Technologist of the Month

🌟 Mentorship Means Seeing Potential Before They See It Themselves According to Kamini Belday, Head of Global Payments, IBM Cloud, true leadership is about lifting others up. Early in her career, Kamini walked into rooms where few people looked like her or talked like her. The finance and tech world was overwhelmingly male-dominated. But leaders saw her potential and nominated her for roles she di...

The Changing Economics of IoT 🌐 In this clip, Kai Hackbarth, Head of Product & Solutions at Bosch, talks about the ongoing consolidation in the IoT industry and why many businesses are rethinking their approach. He explains how high infrastructure costs in SaaS and PaaS models have made it challenging for companies to achieve profitability, even with large-scale data platforms. Kai also highl...

Building a Compliant and Scalable FinTech Ecosystem 💡 Pavan Bachwal, VP and Head of Ericsson Financial Services at Ericsson, explains how Ericsson is empowering banks, fintechs, and OTT players in Europe with a stable, scalable, and compliant technology foundation. 🔐 With a strong focus on regulatory and security compliance, from PSD2 and GDPR to SWIFT integrations and PCI certifications, Ericss...

🎙️ Making AI Simple (Again): Samuel Beek, Chief Product Officer, VEED As VEED transitioned deeper into the AI space, some users felt overwhelmed by new features. Instead of ignoring that feedback, the team doubled down on simplicity, investing in better discovery and adding an AI agent you can literally talk to for edits. Because great products aren’t just powerful, they’re easy, intuitive, and hu...

🎯 Data isn’t just important, it’s everything. For Rollo Goldstaub, Global Head of Sports Partnerships at TikTok, every decision in the sports sector must be backed by evidence, not opinion. 📊 From using data-driven insights to shape partnerships like TikTok’s upcoming collaboration with DAZN for the Club World Cup 🏆 to recognizing early adopters who embrace new trends first, Rollo highlights ho...

⚙️ Optimizing Data for Better ROI and Efficiency 💡 Pavan Bachwal, VP and Head of Ericsson Financial Services at Ericsson, shares how data is a continuous journey of learning and improvement. His team constantly works to enhance how their APIs and features are used by customers, driving faster turnaround times and reducing the total cost of ownership. 📊 By studying how customers interact with dif...

Public + Private Innovation Will Shape the Future of Payments Eric Tak, Head of Division, Digital Euro Product Proposition, European Central Bank, emphasized that while crypto isn’t likely to take off in everyday retail payments yet, the bigger picture lies in the collaboration between the public and private sectors. The Digital Euro will provide a secure, stable platform for basic payments, a fou...

🎥 From Chat to Creation: Meeting Users Where They Already Are- Samuel Beek, Chief Product Officer, VEED When the ChatGPT Store launched, the team at VEED didn’t wait for perfect data or lengthy analysis. They built the bot as an experiment, something small, fast, and curious. And it took off. Constantly ranking in the top 10 ChatGPT apps, it proved that sometimes the smartest move isn’t over-opti...

🧠 Beyond Language Models: Why Reinforcement Learning Still Matters: Martin Riedmiller, Research Scientist & Controls Team Lead, Google DeepMindWhile large language models have taken center stage with their incredible capabilities, Martin reminds us of something crucial: true intelligence isn’t just about processing existing data, it’s about learning from experience. Reinforcement Learning (RL...

☁️ Hybrid Cloud + AI = The Future of Modern Banking According to Kamini Belday, Head of Global Payments, IBM Cloud, hybrid cloud isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a transformation strategy. It allows banks to leap from legacy monolithic systems into flexible, microservice-based architectures while still maintaining compliance and control. With a hybrid cloud, financial institutions can: ✅ Leverage...

Harish Sarma is an accomplished executive with extensive experience spanning technology, sports, media & entertainment, built on a foundation in investment banking. As VP of Business Development and Partnerships at Yahoo Mail, he focuses on growing key metrics through strategic partnerships and business development. On The Menu: Yahoo Mail's revolutionary Catchup feature for inbox management T...

🎯 Marketing Will Evolve Beyond Metrics, It’ll Be About Meaning Igor Mikhalev, Partner & Head of Emerging Technologies Strategy, EY-Parthenon, envisions a future where marketing ceases to exist as a standalone function, instead becoming an extension of the product experience itself, seamlessly integrated into people’s lives. He suggests a radical shift in how we measure success, moving away fr...

🚀 Driving Scalable AI Adoption According to Hugo Hamad, now Head of AI/Gen AI Factory at AXA en France and former Director of AI at Decathlon, successfully scaling AI adoption isn’t about luck; it’s about building the right enablers. Drawing from his experience leading AI initiatives at Decathlon and now AXA en France, he highlights two crucial factors for success: Industrial Mindset & Produc...

🌍AI Regulation Needs a Global Standard Matthew Blakemore, CEO at AI Caramba!, raises an important concern about the imbalanced regulatory landscape in AI development. As the EU AI Act introduces stringent frameworks, many innovative businesses might choose to develop their tools in less regulated markets, taking advantage of greater flexibility before bringing those same tools to more restricted...

"Money with Context, The Magic of Managing Clients and Cash Together" For Oz Alon, Co-founder & CEO, HoneyBook, true business clarity begins when creatives manage clients and cash in one place. 💼💰 At HoneyBook, this integration turns numbers into insight, giving service-based professionals a complete view of their business and the confidence to make smarter decisions. He describes...

Andy Hood is Vice President of Emerging Technologies at WPP , where he leads innovation across 100,000+ creative professionals through the WPP Open AI platform. A night owl who discovered creative technology at 28, Andy has spent 25 years at the intersection of creativity and emerging tech, from his early days at AKQA to serving as jury president at Cannes Lions 2017.  On The Menu: Why generative...

🌐 "Building a Truly Interoperable Smart Home Future", Kai Hackbarth, Head of Product & Solutions, Bosch The smart home industry has evolved from isolated systems to collaborative ecosystems. For Kai Hackbarth, this marks a turning point, a step closer to seamless connectivity across all devices. 🔗 He also highlights the growing role of energy management technologies in enabling dev...

💬 “A Company Is a Living Body, Not a Machine” In an age of constant change, Sophie Heller, COO of BNP Paribas, believes that true leadership isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about empathy. 🧠💚 She trained as a therapist to better understand human behavior, mental health, and how organizations function like living systems. To her, every company is like a body; when one part suffers, the whole re...

🎯 Turning Search Trends into Product Growth | The VEED Way Samuel Beek, Chief Product Officer at @veedstudio, reveals how the company’s explosive growth is powered by one simple strategy: connecting growth channels directly to product development. By analyzing what people are searching for on Google, like “how to generate a podcast,” VEED builds those exact tools into its platform. The result? In...

💡 Scaling Trust in the Financial Ecosystem Pavan Bachwal, VP & Head of Financial Services at Ericsson, shares how the company’s technology powers massive transaction volumes for customers across financial ecosystems. It all comes down to three pillars: Scalability. Stability. Security. By building platforms that combine these strengths, Ericsson is helping financial institutions not only hand...

⚖️ The EU AI Act’s Biggest Hurdle: Regulating AI That’s Already in Use Matthew Blakemore, CEO at AI Caramba!, highlights a pressing challenge with the EU AI Act. While the framework does a strong job of classifying AI projects into risk categories, it faces a dilemma with tools that are already in widespread public use. Many existing systems, some of which likely fall into high-risk categories, ha...

Rollo Goldstaub is the Global Head of Sports Partnerships at TikTok . Rollo oversees Sports Content Partnership, Business Development, Strategy, and Operations, harnessing the power of TikTok for the largest Sports partners in the world. The Sports Partnerships team at TikTok excels in strategic management of the largest leagues, teams, federations, and broadcasters, supporting them in discovering...

Igor Mikhalev, Partner and Head of Emerging Technologies Strategy, EY-Parthenon, emphasizes that while AI has traditionally been used to optimize tasks like refining marketing messages or improving conversion strategies, its real potential lies in augmenting human creativity rather than replacing it. He advocates for a balance where AI supports experimentation and exploration, enabling teams to dr...

Matthew Blakemore, CEO at AI Caramba!, reflects on the recent debates around AI regulation with a healthy dose of scepticism. He highlights how companies like OpenAI, having already secured a competitive advantage through their vast training data, may now be pushing for regulation not purely from an ethical standpoint, but as a way to protect their lead and limit competition. He acknowledges the i...

Igor Mikhalev, Partner and Head of Emerging Technologies Strategy, EY-Parthenon, explains that creating innovative solutions is both an art and a science. Science provides the data, a clear, centered perspective of where the world is and where it was just days ago. But true breakthroughs, he says, come from human creativity and ingenuity, stretching the limits of what’s possible. ""The s...