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...

How AI Chatbots Go Off The Rails And What To Do About It
Today at 2:00 PM

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Your most powerful product might also be your biggest liability: an AI agent making decisions you can’t see and answers you can’t predict. We sat down with Andre Scott of Coralogix to unpack how to make black-box systems measurable, accountable, and—most importantly—improvable over time.

We trace the journey from monoliths to microservices to LLMs and explain why old-school “index everything, analyze later” monitoring breaks under today’s data explosion. Andre introduces an analytics-first approach that processes telemetry in-stream and then stores what ma...


Inside Tupl’s Explainable, Agentic AI Transforming Global Telecom
Yesterday at 4:00 PM

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Telecom doesn’t need another AI science project; it needs outcomes. That’s the thread running through our conversation with kishore bobbarjung from Tupl, where explainable, agentic automation is delivering real wins: faster resolution of customer issues at a US tier one and double-digit energy savings across more than ten European networks—without sacrificing KPIs. We walk through how connecting customer signals to network data shrinks time-to-fix, how policy-aware power optimization lets radios sleep smart, and why trust and transparency with engineering teams are the real force...


Agentic CX, Real Results
Last Tuesday at 5:00 PM

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Tired of chatbots that stall when customers need real help? We dive into how agentic AI flips the script by taking actions inside your systems—issuing refunds within limits, updating orders, authenticating users, and escalating with intent—while humans handle complex, high-empathy moments. Joe Anderson, Senior Director and Head of CX and Digital Transformation at TaskUs, breaks down a practical playbook: choose the right high-volume use cases, embed guardrails and escalation paths, and integrate platforms like Decagon and Regal to ship in weeks, not quarters.

...


If Identity Becomes Portable, Does Trust Become Universal?
Last Monday at 4:00 PM

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Trust has become the entry ticket to the internet, and users are now choosing safety over price and speed. We sit down with Raj from Trua to dig into the 2025 Trust Survey and why verification has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have. From shocking stats on consumer expectations to the real reasons fear and fatigue are rewriting behavior, we map out what it takes to build platforms people will actually use—and pay for.

We walk through the practical playbook: make safety the fi...


Cisco’s Incubation Engine For Agentic AI And Quantum Networking
Last Friday at 4:00 PM

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What if the most human-feeling teammates on your projects moved at machine speed and collaborated across every vendor you use? We sit down with Vijoy Pandey is GM and Senior Vice President of Outshift to unpack how agentic AI and quantum networking move from shiny demos to dependable, scaled systems that actually ship results.

We start by reframing innovation horizons around risk instead of time. Technology risk is where quantum lives today, with foundational challenges from hardware to protocol. Market risk is where agentic...


From Surveillance To Smarter Stores With AI
11/13/2025

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Cameras don’t just record anymore—they inform, alert, and help teams act before problems get expensive. We sit down with Jeff Corrall Chief Product Officer at March Networks, to unpack how AI-powered video is evolving from security footage to real operational intelligence you can search, measure, and scale without ripping out legacy systems.

Jeff explains why continuous video analysis is costly and how an image-first approach delivers the wins that matter. By capturing snapshots at set intervals or when simple edge analytics detect an e...


5G To Autonomous: Making Networks Think
11/13/2025

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What if your network could understand intent, adapt in real time, and deliver the exact experience you need—whether you’re at a packed concert, inside an ambulance, or running a factory floor? We dive into the shift from manual engineering to autonomous networks and how open standards are making AI practical, measurable, and global.

Claudia Muñiz, Global Head of Sales for Cognitive Network Solutions at Ericsson, explains why 5G’s real promise is differentiated connectivity and how the Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) la...


How A Decentralized GPU Network Beats The Cloud On Price And Flexibility
11/11/2025

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What happens when thousands of retired Ethereum GPUs meet a tidal wave of AI demand? We sit down with Hidde Hoogland Founder at Decent to unpack how a former mining operation evolved into a decentralized edge provider and why connecting to Aethir’s GPU marketplace changed the math on utilization, cash flow, and scale. It’s a candid look at turning stranded hardware into a real business with clearer ROI targets and a pricing story that can undercut hyperscalers by 60–80 percent for many workloads.

We tra...


How Agentic AI Turns Calls Into Continuous Learning
11/10/2025

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Customers don’t call to chat with a bot—they want outcomes. In my chat with Jim Palmer Dialpad's Chief AI Officer we dive into how Dialpad’s AI-first platform turns real-time voice, video, and digital interactions into agentic workflows that act on behalf of users, learn from every result, and hand off seamlessly to humans when it counts. No black boxes. No bolt-ons. Just a unified stack where speech recognition accuracy, in-domain adaptation, and transparent evaluations compound into trust you can measure.

We talk t...


How An Agentic Platform Turns First-Party Data Into Loyalty
11/07/2025

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Most brands pay again and again to win back customers they already won. We wanted to fix that. In this candid conversation with Sandeep Menon Co-Founder Auxia we unpack how an agentic AI platform can sit on top of rich first-party data and finally make it work: autonomous decisions about timing, creative, channel, and offer that meet people at the right moment across web, app, and owned media. No more brittle, rules-based journeys that spam everyone. Think continuous learning, clear objectives, and experiences that build trust.


How Enterprises Turn AI Agents Into Real Value With Modern Observability
11/06/2025

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AI is moving faster than any wave we’ve seen—and the hidden cost is complexity. We sit down with New Relic’s leadership to unpack how observability must evolve to keep up with agents, vibe coding, and probabilistic systems that don’t fail like traditional software. From the early SaaS days to hyperscale cloud and now AI-native architectures, we connect the dots on where value breaks, why pilots get stuck, and what changes when real users meet real AI in production.

We challenge the head...


From IVR To AI: How Teneo 8 Scales Multilingual Contact Centers And Revenue
11/05/2025

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What if your contact center could speak 46 languages, automate millions of calls, and still hand tricky moments to the right human in seconds? We dig into the launch of Teneo 8 with CEO Per Ottosson and reveal how a hybrid AI approach—combining LLM-powered conversation with deterministic logic—delivers scale, governance, and measurable results without sacrificing warmth or control.

We walk through the architecture that makes this possible: long-form, human-style dialogue guided by LLMs, paired with rules and business processes that capture facts, validate entities, and...


Why Modern Buyers Hold The Power And What Marketers Must Change
11/04/2025

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Tired of chasing downloads that never turn into deals? We sat down with Refine Labs’ CEO Megan Bowen to unpack why so many B2B playbooks still assume the seller holds the power—and how to rebuild your go-to-market around the way buyers actually make decisions today. From redefining MQLs to recognizing meaningful intent, this conversation is a straight path from vanity metrics to qualified pipeline.

We break down the Brand–Demand–Expand model in practical terms. Brand ensures you land on the day-one consider...


From Ransomware To Resilience: Unifying Data Security And AI
11/03/2025

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We’re joined by **Anand Eswaran**, CEO of **Veeam Software**, and **Rehan Jalil**, CEO of **Securiti AI**, following Veeam’s bold acquisition of Securiti—a move that fuses data protection, security, and AI governance into one platform. Together, they unpack why GPUs alone can’t fix untrusted data and why 80–90% of enterprise AI projects fail, exploring how unifying data security and resilience lays the groundwork for AI that’s safe, compliant, and genuinely useful.

GPUs don’t fix untrusted data. We dig into why 80–90% of enterprise AI...


How Agentic AI Turns Fleets Of Macs Into Enterprise Muscle
10/31/2025

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What if your next high-performing hire never sleeps, knows your stack, and ships secure environments in hours? We dive deep with Chris Chapman CTO of MacStadium to map the shift from brittle automation to agentic AI running on fleets of Macs, where outcomes replace step-by-step scripts and digital employees take on repeatable, high-value work. Chris opens the hood on Orca, their software-defined Mac platform, and shares how customers virtualize thousands of machines to train agents, spin up secure developer workspaces, and deploy specialized small language models t...


Crypto Safety, Finally
10/30/2025

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What if your crypto wallet felt as safe as your bank account? We sit down with Crypto Insurer BDIC Insurance Founder and CEO Jeffrey Glusman to unpack a bold plan to bring deposit insurance to digital assets and unlock mainstream confidence. Instead of chasing whales, the model targets the everyday holder with clear, affordable coverage tiers, vetted wallets, and a focused list of insurable coins. The goal is to turn fear, uncertainty, and doubt into transparent rules and reliable protection that stands up when it counts.<...


From Hype To ROI: Making Enterprise AI Work
10/29/2025

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Most AI pilots impress in a demo and stall in production. We wanted to unpack why. Joseph Kim is the President and CEO of Druid AI joins us to break down the real blockers to AI readiness and the playbook that moves teams from wow to working systems. We talk candidly about market hype, sobering stats on failed deployments, and the ingredients that make enterprise agents safe, accurate, and compliant at scale.

We start with first principles: define the business case, choose the right...


Building An Open Agent Mesh For Real Enterprise Workflows
10/28/2025

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What happens when agents can talk to agents—securely, asynchronously, and at scale? We sit down with Edward Funnekotter Chief Architect and AI Officer from Solace to unpack the architecture behind an open agent mesh and why event-driven design is the key to turning AI hype into dependable workflows. Instead of a single chatbot, imagine a network of specialized agents that advertise their skills, discover each other, and coordinate like a high-functioning team. They fetch data from Salesforce and support systems, compile a customer health report, ra...


How AI Is Changing Cyberattacks And How Enterprises Can Proactively Test Defenses To Stay Ahead
10/27/2025

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The fastest way to lose a security battle is to wait for it to start. We pull back the curtain on a proactive strategy to break the attack chain—disrupting reconnaissance, lateral movement, and exfiltration—by uniting offensive testing with integrated blue team defenses that actually prove what works. John Grancarich Chief Strategy Officer Fortra, joins us to explain how red and blue can operate on a single vision that prioritizes the real prize: protecting data wherever it lives.

We dig into the AI-fueled thre...


From Cyber Trenches To Trusted Voices
10/24/2025

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What makes a brand unforgettable in a world drowning in content? We sit down with cybersecurity veteran and writer Tony Bradley to unpack how thoughtful analysis, consistent execution, and credible placements can move a company from invisible to influential. Tony traces his path from IT and security operations to bylines at PCWorld, TechTarget, TechSpective, and Forbes, explaining why he stopped chasing the news hype cycle and instead built a reputation around “day-two” insights that endure beyond the headline.

We dig into the most common visi...


From Threat Intel To Unified Cyber Risk Intelligence
10/23/2025

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Noise is the enemy of good defense. We sit down with Jawahar Sivasankaran President of Cyware to unpack how a threat-centered architecture, powered by agentic AI and rich collaboration, can turn scattered data into clear, prioritized action. Rather than adding yet another dashboard, the strategy puts high-fidelity intelligence at the core of the SOC so every control—detection, response, and exposure management—makes smarter moves, faster.

We trace the evolution from a classic TIP to unified cyber risk intelligence, where enrichment, STIX-based normalization, and cont...


From Telemetry To Time Saved: How Lakeside Cuts Help Desk Costs
10/22/2025

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Want proof that better IT experience can be engineered, not wished into existence? From the floor at Gartner, we sit down with Lakeside to explore how a lightweight, 29‑year-old agent design built for scarcity is suddenly perfect for today’s edge. When compute, memory, and network were expensive, the team designed a platform that sips resources, keeps data close to the device, and structures it cleanly. That constraint-driven approach unlocks speed, privacy, and resilience for modern fleets spread across remote and hybrid work.

We dig...


From PKI To Post-Quantum: Building Digital Trust That Scales
10/22/2025

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The lock icon is not a comfort blanket. It’s a contract. We sit down with Chris Hickman, Chief Security Officer at Keyfactor, to unpack what digital trust really means when every person, device, app, and service needs a verifiable identity. From the browser to the factory floor, PKI and certificate management quietly power secure connections, and when they fail, the business feels it fast. Chris pulls back the curtain on the policies, processes, and automation that keep identities reliable at scale—and why “crypto agility” is no lo...


Speed, Clarity, And Trust In Modern IT Ops
10/21/2025

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Patch Tuesday shouldn’t feel like roulette. We sat down at Gartner Symposium with Egan from NinjaOne to explore a simple, disciplined idea: beat IT misery with speed, clarity, and trustworthy automation. Guided by decades in the DoD and intelligence community, Egan frames endpoint management as an operational craft where time-to-value, clean data, and risk-aware decisions matter more than shiny features. That lens drives concrete outcomes—deployments that go live in days, ROI signals within 24 hours, and onboarding that turns new admins productive in days instead of m...


Unifying Teams And Mobility For Business
10/21/2025

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What if your mobile number became the single identity that powers every call, text, and meeting—on your smartphone, your desk phone, and your laptop? We sat down at the T-Mobile for Business booth to unpack a 5G connected workplace that unifies communications inside Microsoft Teams while retiring the patchwork of SIP trunks and over-the-top apps that never quite played nicely together.

We walk through how Teams Phone Mobile and Operator Connect extend a SIM-based number into Teams so users keep one identity across de...


5G On Demand, Anywhere
10/21/2025

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Ever wished you could roll into a venue and flip on flawless connectivity like a light switch? We sit down with T-Mobile for Business at their booth to unpack a portable private 5G kit built for speed, security, and control—ready to power live broadcasts, pop-up events, and mission-critical enterprise workflows in a matter of hours.

We walk through how a compact setup supports roughly a thousand authenticated users with private SIMs and delivers low, predictable latency around 10 ms. On the media side, we sh...


Flying Cell Sites Keep Communities Connected
10/21/2025

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Picture a cell tower that takes to the sky when the ground route is blocked. We sit with Chris, senior disaster recovery manager at T‑Mobile for Business, to unpack how a tethered drone becomes a flying cell site—rising to 400 feet, running 24/7, and restoring coverage where trucks can’t reach. From islands off Puerto Rico to rugged stretches near Hawaii, this portable system can ride on a boat or UTV, spin up quickly, and hold the network steady until permanent infrastructure is back online.

Ch...


Supermobile For Business
10/21/2025

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When communication becomes mission critical, “good enough” isn’t good enough. We sit down at the T-Mobile for Business booth to unpack Supermobile, a bundled plan built for reliability under pressure. Instead of stitching together a dozen add-ons, Supermobile brings unlimited talk, text, and data together with satellite backup via SpaceX Starlink and a priority slice on the network during congestion and disasters. The result: simpler procurement, fewer gaps, and a stronger safety net for teams that can’t afford downtime.

We walk through why unli...


How Megaport Built A Thousand-Data-Center Backbone In Seconds-Driven Software
10/20/2025

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What if spinning up a 100G connection took less time than making coffee? We sit down with Megaport’s CEO Michael Reid and technical evangelist Alexis Bertholf to explore how a fully automated, software-defined backbone turns global networking into a click-and-go experience across 1,000+ data centers.

We trace their unconventional paths from aerospace to IT, then dive into the engine room: why no one logs into devices, how code drives every change, and how that design makes it possible to provision cloud on-ramps, private VXCs, an...


From Factory Floor To Frontline: Why Mission-Critical Communications Matter
10/17/2025

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What if customer communications weren’t an island, but the heartbeat of your business? We dive into how we’re unifying contact center and collaboration with an AI-powered CX platform designed for end-to-end automation, tight integrations, and real-world reliability. The goal: make every interaction faster, smarter, and easier to act on—without forcing a rip-and-replace.

We unpack why hybrid UC is accelerating w/ Martin Bitzinger
Senior Vice President, Product Management Mitel, especially for teams that need security, sovereignty, and uptime across regulated industries. You’ll...


Autonomous networks begin where predictive AI meets agents
10/16/2025

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What if AI in telecom had to earn its keep from day one? We sit down with Petri, CEO of Tupl, to unpack a no-nonsense approach to automation where every workflow ties back to a clear business case. From shrinking customer care handle times to orchestrating energy savings that don’t dent performance, this conversation shows how practical AI reshapes the daily work of carriers—and why adoption by 30,000+ frontline users is the metric that matters.

We start with the fundamentals: technical customer care that...


Empowering Experts: Tupl’s Path to Scalable, Agentic AI in Telecom
10/16/2025

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Stuck with slow processes, rising OPEX, and customers who expect fixes in seconds, not hours? We sit down with Hector Montes from Tupl to unpack a pragmatic blueprint for telecom automation that starts with the people who know the work best—domain experts—and turns their know‑how into solutions that scale. From first-contact technical support that slashes escalations to smarter energy management across the network, this conversation explores how to improve experience and cost at the same time.

We trace Hector’s path from dee...


From Courses To Enablement: Reinventing Corporate Learning With AI
10/16/2025

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What if your best coach was available at any moment you needed help on the job? We sit down with industry analyst Josh Bersin to unpack how generative AI is replacing one-size-fits-all courses with real-time, conversational enablement that helps people perform, learn, and grow in the flow of work. Instead of chasing completion rates, teams can tap living knowledge: the latest field fixes, sales plays that actually worked, leadership tips rooted in company context, and multilingual guidance that meets employees where they are.

Josh...


Automation grows, humans stay: the real shape of AI in customer experience
10/15/2025

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The most natural way to ask for help is to speak—and that’s exactly why voice CX is so hard to get right. We sit down with Babelforce CEO & Co-Founder Pierce Buckley to unpack why the real challenge isn’t the AI model at the front, but the orchestration behind it: identity, contracts, logistics, field service, and payments spanning a dozen-plus systems that must work in lockstep to deliver a short, sweet resolution. From “my fridge smells burnt” to warranty confirmation and pickup scheduling, we map the un...


What happens when a $70 phone meets smart financing and trust tech
10/14/2025

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A billion smartphones ship every year, yet billions of people still can’t get online. The barrier isn’t coverage—or even a $70 device—it’s trust, credit, and the lack of banking rails in places where daily income leaves no room for upfront purchases. We sit down with Trustonic CEO Dion Price to unpack a counterintuitive solution: secure device locking that makes micro‑installments viable, protects lenders, and teaches first-time buyers how financing works without requiring bank accounts, addresses, or formal credit histories.

Dion explain...


We started fresh in Bermuda to prove a faster, open, cloud-native network that turns telcos from black boxes into agile platforms
10/13/2025

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What happens when a carrier starts fresh, ditches the black boxes, and treats a nation like a living lab? We sat down with the CEO of Paradise Mobile to unpack how Bermuda—just 21 square miles and 65,000 people—became a launchpad for cloud-native, OpenRAN telecom that ships features in weeks, not years. The story begins with a team that cut its teeth solving “hairy, scary” projects for tier-one operators and now builds a modular, software-first network that can adapt fast, integrate with hyperscalers, and deliver real outcomes for cust...


How a Small Team Rewrote Mobile for Billions
10/10/2025

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Your phone’s most magical moments—messages turning blue, a watch pairing in seconds, an eSIM activating from Settings, a text sent from the middle of nowhere—don’t happen by accident. They ride on a quiet protocol called entitlements, and today we sit down with Emir Aboulhosn, CEO of NetLync to unpack how this invisible layer is being rebuilt for speed, security, and scale.

We start with Emir’s path from MVNO experiments to collaborating with Apple and Google on Apple SIM, eSIM orchestrat...


How AI-Driven Resilience Fixes Firewall Misconfigurations and Closes Security Gaps
10/09/2025

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A single unchecked setting can hand your network to an attacker—and it happens more often than most teams admit. We sit down with Adam BennettCo-Founder and CEO from SureStack to unpack how “resilient intelligence” marries standards, deep practitioner experience, and AI to find misconfigurations fast and guide clear, step-by-step fixes. From the jaw-dropping story of a default admin credential on a major firewall to the subtle ways “any/any” rules and exposed management interfaces creep into production, we break down why configuration management is the real front...


How AI Maps the Earth Beneath Our Feet to De-Risk Megaprojects
10/08/2025

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What if the riskiest part of a megaproject is the part you can’t see? We sit down with Jeremy Suard CEO and co-founder of Exodigo, to unpack how multi-sensor scanning and decision-support AI reveal the utilities and soil conditions that make or break billion-dollar timelines. Instead of relying on incomplete as-builts and sparse borings, Jeremy’s team stitches together an MRI/CT/ultrasound-style approach for the ground beneath our feet—then pairs it with human-in-the-loop engineering so owners get confident maps and actionable choices.

We...


Edge-Ready Connectivity, No Compromises
10/07/2025

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What if the most transformative leap in connectivity isn’t another wireless upgrade, but a smarter wire? We sit down with Valens Semiconductor’s Gili Friedman to explore how high‑bandwidth, zero‑latency, and EMI‑resilient links are quietly powering the systems we can’t afford to fail—cars, factories, clinics, and the collaboration rooms where work actually happens.

Gili walks us through Valens’ journey from co‑creating HDBaseT with industry giants to winning MIPI’s AFI standard for automotive. We break down why reliability and dete...