Tech Disruptors

“Not everything is an AI problem,” says IBM Software SVP and Chief Commercial Officer Rob Thomas. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Thomas and Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana discuss IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy, from Red Hat/OpenShift and containers for multicloud portability to why the mainframe remains the platform for real-time, high-availabilit...

AI demand is scaling and infrastructure complexity is rising. Vultr CEO JJ Kardwell returns to the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast with an update on the market’s AI cloud demand. He spoke to BI tech analyst Woo Jin Ho about production AI workloads, GPU utilization and lifecycle economics, global data-center strategy, supply-chain constraints and capital discipline, as well as outlin...

“If anyone’s going to disrupt Khan Academy, it should be us,” founder and CEO Sal Khan tells Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Tech Analyst Anurag Rana, discussing how AI can deliver personalized learning at scale if embedded in classrooms with teacher oversight, guardrails for minors and rigorous model evaluation. Khan explains Khanmigo’s early GPT-4 roots, why Khan Academy is going multi-model to ma...

Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kunjan Sobhani and Jake Silverman to explain why lasers — not just chips — are the missing piece to making co-packaged optics practical at hyperscale. Harris unpacks Guide, Lightmatter’s VLSP light engine, and Passage, the company’s photonic interconnect platform, walking through real-world reliability, density and power trade-offs, and ho...

Russia invasion of Ukraine “has completely reframed perceptions of drone utility and value. Where once high-end, exquisite systems dominated the procurement logic, today there’s a much clearer recognition that quantity and replaceability are just as critical,” says AV Chief Growth Officer Church Hutton. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Hutton tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior defe...

Ciena is expanding from its telecom optical roots to become a critical enabler of AI-driven data-center infrastructure. In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Ciena Executive Advisor Scott McFeely joins BI analyst Woo Jin Ho to discuss how the company’s optical technology has evolved alongside hyperscale cloud and AI workloads, from coherent optics and WaveLogic DSPs...

‘We’ve seen an incredible acceleration of true automation, where AI agents were able to fulfill a significant amount of engagement with a consumer, whether it be voice or chat-based,” says Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE. He sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh to talk about the deployment of AI agents for contact centers. From fine-tuning of large language models to handling a h...

Quantum computing is extending beyond the lab to redefine how we address complex problems. On this episode of Tech Disruptors, IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi joins Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Jake Silverman and Kunjan Sobhani to explain what quantum computing is and how performance, reliability and cost will determine the winners of the race for fault tolerance. The conversation also explores how qu...

Powering businesses to accomplish their daily work remains Intuit’s central mission, using AI and a network of human experts to accomplish a wide range of business tasks for more than 100 million customers, from closing accounting books, processing payroll to preparing taxes. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Intuit CTO Alex Balazs speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel abou...

“AI removes the friction from the intent to the implementation,” says Amanda Silver, corporate vice president and head of products, apps and agents at Microsoft. She talks with Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana about how copilots and agents are collapsing the software lifecycle — from natural-language ideas to code, tests and operations — shifting developers to reviewing...

“Internally, we’ve kind of moved from a model where kind of engineering kind of owned R&D, to a model where everyone is now in R&D” says Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Humphreys tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana how the web-native platform is expanding into the enterprise while leaning into AI, including a disciplined A...

Embedded finance — integrating payments and financial services directly into apps and platforms — is entering its next phase, shifting from niche fintech use cases to core infrastructure for global players. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Marqeta CEO Mike Milotich joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how embedded finance, buy now, pay later and flexible credentials are r...

Consumer credit may be approaching its foundational AI moment — with buy now, pay later emerging as the first visible act. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Affirm and co-founder of PayPal, joins Bloomberg Intelligence global fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how machine learning is replacing static underwriting with real-time, transa...

Now an annual tradition on the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast, John Chambers, former Cisco CEO and founder of JC2 Ventures, sits down with hardware analyst Woo Jin Ho to kick off 2026 with his latest predictions for the tech sector and the global economy. Chambers argues that AI is entering a phase of rapid adoption — driving enterprise productivity gains, reshaping capital allocat...

The private equity marketplace is increasingly competitive, making it difficult to win a seat at the table on hot deals. AT&T’s in-house private investment arm, AT&T Ventures, seeks to stand out by making strategic investments via a founder-friendly approach, targeting the companies that are helping to shape the future of communications, such as satellite providers, edge computing firms, AI-RAN de...

Webtoon pioneered the vertical scrolling format nearly 20 years ago, and has been expanding the genres of its content since. CFO David Lee joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this Tech Disruptors episode to explain how the company is building out its global-content platform using AI-driven creator tools, advanced data infrastructure and high-throughput content workflows. He discusse...

Shopping is shifting from keyword-based search toward AI-driven, conversational guidance. Rajiv Mehta, Amazon.com’s vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping, joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant that integrates large language models with the company’s commerce data and personali...

Drone technology has had a prolonged evolution, with companies exploring viable use cases for mainstream adoption. Adam Woodworth, CEO of Alphabet’s Wing subsidiary, talks to Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst Mandeep Singh about drone delivery in the US and how he expects it to ramp up for consumer delivery of lighter packages and groceries. The discussion also covers form factor evolution for d...

“…A successful agentic enterprise deployment means each of your departments are fundamentally different,” Salesforce’s SVP of Product Marketing for AI Sanjana Parulekar says, as she joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to unpack what it really takes to scale Agentic AI beyond pilots: getting data AI-ready; adding context and governance; blending deterministic workflow...

“Open doesn’t mean a free for all, but open will win.” Workday CTO Peter Bailis joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to explain how the people-and-money system of record is evolving into an open, AI-ready platform — combining zero-copy data access with strict governance and API-first design. He outlines how Sana, Illuminate, Flowise and Paradox fit together as a front...

Search is shifting to intelligent, context-rich answers from static links. You.com CEO Richard Socher joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior software analyst Sunil Rajgopal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how You.com powers AI search for companies such as DuckDuckGo, while differentiating from enterprise peers like Glean and Exa through its web indexing, real-time accuracy a...

“We think that for every gigawatt, it’s about 25 exabytes of new flash creation,” says Greg Matson, SVP and head of products and marketing at Solidigm. Matson joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Jake Silverman on the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how Solidigm is powering AI’s growing data demands. The conversation explores the company’s evolution into a data-center-focused pure play, its innovatio...

“The world’s now flipped to inference — and it’s limited by power. With the same energy, we can deliver four times the output of a Blackwell,” says SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang. Liang joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kunjan Sobhani in this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to explain how SambaNova’s air-cooled, 10-kilowatt racks and “data-center-in-90-days” model are helping enterprises and gove...

“We are more than 10x safer on many key safety metrics than an average human driver” says Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo chief product officer. Saswat joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh to talk about the inflection in autonomous driving and how Waymo plans to scale across more cities. From the sensors used in Waymo’s AVs, the evolution of its driver system and expansion of its partnerships, the...

“We are moving beyond simple query-response to task completion.” AWS’s Swami Sivasubramanian joins Bloomberg Intelligence Software and Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to contrast consumer chatbots with enterprise agents and the controls they require. Topics include Agent Core for secure deployment (identity, tool use, memory, observability), QuickSuite for business users, Kero for developer workflo...