Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com

What if the secret to scaling AI agents has nothing to do with better prompts and everything to do with smarter integration? We sit down with Rich Waldron Co-founder & CEO of Tray dot ai to unpack how an integration-first architecture turns agent hype into measurable business outcomes. From cloud-native orchestration to resilient API handling, Rich explains why the hardest part of agents isn’t connectivity—it’s everything behind it: concurrency, retries, governance, logging, and security.

We dig into the real reasons enterprise pilots stall and the pattern he sees among programs that succeed: IT-led, department-partnered builds with clear ROI, tight scopes, and fast iteration cycles. Rich shares a standout customer story migrating hundreds of integrations off a legacy vendor while launching agentic workflows on a single governed platform—delivering 60% lower integration costs and three times faster builds. Along the way, we explore how engineering teams use AI coding tools to prototype faster and offload grunt work, freeing time for architecture and testing without threatening roles.

If you’re choosing where to start, accelerators for ITSM, HR, support, and knowledge make time-to-value tangible and create a structure teams can adapt to proprietary data and processes. We also cover the growing priority of enterprise governance: controlling which tools agents can access, how data moves, and how identities map across systems. Rich outlines Tray’s Agent Gateway for MCP—adding authentication and permissioning and exposing Trey-built tools to other services in a controlled way—so CIOs can move quickly without giving away the keys to the kingdom.

Ready to move from pilot to production with confidence? Follow, share, and leave a review to tell us where your organization is on the journey—and what’s blocking your next agent from going live.

Support the show

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com

Vegas turns into a living blueprint for the future as we sit down with CTA’s Gary Shapiro and best-selling author Jim Harris to unpack why CES 2026 is more than a showcase—it’s where strategy gets decided. We dig into how AI has moved from headline hype to the connective tissue of every sector, shaping robotics, health, mobility, and enterprise workflows. Gary lays out the big picture: a record wave of innovation colliding with real constraints like energy supply, fragmented regulation, and national industrial strategies. The tension is exciting—and actionable.

We walk through what’s truly new this year: a surge in humanoid and wearable robotics, patient-centered health tech powered by continuous sensing, and a startup scene in Eureka Park designed to compress months of business development into days. CES Foundry expands into AI and quantum with live demos, while new categories highlight enterprise tech, filmmaking, logistics, and travel. Keynotes—from Dr. Lisa Su to global brands at the Sphere—frame where compute, platforms, and partnerships are headed next. It’s a global stage, with 40% of attendees from abroad, and a clear signal that innovation is now a team sport.

If you’re an enterprise leader, this isn’t a gadget tour. Nearly half the action is B2B: partner summits, private suites, and tracks that turn tech trends into operating plans. We share practical tips to win your week—map your days by venue, leverage the upgraded AI-driven app, hydrate, and focus on one theme per day to avoid context switching. Looking ahead, we explore how quantum computing, agentic AI, and autonomy could reshape supply chains and healthcare, and why energy and policy choices will determine how fast the future arrives.

Subscribe for more deep dives from the front lines of innovation, share this with a colleague who’s planning their CES agenda, and leave a quick review to tell us which track you’re most excited to explore.

Support the show

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel

Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com

A journalist screams, “I’m wasting four hours a day transcribing,” and a product is born. We sit down with Lasse Finderup, CEO of Good Tape to unpack how a newsroom pain point turned into a privacy-first platform used by millions—and why saying no to feature bloat matters more than chasing every shiny AI trick.

We trace the spin-out origin story and the “instant product-market fit” that came from building for colleagues who needed reliable, fast transcripts yesterday. Lasse explains the decision to never train on user data and to host models in-house, trading flashy add-ons for deep security, ISO-grade compliance, and trust. We explore global AI adoption gaps—from Denmark’s “I’ll just ChatGPT this” culture to regions where automated speech-to-text still feels like magic—and why context matters when you’re designing tools for journalists, podcasters, and creators handling sensitive sources.

From a tech perspective, we dive into an open-source stack centered on Whisper V3 Large and the heavy lifting around the model: optimization, infrastructure, and the real costs of self-hosting LLMs. Lasse lays out a sharp distinction between “record-everything meetings” tools and workflows where the transcript is the output itself. That sets the stage for Good Tape’s next big leap: an “artificial memory” that surfaces relevant past notes at the right moment, with user-controlled reminders that feel helpful, not invasive. We also touch on multilingual transcription’s surge across contact centers and newsrooms, market consolidation on the horizon, and founder advice: build for real needs, not just because AI makes it possible.

If you care about accuracy, confidentiality, and simple tools that get out of your way, this conversation will sharpen how you evaluate transcription tech and where the industry is heading. Subscribe, share with a teammate who fights transcripts, and leave a quick review to help more builders and storytellers find the show.

Support the show

More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel