Tech Disruptors

Visa processes more than 65,000 transactions per second across 200-plus countries, but behind those numbers lies a tech story that’s often overlooked. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Rajat Taneja, Visa’s president of technology, joins Bloomberg Intelligence global fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how AI has been embedded in Visa’s DNA for decades, and how the company is now pushing into new frontiers — from Visa Intelligent Commerce to secure agentic payments, identity innovation and stablecoins. With $12 billion invested in technology over the past five years, Visa is building not just a payment network, but the orchestration layer for the future of global commerce.

“You need to manage your labor force now of humans and AI agents very differently”,  says Kishan Chetan, EVP & General Manager of Service Cloud at Salesforce, who argues service now means managing a blended workforce. In conversation with Anurag Rana, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in this episode of Tech Disruptors, he notes productivity gains of about 30% for some customers adopting agents in customer-service workflows, increasing reliance on the platform to orchestrate them. He also outlines the importance of command-center visibility for coordinating human-and-AI work, side-by-side agents that lift rep productivity, autonomous resolution across channels, and why a single platform matters as companies replace stitched-together stacks.

Databases are shifting from passive engines to reasoning tools for artificial intelligence, according to Google Cloud’s Yasmeen Ahmad. She joined Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Mandeep Singh to discuss how AI agents are reshaping the market, citing production use cases involving retrieval-augmented generation and tokenization. Ahmad pointed to rising demand for databases and said Google’s infrastructure — including its in-house chips and large language models — gives the company an edge in addressing return-on-investment concerns tied to AI adoption.

Enabling brands to activate their data in selling across multiple channels with a targeted message is Klaviyo’s mission. The company’s customer-relationship-management technology lets users scale up with a personalized approach to millions of consumers. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Klaviyo Chief Product Officer Adil Wali sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss how the company is expanding customer reach across email, SMS, mobile and other communication channels. He dives into some emerging trends in marketing-tech automation, consumer engagement with AI agents and the industry evolution beyond batch and blast marketing. Listen in to learn about Klaviyo’s opportunity beyond e-commerce and newer offerings like Customer Hub.

PayPal is betting that artificial intelligence will drive the next wave of fintech innovation — from boosting developer productivity to fighting fraud and personalizing user experiences. In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Prakhar Mehrotra, PayPal’s global head of AI, joins BI global fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss how the company is preparing for “agentic commerce,” where AI agents may soon shop, decide negotiate and pay on users’ behalf. The conversation explores the trust and identity frameworks needed to support autonomous digital transactions, and PayPal’s view on what gives it the right to win.

Generative AI is transforming how enterprises and consultants create value, and on this episode of Tech Disruptors, Matt Wood, PwC’s global and US commercial technology and innovation officer, explains how it’s doing so. Wood tells Bloomberg Intelligence senior technology analyst Anurag Rana that it’s a “golden era” for professional services, where the scale and impact of work could grow exponentially. He shares insights from PwC’s Agent OS platform, AI adoption in regulated industries and new data on how upskilling boosts revenue per worker. The discussion also explores cloud strategy, cultural inertia in software teams and AI’s role as a human amplifier.

“AI and agentic marketing is at the top of the list” as the next growth catalyst for customer engagement, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Chief Steve Hammond tells Bloomberg Intelligence, flagging the company’s move to deploy autonomous, context-aware agents that personalize outreach in milliseconds. In this Tech Disruptors episode, Hammond sits down with BI senior technology analyst Anurag Rana to explore how Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud unifies data across sales, service and commerce. He also discusses the role of AI-powered agents and real-time personalization, and why integrated, trust-centric customer data positions marketers for resilience through economic cycles.

AT&T aims to maintain a lead in the US fiber market to sustain growth as its core wireless business slows. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Jeff McElfresh, Chief Operating Officer of AT&T, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst John Butler about the company’s plan to expand its base to more than 60 million locations by 2030, from just over 30 million today. They also discuss how solid planning and execution have helped the company to sustain steady subscriber gains in its wireless business amid rising competition and fierce pricing pressure.

AI “is about aligning the semantics of the data, and that’s again why I believe a suite of applications has advantages. If not, the customer has to do it themselves,” Jan Gilg, SAP’s chief revenue officer for the Americas and Global Business Suite, tells Anurag Rana, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. In this Tech Disruptors episode, the two discuss SAP’s Business Data Cloud, its open multi-large-language-model approach, the Joule digital assistant’s cross-application orchestration and how these advances reshape cloud enterprise resource planning and enterprise-scale AI adoption.

Quantum computing remains an area of high interest as use cases hinge on improving qubits and making them less error-prone for calculations. According to Professor Lene Oddershede, chief scientific officer for Planetary Science & Technology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the field is on the cusp of exponential growth in the coming years. She joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s analysts Mandeep Singh and Sam Fazeli on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss the applications of quantum computing, its adoption timeline, key roadblocks, standards, benchmarks and its convergence with classical computing.