AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology

Episodet

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  The Greatest Risk Isn't Failure. It's Standing Still.​ 19.08.2026 50min

  Most organizations don't fail because they aren't working hard enough. They fail because they spend too long preparing for yesterday's problems.​ Retired General Mike Minihan has spent a career leading organizations where the cost of being unprepared is measured in lives, not quarterly results. That experience shaped the Mobility Manifesto, a leadership philosophy built on a simple belief: readiness isn't something you create in the moment. It's something you build long before the moment arri...
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  How to Escape AI’s 'Open Bar' Era: Intelligent Token Routing 12.08.2026 41min

  For the past few years, enterprise AI had an open tab. Experiment. Build. Give teams access. Put agents to work. Now those agents are running 24/7 and someone has finally looked at the bill. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, AMD’s John Hampton and WWT’s Mike Trojecki dig into what happens when AI moves from experimentation to a real operating expense. Scaling it doesn’t mean simply spending more on compute. It means knowing when a workload needs a frontier model, when it doesn...
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  The Robot Is Waiting on Your Data. 08.08.2026 33min

  Humanoid robots have become the poster child for AI. They're dancing, running, stocking shelves and making headlines almost weekly. It's easy to look at them and think the future has finally arrived. But that's not the hard part. Long before a robot can navigate a warehouse, inspect a factory floor or assist in a hospital, it has to understand the world around it. That begins with trusted data, an accurate understanding of its environment and infrastructure capable of making safe, real-time d...
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  AI Adoption Was the Easy Part. Now Comes the Hard Decision. 05.08.2026 44min

  For the last two years, the conversation has been about getting AI into the enterprise. That chapter is starting to close. Now comes the harder part. Where should AI go first? Which problems are actually worth solving? And how do you build enough trust that people are willing to let AI move from answering questions to taking action? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Brian Feldt is joined by WWT's Walton Smith, Google's Ahmed Ali and Dell's Suri Durvasula for a thoughtful conve...
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  When AI Agents Cross the Boundary: Securing the AI Factory 29.07.2026 31min

  In July, OpenAI disclosed that models undergoing a cybersecurity evaluation escaped their testing environment, exploited a zero-day vulnerability and ultimately reached Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. The incident raised a difficult question for every organization deploying autonomous AI: What happens when an agent crosses a boundary — not because it was instructed to attack, but because doing so helps it complete the objective it was given? Recorded before the incident became publi...
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  A New Data Architecture for Agentic AI 22.07.2026 34min

  AI is forcing enterprises to reconsider what their data infrastructure was built to do. Everpure GM Enterprise Maciej Kranz and WWT Principal Solutions Architect Bob Watson discuss why storing data is no longer enough—and what it takes to make information accessible, governed, secure and ready for inference. They examine the shift toward unified data management, whole-stack AI architecture, shorter investment cycles and governance models designed for a world in which applications, employees a...
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  Your AI Agents Are Ready to Act. Is Your Architecture Ready? 18.07.2026 29min

  AI agents are getting remarkably good at deciding what to do. The harder question is whether they should be allowed to do it. For the last year, Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been viewed as a way to connect AI models to tools. As enterprises move from copilots to autonomous agents, it's becoming something much bigger: the architectural layer that determines how agents access data, interact with systems and operate safely at scale. Brian Feldt sits down with WWT's David Geddam and Chandler ...
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  Your GPUs Are Waiting for Something 15.07.2026 35min

  Buying GPUs is easy. Building an AI system that keeps them busy is something else entirely. Recorded live at Cisco Live, this conversation with Cisco's Will Eatherton and WWT's Eric Fairfield explores what happens after the hardware arrives. Networking, storage, orchestration and security rarely get the same attention as GPUs, yet they're often the difference between an AI investment that scales and one that sits idle. The organizations that get the most from AI won't be the ones with the mos...
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  Your AI Is Only as Good as Your Data. Here's Why. 08.07.2026 25min

  Nearly 90% of enterprise data is unstructured. That's a daunting statistic until you realize it may also be your biggest competitive advantage. In this episode hosted at Cisco Live, Brian Feldt sits down with WWT's Jeff Fonke, NVIDIA's Jason Schroedl and NetApp's Mike Hommer to explore why data has become the defining factor in enterprise AI. From token economics and GPU utilization to hybrid AI infrastructure, the conversation keeps coming back to one idea. AI is only as valuable as the data...
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  When the Ground Keeps Moving: The New Reality of AI Security 06.07.2026 39min

  By the time this episode reaches your feed, the AI landscape may have changed again. That's becoming the new normal. It's tempting to chase every new model, every policy update, every headline. But the organizations making real progress aren't rebuilding their strategy every time the landscape shifts. They're building the resilience to keep moving anyway. Madison Horn and Rob Geis join AI Proving Ground Podcast to explore what this new reality means for enterprise security. The conversation m...
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  Doing AI Is Easy. Doing It Well Is Hard. 01.07.2026 39min

  AI has made writing code dramatically easier. Building great software is another story. Recorded live at Cisco Live, Raj Chopra, Cisco's Chief Product Officer for Security, joins WWT's Brian Ortbals and Joe Berger to explore what it really takes to become an AI-native organization. As AI changes the way software gets built, engineering becomes less about producing code and more about solving meaningful problems, applying domain expertise, and creating the right guardrails for systems that can...
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  The Real AI Advantage Isn't What You Think 24.06.2026 37min

  Everybody says they're data-driven. But according to a Harvard Business Review study, only 7% of enterprises believe their data is actually ready for AI. Not agents. Not advanced machine learning. Just AI. Everyone wants the outcome. Far fewer have done the years of work required to make AI useful in the first place. But Matt Pappas has. As Chief Data Officer at Kiewit, he's spent more than 15 years building production machine learning systems that influence billion-dollar decisions, risk ass...
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  Everybody Wants AI. Who's Paying for It? 17.06.2026 31min

  For years, technology leaders could afford a little inefficiency. A system that stayed in place longer than it should. Infrastructure that nobody got around to optimizing. Assets that quietly blended into the background. AI is changing the math. As organizations invest in more intelligence, more automation, and more ambitious digital strategies, every decision about infrastructure, operations, and capacity suddenly matters a little more. Not because the future is out of reach, but because the...
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  Your AI Agent Doesn't Sleep. Are You Ready for That? NVIDIA Answers. 10.06.2026 32min

  The most important shift in AI isn't better chatbots. It's the arrival of agents that can work independently. Give them a task before bed and they may finish it before you wake up. They can write code, access tools, analyze information and make decisions without a human in the loop. The productivity upside is enormous but so is the potential risk. In this episode, NVIDIA's Dave Barry breaks down what enterprises are learning about autonomous agents, from secure runtimes and policy controls to...
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  Cisco Live! 2026: AI Is Taking Away the Luxury of Time 05.06.2026 37min

  The most interesting thing at Cisco Live! 2026 wasn't a product announcement. It was a shift in tone. For years, technology leaders have had the luxury of studying change before responding to it. They could build a roadmap, socialize a strategy, secure a budget, and move forward on their own timeline. AI is taking that luxury away. Across nearly every conversation this week, the same tension kept surfacing. The technology is improving faster than organizations are adapting to it. Security tea...
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  AI Is Having Its Dropbox Moment 03.06.2026 23min

  Remember when employees started using Dropbox before IT approved it? AI agents feel a lot like that moment. People are building them because they're useful. Not because they were told to. The surprise isn't that agents are showing up across the enterprise, it's how quickly they're multiplying. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Softchoice's Craig McQueen and Stephanie Donahue discuss Microsoft's answer to a problem many organizations are only beginning to see: AI adoption is ou...
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  Boards Can't Stay at 30,000 Feet Anymore 27.05.2026 36min

  AI is collapsing the space between oversight and ownership. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, NASDAQ Global Head of Board Advisory Byron Loflin and WWT Global Head of Cyber Advocacy Kate Kuehn break down why boards are entering an age of accountability and what happens when AI moves faster than governance can keep up. As AI moves deeper into the enterprise, the challenge is no longer adopting the technology. It's knowing who owns the consequences. Byron and Kate unpack what ha...
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  When AI Stops Assisting And Starts Acting 20.05.2026 32min

  What changes when AI stops answering questions and starts taking actions? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT security leaders Istvan Burko and Jillian Anderson-Nix break down why agentic AI is forcing enterprises to rethink security from the ground up. These systems are no longer just generating content. They're touching sensitive data, triggering workflows, modifying code and operating with a level of speed and autonomy existing security models were never designed to handl...
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  Mythos And The Disappearing Patch Window 13.05.2026 33min

  What happens when vulnerabilities can be discovered in minutes and exploits can be generated faster than organizations can patch them? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, former NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce and WWT cyber architecture and innovation leader Kent Noyes break down how AI is compressing the timelines cybersecurity teams have relied on for decades. We explore why Anthropic’s Mythos became a wake-up call for the security industry, how agentic AI is accelerating...
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  AI Can Move Trillions. You Won’t Let It Send an Email. 06.05.2026 32min

  AI moves trillions of dollars in milliseconds. So why won’t companies let it send a customer email? In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Erik Anderson, CEO of Singularity University and former Topgolf leader, breaks down the real constraint on enterprise AI adoption: trust. We talk about the shift to agentic AI, how it's reshaping thought work, and the tension leaders face between productivity gains and the social contract with employees. If AI gives your team 20% of their time b...