Making Industrial Work Safer With Ascend Robotics

What if the most useful industrial robots are the ones helping experienced people continue working in safer conditions? Recording from the show floor at IFS Unleashed 2026 in Orlando, I spoke with David Askey, CEO of Ascend Robotics, about construction and maintenance machines working in spaces that are difficult or dangerous for people to reach. We discussed the gap between a robotics demonstration and equipment that can perform reliably at a customer site, where conditions rarely match the original plans. David shares a ship painting example in which he reports work completed three to four times faster than with typical human crews, alongside approximately twenty five percent material savings. He also describes more consistent coating thickness and explains why people continue to monitor and direct the work. A separate example involves cleaning and coating a factory ceiling during a data center conversion, where live electrical infrastructure added to the difficulty of the job. One of the most interesting parts of our conversation concerns the people operating these machines. David describes hiring experienced workers from painting crews as robot operators and working with unions as the equipment enters the market. For workers affected by the physical demands of construction, operating a robot can provide a way to keep contributing their knowledge from a different working environment. We also discuss how robots adapt to buildings as they actually exist and how operators help them decide what to paint and what to avoid. David explains how AI tools have accelerated his team's software development and why connecting the data collected by robots to enterprise systems is a separate challenge. He describes IFS as a bridge between work happening in the field and the information management teams need. For anyone considering robotics, the conversation offers practical questions about reliability, safety, integration and the outcomes worth measuring. Where could robots support your workforce, and what would you need to see before putting them to work? Please share your thoughts with me.

What happens when individual AI agents begin working together as digital teams, and how much more can businesses achieve when automation moves beyond a single task? Recording live at IFS Unleashed 2026 in Orlando, Neil C. Hughes reconnects with Somya Kapoor, CEO and Co-founder of IFS Loops, to discuss how digital workers have developed since their previous conversation in New York. Last year, the focus was on individual digital workers performing specific tasks. Now, IFS is bringing several workers together to support wider business processes, with early customer deployments providing evidence of what these systems can achieve. Somya explains why the initial approach centered on low-risk, high-impact workflows rather than attempting to automate complex processes all at once. She shares how some customers who began with a single digital worker have expanded to two or three, creating opportunities to automate more work across procurement, asset management, and field service. The conversation also examines customer examples from IFS Unleashed. Somya discusses KLM's reported efficiency improvements, the potential annual savings associated with invoice processing at Eight Group, and how Kodiak Gas is using a digital worker to make spare-parts identification and purchasing significantly faster. These examples provide an interesting perspective on enterprise AI at a time when many organizations are still struggling to move beyond pilot projects. Rather than beginning with large transformation programs, Somya describes an approach built around focused deployments, measurable results, and the opportunity to expand when the initial benefits become clear. But the technology is only part of the challenge. Somya also explains why change management can become a greater obstacle than building the agents themselves, particularly when employees and business leaders are unfamiliar with allowing digital workers to perform operational tasks. As AI agents become increasingly capable of working together, will organizations find greater success by starting small and building confidence through results? And could digital teams provide a more practical route from AI experimentation to everyday business value? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts on where digital workers could make the greatest difference in your organization.

What if the biggest obstacle to industrial AI isn't the technology itself, but the data businesses are trying to use with it? And how much could manufacturers and industrial operators achieve if they could connect information from across the entire life of their assets? Recording live at IFS Unleashed 2026 in Orlando, Neil C. Hughes speaks with Shawn Gregerson, VP APM & MES Business Development at AVEVA, about how industrial companies are using AI, operational data, and predictive maintenance to improve reliability and make more informed business decisions. Shawn explains why industrial AI is increasingly becoming a data challenge rather than an algorithmic one. Although AI models and analytical techniques have developed significantly, many organizations still struggle with disconnected information spread across engineering, operations, maintenance, and asset management systems. The conversation examines how AVEVA is bringing these different sources together through its industrial knowledge graph technology, creating a more reliable foundation for AI applications that need to understand the relationships between assets, processes, and operational conditions. They also discuss the growing financial pressures facing industrial organizations. Shawn highlights the increasing cost of downtime and the challenge of maintaining assets that are operating beyond their original design life. With AVEVA and IFS working together on Continuous Asset Decision Intelligence, or CADi, the discussion turns to connecting asset planning, design, operations, maintenance, and optimization so that decisions can be informed by real operating conditions. Shawn also shares where industrial AI is already delivering results, including predictive maintenance systems that monitor equipment health, identify early warning signs, and help maintenance teams determine what action to take before failures occur. Other applications include predictive quality, manufacturing throughput, and the use of generative AI to make industrial information easier to access. Looking beyond individual applications, they consider how connected industrial data could support agentic workflows and enable businesses to automate more of the tasks that employees currently perform manually. As industrial organizations face pressure to improve efficiency while extending the life of existing equipment, could connecting their operational data deliver greater value than investing in increasingly sophisticated AI models alone? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts on how industrial AI is changing maintenance, asset management, and operational decision-making.

Could your enterprise data support a reliable report and still leave an AI agent unsure what the numbers mean? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Saurabh Gupta, CEO of The Modern Data Company, about the difference between being analytics ready and AI ready. Saurabh's background includes data strategy and governance work at Thoughtworks, Washington DC government, and international organizations. Our conversation focuses on the information around data that machines need when they begin consuming it directly. A familiar reporting process can depend on human knowledge that never becomes part of the underlying dataset. Saurabh describes a system-of-record report exported to Excel, adjusted, and then used for compliance reporting. The spreadsheet and the original source now tell different stories. If an AI system encounters multiple copies, it needs a way to understand which version is appropriate and why. We discuss how context includes quality, lineage, transformations, meaning, usage, and permissions. Those details often live across separate tools and teams. Bringing them together is part of the challenge of making data useful to agents, rather than simply making it available. The distinction becomes clearer through a furniture company's date fields. Saurabh describes 14 fields that were tagged similarly but carried different business meanings. A warehouse, an ecommerce team, and a delivery team can use a label in different ways. An answer based on the wrong interpretation may look convincing while failing to address the question. Governance also needs to reach the point of consumption. Saurabh explains why one person may be allowed to see a name, address, and date of birth while another needs the same fields masked. His approach is to connect those permissions with how the data is used, including when a machine becomes the consumer. We then discuss DataOS, which The Modern Data Company describes as a platform for data products. Saurabh argues for starting with the outcome a user wants, then working backward to the necessary sources and controls. He explains how the company brings data from different locations into that process, while acknowledging that moving or centralizing data can still be appropriate where latency requires it. The interview also addresses measurement. Saurabh clarifies the company's 90% claim as faster use-case delivery or time saved. It is not a 90% increase in adoption. He describes tracking data interactions to identify stale processing and report schedules that do not reflect actual use. The company also reports potential reductions in data ownership costs, but the interview does not provide enough detail to treat those figures as a universal return. For CIOs and CDOs, his practical recommendation is to begin with a business problem and implement incrementally. A clearer view of which data people consume can help teams decide what to process, what to retire, and which investments serve a useful outcome. We also discuss how AI may change the division of work between consumers, analysts, and engineers. Saurabh's forecast is a strong one. The broader issue is how organizations preserve business interpretation and accountability as additional reporting tasks move into automated systems. The resources supplied after the interview include the company website, the Modern Data 101 practitioner community, and The Modern Data Report 2026. They offer destinations for listeners who want to continue learning about the team's approach. What would make your data genuinely ready for AI, and where do definitions, permissions, or inconsistent copies still create uncertainty? Please listen and share your thoughts.

What happens when marketing software starts learning from customer behavior instead of following a campaign rule that someone wrote weeks ago? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Neha Mittal, co-founder and CEO of JustAI, about AI agents, reinforcement learning, and a different approach to personalization. Neha spent over a decade working on growth and retention at companies including Twitter and Pinterest. Her experience repeatedly brought her back to the same problem: teams were running sequential experiments while the interests and behavior of their users kept changing. Neha describes how a series of small A/B tests could consume weeks without producing a durable answer. Changing a button from red to blue might teach a team something, but the larger opportunity was to keep experimenting and learning across many decisions. Seeing similar problems at different companies helped shape the idea behind JustAI. We discuss why she considers marketing a promising environment for autonomous agents. It involves a high volume of decisions, frequent feedback, and experiments that can often be assessed quickly. Opens, purchases, and ignored messages can all contribute to learning. Neha contrasts those conditions with higher-consequence fields such as medicine and law, while explaining that strategy and judgment remain responsibilities for people. The conversation also separates generating content from choosing an action. A language model can help produce an email. The reinforcement learning approach Neha describes aims to learn which decision supports longer-term customer value. The question becomes what message, timing, or channel makes sense for a particular person in the current moment, rather than which static segment or campaign they belong to. JustAI divides the work across Strategy, Creative, Decisioning, and Data agents. Neha explains how opportunities feed into messaging, how the decisioning system learns from responses, and how the data agent returns insights to the process. Marketers can review customer-facing creative, provide brand guidance, and adjust strategy when the company's products or priorities change. Her hypermarketer vision raises another question about how teams grow. Neha imagines one marketer having the capacity traditionally associated with a much larger team, with agents handling repetitive execution and experimentation. She presents this as a direction for the business rather than a demonstrated productivity ratio for every customer. The marketer still needs to translate business goals into instructions and judge whether the results make sense. We bring the discussion back to current examples. Neha describes Coursera and ClickUp delegating the creation and selection of messaging variants. She also discusses the importance of human review for Better's financial-services communications. These examples show why the level of autonomy should depend on the task and the consequences of getting it wrong. The supplied booking notes report over $100 million in customer revenue influenced and a $17 million funding round. Those company claims provide background, but the interview does not establish a revenue attribution method, incremental lift, or a complete return-on-investment calculation. The practical value of the conversation lies in understanding what work is being delegated and what people continue to own. For me, the interesting issue is how to create a feedback loop that improves relevance without letting operational speed run ahead of customer trust or business judgment. Which marketing decisions would you delegate to AI agents today, and what would you want to review before a message reaches a customer? Please listen and share your thoughts. 5. Suggested URL

Is your company using AI to improve the buying experience, or to carry out the same processes faster? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Jonathan Kvarfordt, known as Coach K, about business strategy, go-to-market AI, and the relationship between people and automated systems. Jonathan introduces himself as VP of Marketing at 1mind and brings experience training revenue leaders and teams to assess where AI can support their work. We begin with his framework for optimizing, amplifying, or reinventing a process. The point is to recognize the difference between making an existing task easier and considering whether the task should be done differently. Jonathan also acknowledges that organizations have different levels of readiness. Changing everything at once is not a practical answer for every business. The conversation becomes especially useful when we discuss measurement. Rather than beginning with licenses or prompt activity, Jonathan recommends identifying the business outcome and working backward. Is the goal improved quota attainment, a higher win rate, reduced churn, or another result? What is preventing it today? Sometimes the answer concerns process or people rather than AI. We then turn to the customer journey. Jonathan describes how 1mind aims to help buyers get product information, receive demonstrations, and answer technical questions before moving into a conversation with a person. His argument is that a website visitor may already be researching a specific decision, so an experience built only around awareness and meeting bookings can leave their immediate questions unanswered. The practical question is how to support that buyer at the moment they need help. Jonathan talks about website assistance, sales engineering, product guidance, and customer success. He sees opportunities to provide information when a team cannot staff every interaction, while giving people additional context when they take over. We also discuss the human side of AI adoption. Jonathan describes the continued value of emotional intelligence, relationships, and strategy. He challenges the assumption that every buyer always wants to speak with a person, but also recognizes that providing facts is different from understanding someone's motivations. The opportunity depends on the individual, the task, and the trust they place in the experience. A comparison between two companies using the same outbound tool brings the discussion back to operational reality. In Jonathan's account, one company had clearer customer definitions, messaging, and data. The other used a broad target and expected the technology to compensate. His lesson is to examine what the system receives before concluding that another purchase will solve the problem. For leaders assessing AI value, we talk about conversion rates, selling time, and the parts of a buyer's journey a system can support. Establishing a baseline matters. A team cannot confidently claim improved selling time if it never measured how much time people had to sell in the first place. The interview also contains an inconsistent percentage claim about hallucinations. I have kept those figures out of the promotional package pending clarification. Reliability needs evidence, and the discussion does not provide a benchmark methodology or enough detail to establish a performance guarantee. We close with Jonathan's advice to remain willing to learn and reconsider familiar habits. He is candid about feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change, which makes the conversation useful for people who are experimenting without feeling they have every answer. Where does your buying journey create unnecessary effort, and how would you assess whether AI made the experience better for the customer? Please listen and share your thoughts.

What would change if your building could help explain what needs attention, why it matters, and whether the action you took actually worked? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome Bert Van Hoof, CEO of Willow, back to the show to discuss operational AI for buildings and infrastructure. Bert spent about 20 years at Microsoft, where his work included launching Azure Digital Twins. He now works with environments such as hospitals, airports, universities, corporate campuses, and data centers, where the condition of a physical space can directly affect the work happening inside it. We begin with a problem familiar to many facilities teams. Buildings already have sensors, management systems, meters, maintenance records, and dashboards. Having access to information does not necessarily help an operator decide what to do next. Bert describes operational AI as a way to move through a sequence of questions: what is happening, why is it happening, what might happen next, what should we do, and did the action produce the expected result? Context gives those questions meaning. A temperature reading alone cannot tell us whether a room is operating correctly. We need to know the room's purpose, occupancy, equipment, weather conditions, and recent maintenance history. Bert explains how digital twins and knowledge graphs connect those relationships so that a system can assess the situation rather than interpret a sensor value in isolation. The discussion then turns to predictive maintenance. A probability of failure may be useful to an analyst, but a technician also needs to understand the consequence, urgency, and next step. Bert describes how condition-based maintenance can support equipment decisions and how earlier detection can reduce the disruption caused by refrigeration problems or water leaks. These are practical examples of the types of outcomes Willow targets, rather than a claim that every customer will achieve the same result. There is a human side to the conversation too. Bert describes operators opening numerous browser tabs each morning to assemble a picture of their buildings. Daily briefings and natural-language questions could reduce that search effort, helping teams focus their attention on the issues that deserve it. We also discuss the relationship between occupancy, ventilation, energy consumption, comfort, and maintenance. Bert describes Willow's Active Control and the use of schedules and occupancy signals to help buildings respond to how spaces are being used. His argument is that these decisions should account for the whole environment. Saving energy in isolation can create different problems if comfort, reliability, or safety is overlooked. Trust runs through the interview. A poor recommendation in a hospital has different consequences from an awkward paragraph in a document. Bert argues for explainable recommendations, operational evidence, defined limits, and verification after an action. He also sees experienced facilities engineers as part of the solution, with responsibility for setting objectives and judging trade-offs. For me, the larger question is how building operations connect with the organization's purpose. A hospital needs spaces and equipment ready for patient care. An airport needs to account for passengers, flights, gates, and changing demand. Understanding the environment means understanding what it needs to support. Where would operational AI make the most useful difference in your buildings, and what evidence would you want before allowing it to take action? Please listen and share your thoughts.

How much damage can a proven leadership playbook cause when it is applied to the wrong company? Experience can give executives confidence, but Sameer Kazi argues that confidence becomes dangerous when it replaces diagnosis. In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I welcome Sameer Kazi, CEO of the Pantheon Platform, back to the show for a conversation about copy-and-paste management, first-principles thinking, AI adoption, and the value of listening before making changes. Pantheon supports major websites and provides DevOps tools for agencies and enterprise web teams, placing Sameer close to the changing relationship between SaaS, web development, and agentic website creation. Sameer describes a familiar mistake in technology companies. A new executive arrives with a formula that worked elsewhere, hires people from a previous team, and assumes the same inputs will produce the same growth. In the early SaaS era, for example, a company might have treated its sales efficiency ratio as a direct signal to hire another quota-bearing sales representative.  Product-led growth, changing buying behavior, and different forms of product market fit have weakened that assumption. Adding salespeople does not automatically create demand. His alternative begins with product market fit and the way buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase a product. From there, leaders can study the mechanics across marketing, sales, customer success, support, and product development. Sameer argues that rapidly growing AI businesses do not come with a settled operating manual, so executives need curiosity and evidence instead of a formula copied from the past. Customer feedback provides one source of that evidence. Pantheon runs a public Slack channel where customers and partners speak directly with the company. Sameer says those conversations can reveal customer experience problems and, in some cases, signal a platform slowdown before observability tools detect it.  A small piece of feedback may not represent every customer, but it can give an experienced leader a reason to investigate immediately. We also discuss AI return on investment and the growing cost of adding token consumption to an organization's existing workforce and infrastructure. Sameer does not claim to have one universal metric. Instead, he recommends looking at customer reactions to AI across sales, support, and internal processes. If AI makes a process faster for the company but worse for the buyer, customer evidence should reveal the problem. The conversation then turns to data ownership. Sameer compares the hesitation companies once felt about moving data into the cloud with the speed at which some now provide business data to frontier AI labs. He expects small language models and open-weight models to give companies additional choices, including the option to run systems on their own hardware and isolate proprietary information where appropriate. One of the strongest leadership examples comes from Sameer's arrival at Pantheon. He promised to speak with every employee and spent four months holding small roundtables. The format began with introductions and favorite movies before moving to a direct invitation: tell me what works, what needs attention, and what should be addressed first. Sameer describes the result as a treasure trove of information from people closest to customers, prospects, products, and daily operations. That approach also challenged the lazy assumption that long-serving employees represent outdated thinking. Sameer found experienced practitioners who had built agencies, developed large fleets of websites, and worked directly with customers. Recognizing that knowledge can strengthen commitment, while dismissing it can leave employees disconnected and encourage quiet quitting. Can leaders keep the principles that made them successful while treating every familiar method as a hypothesis to be tested? Listen to the episode and share how your organization balances executive experience with customer evidence and employee knowledge.

What matters most when you land in another country and your phone has no data? The cheapest plan may have looked like the obvious choice before departure, but priorities change quickly when you need a map, a translator, a ride to the hotel, or a way to tell your family you arrived safely. In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Alfonso Mata Villa, Head of Strategy at Holafly, about the growth of travel eSIMs and why they have moved from a specialist product to a far easier alternative to physical SIM cards and traditional roaming. Alfonso explains that modern smartphones now make it possible to keep a normal number active while adding a separate data connection for an international trip. The result is a product that feels less like replacing a phone service and more like adding connectivity for a destination. We talk through the practical experience for someone using an eSIM for the first time, including installation, activation, turning off the home data connection, and avoiding an unexpected roaming bill. Alfonso also describes Holafly's Always On benefit, which the company says gives customers one gigabyte of data each month so they can access basic services after arrival before buying another plan. The apparent simplicity hides a demanding operating model. Holafly works across over 200 markets, where network quality, device behavior, carrier restrictions, hardware differences, and local regulation can all vary. Alfonso explains why providers need strong operator relationships, redundancy, and the ability to move traffic when coverage becomes unreliable. His argument is that travelers should never have to see the complexity required to make a connection work. That raises a useful question for anyone comparing travel eSIM providers. Price and data allowance matter, but what happens after the purchase? We discuss network reliability, data routing, latency, access to local services, privacy, and the speed of customer support when an installation or connection fails. Alfonso says Holafly treats multilingual support, unlimited data, transparent pricing, and reliable connectivity as parts of the product rather than extras. The conversation also looks at the changing relationship between eSIM companies and mobile operators. Travel eSIMs compete with traditional roaming, but they still depend on operator networks. Alfonso sees an increasingly connected model in which operators supply infrastructure while global providers package connectivity for travelers and distribute it through airlines, travel agencies, hotels, online travel platforms, and financial services. There is also a risk of leaving some travelers behind. Older phones may lack eSIM support, while carrier-locked devices and regional differences can create additional barriers. Alfonso argues that progress should be measured by whether the technology becomes simple enough for almost any traveler to use, rather than by technical sophistication alone. If mobile connectivity can become another digital part of planning a trip, will travel eSIMs finally retire the anxiety and surprise costs associated with international roaming? Listen to the episode and share your experiences with eSIMs, roaming charges, and staying connected abroad.

Could your board explain where the organization's most valuable data resides, who can control it, and how quickly it could be recovered In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I speak with Adam Gale, CTO for Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence at NetApp, about why digital sovereignty is moving from compliance teams into boardroom discussions. Adam argues that data has measurable business value, so decisions about its location, ownership, protection, and recoverability should be treated with the same seriousness as other financial risks. We discuss how the US CLOUD Act, Europe's sovereignty agenda, and wider geopolitical tensions are changing cloud decisions. Adam explains that sovereignty extends beyond physical data location. Hardware supply chains, software development, labor, access, operational control, and recovery all influence the level of sovereignty an organization may require. His advice is to treat sovereignty as a scale rather than impose the same controls on every workload. The conversation also turns to sovereign AI. Adam describes why businesses and governments want greater control over training data, intellectual property, model activity, and audit records. He explains how poisoned data can produce plausible but unsafe outputs, and why controlled AI environments, traceable logs, and immutable records matter when systems begin making consequential decisions. We then connect data visibility with business value. Adam shares how uncertainty over data location can affect a company acquisition and explains why insurers increasingly ask organizations to prove how information is protected and recovered. He also describes the growing role of behavior analytics, automated responses, immutable storage, and storage-level ransomware protection in limiting damage and restoring trusted data. If digital sovereignty begins with responsibility, control, and security, who owns those decisions in your organization today? Listen to the conversation and share your thoughts with me.