Tech Talks Daily

Bill Briggs, CTO at Deloitte with nearly 30 years turning tech into business value. He explains why AI pilots stall, the danger of layering AI on broken workflows, and how to build an innovation flywheel that puts AI into teams' hands. He also covers governance for agentic systems, prioritizing technical debt, and practical infrastructure myths, all with down-to-earth examples and a human touch.

Steve Tack, Chief Product Officer at Dynatrace and observability and causal AI expert, explains Dynatrace Intelligence and the shift from data collection to automated, trusted action. He discusses real production ROI stories, combining causal AI with agentic systems, Grail and Smartscape foundations, hyperscaler integrations, plus developer workflow and safety measures for human-in-the-loop automation.

What happens when the noise around AI starts to drown out the actual business value it is meant to deliver? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sat down with Adam Field, Chief AI and Product Officer at Tungsten Automation, fresh from the conversations unfolding at Davos. While headlines continue to celebrate agentic AI and sweeping automation claims, Adam offered a grounded perspective shaped by decades of experience turning AI pilots into measurable, ROI-driven deployments. His view is simple. The hype cycle may be accelerating, but many organizations still struggle with the fundamentals. Adam described a common boardroom dynamic. "What do we want? AI. What do we want it to do? We're not sure." That pressure to move fast often collides with a deeper reality. Software has shifted from deterministic to probabilistic. Leaders who grew up expecting the same inputs to always produce the same outputs now face systems that behave differently by design. Measuring value in that environment requires a different mindset. One of the most compelling ideas in our conversation was Adam's concept of "boring AI." While splashy announcements about replacing hundreds of employees grab attention, he argues that real returns often come from quieter use cases. At Tungsten Automation, that means intelligent document processing, extracting trusted, AI-ready data from the 80 percent of enterprise information that is unstructured. Contracts, invoices, transcripts, compliance paperwork. The work may not trend on social media, but it saves time, improves accuracy, and fits directly into daily workflows. We also explored accountability. AI can compress output, but it concentrates responsibility. When generative tools make architectural or compliance decisions, the liability does not shift to the model. Organizations remain accountable for privacy, ethics, and customer trust. Adam shared his own experience rebuilding a legacy application in days using AI code generation, only to discover licensing and compliance nuances that required human judgment. The lesson was clear. AI amplifies capability, yet human oversight remains essential. For leaders searching for signals that an AI strategy will actually deliver long-term returns, Adam pointed to two patterns from the small percentage of projects that succeed. First, integration into daily workflows drives adoption. Second, partnering with trusted vendors often reduces risk compared to attempting everything in-house. In a world flooded with open-source experiments and "X is dead" headlines, discipline and focus still matter. Tungsten Automation has spent four decades evolving alongside automation technologies, previously known as Kofax. Today, the company applies large language models and agentic workflows to transform unstructured data into decision-ready insights across finance, logistics, banking, and insurance. It is a reminder that the future of AI may be less about replacing people and more about removing friction so humans can do the work they were actually hired to do. So as AI investment continues to grow and pressure for returns intensifies, the question becomes harder to ignore. Are we chasing the headlines, or are we building systems that quietly deliver value where it counts? Useful Links Connect with Adam Field Learn more about Tungsten Automation Upcoming Events

Amos Bar Joseph, founder and CEO of Swan AI building autonomous business platforms. He discusses using agentic AI to scale go-to-market with minimal headcount. Conversations cover grassroots AI experimentation, the shift from automation to agentic decision-making, rethinking growth metrics like ARR per employee, and how leadership and workflows change when agents run core operations.

Is Bitcoin still just a digital store of value, or is it quietly evolving into the financial engine of a new on-chain economy? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sat down with Callan Sarre, Co-Founder of Threshold Labs, to explore what happens when the world's most recognized crypto asset stops sitting idle and starts becoming programmable capital. We recorded against the backdrop of a sharp market correction that wiped out value across crypto and traditional assets alike, making for a timely and honest conversation about volatility, maturity, and why Bitcoin's next chapter may be defined by utility rather than price speculation. Callan explains how the rise of ETFs and institutional flows is reshaping ownership, while decentralized infrastructure is working to ensure users can still access the asset's underlying power. At the heart of our discussion is tBTC, a trust-minimized bridge that moves native Bitcoin into DeFi without handing control to centralized custodians. Callan breaks down how Threshold's decentralized custody model works in practice and why removing single points of failure matters in a post-FTX world. We also explore the behavioral barriers that have kept long-term holders from putting their BTC to work, the real risks behind Bitcoin yield strategies, and the infrastructure required to make these tools accessible to a broader audience through familiar Web2-style experiences. The conversation also takes a global turn as we look at why Asia is accelerating Bitcoin innovation, how regulation is driving institutional adoption in Western markets, and what the shift from DAO-led governance to a lab execution model reveals about the realities of building at scale. Looking ahead five years, Callan paints a picture of an integrated on-chain financial system where Bitcoin can be borrowed against, deployed, and settled instantly across shared liquidity rails, while still preserving the principles that made it attractive in the first place. So if Bitcoin becomes productive capital and the majority of financial activity moves on-chain, what does that mean for traditional finance, for long-term holders, and for the next wave of builders? And are we ready for a world where the most secure monetary asset also becomes the most composable?

Logan Lawler, Senior Director at Dell Technologies who leads AI strategy for Precision workstations and hosts Reshaping Workflows, talks hardware realities for desktop AI. He cuts through AI PC hype. He explains roles of CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and why GPUs matter for serious model work. He explores hybrid local-then-cloud workflows, cost and data tradeoffs, and how teams future-proof AI hardware.

Rob Lay, CTO and Solutions Engineering Director for Cisco UK & Ireland, explains why infrastructure is the real gatekeeper for scaling AI. He discusses how legacy debt, latency, and siloed teams derail agentic AI. Learn about embedding security into networks, platform strategies to cut tool sprawl, and why digital resilience and data residency shape real-world deployments.

Neil Dhar, IBM Consulting Americas leader with a finance and private equity background, talks about shifting AI from demos to measurable ROI. Short takes on boards demanding proof of value. Conversations on redesigning workflows, treating AI as capital allocation, data foundations, and IBM’s $4.5B productivity push and workforce reskilling.

Julie Teigland, Global Vice Chair for Alliances and Ecosystems at EY, helps enterprises scale AI through partnerships and marketplaces. She discusses how curated marketplaces collapse AI complexity, shift orgs from experiments to defensible decisions, and manage integration and governance risks. She also covers multi-vendor orchestration, responsibility-by-design under regulation, and the future of marketplaces as operational control planes.

Amish Babu, CTO at Motive and builder of real-time edge AI for fleets, discusses designing AI for vehicles and safety-critical operations. He covers why edge, on-device compute, and multimodal sensors are essential. He explains latency, reliability, and full-stack hardware-software-model integration for real-world, life-or-death environments.