Tech Disruptors

Since last year, Google has had 40x growth in Gemini use on its Vertex AI platform, highlighting the pace of demand in AI, says Will Grannis, chief technology officer of Google Cloud. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Grannis sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Mandeep Singh to talk about the variety of use cases with large-language-model deployments. They discuss the company's Ironwood TPU launch to give an end-to-end stack perspective around inferencing workloads, and what it means for cloud demand.

“The average knowledge worker is interrupted every two minutes during work hours,” according to Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Jared Spataro. “You're getting an email, a meeting kind of request, a chat coming in, and if you do the math, that's 275 times a day.” On this episode of Tech Disruptors, Spataro joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to discuss emerging trends in the way employees work and how AI is already changing the game. The two define the “Frontier Firm” and discuss why this is a big year for such organizations. They also talk about the introduction of new research and analyst AI agents and the future of head count and staffing needs.

Helping small businesses manage all things human resources — payroll, benefits, tax compliance and employee onboarding — is Gusto's central focus, which presents unique challenges given the fragmented customer base. Chief Technology Officer Mike Tria outlines the company's product-portfolio suite and the evolution of the human-capital management industry over the past 10 years from a technology angle. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, BI analyst Niraj Patel sits down with Tria to discuss Gusto's appeal across small and medium-sized business (SMBs), the leverage of its technology infrastructure (Ruby on Rails) to scale up for asynchronous workloads, the software ecosystem, its “Gus” AI solution and more.

“I think people should stop thinking about contact centers as a thing that is sort of about being responsive and reactive, and instead, really how do we fundamentally change the way you think about the way you talk to customers,” says Pasquale DeMaio, Amazon Web Services' vice president of Amazon Connect. “In that sense, I think the status quo is really our competition.” In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, DeMaio and Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior technology analyst, touch on several pressing topics related to contact center-as-a-service, among them being AI automation, data integration challenges and the shifts in enterprise and end-user expectations for customer service.

US tariffs won't change the cyclical journey in tech, with artificial intelligence set to be the dominant force for years to come the same way the Internet was, according to Rodrigo Liang, CEO of SambaNova, which builds AI hardware and software platforms. Liang joins Bloomberg Intelligence's analyst Mandeep Singh on the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss SambaNova's cloud's differentiation for inferencing workloads. They also talk about the demand for AI infrastructure, adoption of open-source large-language models and focus on power efficiency as AI compute remains scarce.

Artificial intelligence is opening up new possibilities for computer simulation, offering lower costs and expedited processes in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy and other industries. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Jim Scapa, founder and former CEO of Altair, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel about the company's portfolio expansion and broader customer reach beyond these verticals. He discusses the major consolidation drivers in simulation technology that have fueled recently announced M&A, including Siemens-Altair. Scapa offers his insight on Altair's unique pricing model, differentiators among simulation-software technologies, customer retention, the impact of third-party generative-AI models, instantaneous design and simulation enabled by AI technology, and more.

There has been a buildout of platforms for various marketplace sectors in the past 15 years, though ridesharing essentially remains a duopoly. Lyft's CEO David Risher talks to Bloomberg Intelligence's senior tech analyst Mandeep Singh about the ridesharing marketplace in this episode of Tech Disruptors. David also discusses the company's positioning in the autonomous-vehicle segment and his views on the technology, alliances and challenges involved in scaled adoption.

“Security is not a technology problem; security is a people and culture problem,”Amazon.com Chief Security Officer Steve Schmidt tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Schmidt discusses how enterprises should be thinking about all things cybersecurity, ranging from vendor assessment, permissioning, auditing and compliance and regulatory reporting. Additionally, the two go over how AI is affecting security and changing the behavior of bad actors, especially amid a shortage of cybersecurity professionals.

“The metric that we need to keep an eye on is the number of qubits,” Simone Severini, Amazon Web Services' director of Quantum Technologies, tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. Also important “is the quality of the qubits and the way people try to scale,” he says. On this episode of Tech Disruptors, Severini and Rana discuss the basics of quantum computing and how qubits differentiate themselves from their classical counterparts. Additionally, the two go over several potential use cases for the technology and the time line to fault tolerance.

“You manage your workforce in a system like Workday; you have to do that with your digital workforce as well,” Workday Chief Technology Officer Jim Stratton says as he breaks down the company's thinking behind its recently released Agent System of Record. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Stratton joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana to discuss generative AI in HR and financial software and the different approach Workday is taking from peers in areas such as AI agent integration and monetization.

As enterprises across industries seek to leverage artificial intelligence in their workflows, demand is mounting for specialized models designed for specific tasks and verticals, creating new opportunities for companies that manage the entire AI life cycle, such as DataRobot. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, the company's CEO, Debanjan Saha, joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Software Analyst Sunil Rajgopal to discuss the evolving AI-solutions landscape, the importance of predictive analytics and the value of being cloud-agnostic and on-premises-friendly. They also cover DataRobot's revenue model, the future of enterprise apps and the competitive dynamics of the AI space.

The sharp rise of AI workloads and larger parameter-training models needs a new type of data center — one that can support the size, power and cooling needed for 100,000 GPU AI server clusters. Crusoe co-founder and CEO Chase Lochmiller sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho to discuss how Crusoe's vertically integrated, energy-first focus toward data-center infrastructure and its ability to identify regional sites has given Crusoe an edge in the AI build-out race.

“For every knowledge worker, every business professional, an important element of what they do is creativity,” Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe's Digital Experience president, tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. On his third appearance on the Tech Disruptors podcast, Chakravarthy goes in depth on how Adobe is integrating its enterprise marketing tools, along with its creative-application portfolio. Additionally, Chakravarthy discusses the importance of the content supply chain and what has led Adobe's portfolio to amass over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

“Most customer service reps have five to 20 different tabs open in their browser of all these different systems — it's the modern equivalent of the swivel chair,” said Salesforce AI's Adam Evans, executive vice president and general manager. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Evans joined Bloomberg Intelligence's senior technology analyst Anurag Rana for a discussion encompassing several key initiatives Salesforce is developing with data and AI for products such as Agentforce and Data Cloud. Additionally, the two recap the company's recent partnership with Google Cloud and what Gemini can do for the former's AI tools.

The infusion of compute-heavy AI across enterprise applications and work flows, growing appetite for real-time business intelligence and more digitization calls for an expansion of compute, storage and networking resources. The growing dependency on digital services and tools likely necessitates ongoing monitoring of the IT value chain to prevent business disruption and reduce time to remediate. These shifts will likely drive demand for platforms like Grafana Labs. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO at Grafana, joins Sunil Rajgopal, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior software analyst, to discuss the impact of DeepSeek, emerging data and large language model-focused observability solutions. They also talk about implications from agentic work flows, future growth paths and competition.

Google is an AI-first company, according to Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure at the company. It has deep expertise in all of the relevant domains customers might need - research, models and finally how they get built into applications and services. Lohmeyer sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Mandeep Singh on this episode of Tech Disruptors to discuss how Google Cloud infrastructure supports the company's internal apps and external customers. They discuss various aspects of Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer and TPUs in supporting Gemini and other large language model training and inference workloads.

Twilio is a customer-engagement platform that combines cloud-based communications tools with contextual customer data, analytics and AI that are used by brands like Nike, Dominos and Toyota. The company is expanding beyond its historical focus on cloud-based communications platform-as-a-service software to allow its clients to more narrowly target their customer communications and increase the ROI on their marketing investment. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Khozema Shipchandler, CEO of Twilio, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst John Butler about recent organizational changes intended to accelerate the company's evolution, expand its addressable market and drive higher revenue growth as it broadens its offerings.

“The average enterprise has over 360 applications running in the cloud today,” Boomi Chairman and CEO Steve Lucas notes to Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. “Then, on top of that, the average enterprise is dealing with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 difference sources of data.” In this episode of Tech Disruptors, the two take a deep dive into the complexities that frequently require integration platforms such as Boomi. Additionally, Lucas explains the differences between Boomi and its competitors, how agentic AI is creating opportunities for the market and what becomes of software-as-a-service (SaaS) at the end of the day.

Corporate efforts to harness unstructured data to drive business intelligence could keep growing. Enterprises deploying more AI-infused applications and pushing more of their workflows through the technology appear likely to boost demand for platforms like Elastic, which enable users to index, search and update large swaths of data, monitor the health of digital applications and infrastructure and analyze data for threat detection and resolution. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Elastic CEO Ashutosh Kulkarni joins Sunil Rajgopal, BI's senior software analyst, to discuss the evolving search, observability and security landscape amid rising AI capabilities, use cases and deployment. They also talk about Elastic's product ambitions, competition landscape and M&A philosophy.

“More or less, the data strategy will inform the AI effectiveness,” SAP President and Chief Product Officer of Data and Analytics Irfan Khan explains to Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Khan and Rana delve into the three archetypes of data management, how zero copy sharing enables greater flexibility and how SAP's new Business Data Cloud product can optimize customer data inside and outside of the SAP ecosystem.

Verizon is the biggest wireless-service provider in the US, with its business largely centered on the consumer segment. Wireless is a high-touch business, which has prompted the company and peers to deploy AI across its customer-care operations to drive greater efficiencies and higher cross-selling. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon's Consumer Group, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and John Butler about the company's current deployment of AI and plans to further improve its operations with the technology. Sampath discusses AI's use in customer care and provides some thoughts on what the future holds for its broader deployment in network operations, software development and the radio-access network. He also offers insight on the AI ecosystem today, where it's headed and how AI models are quickly commoditizing.

Delivering a comprehensive software platform for the construction industry that bridges project to financial management remains Procore's central focus. Tooey Courtemanche, Procore's founder and CEO, tells Bloomberg Intelligence that the platform has broad appeal for the various stakeholders, owners, general and specialty contractors. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Courtemanche sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss what a unified platform means to Procore and how macroeconomic factors like tariffs, labor costs and cyclical trends could impact its 17,000-plus customers. Courtemanche also offers insights on Procore's unified data set, its unique pricing model, international opportunities and the leverage of gen AI.

World Wide Technology (WWT) has evolved from a value-added reseller to a global systems integrator with $20 billion in annual sales and 10,000 employees that today identifies itself as an “AI First” company. WWT CEO and co-founder Jim Kavanaugh joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss the company's journey, building AI capabilities for customers and its effort to train the entire staff in AI. Kavanaugh, whose company does 80% of business in North America, says he sees “huge” growth opportunities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Costs for generative AI are coming down, with some of the leading models massively lower than they were a year ago, says Citigroup Chief Technology Officer David Griffiths. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, he chats about gen-AI deployment at his company with Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Alison Williams and Mandeep Singh. From back-end use cases to the impact on the product side, they discuss the opportunities and challenges with AI agents, large language models and the ripple effects on hiring and talent in a big financial institution.

Contentful's platform, built on an API-first architecture, provides differentiated technology for marketers and developers in creating landing pages, blogs, campaigns and other personalized content. CEO Karthik Rau talks about customer choices across the marketing-tech landscape and the company's evolution to a broader platform from a composable content-management system (CMS). In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Rau sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss the state of so-called headless solutions in CMS, AI disruptions in digital agency, customers' buying criteria, the marketing-tech stack, machine-generated content volume and more. Will generative AI disrupt the trillions of dollars spent on digital-agency services? Tune in to hear Rau's insights and the potential shifts ahead.

Automating email marketing with top-quality design and user experience is Flodesk's central strategy. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Martha Bitar, CEO and founder of Flodesk, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel about empowering entrepreneurs and small businesses to reach their target customers more effectively. She discusses why 85,000 customers choose Flodesk, its position in the software ecosystem with e-commerce providers like Shopify, the convergence of decision makers and end users, and gives insight on the company's ability to navigate a fragmented competitive landscape. Bitar also offers her insight on AI email marketing content generation, customer changes since the introduction of gen AI and the upcoming wave of authentic connection.

Creating an ever-changing knowledge-graph relational database isn't a small thing. But then connecting it to all the end points (to publishers and social media publishers) and managing the distribution workflow through channels is extremely important. Yext CEO Michael Walrath talks to Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, about the changes to traditional search and the potential for more competition. Building knowledge graphs for businesses to manage their online presence could be a key differentiator in the world of large-language-model-powered searches.

The tools that enable companies to build, operate and manage enterprise applications and infrastructure are evolving, and AI's advancements could reset the technology, business and M&A landscape. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Tim Tully, a partner at Menlo Ventures, joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss the broad technology shift, with a particular focus on databases, observability, large language models and front-end development tools. They also talk about the shift in developer roles, productivity gains from AI, tech-industry policies and M&A prospects in the space. Menlo is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies in areas including consumer, enterprise and health-care technologies.

What does DeepSeek's efficiency breakthrough and the Stargate Project mean for the adoption of AI, data-center growth, power consumption and cooling-system demand? In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence's Tech Disruptors podcast, Abhijit Dubey, CEO of NTT DATA Group, sits with Omid Vaziri, BI senior analyst, to examine new trends in AI and cloud infrastructure, growth expectations and challenges. They discuss space-based data centers, optical and wireless networks replacing electronics with photonics and likely power sources. They also talk about what gen-AI adoption could mean for the industry's operating margins and key factors to consider in its implementation. Workforce upskilling efforts needed to upgrade human capacity to adopt gen-AI makes advances in cost-efficiency from the likes of DeepSeek highly welcomed news.

Building an online presence for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is the central mission of GoDaddy. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Chief Technology Officer Charles Beadnall discusses the major trends likely to be encountered by entrepreneurs, including AI, the range of tools across applications like domains, website creation to payment services and the ramp-up in security requirements. Beadnall sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Pate land dives into GoDaddy's technology focus and its points of differentiation. Tune in to hear about GoDaddy's Airo platform and its view on leveraging third-party large language models across its 21 million-customer base.

Modern-day businesses are increasingly digital and data dependent, and organizations need to critically monitor their data assets, protect them against external threats and create guardrails around access. They also need to have robust mechanisms and tools that allow them to back up, preserve and reconstruct applications in case of a disruption, and this creates an opening for platforms like Cohesity that provide data-security and management products. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen joins Sunil Rajgopal, BI's senior software analyst, to discuss the data replication, protection and security landscape, the opportunity from the shift to the cloud and AI-led implications for the market. They also talk about Cohesity's scale ambitions, competition and product road map. This episode was recorded on Dec. 17.

With AI “you can talk to your data for the first time ever. So you can ask almost any question on almost any amount of information in your enterprise,” Box CEO and Founder Aaron Levie tells Bloomberg Intelligence. The dispersed nature of enterprise information across regions and systems, accentuated by remote working, could drive the case for platforms like Box that allow users to centrally store data securely and then access it anywhere. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Levie joins Sunil Rajgopal, BI's senior software analyst, to discuss enterprise content management landscape, the cloud shift and potential implications from AI and AI-powered digital workers. They also talk about Box's product ambitions, competition landscape and revenue model. This episode was recorded on Dec 17.

Northern Data runs “a full customer platform, which offers that groundbreaking Nvidia GPU infrastructure to help bring AI applications to life,” COO Rosanne Kincaid-Smith tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, she sits down with BI senior analyst Mandeep Singh to discuss the build-out of GPU data centers in a growing cloud market, and how the company is looking to differentiate vs. hyperscale cloud providers.

What separates SentinelOne from other security-software providers is that you'll find large language models “in a lot of our automation capabilities that help you go through and deal with triage, investigation and ultimately the remediation of issues,” Chief Product Officer Ric Smith says. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Smith talks with Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Mandeep Singh about the use of foundational large language models and agent vs. agentless security. Smith also discusses SentinelOne's product differentiation vs. peer CrowdStrike and bundled endpoint offerings from Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft.

“The AI trend still feels significantly larger than all of those previous trends that we've seen in technology over the last three decades” Glean CEO and founder Arvind Jain tells Bloomberg Intelligence. The growing enterprise-information stack that's dispersed across diverse systems adds complexity and Glean enables organizations to deploy AI-powered knowledge retrieval systems for customer workflows and systems, on the lines of ChatGPT or Google Search. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, he joins Sunil Rajgopal, BI's senior software analyst, to discuss the AI-fueled changes to enterprise knowledge management, the impact of AI agents and the broader implications of AI. They also talk about Glean's product evolution, competition landscape and pricing model. Find this and other Bloomberg Intelligence podcasts at BI PODCASTS .

It can be difficult to manage people via email or to coordinate work using spreadsheets or documents, raising the need for a “collaboration layer” such as that offered by Asana, Chief Product Officer Alex Hood tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, he joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at BI, to discuss the AI-fueled changes to the work-management products, the impact of those changes on competition and the importance of scale. They also talk about Asana's product evolution, AI agents and monetization models. 

Andi Gutmans, VP and general manager of Databases at Google, said customers who house information in enterprise-grade databases — durable, reliable and secure — don't want to move it around. As such, Google worked to bring AI capabilities into their existing databases. Gutmans sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology AnalystMandeep Singhto talk about the impact of large language models and AI agents to the database market. From supporting Google's family of apps to the rapid growth in enterprise customers for Google Cloud, database infrastructure has been a key part of Google's infrastructure differentiation.

“The workflow doesn't go away, but the interface and the capability set of what constitutes a SaaS application is going to be very different than what we see today,” says Chris Young, Microsoft's executive vice president of business development, strategy and ventures. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Young joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana in a discussion covering a wide range of topics, from generative AI to cybersecurity to autonomous vehicles. The two examine just what Microsoft is looking for when it makes its investments, as well as what Microsoft itself is doing in many of these topics. Find this and other Bloomberg Intelligence podcasts at BI PODCASTS .

The cyberthreat environment keeps worsening because more business is being conducted online and nation states are looking to steal secrets and intellectual property, and get into other countries' infrastructure, according to Zscaler Chairman and CEO Jay Chaudhry. He sits down with Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to talk about the relevance of gen AI to cybersecurity and how the deployment of zero trust is likely to grow with more AI workloads. Chaudhry also discusses the risk of data leakage with enterprise data and his expectations around consolidation for the security space in 2025. The US Treasury cyberattack took place in late December, a week after we recorded this episode.

This is the year that AI will break through to drive company productivity and in what's becoming a Tech Disruptors annual tradition, tech luminary and former Cisco CEO John Chambers sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst Woo Jin Ho to share his key themes for 2025 that could weigh on the technology sector and on investors' minds. John zeros in on his latest thoughts on AI, security, India and the tech IPO/M&A landscape.

For selecting generative-AI strategy, “there's usually four drivers before you get into the use case: domain accuracy, efficiency, cost effectiveness and, of course, deployment preferences,” says Satish Thomas, Microsoft's corporate vice president of business and industry solutions. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Thomas sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana to discuss all the ways in which gen AI is being applied by industries. The two cover the nuances of industry application and how it differs from an out-of-the-box foundational model. This episode also goes over several real-world examples of customers already implementing gen-AI solutions and the steps they took to get there.

“Merchants can bet on Shopify and not worry about falling behind the cutting edge here,” explains the company's vice president of product, Glen Coates, to Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana on the latest episode of Tech Disruptors. “We are extremely good at software, so merchants can be really good at what they're trying to build into their business.” The two delve into a broad range of topics and assess the problems facing merchants, discussing how Shopify addresses such issues in a highly unified and integrated manner. Coates compares the needs of an entrepreneur with those of an enterprise, talking through several product areas, including point-of-sale, logistics, capital lending and generative AI.