AI Proving Ground Podcast: Exploring Artificial Intelligence & Enterprise AI with World Wide Technology

AI pilots are easy.
Scaling AI across a live network is not.
As organizations move beyond experimentation, the challenge isn’t better models — it’s building AI that operates like infrastructure: reliable, secure, and measurable.
In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Matt Shorts, AVP of AI at Cox Communications, joins WWT’s Greg Schoeny to share how Cox moved AI from isolated pilots into production across a customer-facing network where uptime, trust, and scale matter daily.
You’ll learn:
Why operating conditions expose bad AI decisions fast
How to modernize without waiting for perfect data
The risks of rushing into closed platforms
Why momentum beats perfection
How framing AI as augmentation — not replacement — drives adoption
This episode is for CIOs, infrastructure leaders, and platform teams responsible for deploying AI in complex, regulated environments.
The bottom line: AI only delivers value when it behaves like infrastructure.
And infrastructure rewards discipline — not hype.
More about this week's guests:
Greg Schoeny is Senior Vice President of Services and Strategic Solutions at WWT, leading services sales, business development, and architecture for the Global Service Provider (GSP) business. His team delivers outcome-driven solutions across AI, cloud, security, mobility, automation, and advisory services, supporting customers with professional services, managed services, staffing, and strategic consulting.
Matt Cox is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience driving digital transformation and product innovation. He specializes in AI strategy, multi-cloud optimization, and building high-performing teams. Matt has led successful product launches, developed IP strategies, and architected IoT solutions that unlock new revenue and operational efficiency, aligning technology with measurable business impact.
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

As enterprises rush to deploy AI, observability is emerging as the discipline that determines whether those investments create durable value—or quietly erode it. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Ivan Wintersteiger, Cisco's Tapan Shah and NVIDIA's Shashank Sabhlok discuss why observability, when treated as foundational, becomes the connective tissue between infrastructure, applications, security and user experience.
More about this week's guests:
Ivan Wintersteiger brings more than 20 years of experience across IT leadership, engineering, and business development, with a consistent focus on end-user experience and security. In his current role, Ivan leads the End User Computing practice, driving transformational solutions across modern device management, application delivery, and identity management to help organizations operate securely at scale.
Tapan Shah leads the Splunk AIOps products—IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk On-Call—within the Splunk Observability portfolio. With more than 20 years of experience across observability, systems and network management, application performance monitoring, and AIOps, Tapan has worked closely with large global enterprises across industries, including a significant portion of the Fortune 100. Based in California, he focuses on helping organizations gain end-to-end visibility and operational resilience at scale.
Shashank Sabhlok is a senior product manager in the NVIDIA Enterprise product group, where he leads initiatives around AI factory design and enterprise adoption to drive scalable, high-performance AI across organizations. Prior to this, he was the lead product manager for IBM watsonx.governance, IBM's generative AI governance solution, where he successfully led the product from inception to launch and beyond. He holds an MBAi (MBA + AI) degree from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering, and a BASc in Electrical Engineering with Distinction from the University of Waterloo.
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

As organizations move beyond experimentation, compute has become a deciding factor in whether AI delivers real value or stalls before production. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT VP Neil Anderson, NVIDIA VP Chris Marriott and Cisco VP Daniel McGinniss talk about how organizations are rethinking where AI runs, how it's secured and how value is measured.
More about this week's guests:
Neil Anderson has over 30 years of experience in AI, Software Development, Wireless, Cyber, and Networking technologies. At WWT Neil is VP and CTO in our Global Solutions and Architectures team, with responsibility for over $16B in WWT's solutions portfolio. Neil advises hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies on their global architecture and technology strategy.
Daniel McGinniss is Vice President of Product Management for Cisco Compute, responsible for developing innovative products and establishing new routes to market for Cisco's multi-billion-dollar compute and SaaS infrastructure management portfolio, while driving new solutions and as-a-service offers with ecosystem partners in alignment with customers' most critical business needs.
Chris Marriott is the vice president of enterprise platforms at NVIDIA, spending the last 14 years advancing enterprise solutions. With a background in engineering, including 10 years in ASIC development, Marriott combines technical expertise with strategic insight to address the evolving technology landscape. Outside of work, he enjoys playing ice hockey and exploring the outdoors with his family.
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

As AI systems grow larger and more distributed, enterprises are discovering that performance, security and time-to-value depend less on individual components and more on how well the system moves, synchronizes and protects data at scale. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Justin van Schaik, Cisco's Dave Jansen and NVIDIA's Taylor Allison talk about how a well-designed network fabric extends time to value, increases risk and quietly erodes the economics of AI initiatives.
More about this week's guests:
Justin van Shaik is a Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology, specializing in High Performance Networking, AI and Open Networking. A seasoned technologist, he helps organizations design and deploy advanced infrastructure to support next-gen workloads at scale.
David Jansen is focused on technology strategy for Cisco's Global Solutions Engineering team across all segments, verticals, and technologies via an ongoing series of innovation initiatives. David spends a lot of time with strategic customers + partners engagements globally. With over 30 years of experience in the IT industry, David is an industry expert in Cloud, Software Defined Networking (SDN), virtualization, orchestration, large scale WAN backbone, and AI Infrastructure.
Taylor Allison is responsible for product marketing related to the NVIDIA Ethernet switch portfolio, including the hardware platforms as well as network operating systems and telemetry tools. Taylor has a passion for product marketing and management in the data center infrastructure space, with expertise in networking, storage, HPC, and AI/ML. Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2021, Taylor was Lenovo's HPC/AI storage leader, responsible for high performance storage platforms, software, and solutions. Taylor earned his MS in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina.
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

As enterprises move AI from experimentation to production, security failures are no longer isolated incidents—they are systemic risks embedded deep in infrastructure, data flows, and decision-making systems. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Istvan Berko, Cisco's DJ Sampath and NVIDIA's Ofir Arkin discuss why as AI becomes core infrastructure, security becomes the mechanism that determines whether that infrastructure scales or undermines itself.
Support for this episode provided by: Rubrik
More about this week's guests:
Istvan Berko is the Global Head of AI Cyber and Innovation at World Wide Technology. With 25+ years in security, risk, and governance, he has held senior roles at NTT/Dimension Data and AWS, authored AWS Cloud Adoption Framework whitepapers, and remains active in the cybersecurity community through leadership and industry events.
DJ Sampath is Senior Vice President of Cisco's AI Software and Platform group, where he leads the charge in shaping a unified AI vision across the company's product portfolio. A builder at heart and a visionary by design, DJ blends deep technical expertise with strategic storytelling to drive transformative outcomes at scale. He has founded, grown, and sold category-defining startups, advised U.S. government agencies, and emerged as a thought leader at the intersection of enterprise AI and innovation.
Ofir Arkin is a renowned information security expert with a career spanning academia, consulting, and executive roles. He's passionate about creating innovative products that address customer needs, and has introduced several industry-first technologies. Known for his dedication to mentoring, Ofir has authored numerous influential research papers and articles, and is a recognized speaker in the information security community.
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.