IT Visionaries

AI is forcing enterprises to rethink everything from hardware to governance, and most organizations are attacking it in silos.

Mano Bhattacharyya (CTO, Nutanix) breaks down why AI isn't just an application layer problem, but an end-to-end transformation that spans compute (GPUs, ARM, DPUs), data management (unclean enterprise data, knowledge graphs), security (agent gateways, MCP server risks), and economics (token costs vs. usage explosion). He explains why CIOs need cross-functional AI committees, not isolated strategies, and why use case driven AI beats exploratory projects that burn budgets in months.

The solution is to form AI committees where CIO, CTO, and CDO work together, not in silos. Focus on use case driven AI by learning from peers, rather than exploratory AI that becomes a budget trap. Start with small prototypes with dedicated use cases, not a free-for-all where every team tries something.

 

Chapters:

0:00 AI as an End-to-End Infrastructure Challenge

2:16 Networking, Storage, and Bare Metal VM Performance

4:43 Agent Security, Gateways, and Enterprise Governance

6:33 Use Case Driven AI and Learning from Peers

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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 Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools.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.

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.

---
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.

---
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.