The digital economy runs on connectivity. But while cloud infrastructure became programmable, elastic, and API-driven, telecom workflows remained manual, fragmented, and stuck in decades-old procurement processes.

In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with Ben Edmond, Founder and CEO of ConnectBase, to explore why that is finally changing.

As AI workloads accelerate and enterprise architectures shift toward multi-cloud and distributed environments, legacy WAN procurement models are being exposed. Spreadsheets, slow RFP cycles, and opaque serviceability data simply cannot support the demands of the AI economy.

Nick and Ben discuss:

1. The four structural shifts forcing telecom modernization
2. Why automation increases growth rather than eroding margins
3. The rise of programmable connectivity and API-driven exchanges
4. How AI is exposing bandwidth, latency, and procurement limitations
5. Why control is flowing back to the enterprise

From wholesale marketplaces to enterprise WAN estate intelligence, this conversation outlines how telecom is evolving from a relationship-driven industry to a programmable platform.

The AI economy is here. Now telecom has to catch up.

New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!

In this episode of the Built for Trust Podcast, Nick Lippis breaks down the real barriers preventing large enterprises from deploying agentic AI at scale.

After gathering direct input from enterprise leaders across the ONUG community, a clear pattern emerged: the blockers are not model performance or innovation. They are trust, security, and governance.

Nick outlines the prioritized requirements enterprises say must be solved before agentic AI can move from experimentation to production. From non-human identity and lifecycle management to runtime behavior enforcement, data and content guardrails, zero trust across multiple trust domains, and secure orchestration, this episode reframes the conversation around what truly matters for scalable adoption.

If your organization is exploring AI agents but struggling with control, compliance, or cross-domain risk, this episode defines the problem set and the path forward.

New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!

As enterprises rush to prepare for AI, most of the attention is focused on models, GPUs, and applications. But what if the real starting point isn’t AI at all?

In this episode of the Built for Trust Podcast, Nick Lippis sits down with Patrick Heinz from Ameriprise to explore why observability is the true foundation of AI-ready infrastructure. Patrick draws on decades of experience spanning service providers, startups, and large enterprises to explain why AI systems depend on continuous, high-quality data and why visibility across networks, applications, and service providers is no longer optional.

The conversation dives into synthetic path monitoring, breaking down data silos, contextualizing massive volumes of telemetry, and how “data without context is dangerous.” Patrick also shares real-world examples of how improved visibility builds trust with users, operations teams, and service providers while reducing outages, escalations, and firefighting.

If you’re thinking about AI readiness, automation, or agentic systems, this episode makes one thing clear: you can’t automate what you can’t see, and trust starts with visibility.

New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!