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

AI is changing by the week. Most companies are still planning by the quarter.
Softchoice CEO Andrew Caprara joins the AI Proving Ground Podcast with a refreshingly practical take on what it actually takes to keep up. Forget starting with the latest tool or another sprawling AI transformation plan. Start with a broken workflow, put the right people around it and build something in days, not months.
Andrew talks openly about Softchoice’s own experience. The first year brought a lot of activity without much to show for it. Since then, they’ve changed how the work gets done, moving AI projects faster, getting the right people closer to the problem and building a weekly rhythm around AI. And it’s translating into real business results, including more capacity without adding headcount.
Because when the technology moves weekly, a 12-week project plan starts to look a little suspicious.
More about this week's guest: 
Andrew Caprara is President and CEO of Softchoice, where he’s leading the company through the same AI transformation challenges facing its customers. Since joining Softchoice in 2014, he has led across sales, services, operations and strategy, giving him a firsthand view of what it takes to turn new technology into real business results. Before Softchoice, Andrew worked in management consulting at McKinsey & Company and earned his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
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.

AI spending is climbing fast. But the number itself may be less important than what it reveals about how an organization is actually using AI.
WWT CFO Tom Strunk and CIO Kevin Dana are watching that shift firsthand. As token consumption moves from thousands to millions, the spend becomes a signal: where people are experimenting, which use cases are gaining traction and where it may be worth looking more closely for value.
They also get into a challenge traditional IT budgets weren't built for. AI usage can scale quickly and unpredictably, making transparency between finance and technology critical. The goal isn't simply to control the cost. It's to understand what's driving it, where it's creating value and how the business can make smarter decisions as adoption grows.
Support for this episode provided by: Snowflake
More about this week's guests:
Tom Strunk is Chief Financial Officer and Chief Data Officer at World Wide Technology, where he helps shape the company’s financial, data and investment strategy. Since joining WWT as its 21st employee in 1994, he has helped guide its growth into a global technology solutions provider. Tom brings a CFO’s perspective to AI investment, rising consumption and the challenge of connecting AI spend to real business value.
Kevin Dana is Senior Vice President of IT and Cybersecurity and CIO at World Wide Technology, where he leads the company’s technology strategy and digital transformation efforts. With more than 28 years of IT experience, Kevin focuses on using technology to drive meaningful business outcomes. He brings a CIO’s perspective to AI adoption, rapidly growing token consumption and what AI spend can reveal about usage, opportunity and business value.
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.

What changes when scientists stop thinking about how much compute they can afford to use and start thinking about what they could discover with more of it?
That question sits behind LillyPod, Eli Lilly & Company’s on-prem AI supercomputer. Chief AI Officer Dr. Thomas Fuchs sees compute less as infrastructure and more as a scientific instrument, something that allows researchers to work at a scale that changes not only the answers they can find, but the questions they’re willing to ask.  
It’s a philosophy that runs counter to much of the current enterprise AI conversation. While companies wrestle with token costs, cloud economics and how tightly to ration increasingly expensive AI, Lilly is exploring what happens when some of those constraints begin to disappear. Fuchs calls it a move from scarcity to abundance. And when the underlying economics change, so does the ambition. 
But Fuchs is no AI maximalist. After two decades in machine learning, he is remarkably unsentimental about the hype. AI, in his view, becomes far more interesting when you stop asking it to be magic and start getting serious about what it can actually do.
Support for this episode provided by: Infoblox
Thomas Fuchs, Dr.sc., is Eli Lilly& Company’s first Chief AI Officer and a machine learning scientist who has spent two decades pushing AI into places where the stakes are real. His career spans NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mount Sinai and founding Paige AI. He holds a doctorate in machine learning from ETH Zurich and now leads Lilly’s use of AI across science, medicine and the enterprise.
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.

Most organizations don't fail because they aren't working hard enough. They fail because they spend too long preparing for yesterday's problems.​
Retired General Mike Minihan has spent a career leading organizations where the cost of being unprepared is measured in lives, not quarterly results. That experience shaped the Mobility Manifesto, a leadership philosophy built on a simple belief: readiness isn't something you create in the moment. It's something you build long before the moment arrives. ​
In his conversation with Brian Feldt, Minihan challenges one of leadership’s most comfortable assumptions: that caution is inherently safer. He makes the case for clear priorities, deliberate risk and leaders who stay close enough to the work to own the consequences when they ask teams to move.
​The conversation begins with military leadership but quickly becomes something much broader. It's about preparing people for a future they can't fully predict, building cultures that learn faster than circumstances change, and remembering that technology may accelerate transformation, but leadership is what makes it possible.​
Support for this episode provided by: Red Hat
More about this week's guest:
Mike Minihan is a distinguished military leader with over three decades of service in the United States Air Force. Rising to the rank of General, Minihan served in several key positions within the Air Force and Joint Force, including his most recent role as the Commander of Air Mobility Command. Throughout his career, General Minihan has demonstrated exceptional leadership, strategic vision, and a deep commitment to enhancing the capabilities and readiness of the military, especially mobility forces.
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.

For the past few years, enterprise AI had an open tab. Experiment. Build. Give teams access. Put agents to work. Now those agents are running 24/7 and someone has finally looked at the bill.
In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, AMD’s John Hampton and WWT’s Mike Trojecki dig into what happens when AI moves from experimentation to a real operating expense. Scaling it doesn’t mean simply spending more on compute. It means knowing when a workload needs a frontier model, when it doesn’t and where that work should run in the first place.
AMD has already put that thinking to work internally, cutting its token costs by 43% while improving response speeds by 2.9x for workloads it rerouted.
The next AI advantage may have less to do with who can consume the most compute and more to do with who can use it intelligently.
Support for this episode provided by: Lenovo
More about this week's guests:
John Hampton is Corporate Vice President of AMD Global Pre-Sales, leading the technical sales organization working with enterprise customers across AI, data center, high-performance computing and commercial technology. With decades of experience in the semiconductor industry, he brings a firsthand view of how organizations are making the infrastructure and investment decisions required to scale AI.
Mike Trojecki leads the AI Practice at World Wide Technology, helping organizations turn AI ambition into infrastructure that can actually scale. With more than 25 years in technology, his work spans AI architecture, data, computer vision and data center design, giving him a practical view into the decisions enterprises face as AI moves from experimentation into everyday operations.
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.