Artificial intelligence has pushed cloud into overdrive. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, two of our top cloud experts — Jack French and Todd Barron — reset the approach and detail why cloud is the launchpad but portability is the strategy; how to start greenfield with containers and abstraction; what a real FinOps model for AI looks like (unit economics, tagging, token/GPU visibility); where neo clouds fit versus hyperscalers; and how to handle cross-cloud risk and skill gaps; and the governance moves that accelerate—not restrict—innovation.

Support for this episode provided by: Trellix

More about this week's guests:

Jack French brings a depth of experience in public cloud technologies to WWT. As the Senior Director of the Cloud Global Solutions and Architecture team, his responsibilities include leading the Cloud presales, business development and solution development efforts around public cloud. This also includes cloud consumption resell, cost management and marketplace.

Jack's top pick: The Cloud Advantage for AI

Todd Barron is a Technical Solutions Architect at Worldwide Technology (WWT), specializing in cloud and AI technologies. With over 34 years of experience, Todd joined WWT in 2023 after serving as a Partner Management Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In his role at WWT, he supports the pre-sales organization and leverages his expertise to help customers navigate the complexities of cloud and AI, particularly focusing on AWS platforms.

Todd's top pick: Enterprise Cloud Transformation: Practical Approaches to Migration and Modernization with WWT & AWS

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.