What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like...
A Physical Key Is The Missing Layer For Modern Account Security
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Your AI account is quickly becoming your most valuable account. It can hold business context, customer details, code, research, and the day-to-day workflows you rely on. That also makes it a prime target for phishing and account takeover, especially as attacks get more convincing with AI.
We sit down with Dawn Manley, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Yubico, to unpack what “phishing-resistant MFA” actually means and why hardware-backed authentication changes the game. We compare the familiar world of SMS codes and approval prom...
Enterprise 5G That Actually Works
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A hospital breach can turn the network “dirty” in minutes. A fiber cut can take a grocery store offline at the worst possible time. And almost every CIO has said some version of the same thing: “I love the technology, help me find the money.” That’s the tension we dig into with John Tonthat CRO of Cell Hub, one of T-Mobile’s longest-tenured agency partners operating right at the intersection of telco, wireless, and IT systems integration.
We start with the real-world enterprise problems Cel...
How GTT Rebuilt Global Security For The AI Era
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The fastest attackers don’t “hack” like they used to, they drift through systems, blend into normal behavior, and move at machine speed. That reality forces a hard question: if you cannot defend the perimeter anymore, what should a modern security architecture look like?
We sit down with James Karimi, CIO and CISO of GTT Communications, one of the world’s largest tier one internet operators, to break down the practical moves behind a containment-first strategy. We talk candidly about the human layer of risk, wh...
When AI Agents Go Off The Rails
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A two-week simulation was all it took for “autonomous AI agents with rules” to reveal how fragile our current guardrails really are. We sit down with Satya Nitta from Emergence AI, an autonomous AI lab working at the intersection of neural networks and symbolic AI, to unpack the Emergence World Experiment: five virtual cities, ten agents per city, and different frontier language models powering each world, including a mixed-model society where agents influence each other.
What we saw is the kind of long horizon auto...
The Real Cost Of Enterprise AI
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AI isn’t magic, and it definitely isn’t free. We sit down with Ken from Pega Systems to get brutally practical about the economics of enterprise AI: why token costs are a symptom, why infrastructure spend is so high, and how “murky ROI” happens when companies deploy AI for novelty instead of measurable business value.
From Ken’s perspective as a former CFO and current COO, the best mental model is surprisingly simple: treat AI like a utility. If electricity has taught us anything...
Hybrid Communications That Actually Work
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Hybrid communications is easy to praise and hard to pull off, especially when your reality includes on-prem systems, private cloud requirements, public cloud apps, and a growing buy-in committee that can hit dozens of stakeholders. We talk with Jonathan Buckle, VP of the Americas at Mitel, about what hybrid unified communications actually looks like when you refuse to force customers into a single model and instead design around how organizations really operate.Â
We get concrete about the process: why discovery matters more than demos, h...
Trustworthy AI For Real Telco Impact
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AI in telecom is finally graduating from slide decks to real operational impact, but the jump from pilot to production is where most teams get stuck. I sit down with Guy Lupo from the TM Forum, who leads the trustworthy AI and data mission, to talk about what it actually takes to become an AI native telco and why the industry’s next gains depend less on flashy demos and more on operational proof.
We break down where operators are seeing traction right now, li...
Architectural Invisibility For Modern Cybersecurity
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The easiest system to hack is the one that’s always there to be found. We sit down with Steve Visconti, CEO and co-founder of XIID, to talk about a different cybersecurity mindset: architectural invisibility, where the goal isn’t to build a bigger wall, it’s to make the target unreachable in the first place.
We dig into what “no inbound communication” really means, including removing public IP dependence, reducing DNS exposure, and enforcing process-to-process connectivity so only the exact executable you approve can talk t...
A 2005 Malware Find That Rewrites Cyber Warfare History
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A 2005 malware sample sounds like ancient history, until it looks like cyber sabotage that may predate Stuxnet. We sit down with Jags from SentinelOne’s Sentinel Labs to unpack Fast 16, a rare framework that doesn’t just break computers, it quietly corrupts high precision calculations. If you’ve ever treated simulation results, engineering models, or AI outputs as “the answer,” this conversation will make you pause.
We walk through the unexpected discovery path: a curious reference tied to the Shadow Brokers leak, years of researcher...
How Data Brokers Fuel AI-Driven Social Engineering
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Personalized phishing is no longer “spray and pray.” It’s targeted, multi-channel, and increasingly powered by exposed employee data that’s sitting in plain sight. We sit down with Paul Mander, Chief Commercial Officer at Optery for Business, to unpack what’s driving the next wave of AI-driven social engineering and why so many security teams are rethinking where the real attack surface begins.
Paul walks us through eye-opening survey findings from more than 400 cybersecurity leaders: social engineering attempts are rising sharply, most attacks are modera...
When Messaging Apps Become Enterprise Infrastructure
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Your phone rings, you hesitate, and you let it go to voicemail because it might be a scam. Meanwhile your team is juggling Microsoft Teams, Webex, mobile calling, messaging apps and a growing stack of AI tools that promise better customer experience but often add complexity. We sit down with William Rubio to unpack what’s actually changing in cloud communications and what a managed service provider needs to deliver in 2026: not just licenses, but outcomes across UCaaS, CCaaS and AI.
We talk through Ca...
How Spark Microsystems Makes Short-Range Wireless Deterministic
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Your product can have a world-class cloud stack and a blazing-fast 5G link, then lose the whole experience in the last half meter. That’s the “last meter” problem, and it’s why we sat down with Dr. Frederic Nabki Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Spark Microsystems, to talk about ultra-wideband wireless that targets wirelike responsiveness instead of “good enough” latency.
We dig into where Bluetooth and Wi‑Fi still shine and where they hit real limitations for deterministic wireless, ultra-low latency, and interference-heavy environments...
AI’s Real Payoff In Telecom
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Your carrier has more data than almost any company you interact with, yet most telcos still struggle to turn that advantage into growth. We sit down with Miguel Carames, the Chief Product Officer at Mobileum to sort out what’s real, what’s next, and what’s pure hype when it comes to AI in telecom, 5G monetization, and the future of operators as intelligence-driven businesses. Along the way, we get honest about why “we invested billions” doesn’t automatically translate to new revenue and why regulation a...
Agentic SecOps That Works
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If your SOC is buried under alert noise, another flashy AI demo won’t save you. We go deeper into what actually works: starting with data strategy and detection quality so automation has real signal to work with, not chaos to summarize. Our guest CEO and Founder Karthik Kannan from Anvilogic explains what “agentic SecOps” looks like in practice, from data onboarding and normalization to detection engineering, hunting, triage, investigation, and the integrations that move outcomes into your ticketing or case management systems.
We talk th...
What Happens When Hype Hits Budgets
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Cloud was supposed to simplify everything. Instead, a lot of CIOs are staring at bills that are far higher than anyone forecast, feeling locked into hyperscalers, and wondering where the business value went. I sit down with David Linthicum, former Deloitte chief cloud strategy officer turned tech influencer, to give an unvarnished reality check on cloud computing costs, cloud repatriation, and what “pragmatic architecture” looks like when budgets are real and timelines are slow.
We also get blunt about enterprise AI. David explains why so m...
How HYCU And Dell Turn Backups Into Cyber Intelligence
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Your backup system is sitting on a gold mine and most companies are treating it like a fire extinguisher behind glass. From the floor of Dell Technologies World, we talk with Simon Taylor CEO of HYCU about their next chapter: HYCU Air, an AI resiliency platform designed to turn SaaS backup data into something you can actually interrogate, learn from, and use to stay ahead of cyber risk.Â
We dig into the big idea that the most valuable asset is not the LLM itself, b...
A New Way To Cut IoT Network Data At The Edge
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The fastest way to break a modern network isn’t your Netflix download, it’s the quiet, constant upload from sensors, logs, and telemetry that nobody ever reads. We sit down with Julien Dersey from AtomBeam to unpack why data efficiency is suddenly a front-line issue for IoT networking, edge computing, and cloud operations, even in a world with 5G and new satellite options like Starlink. The uncomfortable reality is that bandwidth grows, then data expands to fill it, especially once cybersecurity teams demand near real-time visi...
Complex Enterprises Need Custom UC And CX
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ANZ moves fast, and that speed exposes the difference between “cloud by default” and communications that actually hold up under pressure. We sit down with Mitel and Ethan Global to unpack what it takes to deliver unified communications, contact center, and customer experience platforms across Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific where geography is huge, budgets demand efficiency, and resilience is non-negotiable.
We talk about why Australia and New Zealand are early adopter markets, how hybrid work has shifted to a role-based model, and...
How Tugger Turns Scattered Business Systems Into Trusted AI Answers
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Your AI assistant is only as smart as the mess behind your dashboards. When business data lives across CRM, accounting, HR, and job systems, “connect ChatGPT to our data” quickly turns into rate limits, broken joins, confusing IDs, and answers nobody trusts.
We sit down with Craig Morrall, co-founder of Tugger, to unpack a practical architecture for enterprise AI that actually holds up in the real world: pulling data from many platforms into a warehouse, then layering on a semantic model that explains what the...
Securing Agentic AI Identities
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AI agents are starting to do real work inside real companies and they often do it by acting as us. That’s exciting, and it’s also a security wake-up call. We sit down with Matthew Immler Regional CSO, Americas at Okta, to unpack why identity security has become the primary battleground and why attackers increasingly prefer impersonation over breaking through a “front door” with zero-days.
We get concrete about what “non-human identities” actually means in plain English, and how agentic AI changes the rules. When...
How To Cut Costs And Errors With A Single Source Of Medical Truth
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Healthcare keeps getting more expensive, yet most of us feel like we’re doing more work just to get the same care: more portals, more forms, more phone calls, and more confusing lab results. We sit down with Greg Brady the founder and CEO of Connect4Patients to dig into the root cause he’s spent decades solving in other industries: fragmented data. His claim is direct and a little startling. If we can’t assemble a complete, real-time medical record, we can’t reliably reduce errors...
From Data Quality To Autonomous Networks In Telecom
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AI is finally forcing a scoreboard moment in telecom: some organizations are seeing massive productivity gains, while others are stuck between fear of missing out and fear of getting it wrong. From the floor at IBM Think in Boston, we sit down with IBM’s global CTO for telecom, media, and entertainment Eoin Coughlan to get practical about what separates “AI pilots” from AI that actually lands in production and earns trust.
We start with the hard truth that hasn’t changed for decades: data is...
AI Security Only Works When It Matches Business Goals
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AI didn’t just change how enterprises innovate, it changed how they get breached. One month you’re racing to deploy new copilots and agentic workflows; the next you’re asking a harder question: did we build any of this to match our risk posture?
We talk with Chris Bonavita, Vice President of Strategy and Technology Adoption at GTT, about what he’s hearing from enterprise security leaders right now and why the mood has shifted from excitement to panic. We dig into the real-wor...
Why The Browser Became The Modern Office And How To Secure It
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Your browser is no longer a passive window to the internet. It’s becoming a worker with autonomy and that single shift changes everything about cybersecurity, identity, and data protection.
We sit down with Anupam Upadhyaya SVP, Products, SASE and Network Security, Palo Alto Networks to unpack what “agentic browsing” really means: the jump from an AI copilot that helps you to an agent that works for you by clicking, filling forms, and moving across tabs with your permissions. When the browser becomes the office...
Smart Pool Robots
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Pool season is back and so is the annual question: why does keeping water clean still feel so manual? We sit down with Patrick from Beatbot to talk about what changes when a robotic pool cleaner stops being a “dumb” tethered machine and becomes a cordless AI pool robot that can map your pool, plan an efficient route, and adapt when it hits real-world obstacles like ladders and tight corners.
We dig into what modern smart pool cleaning actually looks like: cleaning the floor, clim...
How A Modern CMO Connects Brand To Revenue
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Marketing isn’t “soft” when you can tie it to the numbers that run the business. Evan sits down with Meghan Keough, a modern, business-first CMO with decades in enterprise tech, to unpack how marketing leaders can operate at the intersection of brand, revenue, and transformation without losing the plot. We get specific about the metrics that matter most in B2B go-to-market strategy: pipeline by source, cost per pipeline, win rates, sales velocity, and the margin impact behind the dashboard.
From there, we zoom o...
6G Beyond The Pipe
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6G is closer than most people think, and the biggest surprise is that the headline might not be “faster.” We sit down with Mats Karlsson from Ericsson to talk about the move toward physical AI, where networks help systems sense and act in the real world. When robots, vehicles, and digital twins depend on connectivity for safety and performance, “more bandwidth” stops being the product and guaranteed outcomes become the real promise.
We unpack what outcome based services actually mean in practice: collision...
rApps for Mobile Networks Autonomy
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Autonomy in telecom sounds like a pure technology race until you look at where operators actually get stuck. It turns out the models aren't the bottleneck. The humans around them are.
We're joined by @Ibrahim Eldeftar, who leads Cognitive Software and Services at Ericsson, to unpack the real path from partial automation to Level 4 autonomous networks, and why the hardest part is often the human system around the tools.
Ibrahim walks us through the two hurdle categories...
Identity Security After RSAC 2026
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Identity is where the fight is moving fastest, and RSAC 2026 proved it. Fresh off the show floor, we sit down with Jim Taylor, President, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at RSA Security, to break down what’s truly changing in identity security as AI reshapes both the threat landscape and the defenses enterprises rely on.
We dig into why “sovereign” and “deploy anywhere” identity deployments are suddenly mission critical. Cloud convenience can quietly trade away resiliency and control, and recent disruptions show how quickly authentica...
Building An Agentic Operating System For Cybersecurity And Beyond
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Agentic AI is no longer a side experiment running in a lab. It’s starting to look like the next operating layer inside the enterprise, and that raises a hard question: do you want a scattered collection of point tools, or a standardized agentic operating system that your teams can actually run?
I sit down with Anurag Gurtu Chief Executive Officer @ AIRRIVED to unpack what “agentic OS” means in practical terms. We get specific about the three pillars that make agentic AI useful at scale...
Device Management Without The Drama
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AI is everywhere in IT operations right now, but most sysadmins don’t need more buzzwords. We need fewer tickets, cleaner patching, faster deployments, and a clear view of what’s happening across every device. That’s why we sat down with Jaren Nichols, President and COO of PDQ to talk about modern enterprise device management the way admins actually live it: too many endpoints, too many apps, constant updates, and zero tolerance for security gaps.
We get into the real pressure point behind “software...
From Martech Stacks To AI Ecosystems For Modern Marketing
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The martech stack used to feel complicated. Then generative AI showed up and turned “complicated” into “constantly changing.” We sit down with Scott Brinker, the analyst behind ChiefMartec, to unpack what’s really happening as marketing teams move from a familiar martech stack to a broader AI ecosystem filled with new tools, copilots, and early stage agents layered on top of the systems we already depend on.
We get concrete about what still anchors modern marketing technology: a system of record for customer data (CRM in man...
From Manual Alert Triage To Autonomous Security Operations
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Manual SOC work is collapsing under its own weight. After RSAC, we sit down with Dave Mcginnis, who leads IBM Consulting’s threat management practice, to get brutally practical about what “autonomous security operations” really means when you strip away the marketing. The headline is simple: humans can’t be the bottleneck in threat monitoring anymore, and “AI-assisted” alert triage won’t cut it when machines can generate more detections than teams can ever click through.
We talk through the hard parts that decide whether autono...
AI For The Trades
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Trade businesses keep our world running, but most of them operate on painfully thin margins. We talk with Fred Voccola CEO from Simpro Group about what happens when you bring practical AI to the job site and the back office, not as hype, but as an operating platform for the trades that helps contractors finish more work right the first time.
We get specific about where the ROI shows up fast: cutting “retreads” (repeat visits) by improving job prep, making sure the right technician arri...
Enterprise Voice AI That Actually Works
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Pressing zero to reach a human should not be the default plan. We talk with Fred Fontes CEO from Acclaim about what’s finally making enterprise voice-first AI work in the real world, especially inside regulated industries like banking and financial services where compliance, auditability, and data security are not negotiable. For teams burned by old IVR trees and brittle chatbots, the conversation gets practical fast: what has changed in the underlying models, and what has to change in how we deploy and control them.
How The We Love Tech Awards Spot Real Innovation
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AI is making a weird problem even worse: it’s getting harder to tell what’s authentic. That’s why we sat down with Russ from Business Intelligence Group to talk about the We Love Tech Awards ( https://welovetechawards.com/) and what real, transparent judging looks like when trust is on the line. We get specific about how awards can be more than marketing, especially when real people review nominations, score the work, and give feedback that founders and product teams can actually use.
We als...
Autonomous Networks Now
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AI hype is everywhere at Mobile World Congress, so we went looking for something rarer: real operational proof. From the Ericsson booth in Barcelona, we sit down with Ibrahim Eldeftar, who leads Cognitive Network Solutions product and portfolio for telco AI software, and Claudia Muñiz Garcia, Global Head of Sales for the same unit, to talk about what it actually takes to run autonomous networks.
We break down the autonomy journey in plain language: moving from manual ways of working to systems that c...
How Brevo Builds Customer Loyalty With Conversational CRM
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CRM is about to feel less like a database and more like a conversation. We sit down with Brevo to unpack how a fast-growing customer engagement platform thinks about the next era of CRM, where large language models change the “entry point” for customer data and where the old battle over slick UI starts to disappear.
We walk through Brevo’s evolution from an agency to an email automation tool (many will remember the Sendinblue days) and then into a broader customer engagement and CRM pl...
How Samsung SDS Makes Mobile Devices Work For Hospitals;
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A check-in tablet passes from one patient to the next, and a single leftover photo of an ID or an auto-filled keyboard suggestion becomes a PHI nightmare. From the Samsung booth at HIMSS, we sit down with Ray to unpack how Samsung SDS approaches healthcare IT with a simple goal: make devices and workflows safer, easier, and more useful for the people on the front line.
We get specific about what Samsung SDS does beyond distribution, including helping health systems get the right Samsung...
Agentic Voice AI For Business
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The fastest way to understand agentic AI is to stop thinking about chatbots and start thinking about outcomes. From Enterprise Connect, we sit down with RingCentral’s John Finch to talk about agentic voice AI that can handle real customer work end to end: answering the call, connecting to back-end systems, completing a transaction, confirming the result, and closing the loop without bouncing the customer between departments.
We also get specific about what makes this hard and why it matters. Voice is still the mo...
