The Artificial Intelligence Podcast

Out of 7 million podcasts on Spotify, The Artificial Intelligence Podcast achieved top 2% Most Shared, top 9% Most Talked About, and top 7% listener retention in 2025. In this year-end review episode, Dr. Tony Hoang reflects on interviewing 80+ enterprise leaders from Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA, and Fortune 500 companies, while previewing 2026's bigger AI guests, deeper enterprise AI case studies, and exciting new distribution opportunities. Our community of AI executives and tech leaders doesn't just listen- you implement AI strategies, share insights with teams, and drive digital transformation in your organizations. Want to sponsor the fastest-growing enterprise AI podcast? Visit tonyphoang.com to explore strategic partnerships for 2026.

Join Christopher Brown, Managing Partner of The Nova Rose Group, as he examines the collision course between AI innovation and governance, arguing that America's fragmented 50-state regulatory patchwork creates unprecedented challenges for an industry evolving too rapidly for traditional democratic experimentation. Brown critiques the Trump administration's AI litigation task force threatening to sue states over AI laws, warning that while maintaining competitive dominance against China is valid, the U.S. risks becoming what it opposes by sacrificing privacy protections and anti-discrimination safeguards in the rush to innovate. He frames AI regulation as an infrastructure problem requiring a comprehensive "national highway system" approach rather than piecemeal solutions, contending that companies pouring trillions into AI investments while ignoring workforce impacts, healthcare risks, and algorithmic bias are creating a financial and social time bomb that could undermine American leadership rather than secure it.

Join Vrajesh Bhavsar, CEO of Operant AI, as he reveals the emerging threat landscape facing production AI systems, from sophisticated prompt injection attacks to zero-click exploits that can exfiltrate sensitive data without any user interaction. Bhavsar explains how traditional security tools like code scanning, network firewalls, and cloud security posture management become largely ineffective against AI agents operating with non-deterministic behavior and authorized access to critical systems, requiring runtime security solutions that function as AI-layer firewalls. He discusses the Shadow Escape attack class discovered by Operant targeting Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, where the rapid proliferation of 20,000 mostly open-source MCP servers creates dangerous shared memory spaces across disparate API endpoints, enabling data poisoning and exfiltration at scale while traditional security teams remain blind to these agent-to-agent interactions happening within the "cloud within the cloud."

Join Raj Shukla, CTO of SymphonyAI, as he discusses the critical distinction between AI demos and production-ready systems, revealing that enterprises consistently underestimate the "last mile" challenges of authentication, authorization, and data scalability that break POCs when moving to production. Shukla explains how SymphonyAI's vertical AI approach pre-trains models on industry-specific ontologies and knowledge graphs for retail, financial services, industrial manufacturing, and enterprise IT, enabling faster ROI by providing pre-built agents and domain-specific context rather than expecting generic LLMs to solve everything. He addresses the hidden costs that shock CFOs—not LLM inference which has dropped 1000x, but the expensive work of making data and APIs AI-ready through proper governance layers and MCP server implementations, while warning that enterprises overestimate the autonomy achievable in the short term and underestimate the infrastructure work required for real process automation at scale.

Join Balaji Raghavan, Head of Engineering at Postman, as he discusses the critical gap between AI adoption and API readiness, revealing that while 80% of developers use AI, only 24% design APIs with AI agents as the intended consumer. Drawing from Postman's 40 million developer user base, Raghavan explains how human-designed APIs create ambiguity problems for AI systems, requiring additional tooling layers that often introduce security vulnerabilities through proxy credentials and unauthorized access risks. He addresses the uncomfortable reality that the industry is still in early stages of making AI reliably call APIs at scale, with hallucinations and context limitations preventing effective orchestration across hundreds of endpoints, while warning that judicious leaders must distinguish between deterministic flows and cases where expensive AI-based approaches are truly necessary to manage infrastructure costs and prevent cascade failures.