Upwork Rides Wave of Freelancers, Talent Demand

Helping knowledge workers and businesses connect in a work marketplace is Upwork’s central mission. A new wave of freelance workers is disrupting typical hiring channels and helping enterprises fill their talent and skills gaps. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Upwork CEO and President Hayden Brown sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to outline the company’s product suite, approach to over 830,000 customers and changing dynamics of work. She discusses its core offering, investments for the enterprise segment and recently launched AI agent, UMA. Listen in to learn about the movement of global freelancers, which number over 250,000 globally, and the sea changes underway in filling the demand for AI talent.

The tech DNA is what’s missing in the power industry, according to Intersect Power CEO Sheldon Kimber. “The fastest-growing technology the world has ever seen is now basically stuck behind one of the most boring and least innovative industries in the world.” In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Kimber joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s head of technology research, Mandeep Singh, to discuss power needs tied to AI data centers and the infrastructure build-out by hyperscalers. They also cover power needs for training vs. inferencing, the various sources of power and how it’s stored for maximum efficiency, and being a disruptor in a field that can’t always wait for the government to upgrade the transmission system.

Front-end development is rapidly evolving, driven by large-language models, agentic workflows and serverless architecture — enabling smarter, scalable apps and blurring front- and back-end boundaries. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Vercel’s Chief Operating Officer Jeanne DeWitt Grosser joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sunil Rajgopal to discuss the company’s go-to-market strategy, enterprise growth and revenue expansion. They also explore Vercel’s core offerings — ranging from managed infrastructure to developer collaboration tools and AI-native application development. The conversation highlights how Vercel is powering AI workloads through custom code-correction models, infrastructure upgrades and rapid prototyping with v0, while expanding globally to support both technical and non-technical users.

While the tech world watches Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks unfold, Juniper is still moving ahead. CEO Rami Rahim joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Woo Jin Ho to unpack how Juniper is seizing the AI moment and driving market-share gains with cutting-edge innovations like 800G AI switching and Mist AI. From cloud data centers to campus networks, discover how Juniper is redefining leadership in AI infrastructure and network automation.

Data centers that are being designed today will need to accommodate IT technology of the future and remain viable during their 15-20-year life cycle. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi and Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior industrials analyst Mustafa Okur talk about the evolving power and cooling needs of data centers and whether a changing use case from training AI models to inference may reduce infrastructure equipment demand. They also discuss the next wave for data-center infrastructure demand, how the next upgrade cycle could be different and when liquid cooling might become the dominant category in heat rejection.

Stack Overflow has long been the go-to platform for developers to learn, collaborate and solve coding challenges. In this Tech Disruptors episode, Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sunil Rajgopal speaks with Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on how generative AI is reshaping developer workflows and platform strategy. They discuss the company’s pivot toward enterprise use cases, including private knowledge sharing, agentic AI integration and data licensing. The conversation also explores major partnerships with AI and cloud providers and Stack Overflow’s evolving role in a rapidly changing developer ecosystem.

Akamai, a leading content delivery network (CDN) provider, has countered a decline in its CDN business by expanding into security and compute services, which offer much higher growth. These areas may expand at a double-digit rate over the next 3-5 years, with their combined revenue accounting for over two-thirds of sales and 100% of the company’s growth. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, CEO Tom Leighton discusses the latest trends in these segments with Bloomberg Intelligence’s John Butler. He touches on how these products are shaping Akamai’s future growth and strategy. The conversation also covers recent moves to stabilize growth in the CDN business, along with an exploration of how AI is emerging as a new opportunity.

Enterprise software is evolving as generative AI enables smarter ways to build and run business processes. In this Tech Disruptors episode, Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sunil Rajgopal speaks with Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler on how tools like Blueprint and agentic workflows help modernize legacy systems and boost productivity. They discuss the company’s recurring software-as-a-service revenue, customer verticals and how its low-code roots power its AI strategy. Trefler also shares his views on the evolving competitive landscape, future product strategy, and scale ambitions.

“When you talk about inferencing, you have a real application. The application has data. The application has compute. The application needs to interface with other third-party applications. So, you need a full general-purpose cloud to coexist with a GPU cloud to power inferencing application at scale,” DigitalOcean CEO Paddy Srinivasan tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, the two discuss DigitalOcean’s edge as a digitally-native cloud service provider in a market served largely by the three hyperscalers. In this conversation, Srinivasan also touches upon the company’s differentiated approach to capital spending, AI inferencing vs. training and which pockets still have a good growth runway.

Generative AI has changed how humans and systems interact, and the science of human-computer interaction is now really the science of human-AI interaction, says Motorola Solutions EVP & CTO Mahesh Saptharishi. He joins Bloomberg Intelligence tech analyst Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to share how his company is building AI into its hardware and software to unlock new capabilities, while putting guardrails in place to ensure responsible use. Its AI for public safety, Assist, is designed to boost productivity and bring automation, situational awareness and real-time insights to first responders, where every second matters.