What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your AI agent can write SQL in seconds. The hard part is letting it touch real data without turning production into a crime scene. We sit down with Mike Freedman, co-founder and CTO of Tiger Data (formerly TimescaleDB) and a Princeton computer science professor, to unpack what “real-time data infrastructure” looks like now that AI agen...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Enterprise AI is everywhere, yet most teams still struggle to move beyond pilots. We sit down with Jason Olkowski, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Creatio to unpack what the data actually says about who is succeeding with enterprise AI adoption and why. One surprising insight: the job-cut narrative is overplayed. The stron...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 e...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 exper...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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, an...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 b...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 indu...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 conn...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 specif...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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-configurin...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 communica...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 sk...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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, summariz...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 enter...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 Tra...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 ev...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 s...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 win...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 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 enter...