What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Talent gaps don’t feel strategic when they hit, they feel personal: missed deadlines, burned-out managers, and the slow bleed of “we can’t grow because we can’t hire.” From the floor at Enterprise Connect, we sit down with Brett and Sebastian from Gr8 Global to talk about a practical answer: building global capability center (GCC) team...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Missed calls cost more than you think, especially when leads come in after hours or demand spikes without warning. From the Enterprise Connect show floor, we sit down with https://www.girikon.com and their product and innovation leaders to unpack how AI-first customer engagement is changing the way contact centers and sales teams respo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Meetings create the most valuable raw material in a company: the ideas people say out loud. The problem is that those ideas usually evaporate into scattered notes, half-remembered decisions, and action items no one can trace. From the floor of Enterprise Connect, we sit down with Zoom Chief Product Officer Jeff Smith to unpack how Zoom...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Cloud native doesn’t mean what it used to. What started as a self-service way to buy compute fast has turned into a full application platform transformation where Kubernetes, desired state, and automation decide how software scales, heals, and lands on compute, storage, and networking. From Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we sit do...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A single customer call can reveal why people churn, what drives complaints, and where sales get stuck, but only if you can actually see the patterns. On the Enterprise Connect show floor, we sit down with John from MiaRec to unpack how AI-powered conversation analytics turns everyday contact center recordings into clear actions you can...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your contact center already tells you what’s happening. The harder question is why and what you should do next. From the Enterprise Connect floor, we sit down with Ray Bohoac CEO of Spearfish.ai to unpack a practical approach to contextual intelligence that connects customer conversations to the back-office data that actually explains...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com If your contact center only finds problems after customers complain, you are operating blind. We sit down with Klearcom at Enterprise Connect to unpack what “CX end-to-end assurance” really looks like when you have voice, IVR, chat, SMS, and now AI-driven journeys all stitched together across multiple regions and vendors. We get specif...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is everywhere right now, but the hard part is turning dozens of pilots into durable systems that actually run a business. We sit down with Tom, SVP of Product Management at GTT, to unpack what changes when enterprises move from “testing AI” to deploying agentic AI at scale across thousands of sites, users, and applications. We start...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Most AI teams are learning the hard way that dumping more text into a prompt does not guarantee better answers. We sit down with Philip Rathle  Chief Technology Officer from Neo4j to talk about the missing ingredient: relationships. When your data is inherently connected, a graph database can turn scattered facts into usable context, s...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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