What's Up with Tech?

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AI isn’t magic, and it definitely isn’t free. We sit down with Ken from Pega Systems to get brutally practical about the economics of enterprise AI: why token costs are a symptom, why infrastructure spend is so high, and how “murky ROI” happens when companies deploy AI for novelty instead of measurable business value.

From Ken’s perspective as a former CFO and current COO, the best mental model is surprisingly simple: treat AI like a utility. If electricity has taught us anything, it’s that the winners don’t just consume more, they manage consumption better. We talk about how to reduce waste, how to avoid paying for frontier-model overkill, and why boards and finance teams are starting to demand tokenomics tied to outcomes. We also dig into a provocative corner of the market: incentives that can turn the AI ecosystem into a circular hype machine unless leaders insist on real examples and hard metrics.

We then shift to what this means inside large organizations. Agentic AI can accelerate judgment-heavy work in finance, legal, HR, and marketing, while deterministic workflows still anchor reliability in core operations. Finally, Ken shares career advice for the next generation: as execution gets automated, the premium rises on strategy, product management, and validation skills, plus the curiosity to keep learning as roles evolve.

If you care about enterprise AI ROI, workflow automation, and the real operating model behind digital transformation, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the metric you think will prove AI is paying off.
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Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Hybrid communications is easy to praise and hard to pull off, especially when your reality includes on-prem systems, private cloud requirements, public cloud apps, and a growing buy-in committee that can hit dozens of stakeholders. We talk with Jonathan Buckle, VP of the Americas at Mitel, about what hybrid unified communications actually looks like when you refuse to force customers into a single model and instead design around how organizations really operate. 

We get concrete about the process: why discovery matters more than demos, how vertical expertise in healthcare, education, hospitality, retail, and the public sector speeds up decision-making, and why workflow integration is often the quickest route to real outcomes. Jonathan shares what he’s seeing in the market as vendors consolidate or exit categories and why that shift is pushing more organizations to rethink voice, UC, and the day-to-day systems their teams rely on. 

Frontline workers are a major focus, from nurses and operators to school staff and hotel teams. We dig into what changes when you sit next to the people doing the work, how simplicity beats feature creep, and why Mitel’s WX UC client is built to make training easier while surfacing workflow triggers directly in the user experience. 

If you’re modernizing business communications and you’re tired of “either cloud or on-prem” debates, this conversation will help you pressure-test your plan. Subscribe, share this with your IT team, and leave a review, then tell us: what would “no compromise” need to mean for your organization to believe it?
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AI in telecom is finally graduating from slide decks to real operational impact, but the jump from pilot to production is where most teams get stuck. I sit down with Guy Lupo from the TM Forum, who leads the trustworthy AI and data mission, to talk about what it actually takes to become an AI native telco and why the industry’s next gains depend less on flashy demos and more on operational proof.

We break down where operators are seeing traction right now, like network fault management, faster mean time to resolve, fewer tickets, and churn reduction, and why those wins correlate directly with clean, structured signals. Then we dig into the uncomfortable middle ground: AI that augments people feels manageable, but AI embedded into tools and workflows raises hard questions about governance, monitoring, and accountability. Guy’s point lands hard: trust cannot be claimed, it must be demonstrated continuously, especially as autonomy increases.

From there, we connect the dots to risk-based regulation and sovereignty. Frameworks like the EU AI Act signal a shift away from checklist compliance toward auditable evidence over time, with telecom increasingly treated as high risk critical infrastructure. We also explore emerging concepts like agent passports, plus why the industry is asking for a shared “agent factory” reference architecture and practical, no regret patterns such as Model as a Service for consistent, governable model access. We close by looking ahead to physical AI and robotics and the surprising telecom advantage: the operational workforce that can install, maintain, and safely support devices at scale.

If you care about AI governance, autonomous networks, agentic AI, and the real-world path to production in telecom, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the one trust gap you want the industry to solve first.
Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.
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The easiest system to hack is the one that’s always there to be found. We sit down with Steve Visconti, CEO and co-founder of XIID, to talk about a different cybersecurity mindset: architectural invisibility, where the goal isn’t to build a bigger wall, it’s to make the target unreachable in the first place.

We dig into what “no inbound communication” really means, including removing public IP dependence, reducing DNS exposure, and enforcing process-to-process connectivity so only the exact executable you approve can talk to the exact service it needs. Steve explains how outbound-only tunnels can be established on both sides, and why strong encryption and post-quantum secure tunneling matter when you’re protecting high-value systems in an increasingly autonomous, machine-to-machine world.

We also get practical about where this fits in today’s security stack. Because it operates at the application layer, it can complement existing tools without a rip-and-replace overhaul, and it can roll out one app at a time while still scaling through orchestration. Along the way, we connect the dots to real risks in modern software delivery, like AI-generated code and CI/CD pipelines that accidentally leave behind discoverable test endpoints.

Finally, we zoom out to critical infrastructure, including EV charging networks and the growing connection between vehicles, cloud billing systems, and the electrical grid. If you care about reducing attack surface, protecting OT environments, and building zero trust security that survives automation at scale, this is for you. Subscribe, share this with a security-minded friend, and leave a review with your biggest question about making systems “unreachable by design.”
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A 2005 malware sample sounds like ancient history, until it looks like cyber sabotage that may predate Stuxnet. We sit down with Jags from SentinelOne’s Sentinel Labs to unpack Fast 16, a rare framework that doesn’t just break computers, it quietly corrupts high precision calculations. If you’ve ever treated simulation results, engineering models, or AI outputs as “the answer,” this conversation will make you pause.

We walk through the unexpected discovery path: a curious reference tied to the Shadow Brokers leak, years of researchers staring at a strange sample that “felt important” but refused to give up its secrets, and the moment an internal project using AI for reverse engineering helped unlock what Fast 16 was built to do. Along the way, we connect the dots to the Stuxnet era, cyber threat intelligence “paleontology,” and why truly high end nation state toolkits look like platforms, not one off scripts.

Then we get uncomfortably current. Sabotaging calculations is an integrity attack, and integrity is the foundation of modern scientific computing, cloud workloads, and frontier AI model training. We talk about how subtle degradation can waste millions, derail decision making, and even turn teams against their own experts. We close with practical lessons for CISOs and enterprise leaders: invest in visibility, telemetry, and log retention before the crisis, and start treating output verification as a core security problem.

Subscribe for more deep dives on cyber sabotage, APT tradecraft, and AI security, and if this made you rethink what “trust” means in computing, share it and leave a review. What system in your world would be hardest to verify?
Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Support the show
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel