What's Up with Tech?

40 Episodes
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By: Evan Kirstel

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...

From Coverage Fix To Smart Buildings
Yesterday at 1:00 AM

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What if one install could fix coverage and unlock an entire layer of building intelligence? We sit down with Michiel Lotter of Nextivity at Mobile World Congress to explore how modern enterprise DAS has evolved from “make the bars appear” to a multi-use platform that delivers public cellular, plug‑in private 5G, and sensor-driven insights across the same footprint.

We break down the Do More with DAS philosophy and why it changes the ROI math for facilities that once viewed in-building coverage as a reluct...


Healing The Sick Care System
Last Tuesday at 9:00 PM

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What if the fastest way to fix American healthcare is the simplest: put people back at the center. Sitting down with Gil Bashe—chair of Health and Purpose at Finn Partners, editor of Medical Life, and author of Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter—we unpack the paradox of a nation that spends more, trains the best, and still delivers poorer outcomes than its peers. Gil brings hard numbers, lived stories, and a clear blueprint for moving from fragmented “sick care” to coordinated care grounded...


Telcos Take Charge On AI
Last Monday at 1:00 AM

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The energy on the MWC floor said it all: AI for telecom has moved past “someday” and into “show me how fast.” We sit down with Broadcom’s Anupama Mahabhashyam to unpack what sovereignty really means for carriers, why local control and continuous compliance matter, and how operators can turn regulated infrastructure and rich datasets into a durable AI advantage.

We trace the shift from AI hype to execution, highlighting the operational realities telcos face as they build private and sovereign AI clouds. That includes t...


Storage Becomes The AI Bottleneck
Last Monday at 1:00 AM

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AI feels fast until memory and storage slow everything down. We sit with Michael Wu to unpack a blunt truth: inference is where value happens, and storage now sits on the critical path. Instead of treating SSDs as cold capacity, Phison’s adaptive middleware turns them into a live cache that expands usable memory and keeps models, embeddings, and long context windows close to compute. The payoff is practical and immediate—lean AIPCs and mini workstations run bigger workloads with steadier latency, and teams can scale infe...


Winning The Wi‑Fi Experience War
03/05/2026

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Ever wonder why your 4K stream freezes even though your plan boasts blazing speeds? We sat down at MWC with Metin from AirTies to unpack the real reason people switch broadband providers—and it’s not the price tag. Drawing on fresh survey data from the US, UK, and Japan, we dig into churn rates, intent to switch, and the number one culprit behind dissatisfaction: inconsistent user experience. From video stutter to choppy video calls, the pain points are surprisingly common, and they point straight at Wi‑F...


AI And Telcos: From Hype To Revenue
03/05/2026

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AI is loud at MWC, but we wanted signal, not noise. We sat down with Angus CEO from BeyondNow to unpack how telcos can turn hype into real revenue by building an “AI factory” for SMBs, digitizing the front office, and orchestrating partner ecosystems that deliver complete, easy-to-buy solutions. The conversation gets practical fast: what it takes to package connectivity with AI-driven services, why data readiness still gates everything, and how to replace price wars with a disciplined upsell motion that deepens relationships and boosts stickiness.
...


Trust, Autonomy, And The New Rules Of AI-Driven NetOps
03/03/2026

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What if your network could sense a problem, explain it, and fix it before anyone files a ticket? We sit down with Cisco’s to unpack the leap from AIOps and GenAI to true agentic operations—systems that detect, diagnose, and remediate across complex, multi-domain environments where the internet is your backbone and SaaS is your front door.

We trace the journey from ThousandEyes’ “Google Maps for the internet” to today’s AI-driven NetOps. You’ll hear how teams move from a find-and-fix mindset to evidence an...


Broadcom’s Telco Cloud Playbook
03/03/2026

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The hallways at MWC were buzzing, but our conversation cut straight to what matters for operators right now: shipping new services faster without getting boxed in. We sat down with Broadcom to unpack VMware Telco Cloud Platform 9 and how it blends cloud-native speed with the reliability telco networks demand. This release pulls previously separate components into a single, horizontal stack, pairing one automation engine for both virtual machines and containers with an embedded Kubernetes runtime. The payoff is simpler operations, shorter launch cycles, and real freedom...


Inside Amdocs AOS: How Unified AI Reinvents Telecom
03/03/2026

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What if a telecom could think with one brain? We sit down at MWC with Gil Rosen CMO from Amdocs to unpack how the company is shifting from building point solutions to delivering AOS, an agentic operating system that orchestrates many AI agents as a single, contextual layer across the business. Instead of bolt-on automations, AOS connects decisions end to end—governed, explainable, and secure—so outcomes are consistent and measurable.

We walk through why domain expertise matters: telecom-specific ontologies, prebuilt process libraries, and open...


Global IoT, Anywhere You Need It
03/03/2026

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What happens when connectivity grows from a niche tool into the backbone of modern industry? We sit with Erik Brenneis CEO of Vodafone IoT, to explore how a team that started in the M2M era now supports 230 million connections across 180 countries and 760 networks. From connected cars that update themselves over the air to smart meters reshaping utilities, we trace the systems, standards, and strategy that turned scattered pilots into dependable, planet-scale services.

Eric breaks down where the demand is strongest—automotive, energy, industrial eq...


HCLTech’s AI-Native Playbook For Telecom, Media, And Platforms
03/01/2026

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Ready to move from AI pilots to P&L? We sit down with HCLTech’s Anil Ganjoo to unpack how telecom, media, and technology are converging into an AI-native future where outcomes rule, stacks unify, and partners co-create at speed. The conversation starts with HCLTech’s engineering roots and tracks a bold evolution into an IP-led, platform-driven strategy that spans networks, cloud, edge, data, and silicon—giving operators and media leaders the tools to turn infrastructure into monetizable products.

We dig into the realities of 5G...


From HIPAA To AI Agents: How To Scale Secure Digital Health Products
02/27/2026

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Building great health tech isn’t about stacking features. It’s about clarity, secure architecture, and the courage to automate the real bottlenecks. We sit down with Technology Rivers founder and CEO to unpack how AI is changing the way we design, build, and scale HIPAA-compliant digital health products without cutting corners on privacy or performance.

We talk through the full development lifecycle and where AI actually pulls its weight: rapid proofs of concept, code generation that respects standards, unit testing and coverage, and fast...


From 5G Hangover To AI Monetization: Broadcom’s Telco Playbook
02/26/2026

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Telco's growth model is broken. Here's the blueprint to fix it.

5G returns are under pressure. Hardware costs keep climbing. And operators are drowning in complexity they can't monetize.

We sat down with VMware by Broadcom leaders to cut through the noise and what emerged is a sharp, actionable roadmap for what comes next.

Three big shifts every telco leader needs to understand:

**1. The mobile core is your highest-leverage asset right now.**
Not the edge. Not the...


Designing Trust: How Age Verification Protects Kids And Platforms
02/23/2026

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How do you protect teenagers online without turning every app into an ID checkpoint?

That's the question governments, platforms, and parents are all wrestling with right now — and most of the answers so far have been blunt, binary, and broken.

We sat down with our guest from TELUS Digital to go beyond the headlines and into the actual design challenge: what age verification gets right, what it gets dangerously wrong, and how to build systems that protect young people without making privacy fe...


Why Unified IT Operations Makes Asset Management Work
02/20/2026

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Your IT Asset Inventory Is Lying to You

Asset sprawl isn't coming. It's already inside your organization, quietly growing through every new SaaS subscription, remote device, and shadow tool your team adopted without a ticket.

Most IT leaders know this. Few want to say it out loud.

In a recent conversation with Peter from NinjaOne, we got into the real reason IT asset management is back on everyone's radar -- and it's not because the category got flashier. It's because...


How Zynga Turns Free-To-Play Into Brand Value
02/17/2026

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Think gamers are just kids with consoles? We pull back the curtain with Zynga to show how mobile gaming has become mass-market entertainment—and a must-buy channel for brands. From FarmVille roots to a powerhouse inside Take-Two Interactive, Zynga sits where free-to-play design, rewarded ads, and deep engagement meet real business outcomes.

We start with the core shift: only a small fraction of players pay, so advertising powers the experience for everyone else. That’s where rewarded ads shine. When players choose to watch a sp...


From Chat-With-PDF To Enterprise Learning Transformation
02/17/2026

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What if your best trainer is the person who’s retiring next month—and an AI that turns their brain dump into accurate, engaging lessons overnight? We unpack how a scrappy chat-with-PDF experiment grew into an enterprise-grade course creation engine that slashes time, cost, and confusion while boosting trust and adoption.

Ro shares the early product choices that mattered: attacking hallucinations head-on, grounding content in source material, and designing guided workflows that mirror real instructional design standards. We dive into the moment enterprise demand hit—...


Switzerland’s Edge In Global Innovation
02/12/2026

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We sit down with Swiss Tech campaign manager to crack open the machine. This isn't luck—it's a surgical combination of world-class universities, patient capital, and a public-private alliance that treats every spinout like a potential Rolex.

From AI and robotics to medtech, biotech, and precision manufacturing, Switzerland weaponizes its obsession with quality. The ecosystem doesn't just fund research; it drags it kicking and screaming into the market, then flies it around the world to prove it works.

**Enter the Swiss Tech Pa...


How SD-WAN And Managed Connectivity Power Modern Enterprises
02/04/2026

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Redundancy only feels like a boring insurance policy… until it starts delivering real, everyday performance wins.

In this conversation with Julian Jacquez, President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of BCN Telecom, we dig into how dual connections, SD-WAN overlays, and intelligent automation transform networks from “hope nothing breaks” into always-on, high-performing platforms that keep cloud apps flying and employees focused on actual work (not buffering wheels).

We walk through the journey from single links and MPLS to today’s world of diverse access...


How A Partner-Obsessed Model Turns Weeks Of Telco Quoting Into Minutes
02/02/2026

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Your quoting process shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt. We sat down with GTT’s channel leaders to unpack how a partner-obsessed strategy and a new digital platform, GTT EnvisionDX, shrink telco quoting from weeks to minutes while boosting transparency, accuracy, and partner ROI. The conversation gets practical fast: what it means to orchestrate sales, marketing, enablement, and product around outcomes; why legacy programs disintermediated partners; and how a modern model respects that MSPs, SIs, and advisors hold the strongest customer relationships.

We dive...


Turning IT From Cost Center To Growth Engine
01/29/2026

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Your next hire shouldn’t spend their first week waiting on a laptop while projects sit in limbo. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the $5B device lifecycle management market and explore how modern IT teams are shipping fully provisioned devices worldwide, recovering assets cleanly, and protecting data without becoming a global logistics operation.

Francis Osifo, third-time founder and CEO of Rayda, breaks down how his team delivers day one ready devices in as little as five business days across 170 co...


How NinjaOne Uses Data And Human-In-The-Loop Automation To Fix Endpoint Headaches
01/28/2026

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Patch Tuesday doesn’t just deliver updates. It delivers pressure. Suddenly, you’re staring at a mountain of fixes, racing to decide what ships now, what waits, and how to keep a single reboot from blowing up your entire week. In our latest conversation with NinjaOne, we dig into what practical AI actually looks like when you’re responsible for millions of endpoints and have zero tolerance for downtime.

Forget the buzzwords. We walk through how real telemetry, public sentiment signals, and human-in-the-loop workflows remove...


Inside Dassault’s 3D Experience Lab: How Startups Build, Scale, And Ship
01/27/2026

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When the CES show floor goes dark and the crowds thin out, the real conversations begin.

We sat down with Dassault Systèmes’ Fred Vacher and Abhishek Bali to explore how early-stage startups turn flashy demos into certified, manufacturable products. Using virtual twins, hands-on mentorship, and a global partner ecosystem, they walk founders through the hard part of innovation, moving from prototype to production. If you’ve ever wondered why some ideas stall while others scale, this conversation breaks down the journey step by step...


From Skepticism To Science: How Photobiomodulation Reduces Pain, Heals Tissue, And Boosts Performance
01/15/2026

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What if pain relief, faster recovery, and better sleep were a matter of getting the right light to the right place with the right dose? We sit down with Tom Kerber, engineer-turned-inventor and founder of SunPowerLED, alongside Dr. Hayman Buwan, physician and medical advisor, are bringing together deep engineering rigor and clinical insight to rethink how light-based technologies are applied in real-world health and performance settings.

We unpack photobiomodulation—the clinical side of red and near infrared light—and why some devices deliver real chan...


Inside The Business Of Recognition And Why Credibility Wins
01/14/2026

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Trophies are easy to buy; credibility is not. We sit down with Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at Business Intelligence Group, to unpack how modern awards can be rigorous, transparent, and genuinely valuable for marketers under pressure to prove results. From volunteer judges with track records to blockchain certificates that verify logos across the web, Russ explains how trustworthy recognition turns into search-friendly proof that buyers and even AI systems can validate.

We dig into why the old models struggled—small panels, popularity contests, an...


Design, Disruption, And The Next Wave
01/13/2026

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Most companies call it innovation when they add a feature. Real disruption is when you build the thing that makes the old one irrelevant.

That’s where this conversation starts. JJ de la Torre, founder and CEO of **Raven**, joins us to talk about what leaders consistently get wrong about digitalization, transformation, and “innovation theater”—and how to re-anchor teams around revenue and outcomes instead of decks and demos.

We dig into why the classic services model keeps breaking down. Strategy writes slides...


Building Resilient Energy Networks With Decentralized IoT
12/29/2025

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What if every meter in a city became a tiny base station? That simple shift unlocks coverage where towers fail, slashes operating costs, and floods the grid with the data it needs to stay resilient under the weight of electrification. We sit down with Wirepas CEO Teppo Hemiä to unpack how a fully decentralized mesh lets devices make local decisions on channel, power, and routing—no single point of failure, no shouting across long distances, and no fragile tuning from a central controller.

We tra...


Inside The We Love Tech Awards: Real Innovation, Real Impact
12/26/2025

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CES is about to flood every feed with AI demos and wall-sized screens, but the real breakthroughs are quieter: teams turning bold ideas into measurable results. We sat down to unpack how the We Love Tech Awards celebrate that kind of progress—transparent judging, practical innovation, and stories you can actually learn from.

We revisit standout winners who proved utility at scale: TD’s immersive learning programs that used VR and AR to deliver real training outcomes, a playful banking experiment on Roblox that stil...


From Guesswork To Answers: How People.ai Transforms Sales
12/23/2025

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Forecast calls shouldn’t feel like theater. We sat down with People got ai’s new CEO Jason Ambrose to unpack how turning raw activity—emails, meetings, call transcripts—into crisp answers can transform forecasting, end CRM fatigue, and give leaders the clarity they actually need. Instead of forcing reps to feed fields, the platform reads what is already happening and returns guidance you can use right now: which deals are at risk, which stakeholders are missing, and where to act to hit the number.

We t...


How Gifting Pink Socks Sparked A Culture Of Human Connection Across Healthcare And Beyond
12/22/2025

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A bright pair of pink socks walked into HIMSS and walked out as a global symbol of connection. We sit down with Nick Adkins to unpack how a playful gesture turned into 300,000 gifts, a nonprofit rooted in kindness, and a book that invites all of us to love more and fear less.

Nick takes us back to 2015, when he and cofounder Andrew Richards skipped the booth, packed a backpack with socks, and discovered the power of intentional gifting to break silos in healthcare. From...


Build Fast, Govern Faster: The Real Path To Agentic Success
12/19/2025

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What if the secret to scaling AI agents has nothing to do with better prompts and everything to do with smarter integration? We sit down with Rich Waldron Co-founder & CEO of Tray dot ai to unpack how an integration-first architecture turns agent hype into measurable business outcomes. From cloud-native orchestration to resilient API handling, Rich explains why the hardest part of agents isn’t connectivity—it’s everything behind it: concurrency, retries, governance, logging, and security.

We dig into the real reasons enterprise pilots stall a...


CES 2026: Where AI Meets Reality
12/18/2025

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Vegas turns into a living blueprint for the future as we sit down with CTA’s Gary Shapiro and best-selling author Jim Harris to unpack why CES 2026 is more than a showcase—it’s where strategy gets decided. We dig into how AI has moved from headline hype to the connective tissue of every sector, shaping robotics, health, mobility, and enterprise workflows. Gary lays out the big picture: a record wave of innovation colliding with real constraints like energy supply, fragmented regulation, and national industrial strategies. The te...


How AI Transcription Is Rewriting Journalism And Media Workflows
12/17/2025

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A journalist screams, “I’m wasting four hours a day transcribing,” and a product is born. We sit down with Lasse Finderup, CEO of Good Tape to unpack how a newsroom pain point turned into a privacy-first platform used by millions—and why saying no to feature bloat matters more than chasing every shiny AI trick.

We trace the spin-out origin story and the “instant product-market fit” that came from building for colleagues who needed reliable, fast transcripts yesterday. Lasse explains the decision to never train...


Beyond Copilots: Agents That Do The Work
12/16/2025

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Copilots can suggest the next click, but they rarely deliver the finished job. We dive into a different path: enterprise AI agents that integrate with your systems, understand your business rules, and execute end-to-end workflows with governance, accuracy, and reliability. Rob Bearden co-founder and CEO Sema4.ai shares how their platform moves beyond brittle scripts and UI macros to reasoning-driven automation that adapts to changing contracts, policies, and supply constraints—turning strategy into repeatable, measurable outcomes.

We trace the journey from big data to au...


Inside AMD’s AI Strategy From Edge To Data Center
12/15/2025

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Big leaps in AI rarely come from one breakthrough. They emerge when hardware design, open software, and real workloads click into place. That’s the story we unpack with AMD’s Ramine Roane: how an open, developer-first approach combined with high-bandwidth memory, chiplet packaging, and a re-architected software stack is reshaping performance and cost from the edge to the largest data centers.

We walk through why memory capacity and bandwidth dominate large language model performance, and how MI300X’s 192 GB HBM and advanced packag...


Rethinking Tech Hiring With AI
12/12/2025

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A billion-dollar talent marketplace doesn’t happen by accident—it happens when access, scale, and experience come together. We sit down with  Michael Morris the head of Torc at Randstad Digital to unpack how a once-independent platform now matches millions of professionals with work, why the talent market feels like a “teenage” phase, and how AI is reshaping recruiting without removing humans from the loop.

The conversation gets practical fast. Automation now handles the busywork—sourcing, screening, scheduling—so recruiters and hiring managers can focus on what...


From Cameras To AI: The SD Association’s Next Leap
12/11/2025

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Most people think of SD cards as camera accessories. We pull back the curtain with the SD Association to show how SD Express turns that tiny card into an SSD-class powerhouse for creators, PCs, and AI at the edge—without losing the flexibility of removable media. By bringing PCIe and NVMe to the SD form factor, SD Express delivers nine to forty times the performance of legacy cards and far better random I/O, so burst capture, rapid transfers, and on-device inference all feel instant.


Your PBX Called; It Wants A Retirement Package
12/11/2025

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What if your hotel could keep checking guests in even when the primary PMS goes down? We sit with Jason from SNET Communications to unpack how a true all‑in‑one stack—networks, SD‑WAN, security, UCaaS, CCaaS, and a native PMS—eliminates finger‑pointing and keeps operations moving when it matters most.

We walk through the realities of legacy PBX in hospitality and why a cloud approach finally fits the property workflow. SNET’s platform delivers over 120 PMS integrations and a unique twist: a built‑in PMS...


Why Voice Still Reigns In Customer Experience As AI Scales
12/10/2025

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Want a clear view of where global voice is headed and how AI changes the math? We sit down with Barbara Dondiego CEO at Avoxi to unpack the shift from legacy telephony to a modern cloud voice backbone that unifies numbers, routes across multiple CCaaS platforms, and puts intelligence at the very top of the stack. If you’ve wrestled with six vendors, inconsistent quality, and opaque billing, this conversation shows how enterprises regain control, visibility, and speed.

We trace the evolution from regional se...


From Hyperscalers To Neo Clouds: Rethinking Enterprise Networks For AI
12/09/2025

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Forget the old playbook of carrier hotels and cross-connects. We sit down with Dave Ward, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Lumen, to map the real shift to Cloud 2.0—an AI-driven rearchitecture of how data moves, where compute lives, and how enterprises keep control as speed and scale explode. Dave explains why data movement has become the bottleneck that decides AI ROI, and how distributed on-ramps, 400G to 1.6T connectivity, and network-as-a-service can shrink time-to-first-token while cutting operational drag.

We unpack the rise of ne...