The AI in Business Podcast

Enterprise software costs are rising while vendor performance often isn't, and AI has fundamentally changed what enterprises can credibly threaten to build in-house. In this episode, David Cost, Chief Digital Officer at Rainbow Apparel, explores how enterprise leaders can restructure vendor contracts to maintain exit leverage, eliminate auto-renewal traps, and use AI-enabled build alternatives as a legitimate negotiating tool. The conversation examines the cost-benefit calculus of build versus buy in the AI era, red flags in service-level agreements, and how to negotiate exits from underperforming contracts.
 
This episode is sponsored by UpperEdge. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at go.emerj.com/partner

Finance teams are being asked to influence outcomes in real time while operating on architectures built for delayed, aggregated, and heavily reconciled data. In this episode, Alex Curran, CEO at Aptitude Software, examines how finance functions can move toward real‑time, event‑level visibility and discusses this shift with host Dan Faggella. She highlights the practical changes required for CFOs — from capturing every financial event at the transaction level to enabling continuous reconciliation and full lineage — so finance can surface exceptions immediately and support decisions as they unfold. This episode is sponsored by Aptitude Software. Learn how financial institutions are digitizing paper-based records to unlock usable data for AI, and using alternative data like public web and social signals to enhance risk assessment. Download our free PDF report, "AI in Financial Services Executive Cheat Sheet" at emerj.com/fcs1

As enterprises move agentic AI from controlled pilots into production customer-facing workflows, the gaps in data continuity, governance, and human-agent coordination become the deciding factors in whether AI scales or stalls. In this episode, Shri Nandan, VP of AI Experiences at Comcast, examines why customer experience has become the real stress-test for enterprise AI — and what it takes to scale with customer trust intact. The conversation covers the three data foundations required for context continuity in production, practical principles for human-AI orchestration, and why cross-team governance — a single North Star across CX, IT, and operations — is what separates the organizations that scale from those that fragment. This episode is sponsored by NiCE. Learn how to structure landing pages for higher conversion and how to use self-qualification systems to prioritize high-intent leads. Download our free PDF report, "B2B AI Lead Generation Guide," at emerj.com/aig1

The rising use of general‑purpose models in regulated environments is creating a widening gap between what AI can generate and what fiduciary professionals can safely rely on. In this episode, Steve Hasker, CEO at Thomson Reuters, examines how AI must be trained, validated, and governed to deliver the level of accuracy required in legal, tax, and audit workflows in conversation with host Dan Faggella, Emerj CEO and Head of Research. The discussion highlights the operational demands of vertical AI, the role of expert‑trained agents, and why human oversight remains essential in high‑stakes professional work. Learn how financial institutions are digitizing paper-based records to unlock usable data for AI, and using alternative data like public web and social signals to enhance risk assessment, download our free PDF report, "AI in Financial Services Executive Cheat Sheet" at emerj.com/fcs1

Supply chain organizations still struggle to respond to major disruptions because their core planning systems can't evaluate structural options or network‑level changes at the speed required. In this episode, Joris Wijpkema, Executive Vice President for Solutions and Strategy at Optilogic, joins host Marilie Fouché and examines how a dedicated, high‑compute modeling layer enables teams to run thousands of scenarios in minutes and make faster, better‑aligned decisions. The discussion highlights how leaders can strengthen resilience by unifying data foundations, building trust in modeling before a crisis, and integrating design‑grade optimization directly into planning cycles. This episode is sponsored by Optilogic. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at go.emerj.com/partner