“If anyone’s going to disrupt Khan Academy, it should be us,” founder and CEO Sal Khan tells Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Tech Analyst Anurag Rana, discussing how AI can deliver personalized learning at scale if embedded in classrooms with teacher oversight, guardrails for minors and rigorous model evaluation. Khan explains Khanmigo’s early GPT-4 roots, why Khan Academy is going multi-model to match use cases like Writing Coach and how district packaging helps cover compute costs while enabling monitoring and accountability. He also lays out a vision of the 2030 classroom where AI reduces teacher planning and grading burdens, supports small-group instruction and enables richer assessment, while warning workforce disruption may arrive faster than society is prepared for.

Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kunjan Sobhani and Jake Silverman to explain why lasers — not just chips — are the missing piece to making co-packaged optics practical at hyperscale. Harris unpacks Guide, Lightmatter’s VLSP light engine, and Passage, the company’s photonic interconnect platform, walking through real-world reliability, density and power trade-offs, and how new EDA and foundry partnerships (Synopsys, Cadence, GUC) move photonics into standard semiconductor workflows. The conversation covers near-package vs co-package optics, deployment timing, who the early buyers will be, and the milestones to watch as photonics shifts from lab demos to production racks.

Russia invasion of Ukraine “has completely reframed perceptions of drone utility and value. Where once high-end, exquisite systems dominated the procurement logic, today there’s a much clearer recognition that quantity and replaceability are just as critical,” says AV Chief Growth Officer Church Hutton. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Hutton tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior defense weapons analyst Wayne Sanders how the landscape of drone technologies and the scalability of platforms must balance between rapid production and programs of record, while maintaining a technological advantage over adversary weapon systems. Critical to this process is reducing “cost per effect” so that we’re no longer shooting down $10,000 drones with million-dollar interceptors. AV and other defense tech companies continue to have this as their mission statement.

Ciena is expanding from its telecom optical roots to become a critical enabler of AI-driven data-center infrastructure. In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Ciena Executive Advisor Scott McFeely joins BI analyst Woo Jin Ho to discuss how the company’s optical technology has evolved alongside hyperscale cloud and AI workloads, from coherent optics and WaveLogic DSPs to optical pluggables for scale across applications. They also explore how AI is reshaping optical demand around and inside the data center, Ciena’s move deeper into the rack through its Nubis acquisition and how its expansion into AI changes its intermediate-term growth trajectory.

‘We’ve seen an incredible acceleration of true automation, where AI agents were able to fulfill a significant amount of engagement with a consumer, whether it be voice or chat-based,” says Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE. He sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh to talk about the deployment of AI agents for contact centers. From fine-tuning of large language models to handling a high volume of transactions, the discussion focuses on the various considerations for AI agents related to customer service across a range of industries.

Quantum computing is extending beyond the lab to redefine how we address complex problems. On this episode of Tech Disruptors, IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi joins Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Jake Silverman and Kunjan Sobhani to explain what quantum computing is and how performance, reliability and cost will determine the winners of the race for fault tolerance. The conversation also explores how quantum computing can complement future AI systems — enabling new breakthroughs in security, networking and high-impact applications like materials and life science — while setting up a “winner-takes-most” competitive dynamic in the industry.

Powering businesses to accomplish their daily work remains Intuit’s central mission, using AI and a network of human experts to accomplish a wide range of business tasks for more than 100 million customers, from closing accounting books, processing payroll to preparing taxes. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Intuit CTO Alex Balazs speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel about the company’s evolution from a provider of desktop products to its latest AI agents. Balazs also touches on its data-scale differentiator, how GenAI is reshaping software and Intuit’s future position as a financial-operating system.Tech Disruptors: Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

“AI removes the friction from the intent to the implementation,” says Amanda Silver, corporate vice president and head of products, apps and agents at Microsoft. She talks with Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana about how copilots and agents are collapsing the software lifecycle — from natural-language ideas to code, tests and operations — shifting developers to reviewing and governance from typing, and making “evals” the new testing standard. She cites big-tech technical-debt wins, such as .NET and Java upgrades requiring 70–80% less manual effort, and SRE agents that reduce remediation time. Additionally, the two discuss GitHub Copilot, already among top contributors in key repos and adopted across most large enterprises.

“Internally, we’ve kind of moved from a model where kind of engineering kind of owned R&D, to a model where everyone is now in R&D” says Canva CTO Brendan Humphreys. On this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Humphreys tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana how the web-native platform is expanding into the enterprise while leaning into AI, including a disciplined API layer to ship quickly, broad use of coding assistants with strict human-in-the-loop review and hiring for “AI-native” skills alongside companywide experimentation. Humphreys also covers how acquisitions like Affinity and Magic Brief fit the road map, and why compliance, governance and brand control are central as Canva targets 1,000-plus employee companies.

Embedded finance — integrating payments and financial services directly into apps and platforms — is entering its next phase, shifting from niche fintech use cases to core infrastructure for global players. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Marqeta CEO Mike Milotich joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how embedded finance, buy now, pay later and flexible credentials are reshaping payments at the point of sale, online and in store. They explore Marqeta’s competitive positioning, AI-driven personalization, the regulation vs. speed trade-off and why Europe could be an underappreciated growth lever as embedded finance moves upmarket.