Next in Tech

The worlds of IT security and operations are being pulled together and AI is a catalyst that's making it happen. The focus on observability that's been part of the DevOps movement, is playing an important role in improving security effectiveness and Scott Crawford, Mark Ehr and Mike Fratto return to look at how this is happening with host Eric Hanselman. Security teams have always wrestled with making effective use of telemetry data from the infrastructure and applications they are securing. Correlating data from just the security tooling is hard enough, let alone adding operational data to the mix. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems came into existence many years ago specifically to address this problem, but they were complex to configure and operate and needed tending to stay accurate. The volumes of data coming from observability initiatives was promising, but new approaches were required and AI and ML have been key to unlocking that value.

Once again, we've hit an opportunity where it's all about the data and getting it to where it can be put to work. The Open Telemetry project simplified data interchange, but the question remained as to where all of this data had to live. It's not practical to get all of the data in one place, but data fabrics and federation can manage access effectively. Better correlation opens the door to many possibilities, including building a single source of truth for IT assets. There's a lot of benefit to bringing security and operations together.

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• 2026 Trends in Information Security
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Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Scott Crawford, Mark Ehr, Mike Fratto
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

As organizations have worked to leverage the power of AI in interacting with large language models, they've invested in prompt engineering to generate better results. But agents shift the need manage the full context of not only the prompt, but also the data that's being presented. Analysts Jean Atelsek and Alex Johnston return to the podcast to look at the new discipline of context engineering and how it's being put to work in AI environments with host Eric Hanselman. The process of context engineering looks at ensuring that the right data context is in place for agents to act on. It requires a shift from thinking that more data is necessarily better and understanding to getting the right data is the best insurance against agents picking up bad habits. We've come full circle in approaches to data and organizations need to raise the level of abstraction at which they address data need for agentic applications.

We've been working through waves of capability in the march to agentic operations. Organizations have access to the same models, but how they're used is where differentiation is possible. Agentic approaches demand greater sophistication and understanding around the context with which data is presented to applications. There has to be more careful curation, to get reasonable results.

More S&P Global Content:

• AI in action: unleashing agentic potential
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For S&P Global Subscribers:

• Agents are already driving workplace impact and agentic AI adoption – Highlights from VotE: AI & Machine Learning
• Benchmarking digital maturity: Are businesses ready for agentic AI? – Highlights from VotE: Customer Experience & Commerce
• Pace of AI agent advancement could spur M&A in the sales automation market
• Big Picture Report: 2026 AI Outlook – Unleashing agentic potential

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Jean Atelsek, Alex Johnston
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

The latest Big Picture reports are out and cover a wide range of topics from financial markets to supply chains and onward to technology and AI. Two of the authors, Lindsey Hall and Chris Rogers, join host Eric Hanselman to talk about sustainability, supply chains and AI. These are tightly interwoven and their dependencies spill out into geopolitics, as well. Sustainability conversations have focused on climate adaptation and resilience. Climate risks are growing and yet only 35% of businesses have adaptation plans in place. The urgent demands for AI infrastructure are consuming both energy and the materials to build data centers. Meeting those needs is shifting sustainability priorities for the companies looking to deploy AI, as well as energy focus. Renewables are still a key part of energy plans, but they've moved to an all-of-the-above approach to fuel AI-driven consumption levels.

It's been what could be called an un-fun year in supply chain. Uncertainty has become the new certainty. Changes in tariff policies have had the side effect of pushing the affected countries closer together. That's led to reshoring efforts, which have seen particular growth in ASEAN countries. One of complexities of this shift is that labor forces are now competing with manufacturing automation and robotics, rather than skills and cost differentials in different regions. The rise of agentic AI is only increasing pressure on infrastructure and energy supplies as it accelerates operational velocity.

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• Insights in Motion: See the Big Picture
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For S&P Global Subscribers:

• Agents are already driving workplace impact and agentic AI adoption – Highlights from VotE: AI & Machine Learning
• Benchmarking digital maturity: Are businesses ready for agentic AI? – Highlights from VotE: Customer Experience & Commerce
• Pace of AI agent advancement could spur M&A in the sales automation market
• Big Picture Report: 2026 AI Outlook – Unleashing agentic potential

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Lindsey Hall, Chris Rogers
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, this year thoughts are turning to agents and the changing role of AI in commerce. Sheryl Kingstone returns to discuss the impacts and offer insights into strategies for putting agents to work and working in a world of agents with host Eric Hanselman. AI is spanning generations in technology adoption and engagement in ways that previous technologies have struggled. Search and digital engagement had strong splits between different generations. The natural language capabilities of chat interfaces are stepping across technology hesitancy. But it is creating challenges for businesses in reaching their customers. Search engine optimization is well understood, but how can a business ensure it's found by AI entities? Making more information available, but being more selective about which interactions get what data is a critical balance to achieve. Bot management has become a lot more complicated.

Building trust in autonomous experiences is the next big hurdle that AI technologies have to accomplish. Gen Z users are more comfortable with automated actions, but trust is still key. Building connections with brand advocates is just as important as it's always been and now has to be delivered through AI. Internal chat can be a good start and it needs to be extended to become a more complete assistant-style interaction. It requires a significant improvement from legacy chatbots and the business it creates can make it worthwhile.

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For S&P Global subscribers:

• Benchmarking digital maturity: Are businesses ready for agentic AI? – Highlights from Vot…
• Pace of AI agent advancement could spur M&A in the sales automation market
• Big Picture Report: 2026 AI Outlook – Unleashing agentic potential

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guest: Sheryl Kingstone
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

One of the biggest banking and payments conferences, Money 20/20, has wrapped up and the enthusiasm for all things stablecoin has continued. Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma and McKayla Wooldridge return to discuss how this is evolving with host Eric Hanselman. The cryptocurrency has become the buzzy headline in so many of the conversations at Money 20/20. But consumers are still wary of stablecoins and the larger questions is around how financial services companies will deliver valuable services using them.

Unlike previous years, there were no dark clouds hovering over the payments markets. The industry is generally upbeat and starting to embrace agentic AI. Efforts are underway to standardize agent-driven commerce with the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). It's a point of cooperation across payments companies that normally compete for share of consumer wallets. There's still work to be done in developing governance mechanisms for agentic transactions and those efforts will also need to build consumer trust.

More S&P Global Content:

• Inside the role of payments manager: Responsibilities, KPIs and strategy
• Next in Tech | Ep. 239: Stablecoins

For S&P Global subscribers:

• Interest in stablecoins and agentic commerce tempered by caution – Highlights from VoCUL: Connected…
• Data Insight: Cross-border payments volume to surpass $17 trillion by 2030
• Cross-Border Payments Market Monitor & Forecast - Data Visualization
• Cross-border payments, stablecoins generate buzz at a low-key Money20/20 Asia

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma, McKayla Wooldridge
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

The equipment that fills data centers is evolving rapidly, driven by the need to fulfill the seemingly insatiable appetite of AI applications. The Open Compute Project (OCP) was founded by Meta/Facebook to promulgate equipment standards and its annual Summit has grown from a small specialized gathering, to an event that strains the capacity of the San Jose Convention Center. Senior research analyst Perkins Liu returns to offer his take on this meteoric growth with host Eric Hanselman. AI requirements are pushing ever greater scale both logically and physically, with the width of server racks doubling in the Open Rack Wide (ORW) specification to support greater density and better serviceability. The OCP Foundation is also working on silicon interoperability and is setting specifications for chiplet integration. Liquid cooling has moved from a nice to have feature to a required capability as a means to dissipate the huge amount of energy drawn by ever denser GPU arrays. Energy delivery is changing with the advent of higher voltage DC power. The early OCP efforts on 48 volt DC are paling in the face of new 800 volts designs.

The OCP Foundation is also expanding its mission to include education, with the establishment of the OCP Academy. It aims to raise workforce skills in open hardware and will offer online training in data center technologies. That underscores not only the expansion of the OCP Foundation's mission, but also the increasing scale of the ecosystem that supports data center environments and complexity and interdependency that AI creates.

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Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guest: Perkins Liu
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

There are many ways to frame conversations around cyber security. They can take on many aspects of security, ranging across the technical to the human. With the press towards platform consolidation, it's critical to reconsider the interaction between the human and technical elements and research director Scott Crawford and Javvad Malik, CISO advisor at KnowBe4, join host Eric Hanselman to dig into this important interplay. It's all too easy to fall into security practices that focus on technical requirements and don't account for the friction that is created for the people who use them. It's also easy to drop into a mindset that better security is just a matter of user education. Effective security requires thinking about user experience, as well as technical controls.

Authentication is one of the most frequently experienced security interactions and also one where a technical focus can have the highest impact on the people using. Authentication happens often and is also a key element in securing IT environments. The push to multifactor authentication, for example, is an important step in security enforcement and can require a significant change in how people interact with the systems that support their daily lives. A wholistic approach to security can help teams move beyond the frustrating cycle of user training and shift to collaborative security implementations.

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• The evolution of security platforms – 6 centers of gravity shaping the market
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• Security for agentic AI: Key areas of focus
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Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Scott Crawford, Javvad Malik
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

The enthusiasm for AI has been impressive and it's leading to the inevitable questions about whether or not all of it is warranted. Melissa Otto CFA, head of S&P Global's Visible Alpha research team, returns to discuss concerns about an AI bubble with host Eric Hanselman. Defining what actually indicates a bubble might be the trickiest aspect of the question. Is it outsized levels of debt? Unrealistic valuations? Both debt and valuations are high, but are they unreasonably so? So much depends on seeing what AI capabilities can deliver and we're still in the early days of understanding what ROI really is. There are still challenges in getting the domain approaches right. Doing real analytical work is more challenging and there is still more work to do in integrating with business processes.

And it's not just the technical aspects that are in play. It's possible that macroeconomic restraints are holding back even more enthusiastic spending that could create a bubble. Current interest rates create caution in taking on additional debt. It's also possible that rate cuts could unleash more risk taking and overextension through debt. That might be an indicator of a looming bubble. Or maybe not…

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For S&P Global Subscribers:

• Shifting AI exits
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• Hyperscaler earnings quarterly: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud capex projections trend still higher
• Tech Trend in Focus: GPUaaS market momentum

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guest: Melissa Otto, CFA
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

The world of cryptocurrencies has seen no shortage of upheaval, but regulatory clarity that has arrived with recent legislation has created opportunities. Stablecoins are an area that's seeing renewed interest in FinTech as a means of reducing friction for global payments. Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma and Nathan Stovall return to the podcast with host Eric Hanselman to look at how stablecoins are being put to work and how they're being used. For applications like cross border trade and the remittances trade, stablecoins can increase speed and potentially reduce costs. They can be considered another payment rail through which to conduct business.

Stablecoins are not without challenges. There are regulatory imperatives to be met, like anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC). Trust needs to be built in the market and education is needed around their potential benefits and risks. Traditional banks are getting involved, but they have additional stumbling blocks. There are technical hurdles, such as the readiness of backend systems to handle the higher precision values of stablecoins. And there are new concerns around custody risk, as handling wallets and the enhanced security required are new skills for many. The potential benefits and lucrative markets may give them enough incentive to take the plunge.

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For S&P Global subscribers:

• Data Insight: Cross-border payments volume to surpass $17 trillion by 2030
• Cross-Border Payments Market Monitor & Forecast - Data Visualization
• Cross-border payments, stablecoins generate buzz at a low-key Money20/20 Asia
• Tariffs create urgency for payment optimization strategies among large merchants, SMBs

Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guest: Jordan McKee, Sampath Sharma, Nathan Stovall
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith

Some might think that the metaverse has been a passing technology fad, but rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated. While the language may have shifted to things like spatial computing and augmented reality, the technologies and use cases have been flourishing. Analysts Neil Barbour and Ian Hughes return to discuss recent study results and industrial metaverse progress with host Eric Hanselman. Companies are working to build a digital thread that runs through their organizations, linking the physical and virtual worlds. They're leveraging digital twins to simulate operations and putting AI to work creating and populating the virtual environments in which they run.

When gaming companies shift to building virtual large world models in partnership with defense contractors, the metaverse has clearly shifted gears. Virtual environments are being used for training as well as strategic planning. Smart phones are being integrated into retail space planning and assessment and emergency teams are playing Tetris to secure helicopter landing sites. The metaverse is alive and well and making some large steps forward.

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For S&P Global Subscribers:

• Industrial metaverse adoption grows – Highlights from Metaverse B2B survey
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Credits:

• Host/Author: Eric Hanselman
• Guests: Neil Barbour, Ian Hughes
• Producer/Editor: Feranmi Adeoshun
• Published With Assistance From: Sophie Carr, Kyra Smith