Moving AI from Engineering Efficiency to Value Creation

In this episode of Data Insights, TechArena's Allyson Klein and Solidigm's Jeniece Wnorowski sit down with Priya Sawant, SVP of Engineering at ASAPP, to explore what it takes to build AI automation products that enterprise customers can trust. Priya leads engineering at a company whose AI agents power contact centers at scale, and her perspective cuts across two simultaneous shifts: the tools her engineers use every day are changing, and what they are building with those tools is changing just as fast. The conversation covers platform engineering as organizational infrastructure, the trust challenge inherent in probabilistic AI, how to drive organic adoption of internal tools, and what differentiates ASAPP's approach to human-in-the-loop design for enterprise contact centers.

In this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Jim Sherhart, VP of Products and Solutions at WEKA, to unpack the launch of NeuralMesh 6, WEKA’s biggest software release to date, and WEKApod 3, the company's first purpose-built hardware. The conversation digs into the shift from GPU scarcity to GPU efficiency, why inference workloads behave nothing like training, and how WEKA’s augmented memory grid pushes up to 7x more tokens through the same GPUs. Jim also explains why a software company decided to build its own hardware, the metrics IT teams should start measuring in the emerging inference economy, and what it really takes to make AI inference profitable.

On this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Melissa Evers, Head of Ecosystem and Co-founder of Kreneon, to unpack why the water crisis isn't a technology problem; it's a financial one.Melissa draws on a career that spans wastewater engineering at ExxonMobil, finance and strategy, and years leading software and open-source initiatives at Intel to explain how Kreneon is building a digital market platform to commodify water, bringing the same price transparency that transformed oil and clean energy markets to the world's most essential resource. She and Allyson dig into what it takes to standardize water as a tradable asset, how virtual water purchase agreements can unlock bank financing instead of relying solely on equity, and why building trust across producers, regulators, and buyers is the key to scaling private investment into water infrastructure.

In this episode of In the Arena, Allyson Klein sits down with Jean-Simon Venne, CTO and founder of BrainBox AI, to explore how AI is transforming the energy performance of existing buildings. With roughly 3 billion buildings consuming about one-third of global energy on outdated template programming, Jean-Simon makes the case that the most impactful sustainability opportunity is not in what gets built next, but in how intelligently we operate what is already standing. The conversation covers predictive versus reactive control, the complexity of optimizing across competing stakeholder objectives, and the responsible AI principles guiding BrainBox AI's next phase of innovation out of Montreal.

In this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Senthil Padmanabhan, VP of Engineering for Global Commerce and Developer Platform at eBay, to talk about what AI adoption looks like inside one of the world's largest online marketplaces.

In this Data Insights episode, hosts Allyson Klein and Jeniece Wnorowski talk with Dan Brown, who leads hardware engineering at DigitalOcean, and Ty MacAdam, account executive at Solidigm, about what it really takes to build and operate data center infrastructure for AI workloads.

In this episode of The Control Plane, host Allyson Klein sits down with Zachary Bobroff, Chief Product Officer at AMI, to explore why firmware is having its defining moment in the age of AI infrastructure.

At Yotta 2026 in Las Vegas, Allyson Klein sat down with Jim Simonelli, SVP and CTO of data center business at Schneider Electric,Simonelli explains why IT moving on six-month cycles and power access running on six- to 10-year cycles makes the data center a systems problem. He covers why rack densities of 600 kilowatts to 1 megawatt drive the move to 800 VDC, and how Schneider’s new Software-Defined Medium Voltage switchgear separates the physical build from protection programming to speed time to power.

In this episode of The Control Plane, host Allyson Klein is joined by Ken Sun, Corporate Vice President at AMI, a Lattice company, for a wide-ranging conversation about firmware's growing strategic importance across the AI infrastructure stack. Ken brings a perspective shaped by years across service providers and cloud infrastructure, and frames firmware as the connective layer binding together the five layers of the modern tech stack: energy, silicon, cloud, models, and applications.

Scott Robohn, CEO of Solutional, co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, and consulting CTO at Carahsoft, joins Hedgehog founder and CEO Marc Austin to talk about why AI infrastructure raises the stakes on network automation. They cover NetDevOps, the talent gap in network engineering, deterministic scripting versus agentic AI, and where reference architectures fall short at scale.