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Produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.
Think 5G is about faster phones? That's what telecom companies want consumers to believe. The truth is far more interesting.
In this episode, Elena Fersman (VP and Head of AI Innovation at Ericsson) reveals what 5G networks are really built for: industries, not consumers. Through network slicing, edge computing, and cognitive systems, 5G creates the infrastructure that makes AI applications possible at scale—from remote surgery where milliseconds matter, to AR/VR without wearing a backpack of GPUs, to factory floors with autonomous heavy machinery.
Elena also shares surprising stories: how establishing a simple communication link led to 20% fuel savings for a shipping company, why autonomous networks are safer than human operators (the elevator operator analogy is perfect), and why Ericsson's trustworthy AI research has been running for 15 years.
If you're an IT leader trying to understand where networks and AI intersect, or you're struggling with AI deployment and don't know where to start, this conversation cuts through the hype with practical frameworks and real-world examples from someone who's been in the trenches for two decades.
Chapters:
00:00 - The Risk of Not Deploying AI
03:05 - The AI RAN Alliance: AI and Networks as Symbiotic Partners
10:03 - Why 5G Is Built for Industries, Not Consumers
13:54 - How AI Optimizes Networks (Energy, Predictions, Handoffs)
21:06 - Cognitive Networks and Self-Organization
29:02 - Real-World Impact: 20% Fuel Savings for Shipping
30:52 - What Makes AI Projects Scale vs Fail
41:11 - The Critical First Step: Data Management Over Algorithms
57:25 - Confessions of an AI Brain: The Positive Future
1:01:02 - Why Autonomous Systems Are Safer Than Humans
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
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IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Compliance and regulatory reporting used to mean endless spreadsheets, fragmented data sources, and teams drowning in manual work. Today, AI is transforming how the world's largest companies manage financial reporting, sustainability disclosures, and audit workflows—not by replacing humans, but by giving them time back to do strategic work.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Kim Huffman, CIO of Workiva, the platform used by 85% of the Fortune 100 for critical financial and compliance reporting. Kim shares her unique perspective as both a former Workiva customer and now the CIO steering the company into an AI-powered future.
They explore how the office of the CFO is evolving under pressure from new sustainability regulations, how AI governance actually works in practice, and why collaboration between IT, finance, sustainability, and risk teams has become essential. Kim also discusses the changing role of the CIO, the coming wave of autonomous agents in the workplace, and why having more data doesn't always mean making better decisions.
Key Moments:
00:58 – The State of Compliance Today
02:18 – Why Standards and Regulations Matter
05:48 – The Complexity of Global Compliance
07:36 – Data Collection Across Teams
08:36 – Single Source of Truth
10:20 – The Sustainability Data Challenge
13:36 – The Endless Spreadsheet Problem
16:12 – What's Driving the CFO Office
19:46 – AI's Strategic Role at Workiva
23:02 – Beyond Repetitive Tasks
25:20 – Transforming How Teams Work
27:03 – Will AI Replace Jobs or Create Capacity?
30:00 – Measuring AI's Business Impact
33:06 – Speed vs. Data Overload
36:25 – The Evolving Role of the CIO
40:00 – Technology Leadership in Transition
43:09 – The Next Five Years for CIOs
46:14 – Managing the Coming Wave of AI Agents
50:02 – AI Will Create Its Own Security Industry
52:26 – The Sustainability Reporting Reality
55:31 – Resource Constraints and AI Consumption
57:34 – Why ESG Data Is Now Critical Business Intelligence
59:23 – Keeping NPS High While Innovating
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
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IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most companies don’t realize it yet, but the way they built their technology foundations is quietly becoming a liability.
Cloud costs are rising. Platforms change underneath you. AI is reshaping infrastructure from hardware to data to governance. And the strategies that once felt “safe” are now the ones creating the most risk.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Mano Bhattacharya, CTO of Nutanix, to unpack what’s really happening inside enterprise technology right now. This isn’t a conversation about chasing the newest tools or betting on a single future. It’s about why adaptability has become the most important design principle in modern tech.
Mano explains why many organizations are rethinking long-held assumptions about virtualization, cloud, and containers, and why the smartest teams are building infrastructure that gives them options over the next three to five years. They explore how AI changes the entire stack, not just applications, why data has become the real bottleneck, and why moving fast without a coherent plan can be more dangerous than moving slowly.
Chapters:
00:00 - The VMware Exodus Wave is Coming
03:34 - VMware Broadcom Acquisition: What Changed and Why It Matters
05:56 - Three Migration Paths: Stay, Move to Cloud, or Modernize
09:59 - Why Containers on VMs Make Sense for Most Enterprises
15:40 - The Five Stages of VMware Migration Grief
21:20 - VMware Admin to Nutanix Admin: Closing the Skills Gap
24:14 - The Cloud-in-a-Box Philosophy: From Boxes to Software
32:30 - Opening Up the Platform: Pure Storage and Third-Party Integrations
40:54 - AI Infrastructure: The End-to-End Challenge
48:01 - Enterprise AI Strategy: Use Cases, Economics, and Governance
56:44 - What's Next: Building the Invisible Platform for AI
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most people assume the internet is stable, durable, and ready for whatever comes next. The truth is a bit more complicated. Modern networks were never designed for today’s scale, and for the first time we are seeing technology that can make them smarter, simpler, and far more reliable.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt talks with Anil Varanasi, CEO and Co-Founder of Meter, about how the next era of networking is taking shape. Anil explains why traditional infrastructure struggles to keep up, how a unified approach can remove layers of complexity, and why the future of the internet is moving toward faster and more resilient systems.
He also shares how natural language tools and purpose-built models are transforming the work of network engineers, and why autonomous networking may arrive sooner than most people expect. These advancements are creating a path to networks that can configure, maintain, and optimize themselves without increasing operational burden.
Key Moments:
00:00 – Why Modern Networks Are Broken
02:50 – The Pain of Multi-Vendor Sprawl
05:04 – Rebuilding the Entire Stack From Scratch
08:31 – Why Meter Refused to Ship Until It Was Great
11:39 – Hardware, Software, Delivery: A Single Platform
13:34 – No CapEx and Automatic Hardware Refresh
18:26 – How Meter Handles Growth, Migration & Space-Level Infrastructure
20:32 – The Real Reason Networks Fail (Configuration + Compatibility)
23:51 – GUI vs CLI: What Engineers Really Want
25:56 – Introducing Command: Natural-Language Networking
27:37 – Auto-Generated Dashboards and Custom Software
30:38 – Why AI Shouldn’t Be an Empty Buzzword
32:51 – Toward Fully Autonomous Networks by 2027
36:46 – The Network Engineer Shortage & What Comes Next
38:33 – What Autonomous Networking Actually Means
41:38 – Why the Internet Will Keep Growing Faster
43:02 – The Customers Who Need Meter Most
45:39 – Factory Floors, Warehouses, Data Centers, and Edge
48:32 – Nine New Hardware Platforms & Design Philosophy
52:56 – How Meter Maintains Networks Without Downtime
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most leaders assume AI and search already see the whole internet. In reality, they all operate on the same tiny slice of the web.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Sudheesh Nair, Co-Founder and CEO of TinyFish and former CEO of ThoughtSpot, to unpack why only a small percentage of the web is indexable and how that cripples enterprise AI.
Sudheesh explains why the next breakthrough won’t come from bigger models or better search, but from agents that can operate the web at scale, logging in, filling forms, running workflows, and surfacing the long tail of opportunities that never appear on page one. He also shares why human craft, taste, and presence will matter more than ever in an agent-driven world.
Key Moments:
00:00 - The Deep Web Problem
02:48 - The Amazon Search Trap
04:26 - Why Search is Broken
07:01 - Internet is No Longer a Library
08:29 - AI Answers vs Blue Links
13:05 - Introducing Tiny Fish's Mission
16:00 - Search as a Poor Experience
18:29 - The Deep Web: APIs, Workflows & Logins
22:11 - Tackling the 93% Problem
25:47 - The Eight-Room Hotel Success Story
29:04 - Operating the Web vs Skimming It
32:42 - Real-Time Personalized Workflows
38:31 - Enterprise B2B Strategy
40:18 - Taste Over Tools
43:08 - AI Freeing Human Experience
46:36 - Travel Experiences & Local Discovery
50:00 - Democratizing the Internet
56:39 - The Waving Guide in China
1:01:12 - Optimism for AI's Future
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Most organizations are sitting on mountains of documents, PDFs, emails, and images they still cannot fully search, organize, or understand.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Tim McIntire, CTO of Hyland, to unpack why unstructured data is still one of the biggest blockers between AI hype and real results. Tim breaks down why so many companies struggle to access the content they already have and what it really takes to make that information usable, trustworthy, and valuable.
From building content that is ready for AI to unlocking new context-aware agents and improving governance and transparency, Tim explains how leading organizations are finally turning everyday content into real business impact and why the future of enterprise AI starts with cleaning up what is already in the basement.
Key Moments:
02:36 - What Hyland Actually Does
04:18 - Why 80% of Enterprise Data Is Unusable
06:46 - From 30,000 Manual Indexes to Automation
07:47 - Vectorization: Making Documents AI-Ready
09:45 - The ROI of Eliminating Mundane Work
10:55 - AI vs RPA: Why Intelligence Changes Everything
13:23 - Federate Don't Migrate: Meeting Customers Where They Are
16:29 - Governance Can't Be an Afterthought
18:11 - The Explainability Breakthrough
20:10 - Day 1 to Day 90: Faster Time to Value
22:56 - Enterprise Agent Mesh Explained
24:06 - Context Engineering: The New AI Superpower
26:36 - Confidence Scores: When Humans Step In
28:12 - Right Model for the Right Job
31:00 - The 18-Month Prediction: Agents Everywhere
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
If your business relies on video calls, messaging apps, or mobile devices, you are at risk for a new kind of attack.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Christine Gadsby, Chief Security Officer at BlackBerry, to explore how AI, deepfakes, and weakened telecom infrastructure are reshaping the modern threat landscape.
Christine explains why enterprises can no longer trust what they see or hear, how metadata has become one of the most valuable intelligence sources for attackers, and why encryption alone is no longer enough to protect high-risk communications.
She also breaks down how nation-state groups like Salt Typhoon infiltrate global telco networks, exploit unpatchable 2G and 3G protocols, and use AI to refine attacks in real time.
Key Moments:
00:00 – Where Organizations Are Underestimating Communication Risk
04:05 – Can You Still Trust What You See and Hear on a Call?
08:11 – How Internal Messaging Quietly Became an Attack Surface
12:18 – Why Encryption Alone Does Not Secure Communications
16:24 – What BlackBerry Is Today and Why It Still Matters
20:31 – Why Governments and Enterprises Face a Different Threat Model
24:37 – How AI Deepfakes Changed Executive and Enterprise Risk
28:44 – Which Conversations Inside Your Company Matter Most?
32:50 – The Trust Assumptions Most Companies Don’t Realize They’re Making
36:56 – Why Attackers Wait for Moments of Urgency
41:03 – Is Cyber Extortion Sometimes a Cover for Espionage?
45:09 – Who Salt Typhoon Is and Why Telecom Networks Were Targeted
49:15 – Why Telecom Infrastructure Became an Intelligence Goldmine
53:22 – Why 2G and 3G Networks Still Put Modern Systems at Risk
57:28 – What Secure Communications Actually Require Today
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Security used to be a headache. Now it is a growth engine.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Taylor Hersom, Founder and CEO of Eden Data and former CISO, to break down how fast growing companies can turn cybersecurity and compliance into a true competitive advantage. Taylor explains why frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and emerging AI standards such as ISO 42001 are becoming essential for winning enterprise business. He also shares how to future proof controls, connect compliance work to real business goals, and avoid the costly pitfalls that stall companies during scale.
Taylor also highlights the biggest blind spots in AI security, including model training risks, improper data handling, and the challenges created by relying on free AI tools. If you are building a SaaS product or selling into large companies, this conversation shows how trust, transparency, and strong security practices directly drive revenue.
Key Moments:
00:00 — The Hidden Risks of Scattered Company Data
04:11 — Why Early-Stage Teams Lose Control of Security
08:22 — Compliance Becomes a Competitive Advantage
12:33 — SOC 2 vs ISO 27001: What Founders Need to Know
16:44 — Framework Overload and How to Navigate It
20:55 — Mapping Security Controls to Business Objectives
25:06 — The Gap Between Compliance Audits and Real Threats
29:17 — Startup Security Blind Spots That Lead to Breaches
33:28 — Rising AI Risks Leaders Aren’t Preparing For
37:39 — Building Customer Trust Through Transparency
41:50 — Protecting AI Models and Sensitive Customer Data
46:01 — Why Free AI Tools Create Hidden Data Exposure
50:12 — Automating Security Controls for Scale
54:23 — Continuous Compliance Beats Annual Audits
58:34 — Final Takeaways on Security, Trust, and Growth
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The promise of agentic AI has been massive, autonomous systems that act, reason, and make business decisions, but most enterprises are still struggling to see results.
In this episode, host Chris Brandt sits down with Sumeet Arora, Chief Product Officer at Teradata, to unpack why the gap exists between AI hype and actual impact, and what it takes to make AI scale, explainable, and ROI-driven.
From the shift toward “AI with ROI” to the new era of human + AI systems and data quality challenges, Sumeet shares how leading enterprises are moving from flashy demos to measurable value and trust in the next phase of AI.
CHAPTER MARKERS
00:00 The AI Hackathon Era
03:10 Hype vs Reality in Agentic AI
06:05 Redesigning the Human AI Interface
09:15 From Demos to Real Economic Outcomes
12:20 Why Scaling AI Still Fails
15:05 The Importance of AI Ready Knowledge
18:10 Data Quality and the Biggest Bottleneck
20:46 Building the Customer 360 Knowledge Layer
23:35 Push vs Pull Systems in Modern AI
26:15 Rethinking Enterprise Workflows
29:20 AI Agents and Outcome Driven Design
32:45 Where Agentic AI Works Today
36:10 What Enterprises Still Get Wrong
39:30 How AI Changes Engineering Priorities
55:49 The Future of GPUs and Efficiency Challenges
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
If you’ve ever shipped an AI feature that looked great in testing — only to watch it behave unpredictably in production — you’re not alone.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt talks with Lawrence Jones, Founding Engineer at incident.io, about the critical gap between AI that demos well and AI that works under pressure. Lawrence shares how his team designs tools that help engineers respond faster, learn from failure, and build systems that don’t crumble when it counts.
CHAPTERS / KEY MOMENTS
00:00 - AI Chaos & The Mike Tyson Rule
00:58 - Meet Lawrence Jones of Incident.io
03:14 - From FinTech Outages to Incident Response
06:22 - The Biggest Mistake in Incident Management
09:08 - Training for Chaos: Game Day Simulations
10:31 - Inside the AI SRE System
13:01 - What SRE Really Means
16:23 - From Prototype to Production AI
20:27 - Keeping Up with AI’s Rapid Evolution
22:50 - Understanding Vector Databases & Embeddings
28:34 - The Architecture Problem: Chaining Prompts at Scale
36:11 - Measuring AI Performance & Reliability
44:02 - The Future of SRE Meets AI
52:10 - Lessons from Real Incidents
56:42 - Final Thoughts: Building AI That Works
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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.
---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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