Winners' Circle

In this Winners Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce talks with Brian Hill, Field CISO at BlackCloak and Innovation Award winner, about one of the biggest blind spots in corporate security: the executive’s home. BlackCloak’s mission is to “protect the other 12 hours of the family’s day,” closing the gap between hardened corporate environments and vulnerable personal lives where executives, spouses, and kids all live and work online.

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Drawing on his background in law enforcement and digital forensics, Brian explains how attackers now treat home Wi‑Fi, smart devices, and family members as the “soft underbelly” that leads back into the enterprise. He walks through BlackCloak’s Digital Executive Protection (DEP) framework, modeled on NIST, and why a concierge style approach is often the only way to change busy executives’ habits.

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You will hear real world examples of password reuse, eight year old Wi‑Fi credentials shared with half the neighborhood, cheap IoT devices phoning home, and data brokers plus AI supercharging highly personalized phishing and deepfakes. Brian also discusses how BlackCloak partners with firms like World Wide Technology, builds a tiered SOC and early career talent pipeline, and the three practical steps any executive family can take today to reduce risk.

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Chapters

00:00 – Welcome and Why BlackCloak Exists

Russ introduces Brian and frames the “other 12 hours” problem in executive and family security.

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02:15 – From Law Enforcement to Field CISO

Brian’s path through law enforcement, digital forensics, and building security operations at BlackCloak.

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04:10 – Digital Executive Protection and the Home Attack Surface

What DEP is, how it mirrors NIST, and why homes, phones, and families have become prime targets.

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06:30 – Wi‑Fi, IoT, and the Soft Underbelly

How stale passwords and insecure devices let attackers move from a thermostat to cameras, alarms, and beyond.

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09:05 – Data Brokers, OSINT, AI, and Deepfakes

How data brokers, open source intelligence, and AI enable targeted scams and “faked to perfection” impersonations.

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13:55 – The DEP Framework: Privacy, Devices, and Home Networks

Key pillars: data broker removal, device protection, dark web monitoring, and home network testing.

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16:40 – Partnerships and Market Momentum

Why firms like World Wide Technology are embracing digital executive protection.

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17:55 – Life After Onboarding

How clients start using BlackCloak as their “bat phone” before clicking, buying, or connecting.

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19:40 – Password Reuse and Family Dynamics

Common patterns Brian sees and why external guidance often lands better than parental advice.

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21:35 – Team, Culture, and Growing Talent

Inside BlackCloak’s tiered SOC, mentoring model, and internal training programs.

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24:15 – Three Steps to Take Today

Brian’s quick wins: check your digital footprint, fix password and MFA hygiene, and audit logged in devices.

Guest: Terrence McCrossan, CEO of Oversight | 2026 BIG Innovation Award Winner

Most CFOs think they know where the money is going. They don't. Terrence McCrossan runs Oversight — the AI platform that monitors 100% of corporate transactions in near real-time and surfaces the fraud, errors, and waste that manual audits have been missing for years. From AI-generated fake receipts to $500K fat-finger payments no one noticed, the things hiding inside your financial systems will surprise you.

[00:01] Introductions

[00:39] What Oversight Does — Real-time AI monitoring across card spend, T&E, accounts payable, and procurement. Every transaction. Not a sample.

[01:52] Why Traditional Audits Fail — Manual, infrequent, superficial. Terrence explains why throwing more people at the problem actually makes it worse.

[04:59] Pattern Recognition Is the Machine's Superpower — Humans can't correlate across thousands of transactions. Machines do nothing but.

[06:53] The Three Buckets of Financial Risk — Egregious fraud, honest errors (like a $50K invoice becoming a $500K payment), and everyday waste. Plus: AI-generated fake receipts are now a real problem.

[08:39] The First 90 Days — Whether companies come to Oversight proactively or after a regulatory scare, the first look at their own data tends to reveal seven-figure exposure nobody knew was there.

[11:02] When Weird Spend Is Actually an Opportunity — Not every flag is bad. Sometimes it's a signal to renegotiate vendor rates or fix supply chain gaps.

[13:06] Human-in-the-Loop vs. Auto-Resolution — How much should the machine decide alone? Terrence walks through Oversight's agentic AI strategy and where human judgment still belongs.

[14:30] Flipping the 80/20 Problem — Right now 80% of finance labor goes to gathering information. Oversight is built to reverse that — so teams spend time on strategy, not spreadsheets.

[16:58] Where AI Goes Next in Finance — Analysis is mature. Process automation is the next wave. Terrence explains why agentic AI is where the real efficiency gains finally show up.

[18:34] One Fix Every CFO Should Make Today — Get curious about the technology, not just the outcomes. The buyers winning now understand what the AI is doing well enough to build their people and processes around it.

[22:52] Nobody Wants Alerts. They Want Outcomes. — The sharpest moment in the episode. How Oversight is built around action plans and measurable results — not another list of exceptions to ignore.

About Oversight: AI-powered spend intelligence for large enterprises. oversight.com

The Winners' Circle is hosted by Russ Fordyce, founder of Business Intelligence Group. New episodes feature the people behind BIG's award-winning honorees. bintelligence.com

In this Winners Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce talks with Bill Anderson of Mattermost about what secure collaboration looks like when failure is not an option. Mattermost powers mission-critical workflows for defense, government, and high-security enterprises that need far more than basic chat to keep people, operations, and data safe.

Bill explains how Mattermost became the place where distributed teams actually do their work by combining messaging, structured playbooks, integrations, and built-in AI copilots. You will hear how operators can ask a self-hosted, domain-tuned LLM what to do next, trigger workflows, and move aircraft or resources with confidence instead of guesswork.

Drawing on his PhD in cryptography, Bill explains why encryption alone is not enough and why threat modeling, authentication, integrity, and zero-trust controls all matter. He also discusses access rules based on clearance, device, location, and network, the shift toward sovereign self-hosted infrastructure, and how post-quantum threats are already shaping long-term security decisions.

You will also hear examples of humanitarian teams whose safety depends on anonymity, defense customers who stay operational through outages with “cloud in a box” deployments and local 5G networks, and organizations that now treat LLMs as sensitive assets with tightly controlled access. Bill closes by explaining why many organizations eventually outgrow commodity chat tools and what mission-critical collaboration platforms enable instead.

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome and Why Mattermost Exists

Russ introduces Bill and frames Mattermost as secure collaboration for defense, government, and critical enterprises.

02:00 – How Work Really Happens Now

How remote and hybrid work pushed Mattermost beyond messaging toward operational workflows.

04:10 – Logistics, Young Operators, and AI Copilots

How staff rely on self-hosted LLMs inside Mattermost to follow the right procedures.

06:30 – Talking to Data in Natural Language

How natural-language AI helps leaders quickly summarize feedback and operational data.

08:20 – Integrations and Unified Context

How Mattermost connects tools like threat detection systems, JIRA, and Microsoft environments.

09:35 – Beyond Encryption

Why encryption, authentication, integrity, and adversary modeling must work together.

11:20 – Zero Trust and Attribute-Based Access Control

Rules that limit access based on clearance, device, network, and time.

15:10 – Post-Quantum Risk

Why adversaries may store encrypted traffic today to decrypt later.

18:00 – Sovereign Infrastructure

Why many organizations rely on self-hosted deployments.

20:20 – Local Clouds and 5G

How teams use “cloud in a box” setups and local networks to stay operational.

23:30 – The Cloud Pendulum

The shift from on-prem to hyperscale cloud and back toward data sovereignty.

25:40 – Guardrails for AI

Managing specialized LLMs and controlling who can access them.

28:10 – Threat Modeling

Matching security protections to the real threat environment.

31:20 – When Chat Tools Aren’t Enough

Where basic messaging platforms fall short for mission-critical work.

32:55 – The Future of Secure Collaboration

What collaboration could look like in the next decade.

In this Winners Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce talks with Brian Hill, Field CISO at BlackCloak and Innovation Award winner, about one of the biggest blind spots in corporate security: the executive’s home. BlackCloak’s mission is to “protect the other 12 hours of the family’s day,” closing the gap between hardened corporate environments and vulnerable personal lives where executives, spouses, and kids all live and work online.

​

Drawing on his background in law enforcement and digital forensics, Brian explains how attackers now treat home Wi‑Fi, smart devices, and family members as the “soft underbelly” that leads back into the enterprise. He walks through BlackCloak’s Digital Executive Protection (DEP) framework, modeled on NIST, and why a concierge style approach is often the only way to change busy executives’ habits.

​

You will hear real world examples of password reuse, eight year old Wi‑Fi credentials shared with half the neighborhood, cheap IoT devices phoning home, and data brokers plus AI supercharging highly personalized phishing and deepfakes. Brian also discusses how BlackCloak partners with firms like World Wide Technology, builds a tiered SOC and early career talent pipeline, and the three practical steps any executive family can take today to reduce risk.

​

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome and Why BlackCloak Exists

Russ introduces Brian and frames the “other 12 hours” problem in executive and family security.

​

02:15 – From Law Enforcement to Field CISO

Brian’s path through law enforcement, digital forensics, and building security operations at BlackCloak.

​

04:10 – Digital Executive Protection and the Home Attack Surface

What DEP is, how it mirrors NIST, and why homes, phones, and families have become prime targets.

​

06:30 – Wi‑Fi, IoT, and the Soft Underbelly

How stale passwords and insecure devices let attackers move from a thermostat to cameras, alarms, and beyond.

​

09:05 – Data Brokers, OSINT, AI, and Deepfakes

How data brokers, open source intelligence, and AI enable targeted scams and “faked to perfection” impersonations.

​

13:55 – The DEP Framework: Privacy, Devices, and Home Networks

Key pillars: data broker removal, device protection, dark web monitoring, and home network testing.

​

16:40 – Partnerships and Market Momentum

Why firms like World Wide Technology are embracing digital executive protection.

​

17:55 – Life After Onboarding

How clients start using BlackCloak as their “bat phone” before clicking, buying, or connecting.

​

19:40 – Password Reuse and Family Dynamics

Common patterns Brian sees and why external guidance often lands better than parental advice.

​

21:35 – Team, Culture, and Growing Talent

Inside BlackCloak’s tiered SOC, mentoring model, and internal training programs.

​

24:15 – Three Steps to Take Today

Brian’s quick wins: check your digital footprint, fix password and MFA hygiene, and audit logged in devices.

Marty Puranik has seen every wave of the internet — dial-up, T1s, colocation, cloud — and now AI. As Founder and CEO of Atlantic.net and a 2026 BIG Innovation Award winner, Marty has spent three decades building secure, HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure for healthcare and biotech. Today, that foundation is becoming mission-critical as AI agents start making life-or-death decisions in hospital settings.

In this episode, Marty breaks down why secure AI infrastructure isn't optional in healthcare, why you shouldn't lock into any single AI model, and what business leaders need to do right now to prepare for the next 18 months.

• [00:01] Introduction & 2026 BIG Innovation Award
• [00:21] Marty's Story — 31 years riding every wave of the internet
• [01:05] Why Atlantic.net Went Deep on Security — Healthcare, HIPAA, and what comes next
• [02:51] AI Agents in Healthcare — Ambulance-to-ER AI coordination in real time
• [04:36] AI in the Hospital Room — What Russ saw on mom's visit
• [05:47] What Separates Atlantic.net from the Big Guys — Boutique speed vs. enterprise slow
• [07:20] Biotech + AI — Preparing for the 2025 explosion and the rise of the Chief AI Officer
• [09:44] The Nvidia Partnership — Chips, InfiniBand, and CUDA: why it's more than just hardware
• [12:28] Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities — Humans are still the weakest link
• [14:29] How HIPAA Must Evolve for AI — The need for standardized secure AI data interchange
• [17:11] MCP and AI Agent Communication — Promising but not production-ready yet
• [18:53] 2026 Trends — Supply constraints, specialty models, and AI legislation
• [23:34] Don't Lock Into One AI Solution — Models change fast; your workflow needs to flex
• [28:35] What Atlantic.net Is Building Next — GPU efficiency, observability, and 3x performance gains

• AI agents in healthcare must communicate securely — the ambulance-to-ER use case is already here
• The human is still the weakest link in cybersecurity
• Don't lock into a single AI model — they're changing every 4–6 weeks and can break your workflows
• GPU infrastructure running at 30% efficiency vs. 100% is the difference between winning and losing competitively
• HIPAA needs a modern equivalent for AI

• 🌐 Atlantic.net: atlantic.net
• 🎙️ The Winners' Circle: bintelligence.com/podcast
• 🏆 BIG Innovation Awards: bintelligence.com

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe and leave a review — it helps us keep bringing you conversations with the innovators shaping tomorrow's industries. Know a business leader who deserves recognition? Learn more at bintelligence.com.

In this episode, Russ speaks with AWS Senior Technical Account Manager and streaming AI specialist Harshit Kohli about the emerging role of the Model Context Protocol in enterprise AI. The conversation explores why AI deployments stall inside large organizations, how MCP changes the architectural map, and what enterprises should expect as streaming intelligence becomes mainstream.

Kohli also breaks down security risks, modernization pressures, and why real time AI will force companies to rethink how they govern access to their systems. This is a fast, practical look at the infrastructure shift happening under today’s AI hype cycle.

Guest: Harshit Kohli
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshit-kohli-99801543/

00:00 Welcome to the Winner’s Circle
00:42 Harshit’s background and AWS role
02:11 What the Model Context Protocol actually solves
04:00 Why MCP matters for enterprise scale
06:25 Real use cases emerging from early adopters
09:10 Streaming AI and real time context
11:18 New security challenges raised by continuous data flow
14:00 Batch versus real time architectures
17:05 How AI turns cloud data from storage into action
20:15 What legacy systems lose in the next five years
23:30 Private LLMs and regulated industries
25:10 The biggest misconception about AI adoption
26:30 Closing thoughts

If you enjoy the show, follow new episodes and subscribe at:
www.bintelligence.com/podcast

In this episode of The Winner’s Circle, Russ Fordyce sits down with Joshua Turiano, SVP of AI at BlueStream Fiber, to talk about how the company turned AI from a buzzword into a practical operating advantage. As a 2026 BIG Innovation Award winner, BlueStream Fiber is being recognized not just for the tech itself, but for a team-first approach that focuses on helping people work faster, smarter, and with better context.

Joshua shares how BlueStream connected structured operational data to AI so call center agents, support reps, and field teams could get faster answers without bouncing between dozens of systems. He walks through the company’s internal tools like the “Support Guru,” how they reduced troubleshooting time, and why their philosophy was simple: don’t replace the person, replace the task. He also gets into governance, adoption challenges, prompt training, and what it really takes to move from AI curiosity to measurable business impact.

This conversation is a smart look at what happens when AI is built around real workflows instead of shiny-object syndrome. It is especially useful for leaders in telecom, customer experience, operations, and any business trying to make AI useful in the messy real world where the spreadsheets squeak and the dashboards breed in the dark.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome to The Winner’s Circle and introduction to Joshua Turiano of BlueStream Fiber
00:40 What BlueStream Fiber does and the markets it serves
01:47 How the AI journey started inside BlueStream
03:54 From dashboard overload to a smarter AI interface
05:00 “Don’t replace the person, replace the task”
07:20 How AI helped reduce troubleshooting time
09:12 Narrowing 86 AI ideas down to the highest impact projects
09:50 Building triage tools and automating work order review
12:12 How BlueStream prioritized AI use cases across departments
14:40 Why structured data matters and how they reduced hallucinations
16:25 Governance, trust, and building internal AI policy
19:08 From six internal GPTs to broad employee co-creation
20:58 The KPIs that matter for AI in operations
22:39 Testing AI in customer-facing call flows
24:36 Why today’s AI still needs clear prompting
26:17 Lessons learned from field tech adoption and change management
28:52 What adoption really looks like in the real world

Enjoy this episode of The Winner’s Circle and subscribe for more conversations with innovators, operators, and award-winning teams shaping what’s next.

Subscribe at bintelligence.com/podcast.

LD walks through the rise of enterprise grade AI agents, how banks are now underwriting loans in days instead of months, why humans are “just another model,” and what a future marketplace of reusable, chainable agents will unlock. The conversation ranges from semantic models to trust, from document intelligence to portfolio level decision making, and finishes with a surprisingly optimistic view of where humans still fit in an automated world.

Takeaways

• Data Integration
• AI Solutions

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Cherry and Data Management
• 07:14 Scalability and AI Solutions
• 20:47 Modularity and Trust in AI
• 28:03 Decoupling Reasoning from Data Retrieval

Real estate data is messy, fragmented, and usually trapped in a dozen conflicting silos. LD Salmanson explains how Cherre turned that chaos into the backbone of modern property intelligence. This conversation digs into what happens when you fuse connected data, knowledge graphs, and agent driven AI into the financial systems that move the global built world.

If you like conversations at the edge of AI, data, and real world impact, hit like, share the episode, and subscribe at www.bintelligence.com/podcast to catch every new Winners Circle discussion as it drops.

Real estate data is messy, fragmented, and usually trapped in a dozen conflicting silos. LD Salmanson explains how Cherre turned that chaos into the backbone of modern property intelligence. This conversation digs into what happens when you fuse connected data, knowledge graphs, and agent driven AI into the financial systems that move the global built world.

LD walks through the rise of enterprise grade AI agents, how banks are now underwriting loans in days instead of months, why humans are “just another model,” and what a future marketplace of reusable, chainable agents will unlock. The conversation ranges from semantic models to trust, from document intelligence to portfolio level decision making, and finishes with a surprisingly optimistic view of where humans still fit in an automated world.

00:00 Welcome back to the Winners Circle
00:25 LD on building and selling multiple data companies
01:10 Founding Cherre and the thesis: whoever wins data wins AI
02:00 Connecting internal, external, and vendor data into one source of truth
03:10 The value of universal data models and massive knowledge graphs
04:20 Getting humans out of multi system data drudgery
05:10 The three layers of the data problem
07:00 The shift from dashboards to conversational insights
08:30 What Cherre’s Agent Studio actually does
10:45 Building custom agents, buying off the shelf agents, and chaining workflows
12:40 Real examples: automating underwriting and document processing
15:50 From five month loan cycles to five day cycles
17:40 Trust, governance, and replacing human judgment
21:00 Breaking every business workflow into atomic, automatable steps
25:00 Why AI is never going to be dumber than it is today
27:15 Data reasoning as the new frontier of automation
29:30 What humans will still do in an agent first world
30:45 Looking ahead to shared agent marketplaces
31:20 Closing thoughts

If you like conversations at the edge of AI, data, and real world impact, hit like, share the episode, and subscribe at www.bintelligence.com/podcast to catch every new Winners Circle discussion as it drops.

The renewable energy market is booming — but most solar and storage assets are quietly underperforming, and nobody knows it. Alon Mashkovich, CEO and Co-Founder of enSights, is on a mission to change that. A 2026 BIG Innovation Award winner, enSights built an energy business management platform that gives asset owners real-time visibility, clean data, and actionable insights across their entire portfolio.

Alon shares how a decade of painful manual spreadsheet work led him to build what the industry was missing. Spoiler: over 70% of systems aren't meeting planned output. enSights is fixing that.

• [00:00] Introduction & 2026 BIG Innovation Award
• [00:27] Alon's Background — From energy consultant to co-founder
• [01:21] The Market Analogy — Renewables today = cable TV in the 1970s
• [03:26] How enSights Was Born — Manual data pain that sparked the company
• [05:30] What the Platform Does — Portfolio monitoring & one-click reporting
• [08:11] The Shocking Discovery — 70%+ of systems underperforming silently
• [10:04] Building an Industry Data Advantage
• [11:35] AI + Renewables — Why clean data must come before AI
• [15:15] The Solar-to-Storage Shift — Storage as the dominant growth engine
• [17:33] The Energy War — Data centers, EVs, and the grid under strain
• [21:00] Advice to Operators — Own your data. Trust your data.
• [22:03] What's Next for enSights

• 70%+ of renewable systems aren't meeting planned output — most owners don't know where losses are coming from
• Clean data must come before AI — enSights prioritizes data quality above all else
• Average company spends 2 weeks generating reports that are already outdated by delivery
• Storage is the next massive wave in the industry
• Asset owners who don't control their own data are locked into someone else's decisions

• 🌐 enSights: ensights.ai
• 🎙️ The Winners' Circle: bintelligence.com/podcast
• 🏆 BIG Innovation Awards: bintelligence.com

Enjoying the show? Subscribe and leave a review — it helps us keep bringing you conversations with the innovators shaping tomorrow's industries. Know someone who deserves recognition? Learn more at bintelligence.com.