Tech Transformed

Every customer service call now produces a measurable outcome, which is exactly why customer experience has become the place where agentic AI either proves itself or falls apart. Most enterprise AI hype centres on generation and productivity. But according to Sneha Iyer, who leads AI value delivery and analytics at Observe.ai, the real test of agentic AI is happening somewhere less flashy, which is the contact centre. In a recent episode of Tech Transformed, host Ravit Jain asked Iyer why customer experience (CX) has become the industry's default stress test and what that means for enterprises still sorting isolated chatbots from genuine AI agents. Iyer has spent nearly a decade watching CX change from manual quality assurance to a blended workforce of human and AI agents. This shift, she says, has quietly rewritten the metrics, tooling, and governance decisions every enterprise leader now has to make.
Why Customer Experience Became AI's Testing Ground
Iyer explains that CX generates more human-AI interaction data than almost any other business function. Every conversation resolves in a clear outcome, resolved or not, retained or churned, and it spans every modality a company touches, from voice to chat to email. Solve AI reliability here, and the lessons transfer everywhere else.
What's actually changed, she notes, isn't that AI got smarter; it's that AI stopped just watching and started acting. Where AI agents once flagged patterns in a transcript after the fact, they now issue refunds, verify identities, and book appointments in real time. This has split the workforce in two, namely, AI agents absorb the high-volume, low-risk interactions, while human agents get pushed toward the complex, judgment-heavy calls machines shouldn't handle alone. Old metrics like containment and deflection no longer capture that split; leaders now need blended resolution measures that account for both.
Fragmented AI Stacks
If you ask most contact centres what their AI stack looks like, you'll find what Iyer calls a "Frankenstein stack": one tool for analytics, another for telephony, another for conversational intelligence, stitched together and barely talking to each other. That setup was tolerable when each tool did one isolated job. It breaks the moment you add agentic AI, because these types of systems depend on shared context to function.
Without that context, a customer verified by an AI agent has to repeat everything to the human agent who picks up next, which turns an already frustrating support call into a worse one. Fragmented tools also make it nearly impossible to prove ROI, since every vendor tracks success differently and costs stack with each new integration.
This is the case for unified CX platforms: not as a nice-to-have, but as the only way to preserve context across a customer's full journey. Iyer points to "companion agents" as a concrete example of real-time, in-context support for human agents that shows them exactly why an AI agent escalated a call and what happened before they picked up.
Build vs. Buy
On the build-versus-buy question, Iyer highlights that building in-house looks cheap upfront and rarely stays that way. Models change every few weeks, which turns any custom build into a permanent maintenance commitment most teams underestimate, including in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, where leaders often assume building keeps data safer. In practice, established vendors have already solved the compliance groundwork, data residency, model governance, and audit trails that a custom build would take months to replicate.
Trust, she argues, isn't really about doubting AI's competence. It's the fear of the one catastrophic interaction happening at scale. That's what simulation testing and evaluation frameworks are for, stress-testing AI agents against the hardest, most ambiguous scenarios before launch, not just the easy paths, backed by governance frameworks that can roll back a deployment fast if something breaks.
Looking six to twelve months out, Iyer expects three shifts, continued consolidation around unified platforms, evaluation frameworks becoming the real competitive edge (not raw model performance), and pricing models moving from seat-based to outcome-based. Her advice to leaders is to build auditability and governance into your AI strategy now, before regulation forces the issue.
Building Customer Experience
The throughline of Iyer's conversation with Jain is that agentic AI in customer experience succeeds or fails on infrastructure and trust, not on which model you're running. Enterprises that unify their data, rethink their success metrics, and choose vendors who can prove reliability through thorough testing are the ones positioned to scale AI-driven CX without breaking it. If you would like to find out more about this visit observe.ai or connect with Sneha Iyer on LinkedIn.
Takeaways
Shift from isolated AI tools to integrated agent systems.
Importance of simulation testing and evaluation frameworks.
Benefits of unified customer experience platforms.
Build versus buy decision in enterprise AI.
Future trends in AI-powered customer experience.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Tech Transform and AI Evolution
02:01 Sneha Iyer's Role and Background in AI
09:35 The Shift in Customer Experience with Agentic AI
13:24 The Move Towards Unified Customer Experience Platforms
18:55 Build vs. Buy: Navigating AI Solutions in Enterprises
20:59 The Cost of AI Maintenance and Vendor Insights
22:20 Navigating Compliance in Regulated Industries
24:52 Building Trust in AI Adoption
30:00 Use Cases Driving AI Value
34:31 Future Trends in AI Customer Experience

The semiconductor industry is undergoing one of its most profound transformations in decades. Driven by the insatiable demand for compute power largely fueled by AI workloads, engineers are moving away from traditional monolithic chips and shifting toward complex multi-die designs. This shift brings a new set of challenges that conventional design and validation methods simply cannot handle.
In a recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, host Dana Gardner sat down with Shekhar Kapoor, Executive Director of Product Line Management at Synopsys, to explore how the growing complexity of semiconductors is changing the way engineers design and validate modern systems. From thermal management to AI-driven automation, the conversation reveals why the old way of building chips is no longer good enough and what the future looks like.
Multi-Die Design
Kapoor explains that the transition to multi-die design is no longer a matter of preference but a necessity. He attributes this shift to the relentless demand for greater compute capacity, driven largely by the rapid growth of AI.
Traditional monolithic chips are hitting hard limits. Reticle sizes are maxing out, and rising yield and cost challenges make it increasingly impractical to pack more functionality onto a single die. Multi-die designs solve this by disaggregating functionality across smaller dies, each targeting the most appropriate process technology, then integrating them into a unified, optimised package.
Leading AI systems already integrate multiple compute and I/O dies alongside large high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks, scaling to 3x–5x reticle-class designs and beyond. The design challenge is very different. As Kapoor puts it: "You're no longer optimising a single chip, you're optimizing a system of chips."
This requires system-level co-design from day one, spanning architecture, silicon, packaging, power delivery, and interconnect strategy simultaneously. Engineers must think in terms of System Technology Co-Optimisation (STCO), not just chip-level optimization. The design tools, methodologies, and team workflows all need to change. For engineers and technology leaders looking to explore these trade-offs, Synopsys has published a comprehensive eBook on accelerating multi-die design and innovation.
Thermal Analysis and Multi-Physics Validation
Historically, thermal, power, and electromagnetic analyses were performed as downstream validation steps once the core design was complete. In a multi-die world, that approach is no longer viable.
"Thermal management is becoming the number one issue when designing these multi-die designs. It has to be managed across a range of scales, from transistor activity to package and board level," Kapoor says.
The problem with late-stage validation is timing. By the time thermal or power integrity issues surface, the most critical decisions are already locked in floorplans, interconnect topologies established, and packaging assumptions embedded.. At that point, the only options are costly ECOs, excessive margining, or a full redesign. Industry estimates suggest over-design can lead to up to 30-35 per cent wasted silicon and hundreds of millions of dollars in optimisation loss.
The solution is a shift-left approach that embeds multiphysics analysis from the earliest stages of design. When thermal hotspots, voltage drop issues, and electromagnetic interactions are identified early, engineers can adjust partitioning and placement strategies before they become expensive problems.
This is the methodology detailed in the Synopsys ebook on Multiphysics Fusion for multi-die design, which covers how teams can build continuous multiphysics validation into their flows to avoid late-stage surprises and protect both performance and reliability.
Multiphysics Fusion and AI-Driven Chip Design
To operationalise the shift-left methodology at scale, Synopsys has introduced the concept of Multiphysics Fusion. This is the native integration of AI-powered EDA technologies with ANSYS's gold-standard multiphysics sign-off analysis capabilities.
Within the 3DIC Compiler platform, this means unifying the implementation environment with RedHawk-SC, RedHawk-SC Electrothermal, and HFSS-IC technologies. This brings IR drop, thermal, signal, and power integrity analysis directly into the design loop. The result is greater predictability, tighter correlation between in-design analysis and sign-off, and significantly fewer design iterations.
The impact on design closure times has been substantial. According to Kapoor, teams using the Multiphysics Fusion solution have seen turnaround times shrink "from weeks to days, and in some cases even hours" even for large, high-performance multi-die designs.
AI amplifies these gains further. Synopsys employs AI in two primary ways: assistive automation through its 3DSO.ai technology, which integrates multiphysics feedback into the optimization loop in real time, and agentic workflow orchestration, which becomes increasingly critical as system complexity scales toward designs incorporating hundreds or even thousands of GPUs. As Kapoor notes, at that scale, "agentic workflows could help engineers converge faster" and manage trade-offs that would otherwise be intractable. If you would like to find out more about this, download the full eBook: Multiphysics Fusion Technology for Multi-Die Designs Explained from Synopsys, which expands on each of these themes with real-world examples, design methodologies, and guidance for implementation teams. You can also connect with Shekhar Kapoor on LinkedIn.
Takeaways
Multi-die architectures and their drivers.
Challenges of traditional monolithic chips.
Importance of early multi-physics analysis.
Multiphysics fusion and its benefits.
AI's role in design automation.
Reducing time-to-market through integrated platforms.
System-level co-design.
Thermal management in 3D IC stacking.
Shift left approach in multi-physics validation.
Future trends in semiconductor design.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Semiconductor Complexity
02:00 The Shift to Multi-Die Designs
04:30 Challenges in Multi-Die Design
08:11 The Importance of Early Multi-Physics Analysis
10:05 Introducing Multiphysics Fusion
12:37 AI's Role in Semiconductor Design
16:37 Reducing Time to Market
19:39 Applications Beyond AI
21:12 Real-World Examples of Multi-Physics Validation
26:20 Practical Advice for Engineers

When most people hear "digital divide," they picture communities without broadband. But in 2026, that definition is dangerously outdated. "The digital divide is no longer just about internet access." These words from Graeme Gordon, Chief Executive Officer of Converged Solutions Group, set the tone for one of the most pressing conversations in technology today.
In this episode of Tech Transformed, host Trisha Pillay sits down with Gordon to unpack the changing digital divide, the massive impact of AI adoption, and what it truly takes. Gordon, whose background spans electrical engineering, oil and gas robotics, and three decades of founding and scaling tech companies, says that the new digital divide is about meaningful participation in the AI-driven economy, not just connectivity.
“More people are connected than ever before,” Gordon explains. “But connection without capability is just noise.” He points to mobile internet adoption as a case in point. Billions of people now access the internet via smartphones. However, the gap between scrolling social media and using cloud-based AI tools to build products and services remains wide.
This participation gap is the new frontier of digital exclusion. The implications stretch well beyond individual users. Organisations, governments, and education systems that fail to close this gap risk being locked out of the innovation economy entirely.
AI Adoption Without Education
Few developments have accelerated the digital divide conversation quite like the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Gordon calls it plainly: "ChatGPT has disrupted and transformed the sector," and not just for technologists. The tool put generative AI in the hands of business professionals, students, and everyday users almost overnight.
Gordon says it's time to rethink our approach to AI. At a recent event he attended with 100 business leaders in the room, every hand went up when asked if they had used an AI platform in the last 24 hours. When asked who had received any formal training on how to use those tools, not a single hand was raised. This is the core paradox of AI adoption today. The tools are everywhere. The understanding of how to use them safely, strategically, and effectively is not. Without structured digital literacy and education, rapid AI adoption becomes a liability rather than an asset for individuals and organisations alike.
Barriers to Digital Inclusion
Gordon identifies several interconnected barriers preventing organisations from fully participating in the digital economy. Let's have a look:
Skills gaps remain the most acute. Technology evolves faster than most training programmes, let alone formal education curricula. University degrees and annual school terms were not designed for the pace of AI-driven change.
Trust and credibility are equally critical. Gordon warns of what he calls "AI slop", the growing proliferation of AI-generated content and half-built solutions that look polished but lack substance or security. Organisations that rely on AI without proper oversight risk undermining the customer trust they're trying to build.
While infrastructure quality is improving globally, it still creates disparities, particularly around data sovereignty. The question of where your data sits, who can access it, and under what compliance framework is no longer just a legal concern. It is a competitive and ethical one.

Sovereign AI
One of the most forward-looking concepts Gordon introduces is sovereign AI, the idea that organisations must control not just their data, but the AI infrastructure that touches it. Just as data sovereignty became a boardroom priority, AI sovereignty is now following the same path.
"Business leaders type sensitive information into ChatGPT or Copilot without thinking twice," Gordon cautions. The solution isn't to avoid AI, it's to build internal AI agents and platforms that interact with large language models without exposing proprietary data to the open web. This is why hyperscaler data centres are appearing in unexpected geographies: latency is secondary; sovereignty is the driver.
Gordon's advice to business leaders is refreshingly direct: go experiment. "You won't break anything," he says. The AI-driven economy rewards curiosity, iteration, and speed of learning, not perfection. Leadership teams need to model responsible AI use, invest in upskilling their people, and treat education as a strategic asset. This applies as much to frontline healthcare workers as it does to C-suite executives.
If you would like to find out more, connect with Graeme Gordon on LinkedIn.
Takeaways
The evolving digital divide from access to participation.
Impact of AI and ChatGPT on business and society.
Importance of secure and sovereign AI infrastructure.
Role of education in digital literacy for all.
Leadership strategies for AI adoption and trust.
Barriers to digital inclusion: skills, trust, infrastructure.
Practical steps for organisations to implement AI responsibly.

Chapters
00:00 Understanding the Digital Divide
02:49 The Role of AI in Participation
06:01 Barriers to Digital Adoption
09:07 The Importance of Education
11:45 Building a Secure AI Foundation
14:51 Trust and Credibility in AI
18:11 Practical Advice for Organisations

AI isn't just speeding up recruiting; it's actually forcing companies to redesign work itself, blending human judgment with agentic execution across hiring, mobility, and skills development. As a result, most conversations these days are about AI in the enterprise centre on software development and engineering. Recruiting, hiring, and talent management get far less attention, but they may be where AI's impact is most immediate.
In a recent episode of Tech Transformed, host Dana Gardner spoke with Meghna Punhani, Chief People Officer at Eightfold AI, about how organisations are rethinking talent acquisition, workforce planning, and employee development in an AI-driven world. Meghna Punhani's perspective is shaped by nearly two decades at Google, a stint leading employee experience at Palo Alto Networks, and her current dual role at Eightfold AI, where she both leads the people function and helps build the product her team relies on. That vantage point gives her a practical, ground-level view of what works and what doesn't when AI meets HR.
Reimagining the Talent Lifecycle with AI
Punhani's central argument is that most legacy HR systems were designed for a different purpose, one that has evolved as work itself has changed and the workforce now includes AI agents alongside people. Simply bolting automation onto existing processes, she argues, isn't enough. Organisations that are succeeding are the ones re-engineering roles, workflows, and organisational structures from the ground up, treating this as an operating-model shift rather than an IT upgrade.
This shift touches the entire talent lifecycle, from how companies find candidates and evaluate skills instead of just job titles to how they support internal mobility. Punhani points out that skills now have a much shorter shelf life than in the past, which means static job descriptions are giving way to dynamic, skills-based decision-making. AI, she says, helps surface pathways for employees that traditional resumes and titles would never reveal, including her own nontraditional route into HR leadership.
How AI Is Reshaping Workforce Strategy
Trust is the recurring theme throughout the discussion. Punhani is candid that employees often fear AI-driven decisions, especially around jobs and evaluations. Her approach is focused on transparency first. When Eightfold rolled out digital twins internally, employees were uneasy until leadership explained how the technology worked and used it themselves, which helped build organisation-wide confidence.
That same principle shows up in Eightfold's own hiring practice. One example is the company's campus recruiting programme in India, where its AI interviewer conducted roughly 90 per cent of interviews. This enabled recruiting to scale from around eight or 10 university partners to more than 150, and from approximately 5,000 applications to 15,000, without pulling engineers away from their day-to-day duties.
Time-to-offer dropped from around six weeks to as little as four days in some technical roles, largely because interviews could happen around the clock rather than around a recruiter's or hiring manager's schedule. Beyond recruiting, Eightfold's internal initiative, nicknamed Project Andromeda, applies the same re-engineering approach across sales and finance, reportedly reclaiming thousands of employee hours through redesigned, agent-assisted workflows.
AI and the Future of Talent
Looking ahead, Punhani doesn't frame AI as a threat to human contribution, but she frames it as an amplifier of it. As tools become more accessible across every function, she believes the people who will succeed won't be the ones who know the most facts, since AI can answer those questions. Instead, it will be the people who ask better questions, orchestrate multiple AI agents, and apply judgment where the right answer isn't obvious.
For HR leaders specifically, Punhani's advice is to claim a seat at the table now, rather than letting AI adoption happen without a people-first lens. This means learning the technology firsthand, demonstrating its value to non-technical teams, and partnering closely with CTOs and CIOs to shape decisions jointly. Her advice for individuals entering this shifting job market is similarly grounded: focus on learning agility over any single technical skill, since the skills in demand today may look different within months.
Future of AI in Talent Management
Across the conversation, Punhani returns to one idea, and that is AI in talent management isn't primarily a technology problem; it's a leadership and trust problem. Organisations that treat it that way, redesigning work with both humans and agents in mind, are the ones seeing measurable gains in speed, candidate experience, and internal mobility.
For HR leaders exploring AI adoption, the takeaway from this episode is to start before you feel ready, build trust through transparency, and let AI handle evaluation and execution so people can focus on judgment, empathy, and connecting the dots across the organisation. If you would like to find out more, visit eightfold.ai or connect with Meghna Punhani on LinkedIn.
Takeaways
AI's impact on talent acquisition and management.
Reengineering work processes with AI.
Building trust and transparency in AI systems.
Skills-based internal mobility and workforce planning.
AI-driven candidate evaluation and employee development.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to AI in Talent Management
02:59 Understanding AI's Role in Talent Acquisition
06:07 AI's Impact on Workforce Planning and Skills Development
10:02 Building Trust in AI for Hiring Processes
13:04 Internal Use of AI at Eightfold AI
18:58 Measuring ROI from AI in Talent Acquisition
25:02 Enhancing Candidate Experience with AI
29:53 Future Directions for AI in Talent Management

With enterprises now rushing to integrate AI agents into their operations and security, the most imperative focus now becomes the AI model itself. However, Eric Tschetter, Chief Architect at Imply, believes the real challenge is within the data infrastructure that supports these systems.
In the recent episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, Kevin Petrie, BARC Vice President of Research, sat down with Tschetter to talk about how AI is actually increasing the current needs around scale, performance, and data access.
“Agents are always running queries. They’re always doing stuff,” Tschetter stated.
Unlike human analysts, AI systems work continuously, producing much higher query volumes and putting more pressure on the data platforms underneath. This leads to a greater demand for observability architectures that can manage more data, more users, and more machine-to-machine interactions without losing speed.
For Tschetter, the solution is not to create new observability tools, but to rethink the data layer that supports them.
Key Takeaways
AI is transforming observability and security disciplines.
The observability warehouse concept is gaining traction.
AI agents increase the volume of queries significantly.
Data silos remain a major challenge for enterprises.
Collaboration between IT and security teams is essential.
Observability and security teams often consume the same data.
A decoupled architecture can enhance data accessibility.
The semantic layer must support multiple query languages.
Effective data management is crucial for AI-driven workloads.
Data should be stored once and accessed from multiple platforms.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to AI and Observability
02:08 Challenges in Observability with AI
06:44 Modernising Architecture for Observability
10:49 Decoupled Observability and Semantic Layers
16:31 Collaboration Between IT and Security Teams
22:23 Imply's Observability Warehouse and Data Lakes

For more information on AI, observability and Imply’s observability warehouse and data lakes, please visit imply.io.
For further information on all things B2B Tech, please visit em360tech.com
Imply LinkedIn: @Imply
Imply X: @implydata
Imply YouTube: @Implydata
EM360Tech YouTube: @enterprisemanagement360
EM360Tech LinkedIn: @EM360Tech
EM360Tech X: @EM360Tech
Follow: @EM360Tech on YouTube, LinkedIn and X
Stay connected for more expert insights, podcast episodes, and enterprise data strategy discussions