The Built for Trust Podcast explores the critical elements of creating trusted enterprise AI infrastructures that are reliable, scalable, secure and cost efficient. Join your host, Nick Lippis, as he delves into the intricacies of building a reliable and secure IT foundation while streamlining the complexities that have emerged in the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Stay in the know on future podcasts releases.
SUBSCRIBE
Agentic AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to real enterprise deployments. As organizations begin running hundreds or even thousands of AI agents across hybrid environments, the challenge becomes how to govern them safely at scale.
In this episode of the Built for Trust Podcast, Nick Lippis walks through a demonstration of the ONUG Agentic AI Overlay and the control framework designed to prevent rogue agents from compromising enterprise systems. He explains the six critical controls required to manage identity, data access, infrastructure tools, and cross domain interactions in agentic environments.
If agentic AI is going to scale in the enterprise, it will require more than powerful models. It will require trusted infrastructure and clear governance.
Learn more about the AI Agentic Overlay here.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
Everyone is talking about agentic AI in the NOC. Fewer are asking whether the foundation is ready.
Nick Lippis sits down with Damien Garros, founder of OpsMill, to unpack what’s missing from most AI-in-operations conversations: structured intent data.
Observability tells you what is happening. But intent defines what should be happening. Without that context, AI systems are left reacting to signals without understanding design, policy, or business impact.
Damien explains why enterprises need a version-controlled, extensible source of truth before letting agents interact with production infrastructure. He walks through how intent management, branching workflows, automated validation, and human-in-the-loop governance create a safer path toward autonomous operations.
If agentic AI is going to live up to the hype, it won’t be because it replaces operators. It will be because it operates on a foundation of structured, trusted intent.
This episode explores what that architecture looks like and what it will take to get there.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
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:
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!
In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis shares firsthand observations from ongoing conversations with enterprise IT leaders and technology providers across the industry.
Nick explores the growing divide between AI-first enterprises that are moving aggressively into large-scale deployments and organizations that are still evaluating where AI fits, how to justify the investment, and how to manage risk. He unpacks why some enterprises remain quiet about their AI initiatives, how concerns around GPUs, cost, and power are shaping infrastructure decisions, and what’s driving the shift toward cloud-based versus on-prem AI strategies.
The discussion also dives into how security and networking are becoming native components of AI infrastructure, why the control plane for agentic AI remains undefined, and how incumbent enterprise vendors are repositioning to close the gap between ambition and execution.
This episode offers a grounded look at where enterprise AI really stands today, not the hype, but the reality from the field.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
Most companies are experimenting with AI in customer experience. Very few are actually transforming it.
In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis is joined by Puneet Mehta, Founder and CEO of Netomi, to explore what it really takes to design AI-driven customer experience that works in the real world at enterprise scale, under regulatory constraints, and without breaking trust.
Puneet shares why simply automating human workflows misses most of AI’s value, and how agentic AI enables a shift from reactive support to proactive, context-driven customer engagement. Drawing on real-world deployments with companies like DraftKings and United Airlines, the conversation dives into how enterprises can safely orchestrate AI across siloed systems, manage authority and compliance, and deliver faster, more empathetic customer experiences.
The discussion also looks ahead to a future where AI becomes the primary customer interface and where AI agents may soon interact directly with other AI agents on behalf of consumers. For enterprise leaders navigating trust, governance, and transformation, this episode offers a grounded look at what agentic AI means beyond the hype.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
Agentic AI is redefining how work gets done. But without the right architecture and controls, autonomy becomes risk.
In this episode, Nick sits down with Peter Campbell to explore the emerging Agentic AI Overlay and what enterprises must build to support secure, scalable agentic workflows. From multi-agent communication and trust boundaries to identity, governance, and responsible AI enforcement, they examine the critical building blocks required to move from AI experimentation to production-ready systems.
The conversation also highlights early findings from ONUG community polling and outlines what’s next as the industry works to turn architecture into action.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
In this episode, Nick reviews lessons from 2025 that shift from POC to production in enterprise AI. Then he discusses key predictions for 2026 and discusses why it is such a pivotal year for enterprises to embrace AI.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!
When a model learns your secrets, it never forgets.
In this episode, Nick sits down with Tom Gillis from Cisco to explore one of the most pressing challenges of the AI era: data sovereignty. As AI models absorb sensitive information and operational data at unprecedented scale, organizations are facing a new reality: once that knowledge is embedded, it can’t simply be erased.
Tom unpacks how Cisco is reimagining the data center for this new world from GPU-driven architectures and co-packaged optics to federated analytics that bring computation to the data instead of the other way around. Together, they discuss the return of on-prem infrastructure, the risks of IP leakage in model training, and why protecting data sovereignty may be the defining trust challenge of enterprise AI.
New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified. See you next week!