AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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 handle.

The conversation explores the idea of blast radius, why AI agents can behave like highly privileged employees vulnerable to manipulation, and what happens when AI deployments move faster than governance and operational controls can keep up.

We also unpack ARMOR, WWT’s AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience, along with the practical guardrails leaders should be thinking about now, including observability, least privilege, secure operations and disciplined human oversight for coding agents.

If your organization is building or deploying agentic AI, this episode offers a practical look at where the next generation of security risk is starting to emerge.

Support for this episode provided by: Akamai

More about this week's guests:

Jillian Anderson-Nix is a Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology focused on enterprise AI security and operational resilience. Her background spans biomedical research, aerospace and applied AI, bringing a cross-industry perspective to securing emerging technologies. Jillian is passionate about building safe, practical and collaborative AI ecosystems grounded in real-world enterprise use cases.

Jillian's top pick: How to Use ARMOR: A Guide to AI Security Transformation

Istvan Burko is a security and governance leader with more than 25 years of experience across cybersecurity, risk and cloud strategy. He has held senior leadership roles at NTT/Dimension Data and Amazon Web Services, where he contributed to the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework whitepapers. Istvan remains active in the cybersecurity community through industry leadership, events and enterprise security initiatives focused on modern operational resilience.

Istvan's top pick: Breaking Data Silos: How Private Inference Unlocks GPU ROI on Sensitive Data

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

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 vulnerability discovery, and why traditional patching and vulnerability management strategies are struggling to keep pace. The conversation also examines which defenses still hold up under machine-speed pressure, from zero trust and segmentation to deception techniques, resilience planning and recovery.

If your security strategy still assumes defenders have time on their side, this episode explains why that assumption is starting to break.

Support for this episode provided by: ExtraHop

More about this week's guests:

Rob Joyce served more than 34 years at the NSA, spending his final years as Director of Cybersecurity. Throughout his career, he held leadership roles in signals intelligence and cybersecurity, including leading Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the NSA’s elite hacking unit focused on foreign intelligence operations. He also served on the White House National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator, and as Acting Homeland Security Advisor. Joyce is now founder of Joyce Cyber LLC and serves in advisory roles for organizations including OpenAI, Microsoft, PwC and others.

Rob's top pick: Cyber Resilience: Why Security Fails When It Matters Most

Kent Noyes is a cybersecurity and infrastructure leader with more than two decades at World Wide Technology, where he has held senior roles across technical pre-sales and service delivery. A Cisco CCIE and WWT’s first Distinguished Solutions Architect, Kent now leads Cyber Architecture & Innovation within WWT’s Global Cyber organization, helping enterprise customers address evolving security challenges, emerging technologies and modern cyber risk.

Kent's top pick: Defending at the Speed of AI

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

Agentic AI is getting real fast. The challenge isn’t building it anymore. It’s running it without losing control.

Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC, this conversation gets into what actually changes when AI moves into production. Not in theory, but in practice.

As organizations start designing for real usage, new pressure shows up. Systems get more complex. Costs become harder to predict. And security can’t be something you fix later.

Cisco’s Kevin Wollenweber, NVIDIA’s Kevin Deierling and WWT’s Neil Anderson talk through what they’re seeing right now and how teams are adjusting in real time.

If you’re thinking about how to scale AI without losing control of your environment, your costs or your risk, this is worth your time.

More about this week's guests:

Kevin Wollenweber is Cisco's Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center and Internet Infrastructure. In this role, he leads product strategy to enhance Cisco's infrastructure solutions for the data center, high-performance routing, and mobile networks. His leadership is pivotal in driving growth and developing cutting-edge solutions to meet the dynamic needs of businesses worldwide.

Kevin Deierling is the senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA, joining from Mellanox Technologies where he was senior vice president of Marketing. He has been a founder or senior executive at five startups that have achieved positive outcomes. Combining both technical and business expertise, Deierling has variously served as the chief officer of technology, architecture, and marketing at these companies, where he led the development of strategy and products across a broad range of disciplines including networking, security, cloud, big data, virtualization, storage, smart energy, and DNA sequencing.

Neil Anderson has over 30 years of experience in AI, Software Development, Wireless, Cyber, and Networking technologies. At WWT Neil is VP and CTO in our Global Solutions and Architectures team, with responsibility for over $16B in WWT's solutions portfolio. Neil advises hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies on their global architecture and technology strategy.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

Most enterprise AI tries to be impressive. In a hotel, it just needs to work.

No one checks in hoping to experience great AI. They want things to feel smooth, fast, intuitive — like everything is just handled. That’s the standard.

At IHG Hotels & Resorts, AI is being applied with that mindset. Not as a headline, but as a way to make employees more effective and operations run cleaner behind the scenes.

In this episode, IHG Chief Product and Technology Officer Jolie Fleming shares what it actually looks like to scale AI inside a global hospitality business. Not pilots that linger. Not demos that look good in slides. Real changes to how work gets done — across call centers, service workflows, language translation and day-to-day operations.

The approach is simple, but disciplined: start with a real problem, fix it, prove it works and then expand. It’s less about chasing the latest model and more about building something that holds up under pressure.

And underneath it all, the fundamentals still matter. Data, workflows and governance don’t go away with AI — they become more important. Fast.

For leaders trying to move quickly without losing control, this episode offers a clear takeaway: the most effective AI doesn’t announce itself. It just makes everything work better.

Support for this episode provided by: Check Point

More about this week's guest:

Jolie Fleming was appointed Chief Product & Technology Officer in April 2024. In this role, Jolie is responsible for driving the development of all guest, enterprise and owner-facing products and technology, while working across our regions with marketing, brands, loyalty and operations. Jolie joined IHG in 2021 as Senior Vice President, Guest Products and Platforms (GPP) for IHG's Commercial and Technology team. In that role, she led the development and launch of technology solutions for the new IHG One Rewards programme and supporting mobile app, new hotel websites and the seamless integration of new partners including Iberostar.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

At NVIDIA GTC 2026, the conversation shifted from model novelty to enterprise reality. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Chief AI Advisor Tim Brooks explains why agentic AI, inference-heavy workloads and physical AI are forcing CIOs and CTOs to rethink infrastructure, governance, trust and leadership.

Brooks, WWT's Chief AI Advisor, said the industry is moving beyond fascination with model releases and into the harder work of managing inference, agents, infrastructure and trust at scale.

The shift matters because enterprise AI is no longer defined primarily by training. Brooks points to an inference inflection point, where production systems, multi-step reasoning and autonomous or semi-autonomous agents are driving exponential token growth. That creates immediate pressure on compute, memory, networking and cost decisions that many organizations are still underestimating.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

Private AI is quickly moving from niche architecture to a core enterprise AI strategy. As AI workloads move into production, leaders are rethinking where inference runs, how data stays governed and why hybrid AI infrastructure may offer the best balance of performance, cost and control.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, VMware by Broadcom’s Chris Wolf, NVIDIA’s Chad Olds and WWT CTO Mike Taylor explore why private AI is gaining momentum across the enterprise. What began as a design choice for highly regulated industries is becoming a practical model for organizations that want to scale AI while maintaining governance, protecting intellectual property and managing infrastructure costs.

The conversation examines how inference workloads are spreading across cloud, on-prem and edge environments, why enterprises are becoming more protective of their data and how the economics of sustained AI workloads are shaping infrastructure decisions.

You’ll learn:

• Why private AI is emerging as a practical enterprise AI architecture
 • How hybrid AI environments balance cloud, on-prem and edge workloads
 • Why data governance and IP protection are driving AI infrastructure choices
 • How inference economics are reshaping enterprise AI strategy
 • What leaders must do to treat AI as operational infrastructure—not a side experiment

If you're building an enterprise AI strategy or scaling AI into production, this episode offers a clear look at how organizations are designing infrastructure to support AI reliably, securely and at scale.

Support for this episode provided by: Eaton

More about this week's guests:

Mike Taylor leads WWT’s Global Engineering, IT and Services organization, helping position WWT as a single-source partner for digital transformation. He connects WWT’s deep technical expertise with business strategy to help customers adopt emerging technologies and drive meaningful outcomes.

Chad Olds leads software sales and customer success across the Americas at NVIDIA. With more than 15 years of experience in AI, data and cloud transformation, he has held leadership roles at NVIDIA, IBM, Anchore, Software AG and startups, and began his career at Red Hat driving open-source adoption.

Chris Wolf leads the Private AI business for Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation division, overseeing AI strategy, architecture and engineering. He works with enterprise leaders to design and scale AI infrastructure that balances performance, governance and cost.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

As AI spreads beyond developers into every workflow, the differentiator shifts from tools to leadership. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh argues that winning in AI will lean heavily on culture: how fast an organization can learn, adapt and change. The new leadership challenge is moving fast without creating downstream chaos.

More about this week's guest:

Jim Kavanaugh is globally recognized as an innovative business executive and is renowned for his inclusive, people-first leadership style. His emphasis on promoting a healthy, vibrant workplace has anchored WWT's award-winning culture, while his savvy business acumen has propelled the company's substantial growth. Jim leads WWT's 18-person executive team and focuses on technology innovation—for both WWT and its customers and partners—long-term planning, strategic acquisitions, financial performance, employee development and workplace culture. Under his leadership, WWT has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company with approximately 12,000 employees globally that is a great place to work for all and is a key business enabler to 80+ of the Fortune 100 companies.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

AI-powered coding assistants are rapidly compressing the time it takes to build software and delivering a competitive advantage that can lead to transformational outcomes. But according to WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, the bigger shift is organizational: companies must rethink leadership, data strategy and workforce skills to compete in an AI-native world. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Jim shares his vision for how coding assistants are emerging as one of the most practical and disruptive use cases in enterprise AI.

More about this week's guest:

Jim Kavanaugh is globally recognized as an innovative business executive and is renowned for his inclusive, people-first leadership style. His emphasis on promoting a healthy, vibrant workplace has anchored WWT's award-winning culture, while his savvy business acumen has propelled the company's substantial growth. Jim leads WWT's 18-person executive team and focuses on technology innovation—for both WWT and its customers and partners—long-term planning, strategic acquisitions, financial performance, employee development and workplace culture. Under his leadership, WWT has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company with approximately 12,000 employees globally that is a great place to work for all and is a key business enabler to 80+ of the Fortune 100 companies.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

AI is accelerating everything — including your attack surface.

Prompt injection. Shadow AI. Non-human identities. Automated agents making decisions at machine speed. The pressure to move fast is real. So is the risk.

In this episode, Fortinet’s Aamir Lakhani and WWT’s Dave Pisarek lay out a practical path forward. No hype — just the controls that actually work.

We cover:

• Why prompt injection isn’t going away
• How attackers hide payloads in unexpected encodings
• Why identity and access management is becoming the control plane for AI
• Guardrails that matter: least privilege, segmentation, scoped agents, robust logging
• Why every automated system needs a human-reviewed “undo”

You’ll also hear where AI is already helping SOC teams move faster — surfacing anomalies, correlating IOCs, and shrinking time to containment.

If you’re being asked to scale AI while preventing breaches, this is the conversation to have with your security and engineering leaders.

Speed is inevitable.

Exposure isn’t.

More about this week's guests:

Dave Pisarek is a Fortinet Practice Manager with 24 years of experience in information technology and a Fortinet NSE 4 certification. He specializes in network security design and integration, translating complex technical requirements into practical, standards-based solutions. Known for his clear communication and problem-solving skills, Dave develops business plans, architectural designs, and project documentation that align security strategy with operational outcomes.

Dave's top pick: Fortinet Xperts 2025

Aamir Lakhani is Global Director of Threat Intelligence and Adversarial AI Research at Fortinet. With more than 15 years in cybersecurity, he leads research and architectural strategy across cyber defense, malware, mobile threats, and advanced persistent threats. Aamir has designed solutions for major commercial, federal, and defense intelligence organizations, helping them defend against sophisticated adversaries while advancing FortiGuard and AI-driven security capabilities. 

Aamir's top pick: Stop Stacking Boxes. Start Designing Security.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

Most AI teams aren’t losing to the model.

They’re losing to bad prompts.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT’s Liz Gattra breaks down the invisible tax of vague instructions, blind trust in outputs and endless iteration loops that quietly burn tokens, waste GPU cycles and drag down ROI.

As generative AI moves into production, AI literacy becomes operational leverage — not a soft skill.

We cover:
 • A practical prompt blueprint that improves output quality fast
 • Why “confident but wrong” is more expensive than you think
 • How precision reduces token spend and compute waste
 • When to switch between ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude
 • Why system prompts, agents and context engineering determine whether AI scales or spirals

Every vague prompt compounds.

The teams that win don’t just deploy models — they train people to think clearly, structure intent and treat prompts like lightweight programs with measurable results.

If you care about AI ROI, compute efficiency, and scaling generative AI in the enterprise, start here.

Precision isn’t optional. It’s a cost control strategy.

Support for this episode provided by: ExtraHop

More about this week's guest:

Liz Gattra is Director of Product Ownership at World Wide Technology’s Application Services practice. A former Agile Coach, IT manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Business Analyst, she has led enterprise agile transformations and built product ownership capabilities across internal and client teams. Liz develops and trains product owners to deliver measurable business value at scale. She holds a Master’s in Biology and Biomedical Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis and brings nearly 20 years of cross-industry IT experience.

Liz's top pick: The AI Adoption Gap Isn't Technical. It's Human.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.