The Catalyst by Softchoice

If you read the headlines, you'd think nearly every major employer marched its workforce back to the office five days a week. The data says otherwise. And so does the human cost when companies push it anyway. In this episode of The Catalyst, Brian Elliott , CEO of Work Forward, an anonymous 30-year IT veteran and former Marine, and Softchoice's Lisa Walkden lay out what return-to-office...

There’s a quiet crisis running through IT leadership that nobody names in the meeting: the certainty that you’re in over your head, and that any minute now, someone’s going to find out. It comes with the job. And for women in tech, there’s a second layer underneath. In this episode of The Catalyst, from Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company, host Katey Teekasingh sits with three women who’ve...

Somewhere in your organization, an AI decision is sitting on someone’s desk right now. Who owns it? In most mid-market companies, nobody does — or rather, it’s landed on the IT leader who was already doing three other jobs. In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Jeremy Wight, CTO of CareMessage — a patient engagement platform serving 22 million low-income patients across the US — who had to wr...

Every IT leader has a “day one” story. The moment they opened the server closet, logged into the admin console, or reviewed the vendor contracts and realized the job they were hired for isn’t the job they actually have. In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Chris Schopf, an IT operations team lead who walked into a new job to find twelve-year-old servers, two unfinished infrastructure project...

After our biggest season ever — nearly 80,000 downloads, a top 2% global ranking, and a documentary-style approach unlike any other show in B2B tech — host Katey Teekasingh is back to set up what's coming next. Season 8 takes on the questions mid-market IT leaders are quietly wrestling with right now: the rise of accidental AI ethics officers. The imposter feeling that follows even the most s...

For decades, building software meant doing eighty percent of the hard work before you had anything to show for it. AI just flipped that equation. And it's creating a risk nobody planned for. In this episode of The Catalyst, host Katey Teekasingh explores vibe coding — the technology that lets anyone build software by describing what they want in plain language. It was named Collins Dictionary...

What got you here won't get you there. For most IT leaders, the path to the top was paved with expertise — knowing the systems, owning the decisions, having the answers. But something happens when that playbook stops working. Not a crash. Not a failure. Just a quiet plateau that tells you something needs to change. In this episode of The Catalyst, we explore what's on the other side of t...

Every vendor in the industry is slapping the word "agentic" on their roadmap. But, what is agentic AI, really? And should IT leaders care? In this episode, we bring together three voices with very different answers: a skeptic who says it's rebranded orchestration, a strategist who says the reasoning layer is genuinely new, and a founder betting his company on it. Together, they cut...

When David Koopmans' IT manager started sending strange messages to employees, David knew something was wrong. By then, threat actors had been inside his network for 30 days. What followed was a ransomware nightmare that cost $14 million, put David in the hospital, and ended with him being let go—despite years of warning leadership they needed to invest in security. In this episode, we follow...

Multi-cloud used to be a dirty word — something that happened to you through mergers, shadow IT, or teams gone rogue with corporate cards. But the walls came down, the standards converged, and best-of-breed finally seemed within reach. Then AI arrived with a whole new layer of complexity. Or did it? In this episode, we explore how agentic AI might actually solve the thing that made multi-cloud har...

Everyone's chasing AI. Meanwhile, most organizations are wasting 25-30% of their software budget on tools nobody uses. In this episode, we meet James Malek, Senior VP of IT Infrastructure at Lexitas, who inherited chaos—45 acquisitions in five years, no structured IT department, and a hodgepodge of contracts everywhere. Instead of chasing the next shiny thing, James took a different approach:...

AI is transforming education—but not evenly, and not easily. In this episode of The Catalyst, we step inside classrooms, school boards, and districts, navigating the AI revolution with tight budgets, limited staff, and high stakes for students. From fears around cheating and data privacy to confusion over licensing and unused tools already paid for, this conversation reveals what AI adoption reall...

Enterprise expectations. Startup-sized teams. And zero margin for failure. Across museums, national parks, retail stores, and nonprofit organizations, mid-market IT leaders are being asked to do more than ever—with fewer people, tighter budgets, and growing complexity. Most burn out. Some figure it out. In this episode, The Catalyst brings together two leaders navigating that reality from differen...

When mid-market IT leaders call about AI, most ask the wrong question. Instead of “What problem are we solving?” they jump straight to “Which LLM should we use?” — a mindset that helps explain why 95% of AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business returns. In this episode, two of Softchoice’s leading AI experts — Sean Larkin, AI Principal Architect, and Ron Espinosa, Director, Google Cloud Categ...

937 applications. 42 interviews. 80 days. That's what it took one experienced data scientist to land a job in 2025—and he's one of the lucky ones. In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow two tech professionals through what they call "the worst job market ever." Emily, a software developer with 10 years of experience and a degree from University of Waterloo's prestigious...

Every night, IT professionals across the country go home and cry. They work until 10PM unpaid. They become "the guy" their entire organization depends on. They stay in toxic jobs because they feel guilty, or because people are counting on them, or because they simply can't imagine leaving. In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, we follow two IT professionals through their bu...

What if the best employee AI adoption strategy is one most companies refuse to try? While business leaders rush to mandate AI from the top down, Softchoice discovered something counterintuitive: the most successful transformations happen when you let people experiment on their own terms. (Safely!) This episode takes you inside Softchoice's organic approach to AI adoption—from a VP who started...

For six years, The Catalyst brought you conversations with IT leaders solving hard problems. But we kept hearing stories that couldn't fit into a single interview—stories that needed multiple voices, conflicting perspectives, the messy truth of what it's really like out there. Season 7 changes everything. We're making audio documentaries—think This American Life for the IT team. Eac...

The rise of AI isn’t just about smarter machines—it’s about reshaping the way we work, create, and innovate.  In the season finale of The Catalyst by Softchoice, Heather Haskin sits down with Gil Press, senior contributor at Forbes, to trace the modern history of AI.  From the early breakthroughs in deep learning to the rise of generative AI, Press explores the key moments that shaped the AI indus...

The future of tech isn’t just about speed and innovation—it’s about who gets a seat at the table.  In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, Rachel Skaff, AWS Managing Director of America’s Channel and Partner Sales, joins Heather Haskin to explore how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are driving innovation in tech.   From her unconventional path into the industry to leading DEI initiat...

The future of business is a conversation. In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, Heather Haskin and Craig McQueen, Vice President of AI Solutions at Softchoice, dive into how conversational AI is reshaping industries and redefining success.   From smarter customer support to groundbreaking innovations, discover why this technology is more than just talk—it’s a game-changer. With real-world...

What if your company could leverage AI to not only increase productivity but also improve your mental well-being? What if the secret to transforming your workplace culture and achieving extraordinary results lay in the smallest, most intentional changes?  In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, host Heather Haskin sits down with 1-Degree/Shift founders Suchitra Davies-Webb and Nick Foster t...

A lot of charities are just trying to keep the lights on. They don’t have resources for tech infrastructure and training. That’s where Softchoice’s Charity Accelerator Program comes in.   In this episode of The Catalyst by Softchoice, host Heather Haskin dives into the transformative power of technology for small charities with Joseph Byer and Jill Crowley, co-chairs of Softchoice’s Charity Accele...

What if your company could leverage AI to not only increase productivity but also improve your mental well-being?  In this episode of The Catalyst, Heather Haskin speaks with Anna Baird, Chief Customer Officer for Generative AI Go-to-Market at Google, about the crucial human element in AI implementation.   They discuss how to leverage AI to enhance, not undermine, the employee experience, fosterin...

It’s one thing to hear about the speeds and feeds of a technology – and quite another to get a real human voice, to shine a light on the real value these tools can offer us.  In this episode, host Heather Haskin delves into the practical applications of Microsoft Copilot with Cole Pascua, Senior Microsoft Modern Work Specialist at SoftChoice.   Cole provides a firsthand account of Softchoice'...