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Tech Disruptors by Bloomberg Intelligence features conversations with thought leaders and management teams on disruptive trends. Topics covered in this series include cloud, e-commerce, cybersecurity, AI, 5G, streaming, advertising, EVs, automation, crypto, fintech, AR/VR, metaverse and Web 3.0.
This podcast is intended for professional investors only. It is being prepared solely for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or investment advice.
301 Episodes
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Embedded finance — integrating payments and financial services directly into apps and platforms — is entering its next phase, shifting from niche fintech use cases to core infrastructure for global players. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Marqeta CEO Mike Milotich joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how embedded finance, buy now, pay later and flexible credentials are reshaping payments at the point of sale, online and in store. They explore Marqeta’s competitive positioning, AI-driven personalization, the regulation vs. speed trade-off and why Europe could be an underappreciated growth lever as embedded finance moves upmarket.
Consumer credit may be approaching its foundational AI moment — with buy now, pay later emerging as the first visible act. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Affirm and co-founder of PayPal, joins Bloomberg Intelligence global fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how machine learning is replacing static underwriting with real-time, transaction-level intelligence. They also explore why this shift could fundamentally reshape the economics of consumer lending over the next decade.
Now an annual tradition on the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast, John Chambers, former Cisco CEO and founder of JC2 Ventures, sits down with hardware analyst Woo Jin Ho to kick off 2026 with his latest predictions for the tech sector and the global economy. Chambers argues that AI is entering a phase of rapid adoption — driving enterprise productivity gains, reshaping capital allocation and compressing winner–loser cycles across industries. The conversation explores AI infrastructure investment, enterprise adoption, cybersecurity risks and the implications for labor markets, M&A, IPO activity and market volatility, with Chambers remaining bullish on AI’s long-term impact despite near-term disruption.
The private equity marketplace is increasingly competitive, making it difficult to win a seat at the table on hot deals. AT&T’s in-house private investment arm, AT&T Ventures, seeks to stand out by making strategic investments via a founder-friendly approach, targeting the companies that are helping to shape the future of communications, such as satellite providers, edge computing firms, AI-RAN developers, security companies and many more. AT&T Ventures Head Vikram Taneja joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior telecom analyst, John Butler, to discuss the company’s approach to investing, his thoughts on where communications technologies are headed and how his group aims to capitalize on current and future trends.
Webtoon pioneered the vertical scrolling format nearly 20 years ago, and has been expanding the genres of its content since. CFO David Lee joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this Tech Disruptors episode to explain how the company is building out its global-content platform using AI-driven creator tools, advanced data infrastructure and high-throughput content workflows. He discusses the economics of paid content, margin impacts from infrastructure modernization and how partnerships with Disney and Warner Bros. expand Webtoon’s IP engine. He offers a sharp look at where AI, platform scale, and digital media monetization converge.
Shopping is shifting from keyword-based search toward AI-driven, conversational guidance. Rajiv Mehta, Amazon.com’s vice president of Search and Conversational Shopping, joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss Rufus, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant that integrates large language models with the company’s commerce data and personalization capabilities. Rufus helps customers identify suitable products using natural language, images and even handwritten lists. Mehta outlines how features such as price history, “help me decide,” image upload and agentic tools like price alerts and auto-buy are reshaping product discovery, conversion and customer loyalty on Amazon — and why he expects highly personalized, agent-supported shopping experiences to define the next phase of retail.
Drone technology has had a prolonged evolution, with companies exploring viable use cases for mainstream adoption. Adam Woodworth, CEO of Alphabet’s Wing subsidiary, talks to Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst Mandeep Singh about drone delivery in the US and how he expects it to ramp up for consumer delivery of lighter packages and groceries. The discussion also covers form factor evolution for drones, regulatory framework, regulations and overlap with Waymo’s use of sensors for safety in the case of autonomous vehicles.
“…A successful agentic enterprise deployment means each of your departments are fundamentally different,” Salesforce’s SVP of Product Marketing for AI Sanjana Parulekar says, as she joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to unpack what it really takes to scale Agentic AI beyond pilots: getting data AI-ready; adding context and governance; blending deterministic workflows with LLM reasoning via hybrid reasoning and monitoring cost and quality with observability tools. They also cover voice agents, cross-agent orchestration with MuleSoft Agent Fabric, model flexibility, change management, and real deployments.
“Open doesn’t mean a free for all, but open will win.” Workday CTO Peter Bailis joins Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to explain how the people-and-money system of record is evolving into an open, AI-ready platform — combining zero-copy data access with strict governance and API-first design. He outlines how Sana, Illuminate, Flowise and Paradox fit together as a front door for work, embedded HR and finance agents, open-source agent building and streamlined recruiting.
Search is shifting to intelligent, context-rich answers from static links. You.com CEO Richard Socher joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior software analyst Sunil Rajgopal on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how You.com powers AI search for companies such as DuckDuckGo, while differentiating from enterprise peers like Glean and Exa through its web indexing, real-time accuracy and privacy-first design. “The biggest factor to get LLMs to give accurate, non-hallucinated answers is the search infrastructure layer,” Socher says. The discussion also covers the market opportunity, competitive landscape and future initiatives.
“We think that for every gigawatt, it’s about 25 exabytes of new flash creation,” says Greg Matson, SVP and head of products and marketing at Solidigm. Matson joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Jake Silverman on the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how Solidigm is powering AI’s growing data demands. The conversation explores the company’s evolution into a data-center-focused pure play, its innovations in high-capacity SSDs and how it’s positioning to lead in the next era of gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure.
“The world’s now flipped to inference — and it’s limited by power. With the same energy, we can deliver four times the output of a Blackwell,” says SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang. Liang joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kunjan Sobhani in this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to explain how SambaNova’s air-cooled, 10-kilowatt racks and “data-center-in-90-days” model are helping enterprises and governments scale up AI faster — and greener. The discussion covers the rise of sovereign-AI deployments in the UK, Europe and Australia, the economics of hybrid data centers and why energy efficiency — not just compute power — might define the next phase of AI infrastructure.
“We are more than 10x safer on many key safety metrics than an average human driver” says Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo chief product officer. Saswat joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh to talk about the inflection in autonomous driving and how Waymo plans to scale across more cities. From the sensors used in Waymo’s AVs, the evolution of its driver system and expansion of its partnerships, the discussion focuses on opportunities and remaining challenges around the rollout of AVs.
“We are moving beyond simple query-response to task completion.” AWS’s Swami Sivasubramanian joins Bloomberg Intelligence Software and Technology Analyst Anurag Rana to contrast consumer chatbots with enterprise agents and the controls they require. Topics include Agent Core for secure deployment (identity, tool use, memory, observability), QuickSuite for business users, Kero for developer workflows, and Transform for code modernization. Their conversation extends into data access across silos, model choice on Bedrock, and why production agents demand governance, connectors, and context.
Emerging AI-hardware technologies are poised to reshape data centers. Penguin Solutions CTO Phil Pokorny joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho to discuss how the company’s bespoke engineering approach, which blends deep technical expertise with differentiated hardware and software, helps enterprises, neo-clouds and sovereign entities tackle the complexity of AI deployments across markets. The conversation also explores what it will take to stay ahead in the next phase of AI-infrastructure growth.
AI infrastructure is becoming central to enterprise innovation as companies seek faster app delivery and efficient use of computing resources. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Rafay Systems CEO Haseeb Budhani joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior software analyst Sunil Rajgopal to discuss how Rafay helps enterprises and emerging cloud providers simplify AI deployment, optimize infrastructure costs and deliver scalable, developer-friendly experiences. The conversation highlights Rafay’s consumption-based model and focus on orchestration and automation, as well as its growing role in enabling enterprises to build and monetize AI-driven platforms.
How will agentic AI change the way we shop and reshape retailers’ go-to-market strategies? AWS’s David Dorf joins Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Poonam Goyal and Anurag Rana on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss intelligent agents’ growing impact on retail. Dorf explains how these AI “interns” can reason, use tools, act autonomously and even collaborate, unlocking new possibilities across retail operations. From multi-agent pricing systems and associated task automation to smarter supply chains, retailers are already beginning to apply this next wave of AI. The conversation also explores shopper-facing shifts such as agent-led checkout; answer engines like Rufus, Perplexity, OpenAI and Google; and the ripple effects on advertising, loyalty and answer-engine optimization.
“We’re the only vendor that really provides that end-to-end suite and the scale and reach that Docusign has — we’re able to do this across an incredibly large customer universe.” Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen tells Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst. “We’re passing 100 million customer contracts uploaded and extracted with AI.” On Thygesen’s second visit to the Tech Disruptors podcast, the two recap the advancements Docusign has made since he was last on in 2023. The discussion covers a broad set of growth initiatives for Docusign including its Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) and AI products, international and US Federal. Thygesen and Rana also debate the fate of the broad software industry and the seat-based pricing model in the age of AI.
“The line between AI workload and non-AI workload is getting blurrier by the day.” Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of AWS Infrastructure Services, talks with Anurag Rana, Senior Technology Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, about what actually changes as AI scales. Prasad lays out the realities behind “AI data centers”: denser accelerators, non-blocking training networks, and modular in-chip liquid cooling. Underneath, the data-center basic priorities hold -— security as job zero, plus availability, performance, and cost. He also explains why clusters must be fungible between training and inference so accelerators and power never sit idle, and how AWS retrofits existing regions rather than treating AI as a separate build.
“In this world of AI, there’s going to be more software, not less — and design and craft will matter more than ever,” Figma CFO Praveer Melwani says. On this episode of the Bloomberg Intelligence Tech Disruptors podcast hosted by BI technology analyst Anurag Rana, Melwani adds that Figma is a web-native, multiplayer platform for moving from idea to design to developer handoff, noting it complements rather than replaces Adobe. Melwani outlines the freemium-to-enterprise model and bundled seats (Viewer, Collab, Dev, Full). The discussion spans core Design, FigJam, Dev Mode and new Figma Make, plus integrations of third-party AI tools using model context protocol (MCP). Melwani also covers recent pricing and packaging changes, as well as how AI alters costs, usage and expectations.
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