What's Up with Tech?

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Marketing isn’t “soft” when you can tie it to the numbers that run the business. Evan sits down with Meghan Keough, a modern, business-first CMO with decades in enterprise tech, to unpack how marketing leaders can operate at the intersection of brand, revenue, and transformation without losing the plot. We get specific about the metric...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com 6G is closer than most people think, and the biggest surprise is that the headline might not be “faster.” We sit down with Mats Karlsson  from Ericsson to talk about the move toward physical AI, where networks help systems sense and act in the real world. When robots, vehicles, and digital twins depend on connectivity for safety and pe...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Autonomy in telecom sounds like a pure technology race until you look at where operators actually get stuck. It turns out the models aren't the bottleneck. The humans around them are. We're joined by @Ibrahim Eldeftar, who leads Cognitive Software and Services at Ericsson, to unpack the real path from partial automation to Le...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Identity is where the fight is moving fastest, and RSAC 2026 proved it. Fresh off the show floor, we sit down with Jim Taylor, President, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at RSA Security, to break down what’s truly changing in identity security as AI reshapes both the threat landscape and the defenses enterprises rely on. We dig into...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Agentic AI is no longer a side experiment running in a lab. It’s starting to look like the next operating layer inside the enterprise, and that raises a hard question: do you want a scattered collection of point tools, or a standardized agentic operating system that your teams can actually run? I sit down with Anurag Gurtu Chief Execut...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is everywhere in IT operations right now, but most sysadmins don’t need more buzzwords. We need fewer tickets, cleaner patching, faster deployments, and a clear view of what’s happening across every device. That’s why we sat down with Jaren Nichols, President and COO of PDQ to talk about modern enterprise device management the way a...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The martech stack used to feel complicated. Then generative AI showed up and turned “complicated” into “constantly changing.” We sit down with Scott Brinker, the analyst behind ChiefMartec, to unpack what’s really happening as marketing teams move from a familiar martech stack to a broader AI ecosystem filled with new tools, copilots,...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Manual SOC work is collapsing under its own weight. After RSAC, we sit down with Dave Mcginnis, who leads IBM Consulting’s threat management practice, to get brutally practical about what “autonomous security operations” really means when you strip away the marketing. The headline is simple: humans can’t be the bottleneck in threat mon...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Trade businesses keep our world running, but most of them operate on painfully thin margins. We talk with Fred Voccola CEO from Simpro Group about what happens when you bring practical AI to the job site and the back office, not as hype, but as an operating platform for the trades that helps contractors finish more work right the first...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Pressing zero to reach a human should not be the default plan. We talk with Fred Fontes CEO from Acclaim about what’s finally making enterprise voice-first AI work in the real world, especially inside regulated industries like banking and financial services where compliance, auditability, and data security are not negotiable. For teams...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI is making a weird problem even worse: it’s getting harder to tell what’s authentic. That’s why we sat down with Russ from Business Intelligence Group to talk about the We Love Tech Awards ( https://welovetechawards.com/) and what real, transparent judging looks like when trust is on the line. We get specific about how awards can be...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com AI hype is everywhere at Mobile World Congress, so we went looking for something rarer: real operational proof. From the Ericsson booth in Barcelona, we sit down with Ibrahim Eldeftar, who leads Cognitive Network Solutions product and portfolio for telco AI software, and Claudia Muñiz Garcia, Global Head of Sales for the same unit, to...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com CRM is about to feel less like a database and more like a conversation. We sit down with Brevo to unpack how a fast-growing customer engagement platform thinks about the next era of CRM, where large language models change the “entry point” for customer data and where the old battle over slick UI starts to disappear. We walk through Bre...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A check-in tablet passes from one patient to the next, and a single leftover photo of an ID or an auto-filled keyboard suggestion becomes a PHI nightmare. From the Samsung booth at HIMSS, we sit down with Ray to unpack how Samsung SDS approaches healthcare IT with a simple goal: make devices and workflows safer, easier, and more useful...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Agentic AI sounds like magic until you have to ship it inside a real enterprise contact center where every mistake becomes a compliance problem and every bad interaction hits customer trust. From Enterprise Connect, we sit down with Dialpad to unpack how they’re building agentic customer service on top of an end-to-end UCaaS and CCaaS...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your phone rings. The screen shows an unknown number or “spam likely.” Do you pick up, or do you protect yourself and ignore it? That split-second decision has become the default for millions of people, and it’s crushing legitimate communication from banks, healthcare providers, insurers, and service teams that genuinely need to reach...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com The fastest way to understand agentic AI is to stop thinking about chatbots and start thinking about outcomes. From Enterprise Connect, we sit down with RingCentral’s John Finch to talk about agentic voice AI that can handle real customer work end to end: answering the call, connecting to back-end systems, completing a transaction, con...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com RSAC Season Is Here. Your Certificates Expired Last Month. RSAC is coming, and I'll be there — so expect more conversations like this one dropping in the weeks ahead. But here's the thing: the most important security story this season isn't happening on the conference floor. It's already inside your network, running...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Talent gaps don’t feel strategic when they hit, they feel personal: missed deadlines, burned-out managers, and the slow bleed of “we can’t grow because we can’t hire.” From the floor at Enterprise Connect, we sit down with Brett and Sebastian from Gr8 Global to talk about a practical answer: building global capability center (GCC) team...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Missed calls cost more than you think, especially when leads come in after hours or demand spikes without warning. From the Enterprise Connect show floor, we sit down with https://www.girikon.com and their product and innovation leaders to unpack how AI-first customer engagement is changing the way contact centers and sales teams respo...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Meetings create the most valuable raw material in a company: the ideas people say out loud. The problem is that those ideas usually evaporate into scattered notes, half-remembered decisions, and action items no one can trace. From the floor of Enterprise Connect, we sit down with Zoom Chief Product Officer Jeff Smith to unpack how Zoom...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Cloud native doesn’t mean what it used to. What started as a self-service way to buy compute fast has turned into a full application platform transformation where Kubernetes, desired state, and automation decide how software scales, heals, and lands on compute, storage, and networking. From Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we sit do...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com A single customer call can reveal why people churn, what drives complaints, and where sales get stuck, but only if you can actually see the patterns. On the Enterprise Connect show floor, we sit down with John from MiaRec to unpack how AI-powered conversation analytics turns everyday contact center recordings into clear actions you can...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com Your contact center already tells you what’s happening. The harder question is why and what you should do next. From the Enterprise Connect floor, we sit down with Ray Bohoac CEO of Spearfish.ai to unpack a practical approach to contextual intelligence that connects customer conversations to the back-office data that actually explains...

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com If your contact center only finds problems after customers complain, you are operating blind. We sit down with Klearcom at Enterprise Connect to unpack what “CX end-to-end assurance” really looks like when you have voice, IVR, chat, SMS, and now AI-driven journeys all stitched together across multiple regions and vendors. We get specif...