TechSpective Podcast

Beth Simone Noveck joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about her book, Reboot, AI and the Race to Save Democracy. She's a professor at Northeastern, where she leads the Burns Center for Social Change. She also founded Innovate US, a training program for public sector workers. It's grown into one of the largest AI training efforts in the country. Before that, she ran AI for...

Most cloud security tools have a detection problem. They find misconfigurations well enough. The issue is what happens after — a ticket gets opened, someone works the queue, the fix goes in, and three weeks later the same misconfiguration is back because a different person on the team made the same call. Ariel Litmanovich watched that cycle for years, not at some mid-market company struggling with...

Before COVID forced everyone out of the office, hiring for most companies was a pretty localized exercise. You posted the job, you interviewed whoever could physically show up, and you picked someone. If you were based in a mid-sized city, you hired from a mid-sized city talent pool. Remote work changed that. Suddenly a company in Topeka, Kansas could interview candidates in Portland, Maine — or a...

Most organizations believe they have a solid handle on their AI risk. According to a new report, that confidence may be misplaced. ArmorCode partnered with the Purplebook community to survey more than 650 cybersecurity leaders to produce the State of AI Risk Management 2026 report. The results reveal a disconnect that's hard to explain away. Nearly 90% of respondents said they had complete visibil...

Every few years, something comes along that reshapes the threat landscape and sends the industry scrambling for new tools, new frameworks, and new buzzwords. The perimeter died. Then it came back. Endpoints became the priority. Now they're not the whole story. Identity is the new battleground. AI is changing everything. And yet, the more I talk to people who've spent decades in the trenches, the m...

There's a pattern that shows up in incident response work that nobody talks about in the vendor briefings. You bring in forensics after something goes wrong, and somewhere in that process, you find a tool — already deployed, already licensed, sometimes running for years — that had the data to catch what happened. Nobody was looking at it. In some cases, it wasn't even turned on the right way. Max...

I keep having versions of the same conversation. The names and logos change, but the underlying tension doesn't: organizations are deploying AI agents fast, they're deploying them into production, and a lot of them weren't ready when they did it. Monte Carlo's co-founder and CTO Lior Gavish joined me on the TechSpective Podcast recently, and we got into why that's happening and what it actually me...

There's a moment in my conversation with Bob Bobel where he mentions that customers are having a harder time finding people who actually know Active Directory. Not cloud identity — the old on-premise stuff that most large organizations still run. Even if they've also got Entra ID and Office 365 sitting on top of it, they maintain those older systems. That expertise is retiring. Moreover, it's not...

Every conversation I’ve had for the past couple of years has followed the same arc. First, it was generative AI. Then agentic AI. Now the question everyone is circling is how you actually secure agentic AI — and it turns out that’s a harder problem than most people expected. I sat down with Naor Paz, CEO and co-founder of Capsule Security, to talk through it. Naor spent years as a security practit...

Fresh off RSAC 2026, I sat down with Ramin Farassat, Chief Product Officer at Menlo Security, to work through what agentic AI is actually doing to the enterprise attack surface. Menlo has spent 13 years focused specifically on browser security. The idea is that the browser, not the endpoint, not the network perimeter, is where most enterprise work happens and most exposure lives. That was already...

Ransomware has been a persistent headline topic for years now. As a result, a lot of people have probably gotten numb to it. I know I had. It starts to feel like background noise — another attack, another breach, another company paying out. So when I sat down with Derek Manky, Chief Security Strategist and Global VP of Threat Intelligence at Fortinet, he started walking through the numbers from Fo...

Everyone is talking about agentic AI. And that's part of the problem. Over the last couple of years, the term has gone the way of every other buzzword in tech — slapped onto products and platforms regardless of whether it actually applies. Marketing departments are busy. As Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, put it, we sat down to record the latest TechSpective...

Cloud was supposed to make everything easier. In some ways, it absolutely has. You can spin up infrastructure in minutes, scale on demand, and deploy globally without ever touching a piece of hardware. That’s a massive shift from the days when a “deployment” meant racking servers and hoping you sized things correctly six months in advance. But if you’ve actually been in the trenches—even recently—...

Everybody's got an AI strategy. Every platform claims to be AI-powered. Every vendor deck has a slide about how their product uses machine learning to deliver transformative outcomes. Most of it is still theater. I had a conversation with David DeSanto, CEO at Anaconda, recently for the TechSpective Podcast, and what struck me most was how honest he was about where enterprise AI actually stands. N...

I spend a lot of time talking with people in cybersecurity. Founders, analysts, CISOs, researchers. One thing that comes up again and again is that the problem space keeps getting bigger. Not just more threats—more complexity. That’s really the thread running through my recent TechSpective Podcast conversation with Clarence Chio, co-founder and CEO of Coverbase. Security used to be easier to conce...

Trust on the internet used to be a fairly simple calculation. You looked for familiar names, recognizable brands, maybe a blue checkmark, and you made a judgment call. Today, that math often fails. AI has changed the game. Deepfakes are convincing. Entire personas can be spun up in minutes. Fraud doesn’t look sloppy anymore—it looks professional. And in many cases, it looks exactly like the people...

If you’ve been following trends in cybersecurity and enterprise tech, you already know that AI has become more than a buzzword—it’s a foundational shift. What may surprise you, though, is just how central identity has become in that evolution. In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I had the chance to speak with Naresh Persaud, Principal at Deloitte, who has spent more than two decades...

How do you know your cybersecurity investments are actually making you safer? That’s the question at the heart of the latest TechSpective Podcast episode, where Dr. Chase Cunningham—better known to many as “Dr. Zero Trust”—joins me for an unfiltered, candid conversation about the state of modern cybersecurity. And no, this isn’t a puff piece on policy frameworks or the latest silver bullet tool. I...

It’s getting harder to have a “normal” conversation about content, social media, or visibility anymore—mostly because the rules keep changing while you're still mid-sentence. Just a few years ago, you could create a blog post, optimize it for SEO, promote it on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter and not a dumpster fire of right-wing conspiracy lunacy rebranded as X), and expect a decent numbe...

The cybersecurity landscape never sits still—and neither do the conversations I aim to have on the TechSpective Podcast. In the latest episode, I sit down with Etay Maor, Chief Security Strategist at Cato Networks and a founding member of Cato CTRL, the company’s cyber threats research lab. Etay brings a rare mix of technical depth and practical perspective—something increasingly necessary as we n...

I’ve had a lot of conversations about AI over the past couple years—some insightful, some overhyped, and a few that left me questioning whether we’re even talking about the same technology. But every now and then, I get the opportunity to sit down with someone who not only understands the technology but also sees its broader implications with clarity and honesty. This episode of the TechSpective P...

There’s a question I’ve been sitting with lately: Are we prepared for what AI is about to expose in our organizations—not just technically, but operationally? In this episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sit down with Kavitha Mariappan, Rubrik’s Chief Transformation Officer, to unpack some of the less flashy but arguably more urgent questions about enterprise security, AI readiness, and business...

There’s something happening in cybersecurity right now that’s both exciting and a little disorienting. As generative and agentic AI take over headlines, conference keynotes, and investor decks, it’s easy to assume we’re on the verge of some great leap forward. The reality is more complicated—and more interesting. In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I had the chance to sit down with...

Every once in a while, a conversation forces you to stop and rethink something you thought you already understood. Recording this latest TechSpective Podcast episode with Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman did exactly that—and it has everything to do with how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of identity security. If you’ve been following the industry for a while, you know the story: hybrid environments...

Every once in a while, I end up in a conversation that hits at exactly the right moment—when the industry is shifting, the vocabulary is changing, and everyone is quietly circling the same questions. This new episode of the TechSpective Podcast is one of those. Art Poghosyan, CEO and co-founder of Britive, joined me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast for a fluid and surprisingly energizin...