Workdays CTO on its Open-Platform Bet

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.