Tech Field Day - Part of The Futurum Group
166 episodes listed below
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Utilizing Tech is a weekly podcast exploring practical technology in the modern enterprise. Each season spotlights an emerging area: three seasons on AI, plus dedicated seasons on CXL and Edge. Season Six revisited AI, while Seasons Seven and Eight—presented by Solidigm—examined AI Data Infrastructure and AI at the Edge. Now, Season Nine turns to Agentic AI.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Stephen Foskett turns emerging enterprise technology into concrete conversations about architecture, deployment constraints, and the infrastructure carrying AI into production.
Utilizing Tech follows Stephen Foskett into the machinery beneath emerging enterprise systems, using guest conversations to connect product decisions with operating constraints.
A truck without broadband or GPUs waiting on storage: your AI plan needs a second draft.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded enterprise AI discussion on using storage to ease GPU memory pressure around retrieval and inference.
GPU memory pressure gives this episode its center of gravity, as the conversation follows enterprise AI from retrieval design into inference architecture.
A grounded review of immersion-ready server design, from coolant flow to serviceability.
Immersion cooling comes through here as a practical engineering challenge, not just a data center buzzword. Patrick Scantini of Hypertech explains why a server intended to run submerged in coolant needs a chassis that moves liquid cleanly, while Stephen Foskett and Janice…
A practical season opener on agentic AI, context, reasoning, action, and MCP.
Utilizing Tech opens season nine with a focused look at agentic AI: systems that need context, reason through work iteratively, and then take action.
A grounded review of why agentic AI depends on storage systems that keep data current, accurate, and governed.
Enterprise AI is framed here as an infrastructure problem, with storage teams positioned as key to making data usable for agentic applications.
A grounded reminder that predictable, resilient storage is part of real AI infrastructure design.
AI infrastructure is often framed around compute and data movement, but this PlayNext review puts storage nearer the center of the discussion.
A technical look at scaling AI data without wasting power.
Chris Gladwin makes a practical argument for AI data infrastructure that can grow without treating power efficiency as a side issue. The discussion is at its best when it ties scale to design choices: solid state, computation closer to the data, and less movement across the…
AI at the edge turns data protection into a practical problem.
Rick Vanover joins Stephen Foskett and Scott Shadley for a grounded look at how AI moves beyond the cloud and the data center. The conversation stays practical, with attention on data management and data protection instead of big abstract claims, which suits a subject that…
A measured season closer on practical agentic AI, with a clear look at training data, synthetic data, and feedback loops.
Season 9 closes on a practical note. Stephen Foskett, Frederick Van Haren, and Guy Currier spend most of the hour on what agentic AI can do when software is meant to learn, adapt, and act for a user.
David Sparks and Stephen Robles dig into Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and Mac automation weekly.
Federico Viticci, Stephen Hackett, and Myke Hurley work through the week's Apple news and their own gear problems.
Jason Snell and Myke Hurley debate Apple's product roadmap, leadership, and rumors weekly.
Long-form Apple talk with sharp product judgment and deep tech history.
Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell break down Microsoft's week in Windows, Xbox, and AI.
Steven Foskett and Scott Shadley close Season 8 of Utilizing Tech with Alan McSeveny, Weka's field CTO for media and entertainment and related AI, who also says he was a Weka customer for four years before joining in December.
Stephen Foskett closes Season 9 with Frederick Van Haren and Guy Currier at the table.
Stephen Foskett opens the conversation by framing AI as more than chatbots and power use.
Stephen Foskett and Janice Narowski open the conversation by laying out what reliable edge infrastructure has to do in the AI age.
Stephen Foskett and Janice Narowski talk with Mark Klosinski of Peak AIO about bringing AI infrastructure into hospitals.
Stephen Foskett and Janice Narowski welcome Alistair Bradbook of Antillion to talk about edge servers.
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Stephen Foskett and Janice Narowski talk with Micah Jordan of Doug Technologies about Nomad 10 immersion cooling for AI at the edge.
Stephen Foskett opens Season 8 of Utilizing Tech with Janice Narowski and Scott Shadley from Solidigm, framing AI at the Edge as a 2025 infrastructure story rather than a generic AI trend.
Season 9 of Utilizing Tech opens with Stephen Foskett, Frederic Van Haren, and Guy Currier defining agentic AI, generative AI, and why AI matters now.
Utilizing Tech, sponsored by Solidigm, centers on Ceph as an open-source storage system that many large-scale environments already use and are now trying to connect to AI data pipelines.
Patrick Scantini, Global VP of Sales at Hypertec, says immersion cooling can cut a data center’s PUE from about 1.5-1.6 to around 1.03-1.04, and he ties that to a large HPC deployment with thousands of nodes.
Stephen Foskett and Guy Currier frame this Utilizing Tech episode around skepticism of generative AI and a focus on practical applications, then welcome Luke Norris from Kamiwaza AI.
The episode brings Stephen Foskett, Frederik van Heren, and Nick Patience together for a grounded conversation about agentic AI.
Ariel Pisetsky of Taboola argues that 4 billion web pages a day and 40 billion content recommendations make AI data infrastructure an on-prem problem, not just a cloud one.
Utilizing Tech episode 07x04 focuses on AI data infrastructure, with Stephen Foskett and Ace Stryker talking to David Villa, chief revenue officer at Xinnor.
Utilizing Tech presents Kelly Osborne of Grade Technology discussing Supreme RAID, a GPU-accelerated RAID stack that uses NVIDIA GPUs and peer-to-peer DMA to move data across PCIe.
Brad Shimon of The Futurum Group says agentic AI is moving from code-heavy frameworks like LangChain and LangGraph toward productized systems that consumers and enterprises can actually use.
Stephen Foskett and Guy Currier speak with Ingo Fuchs, NetApp’s Chief Technologist for AI, at NetApp Insight about why storage teams now matter in agentic AI.
The hosts start from a blunt premise: AI is still too text-heavy.
Utilizing Tech episode 08x09 brings Steen Graham, CEO of Metrum AI, to Sunnyvale for a conversation with Stephen Foskett and Ace Stryker about RAG, agentic AI, and memory limits in production inference.
This episode explores the complexities of AI data pipelines with Kartik from Vast Data, highlighting how enterprises must wrangle petabytes of data for training and inference.
This episode explores how ML Commons' storage benchmark measures AI infrastructure performance by focusing on GPU utilization rather than traditional metrics.
This episode of Utilizing Tech features Jordan Ranos from Storage Review discussing AI data infrastructure, focusing on real-world testing of Solidigm SSDs for edge AI applications like astrophotography.
Stephen Foskett opens the show with the idea that a lot of the IT industry was seeded by high performance computing and the national labs.
Stephen Foskett and Guy Currier spend this episode with Arun Subramanian on the problem of taking agentic AI out of the demo stage and into production.
Stephen Foskett and Janice open with the mounting pressure to make AI data infrastructure both fast and power efficient.
Stephen Foskett opens the season by framing a world full of intelligent devices and the growing role of AI assistance and agents.
Rick Vanover joins Stephen Foskett and Scott Shadley for a conversation about data protection at the edge.
Stephen Foskett opens the season by treating AI as a full-stack infrastructure problem.