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Tech Disruptors

Author: Bloomberg

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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.

294 Episodes
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“…A successful agentic enterprise deployment means each of your departments are fundamentally different,” Salesforce’s VP 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.
“We’re in the first inning right now. In the second inning, you’ll see companies really adopting agents, building their own models for consumption within the organization and outward looking to their customers,” Check Point CEO Nadav Zafrir tells Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh in this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast. The two discuss the open-platform concept and runtime security as AI reshapes how cybersecurity is deployed. Zafrir also explains his rationale for acquiring Lakera and how consolidation could unfold in SASE and browser security as enterprises look to deploy more AI agents.
“I think we’re at this really seminal moment from an industry where we clearly have a major inflection shaping the end-markets. Adobe is not new to inflections. In fact, the arc of time and history of the company and the ability to reinvent ourselves each and every time one of these major inflections happen, to cement our leadership position...it’s a part of our heritage,” Adobe CFO Dan Durn explains to Anurag Rana, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. The two explore each of Adobe’s product clouds, customer groups and cross-cloud workflows. Durn also outlines a monetization playbook—price x quantity + value—backed by brand-safe Firefly and native model choice (first- and third-party) via generative credits. Additionally, the two cover the enterprise go-to-market, Acrobat and Express upselling, AI-influence in products and capital allocation.
“AI has become the new UI,” says Amit Zavery, ServiceNow’s president, chief product officer and COO, referring to the user interface as he explains why the company is building an agentic operating system, an AI control tower to govern models and agents and end-to-end orchestration that goes beyond chat to complete work across human resources, IT, customer-service and customer-relationship management. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Zavery and Anurag Rana, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, dig into platform strategy, the emerging ServiceNow CRM push and what “autonomous IT” looks like in practice.
Pure Storage is disrupting a hard-disk-dominated market by solving the price, power and performance puzzle. Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo joins Bloomberg Intelligence hardware analyst Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss the company’s flash innovations powering enterprise AI and cloud-scale storage.
In a rapidly evolving battery-technology landscape, Enovix stands out as a leader in advanced silicon anodes. Enovix’s disruptive architecture enables a battery with high energy density and capacity, without compromising on safety, CEO Dr. Raj Talluri said. He joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior chemicals analyst Sean Gilmartin on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to explain why silicon beats graphite on performance, how Enovix’s unique cell architecture combats thermal runaway and the positive outlook for consumer electronics. The company is expanding its manufacturing capabilities in silicon-anode lithium-ion batteries to meet customer demand, primarily for smartphones.
Powering brands to boost customer acquisition, retention and monetization by effectively leveraging consumer data is Zeta Global’s core mission. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Zeta CEO and cofounder of David Steinberg speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel about the company’s evolution and its key differentiator: being a data- and AI-native platform. He also delves into Zeta’s AI agents, the transformation of marketing communication channels and the company’s ambitious revenue goals for 2028. Steinberg highlights the importance of its proprietary data cloud, which includes 550 million active users and over 1 trillion ingested signals, the multiplier impact of AI agents and the competitive landscape in the marketing industry. Listen in to hear the challenges and opportunities for growth in an AI-driven world.
“We are investing significantly in dating features right now because that’s a really big item people want,” says George Arison, CEO of Grindr, noting that half of users under 35 want to be married. That contrasts with older generations, giving Grindr an opportunity to emphasize long-term relationships as well as casual connections. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Arison speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nicole D’Souza about how Grindr has avoided the headwinds rivals face from shifting Gen Z dating habits by catering to younger, more affluent users. They also discuss Grindr’s ad strategy as the company raises ad load while keeping pricing steady, with plans to boost it through differentiated products and more direct-response advertising.
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