The Catalyst by Softchoice

This summer, an AI agent escaped its testing sandbox, crossed the internet, and spent four and a half days inside another company's production servers. Roughly seventeen thousand actions. No human at the keyboard.

Sounds scary, right? But the same power the attackers have is now available to defenders too.  And it's arriving just as the oldest excuse in security runs out. 

Jason Maynard, Field CTO for Cybersecurity at Cisco, and Robert Geis, Field CTO for Global Cyber at World Wide Technology, unpack why unpatched vulnerabilities just overtook stolen credentials for the first time in nineteen years, why the fundamentals kept getting deferred, and how IT leaders can put AI to work closing the gap.

Support our sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by Cisco. Learn how to reduce risk, strengthen your security posture, and stay one step ahead of emerging threats at softchoice.com/cisco-security.

In this episode:

• Why the year's most alarming AI attack would have been caught by just doing the basics

• The reframe that turns security from the department of no into the reason the business can move fast

Narrated by guest host Joseph Byer.

#Cybersecurity #AISecurity #ITLeadership #ZeroTrust #MidMarketIT #AgenticAI #ThePodcastForITLeaders

Show Notes & Resources

• Jason Maynard, Field CTO, Cybersecurity — Cisco

• Robert Geis, Field CTO, Global Cyber — World Wide Technology

• Cisco LLM Security Le`aderboard — public rankings of model security, safety and robustness: leaderboard.aidefense.cisco.com/rankings

• Cisco AI Defense — AI asset discovery, model validation, agentic red-teaming: cisco.com/site/us/en/products/security/ai-defense/index.html

• WWT ARMOR (AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience), developed with NVIDIA: wwt.com/atc-capabilities/ai-readiness-model-for-operational-resilience/overview

• 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report: verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/

• Black Hat USA 2026 — “The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident”: youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

• Cisco security solutions through Softchoice: softchoice.com/cisco-security

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

Your AI bill just stopped behaving like a software bill. For twenty years, IT leaders got very good at counting seats: buy a hundred, pay for a hundred. Then AI swapped the seat for a meter, and the number stopped holding still.

This episode follows the burn from three vantage points: a financial analyst rationing a $250-a-month token budget he tore through in two days; the tech executive who watched enterprise AI bills climb 7x, 10x, 20x; and the IT leader at a 300-person company who refused to solve it with a usage dashboard. Along the way: Meta's leaked internal token leaderboard, Uber blowing its entire annual AI budget by April, and the uncomfortable question of who profits when everyone's told to use more.

In this episode:

• Why token-based pricing breaks the budgeting playbook IT has relied on for two decades
• What happens to the people using the tool when the meter starts running — and why rationing has a hidden cost
• Why measuring usage is the wrong scoreboard, and who benefits when you keep score anyway
• The mid-market move that beats policing: measure centrally, push the judgment to managers, and get clear on what you're optimizing for

Featuring Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward; Daryl Dore, Senior Director of IT & Information Security at Higher Logic; and Benjamin, a financial analyst who spoke with us on condition of anonymity.

Support our sponsor:

This episode is brought to you by Sophos MDR. Running Microsoft security tools and drowning in alerts? Sophos MDR's 24/7 experts investigate and stop the real threats. 

>>> Learn more at: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/solutions/use-cases/microsoft

#ITLeadership  #AICostManagement  #SaaSManagement  #FinOps  #EnterpriseAI  #TokenBurn  #ITAM

Show Notes & Resources

Referenced in this episode

• Meta's internal AI token leaderboard (Fortune) — 85,000 employees ranked by token consumption; shut down days after it leaked.
• Uber burns its 2026 AI budget in four months (Forbes; TechCrunch) — adoption jumps 32% to 84% in a month; spend later capped.
• Jensen Huang on token consumption as a productivity signal (Tom's Hardware).
• Gartner: worldwide AI spending forecast to grow 47% in 2026 (Gartner).
• Zylo 2026 SaaS Management Index — the scale of wasted SaaS spend (Zylo).
• Brian Elliott's newsletter, Work Forward.

Guest: Daryl Dore — Higher Logic.

This episode's sponsor: Sophos MDR, in partnership with Softchoice — 24/7 managed detection and response for Microsoft environments. https://www.sophos.com/en-us/solutions/use-cases/microsoft 

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

Almost every machine you can buy today is technically an “AI PC.” Which is exactly why the label can’t tell you what to buy. This episode skips the hype and asks the question IT leaders are actually wrestling with: why now, and what happens if you wait? Because two things just landed on the same calendar — the end of Windows 10 support, and an AI-driven memory shortage pushing hardware prices up every quarter — and together they’re quietly taking the refresh decision out of your hands.

In this episode:

• Why “AI PC” has stopped being a useful filter — and what to look at instead
• The hidden tax you’re already paying on the machines that still turn on
• How Windows 10’s end of support and the memory squeeze changed the math on waiting
• A practical way to make the refresh call: match the machine to the workload, not the org chart

Featuring Ivo van Selst, Senior Technical Solutions Architect for AI and Data at Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company, and Brandon Boone of Dell Technologies’ Client Solutions Group. 

This episode is brought to you by Dell Technologies. 

Explore Dell’s AI PC lineup — Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max — and find the right fit for your fleet at softchoice.com/technology-partners/dell

#AIPC #ITLeadership #DeviceRefresh #Windows11 #MidMarketIT #EndUserComputing #TheCatalyst

Show Notes & Resources

Referenced in this episode:

• Windows 10 end of support (October 14, 2025) — Microsoft: support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-support-has-ended-on-october-14-2025
• The global memory shortage and its impact on device costs — IDC: idc.com/resource-center/blog/global-memory-shortage-crisis
• DRAM prices and the AI memory squeeze — IEEE Spectrum: spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage
• AI-capable PCs to surpass half of global shipments in 2026 — Counterpoint Research: counterpointresearch.com/en/reports/ai-advanced-pcs-to-surpass-half-of-global-shipments-in-2026
• The productivity cost of aging PCs — Intel research (PCs 4+ years old lose ~21 hours per year)
• Dell’s AI PC portfolio — Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Pro Max: dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-transforms-ai-pc-portfolio-for-anywhere-productivity
• Workplace lifecycle services — Softchoice: softchoice.com/solutions/modern-workplace/managed-services/lifecycle-services

Guests:

• Ivo van Selst, Senior Technical Solutions Architect for AI and Data, Softchoice — linkedin.com/in/ivo-van-selst-4579a96
• Brandon Boone, Dell Technologies, Client Solutions Group — dell.com

Key moments:

• Cold open — the hidden tax: the laptop nobody complains about
• Act One — what an AI PC actually is, and why the label misleads
• Act Two — the false economy of deferring a refresh
• Act Three — Windows 10, the memory squeeze, and losing control of your timeline
• Act Four — match, don’t guess: segmenting your fleet by workload

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

If you read the headlines, you'd think nearly every major employer marched its workforce back to the office five days a week. The data says otherwise. And so does the human cost when companies push it anyway.

In this episode of The Catalyst, Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward, an anonymous 30-year IT veteran and former Marine, and Softchoice's Lisa Walkden lay out what return-to-office mandates are actually about — and what they cost the leaders who issue them.

Here's what you'll take away:

• Why only about a third of US companies actually went back to five days — and what's really driving the ones that did
• How a 30-year tech veteran ended up quiet-quitting his job, and what that reveals about the real cost of a mandate
• The reframe one Softchoice leader uses with executives weighing RTO — and the data that backs it up
• Why the same companies still picking the RTO fight are often the same ones struggling with AI adoption

Featuring: Brian Elliott, founder of the Flex Index and CEO of Work Forward; Lisa Walkden, Senior Manager of Workplace Experience at Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company; and an anonymous IT leader who agreed to share his story on condition we don't name his employer.

#ReturnToOffice #HybridWork #ITLeadership #WorkplaceStrategy #FutureOfWork #FlexIndex #TheCatalyst

Guests

• Brian Elliott — Work Forward
• Flex Index (Brian's data set) — flexindex.com
• Lisa Walkden — Softchoice
• Anonymous — 30-year tech veteran and former US Marine

Research & Data Cited

• Flex Index quarterly reports — flexindex.com/reports
• Stanford Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (Nick Bloom, WFH Research) — wfhresearch.com
• Richmond Fed Economic Brief No. 24-16 (May 2024) — "Return-to-Office Orders: A Survey Analysis of Employment Impacts" by Grey Gordon and Sonya Ravindranath Waddell — richmondfed.org
• "Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain" — research from the University of Pittsburgh and Baylor's Hankamer School of Business (3M+ workers tracked via LinkedIn data) — hankamer.baylor.edu
• CBRE data on workforce-manager geographic distribution (cited by Brian Elliott in interview)

More from Brian

• Work Forward newsletter — theworkforward.substack.com

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

There’s a quiet crisis running through IT leadership that nobody names in the meeting: the certainty that you’re in over your head, and that any minute now, someone’s going to find out. It comes with the job. And for women in tech, there’s a second layer underneath.

In this episode of The Catalyst, from Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company, host Katey Teekasingh sits with three women who’ve lived imposter syndrome from every altitude: an IT director who wasn’t the first pick for her role, a five-time CTO who argues the field itself is the problem, and an MIT scientist who built a whole technology field while the engineering world dismissed her work — then won one of its highest honors.

Their answers about how to lead through doubt without faking it will reframe what most IT leaders quietly carry.

Key takeaways

• Why getting promoted for being the best engineer sets you up to feel like a fraud — and why it’s structural, not personal
• The second layer of doubt women in tech describe — the “merit, or a box to check?” question that follows them into every room
• How a top scientist reacted to winning one of engineering’s highest honors (hint: her first thought was “is this a scam?”)
• Three different strategies for leading through uncertainty — without pretending it isn’t there

Guest credentials

Rosalind Picard, ScD — Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab; co-founder of Empatica and Affectiva; 2026 recipient of the IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology.

Meri Williams — Chief Technology Officer at Pleo; five-time CTO across fintech, retail, banking, and biotech; previously scaled the team that built GOV.UK at the UK’s Government Digital Service.

Julie Szaj — Director of Organizational Change Management at Washington University; 25+ years across education, learning design, and technology leadership.

About Our Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by HP, in partnership with Softchoice. HP helps organizations shape the future of work with AI-powered solutions across devices, printing, and services. 

Learn more at https://www.softchoice.com/technology-partners/hp

Hashtags

#TheCatalyst #Softchoice #HP #ITLeadership #ImposterSyndrome #WomenInTech #CTO #DigitalTransformation #MidMarketIT

Show Notes & Resources

Connect with our guests:

• Rosalind Picard — MIT Media Lab Affective Computing Group: media.mit.edu/groups/affective-computing
• Meri Williams — Pleo: pleo.io
• Julie Szaj — Washington University in St. Louis: wustl.edu

Referenced in the episode:

• Affective Computing (1997) by Rosalind Picard — the founding text of the field
• IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology — 2026 recipient: Rosalind Picard
• Empatica — wearable health technology co-founded by Picard: empatica.com

Learn more about HP’s partnership with Softchoice: https://www.softchoice.com/technology-partners/hp

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

Somewhere in your organization, an AI decision is sitting on someone’s desk right now. Who owns it? In most mid-market companies, nobody does — or rather, it’s landed on the IT leader who was already doing three other jobs.

In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Jeremy Wight, CTO of CareMessage — a patient engagement platform serving 22 million low-income patients across the US — who had to write his organization’s AI policy himself. No committee. No playbook. Just the weight of getting it right for some of the most vulnerable people in the healthcare system.

Alongside Jeremy, we hear from Reid Blackman, author of The Ethical Nightmare Challenge and founder of Virtue, who argues that the standard policy-first approach to AI governance is already broken — and offers a framework any team can implement in weeks, not years. Olivia Gambelin, AI ethicist and author of Responsible AI, reframes the vendor selection question entirely: it’s not about auditing their product, it’s about whether their values align with yours. And Anthony Vinci, former intelligence officer and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, draws an unexpected parallel — between the integrity required of a spy with no rulebook, and the integrity required of an IT leader doing the same.

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This episode is brought to you by HPE.

From AI to data center and network modernization, HPE delivers a cloud-like experience right on your own infrastructure — the full portfolio, from one partner. softchoice.com/technology-partners/hewlett-packard-enterprise 

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In this episode:

• Why the policy-first approach to AI governance is broken — and what to do instead
• A practical three-question framework any team can implement this week
• How to evaluate AI vendors by values alignment, not just product capability
• What it actually looks like when one IT leader has to make these calls alone — with 22 million patients on the line

Featured guests: Jeremy Wight (CTO, CareMessage) • Reid Blackman (Founder/CEO, Virtue) • Olivia Gambelin (AI Ethicist & Author) • Anthony Vinci (CEO, VICO) • Craig McQueen (VP Microsoft Practice, Softchoice)

#AIEthics #ResponsibleAI #ITLeadership #AIGovernance #TheCatalyst #Softchoice #MidMarket #HPE

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Show Notes & Resources

Guests

• Jeremy Wight, CTO — CareMessage: caremessage.org
• Reid Blackman, Founder/CEO — Virtue: reidblackman.com • The Ethical Nightmare Challenge (book, April 2025) • Ethical Machines (HBR Press, 2022)
• Olivia Gambelin, AI Ethicist: oliviagambelin.com • Responsible AI: Implement an Ethical Approach in Your Organization • Values Canvas framework — free download at oliviagambelin.com
• Anthony Vinci, CEO — VICO: anthonyvinci.com • The Fourth Intelligence Revolution (Henry Holt, 2025) • VICO forecasting platform: vico.ai
• Craig McQueen, VP Microsoft Practice — Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company

Sponsor

• HPE via Softchoice: softchoice.com/technology-partners/hewlett-packard-enterprise
• Softchoice AI & Ethics resources: softchoice.com/EAS

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

Every IT leader has a “day one” story. The moment they opened the server closet, logged into the admin console, or reviewed the vendor contracts and realized the job they were hired for isn’t the job they actually have.

In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Chris Schopf, an IT operations team lead who walked into a new job to find twelve-year-old servers, two unfinished infrastructure projects, and a team that had been poached by the outgoing manager. Then we hear from Leon Adato, a 37-year IT veteran who’s made a career of walking into other people’s messes, and Ned Bellavance, a former consultant who warns that not every mess is actually a mess. Some of it is “purposeful chaos” you just don’t understand yet.

What you’ll learn:

• How to tell the difference between a real disaster and “purposeful chaos” with reasons you don’t understand yet
• Why Chris convinced his CEO to stop all projects for two weeks — and how it saved the team
• The three-word business framework that gets IT leaders budget, staff, and permission to fix the mess: revenue, cost, risk
• Why learning to “speak business” doesn’t make you less technical — it makes you bilingual

Featuring:

Chris Schopf — IT Security Architect 

Leon Adato — Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, Cribl

Ned Bellavance — Founder, Ned in the Cloud | Podcast Host 

From Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company — this is The Catalyst.

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

After our biggest season ever — nearly 80,000 downloads, a top 2% global ranking, and a documentary-style approach unlike any other show in B2B tech — host Katey Teekasingh is back to set up what's coming next.

Season 8 takes on the questions mid-market IT leaders are quietly wrestling with right now: the rise of accidental AI ethics officers. The imposter feeling that follows even the most senior leaders. The SaaSpocalypse threatening to undo years of cost optimization. What happens when you inherit a mess. The new realities of security and the return to the office. And a lot more.

We're bringing you the human side of IT — told like a documentary, not a Q&A.

New episodes every second Wednesday. Only on The Catalyst — from Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company.

Subscribe now and join the thousands of IT leaders already listening.

Listen to back episodes and more: https://www.softchoice.com/podcast 

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

For decades, building software meant doing eighty percent of the hard work before you had anything to show for it. AI just flipped that equation. And it's creating a risk nobody planned for.

In this episode of The Catalyst, host Katey Teekasingh explores vibe coding — the technology that lets anyone build software by describing what they want in plain language. It was named Collins Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year. It's already inside your organization. And in late 2025, it might have taken down Amazon's own cloud for thirteen hours.

Three experts break down where vibe coding genuinely helps, where it's dangerous, and what to put in place before it touches anything that matters.

In This Episode

• Why “the pilot is dead, long live the pilot” — and what that means for how mid-market IT teams test new ideas
• The 80/20 flip that makes AI-generated code fundamentally different from everything before it
• What happened at Amazon when an AI coding tool deleted a live production environment
• The five questions every IT leader should answer before a single line of AI code gets generated

Guests

• Greg Whalen, CTO, Prove AI
• Ron Espinosa, Director, Google Category, Softchoice
• Sean Larkin, AI Principal Architect, Softchoice

Support Our Sponsor

This episode of The Catalyst is brought to you by Veeam Data Cloud Vault — fully managed, secure cloud storage for your backups, with no surprise bills and zero configuration headaches. 

Sign up for their AWS Demo Series and see it in action:

https://veeam.com/aws-native-backup-demo-series.html

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

What got you here won't get you there. For most IT leaders, the path to the top was paved with expertise — knowing the systems, owning the decisions, having the answers. But something happens when that playbook stops working. Not a crash. Not a failure. Just a quiet plateau that tells you something needs to change.

In this episode of The Catalyst, we explore what's on the other side of that wall: a shift toward curiosity, empowerment, and a fundamentally different way of leading. Featuring leadership coach Kirsten Schmidtke, curiosity researcher Dr. Deb Clary, and Benevity VP of Engineering Rob Woolley — three voices who all landed in the same place.

What you'll take away:

• Why expertise becomes a trap for senior IT leaders — and how to recognize when it's happening to you
• The one behaviour change Rob Woolley made that created what he calls "titanic shifts" in his leadership
• What MIT-commissioned research reveals about the direct link between curiosity and organizational performance
• Why the best leaders aren't the ones with the most answers — and what they do instead

Featuring: Rob Woolley, VP Core Platform & Data Engineering at Benevity | Kirsten Schmidtke, Leadership Coach & Growth Advisor | Dr. Deb Clary, Author of The Curiosity Curve (Fast Company Press)

Learn more about Kirsten at kirstenschmidtke.com 

Take Deb's curiosity assessment at debraclary.com 

#ITLeadership #MidMarketIT #TheCatalyst #CuriousLeadership #Softchoice #LeadershipDevelopment #FutureOfIT

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.