Humanoid robots have become the poster child for AI. They're dancing, running, stocking shelves and making headlines almost weekly. It's easy to look at them and think the future has finally arrived.

But that's not the hard part.

Long before a robot can navigate a warehouse, inspect a factory floor or assist in a hospital, it has to understand the world around it. That begins with trusted data, an accurate understanding of its environment and infrastructure capable of making safe, real-time decisions.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Paige Reiter and Wes Long separate the hype from the reality of physical AI. They explore why the conversation extends far beyond robotics, how physical AI changes the way organizations think about risk and what leaders can do today to prepare for what's next.

The robot may capture the attention. The foundation will determine who succeeds.

Support for this episode provided by: Weka

More about this week's guests:

Paige Reiter spends less time talking about robots and more time helping organizations prepare for them. As a Technical Solutions Architect at WWT, she works with enterprises deploying physical AI through robotics, computer vision and digital twins, translating emerging technology into real-world execution.

Wes Long focuses on the work that happens long before a robot ever moves. As a Technical Solutions Architect at WWT, he helps organizations build the data, infrastructure and security foundations that allow physical AI, computer vision and automation to operate safely and at scale.

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.

For the last two years, the conversation has been about getting AI into the enterprise. That chapter is starting to close.

Now comes the harder part.

Where should AI go first? Which problems are actually worth solving? And how do you build enough trust that people are willing to let AI move from answering questions to taking action?

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Brian Feldt is joined by WWT's Walton Smith, Google's Ahmed Ali and Dell's Suri Durvasula for a thoughtful conversation about what comes after adoption. They explore why organizations get stuck chasing possibilities instead of outcomes, how agentic AI is reshaping security and governance, and why the strongest AI strategies start with a clear understanding of the work that matters most.

Along the way, they challenge the idea that AI success comes from choosing the right model. Instead, they make the case that success depends on connecting data, infrastructure, governance and people into a system that works together.

AI can make almost anything faster. Deciding what deserves AI in the first place is still a leadership decision.

Support for this episode provided by: Nutanix

More about this week's guests:

Walton Smith leads AI and technology strategy for public sector customers at World Wide Technology, helping government organizations translate emerging technologies into real-world outcomes. With decades of experience at the intersection of federal IT, cybersecurity and infrastructure, he works with agencies to build AI strategies that are secure, practical and built to scale.

Ahmed Ali helps government organizations navigate the intersection of AI, national security and cloud transformation at Google Public Sector. Drawing on a career spanning cybersecurity, enterprise technology and executive strategy, he works with leaders to turn complex AI capabilities into practical, trusted solutions for some of the world's most demanding environments.

Suri Durvasula helps government organizations turn AI strategy into real-world outcomes. As a technology leader at Dell Technologies, he works with federal agencies to navigate AI adoption, data strategy and secure infrastructure, with a focus on building trusted systems that deliver measurable impact.

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.

In July, OpenAI disclosed that models undergoing a cybersecurity evaluation escaped their testing environment, exploited a zero-day vulnerability and ultimately reached Hugging Face’s production infrastructure.

The incident raised a difficult question for every organization deploying autonomous AI: What happens when an agent crosses a boundary — not because it was instructed to attack, but because doing so helps it complete the objective it was given?

Recorded before the incident became public, this conversation from Cisco Live! features WWT's Istvan Berko, Cisco's Vikram Varakantum and NVIDIA's Trevor Caulder, who discuss what it takes to secure AI at machine speed. They examine the security challenges it has now made impossible to ignore, and discuss why enterprises must secure AI from the silicon and network to the workload, model and identity of every agent.

Support for this episode provided by: VAST Data

More about this week's guests:

Istvan Berko leads AI Cyber and Innovation at World Wide Technology, where he works with organizations building secure AI systems for production. With more than 25 years in cybersecurity, risk and governance, he brings a practical perspective on the identity, infrastructure and operational challenges shaping the next generation of AI.

Istvan's top pick: Everyone Sees the Risk. Nobody Owns It.

Vikram Varakantam is Senior Director of Product Management at Cisco, where he leads the strategy behind the company's AI security portfolio. With experience across AI, cloud and application security, he works at the intersection of product, infrastructure and enterprise AI, helping organizations secure AI as it moves into production.

Vikram's top pick: Securing AI When Agents Move Faster Than Humans Can Respond

Trevor Caulder is a Principal Technologist at NVIDIA, where he works with partners across the AI ecosystem to advance the infrastructure behind secure AI. With more than 25 years of experience spanning silicon, networking and enterprise systems, he brings a hardware-first perspective to securing AI at scale.

Trevor's top pick: Breaking Data Silos: How Private Inference Unlocks GPU ROI on Sensitive Data

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.

AI is forcing enterprises to reconsider what their data infrastructure was built to do. Everpure GM Enterprise Maciej Kranz and WWT Principal Solutions Architect Bob Watson discuss why storing data is no longer enough—and what it takes to make information accessible, governed, secure and ready for inference.

They examine the shift toward unified data management, whole-stack AI architecture, shorter investment cycles and governance models designed for a world in which applications, employees and autonomous agents all need trusted access to enterprise data.

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.

AI agents are getting remarkably good at deciding what to do. The harder question is whether they should be allowed to do it.

For the last year, Model Context Protocol (MCP) has been viewed as a way to connect AI models to tools. As enterprises move from copilots to autonomous agents, it's becoming something much bigger: the architectural layer that determines how agents access data, interact with systems and operate safely at scale.

Brian Feldt sits down with WWT's David Geddam and Chandler Heath to explore why governance is becoming just as important as intelligence. From manufacturing and healthcare to finance, they examine how observability, identity, security and trust will shape the next generation of enterprise AI.

Support for this episode provided by: SentinelOne

David Geddam is Senior AI Advisor and Chief Solution Architect at WWT, where he helps organizations design the architectures behind enterprise AI. With more than 25 years of experience across healthcare, cloud and AI, he specializes in turning emerging technologies into secure, scalable solutions that work in the real world.

David's top pick: Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A): The Future of Enterprise AI

Chandler Heath is a Principal Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology, where he focuses on edge and industrial technologies. His work centers on helping enterprise customers bridge operational technology and AI, designing architectures that are secure, practical and built for production.

Chandler's top pick: Why the AI Factory Is Becoming the Enterprise's Next Critical Infrastructure

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.

Buying GPUs is easy. Building an AI system that keeps them busy is something else entirely.

Recorded live at Cisco Live, this conversation with Cisco's Will Eatherton and WWT's Eric Fairfield explores what happens after the hardware arrives. Networking, storage, orchestration and security rarely get the same attention as GPUs, yet they're often the difference between an AI investment that scales and one that sits idle. The organizations that get the most from AI won't be the ones with the most compute. They'll be the ones that build the best systems around it.

More about this week's guests:

Eric Fairfield helps organizations design the networking foundations that power modern AI infrastructure. With deep expertise in Cisco ACI, VMware NSX and high-performance data center networking, he works with enterprises to solve the complex architecture challenges that determine whether AI environments perform at scale.

Will Eatherton leads Cisco's Data Center, Internet and Cloud Infrastructure Engineering team, helping shape the networking architectures behind enterprise AI. From high-performance Ethernet fabrics to AI infrastructure at scale, his work focuses on the systems that make modern AI possible.

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.

Nearly 90% of enterprise data is unstructured. That's a daunting statistic until you realize it may also be your biggest competitive advantage.

In this episode hosted at Cisco Live, Brian Feldt sits down with WWT's Jeff Fonke, NVIDIA's Jason Schroedl and NetApp's Mike Hommer to explore why data has become the defining factor in enterprise AI. From token economics and GPU utilization to hybrid AI infrastructure, the conversation keeps coming back to one idea. AI is only as valuable as the data behind it.

If your organization is moving beyond AI experiments and into production, this episode offers a practical look at the decisions that matter most and why bringing AI closer to your data may be the smartest investment you make.

More about this week's guests:

Jeff Fonke leads WWT's High-Performance Architectures team, where he helps customers build the AI infrastructure they'll rely on for years to come. With more than 25 years of experience, he brings a practical perspective on what works, what doesn't and where enterprise AI is really headed.

Jason Schroedl is Director of Product Marketing at NVIDIA, where he helps shape how enterprise AI moves from innovation to production. With more than two decades in enterprise technology, he brings a practical perspective on AI infrastructure, data readiness and what it takes to scale AI successfully.

Mike Hommer is a Field CTO at NetApp, where he helps organizations make smarter decisions about AI, data and infrastructure. With more than two decades in enterprise technology, he focuses on separating lasting strategy from short-lived hype and helping customers build for what's next.

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.

By the time this episode reaches your feed, the AI landscape may have changed again.

That's becoming the new normal.

It's tempting to chase every new model, every policy update, every headline. But the organizations making real progress aren't rebuilding their strategy every time the landscape shifts. They're building the resilience to keep moving anyway.

Madison Horn and Rob Geis join AI Proving Ground Podcast to explore what this new reality means for enterprise security. The conversation moves beyond the latest AI models to something much bigger: how to build an organization that can absorb change, contain risk, and stay effective when the technology refuses to stand still.

In AI security, keeping your head on a swivel isn't just good advice.

It's becoming the job.

Support for this episode provided by: Cloudflare

More about this week's guests:

Madison Horn is National Security & Critical Infrastructure Advisor at WWT, where she helps organizations strengthen cyber resilience and prepare for emerging threats at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure. With more than 15 years of experience spanning national security, global incident response, and cybersecurity strategy, Madison advises enterprise and public sector leaders on securing the technologies shaping the future.

Madison's top pick: The Quantum Signal from the White House Operators Should Not Miss

Robert Geis is a Field CTO for Global Cyber at WWT with more than 30 years of experience helping organizations strengthen cybersecurity, manage risk, and protect critical infrastructure. He advises enterprise leaders on cyber resilience, governance, and AI adoption, helping some of the world's largest organizations navigate an increasingly complex and fast-changing threat landscape.

Robert's top pick: AI Security Threats: Mythos, Project Glass Wing, and the New Cyber Resilience Framework

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.