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...
Building Reliable AI For Industrial IoT And Edge Systems
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AI gets a lot messier the moment it leaves the chat window and touches real sensors, machines, and buildings. We sit down with Anthony Canterbury, Head of Engineering and Architecture, JIG-SAW US to dig into AIoT, the intersection of AI and industrial IoT, and why reliability and safety matter more than hype when you are dealing with edge computing, automation, and real operational risk.
We talk through what has actually changed over the last couple decades of machine intelligence, from expert systems and early...
Engineering Trustworthy Enterprise AI
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Only 35% of executives say AI consistently delivers the business outcomes they expect, and that single stat explains why “AI everywhere” suddenly feels risky. We sit down with Sushant Tripathi Vice President & North America Lead – AI & Digital Transformation from TCS to talk about what changes when enterprises move beyond experimentation and put autonomous agents into real business operations, where the cost of a bad decision is measured in customer harm, regulatory exposure, and millions in downtime.Â
We dig into why classic IT reliability metrics like uptime...
How AWS CloudWatch Omni Monitors Agents And Apps Together
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AI agents are starting to run real customer workflows, and the hardest part isn’t getting a demo to work, it’s knowing the agent is behaving correctly at scale. We talk with Mukul Karnik Vice President of AWS Observability at Amazon Web Services about what “observability for AI agents” actually means when the system can be up, fast, and still wrong. Think guardrails, accuracy, and policy compliance alongside the classic metrics like latency and availability.
We get specific about failure modes that don’t look lik...
Building Self-Learning Robots For Hazardous Real-World Missions
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Robots are leaving the lab, and the real world does not hold still. We sit down with Dr. Amarjot Singh Founder and CEO of Skylark Labs to unpack what “physical AI” actually means when a machine has to operate outdoors, in hazardous environments, and keep learning after deployment, without a safety net of perfect data or constant cloud access.
We walk through mission-critical examples where edge AI and continual learning are not optional. Think military tarmacs where a 1 cm piece of debris can cripple a je...
Programmable Networking Now
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Your network can be “up” and still be the thing that slows every cloud migration, security rollout, and AI initiative. From the Lumen booth at the Gartner IT Symposium, we sit down with Scott Yao to get specific about what’s really driving enterprise network complexity: different networking models to the cloud, inside each cloud, and between clouds, plus the operational burden that grows every time you add another workload or provider.
Scott walks us through Lumen’s push to modernize the old telco experien...
Why European Buyers Need Proof Before Hype
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US tech companies don’t usually lose in Europe because the product is bad. They lose because they market like Europe is one big country. From Berlin, B2B marketer and podcast host William Delaney joins us to compare how SaaS and tech companies sell, market, and grow across Europe versus the United States, especially in traditional industries like manufacturing, pharma, and logistics where trust is everything and “move fast” is not the default setting.
We dig into a simple but revealing contrast: in many E...
Always-On Enterprise Connectivity
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A fiber cut, a congested wireless sector, a storm blocking satellite visibility: any one of these can happen on a normal day. The real question is whether that moment turns into a business outage. We walk through what “virtually unbreakable” enterprise networking looks like when you plan for failure up front and build an always-on connectivity model that keeps traffic moving even when a link goes bad.
We’re joined by Jonathan Drexel from T-Mobile, who shares why outage risk has changed shape and scale...
Hybrid UC That Actually Works
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Hybrid isn’t a stepping stone anymore. For a lot of organizations, it’s the only realistic way to balance cloud innovation with the uptime, compliance, and control they cannot give up, especially in healthcare, public sector, utilities, and other high-stakes environments. We sit down with a panel from Mitel and GlobalData to get specific about what’s changing in unified communications, why “move everything to the cloud” keeps running into the real world, and what buyers should demand from vendors when resilience is non-negotiable.Â
Our Glo...
Autonomous Networks Explained
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Networks don’t “run themselves” by magic, they do it by stacking the right data, platforms, and automation logic until the network can sense trouble, reason about options, and act safely. We sit down with Rodrigo from Ericsson to unpack what autonomous networks really mean in practice: self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-configuring capabilities that reduce operational effort for communication service providers while improving quality of service for all of us using mobile networks every day.
From there, we get concrete about how you scale automation beyond...
How CallTower Builds One-Stop Cloud Communications For Global Teams
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A major deal just landed in cloud communications: CallTower is acquiring Momentum Telecom. We sit down with William Rubio right after the news to explain what CallTower actually does as a managed service provider, why this acquisition matters, and what customers and partners should expect next. If you’ve ever wondered why the communications industry keeps consolidating, or how providers stitch together Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom into something businesses can actually run, this conversation puts real clarity around it.Â
We also get honest about the...
How AI Interviewers Cut Time To Hire And Improve Candidate Experience
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Resumes are getting easier to generate and harder to trust and that is forcing HR teams to rethink how hiring works from the ground up. We sit down with Navneet “Nav” Singh the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Eightfold AI. Nav from Eightfold to explore what happens when AI agents enter talent acquisition, not as a gimmick, but as a skills-first system designed to match people to roles based on capability, potential, and learnability. If you care about the future of work, hiring fairness, or scaling recr...
Safe AI Data Resilience
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Everyone is flipping on Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI agents, and then realizing they can’t answer a basic question: what data can those agents actually reach? We sit down with Rick from Veeam to unpack the messy reality behind “safe AI at scale” and why AI success starts with data resilience, not demos. When agents can search, summarize, move, and delete content at machine speed, the cost of unclear permissions and unmanaged data sprawl spikes overnight.
We dig into ROT data (redundant, obsolete, or trivia...
What Happens To A Telco When Networks Get Autonomous
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AI is forcing a hard reset in telecom, and it’s not just about models or GPUs. The real shockwave hits the CIO’s mandate: reinvent IT fast enough to enable enterprise AI while still keeping the lights on across sprawling legacy stacks. We sit down with TM Forum leader and veteran CIO Willie Stegmann to break down why this moment feels different from past digital transformation and cloud migrations, and why boards are pushing for measurable impact rather than more pilots.
We get spec...
What Tech Expo 26 Reveals About The Future Of Broadband
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Speed used to be the headline for broadband. Now the real question is tougher: did your internet actually feel reliable all day, on every device, in every room? We talk with Janelle Morse from SCTE, an industry insider helping shape Tech Expo 26 in Atlanta, about why the broadband world is pivoting toward end-to-end customer experience and what that means for operators, engineers, and anyone building modern networks.
We break down the event’s theme, “convergence powered, experience protected,” and why convergence is no longer a buzz...
Why 100G Networking Is Suddenly A Day To Day Enterprise Problem
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100G Ethernet quietly crossed a line from “carrier-only” to “normal enterprise,” and the operational fallout is real: bigger links mean bigger outages, higher stakes, and far less room for sloppy assumptions. We sit down with NetAlly CEO Jeff O’Mara and Product Lead Thomas Doumas to break down why 100G networking is showing up in enterprise environments now, how AI-driven demand is accelerating the bandwidth curve, and what network teams need to do differently when the speed jumps beyond 10G.
We get specific about what actua...
How Enterprise AI Agents Break Budgets And How To Fix It
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Your AI budget isn’t blowing up because someone asked too many questions. It’s blowing up because AI agents turn one request into a chain reaction of inference calls, and the infrastructure underneath can’t deliver fast tokens efficiently at scale. We sit down with Vasanth Mohan from SambaNova to get specific about what changes when AI moves from “chat” to “do,” and why enterprises suddenly feel latency, throughput, and cost as operational constraints.
We break down the difference between training and AI inference, the...
How Enterprise Tech Awards Help Buyers Find Real Innovation
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Enterprise tech is having a weird moment: innovation is real, but so is the noise. AI shows up in every pitch, “leading” is used in every sentence, and buyers who actually have budgets and deadlines are stuck asking the same question: what’s genuinely worth my time? I’m joined by Rose Ross, founder and chief Trailblazer at the Tech Trailblazers Awards, to talk about how credible startup awards can act as a practical filter for enterprise IT leaders and a meaningful growth lever for founders.
How Broadcom And VMware Protect Dynamic AI Workloads
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Agentic AI is showing up everywhere, and it is not waiting for your security program to catch up. From the VMware Explore floor, we talk with Umesh Mahajan, General Manager for Broadcom’s Application Networking and Security Division, about what changes when AI agents become real workloads that talk constantly, call tools through APIs, and evolve by the week. The headline is uncomfortable but useful: AI helps defenders ship faster, but Frontier AI also helps attackers find vulnerabilities and drive more zero-day behavior than many teams ar...
How To Secure Enterprise AI Agents With VMware Tanzu
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Frontier AI is changing the rules of security, and enterprises feel it first. From the floor at VMware Explore, we sit down with Purnima Padmanabhan
Vice President and General Manager, Tanzu Division, to unpack what customers are asking for as AI agents move into real systems and real data. The headline: private AI is getting a serious bump, not as a trend, but as a control strategy for regulated industries and anyone worried about risk, governance, and cost.Â
We walk through the “threat sid...
Trustworthy AI For High Stakes Decisions
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AI is making decisions that shape real lives, yet most people cannot see how those decisions get made. We sit down with Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer at FICO, to unpack what “trustworthy AI” actually requires when the stakes include fraud, credit risk, and customer outcomes in heavily regulated financial services. If you have ever wondered why black box models create so much fear and backlash, this conversation puts clear language around the real issues: data provenance, explainable AI, ethical testing, robustness, and the ability to audi...
How NVIDIA Turns Computing Into A New Lab Partner
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Drug discovery is one of the hardest engineering problems on Earth, except it has not always been treated like engineering. Costs can hover around $2 billion per successful drug, timelines can run 10+ years, and too many patients still wait without a cure. We sit down with Rory Kelleher, who leads global business development for life sciences at NVIDIA, to talk about what changes when accelerated computing meets foundation models, generative AI, and agentic AI that can actually do work.
We break down how scientific agents...
How To Store And Serve AI Data At Scale
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Everyone is obsessed with bigger models and faster GPUs, but the part that decides whether AI actually works in the real world is the data behind it. We talk with Paul Speciale CMO at Scality, about what happens when enterprises try to store, protect, and serve AI data at petabyte and exabyte scale, and why the rise of huge context windows turns “just a chat” into a massive storage and latency problem.
We walk through the full enterprise AI pipeline, from data collection and clea...
How Pega Blueprint Changes Who Builds Software
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AI is cranking out more code than ever, but that doesn’t mean teams are shipping the right outcomes. From PegaWorld, I sat down with Steph Lewis, Senior Director of Community Developer Programs at Pega Systems, to unpack what’s actually changing for developers, architects, and business stakeholders as AI, agents, and LLMs reshape enterprise delivery.Â
We get specific about the Solution Designer role Steph helped build and why it’s showing up now. We talk about Pega Blueprint as a practical way to turn bu...
Why CRM Still Fails Sellers And How AI Fixes It
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Your CRM knows a lot about your customers, so why does it still feel like a place you go to do homework? We talk with SugarAI CEO David Roberts about the hard truth many sellers live every week: CRM has mostly evolved into a management tool, not a system that makes reps better in the moment that matters, right before a call, a meeting, or a critical follow-up.
We dig into why the “360-degree view of the customer” often backfires. More dashboards and more repo...
When AI Learns Your Workflow Who Wins The Market
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Your AI demo is easy. Shipping AI inside a regulated insurance workflow is the hard part and that’s where the real advantage gets built. We sit down with Doug Marquis, CTO at ZyWave, to get specific about what’s changing in insurance technology and why “agentic AI” only matters when it reliably drives growth outcomes for agencies and brokers.
We dig into ZyWave’s front office focus from lead identification and marketing to quoting, service, and renewals and why that matters as the insurance...
Stop Drowning In Security Alerts
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AI isn’t just changing cybersecurity tools, it’s changing the pace of the entire fight. When attackers can scale campaigns with automation and operate at machine speed, the old rhythm of annual pen tests and quarterly reviews stops making sense. We sit down with Hom Bahmanyar Global Enablement Officer at Ridge Security, to talk about what security teams are up against right now and how continuous security validation can turn an endless backlog of findings into a short list of exposures that truly matter.
...
HIPAA-Ready AI Health Tech
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AI is rewriting the rules of healthcare software development, but building a secure scalable healthcare platform still comes down to fundamentals: clear requirements, strong ownership, and serious engineering discipline around HIPAA compliance and PHI protection. We sit down with Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of TechnologyRivers, to talk through what’s working right now as digital health teams race from prototype to production.
We get practical about how AI fits into the real build process, including rapid POCs, code generation, and stronger testing through AI...
Why AI Era Security Needs Hardware Keys
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Phishing used to be a numbers game. With AI, it’s becoming a personalization game and that’s exactly why “good enough” login security is quietly turning into a liability. We sit down with Dawn Manley, PhD, SVP, Product Management of Yubico to talk about why phishing-resistant authentication is now a must-have for anyone protecting high-value accounts, especially as AI tools become central to daily work and decision-making.Â
We get specific about OpenAI’s Advanced Account Security and why YubiKeys are part of the story. AI a...
Real Leadership Development Starts With A Deep Inventory Of Self
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The leadership playbook a lot of us grew up with is starting to fail in the moments that matter most: high pressure decisions, fast growth, founder stress, and team conflict that can’t be solved with a new script. We sit down with Peter Carnochan , an executive coach who is also a psychologist and trained psychoanalyst, to talk about a simple idea with big consequences: the next frontier of leadership development is within, not without.
We unpack why “good enough” emotional skills stop working when y...
How Tech CMOs Are Embedding AI Across The Marketing Stack
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AI isn’t a side project for marketing anymore. It’s becoming the way work gets done, and that shift is happening faster than most teams can measure, govern, or even fully see. We sit down with Ed from Callan Consulting to unpack what he’s hearing directly from CMOs and heads of marketing about real-world AI adoption in tech marketing, from early-stage startups to multi-billion-dollar enterprises.Â
We talk about the move from experimental “skunkworks” use to embedded AI across the marketing tech stack, including L...
The AI Factory Blueprint
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AI is everywhere on stage, but production AI is won in the details. From HPE Discover, we sit down with Jason Schradel, Director of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA, to unpack what it really takes to build an “AI factory” that an enterprise can deploy, operate, and scale without turning every upgrade into a science project. If you’re trying to move from AI proofs of concept to real business outcomes, this conversation maps the stack in plain terms.Â
We start with what’s being showcased...
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 Cellhub, 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 Cell Hub hel...
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...