Gain unparalleled access to the minds of industry-leading CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs. Enjoy episodes filled with expert insights, inspiring stories, and trend analysis, all brought to you by the people shaping the future of technology. Whether you're an IT professional, aspiring tech leader, or general tech enthusiast, IT Visionaries has something for everyone. Don't miss out on the chance to learn from the best – subscribe now! Produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.
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August 6, 20268 min
Spotlight: Is 80% Accuracy Enough for AI?
Would you trust AI at only 80% accuracy? What about for your enterprise?
KPMG Chief Digital Officer Kelle Fontenot explains why AI success cannot be measured by headcount reduction alone - and how synthetic data can help companies test agents safely, protect sensitive information, and focus on the moments that matter most to employees.
-- 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 Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools.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.
July 16, 202656 min
Your AI Agent Shouldn’t Be Able to Delete the Database
If you tell your AI NOT to delete your database you’re good right?
In this episode of IT Visionaries, Chris Brandt sits down with Daniel Meyer, CTO of Camunda, to explore why prompts alone are not enough to govern AI.
They discuss the difference between governance by instruction and governance by structure, why enterprises are struggling to turn AI investments into meaningful outcomes, and why adding agents to legacy processes often creates faster versions of the same old problems.
Daniel also explains how one company reduced a four-day process to just 17 minutes—and why results like that only happen when organizations fundamentally rebuild how work gets done.
Highlights:
• Why enterprises need guardrails AI cannot override
• How orchestration connects people, systems, and AI agents
• Why process redesign matters more than simple automation
• How businesses can safely enable non-technical teams to build with AI
• What the orchestrated enterprise could look like over the next five years
Connect
Daniel Meyer on LinkedIn
Camunda
IT Visionaries
Chapters
2:16 Why Business Processes Are Enterprise Algorithms
2:40 Why AI Investment Isn’t Delivering Bigger Outcomes
4:29 What Real AI Leverage Looks Like
6:35 Rebuilding the Software Development Process Around AI
11:19 Why Companies Struggle to Understand Their Own Processes
15:29 How Harmony Made a Process 90x Faster
16:40 How ProcessOS Reengineers Business Processes
19:54 Building AI Agents You Can Actually Trust
21:49 When an AI Agent Deletes the Database
22:28 Governance by Instruction vs. Governance by Structure
25:03 What AI Governance Can Learn From Human Access Controls
38:45 How to Test and Switch Between AI Models
45:00 Is Enterprise Software Becoming Headless?
46:51 The Rise of the Orchestrated Enterprise
-- 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.
July 3, 202610 min
Spotlight: The Safest First Use of AI in Networking
Does AI watch your network? Read-only of course!
In this segment from IT Visionaries, Chris Brandt and John Capobianco discuss where AI agents can create real value for network teams before they ever touch production infrastructure. Instead of jumping straight to full automation, John makes the case for read-only AI: agents that document the network, compare changes over time, run tests, support compliance, enrich tickets, and help engineers understand what changed when something breaks.
They also explore why networking may be uniquely suited for AI-assisted operations. Networks are deterministic, but the problems can be difficult to spot - especially when outdated documentation, configuration drift, and human error pile up over time.
Before AI changes the network, maybe it should learn to watch it.
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6zZmgPOW7I
Chapters
0:00 - Why AI Should Watch the Network
1:03 - Finding What Changed
3:51 - Beyond Config Management
7:15 - From Detection to Safe Remediation
-- 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.
June 11, 202653 min
The AI Saturation Problem
Your people aren't tired of change — they're saturated. There's a difference, and it's the difference between an AI rollout that lands and one that bounces off your workforce entirely.
Kelle Fontenot is the Chief Digital Officer at KPMG US, where the CIO, the CTO, and the Chief Data Officer all report to her. She owns internal innovation, architecture, platform, engineering, and data across a 40,000-person workforce — and she's spent the last four and a half years steering that organization through cloud, data, and now an AI wave reshaping how every one of her people does their job.
In this conversation, Kelle reframes 'change fatigue' as 'change saturation,' reveals that KPMG employees built 25,000 AI agents in the last six months alone, walks through the synthetic-data acquisition powering regulated AI testing at scale, and explains the brand-new Anthropic partnership turning a 140-year-old services firm into a products company.
What you'll learn
• Why 'change fatigue' is the wrong diagnosis — and what 'saturation' changes about how you roll out AI
• Why KPMG refuses to use AI as a head-count lever — and why that decision is actually accelerating adoption
• How 40,000 KPMG employees built 25,000 AI agents in six months — and what that means for who counts as a 'builder'
• Why the CIO, CTO, and CDO all report to one person — and what would break if they didn't
• How synthetic data lets a regulated firm test AI at scale without the breach risk
• What KPMG's Anthropic partnership signals about the future of professional services
Connect
Kelle Fontenot on LinkedIn
KPMG US
IT Visionaries Podcast
Chapters
0:00 AI Change Has Become AI Saturation
1:29 Why “Change Fatigue” Is the Wrong Diagnosis
3:27 Prompting Like It’s November
4:46 Giving People Space to Innovate
6:38 AI Is Not a Headcount Lever
10:07 Building AI in a Regulated Business
11:24 The Risk Container Around AI
14:12 The AI-Augmented Auditor
17:21 The Agent Governance Problem
20:59 Why Digital, Data, and Tech Sit Together
22:59 Building an Inside Startup
30:04 Innovation Has to Happen at the Edge
36:48 The ROI Math for AI Agents
38:50 Why KPMG Bought a Synthetic Data Company
44:09 KPMG’s Anthropic Partnership
51:03 Shipping AI at Scale
52:10 Kelle Fontenot’s Advice for Leaders
-- 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.
May 28, 20268 min
Spotlight: Automating A Bad Process With AI Is Still A Bad Process
Companies are making the exact same mistake with AI that they made with cloud.
FICO's CIO Mike Trkay breaks down why 95% of companies are failing at AI alignment, why "automating a bad process faster" is the #1 trap, and why regulated industries are already abandoning LLMs in favor of focused language models.
Key takeaways:
• Only 5% of AI pilots make it to production — and MIT's research backs it up
• The lift-and-shift parallel: cloud costs went up for the same reason AI ROI is missing
• Why the LLM-to-focused-language-model shift mirrors cloud-native vs lift-and-shift
• What "AI native" actually means (and why chatbots aren't it)
Chapters
00:00 The 5% Alignment Problem
01:09 Only 7% Even Measure If Their AI Works
02:15 "You're Just Doing a Bad Process Faster"
06:29 LLM Repatriation and the Rise of Focused Language Models
-- 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.
May 14, 20261 hr 3 min
The End of Handwritten Network Configs?
Network automation has been "coming soon" for over a decade. So what's actually different this time?
John Capobianco, Head of AI & Developer Relations at Itential, built NetClaw — a CCIE-level AI agent that manages network infrastructure through Slack and WhatsApp. It hit 300 GitHub stars in two weeks. It can analyze packet captures, configure routers, run compliance tests, and generate documentation — all through natural language.
John spent 15 years as a network engineer before becoming one of the leading voices in network automation. He's published multiple books, created dozens of open-source projects, and just launched the VibeOps community where 600+ network engineers share AI code without judgment.
Key takeaways:
• Why natural language is the breakthrough that makes network automation finally work (hint: nobody has to learn Python anymore)
• The 5 use cases beyond config management that deliver value on day one — all read-only, all low-risk
• How to go from human-in-the-loop to fully agentic network operations without triggering panic
• Why "shadow AI" is the new shadow IT — and what leadership needs to do about it
• The contrarian case that writing configs by hand is now a solved problem
Guest: John Capobianco — Head of AI & Developer Relations, Itential
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/john-capobianco-644a1515
X/Twitter: @John_Capobianco
NetClaw: github.com/automateyournetwork/netclaw
VibeOps Forum: Reach John on LinkedIn or X for invite
Chapters
0:00 Why AI Is Different for Network Automation
2:32 Natural Language: The Interface That Changes Everything
3:51 "The Network Should Be Like a Telephone" — Why Engineers Resist Change
6:08 The No-Win Life of a Network Engineer
8:08 OpenClaw: More GitHub Stars Than Linux
10:15 What NetClaw Actually Does (90 Skills, 43 MCPs)
11:37 The RFC Documentation Problem AI Can Solve
13:03 Day One Agent Rules: Start Read-Only
13:58 When Was the Last Time We Hired a Junior?
15:54 How NetClaw Hit 300 Stars in Two Weeks
19:54 Deterministic vs Non-Deterministic: Getting Engineers Over the Hump
23:36 War Stories: Fat Fingers, MTU Issues, and the DNS Nightmare
28:32 Documentation: The AI Use Case Nobody Can Argue With
32:34 Beyond Config Management: 5 AI Use Cases That Matter Now
36:00 The IDS/IPS Analogy: Why AI Agents Succeed Where Signatures Failed
40:02 AI Hallucination Is Overstated — Misalignment Is the Real Problem
41:53 Model Convergence: Why the Stuff Around the Model Matters More
46:00 Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT
47:59 What Happens When AI Understands Your Business Context
53:59 The Optimistic Case for AI and Humanity
56:05 VibeOps: Building a Safe Space for AI-Curious Engineers
1:00:36 Is Vibe Coding Just Coding Now?
1:01:54 "Don't Write the Configs Anymore"
1:02:43 Closing & Where to Find John
-- 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.
April 30, 20269 min
What Agentic Search Means for Normal Humans
Your basic search is missing a massive section of the internet.
In this IT Visionaries Spotlight, Chris Brandt talks with Sudheesh Nair, Co-Founder and CEO of TinyFish, about the hidden layer of the internet - the data, pricing, and real-world context that never shows up in search results.
The future isn’t better search. It’s AI that can operate the web for you - executing multi-step tasks, navigating complexity, and returning answers that actually reflect your situation.
Chapters:
0:00 The Internet You Never See
1:55 From Search to “Operating the Web”
4:30 The Real Value - From Pricing to Taste
-- 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.
April 16, 202659 min
Why Companies Are Already Abandoning LLMs
Think AI is about automating what you already do? That's the same mistake companies made moving to cloud, and FICO's Mike Trkay says you're about to waste millions proving it.
Mike is Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at FICO, an analytics software company that processes billions of decisions per day and powers 80% of fraud detection.
In this episode, Mike explains why 95% of AI projects never reach production, why companies are already repatriating workloads from large language models, and what really separates automation from transformation.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:23: Why FICO's CIO Is Also the Chief Customer Officer
4:52 The Office Space Problem: Why CIOs Are Really Translators
6:02 "Conduit in Chief" — The CIO's Real Job
6:45 How CIOs Accidentally Become Cost Centers
7:40 What FICO Actually Does (It's Not Just Credit Scores)
12:59 How Missile Guidance Tech Became Fraud Detection
17:59 When LLMs Can't Meet 150-Millisecond Latency
21:32 Why AI Strategy Is Harder Than It Looks
24:50 The Cloud Parallel: 5% Alignment and Why AI Projects Stall
27:08 "You're Just Doing a Bad Process Faster"
31:44 LLM Repatriation Is Already Happening
37:40 A FICO Score for AI Decisions
43:10 Global Regulation and Staying Ahead of Compliance
45:22 The Australian Banking Example: Focused Language Models in Practice
52:08 From Cost Center to Innovation Driver
54:40 What's Next: Agentic Architecture and Focused Sequence Models
57:49 "What's the Opportunity Today?" — The CIO Mindset Shift
-- 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.
April 2, 20268 min
AI Is Reshaping Your Entire Stack, Not Just Applications
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
-- 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.
March 19, 20261 hr 9 min
Why 5G Isn't About Faster Phones (And What It's Really For)
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
-- 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.
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