Utilizing Tech - The Podcast Series about New and Emerging Technologies

In this episode, Stephen Foskett and Chris Grundemann discuss the impact of AI on the future of work. How will our everyday lives be transformed by the widespread application of AI? What about the datacenter? Do AI-enabled network management tools mean we lose jobs? We already rely on AI-enabled tools, from Siri to Marvis, and maybe this is the template for the future of work with AI. Not everyone...

We begin by taking a look at the world of data and analytics in the enterprise. Data architects like Yves have been involved in enterprise IT applications for decades, but the world really took off with the advent of data warehouses and the field of data science. Now AI and ML are impacting the field in many ways, and we discuss how this world has changed. Data scientists come from a statistics ba...

AI, machine learning, and neural networks are not new ideas. So what changed now? Over the last 5-6 years, advances in software, hardware, and scale have brought machine learning to the forefront, enabling new products and technologies. In this episode, Bob Friday, CTO of Mist, a Juniper Company, discusses the changes that have enabled his company and others to bring AI to the enterprise. We focus...

Matt Bryson of Wedbush Securities joins Stephen Foskett for a discussion of AI hardware companies, focusing on the biggest player, Nvidia. Stephen and Matt start with a look at Nvidia: Just how big is Nvidia in the enterprise AI market? Then we turn to other major player in this space, Intel, which is strong in the inference market with their Xeon processors but obviously wants a bigger piece of t...

Most enterprise IT projects fail, and it has been this way for decades, and this discussion with Roey Mechrez of BeyondMinds considers why this is the case. One of the primary reasons is the trade-off between building custom solutions and buying off the shelf products. This is doubly different with AI since the success of a model depends on the data and training, not to mention the maintenance and...

David Aponte and Demetrios Brinkmann discuss the future of Kubeflow with Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai. Kubeflow is getting a lot of attention, but contributions and community seem to be lagging. Is this really the future of machine learning or just another dead-end open source project? Will product vendors pile on top, redirect the project, or kill development? The open source community tends t...

Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai discuss the parallels between DevOps and MLOps with Gaetan Castelein of Tecton. We are in the middle of a shift in analytics and software engineering, with DevOps and continuous deployment, and this is colliding with the development of data analytics and big data. Machine Learning allows organizations to handle this explosion of data and build new applications and a...

Stephen Foskett discusses the practicalities involved in packaging, deploying, and operating AI models with Manasi Vartak of Verta. Deploying an AI model in production is a challenge, just like it was in the past with software. Once a company has an AI model to deploy, they must validate its results, create scaffolding code to make it consumable, optimize the data pipelines, instrument it, and ass...

Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai are joined by Chris Grundemann to discuss how AI is used in enterprise networking, and how it is changing the industry. They begin with a discussion of AI in enterprise networking, connecting it with software-defined networking and other trends. What network management tasks can be improved through the use of AI? Grundemann looks to using the technology in root caus...

Stephen Foskett is joined by Josh Fidel, a technologist and futurist who has been inspired by applications for AI. Starting with a discussion of GPT-3, the AI text generation engine, the discussion ranges widely from AI Weirdness to James Yu's Singular to technological determinism to the Melbourne Monolith . Applications of AI are everywhere today, and Fidel's background as an enterprise technolog...

Stephen Foskett is joined by Karen Lopez, an expert and speaker on data management, data quality, and data analysis. Karen focuses on the quality of the data underlying AI systems and the ethics of using this data. She discusses concerns about data reuse, consent for use, and how changes of data cat impact the outcome of models. We also consider the impact of pervasive data collection, and how thi...

Stephen Foskett is joined by Gina Rosenthal, an expert on enterprise IT infrastructure and operations. Gina has made her career in enterprise IT infrastructure and has worked with many of the largest vendors. In this episode, she considers how vendors approach artificial intelligence, what applications they are delivering, and what this means in the enterprise. The conversation turns to ethics and...

Stephen Foskett is joined by Ray Lucchesi, an expert on enterprise IT infrastructure and operations. Ray has seen many technologies come and go, but he's impressed by AI. Why does he think it's more reality than hype and how does he think it will affect the datacenter going forward? How are product vendors using AI and ML technology today, from storage to security to systems management? What will...

Stephen Foskett discusses practical aspects of enterprise AI with David Aponte and Demetrios Brinkmann. AI offers promise to help IT operations departments deal with the flood of data, since ML is so good at finding needles in haystacks. But is it true or just vendor hype? Are current vendors able to work in this space or do we need a new kind of product or vendor to develop AI models? Does the ne...

Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai discuss the ethics and morality of AI. Taking a cue from an article written by Andy for AI Trends, we focus on the various biases that can influence AI, and how to prevent these from interfering with the results. Andy recommends modeling knowing that biases would come into the input data, recognizing limitations in technology and data, teaching human values and vali...

In this pilot episode of Utilizing AI, Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai discuss the reason for the podcast and consider where we go from here. AI is getting real, moving out of academia and hyperscale and into the enterprise. Businesses are adopting AI in strategically, and IT companies are deploying AI technologies in their products. This trend is quite obvious to Stephen at Gestalt IT, as many Te...