Tech Talks Daily

Epizodai

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  Making Better Marketing Decisions With Braze AI 02.10.2026 20min

  How can marketers make better decisions for individual customers without spending their working lives designing, running, and maintaining separate tests? Recorded at Braze Forge 2026 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, this episode of Tech Talks Daily features my conversation with George Khachatryan, Head of AI Decisioning at Braze. George describes leading product management for AI Decisioning Studio and shares the story behind OfferFit, the company he cofounded before it became part of Braze. We begin with the practical limits of segmentation and A/B testing. George explains that smaller customer segments can make it harder to collect enough evidence for a useful result, while each new creative option introduces further work. His explanation of reinforcement learning offers a different approach. The marketer defines the objective and the options available to the system, which then experiments, observes the results, and adjusts its decisions. We discuss the distinction between Decisioning Studio Pro and the newly announced Decisioning Studio Go. George describes Pro as offering flexibility around success metrics and custom data, with data science support required during implementation. Go is designed as a self-service option using data generated within Braze. At the time of recording, he says Go supports email and optimizes click activity with machine clicks filtered out. Marketers choose the journey, creative options, subject lines, calls to action, available timings, frequencies, and guardrails. The limits are as useful as the possibilities. George recommends a baseline of at least a few thousand clicks per month for a journey using Go, so the model has enough information to learn. He also acknowledges that maximizing clicks will not always maximize conversions. We discuss why those objectives need to be assessed separately, rather than treating improved interaction metrics as proof of additional sales. George explains how the system can learn from similarities between creative variants and describes daily model retraining as a way to adapt to changing behavior. We also talk about reporting against a business-as-usual control group. He distinguishes the performance reporting available at the time of recording from deeper explanations of why a model made a particular choice, which he describes as an area of ongoing development. One of the most memorable parts of the conversation concerns customer trust. George recounts arriving with his family for an apartment viewing arranged by an AI assistant, only to discover that no appointment had been booked. His point is that speed and responsiveness lose their value when a company refuses responsibility for the actions of its AI. Transparency and ownership of the customer experience still require human judgment. We finish with George's advice on readiness, including experience with manual testing, measurement, and customer data. His broader comments about data infrastructure should be considered separately from his description of Go's use of native Braze data. Which marketing decision would you automate first, and how would you check that it was improving the outcome you actually care about? I'd love you to share your thoughts.  
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  Forge26: AI Marketing With Human Creativity With Braze 02.10.2026 17min

  How can marketers use AI to improve the customer experience without filling every channel with increasingly similar content? Recorded at Braze Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, this episode of Tech Talks Daily features my conversation with Christy Poulos, VP of Product Marketing at Braze. We discuss the practical choices behind AI marketing, from deciding what a campaign should achieve to keeping creative work, compliance, and customer relationships under human direction. Christy describes Forge as an opportunity for marketers to talk about their craft and the problems they face every day. Technology forms part of that conversation, but her starting point is the work itself. Teams are being asked to adopt AI while also demonstrating a useful return. Her advice is to connect the tools they choose with specific goals for the brand, the team, and the wider business. Producing additional content offers little reassurance if nobody has agreed what success looks like. We discuss Agentic Standards and the less glamorous work of checking campaigns against rules. Drawing on her experience marketing a regulated product, Christy explains why automating repetitive checks could give teams greater confidence in their output. The marketer still sets the boundaries. Her argument is that campaigns should operate within those boundaries whether a human or an agent prepares them. The interview presents the intended value of these capabilities, rather than independent evidence that they remove compliance risk. Another part of the conversation concerns where marketers actually want to work. Operator Connect introduces ways to connect AI assistants and other working environments with Braze. Christy discusses campaign briefs created in Claude and the growing interest in collaboration through Slack. She also makes a clear case for retaining the traditional product interface, where teams can review a campaign in context, check standards, and launch it. Some businesses are interested in these connections, while others are still developing their AI skills or learning what the tools can do. The question of creative quality runs through the interview. Christy believes customers will recognize generic AI content and that this could weaken their relationship with a brand. Her view is that marketers who continue to bring their own creativity and work alongside AI will produce stronger results. We also discuss conversational agents and the possibility of customer interactions that allow people to respond and feel heard, rather than simply receive another broadcast message. For teams wondering where to begin, Christy recommends Content Optimizer and email content testing as a first step. She describes the possibility of testing many variants, then progressing to Decisioning Studio Go to consider send times and channels. These are her recommendations for adoption, not measured results from a customer case study. Later, she discusses how insights from decisioning products could help marketers contribute to product strategy and business planning. One of the most memorable examples arrives toward the end, when Christy describes a ride hailing platform in Venezuela using Braze to create an earthquake awareness system. The company is not named in the interview, but the story illustrates her broader point about customers finding applications that product teams had not anticipated. Where could AI make your marketing more useful to customers, and which decisions should remain with the people who understand them? I'd love you to share your thoughts.
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  Building Governed AI Across Distributed Data With Starburst 02.10.2026 23min

  Can an enterprise move quickly with AI when the information it needs remains spread across business units, acquired companies, private data centers, multiple clouds, and systems governed by different privacy rules? In this episode , I speak with Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO of Starburst, about the data architecture decisions now affecting how quickly businesses can turn AI investment into useful results. The conversation begins with a reality many established companies will recognize. Their technology estate reflects years of applications, acquisitions, regulatory demands, regional choices, and earlier infrastructure programs. Justin argues that this history becomes a constraint when AI teams need governed access to information quickly. A company created within the last year may design its data environment around AI from the beginning. A multinational enterprise rarely has that freedom. It must work with valuable data held across different locations while respecting security, privacy, and sovereignty requirements. The traditional response has been to centralize everything. Justin believes the single source of truth is often an impossible target rather than a finished destination. Drawing on his earlier experience at Teradata, he says even customers using a leading database continued to retain information elsewhere. New applications, company acquisitions, regulations, and changing business demands kept creating additional systems. His preferred approach is to accept that distributed data will remain part of enterprise life and build an architecture that can work across it. A federated data platform can query information where it lives while giving users a common point of access. This can reduce the time spent moving data before an analyst, executive, application, or AI agent can use it. Justin illustrates the problem through a large American bank with many lines of business and inherited data silos. Senior leaders could ask commercially important questions, but answering them required analytics teams to write queries, assemble dashboards, and combine information from several systems. The process could take weeks. He describes how connecting those sources and adding a natural-language interface can reduce that delay. Starburst calls its interface ADA. It allows a user to ask questions in conversational language while drawing on governed enterprise information and its business context. The company presents this as a way to shorten the path from question to insight without forcing every data set into one platform first. Business value remains harder to prove than technical access. Justin recommends connecting data projects with revenue growth, cost reduction, or risk management. He also points to usage evidence within data platforms. If a data product is accessed frequently by leaders or operational teams, and the cost of producing it is known, those signals can help a company evaluate whether the investment is serving a recurring need. Architecture economics also influence where workloads belong. Justin favors S3-compatible object storage and open formats such as Parquet and Apache Iceberg when companies assemble data in a lake architecture. His argument is that open storage can reduce cost while allowing customers to choose among query engines rather than binding the information to one provider. That advice does not mean every workload belongs in one format or location. Some data will remain in warehouses, operational databases, regional systems, and on-premises infrastructure. Federation can provide access across those environments, while open formats create additional choice for the information that can be consolidated economically. The human side of architecture receives equal attention. Justin says ownership, incentives, and internal politics affect data quality because centralized teams may lack the domain knowledge held by the business unit that produced the information. Treating data as a product gives an organization a way to assign responsibility for quality, maintenance, adoption, and feedback. Named ownership changes the conversation. A successful data product can be recognized and improved because people know who created it. A weak product can receive feedback from its internal users. Distributed control can also allow teams closest to the data to apply their knowledge while the wider company accesses it through common governance. Governance becomes especially important when AI agents can query enterprise information directly. Justin says access controls must operate beneath the agent rather than relying on the model to decide what a user should see. Row-level and column-level permissions, data masking, and query auditing can determine which records are available and provide a record of what the system retrieved. Security and economics are also contributing to renewed interest in running some AI workloads on-premises. Justin says businesses may prefer open-weight models on owned hardware when scale improves the economics or when confidential data cannot comfortably leave the corporate firewall. He expects cloud and on-premises capabilities to coexist rather than one replacing the other. For employees, conversational access could change the role of traditional business intelligence. Justin expects standard KPI dashboards to remain useful, but believes many custom reports and one-off dashboards could be replaced by interactive models that answer questions directly. Analysts and engineers may spend less time responding to requests and additional time improving trusted data products and governance. The opportunity is faster access to answers. The risk is allowing speed to outrun security, quality, or accountability. A federated architecture can connect distributed systems, but it still requires companies to know who owns the data, which users can access it, how results are audited, and whether the outcome supports revenue, cost, or risk goals. Should enterprises keep pursuing one central source of truth, or accept distributed data as a permanent condition and build governed AI around it? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts.
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  Measuring AI by Business Results Instead of Adoption With Domino Data Lab 01.10.2026 29min

  How should a business measure AI success when employee adoption tells leaders very little about revenue, savings, risk, or better decisions? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Thomas Robinson, better known as T-Rob, who recently moved from Chief Operating Officer to CEO of Domino Data Lab. After ten years inside the company, he has seen enterprise AI move through several phases, from specialist data science projects to generative AI tools available across the workforce. T-Rob argues that businesses have become too focused on the technology itself. Generative AI has attracted attention because almost anyone can use it, but an individual productivity tool is very different from an AI system making decisions about mortgages, clinical trials, financial markets, or defense operations. As the potential value of a decision rises, so does the financial, regulatory, and operational risk. That is why T-Rob believes governance should be built alongside AI development rather than added after a system has been completed. He compares the process with constructing a building. Engineers do not wait until the work is finished before checking whether it has been designed and assembled correctly. Reviews happen throughout construction. Domino applies the same principle to AI through policy controls, production monitoring, tracing, and continued human oversight. We also discuss why companies should avoid beginning with a fashionable tool and searching for somewhere to use it. T-Rob recommends starting with the company's primary business measures and working backward. A pharmaceutical business may examine the number of promising therapies entering its pipeline, revenue, and risk. The appropriate AI system can then be designed around those outcomes. That system may combine large language models with computer vision, statistical models, rules, and company data. T-Rob believes the assumption that every business problem requires the latest frontier model can waste money and produce weaker results. People remain a major part of the equation. T-Rob has seen companies reduce headcount in anticipation of AI replacing employees before the technology was ready. He argues that domain experts become more valuable because they understand the business history, operating environment, exceptions, and consequences that a model may miss. The conversation also considers model independence and AI sovereignty. Many enterprises became dependent on a single cloud provider by building their own technology on proprietary services. T-Rob believes businesses should avoid repeating that decision with AI models. Open systems can allow companies to replace models as prices, capabilities, regulations, and operational needs change. For organizations handling sensitive intellectual property, sovereignty also raises questions about what information leaves the business when employees prompt external models. T-Rob describes the risk of enterprise knowledge being absorbed into future model development, even when information has been anonymized. Perhaps his strongest argument concerns measurement. He calls consumption and adoption terrible measures of success because they mainly reveal cost. Giving every employee an AI tool does not mean the entire company becomes proportionally more productive. Real return comes from improving the business processes that generate revenue, reduce expense, control risk, or support better decisions. Are businesses ready to stop measuring AI by logins and start measuring what it changes inside the company? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts.
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  Braze at Forge 2026: Where Should Human Judgment End and AI Decisioning Begin? 30.09.2026 24min

  What happens when artificial intelligence moves beyond helping marketers create content and begins making decisions on their behalf? Recorded at Forge 2026 in Las Vegas, I speak with Astha Malik, Chief Business Officer at Braze, about how AI is changing customer engagement and what marketers should retain control over as more operational work is handed to software. Astha explains why the long-standing promise of genuine one-to-one personalization has been so difficult to deliver and why she believes AI can finally help brands move beyond broad segments toward individual decisioning. We discuss Decisioning Studio Go, where AI can optimize content, timing, and frequency for different customers, while marketers continue to define the objectives and brand boundaries within which the system operates. But greater automation creates new questions. If AI can generate more campaigns and messages, does marketing simply become noisier? Astha talks openly about the danger of "AI slop" and why using the same models and tools can make brands increasingly forgettable. We also discuss Agentic Standards and the idea of AI checking the work of other AI systems before campaigns reach customers. Astha argues that organizations need controls around agents in much the same way they already have quality processes around human teams. Our conversation also moves beyond marketing into the changing enterprise software interface. Operator Connect allows Braze capabilities to be accessed through environments such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, raising questions about whether employees will increasingly interact with business systems through AI assistants rather than traditional applications. Finally, we examine how organizations can prove AI is creating measurable value, why some businesses remain trapped in experimentation, and Astha's advice for leaders overwhelmed by the pace of change. Her recommendation is simple: start experimenting rather than waiting for certainty. As AI takes on more decision-making and execution, which parts of marketing should remain firmly in human hands? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts.
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  Turning Disposable Research Into Continuous Insight With Cint 29.09.2026 21min

  What if every market research project could continue contributing to business decisions after its original question had been answered? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Phil Ahad, Managing Director of Data at Cint, to discuss why he believes companies should move away from disposable research. For decades, the familiar model has been straightforward. A business asks a question, commissions a study, receives the answer and begins again when the next question appears. Phil argues that this process wastes useful information and repeatedly asks people for details that may already be available. His alternative is an always-on human data engine that allows new studies to build on previous research. Existing responses can be combined with first-party information, third-party sources, transactional records and behavioral signals. Phil says this can help organizations answer new questions faster while reducing the burden placed on respondents. That burden matters because survey fatigue is often misunderstood. Phil does not believe people have stopped wanting to share opinions. The problem is the experience. Customers are repeatedly asked long batteries of familiar questions, often after everyday transactions, because the structure of data collection has changed remarkably little since paper surveys. If researchers already know much of the background, they can ask fewer questions and focus on the reasons behind a person's decision. We also examine synthetic data, a term Phil openly dislikes, and the growing use of AI personas or digital twins. At one end of the spectrum, a model might add 200 modeled responses to an 800-person study so researchers can work with a sample of 1,000. Phil says this extends an existing data set rather than creating genuinely new insight. At the other end, a company may create a digital representation of a person from survey responses, purchasing patterns, mobile activity and other signals, then ask that representation new questions. The opportunity is faster research with less repeated questioning. The risk is believing the model knows a person better than the evidence allows. Phil says the industry must test how much information is required to predict an answer with an acceptable level of confidence. He expects progress to come from repeated comparison and validation rather than a single certification method or technical shortcut. For business leaders, this makes transparency as important as speed. Before relying on AI-augmented research for a major decision, they need to understand where the original data came from, how modeled responses were created, how performance was tested and where human judgment remains involved. Phil also notes that strong decisions rarely rely on a single input. Companies bring together research, customer records, benchmarks and other sources before deciding what to do. Cint's ambition, as Phil describes it, is to turn recurring tracking studies into a continuing source of insight. He says roughly one million people pass through the company's ecosystem each day, giving Cint an asset that can be combined with increasingly accessible technology. The larger challenge is making useful sense of growing data volumes at business speed. Could continuous research help your organization ask people fewer, better questions, or would AI-generated responses introduce uncertainty that outweighs the speed gained? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me.
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  Security Posture at Machine Speed With Barracuda 28.09.2026 23min

  What happens when attackers can discover and exploit a weakness faster than your organization can patch it? Recorded at Barracuda TechSummit 2026 in Alpbach, Austria, this conversation features Arve Kjoelen, CISO at Barracuda. Arve is responsible for protecting Barracuda's systems, environment, and code, which makes him the person answering the familiar question of who checks the checker. Our conversation begins with the collapse in response time. Security teams once had hours or days to investigate suspicious activity. Arve explains why they may now have minutes or seconds, while vulnerabilities can move from disclosure to exploitation within days. Traditional weekly scans and handoffs to patching teams struggle when attackers operate at machine speed. Arve offers a useful framework for understanding security posture through threats, exposures, assets, and controls. Technology changes constantly, but these categories give leaders a way to assess risk without chasing every new term. He also explains why reducing attack surface can begin with basic questions. Does a system need to be accessible from the internet? Does a web server also need remote management exposed? Does a midsize business benefit from spreading its workloads across every major cloud provider? We examine the difficult balance surrounding AI adoption. Blocking every new tool can prevent employees from benefiting from useful technology, but allowing unrestricted adoption creates new exposure. Arve argues for deliberate choices and guidance that reduce risk without stopping progress. The conversation also addresses AI-guided remediation. Barracuda uses AI internally to identify vulnerabilities, but Arve is cautious about fully automated fixes. An AI system may identify a problem and suggest a solution, while a human remains responsible for judging whether the proposed action could damage a production environment. Faster decisions are valuable only when organizations understand the consequences. Arve also considers how entry-level technology roles may change as AI performs more coding and analysis. His view is that people will need to understand how to work with AI, evaluate its output, and carry an idea from design through secure implementation. The role changes, but the demand for human judgment remains. We finish with model sovereignty, data trust, and provider dependency. If a security capability relies on one AI model, leaders need to know whether they can move to an alternative if access, performance, pricing, or policy changes. Arve also explains why Barracuda is preparing to support both open and closed models while the market develops. Where should your organization use AI to accelerate defense, and which security decisions should remain firmly under human control? Listen to the full conversation and share your thoughts with me.
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  Giving Enterprise AI the Context It Needs With Orange Logic 27.09.2026 21min

  Why do increasingly capable AI models struggle to produce reliable answers inside large organizations? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Misti Vogt, SVP of Engagement at Orange Logic. Her career spans military intelligence, data science, and enterprise content technology, and she also teaches in the DAM and AI program at Rutgers University. That combination gives her an unusually practical perspective on how machines interpret information and why business meaning cannot be assumed. Misti argues that enterprise AI reliability depends on the context surrounding company data. A model may be technically impressive, but it needs to understand relationships, rules, metadata, rights, and intent. Without that layer, it reasons over information originally organized for people rather than machines. The result may sound convincing while remaining disconnected from the way the business defines accuracy, trust, and permitted use. We discuss three forms of context. Static context reflects accumulated knowledge. Transactional context develops through projects and outside information. Semantic context helps systems interpret meaning and relationships across large collections of information. Misti compares this with human conversation. When an answer misses the point, we add information until the other person understands what we mean. Digital asset management sits at the center of this discussion because DAM platforms already organize master data, metadata, transactional data, governance, relationships, and usage rights. Misti believes those structures can give AI applications a stronger business foundation. She also argues that content should become self-aware, carrying information about when it was created, how it was produced, its intended audience, where it has appeared, and how it has performed. Natural language search provides a useful example of why this matters. An employee might ask for creative assets suited to a campaign and welcome a broad set of suggestions. The same employee may then ask for assets licensed for the United Kingdom and United States, with print and web rights for the next 12 months and no use in another campaign during the previous six months. That second request carries business consequences, so the system needs deterministic rules alongside creative choice. Misti also shares an Orange Logic customer example involving a conglomerate with several brands. The company consolidated seven platforms, including three DAM deployments and local storage. Orange Logic then supported shared governance across the group while preserving autonomy for individual brands. Misti says the early results include time savings, improved efficiency, richer metadata collection, and lower costs, although no quantified figures were provided in the recording. The wider question is whether businesses are spending enough time on the information surrounding their content before expanding AI use. Could better metadata, rights management, and business logic produce greater value than another round of model upgrades? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts with me.  
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  Building the Five Foundations of AI Value With Mobile Mentor 26.09.2026 34min

  What happens when employees begin using AI before their organization has prepared the data, training, controls and measurement required to support them? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, returning guest Denis O'Shea, CEO of Mobile Mentor, joins me to discuss the 2026 Endpoint Ecosystem Study. The research surveyed 2,500 workers across the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia to understand how employees experience their devices, applications, sign-in processes, support systems and workplace AI. The findings show a gap between access and useful adoption. According to the study figures discussed in our conversation, only 29 percent of employees say AI provides regular or indispensable value in their work, while 48 percent report receiving no AI training or do not know whether training exists. Denis says the differences become sharper by sector. Finance has made greater progress with company-wide and role-specific training, while half of the healthcare and government employees surveyed reported receiving no AI training. The generational picture is equally complicated. Denis says Gen Z workers are adopting AI faster than other age groups, but they are also the group most likely to work around company policies when approved tools create friction. If employees cannot complete a task through the sanctioned route, some will use personal accounts and upload company information to public models. The same workers may also need greater support during onboarding, challenging the assumption that digital familiarity automatically means workplace technology fluency. Denis also shares Mobile Mentor's own mistakes. The company deployed Microsoft Copilot to roughly two-thirds of its workforce, ran competitions and encouraged experimentation. When the board asked whether the investment was working, Denis realized he had no dependable answer. The team had not defined use cases, assigned licenses according to the work being done or established a reliable way to measure returns. A subsequent scan found 33,000 sensitive data assets that Denis says were overexposed or shared too widely. Those lessons became what Denis calls the five foundations of AI success. Organizations should define each use case, secure the relevant data, provide training for that use case, build agents around the work and measure the outcome repeatedly. He recommends treating deployments as experiments. If a use case cannot demonstrate a return within three months, the licenses can be reassigned and tested elsewhere. We also discuss passwordless access, the cost of AI tokens and services, and the operational work required to govern growing numbers of agents. Denis believes data, agents and spending will become three immediate management challenges. Each agent will need an identity, appropriate permissions, an owner and a retirement process, while finance and technology leaders will need a clear view of licenses, tokens, API calls and platform consumption. One final lesson reaches beyond AI. Denis says organizations that automated password resets, patching and device provisioning have released technology staff to address newer priorities.  Businesses still handling those tasks manually may struggle to find the time needed for data preparation and agent governance. Does your AI strategy begin with another license purchase, or with a defined problem, prepared data and a measurable result? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me.
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  Why AI Favors Whoever Automates Most With Barracuda 25.09.2026 25min

  Can security teams defend an organization when attackers are using AI to research targets, personalize messages, identify weaknesses, and launch campaigns at a scale no human team can match? I returned to Alpbach, Austria, for Barracuda TechSummit 26 and caught up with Neal Bradbury one year after our conversation about being secure today and ready tomorrow. A lot has happened since then. Agentic AI has become a boardroom subject, employee AI use has spread across businesses, and attackers have gained access to tools that lower the cost and expertise required to launch sophisticated campaigns. Neal explains why Barracuda has continued with the unified platform strategy introduced at last year's event. In his view, AI creates additional exposure across identities, applications, email, and data, but it does not make every existing security control obsolete. The immediate requirement is to connect information across these areas and accelerate how quickly security teams can interpret and act upon it. We discuss Barracuda ONE, its Barracuda IQ intelligence engine, the Bailey assistant, Integrated Email Protection, and the recently announced Barracuda AI Data Security offering. Neal also explains why the acquisition of Evo Security adds identity protection at a time when businesses must secure human users, service accounts, and AI agents. One customer example shows why connected telemetry matters. According to Neal, Barracuda's team investigated an attempted wire fraud worth almost a quarter of a million dollars. No single product could see the complete attack. Information from email, network activity, and identity systems had to be combined before the team could understand what was happening. The conversation also examines shadow AI. Employees are already placing workplace information into chatbots and using tools outside approved systems. Neal argues that attempting to ban every tool will send that behavior further out of view. Organizations first need to understand which services are being used, educate employees about the information they can share, and guide them toward approved options. Attackers may have gained the early advantage from AI, but Neal says defenders are catching up through automation. Work that previously took around 45 minutes can now be completed in under a minute inside Barracuda's agentic SOC. The aim is to correlate signals, remove repetitive analyst work, and present fewer alerts with better context. Human judgment remains part of the process when accountability and empathy matter. Do you agree that AI favors the side that automates most, or could excessive automation create another security weakness? Share your thoughts.
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  Inside the Agentic SOC Where Humans and AI Defend at Machine Speed With Barracuda 24.09.2026 24min

  What does a security operations center need when attacks are arriving at a speed and volume that human analysts cannot manage alone? I recorded this episode with Adam Khan, VP of Global Security Operations and AI Security at Barracuda, during the 20th anniversary of the Barracuda Tech Summit in Alpbach, Austria. Adam has spent over 25 years in technology and security. When we last spoke at the event, he used Home Alone and soccer to make complex security topics easier to understand. This year, expectations were high, and he arrived with Formula One. The comparison begins with what spectators see. Attention naturally falls on the car and driver. Behind them sits a much larger operation involving engineers, strategists, mechanics, simulations, telemetry, and rapid decisions. Adam believes modern security works in a similar way. Customers want to run their businesses, while a largely unseen combination of analysts, threat intelligence, automation, and AI works behind them. That operating model has developed into what Barracuda calls the Agentic SOC. AI agents follow the same playbooks analysts use when examining endpoints, malware connections, artifacts, threat intelligence, identity behavior, and other signals. They can complete repeatable investigative work quickly and consistently across volumes that have grown from hundreds of alerts to thousands or millions. Adam says Barracuda now has hundreds of agents with hundreds of individual skills. These agents can support the process from triage and intelligence gathering through correlation and response. When the system has high confidence that an ordinary user account has been compromised, it may disable that account. If the incident involves an administrative account capable of locking down an entire customer environment, a person must confirm the action. This matters because an AI system can misclassify an event or reach a conclusion that requires additional context. Adam describes feedback mechanisms through which people review decisions, identify mistakes, and feed those findings back into the system. Barracuda also records an audit trail of the actions and queries performed by its agents. One of the most surprising details concerns employment. While headlines frequently associate AI with reducing headcount, Adam says his team has doubled since adopting it. Analysts previously occupied with repetitive investigation have moved into threat hunting, model development, prompt engineering, and attack and defense exercises. The team is also attacking its own systems so that its agents can learn from emerging techniques before a genuine incident occurs. The audience saw this operating model during Adam's keynote. Attendees used their phones to launch controlled business email compromise, QR-code phishing, and ransomware scenarios against Barracuda's attack and defense environment. The platform then analyzed and blocked the activity while the audience watched. Adam says approximately 395 attacks were initiated during the demonstration and all were successfully blocked. That result comes from a controlled Barracuda demonstration rather than an independent test, but it gave attendees a rare view of the speed required during an active incident. We also discuss how Barracuda Managed XDR uses behavior and telemetry across email, endpoints, cloud services, identities, networks, and other technology. An employee traveling with a familiar laptop and phone should not create the same response as an unknown device attempting an unusual login. Historical patterns, device identifiers, signatures, and location data can help reduce unnecessary alerts while highlighting activity that deserves attention. For Adam, the purpose of AI is to increase the speed and reach of security experts rather than remove them. People determine strategy, examine high-consequence decisions, test systems, and remain accountable for customer outcomes. Could the Agentic SOC give security teams the speed they need without surrendering the judgment and accountability customers expect? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts.
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  Barracuda CEO Rohit Ghai on Cybersecurity in the AI Era 23.09.2026 29min

  How should security leaders respond when AI-powered attacks compress detection and response windows from minutes to seconds? At Barracuda TechSummit 26 in Alpbach, Austria, I spoke with Rohit Ghai, Chief Executive Officer at Barracuda. The conversation took place exactly one year after Rohit joined the company, giving us an opportunity to discuss what brought him to Barracuda, what he inherited, and how his first year has influenced his plans for the business. Rohit explains that Barracuda's focus on smaller and resource-constrained organizations was an important reason he accepted the role. A cyber incident can threaten the survival of a smaller company, particularly when it has a lean IT team and limited access to specialist security knowledge. For these businesses, Rohit argues that AI-supported and increasingly autonomous security is a practical requirement. We discuss Barracuda's platform strategy and why genuine integration must extend beyond a shared interface. Rohit compares loosely connected product portfolios to supermarkets. Customers may find it easier to purchase several products from one supplier, but that commercial convenience does not mean the products share data or produce a coordinated response. Traditional tool sprawl forced analysts to interpret information across several screens. Agent sprawl could introduce systems that act independently, disagree with one another, or take conflicting actions. Rohit believes security platforms must connect information across email, identity, applications, data, and infrastructure so they can reason across the complete attack sequence. Identity is another major part of the discussion. Barracuda's acquisition of Evo Security addresses privileged access for managed service providers and smaller businesses. Rohit expects machine and non-human identities to greatly outnumber human users, raising questions about excessive privileges and how organizations grant temporary access to autonomous agents. We also discuss the economics behind AI security. Rohit explains how Barracuda is adapting its value reports to account for token consumption as well as staffing, software, and security outcomes. Barracuda absorbs the direct token costs associated with its own AI capabilities and selects different models according to the task, an approach intended to keep its products affordable for smaller customers and MSPs. Rohit is cautious about calls for the AI industry to slow development. Coordinating a worldwide slowdown between companies and countries would be extremely difficult. He also argues that cyber defenders cannot pause while attackers continue using widely available models to improve their campaigns. The conversation ends with a wider leadership question. Rohit believes intelligence will become widely available, making empathy and trust more valuable. AI can generate an answer, but customers, partners, and security professionals must decide whether they trust the organization acting upon it. Will connected AI security platforms reduce complexity, or could autonomous agents introduce a new form of operational risk?  Share your thoughts.
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  Zeta Global on Why AI Agents Need Context Before Autonomy 23.09.2026 27min

  What happens when enterprises spend trillions of dollars on AI but the systems underneath it still cannot provide the context those models need to make reliable decisions? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I reconnect with Christian Monberg, CTO at Zeta Global, to examine what separates AI experimentation from production systems that organizations can actually trust. Our previous conversation focused on how businesses could use AI to scale marketing without losing the human connection with customers. This time, we move deeper into the technology underneath those experiences. Christian explains why disconnected tools and fragmented data remain barriers to AI adoption, and why Zeta rebuilt its data architecture using Palantir Foundry. We discuss the role of context graphs in connecting customer identity, business objectives, previous decisions, campaign history and outcomes so AI systems can understand more than isolated pieces of information. We also examine one of the biggest questions surrounding agentic AI: when should businesses allow an AI agent to take action? Christian shares what enterprises need around explainability, permissions, observability and learning loops before AI systems can safely move from recommendation to execution. With global AI spending expected to reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, the conversation ultimately comes back to a simple question: how can technology leaders prove that their AI investments are producing measurable business value?
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  Turning AI Adoption Into Business Value With BCG 22.09.2026 27min

  Why is employee AI use rising so quickly while measurable business value remains difficult for many organizations to find? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with David Martin, Senior Partner and Global Leader of People and Organization at BCG, about the firm's fourth annual AI and workforce report. The research surveyed 11,749 employees across 14 countries and points to a growing divide between companies that distribute AI tools and companies that give people a clear plan for changing how work gets done. BCG reports that 74 percent of frontline and nonmanagerial employees now use AI regularly, an increase of 23 percentage points from the previous year. Adoption, however, is only part of the story. The report says 71 percent of employees receive little or no guidance about what to do with the time AI frees, while over half are not redirecting that capacity into strategic work. David describes one of the research findings that best captures the problem. Companies where employees understand the strategic direction but rate their AI tools poorly can realize greater value than organizations with strong tools and limited strategic clarity. Better technology helps, but its impact remains small when employees do not understand which business problem they are solving or how the operating model should change. The report connects clearer strategy with a roughly 25 percentage point increase in measurable business impact when companies redesign workflows from end to end or create new business models. BCG says strong tools without that clarity produce an improvement of roughly five percentage points. Companies that redesign workflows also outperform tool-only adopters by 23 percentage points on measurable business impact, 22 points on time saved, and 20 points on job satisfaction. David explains what redesign looks like in practice. Giving software engineers stronger coding tools may improve part of a development task, but keeping the overall product lifecycle unchanged limits the result. A deeper redesign considers how research, product management, engineering, and decision-making operate together, then changes roles and processes around the capability of AI. The objective is a better business outcome rather than a faster version of the same work. This distinction also explains why promising pilots fail when companies attempt to expand them. A pilot can prove that a model works inside a controlled environment. Wider deployment tests whether the organization surrounding that model works. David cites BCG research indicating that 70 percent of the factors determining whether AI scales with a return relate to people, organization, and process. Talent, operating models, cross-functional teamwork, incentives, learning, and leadership all become part of the result. Measurement must also move beyond adoption. David argues that the final metrics remain familiar business outcomes such as conversion, competitive win rate, price realization, cycle time, and inventory performance. A pilot can use controlled comparison to test whether AI changes one of those outcomes. The missing management step is often accountability. If several executives share ownership but nobody is responsible for the return, the investment can continue without a clear test of success. There is a case for broad experimentation because it can build familiarity and surface ideas. David warns that hundreds of isolated use cases can also fragment investment, increase risk, and save small amounts of individual time without producing company-level value. His preferred balance combines focused governance with structured opportunities such as hackathons, where employees contribute ideas but the organization selects which ones receive investment. The workforce findings add an important human dimension. BCG says 67 percent of regular AI users report higher job satisfaction, while 41 percent also report higher cognitive load. David connects that tension with the effort required to assign work to agents, evaluate quality, and keep those agents operating. He refers to separate BCG research called AI Brain Fry, which found productivity rising as employees managed additional agents until a limiting point. In that research, productivity fell when workers moved beyond managing three agents. Training remains another stubborn problem. The report says 72 percent of employees believe AI has changed skill expectations, and nearly half say their role is moving toward directing and managing AI. Only 36 percent feel they have received enough training, a figure David says has not improved despite new learning programs. His recommendation is in-context training that brings AI into daily work, followed by peer discussion about what worked, what failed, and how behavior should change. The purpose of recovered time may be the most revealing management question of all. David says employees report saving an average of around eight hours a week, but many use that time to perform additional versions of the same tasks. That can become demoralizing if greater output benefits the company without giving employees room for learning, infrastructure improvement, experimentation, or new product work. Leaders need to explain where the capacity should go and why. Clear communication also reduces fear. Automation targets introduced without an explanation of strategy can leave employees assuming that efficiency is a code word for job loss. When leaders explain whether AI is intended to improve customer experience, create growth, reduce cost, or change the business model, employees have a better basis for understanding what is expected of them. If strategic clarity is producing greater value than better tools, should the next AI investment begin with another platform or with a decision about how the work itself must change? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts.   Useful Links AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools When Using AI Leads to "Brain Fry" When Everyone Uses AI, Companies Risk Losing Critical Skills LinkedIn – BCG on the CHRO Agenda    
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  Building a Trusted AI Voice With Voices 21.09.2026 25min

  What will customers remember about a business when the voice answering their questions becomes the main expression of its identity? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Ruth Zive, who leads marketing at Voices, about the business and human questions surrounding AI voice. Voices is an enterprise marketplace and platform where companies can find professional voice actors, license AI voices with consent, and source custom voice data for training models. The company says its global talent network includes millions of performers and has served brands including Microsoft, Shopify, and Cisco. For years, much of the AI voice debate focused on whether synthetic speech could sound convincingly human. Ruth believes the commercial conversation has moved toward provenance, brand integrity, permission, and usage rights. A voice can sound polished while exposing a company to reputational damage if the performer did not understand the use, the license is unclear, or the same generic voice appears in a competitor's customer experience. Voices research cited during the interview found that 79 percent of business leaders believe inauthentic AI voices could damage brand perception. Ruth also says almost half of enterprise decision makers regard tone and emotional expression as the most important vocal factor in authenticity. That matters when a customer is frustrated, confused, or asking for help. A voice that sounds human but responds without suitable emotion can weaken trust at the exact moment a company needs to earn it. Ruth describes responsible licensing through three ideas: compensation, control, and consent. The performer should understand how the voice will be used, retain an agreed degree of control, and receive payment that reflects the commercial use. Those decisions need to appear in the contracting, licensing, and entitlements before a model is trained or placed in front of customers. We also consider the economic effect on professional performers. AI voice can change existing work, but Ruth argues that it can also create additional assignments when licenses are written carefully. An actor might provide the voice for an in-car assistant while continuing to record commercials in unrelated categories. Other opportunities include contact center experiences and the creation of specialized voice data used to train models. The positive case depends on clear boundaries and fair commercial terms rather than unlimited reuse. The brand question may become even larger as customers move from websites and typed interfaces toward spoken conversations. Ruth points to BMW's careful selection of voices based on customer profile, tone, language, accent, and how each performer sounded inside the vehicle cabin. Her advice is to treat a voice as a long-term brand asset, test it in the setting where customers will hear it, and confirm that the company has the required rights before deployment. Voice AI offers companies a more natural customer experience and gives performers access to new forms of paid work. It also raises difficult questions about disclosure, ownership, exclusivity, and trust. Should every company now have a formal policy for choosing, licensing, and governing the voice that speaks on its behalf? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts with me.
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  Why AI Transformation Needs Wisdom as Well as Technology 20.09.2026 34min

  Can ideas developed thousands of years ago help leaders make better decisions about AI, data and digital transformation today? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Alfonso Asensio, author of Digital Wisdom: Leading Transformation With the Sophia Factor and head of data measurement for global clients at Google in Tokyo. Alfonso has spent his career working across data, digital business and global client leadership, but his latest work looks beyond technical capability. He asks what changes when organizations bring sound judgment, ethical reasoning and human purpose into the decisions that shape digital change. We begin with Sophia, the classical Greek idea of wisdom. Alfonso argues that modern business often treats wisdom as another word for knowledge, even though the older idea also included practical intelligence and judgment. Technical expertise can tell a company whether a system can be built. Wisdom asks why it should be built, who benefits and what consequences may follow. That distinction matters when businesses feel pressure to adopt AI because competitors are doing the same. Alfonso shares the story of a large company with the resources, talent and urgency to pursue an ambitious digital program. When he asked what the business was trying to achieve, the answer became a list of fashionable technologies. AI-driven customer activity, blockchain supply chains and data optimization had become substitutes for a clear objective. His conclusion was that the company was attempting to build its future on buzzwords. Sometimes the better decision is to remain analog in a particular process if that choice serves customers and employees better. We also consider Socratic thinking in organizations where boards and investors expect certainty. For Socrates, confusion was a stage in learning rather than a failure of leadership. Alfonso believes leaders can use probing questions to expose assumptions and contradictions before a technology plan becomes expensive. Admitting uncertainty can be difficult, but false certainty can send a business confidently in the wrong direction. Heraclitus offers another useful comparison. Technology resembles a river that never stops moving, while employees need stability and meaning. Alfonso argues that leaders should create stable banks around that flow through a consistent capacity for improvement, adaptation and long-term thinking. The tools will continue to change, but organizations can reduce exhaustion when people understand the purpose behind that change and have a reliable way to respond. One of the most memorable parts of our conversation compares large language models with the Oracle of Delphi. Ancient leaders sought answers from an institution whose workings they could not fully see. Modern users can receive equally confident guidance from AI systems without knowing which data, assumptions or commercial interests influenced the response. Alfonso's point is not that machines are mystical. It is that people need discernment, source awareness and judgment when an answer arrives with authority. We then turn to Epicurus and the idea of ataraxia, or freedom from anxiety. In a business setting, Alfonso connects this with reducing unnecessary friction, decision fatigue and overload. Systems should be reliable, suited to the organization and valuable to employees as well as customers. Governance sometimes requires deliberately adding friction before investment, so teams can pressure test assumptions and ask whether people will be served by a tool or forced to serve it. Alfonso closes with two questions for any leader considering a major AI decision. What is our identity as an organization, and are we acting ethically? He uses Blockbuster as an example of a company that defined itself through videotape rental rather than entertainment. A clear identity can help a business choose technology that supports its purpose. The ethical check then asks whether transparency, consent and accountability are present, or whether data and algorithms are being used to manipulate people. Are organizations giving themselves enough time to ask why an AI system should exist before asking how quickly it can be deployed? Listen to the conversation, then share your thoughts with me.
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  Building a New Operating Model for Ecommerce Scale With ZyG 19.09.2026 30min

  Why is launching a consumer product easier than ever while turning it into a profitable global brand remains so difficult? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Omer Kaplan, co-founder and CEO of ZyG, about the operational gap between creating a product and building a durable ecommerce business around it. Omer previously helped build ironSource into an $11 billion public company before its acquisition by Unity. He explains how recognizing the move from desktop to mobile helped shape that company's growth and why the ability to adapt quickly matters even more when AI capabilities are changing every week. ZyG is building what it describes as an operating system for ecommerce scale. It combines AI agents with experienced human specialists to manage the work surrounding a consumer product, including the online store, creative production, advertising, retention, customer support, analytics, and other commercial operations. The brand retains its product, identity, and intellectual property, while ZyG operates the connected scale engine and is assessed by the resulting performance. Omer argues that existing routes solve only part of the problem. A marketplace can provide distribution, but a young brand may disappear among thousands of competitors. A commerce platform can make it easy to open a store, but the store alone does not create demand, coordinate marketing, or build customer loyalty. Agencies and software products can fill individual gaps, yet their data, incentives, and messages often remain separated. We discuss ZyG's approach to what Omer calls scale market fit. Its team creates the store, campaigns, and brand assets with agentic systems, then tests them with real paid traffic and real customer behavior. Omer says each test includes about $10,000 in media spending and that ZyG has completed over 100 tests. Cost of acquisition, predicted customer value, category benchmarks, and expected performance at higher volumes are combined into a score intended to show whether a brand can grow in the US market. He says the full process can be completed in about a week, compared with a far longer manual exercise before current AI capabilities. The conversation also examines the move from software as a product toward outcomes as a service. ZyG's consumption-based model takes a percentage of the revenue it manages. Omer is careful to distinguish accountability from assuming every commercial risk. His point is that one party should own the end-to-end result, removing the familiar cycle in which creative, advertising, and retention providers blame one another when growth stalls. Omer also shares why he returned to startup life after ironSource. Music, travel, and family offered appealing alternatives, but he saw the current technology cycle as a rare period for creating enduring companies. His advice to founders is to pursue large, complicated problems that general-purpose AI cannot easily reduce to a single feature. ZyG recently announced a $60 million Series A led by Accel, following a $58 million seed round two months earlier. Can its combination of AI agents, human expertise, real-world testing, and commercial accountability provide the missing infrastructure for the next generation of consumer brands? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts with me.
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  Rebuilding Trust in Pet Insurance With AI and Lassie 18.09.2026 23min

  Why do pet owners so often learn the limits of their insurance when an animal is already ill and the veterinary bill is growing? That trust problem sits at the center of my conversation with Hedda Båverud Olsson, co-founder and CEO of Lassie, a pet insurer that combines coverage with preventative health guidance, rewards, activity tracking, and AI-assisted claims. Hedda's reason for starting Lassie is personal. Her mother is a veterinarian, and Hedda grew up around healthy pets without fully appreciating how much fear and financial pressure many owners experience. After working at McKinsey and EQT, she became absorbed by an idea she describes as putting her mother in every owner's pocket. The aim was to help people understand risks earlier and make better daily choices, rather than waiting until an animal needed treatment. The claims process shows where AI can offer immediate value. Lassie has developed a system called Bark Office that scans an invoice, reads each line, identifies whether the treatment relates to illness or an accident, checks the policy, and decides whether enough information is available. Hedda says that when the system is confident, the money can reach the customer in around six minutes. She reports that approximately 65 percent of claims in Germany follow that route. Automation has limits, especially when a blurry receipt, missing diagnosis code, incomplete journal, unusually expensive treatment, or uncertain policy detail prevents a reliable decision. Those cases can prompt a request for further information or move to a human reviewer. Hedda says customers receive a line-by-line explanation of what was and was not covered, with the option to dispute a result and request another review. She reports an error rate below 2 percent for automated claims and compares it with what she describes as a 5 percent human error rate across insurance. Those are Lassie's figures, but the operating principle is useful across many regulated services: automate clear cases, explain the result, and give uncertain or sensitive cases to a person. We also consider why an insurer should have a role when nothing has gone wrong. Hedda says over 90 percent of Lassie customers use its app and roughly a quarter use it daily. Owners can watch health videos, complete quizzes, follow life-stage guidance, record activity, and earn rewards that can reduce their insurance price. Advice changes according to breed, age, and season, covering subjects such as weight, joint health, toxic foods, nail trimming, and ticks. Lassie also works with Tractive, allowing customers to connect a tracker and bring activity data into the app. Hedda explains that Lassie customers can receive a tracker while paying the Tractive subscription, and existing Tractive users can connect their current device. Owners who do not want a tracker can record activity manually. The feature gives the company another regular point of contact while helping customers follow their pet's routine. That daily relationship has commercial consequences. Hedda says regular app use supports customer loyalty, reduces churn, and raises lifetime value. Preventative actions may also support lower prices for owners. The opportunity is to make insurance useful before a claim, although firms must avoid turning care advice and rewards into confusing conditions or allowing gamification to distract from clear coverage. The conversation moves to the UK, where the supplied briefing estimates that around 20 million pets remain uninsured. Hedda believes culture and distrust may outweigh price alone, comparing the UK with Sweden, where she says approximately 90 percent of dogs and 50 to 60 percent of cats are insured despite higher prices. She also argues that established insurers have been slowed by old systems and disconnected technology, making simple onboarding, mobile service, and automated claims harder to deliver. For Lassie, the test is knowing where automation improves the experience and where it would make a difficult moment worse. Customers may welcome an administrative claim completed in minutes, but few want to speak with a bot when a pet is seriously ill or dying. That distinction between speed and empathy may be the most useful lesson for any business automating emotionally sensitive work. Can insurance become something customers value every day without losing the clarity and human care they need during a crisis? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me.  
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  Proving AI Value in Architecture and Construction With Nemetschek 17.09.2026 35min

  How much of construction's cost, delay, and waste begins with information that fails to survive the journey from design to delivery? That question runs through my conversation with Julian Geiger, Chief AI Officer at Nemetschek Group, as we look at the practical role of AI across architecture, engineering, construction, and operations. Julian describes what he calls the industry's 90, 40, 20 problem. According to the figures he shares, 90 percent of projects are over budget or over time, the built world accounts for roughly 40 percent of global carbon emissions, and around 20 percent of material is wasted. His argument is that many poor outcomes start as information and decision problems. Each project phase may work reasonably well on its own, but handovers can strip away context. A building information model becomes a PDF, a PDF becomes an email, and a decision may never be recorded against the object it changed. We discuss how AI, building information modeling, and digital twins can identify missing information, scope gaps, clashes, and design choices before they become expensive construction site problems. Julian shares Nemetschek's work bringing Firmus AI into Bluebeam to review two dimensional drawings, then explains the broader goal of feeding lessons from construction back into design and engineering tools. The commercial promise is easy to understand. Finding a mistake while a wall exists only in software costs far less than finding it after workers and materials are waiting on site. The conversation also moves beyond the assumption that every task needs the largest available model. Julian sets out a four tier approach. Deterministic calculations such as structural math should remain deterministic. Stable, high volume checks may be handled by conventional rules. Smaller domain models can classify objects, retrieve data, and interpret geometry close to the source. Frontier models earn their place when the work involves ambiguity, reasoning across documents, or several dependent steps. His test is refreshingly practical: use the least expensive method that is reliably right and fast enough for the person waiting on the answer. That discipline matters when finance teams ask for proof. Time saved on drawing reviews or tender preparation can be measured quickly, while reductions in rework or missed issues require a longer data series. Julian also notes a familiar problem for enterprise AI programs. If a firm never established a baseline, it becomes difficult to show what improved. Usage can indicate that people find a tool useful, but adoption alone does not settle the return on investment question. Data sovereignty adds another layer. Construction files can include valuable designs, commercial information, and details tied to national infrastructure. We discuss where the data is stored, who processes it, which jurisdiction applies, and whether customer material is used for model training. Julian argues for separating genuine intellectual property from routine usage data, then matching controls to the sensitivity of each project rather than treating every data set as identical. Finally, we consider people. In an industry facing a skills shortage, removing junior roles creates a future shortage of experienced professionals. Julian sees AI as a way to shorten the apprenticeship period and reduce repetitive documentation, while preserving a clear line of accountability: AI proposes and a qualified human decides. Could that model help construction professionals spend more of their time on judgment, design, and better buildings, and where should the industry draw the line? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me
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  Taking Enterprise AI Agents Beyond the Model With Databricks 16.09.2026 22min

  Why do businesses replace the AI model when the failure may have started somewhere else entirely? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Richard Shaw, Technology General Manager for Databricks in the UK and Ireland. Richard leads the field engineering organization that works closely with customers on data and AI problems, giving him a practical view of what happens when promising agentic AI projects meet production workloads. Richard argues that the model often receives the blame because it is the most visible part of the system. The actual fault may come from stale data, missing business context, inconsistent permissions, an unsuccessful tool call, or another point in the workflow. Replacing the model before tracing the request from start to finish can recreate the same problem in a new place. This is why lineage, end-to-end tracing, and continuous evaluation matter once an agent moves beyond a controlled pilot. We discuss what a production-readiness rehearsal should include. Richard recommends realistic data, realistic user volumes, unauthorized requests, ambiguous questions, failed tool calls, and tests of what the agent should refuse to do. Teams also need agreed standards for quality, security, cost, and auditability, along with a clear decision about which actions an agent can complete independently and where a person must review or approve the result. The conversation also looks at model choice and infrastructure cost. Richard believes the strongest test is performance on the organization's actual work rather than a benchmark leaderboard. A frontier model may suit complex reasoning, while a smaller or open-weight model may perform routine extraction or classification at a lower cost. Access policies, observability, and spend controls need to remain consistent as those model choices change. Conversational analytics creates another governance challenge. Databricks customers such as Virgin Atlantic and Repsol are using natural-language tools to make company data easier for employees to question. Richard says wider access should preserve existing permissions, ownership, definitions, and lineage. An answer becomes far more useful when the user can see where it came from and which team owns the information behind it. We also cover the boundary between historical analytical data and fast operational workloads. Richard describes how Databricks positions the lakehouse for broad enterprise context and Lakebase for immediate reads and writes, such as updating an account, placing an order, or storing agent memory, while keeping both connected to a common data and governance base. Are companies ready to trace and test the whole AI workflow, or are too many treating the model as both the hero and the culprit? Listen to the episode and share your thoughts with me.