What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your CRM knows a lot about your customers, so why does it still feel like a place you go to do homework? We talk with SugarAI CEO David Roberts about the hard truth many sellers live every week: CRM has mostly evolved into a management tool, not a system that makes reps better in the moment that matters, right before a call, a meeting,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your AI demo is easy. Shipping AI inside a regulated insurance workflow is the hard part and that’s where the real advantage gets built. We sit down with Doug Marquis, CTO at ZyWave, to get specific about what’s changing in insurance technology and why “agentic AI” only matters when it reliably drives growth outcomes for agencies and b...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t just changing cybersecurity tools, it’s changing the pace of the entire fight. When attackers can scale campaigns with automation and operate at machine speed, the old rhythm of annual pen tests and quarterly reviews stops making sense. We sit down with Hom Bahmanyar Global Enablement Officer at Ridge Security, to talk about w...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is rewriting the rules of healthcare software development, but building a secure scalable healthcare platform still comes down to fundamentals: clear requirements, strong ownership, and serious engineering discipline around HIPAA compliance and PHI protection. We sit down with Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of TechnologyRivers,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Phishing used to be a numbers game. With AI, it’s becoming a personalization game and that’s exactly why “good enough” login security is quietly turning into a liability. We sit down with Dawn Manley, PhD, SVP, Product Management of Yubico to talk about why phishing-resistant authentication is now a must-have for anyone protecting high...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The leadership playbook a lot of us grew up with is starting to fail in the moments that matter most: high pressure decisions, fast growth, founder stress, and team conflict that can’t be solved with a new script. We sit down with Peter Carnochan , an executive coach who is also a psychologist and trained psychoanalyst, to talk about a...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t a side project for marketing anymore. It’s becoming the way work gets done, and that shift is happening faster than most teams can measure, govern, or even fully see. We sit down with Ed from Callan Consulting to unpack what he’s hearing directly from CMOs and heads of marketing about real-world AI adoption in tech marketing,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is everywhere on stage, but production AI is won in the details. From HPE Discover, we sit down with Jason Schradel, Director of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA, to unpack what it really takes to build an “AI factory” that an enterprise can deploy, operate, and scale without turning every upgrade into a science project. If you’re try...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A hospital breach can turn the network “dirty” in minutes. A fiber cut can take a grocery store offline at the worst possible time. And almost every CIO has said some version of the same thing: “I love the technology, help me find the money.” That’s the tension we dig into with John Tonthat CRO of Cellhub, one of T-Mobile’s longest-ten...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest attackers don’t “hack” like they used to, they drift through systems, blend into normal behavior, and move at machine speed. That reality forces a hard question: if you cannot defend the perimeter anymore, what should a modern security architecture look like? We sit down with James Karimi, CIO and CISO of GTT Communications...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A two-week simulation was all it took for “autonomous AI agents with rules” to reveal how fragile our current guardrails really are. We sit down with Satya Nitta from Emergence AI, an autonomous AI lab working at the intersection of neural networks and symbolic AI, to unpack the Emergence World Experiment: five virtual cities, ten agen...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI isn’t magic, and it definitely isn’t free. We sit down with Ken from Pega Systems to get brutally practical about the economics of enterprise AI: why token costs are a symptom, why infrastructure spend is so high, and how “murky ROI” happens when companies deploy AI for novelty instead of measurable business value. From Ken’s perspe...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Hybrid communications is easy to praise and hard to pull off, especially when your reality includes on-prem systems, private cloud requirements, public cloud apps, and a growing buy-in committee that can hit dozens of stakeholders. We talk with Jonathan Buckle, VP of the Americas at Mitel, about what hybrid unified communications actua...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI in telecom is finally graduating from slide decks to real operational impact, but the jump from pilot to production is where most teams get stuck. I sit down with Guy Lupo from the TM Forum, who leads the trustworthy AI and data mission, to talk about what it actually takes to become an AI native telco and why the industry’s next ga...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The easiest system to hack is the one that’s always there to be found. We sit down with Steve Visconti, CEO and co-founder of XIID, to talk about a different cybersecurity mindset: architectural invisibility, where the goal isn’t to build a bigger wall, it’s to make the target unreachable in the first place. We dig into what “no inboun...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A 2005 malware sample sounds like ancient history, until it looks like cyber sabotage that may predate Stuxnet. We sit down with Jags from SentinelOne’s Sentinel Labs to unpack Fast 16, a rare framework that doesn’t just break computers, it quietly corrupts high precision calculations. If you’ve ever treated simulation results, enginee...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Personalized phishing is no longer “spray and pray.” It’s targeted, multi-channel, and increasingly powered by exposed employee data that’s sitting in plain sight. We sit down with Paul Mander, Chief Commercial Officer at Optery for Business, to unpack what’s driving the next wave of AI-driven social engineering and why so many securit...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your phone rings, you hesitate, and you let it go to voicemail because it might be a scam. Meanwhile your team is juggling Microsoft Teams, Webex, mobile calling, messaging apps and a growing stack of AI tools that promise better customer experience but often add complexity. We sit down with William Rubio to unpack what’s actually chan...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your product can have a world-class cloud stack and a blazing-fast 5G link, then lose the whole experience in the last half meter. That’s the “last meter” problem, and it’s why we sat down with Dr. Frederic Nabki Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Spark Microsystems, to talk about ultra-wideband wireless that targets wirelike resp...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your carrier has more data than almost any company you interact with, yet most telcos still struggle to turn that advantage into growth. We sit down with Miguel Carames, the Chief Product Officer at Mobileum to sort out what’s real, what’s next, and what’s pure hype when it comes to AI in telecom, 5G monetization, and the future of ope...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com If your SOC is buried under alert noise, another flashy AI demo won’t save you. We go deeper into what actually works: starting with data strategy and detection quality so automation has real signal to work with, not chaos to summarize. Our guest CEO and Founder Karthik Kannan from Anvilogic explains what “agentic SecOps” looks like in...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Cloud was supposed to simplify everything. Instead, a lot of CIOs are staring at bills that are far higher than anyone forecast, feeling locked into hyperscalers, and wondering where the business value went. I sit down with David Linthicum, former Deloitte chief cloud strategy officer turned tech influencer, to give an unvarnished real...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your backup system is sitting on a gold mine and most companies are treating it like a fire extinguisher behind glass. From the floor of Dell Technologies World, we talk with Simon Taylor CEO of HYCU about their next chapter: HYCU Air, an AI resiliency platform designed to turn SaaS backup data into something you can actually interroga...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest way to break a modern network isn’t your Netflix download, it’s the quiet, constant upload from sensors, logs, and telemetry that nobody ever reads. We sit down with Julien Dersey from AtomBeam to unpack why data efficiency is suddenly a front-line issue for IoT networking, edge computing, and cloud operations, even in a wo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com ANZ moves fast, and that speed exposes the difference between “cloud by default” and communications that actually hold up under pressure. We sit down with Mitel and Ethan Global to unpack what it takes to deliver unified communications, contact center, and customer experience platforms across Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacif...