Tech Disruptors

Work-management platforms are being redefined by AI, new pricing models and intensifying competition. In this Tech Disruptors episode, Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior software analyst Sunil Rajgopal to discuss how technology evaluation is changing in the AI era, with companies balancing “buy vs. build” decisions, and Smartsheet’s evolution from seat-based pricing to more flexible, consumption-driven models. The conversation highlights Smartsheet’s focus on specialized AI solutions to avoid commoditization, the strategic role of M&A, its vision for future product and business growth and how the company is evolving under the private ownership of Blackstone and Vista.

HP Enterprise has leveraged its deep supercomputing roots to play a leading role in the AI-infrastructure revolution. Bloomberg Intelligence hardware analyst Woo Jin Ho hosts HPE Senior Vice President of High Performance Computing & AI Trish Damkroger to discuss how the company’s rich supercomputing technology portfolio, such as fanless liquid cooling, AI networking and clustering compute, puts it in good position to steer the next generation of AI compute.

Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki said an immersive 3D co-experience is going to form the future foundation for how people communicate, connect, shop, learn and play together — even how they experience entertainment. Gaming has always been at the forefront of 3D communication. Baszucki joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s head of technology research, Mandeep Singh, to discuss the use of AI in gaming, infrastructure, engagement and content safety among other topics. They also cover changes to the Roblox platform and the evolution of the virtual economy, including the adoption of stablecoins.

“AI is a distributed system — and the network is the computer,” says Ram Velaga, senior vice president of Broadcom’s Core Switching Group. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Velaga joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kunjan Sobhani to explain how Ethernet is expanding from scale-out AI networking into the scale-up domain, challenging proprietary solutions like NVLink and Infiniband. The discussion covers Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 and Ultra product lines, its open SUE spec, and why simplicity, bandwidth and vendor neutrality may shape the next generation of AI infrastructure.

The current phase of software development is probably the most insecure era ever — there’s so much more application and code that’s vulnerable, according to Snyk CEO Peter McKay. “It was a struggle for security teams to keep up with the pace of software development prior to generative AI, and now with generative and copilot and Windsurf and all the tools that are out there, you know, they’re moving even faster and security is struggling to keep up.” McKay joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s head of technology research, Mandeep Singh, to discuss the application of large-language models for securing the use of tools, including Cursor and Github copilots. He also talks about the addressable market for DevSecOps (the development, security and operations approach), potential automation driven by AI and Snyk’s acquisitions for both talent and product features as the attack surface expands in cybersecurity.

Helping knowledge workers and businesses connect in a work marketplace is Upwork’s central mission. A new wave of freelance workers is disrupting typical hiring channels and helping enterprises fill their talent and skills gaps. In this Tech Disruptors podcast episode, Upwork CEO and President Hayden Brown sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to outline the company’s product suite, approach to over 830,000 customers and changing dynamics of work. She discusses its core offering, investments for the enterprise segment and recently launched AI agent, UMA. Listen in to learn about the movement of global freelancers, which number over 250,000 globally, and the sea changes underway in filling the demand for AI talent.

The tech DNA is what’s missing in the power industry, according to Intersect Power CEO Sheldon Kimber. “The fastest-growing technology the world has ever seen is now basically stuck behind one of the most boring and least innovative industries in the world.” In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Kimber joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s head of technology research, Mandeep Singh, to discuss power needs tied to AI data centers and the infrastructure build-out by hyperscalers. They also cover power needs for training vs. inferencing, the various sources of power and how it’s stored for maximum efficiency, and being a disruptor in a field that can’t always wait for the government to upgrade the transmission system.  

Front-end development is rapidly evolving, driven by large-language models, agentic workflows and serverless architecture — enabling smarter, scalable apps and blurring front- and back-end boundaries. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Vercel’s Chief Operating Officer Jeanne DeWitt Grosser joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sunil Rajgopal to discuss the company’s go-to-market strategy, enterprise growth and revenue expansion. They also explore Vercel’s core offerings — ranging from managed infrastructure to developer collaboration tools and AI-native application development. The conversation highlights how Vercel is powering AI workloads through custom code-correction models, infrastructure upgrades and rapid prototyping with v0, while expanding globally to support both technical and non-technical users.

While the tech world watches Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s proposed acquisition of Juniper Networks unfold, Juniper is still moving ahead. CEO Rami Rahim joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Woo Jin Ho to unpack how Juniper is seizing the AI moment and driving market-share gains with cutting-edge innovations like 800G AI switching and Mist AI. From cloud data centers to campus networks, discover how Juniper is redefining leadership in AI infrastructure and network automation.

Data centers that are being designed today will need to accommodate IT technology of the future and remain viable during their 15-20-year life cycle. In this episode of Tech Disruptors, Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi and Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior industrials analyst Mustafa Okur talk about the evolving power and cooling needs of data centers and whether a changing use case from training AI models to inference may reduce infrastructure equipment demand. They also discuss the next wave for data-center infrastructure demand, how the next upgrade cycle could be different and when liquid cooling might become the dominant category in heat rejection.