DisrupTV

DisrupTV

DisrupTV is a weekly podcast with hosts R "Ray" Wang and Vala Afshar. The show airs live at 11:00 a.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. ET every Friday. The audience can expect A-list guests, the latest enterprise news, hot startups, insight from influencers, and much more. Tweet questions to #DisrupTV or @DisrupTVShow.

  1. 5d ago

    AI, Outcomes, and Leadership: What Tomorrow’s Disruptive Companies Are Doing Differently | DisrupTV Ep 445

    What separates the companies that will define the AI era from those that will be displaced by it? In this episode of DisrupTV, hosts R "Ray" Wang and Vala Afshar bring together two guests with very different vantage points on the same question — one from the front lines of AI-first transformation, and one from the deeply human side of leadership development. Alejandro Laplana, CEO of Shokworks — the AI-first digital transformation consultancy behind work for HBO, FC Barcelona, and the United Nations — makes the case that the traditional services model is being fundamentally disrupted. The billable hour is giving way to gain-share arrangements where vendors win only when clients win. Middle-market companies ($50M–$500M) are using AI to achieve leverage that once required billions in investment. And the real efficiency gains aren’t in headline automation — they’re in eliminating the coordination tax buried in middle management layers and compliance workflows. He also draws a crucial distinction between operational AI, which improves today’s business, and innovation AI, which builds tomorrow’s competitive moat. Claire Díaz-Ortiz, who co-authored Why Can’t They Be Like Me? with legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, explores the leadership trap that quietly caps most organizations’ potential: the assumption that what made you successful should work for everyone around you. She explains why homogeneity is innovation’s enemy, where AI genuinely helps in leadership development and where it falls short, and why the strengths that build careers can become the blind spots that limit leadership — if they go unexamined. Together, they trace a through-line from business model disruption to the human transformation required to lead through it: outcome-obsessed strategy on one side, and the perspective-rich, deliberately curious leadership needed to execute on the other.

    AI, Outcomes, and Leadership: What Tomorrow’s Disruptive Companies Are Doing Differently | DisrupTV Ep 445
  2. Jun 26

    Resilience, AI, and What It Means to Be Human Next | DisrupTV Ep 444

    What does it actually take to win with AI at the enterprise level — and what does it mean for society as AI becomes inseparable from how we live, work, and relate to one another? In Episode 444 of DisrupTV, hosts R Ray Wang and Vala Afshar bring together two leaders at the front lines of those questions from very different vantage points. TVN Reddy, CEO of Aptean — a vertical enterprise software company serving more than 10,000 customers — shares what AI adoption actually looks like at the front line of business. He explains why most organizations are caught in the action trap, burning tokens without creating outcomes, and why the shift from selling tools to selling results is fundamentally rewriting the enterprise software model. He introduces the 90/10 rule for competitive differentiation, makes the case for hiring AI-native engineers whose job is to feed agents work rather than do work themselves, and explains how ecosystems of agents — not single agents — are how you get from 60% accuracy to 99%. Lee Rainie, who spent nearly 25 years leading Pew Research’s internet and technology work and now directs the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, brings a societal lens to the same transformation. His research asks how humans will cope with the disruptions AI brings — and his answer may surprise you: resilience must start with institutions, not individuals. He introduces the concept of existential literacy, explains why AI may consume our solitude, and makes the case that deliberate friction — pause points built into AI-augmented workflows — may be essential to preserving human judgment, creativity, and agency. Together, they trace a through-line from enterprise outcomes to civilizational resilience, and close with a line that reframes the entire conversation: we are the last generation that will know what human capability felt like before it became inseparable from AI.

    Resilience, AI, and What It Means to Be Human Next | DisrupTV Ep 444
  3. Jun 19

    Beyond AI Pilots: Building a Culture for Lasting Transformation | DisrupTV Episode 443

    Charlene Li makes the case that AI is a leadership and strategy test, not a tech rollout — and that most organizations stall because they hand AI to IT instead of owning it as a CEO-level priority. She explains why leaders should kill their pilots, why speed has become the real competitive moat, and why the smartest companies are using AI for value reclamation — building new capabilities and services — instead of just cutting headcount. She also lays out the four building blocks of AI fluency: mindset, skill set, tool set, and decision set, and makes the case for a dedicated AI value owner who keeps the whole organization moving at the same tempo. Sebastian Wernicke shifts the conversation to the foundation underneath all of this: data. He argues that most data initiatives fail not because of bad tools, but because organizations misunderstand data’s actual purpose — which is change, not dashboards. He debunks three persistent myths — that data is objective, that it speaks for itself, and that it provides clean, definitive answers — and explains why psychological safety, not better software, is what actually lets data change minds inside an organization. Together, Li and Wernicke offer a practical, unified roadmap: clarify your strategy, empower real ownership, invest in fluency, and build a culture where data — and leaders — can be wrong in public without consequence.

    Beyond AI Pilots: Building a Culture for Lasting Transformation | DisrupTV Episode 443
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24 Ratings

About

DisrupTV is a weekly podcast with hosts R "Ray" Wang and Vala Afshar. The show airs live at 11:00 a.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. ET every Friday. The audience can expect A-list guests, the latest enterprise news, hot startups, insight from influencers, and much more. Tweet questions to #DisrupTV or @DisrupTVShow.

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