries, Yum operates at a scale where a single bad AI decision ca...

Not every AI problem is a language problem. I talk with Vinci CEO Hardik Kabaria about what changes when AI has to reason about the physical world.

Full show notes

Most of the AI conversation in enterprise circles is about large language models — text, code, maybe images. This episode is about something different: what happens when AI has to reason about physical systems where the laws of physics don't negotiate and a wrong answer can't be patched after the product ships.

I talked with Hardik Kabaria, CEO of Vinci, about how ph...

NVIDIA’s NemoClaw adds enterprise security to OpenClaw. What it does, what it doesn’t, and what CIOs should do before deploying.

FULL SHOW NOTES

OpenClaw became the fastest-growing open-source project in history. Enterprise buyers watched from the sidelines — not because the technology wasn’t useful, but because an autonomous agent with access to corporate file systems, credentials, and external communication channels is a governance and security problem that no one had solved at the enterprise level.

At NVIDIA’s GTC 2026 conference, Jensen Huang announced NemoClaw: a reference stack that adds enter...

Most enterprises are layering AI tools on top of broken processes and wondering why ROI never materializes. In this solo episode, Maribel breaks down Cisco’s systematic approach to workflow redesign, why visibility into how work actually gets done is the missing first step, and what enterprise leaders need to change about their leadership culture and talent systems before AI adoption will deliver real results.

Key Topics Covered

•  Why AI tool adoption without workflow redesign fails to deliver ROI

•  How Cisco’s Atlas AI agent system maps work across the enterprise...

Episode Summary: The "SaaS is dead" narrative is generating real confusion for enterprise buyers trying to make procurement decisions right now. In this solo episode, Maribel Lopez breaks down the two legitimate arguments driving the disruption narrative — AI coding tools and agentic AI — separates what's real from what's overstated, and gives enterprise technology leaders the two questions that actually matter for evaluating their SaaS stack in an AI-first world.

What You'll Learn:

Keywords
AI, agentic AI, Work Fusion, RPA, intelligent automation, compliance, machine learning, LLMs, automation, enterprise technology

Episode Summary
Agentic AI dominated industry conversation in 2025. But in 2026, enterprise leaders are asking a harder question: How do we deploy AI agents safely, accurately, and in production environments?
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Peter Cousins, CTO of WorkFusion a UiPath company, about how AI agents evolved from RPA and intelligent automation into production-ready “digital workers.” The discussion focuses on regulated industries, where explainability, auditability, and risk controls matter as much as automation gains.
...

The National Retail Federation Show highlighted that Agentic Commerce is the new buzzword for 2026. But before you rewrite your roadmap, let's talk reality.
Julie Ask and Maribel Lopez are discussing:

What actually has to happen before agents can buy things for consumers
Why 85% of retail is still offline (and what that means for AI commerce)
The payments protocol wars: Google/Shopify vs. OpenAI/Stripe/PayPal
Where to actually invest your AI budget in customer experience

Spoiler: The "auto-magic" future isn't here yet. But the opportunities in between?  
#AgenticAI #RetailInnovation #CommerceAI #N...

Agentic AI is emerging as the next evolution of artificial intelligence in customer experience (CX), moving beyond chatbots to systems that can take real action on behalf of customers. In this episode of AI with Maribel Lopez, Maribel Lopez speaks with Jarrod Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs, about how enterprises are actually deploying AI in customer experience today. The conversation covers real-world CX use cases, where AI delivers measurable ROI, why data and process design remain the biggest bottlenecks, and how organizations should manage risk, governance, and human handoffs as agentic AI scales. This episode is designed for...

CES 2026 Quick Take: Physical AI, Ambient AI, and the Reality of Adoption

In this episode, Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, is joined by Julie Ask, founder of Ask Advisory, for a candid, unscripted conversation on what CES 2026 actually revealed about the state of AI.

Rather than focusing on flashy demos or speculative promises, Maribel and Julie examine where AI is delivering real value today—and where expectations are running ahead of reality. 

Julie's bio

Julie is a prominent customer experience analyst, tec...

Maribel Lopez reports live from AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas, unpacking why the AI experimentation phase is officially over. With statistics that say 95% of AI projects are failing and enterprise budgets tightening, 2026 demands production-quality AI—not more proof-of-concepts. This episode explores the critical shift from building agents to deploying them safely at scale.

Key Themes

The Reality Check (2025 Recap)

In this episode of AI with Maribel Lopez, Maribel sits down with Ian Bramson, Vice President of Global Industrial Cybersecurity at Black & Veatch, to explore the growing intersection between artificial intelligence and operational technology (OT) security.

From power grids and oil refineries to manufacturing plants, critical infrastructure systems are becoming increasingly connected—and therefore more vulnerable. Ian shares how Black & Veatch is helping industrial organizations rethink cybersecurity from the ground up, integrating protection early in the design and build process rather than bolting it on later.

Together, Maribel and Ia...

About This Episode
Daniel Ziv, Global VP of AI and Analytics at Verint, reveals why experienced executives are making their worst decisions in decades—and how AI analytics is rewriting the rules of business intelligence. Learn the two critical frameworks that separate AI winners from losers, and why the biggest risk isn't picking the wrong technology—it's doing nothing at all.
Guest Bio
Daniel Ziv leads AI and analytics product management and go-to-market strategy at Verint, where he helps global enterprises transform customer experience through data-driven decision-making. With two decades in the analytics space, Daniel has witn...

Episode Overview

Host Maribel Lopez sits down with Kerrie Jordan, the newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer at Epicor, to discuss the evolution of ERP systems and the transformative power of cognitive ERP in manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain industries.

Guest Bio and social links

Kerrie Jordan - Chief Marketing Officer, Epicor

Kerrie Jordan, Chief Marketing Officer at Epicor, leads the global go-to-market efforts, bringing together her deep product innovation and strategic marketing experience to drive brand growth and customer engagement across the make, move...

Overview

Maribel Lopez interviews Kathleen Peters, Experian's Chief Innovation Officer, about AI's evolution in fraud detection, the shift to generative and agentic AI, and balancing innovation with security in financial services.

Key Topics

AI Evolution at Experian

...