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

AI is accelerating everything — including your attack surface. Prompt injection. Shadow AI. Non-human identities. Automated agents making decisions at machine speed. The pressure to move fast is real. So is the risk. In this episode, Fortinet’s Aamir Lakhani and WWT’s Dave Pisarek lay out a practical path forward. No hype — just the controls that actually work. We cover: Why prompt injection isn’t...

Most AI teams aren’t losing to the model. They’re losing to bad prompts. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , WWT’s Liz Gattra breaks down the invisible tax of vague instructions, blind trust in outputs and endless iteration loops that quietly burn tokens, waste GPU cycles and drag down ROI. As generative AI moves into production, AI literacy becomes operational leverage — not a soft...

AI pilots are easy. Scaling AI across a live network is not. As organizations move beyond experimentation, the challenge isn’t better models — it’s building AI that operates like infrastructure: reliable, secure, and measurable. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Matt Shorts, AVP of AI at Cox Communications, joins WWT’s Greg Schoeny to share how Cox moved AI from isolated pilots in...

As enterprises rush to deploy AI, observability is emerging as the discipline that determines whether those investments create durable value—or quietly erode it. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Ivan Wintersteiger, Cisco's Tapan Shah and NVIDIA's Shashank Sabhlok discuss why observability, when treated as foundational, becomes the connective tissue between inf...

As organizations move beyond experimentation, compute has become a deciding factor in whether AI delivers real value or stalls before production. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT VP Neil Anderson, NVIDIA VP Chris Marriott and Cisco VP Daniel McGinniss talk about how organizations are rethinking where AI runs, how it's secured and how value is measured. More about this wee...

As AI systems grow larger and more distributed, enterprises are discovering that performance, security and time-to-value depend less on individual components and more on how well the system moves, synchronizes and protects data at scale. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Justin van Schaik, Cisco's Dave Jansen and NVIDIA's Taylor Allison talk about how a well-de...

As enterprises move AI from experimentation to production, security failures are no longer isolated incidents—they are systemic risks embedded deep in infrastructure, data flows, and decision-making systems. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Istvan Berko, Cisco's DJ Sampath and NVIDIA's Ofir Arkin discuss why as AI becomes core infrastructure, security becomes...

As organizations struggle to move beyond AI pilots, a new architecture — Cisco's Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA — is emerging as a missing link between experimentation and real business outcomes. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Neil Anderson, Cisco's Kevin Wollenweber and NVIDIA's Chris Marriott discuss how the Secure AI Factory represents a shift from bo...

As companies move from chatbots to agents, the hardest work isn't prompting — it's building an always-on, governable, cost-aware system that leaders can trust. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, NVIDIA Vice President Craig Weinstein and WWT CTO Mike Taylor discuss how Cisco's Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA i...

Enterprise AI isn’t failing because of models, tools, or budgets. It’s failing because people don’t actually use it. While most organizations stall after pilots, Ally Financial broke the pattern — reaching over 50% AI adoption with nearly 90% retention. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Ally Chief Information, Data and Digital Officer Sathish Muthukrishnan joins former Bank of Ame...

Enterprise AI is moving out of pilots — and the infrastructure gaps are getting harder to ignore. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Intel’s Lynn Comp and WWT’s Mike Trojecki break down why treating enterprise AI infrastructure as a single hardware decision is a costly mistake. As agentic systems push AI into real operations, assumptions like “AI = GPUs” start to crack under pressur...

Enterprise AI didn’t fail. It hit the wall. In 2025, pilots multiplied, copilots spread, and expectations skyrocketed. Then reality caught up. Scaling AI turned out to be less about model quality — and more about data, security, cost visibility, and how organizations actually work. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Chris Campbell and Jason Campagna break down what enterprises learn...

AI is no longer an experiment — it’s an accountability test. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Dave DeWalt, Founder and CEO of NightDragon, and Kate Kuehn of WWT unpack what happens when AI systems fail, misfire, or create real-world risk — and who ultimately owns the outcome. As organizations look toward 2026, boards want visibility, CEOs want measurable impact, and the lines betw...

Cyber risk is changing — and AI is accelerating it. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, former NSA Director Rob Joyce joins WWT’s Madison Horn to explain how nation-state cyber activity has shifted from quiet espionage to strategic pre-positioning inside critical infrastructure. AI isn’t introducing new tactics — it’s collapsing timelines. Reconnaissance, phishing, and exploitation n...

Enterprise AI just grew up—and the math has changed. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, breaks down why the era of scattered AI pilots is over—and why the winners are moving fast, focused, and top-down. We unpack how leading enterprises are shifting from “let a thousand flowers bloom” to a tight portfolio of high-impact AI use cases that actual...

AI is moving faster than the rules designed to govern it—and legal teams are now on the critical path. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Olivia Fleming, Chief Legal Officer at Edgewood Management, and Erika Schenk, General Counsel and EVP of Compliance at World Wide Technology, unpack how enterprise AI is reshaping the legal function—from gatekeeper to growth enabler. They break d...

AI is shipping faster than security teams can catch it—and the attack surface is quietly exploding. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Shawn Wormke of F5 and Chris Konrad of World Wide Technology unpack the rise of what they call “naked AI”—enterprise AI systems deployed without proper data controls, API protection, or governance. Drawing on new F5 research, they reveal why only 2%...

AI pilots are easy. Enterprise AI at scale is the hard part. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Craig Dillman of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Earl Dodd of World Wide Technology break down how enterprises are moving from experimentation to production-grade artificial intelligence—and why AI Factories are becoming the backbone of modern enterprise AI. Rooted in decades of supercompu...

GPUs don’t create value. Enterprise AI does—when it’s built the right way. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Allen Clingerman of Dell Technologies and Matt Halcomb of World Wide Technology break down why the next phase of enterprise AI won’t be won by chasing GPUs or spinning up one-off pilots—but by building real AI factories grounded in data, strategy, and execution. They introdu...

AI at scale isn’t about more GPUs—it’s about building a system that can keep evolving. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , John Gentry of NVIDIA and Derek Elbert of World Wide Technology explain why AI factories are becoming the backbone of enterprise AI—and why isolated GPU clusters can’t keep up. They break down the factory model for production-grade artificial intelligence: data...

Cisco's Nicolas Sagnes and World Wide Technology's Bob Watson outline why the next generation of AI infrastructure must be engineered as a secure, observable, full-stack system — and why enterprises relying on pilots risk falling behind. The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving G...

AI isn’t just changing how software gets written—it’s changing who ships, who scales, and who falls behind. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast , Nate McKie and Andrew Brydon of World Wide Technology break down how artificial intelligence and AI coding assistants are reshaping enterprise software development—from real productivity gains and improved data quality to the risks leaders c...

As enterprises rush to deploy copilots, automation and secure private AI, energy has become the defining constraint. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, visionary leaders including NightDragon's Dave DeWalt, Morgan Stanley's Jeff Holzschuh and Beacon AI Centers' Josh Schertzer unpack the new reality unfolding across the grid. They reveal why power — not land or fiber —...

Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of the global economy. Powered by leaps in accelerated computing, digital twins and autonomous systems, a new industrial era is emerging in real time. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, NVIDIA leaders Jay Puri, Charlie Wuischpard and Craig Weinstein break down how the entire AI stack — from the silicon driving breakthroughs to the softw...

In this episode, Google Cloud COO Francis deSouza and WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh talk about how executives are turning artificial intelligence into a true competitive multiplier by building intelligent operations that run faster, cheaper and smarter; create predictive customer experiences that earn real loyalty; and accelerate innovation by embedding AI into every workflow. Editor's...