IT Visionaries

Compliance and regulatory reporting used to mean endless spreadsheets, fragmented data sources, and teams drowning in manual work. Today, AI is transforming how the world's largest companies manage financial reporting, sustainability disclosures, and audit workflows—not by replacing humans, but by giving them time back to do strategic work.

In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Kim Huffman, CIO of Workiva, the platform used by 85% of the Fortune 100 for critical financial and compliance reporting. Kim shares her unique perspective as both a former Workiva customer and now the CIO steering the company into an AI-powered future.

They explore how the office of the CFO is evolving under pressure from new sustainability regulations, how AI governance actually works in practice, and why collaboration between IT, finance, sustainability, and risk teams has become essential. Kim also discusses the changing role of the CIO, the coming wave of autonomous agents in the workplace, and why having more data doesn't always mean making better decisions.

 

Key Moments:

00:58 – The State of Compliance Today

02:18 – Why Standards and Regulations Matter

05:48 – The Complexity of Global Compliance

07:36 – Data Collection Across Teams

08:36 – Single Source of Truth

10:20 – The Sustainability Data Challenge

13:36 – The Endless Spreadsheet Problem

16:12 – What's Driving the CFO Office

19:46 – AI's Strategic Role at Workiva

23:02 – Beyond Repetitive Tasks

25:20 – Transforming How Teams Work

27:03 – Will AI Replace Jobs or Create Capacity?

30:00 – Measuring AI's Business Impact

33:06 – Speed vs. Data Overload

36:25 – The Evolving Role of the CIO

40:00 – Technology Leadership in Transition

43:09 – The Next Five Years for CIOs

46:14 – Managing the Coming Wave of AI Agents

50:02 – AI Will Create Its Own Security Industry

52:26 – The Sustainability Reporting Reality

55:31 – Resource Constraints and AI Consumption

57:34 – Why ESG Data Is Now Critical Business Intelligence

59:23 – Keeping NPS High While Innovating

 

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

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IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most companies don’t realize it yet, but the way they built their technology foundations is quietly becoming a liability.
Cloud costs are rising. Platforms change underneath you. AI is reshaping infrastructure from hardware to data to governance. And the strategies that once felt “safe” are now the ones creating the most risk.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Mano Bhattacharya, CTO of Nutanix, to unpack what’s really happening inside enterprise technology right now. This isn’t a conversation about chasing the newest tools or betting on a single future. It’s about why adaptability has become the most important design principle in modern tech.
Mano explains why many organizations are rethinking long-held assumptions about virtualization, cloud, and containers, and why the smartest teams are building infrastructure that gives them options over the next three to five years. They explore how AI changes the entire stack, not just applications, why data has become the real bottleneck, and why moving fast without a coherent plan can be more dangerous than moving slowly.
 
Chapters:
00:00 - The VMware Exodus Wave is Coming
03:34 - VMware Broadcom Acquisition: What Changed and Why It Matters
05:56 - Three Migration Paths: Stay, Move to Cloud, or Modernize
09:59 - Why Containers on VMs Make Sense for Most Enterprises
15:40 - The Five Stages of VMware Migration Grief
21:20 - VMware Admin to Nutanix Admin: Closing the Skills Gap
24:14 - The Cloud-in-a-Box Philosophy: From Boxes to Software
32:30 - Opening Up the Platform: Pure Storage and Third-Party Integrations
40:54 - AI Infrastructure: The End-to-End Challenge
48:01 - Enterprise AI Strategy: Use Cases, Economics, and Governance
56:44 - What's Next: Building the Invisible Platform for AI
 

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

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IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most people assume the internet is stable, durable, and ready for whatever comes next. The truth is a bit more complicated. Modern networks were never designed for today’s scale, and for the first time we are seeing technology that can make them smarter, simpler, and far more reliable.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt talks with Anil Varanasi, CEO and Co-Founder of Meter, about how the next era of networking is taking shape. Anil explains why traditional infrastructure struggles to keep up, how a unified approach can remove layers of complexity, and why the future of the internet is moving toward faster and more resilient systems.
He also shares how natural language tools and purpose-built models are transforming the work of network engineers, and why autonomous networking may arrive sooner than most people expect. These advancements are creating a path to networks that can configure, maintain, and optimize themselves without increasing operational burden.
 
Key Moments:
00:00 – Why Modern Networks Are Broken
02:50 – The Pain of Multi-Vendor Sprawl
05:04 – Rebuilding the Entire Stack From Scratch
08:31 – Why Meter Refused to Ship Until It Was Great
11:39 – Hardware, Software, Delivery: A Single Platform
13:34 – No CapEx and Automatic Hardware Refresh
18:26 – How Meter Handles Growth, Migration & Space-Level Infrastructure
20:32 – The Real Reason Networks Fail (Configuration + Compatibility)
23:51 – GUI vs CLI: What Engineers Really Want
25:56 – Introducing Command: Natural-Language Networking
27:37 – Auto-Generated Dashboards and Custom Software
30:38 – Why AI Shouldn’t Be an Empty Buzzword
32:51 – Toward Fully Autonomous Networks by 2027
36:46 – The Network Engineer Shortage & What Comes Next
38:33 – What Autonomous Networking Actually Means
41:38 – Why the Internet Will Keep Growing Faster
43:02 – The Customers Who Need Meter Most
45:39 – Factory Floors, Warehouses, Data Centers, and Edge
48:32 – Nine New Hardware Platforms & Design Philosophy
52:56 – How Meter Maintains Networks Without Downtime
 

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most leaders assume AI and search already see the whole internet. In reality, they all operate on the same tiny slice of the web.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Sudheesh Nair, Co-Founder and CEO of TinyFish and former CEO of ThoughtSpot, to unpack why only a small percentage of the web is indexable and how that cripples enterprise AI.
Sudheesh explains why the next breakthrough won’t come from bigger models or better search, but from agents that can operate the web at scale, logging in, filling forms, running workflows, and surfacing the long tail of opportunities that never appear on page one. He also shares why human craft, taste, and presence will matter more than ever in an agent-driven world.
 
Key Moments:
00:00 - The Deep Web Problem
02:48 - The Amazon Search Trap
04:26 - Why Search is Broken
07:01 - Internet is No Longer a Library
08:29 - AI Answers vs Blue Links
13:05 - Introducing Tiny Fish's Mission
16:00 - Search as a Poor Experience
18:29 - The Deep Web: APIs, Workflows & Logins
22:11 - Tackling the 93% Problem
25:47 - The Eight-Room Hotel Success Story
29:04 - Operating the Web vs Skimming It
32:42 - Real-Time Personalized Workflows
38:31 - Enterprise B2B Strategy
40:18 - Taste Over Tools
43:08 - AI Freeing Human Experience
46:36 - Travel Experiences & Local Discovery
50:00 - Democratizing the Internet
56:39 - The Waving Guide in China
1:01:12 - Optimism for AI's Future

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This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most organizations are sitting on mountains of documents, PDFs, emails, and images they still cannot fully search, organize, or understand.
In this episode of IT Visionaries, host Chris Brandt sits down with Tim McIntire, CTO of Hyland, to unpack why unstructured data is still one of the biggest blockers between AI hype and real results. Tim breaks down why so many companies struggle to access the content they already have and what it really takes to make that information usable, trustworthy, and valuable.
From building content that is ready for AI to unlocking new context-aware agents and improving governance and transparency, Tim explains how leading organizations are finally turning everyday content into real business impact and why the future of enterprise AI starts with cleaning up what is already in the basement.
 
Key Moments:
02:36 - What Hyland Actually Does
04:18 - Why 80% of Enterprise Data Is Unusable
06:46 - From 30,000 Manual Indexes to Automation
07:47 - Vectorization: Making Documents AI-Ready
09:45 - The ROI of Eliminating Mundane Work
10:55 - AI vs RPA: Why Intelligence Changes Everything
13:23 - Federate Don't Migrate: Meeting Customers Where They Are
16:29 - Governance Can't Be an Afterthought
18:11 - The Explainability Breakthrough
20:10 - Day 1 to Day 90: Faster Time to Value
22:56 - Enterprise Agent Mesh Explained
24:06 - Context Engineering: The New AI Superpower
26:36 - Confidence Scores: When Humans Step In
28:12 - Right Model for the Right Job
31:00 - The 18-Month Prediction: Agents Everywhere

--
This episode of IT Visionaries is brought to you by Meter - the company building better networks. Businesses today are frustrated with outdated providers, rigid pricing, and fragmented tools. Meter changes that with a single integrated solution that covers everything wired, wireless, and even cellular networking. They design the hardware, write the firmware, build the software, and manage it all so your team doesn't have to.
That means you get fast, secure, and scalable connectivity without the complexity of juggling multiple providers. Thanks to meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com/itv to book a demo.

---
IT Visionaries is made by the team at Mission.org. Learn more about our media studio and network of podcasts at mission.org.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.