Tech Disruptors

As autonomous AI agents proliferate across enterprises, keeping track of assets, identities and access is becoming a bigger cybersecurity challenge. Axonius CEO Joe Diamond joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s analyst Mandeep Singh to discuss how agentic AI is expanding the attack surface through nonhuman identities and broader access to data and applications. They examine the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and why continuous asset visibility, identity controls and real-time monitoring will become increasingly critical as AI agents scale.

AI is moving beyond software and into the physical operations that power industries like energy, manufacturing, logistics and aerospace. Avathon CEO Pervinder Johar joins Bloomberg Intelligence’s Woo Jin Ho on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss how the company is using AI to reduce downtime, improve efficiency and support operating decisions. The conversation also explores physical AI and robotics, the shift from prediction toward autonomous action, customer deployments, market potential and how Avathon plans to scale over the next five years.

“There is a national imperative to win across all those lines of effort,” says retired Adm.Chris Grady, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Grady joins Bloomberg Intelligence senior defense weapons analyst Wayne Sanders on this episode of the Tech Disruptors podcast to discuss quantum capabilities, including sensing, computing and magnetometry. The conversation also covers nuclear-power generation for contested logistics, robotics and advanced manufacturing for the next generation of warfare and the private-capital partnerships needed to support the ecosystem.

“I think one of the things that people have gotten wrong, especially Wall Street, is that they confused intelligence with execution,” Bhavin Shah, Senior Vice President of the Employee Experience Group at ServiceNow and co-founder of Moveworks, tells Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Technology Analyst Anurag Rana. In this episode, they discuss how ServiceNow is turning EmployeeWorks into an enterprise front door, with universal and specialized assistants orchestrating work across HR, IT, CRM, ERP and other systems rather than simply generating answers. Shah explains how combining probabilistic AI with deterministic workflows, flexible model selection and enterprise controls can deliver durable ROI through self-service while providing the secure execution layer agents need to operate at scale.

AI agents are rapidly reshaping product discovery and shopping, but earning consumer trust in payments is a critical barrier to fully autonomous commerce. In this episode of Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tech Disruptors podcast, Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, joins BI fintech and payments analyst Diksha Gera to discuss what needs to be solved before agentic commerce can move from product discovery to transactions at scale. They explore how merchants distinguish legitimate agents from bots, how consumers set and verify an agent’s authority to spend, who carries liability when an autonomous transaction goes wrong and whether emerging payment and checkout protocols can work together. The discussion examines why solving identity, intent, control and accountability could determine how quickly AI agents graduate from shopping assistants to economic actors, and how that shift could affect merchant conversion, pricing and loyalty.