Liquidware Chats
Liquidware Chats is a monthly podcast hosted by James O'Regan, Product Marketing Manager at Liquidware. The podcast is dedicated to discussing topics related to digital workspace strategy, digital employee experience (DEX), and end-user computing (EUC). It can be found on all the major audio platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Liquidware Chats
Brian Madden — You Can't Automate Your Way to Intelligence
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Brian Madden wrote The VDI Delusion in 2012 and called out an entire industry for believing its own marketing. Fourteen years later, he's a VP and Futurist at Citrix, and he thinks we're making the same mistake with AI.
In this episode of Liquidware Chats, Brian joins James and introduces his "Cognitive Stack" framework and makes the case that everything we do in end user computing today sits in the bottom 20% of where AI value actually lives.
The real transformation is happening in the 80% that was previously invisible: the thinking, reasoning, and decision-making inside knowledge workers' heads.
We dig into why corporate AI initiatives keep showing disappointing ROI while individual workers with a $20/month subscription are saying it changed everything.
Brian explains how he uses AI as a cognitive extension, why he predicted this shift wouldn't happen until 2027 and was wrong by over a year, and what software development's rapid AI adoption tells us about what's coming for all knowledge work.
We also get into the hard questions for EUC. If traditional applications become "compatibility layers," where do you apply your security policies? What happens to DLP when you're dealing with tokens instead of packets? And why does none of this work if the infrastructure foundation isn't solid?
Whether you're an IT leader, a vendor, or someone trying to figure out where AI fits in your stack, this one will reframe how you think about it.
Discuss on our Slack Community:
https://join.slack.com/t/liquidwarecommunity/shared_invite/zt-38l4hsgk3-iqlRF1cpjdQGlvojDo1ecw
Liquidware Chats is a monthly podcast hosted by James O'Regan, Product Marketing Manager at Liquidware. The podcast is dedicated to discussing topics related to digital workspace strategy, digital employee experience (DEX), and end-user computing (EUC). It can be found on all the major audio platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Liquidware provides digital employee experience monitoring and workspace management solutions including ProfileUnity, FlexApp, Stratusphere UX, and CommandCTRL.