AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology

Nearly 90% of enterprise data is unstructured. That's a daunting statistic until you realize it may also be your biggest competitive advantage. In this episode hosted at Cisco Live, Brian Feldt sits down with WWT's Jeff Fonke, NVIDIA's Jason Schroedl and NetApp's Mike Hommer to explore why data has become the defining factor in enterprise AI. From token economics and GPU utiliz...

By the time this episode reaches your feed, the AI landscape may have changed again. That's becoming the new normal. It's tempting to chase every new model, every policy update, every headline. But the organizations making real progress aren't rebuilding their strategy every time the landscape shifts. They're building the resilience to keep moving anyway. Madison Horn and Rob G...

AI has made writing code dramatically easier. Building great software is another story. Recorded live at Cisco Live, Raj Chopra, Cisco's Chief Product Officer for Security, joins WWT's Brian Ortbals and Joe Berger to explore what it really takes to become an AI-native organization. As AI changes the way software gets built, engineering becomes less about producing code and more about sol...

Everybody says they're data-driven. But according to a Harvard Business Review study, only 7% of enterprises believe their data is actually ready for AI. Not agents. Not advanced machine learning. Just AI. Everyone wants the outcome. Far fewer have done the years of work required to make AI useful in the first place. But Matt Pappas has. As Chief Data Officer at Kiewit, he's spent more t...

For years, technology leaders could afford a little inefficiency. A system that stayed in place longer than it should. Infrastructure that nobody got around to optimizing. Assets that quietly blended into the background. AI is changing the math. As organizations invest in more intelligence, more automation, and more ambitious digital strategies, every decision about infrastructure, operations, and...

The most important shift in AI isn't better chatbots. It's the arrival of agents that can work independently. Give them a task before bed and they may finish it before you wake up. They can write code, access tools, analyze information and make decisions without a human in the loop. The productivity upside is enormous but so is the potential risk. In this episode, NVIDIA's Dave Barr...

The most interesting thing at Cisco Live! 2026 wasn't a product announcement. It was a shift in tone. For years, technology leaders have had the luxury of studying change before responding to it. They could build a roadmap, socialize a strategy, secure a budget, and move forward on their own timeline. AI is taking that luxury away. Across nearly every conversation this week, the same tension...

Remember when employees started using Dropbox before IT approved it? AI agents feel a lot like that moment. People are building them because they're useful. Not because they were told to. The surprise isn't that agents are showing up across the enterprise, it's how quickly they're multiplying. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Softchoice's Craig McQueen and...

AI is collapsing the space between oversight and ownership. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, NASDAQ Global Head of Board Advisory Byron Loflin and WWT Global Head of Cyber Advocacy Kate Kuehn break down why boards are entering an age of accountability and what happens when AI moves faster than governance can keep up. As AI moves deeper into the enterprise, the challenge is no long...

What changes when AI stops answering questions and starts taking actions? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , WWT security leaders Istvan Burko and Jillian Anderson-Nix break down why agentic AI is forcing enterprises to rethink security from the ground up. These systems are no longer just generating content. They're touching sensitive data, triggering workflows, modifying code...

What happens when vulnerabilities can be discovered in minutes and exploits can be generated faster than organizations can patch them? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, former NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce and WWT cyber architecture and innovation leader Kent Noyes break down how AI is compressing the timelines cybersecurity teams have relied on for decades. We explore why A...

AI moves trillions of dollars in milliseconds. So why won’t companies let it send a customer email? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Erik Anderson, CEO of Singularity University and former Topgolf leader, breaks down the real constraint on enterprise AI adoption: trust. We talk about the shift to agentic AI, how it's reshaping thought work, and the tension leaders face betwe...

Most personalization efforts fail long before AI becomes the problem. It fails in quieter ways. A missing identity. A disconnected signal. A decision no one owns. In this conversation, Ralph Jovine and Chris Douglas unpack why most personalization efforts stall long before AI becomes the problem. The issue is structural. Data ownership is unclear. Governance is inconsistent. Signals don’t connect...

AI can generate answers instantly. But that doesn’t mean they’re right. Most enterprise AI doesn’t fail because of the model. It fails because the data underneath it doesn’t agree. Different teams, different definitions, different outcomes. It’s subtle, and it breaks trust fast. In this episode, Paul Bruffett, VP of Data and Analytics at Jack in the Box, joins WWT’s Dan Moristro to talk about what...

Most AI strategies look good in a demo. The real challenge is getting them to run at scale. Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC 2026, this episode with Ragu Chakravarthi from Core42 and Kraig Ecker from WWT explores what it actually takes to move from AI pilots to production systems. They discuss sovereign AI as critical infrastructure, what control really means across data and operations, and why trust h...

AI is writing code faster than most teams can review it. That’s the tension. Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC with Nate McKie, we get into what happens when developer speed takes off but security and quality don’t. The middle of the development process is collapsing. Code is cheap. Mistakes aren’t. So what actually has to change? We get into AI-native engineering, agentic development and the shift from...

AI is working. Your data probably isn’t. As enterprise AI moves into production, a new constraint shows up fast. Not models. Not compute. Data. In this episode, recorded live at NVIDIA GTC, NetApp’s Tore Sundelin and WWT’s Derek Elbert get into what’s actually slowing teams down. The shift from clean, structured data to messy, high-value, unstructured data that’s harder to find, govern and use in...

AI isn’t slowing down. Your data center is. As enterprise AI moves into real workloads, physical limits show up fast. Power. Cooling. Space. Timing. The conversation shifts quickly from what model to use to whether you can run it at all. In this episode, Schneider Electric CTO Jim Simonelli and WWT’s Chris Campbell talk through what happens when AI infrastructure, data center design and workload p...

AI is working. Until it isn’t. Not because the model failed, but because something behind it did. In this episode, recorded live at NVIDIA GTC, WWT’s Mike Trojecki and Everpure’s Kaycee Lai talk through what starts to show up once AI moves into real use. Data that’s harder to access than expected. Systems that slow things down. Security and governance questions that weren’t part of the original pl...

Agentic AI is getting real fast. The challenge isn’t building it anymore. It’s running it without losing control. Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC, this conversation gets into what actually changes when AI moves into production. Not in theory, but in practice. As organizations start designing for real usage, new pressure shows up. Systems get more complex. Costs become harder to predict. And security c...

Most enterprise AI tries to be impressive. In a hotel, it just needs to work. No one checks in hoping to experience great AI. They want things to feel smooth, fast, intuitive — like everything is just handled. That’s the standard. At IHG Hotels & Resorts, AI is being applied with that mindset. Not as a headline, but as a way to make employees more effective and operations run cleaner behind th...

At NVIDIA GTC 2026, the conversation shifted from model novelty to enterprise reality. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Chief AI Advisor Tim Brooks explains why agentic AI, inference-heavy workloads and physical AI are forcing CIOs and CTOs to rethink infrastructure, governance, trust and leadership. Brooks, WWT's Chief AI Advisor, said the industry is moving beyond fasci...

Private AI is quickly moving from niche architecture to a core enterprise AI strategy. As AI workloads move into production, leaders are rethinking where inference runs, how data stays governed and why hybrid AI infrastructure may offer the best balance of performance, cost and control. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, VMware by Broadcom’s Chris Wolf, NVIDIA’s Chad Olds and WWT CT...

As AI spreads beyond developers into every workflow, the differentiator shifts from tools to leadership. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh argues that winning in AI will lean heavily on culture: how fast an organization can learn, adapt and change. The new leadership challenge is moving fast without creating downstream chaos. More about this wee...

AI-powered coding assistants are rapidly compressing the time it takes to build software and delivering a competitive advantage that can lead to transformational outcomes. But according to WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, the bigger shift is organizational: companies must rethink leadership, data strategy and workforce skills to compete in an AI-native world. In this episode of the AI Proving...