Alert: A Week of AI via WWT's Business Innovation Summit

The AI Proving Ground Podcast team is proud to kick off a weeklong series of daily releases from WWT's Business Innovation Summit — bringing you unfiltered conversations with the visionary leaders shaping the next decade of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud and enterprise AI strategy. Featuring insights from executives at Cisco, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NVIDIA, NightDragon, Morgan Stanley and more, this series offers urgent, real-time perspective on how AI is transforming the global economy, redefining risk, and rewriting the rules of competitive advantage.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

Chapters

• 0:00 A Different Kind of Episode (Buckle Up)
• 0:12 Why We Hit “Record” on Everything
• 0:36 What You’re Getting This Week (Spoiler: A Lot)
• 0:47 The Heavy Hitters in the Room
• 1:10 Big Themes, Zero Fluff
• 1:21 Stay Relevant or Get Replaced (Gently)
• 1:43 AI’s Economic Shockwave, Explained Fast
• 2:50 Your Front-Row Seat to the Next Decade
• 3:07 Multimodal + Robotics: The Plot Twist
• 3:25 Leadership in the AI Era (No Pressure)
• 3:43 Why We’re Keeping It Unfiltered
• 3:51 Share the Episode… or Keep the Advantage

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey everybody, Brian Felt, host of the AI Proving Ground podcast here. I wanted to alert you to a bit of a programming change here at the podcast.

SPEAKER_02: 0:08

Good morning, Buenos Aires. Good morning, welcome. Welcome to the 2025 WWT Business Innovation Summit.

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

Every year, WWT hosts an annual Business Innovation Summit in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, that brings together some of the most influential voices in technology, business, and leadership. And for years, we've stashed those videos on our WWT.com platform. But this year, the conversations were simply too powerful not to share with you directly. So for the next several days, instead of our usual weekly cadence, we're releasing a special series of daily episodes, unedited, on-the-ground recordings from the summit's most impactful panels. You'll hear from executives shaping the future of AI and enterprise technology, WWT co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer, G2 Patel, Google Cloud's Chief Operating Officer, Francis D'Souza, Dave DeWalt, founder and CEO of Night Dragon, Microsoft AI futurist Marco Casalena, and those are just a few of the marquee names that you'll hear from. But more importantly than even the names are the ideas, tensions, and practical guidance that you'll hear from these leaders for how to build AI native organizations, secure infrastructure at a global scale, modernize data and energy systems, and how to lead teams through transformation with purpose and resilience.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28

Because there's only going to be two kinds of companies, relevant and dexterous with the use of AI, and ones that struggle for relevance. And we want to be the first kind. And that requires every single one of our employees to be in that camp.

SPEAKER_00: 1:43

So if you're an IT or business leader navigating the realities of AI adoption, things like the pressure from the business, uncertainty in the market, or the need to turn strategy into outcomes, these episodes offer something rare: real-time executive level insight into what's working, what's shifting, and what's coming next.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

I can honestly say that, you know, um, AI is by far the biggest thing I've ever seen in my life. You know, if compared to the internet, compared to genomic sequencing. Um, and this transformation is different from anything I've seen before in a number of ways.

SPEAKER_05: 2:16

I don't think it's hyperbole to think that it's reshaping the global economy. The explosive growth in CapEx, uh, the grid modernization, uh the safety issues associated with it. So it's an incredible. You look at the GDP in the United States for the first six months, it was about 1.2% growth, and 1% of it was the spend on AI and data.

SPEAKER_04: 2:39

There's so many layers to this challenge that it just is mind-boggling. But I'm not sure if I'm more scared after the one year of early learning or more optimistic, but we have technology that can solve it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50

So for this week, think of the AI Proving Ground podcast as your front row seat to the conversations shaping the next decade of enterprise technology, because that's the backdrop for the next leap in AI, an era defined by expanding capabilities that will reshape how machines understand and interact with the world.

SPEAKER_04: 3:07

We're moving towards this realm where these models can take many more modalities as input and can output many more modalities. So, what I anticipate will happen over the next few years is that we'll start to see omni-models with greater modality. And those modalities will include the ones that are used by robots. It really does require you to step back and think about what we're talking about here.

SPEAKER_00: 3:30

All of these voices across industries, disciplines, and perspectives are pointing to the same truth. We're entering a new era of enterprise leadership defined by speed, clarity, and the courage to rethink what's possible with AI. And over the next week, you'll hear these conversations exactly as they happened in the room unfiltered, urgent, and grounded in real world experience. So thanks for listening. Our hope here at WWT is that these daily executive-led conversations bring you real value as you navigate your AI strategy. And if they do, please consider sharing them with colleagues and peers who would benefit from the insights as well. Because in a world where AI is moving this fast, the simplest way to stay ahead is to learn together.