Tech Disruptors

Verizon is the biggest wireless-service provider in the US, with its business largely centered on the consumer segment. Wireless is a high-touch business, which has prompted the company and peers to deploy AI across its customer-care operations to drive greater efficiencies and higher cross-selling. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, CEO of Verizon’s Consumer Group, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and John Butler about the company’s current deployment of AI and plans to further improve its operations with the technology. Sampath discusses AI’s use in customer care and provides some thoughts on what the future holds for its broader deployment in network operations, software development and the radio-access network. He also offers insight on the AI ecosystem today, where it’s headed and how AI models are quickly commoditizing.

Delivering a comprehensive software platform for the construction industry that bridges project to financial management remains Procore’s central focus. Tooey Courtemanche, Procore’s founder and CEO, tells Bloomberg Intelligence that the platform has broad appeal for the various stakeholders, owners, general and specialty contractors. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Courtemanche sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss what a unified platform means to Procore and how macroeconomic factors like tariffs, labor costs and cyclical trends could impact its 17,000-plus customers. Courtemanche also offers insights on Procore’s unified data set, its unique pricing model, international opportunities and the leverage of gen AI.

World Wide Technology (WWT) has evolved from a value-added reseller to a global systems integrator with $20 billion in annual sales and 10,000 employees that today identifies itself as an “AI First” company. WWT CEO and co-founder Jim Kavanaugh joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss the company’s journey, building AI capabilities for customers and its effort to train the entire staff in AI. Kavanaugh, whose company does 80% of business in North America, says he sees “huge” growth opportunities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Costs for generative AI are coming down, with some of the leading models massively lower than they were a year ago, says Citigroup Chief Technology Officer David Griffiths. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, he chats about gen-AI deployment at his company with Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Alison Williams and Mandeep Singh. From back-end use cases to the impact on the product side, they discuss the opportunities and challenges with AI agents, large language models and the ripple effects on hiring and talent in a big financial institution.

Contentful’s platform, built on an API-first architecture, provides differentiated technology for marketers and developers in creating landing pages, blogs, campaigns and other personalized content. CEO Karthik Rau talks about customer choices across the marketing-tech landscape and the company’s evolution to a broader platform from a composable content-management system (CMS). In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Rau sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss the state of so-called headless solutions in CMS, AI disruptions in digital agency, customers’ buying criteria, the marketing-tech stack, machine-generated content volume and more. Will generative AI disrupt the trillions of dollars spent on digital-agency services? Tune in to hear Rau’s insights and the potential shifts ahead.

Automating email marketing with top-quality design and user experience is Flodesk’s central strategy. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Martha Bitar, CEO and founder of Flodesk, speaks with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel about empowering entrepreneurs and small businesses to reach their target customers more effectively. She discusses why 85,000 customers choose Flodesk, its position in the software ecosystem with e-commerce providers like Shopify, the convergence of decision makers and end users, and gives insight on the company’s ability to navigate a fragmented competitive landscape. Bitar also offers her insight on AI email marketing content generation, customer changes since the introduction of gen AI and the upcoming wave of authentic connection.

Creating an ever-changing knowledge-graph relational database isn’t a small thing. But then connecting it to all the end points (to publishers and social media publishers) and managing the distribution workflow through channels is extremely important. Yext CEO Michael Walrath talks to Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, about the changes to traditional search and the potential for more competition. Building knowledge graphs for businesses to manage their online presence could be a key differentiator in the world of large-language-model-powered searches.

The tools that enable companies to build, operate and manage enterprise applications and infrastructure are evolving, and AI’s advancements could reset the technology, business and M&A landscape. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Tim Tully, a partner at Menlo Ventures, joins Sunil Rajgopal, senior software analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, to discuss the broad technology shift, with a particular focus on databases, observability, large language models and front-end development tools. They also talk about the shift in developer roles, productivity gains from AI, tech-industry policies and M&A prospects in the space. Menlo is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage companies in areas including consumer, enterprise and health-care technologies.

What does DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthrough and the Stargate Project mean for the adoption of AI, data-center growth, power consumption and cooling-system demand? In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Abhijit Dubey, CEO of NTT DATA Group, sits with Omid Vaziri, BI senior analyst, to examine new trends in AI and cloud infrastructure, growth expectations and challenges. They discuss space-based data centers, optical and wireless networks replacing electronics with photonics and likely power sources. They also talk about what gen-AI adoption could mean for the industry’s operating margins and key factors to consider in its implementation. Workforce upskilling efforts needed to upgrade human capacity to adopt gen-AI makes advances in cost-efficiency from the likes of DeepSeek highly welcomed news.

Building an online presence for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is the central mission of GoDaddy. In this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast, Chief Technology Officer Charles Beadnall discusses the major trends likely to be encountered by entrepreneurs, including AI, the range of tools across applications like domains, website creation to payment services and the ramp-up in security requirements. Beadnall sits down with Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Pate land dives into GoDaddy’s technology focus and its points of differentiation. Tune in to hear about GoDaddy’s Airo platform and its view on leveraging third-party large language models across its 21 million-customer base.