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...
The Invisible Shield: IoT Security Challenges and Solutions
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The connected world of IoT devices brings incredible benefits—from smart manufacturing to intelligent agriculture—but also creates unprecedented security challenges. When billions of devices collect and transmit sensitive data in real-time, how do we ensure they're properly protected?
Rodrigo Ferreira, Senior Vice President of Sales at Thales Mobile Connectivity Solutions, reveals the uncomfortable truth about IoT security: most devices lack built-in protection from the start. "Security isn't by design," he explains, leaving critical vulnerabilities that attackers can easily exploit. Among the biggest concerns is w...
How Digital Diagnostics Is Transforming Diabetes Care Through AI
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Imagine a world where AI can detect serious eye disease in just 60 seconds—not in a specialist's office after months of waiting, but right at your primary care visit. That's the reality Digital Diagnostics has created with their groundbreaking autonomous AI system for diabetic retinopathy detection.
In this eye-opening conversation, Mark Daly reveals how their FDA-cleared technology is transforming diabetes care by addressing a critical healthcare bottleneck. "There's a huge lack of access to care because there just aren't enough ophthalmologists," he explains. Their so...
Manufacturing's AI Revolution
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Imagine a world where engineers no longer waste hours on mundane translation tasks after designing a product. That's exactly what Ross Meyercord, CEO of Propel Software, is helping create through cloud-native solutions that are revolutionizing manufacturing.
Manufacturing software has been built on the same stack for 30-40 years, but Propel's cloud approach creates what Ross calls "almost an unfair advantage" - they can deploy innovations before competitors even finish planning. This speed is powering real-world AI applications that solve tangible problems for engineers and...
Open Source AI Governance: Balancing Innovation with Enterprise Security
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The evolution of Python from scientific computing tool to AI powerhouse forms the fascinating backdrop of our conversation with Peter Wang from Anaconda. What began in 2012 as a bet that Python would transform business data analytics has blossomed into something far more profound, with Anaconda now at the forefront of enterprise AI implementation.
Peter shares the origin story of Anaconda, founded when he and co-founder recognized that Python's scientific tools were ready to cross into mainstream business applications. While they correctly predicted Python would...
Independent Voices: How FourCasters is Revolutionizing Analyst Content
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The analyst world has long been dominated by commercial giants with rigid publishing schedules and predetermined agendas, but FourCasters is breaking that mold. This groundbreaking platform, launched in March 2023, provides independent analysts and boutique firms a dedicated space to share their unfiltered, future-focused insights without commercial constraints.
Roberta Gamble, drawing on her impressive 25-year tenure at Frost Sullivan, explains that FourCasters fills a critical void in the B2B technology landscape. While LinkedIn and personal websites serve their purpose, independent voices often lack visibility...
AI-Powered Patient Replicas: The Future of Drug Development
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The race to develop life-saving medications has always been constrained by time, cost, and the challenge of gathering enough patient data. But what if we could create AI-powered replicas of trial participants that accurately predict how they would respond to treatment?
Chief Executive Officer Steve Herne from Unlearn.AI joins us to reveal how digital twins technology is revolutionizing clinical trials by creating virtual patient forecasts that run alongside actual participants. This breakthrough approach enables researchers to compare observed versus predicted outcomes, dramatically reducing...
Securing Business-Critical Apps in the Cloud Era
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Cybersecurity for business-critical applications represents one of the most significant blind spots in enterprise security today. As Mariano Nunez, CEO and co-founder of Onapsis reveals, sophisticated attackers are now targeting the crown jewels of organizations – their SAP, Oracle, and other mission-critical systems – with unprecedented success.
What makes these attacks particularly alarming is how they bypass traditional security controls. While most organizations focus on user access controls and segregation of duties, today's threat actors exploit vulnerabilities at the application layer without requiring any user credentials. As M...
Universities Must Evolve: Preparing Students for an AI-Driven Workforce
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What happens when artificial intelligence meets higher education? The answer might surprise you. It's not just about new technology—it's about a complete cultural transformation.
Professor Angela Virtu from American University's Kogod School of Business reveals how their Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence is reimagining business education from the ground up. Their revolutionary approach? Infusing AI into every single course while simultaneously strengthening the human skills that machines struggle to replicate. "Knowledge has become a commodity," she explains. "The differentiator now is critical thinking an...
Data Giants Aren't Dinosaurs: Experian's AI Leap
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Experian's dramatic evolution from traditional credit bureau to technology innovator takes center stage in this fascinating conversation with Kathleen Peters Chief Innovation Officer who leads Experian's Innovation Lab. She reveals how the 15-year-old lab has become the beating heart of technological advancement at the company, bringing together PhD-level scientists, engineers, and data experts to tackle the financial industry's most challenging problems.
The discussion unveils Experian's surprisingly deep history with artificial intelligence – their teams have been developing machine learning models and neural networks for over a...
AI That Remembers So You Don't Have To
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What if your meetings could remember everything so you don't have to? That's the promise behind Granola AI, the innovative note-taking tool designed to augment human capabilities rather than replace them.
In this revealing conversation with founder Christopher Pedregal, we explore how Granola differentiates itself in the crowded AI productivity space by focusing on what truly matters - fitting seamlessly into users' workflows and addressing the small "paper cuts" that plague our daily meeting routines. Unlike other solutions that deploy bots to meetings (creating...
What if AI became your most valuable team member?
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"AI is an enabler, an augmenter, not a replacement." These words from Navneet Singh, a marketing leader at Palo Alto Networks with nearly a decade of experience, set the tone for our exploration into the transformative relationship between artificial intelligence and marketing.
During our conversation, Nav shattered common misconceptions about AI's role in marketing by demonstrating how human creativity and AI efficiency can form a powerful partnership. He shared a compelling example from Palo Alto Networks' recent product launch, where an AI-powered contest among...
Sensors, AI, and Incentives Are Making Our Roads Safer
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The technology in your pocket—sensors in your everyday smartphone—is quietly revolutionizing road safety in ways most of us never realize. In this eye-opening conversation, MIT professor Hari Balakrishnan shares the remarkable journey of Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) from university research project to global safety leader.
What began as a simple idea to use mobile device sensors to measure driving quality has evolved into technology that's prevented over 90,000 crashes and saved 50,000 lives worldwide. Balakrishnan reveals how CMT's DriveWell platform fuses data from phones, wind...
AI Governance: ModelOp's Approach to Enterprise Trust
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Trust remains the central challenge for enterprise AI adoption, as revealed in ModelOp's comprehensive AI Governance benchmark report. CTO Jim Olsen explains why so many generative AI projects remain stuck in development limbo, with 56% taking 16-18 months to reach production.
The disconnect stems from AI's non-deterministic nature - unlike traditional software, models can't be fully predicted or verified in the same ways. "One bad recommendation is harder to overcome than a thousand correct ones," Olsen notes, highlighting how organizations struggle to build confidence in...
The Internet Has Become Your Enterprise Network, And That Changes Everything
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Cloud security is facing a fundamental paradigm shift that most organizations haven't fully recognized. According to Aviatrix CEO Doug Merritt, we're overlooking a staggering 50-80% of our attack surface by failing to properly secure cloud workload communications.
The problem stems from three critical changes in how computing works today. First, the internet has essentially become our enterprise network – when your application calls an S3 bucket, that communication happens over the internet, not a controlled private network. Second, the traditional security perimeter hasn't disappeared; it's at...
Who Will Build the Builders? Inside Emergence AI's CRAFT Platform
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The quiet revolution happening in enterprise AI isn't about flashy robots or sci-fi scenarios—it's about solving a $200 billion problem hiding in plain sight. Outdated, manual data pipelines are costing businesses astronomical amounts and keeping your smartest people stuck doing digital busywork.
Emergence AI's CRAFT platform stands at the forefront of this revolution with its "agents creating agents" approach. The concept sounds deceptively simple: AI systems that can dynamically create specialized AI tools to handle specific tasks. But the implications are profound. Data scientists sp...
The Enterprise AI Revolution: From Science Project to Mission Critical
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From cutting-edge experimentation to business-critical infrastructure, the AI landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation. Ron from KungFu.ai shares an insider's perspective on this evolution, drawing from his experience dating back to AI research in the 1990s.
The conversation reveals the pivotal factors driving AI's enterprise breakthrough: exponentially increased computing power, unprecedented data availability, and the democratizing effect of open-source libraries. These elements have converged to create capabilities early researchers could scarcely imagine, requiring millions of times more resources than initially anticipated.
...
Reimagining Identity Verification in a Digital World
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What if you never had to share your social security number or personal details again? What if there was a way to verify your identity and background just once, then reuse that credential securely for life? Trust might be the new digital currency, and Trua is building the exchange.
The digital world demands proof of who we are at every turn, but our current verification systems create massive security risks. Each time we provide our personal information for a background check, membership sign-up, or...
AI Meets DNA: Democratizing Precision Health
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Dr. Kapoor takes us on a fascinating journey from the COVID pandemic's testing challenges to his groundbreaking work at BioAero, where AI meets genomics to revolutionize healthcare delivery. What began as an effort to speed up COVID test results evolved into a mission to solve a critical healthcare bottleneck: the months-long wait for genomic sequencing data that makes personalized medicine nearly impossible to deliver at the point of care.
"There's a secret key all of us are born with—a blueprint of our life," Dr...
AI, Deep Fakes, and Your Digital Self: Navigating the New Identity Landscape
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Every chip in every device around you has at least one identity associated with it. Machine identities now outnumber human ones online. AI can replicate your face and voice with frightening accuracy. Welcome to the brave new world of identity security.
Jeff Reich, Executive Director of the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA), brings over 45 years of security experience to this fascinating discussion about why identity has become ground zero in today's cybersecurity battles. The perimeter has shifted dramatically — from physical computer rooms to worldwide ne...
Retail Revolution: Navigating Tariffs and Trends
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AI-Powered Observability Is Changing How We Manage Enterprise Storage Forever
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Unified visibility has transformed from a luxury into a business-critical imperative for enterprises navigating today's complex IT landscape. In this revealing conversation with Sunitha Rao, who leads Hitachi Vantara's hybrid cloud business unit, we explore why this shift has occurred and how their newly launched VSP360 platform delivers game-changing capabilities.
The driving forces behind unified visibility's rise are compelling - AI's acceleration, evolving regulatory landscapes across regions, and the pressing need for financial agility as we approach 2025. Organizations struggling with fragmented visibility across hybrid...
Digital Giants: Inside TELUS Digital's Global CX Transformation
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Why your organization needs a stronger approach to identity security right now.
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Real Talk About MarketingAn Acxiom podcast where we discuss marketing made better, bringing you real...
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What happens when AI meets the arcane world of enterprise networking?
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Telecom procurement has remained stubbornly rooted in spreadsheets, emails, and manual workflows – even as enterprises spend millions on critical network infrastructure. But what happens when modern AI technology meets this arcane industry?Â
Dennis Thankachan founder and CEO of Lightyear, takes us on a fascinating journey from hedge fund investing to building what he calls "the telecom operating system for the enterprise." After becoming obsessed with the telecom sector's untapped potential, Dennis discovered large companies were managing tens or hundreds of millions in annual telecom spe...
Why Your AI Initiatives Are Stuck at the Starting Line
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Data without context is just noise. Despite billions invested in data infrastructure, most Fortune 1000 companies struggle to extract meaningful value from their investments. Why? They've built complex, fragmented ecosystems focused on tools rather than outcomes.
Srujan Akula, founder of The Modern Data Company, shares how his frustration with this industry-wide problem led to a revolutionary approach. After witnessing global enterprises repeatedly fail to achieve ROI from massive data investments, he and co-founder Animesh Kumar developed an operating system for data that converges the entire...
Beyond Insurance: The Hidden Path to Affordable Healthcare
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Marketing Essentials for Small Business Growth
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The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, but what actually works for small businesses with limited time and resources? Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, reveals the surprising truth: despite all the technological advancements, success still comes down to building authentic relationships.
Drawing from Constant Contact's extensive research with thousands of SMBs, Dave shares eye-opening statistics: 56% of small business owners have less than an hour daily for marketing, 73% feel uncertain about their strategy, and over half regularly procrastinate on marketing tasks...
When AI Meets Identity Protection: The Full Story of Loti's Internet Takedown Service
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Imagine having a delete button for the internet. That's exactly what Loti offers—a groundbreaking service that literally downloads the entire web and runs sophisticated face and voice recognition across billions of pieces of content to find and remove unwanted digital traces.
Luke Arrigoni, Loti's founder, shares how the service evolved from combating non-consensual intimate imagery into a comprehensive digital protection platform now backed by major entertainment agencies and venture capital. What sets Loti apart is their extraordinary technical approach—they can identify as litt...
AI Test Engineers: The Future of QA
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Testing has become the hidden bottleneck in software development. While companies invest heavily in AI-powered coding tools to accelerate development, quality assurance can't keep pace—until now.Â
Tal Barmeir, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of BlinqIO, reveals how his company's AI test engineer is fundamentally changing the testing landscape. This isn't just another automation tool; it's an intelligent system that autonomously creates, executes, and maintains test code by understanding the business logic behind requirements. When a user interface changes, the AI doesn't break—it adapts, just...
Building The Future: AMD's Software Strategy for the AI Revolution
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The AI revolution demands a new approach to computing infrastructure, and AMD is positioning itself at the forefront of this transformation through an ambitious software strategy that empowers developers and enterprises alike.
In this illuminating conversation, Anush Elangovan—who joined AMD through the acquisition of his company NordI—shares how AMD is fundamentally rethinking its approach to software development. Rather than treating software as merely an enabler for hardware, AMD now views its software layer as a product with a 10-year lifecycle that transcends hard...
Beyond AV: Building the Intelligent Workplace Ecosystem
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Artificial intelligence isn't just changing how we work—it's fundamentally transforming the workplace itself. In this eye-opening conversation direct from InfoComm, Ryan from Unified Communications takes us inside booth 3817 to explore their groundbreaking approach to creating truly intelligent workspaces.
What makes their vision unique is how they're moving beyond traditional AV integration to develop specialized AI agents addressing real business challenges. Their Company Pulse Agent conducts conversational interviews with employees through Teams, gathering and summarizing valuable feedback for leadership. Their Customer Advocate Agent monitors em...
How AI is Making Every Seller Your Best Seller
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What would your sales team look like if every rep could sell like your top performer? That's the transformative promise of AI in sales, and it's happening right now.
Arjun Pillai, serial entrepreneur and CEO of Docket, an AI platform transforming B2B sales, reveals how his third venture in sales technology is fundamentally changing how companies approach go-to-market strategies. The problem? A staggering 90% of sales knowledge exists either in people's heads or buried in unstructured data like call recordings and chat conversations. This...
Transforming Workplaces: The Convergence of AI, AV, and Modern Collaboration
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Data-Driven CX: Balancing Technology and Humanity in Customer Care
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The world of customer experience has evolved dramatically in recent years, and few understand this transformation better than Joel Sylvester of Five Star Call Centers. In this fascinating conversation, Joel takes us through the reinvention of customer care, showing how today's most successful organizations are blending cutting-edge technology with authentic human connection.
Having pioneered work-from-home call center programs back in 1999 and helped establish some of the first offshore operations in the Philippines, Joel brings a uniquely informed perspective on how AI, data intelligence, and...
Orchestrating AI: Martin Taylor on Transforming Customer Experience
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Martin Taylor takes us on a fascinating journey through the rapidly evolving landscape where artificial intelligence meets customer experience. As the co-founder of Content Guru, he's spent decades watching this space transform from simple call centers to sophisticated, AI-enhanced engagement platforms that serve millions of interactions across financial services, government agencies, and healthcare systems worldwide.
The conversation reveals how COVID-19 created a watershed moment for customer experience technology. When face-to-face interactions ceased, organizations were forced to elevate their digital engagement strategies, creating competitive differentiation...
AI Assistants in Law: How Lex Machina's Protege is Transforming Legal Strategy
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The legal profession stands at a transformative moment as artificial intelligence reshapes how attorneys work, strategize, and win cases. In this illuminating conversation with Carla Rydholm General Manager at Lex Machina, we explore how legal analytics and AI are fundamentally changing litigation practice while preserving the irreplaceable human elements that define quality legal representation.
Carla shares the fascinating evolution of Lex Machina from a public interest project between a law school and computer science department to a pioneering legal analytics company now owned by...
The Future of Customer Experience: TELUS Digital's Journey from Telecom to Global Technology Leader
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What happens when you combine cutting-edge AI with a deeply human approach to customer care? TELUS Digital provides the answer, demonstrating how a 20-year journey has transformed a Canadian telecom offshoot into a global digital powerhouse operating across 32 countries with 78,000 employees.
Monty Hamilton, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at TELUS Digital, takes us behind the scenes of their innovative approach to digital transformation. Rather than simply putting "humans in the loop," TELUS embraces what they call "humanity in the loop" – making people the foundation of...
Securing Your Entire Data Estate: From SaaS Apps to AI Infrastructure
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Universal data protection has never been more critical as organizations spread their digital footprint across hundreds of SaaS applications and cloud environments. In this compelling conversation, Andy Fernandez, Senior Director of Product Marketing at HYCU, pulls back the curtain on the company's groundbreaking integration with Dell Power Protect Data Domain, recently announced at Dell Technologies World.
As the fastest-growing data protection as a service provider globally, Haiku now empowers Dell customers to shield their entire data estate through 86 specialized integrations. The partnership comes at...
AI's Telecom Revolution
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Telecom operators worldwide are facing a profitability crisis. After investing billions in 5G infrastructure with minimal revenue gains to show for it, the industry finds itself at a critical juncture where transformation is no longer optional but existential. Michele from Optiva brings over three decades of telecom software experience to illuminate how AI is becoming the industry's lifeline.
The conversation quickly establishes why this moment is different from previous technology waves. While neural networks have existed for decades, today's convergence of massive data availability...
Tariffs, Tech, and Transformations: A Retail Reality Check
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Retail is in an age of perpetual reinvention. From navigating online strategies in the early 2000s to mobile adoption in the mid-2000s and now grappling with tariffs and supply chain disruptions, retailers must continuously evolve to survive and thrive. According to Dominick Miserandino, CEO of Retail Tech Media Nexus, the fundamental truth remains constant amid this change: "You are selling an emotion, the emotion of that thing."
Dominick brings a unique perspective to retail, having transitioned from mainstream media to mentoring over 200 e-commerce...