The Digital Executive

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Tatiana Aleksandrova, co-founder and CEO of Subsense, to explore one of the most ambitious bets in deep tech — a non-surgical brain-computer interface that could eventually allow humans to communicate directly with AI, each other, and the digital world using nothing but thought. Tatiana opens by explaining why she founded her second BCI company: her first taught her that fully non-invasive approaches lack the signal precision needed for truly transformative applications, while surgical implants will never scale

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jerry Zhang, co-founder of Lemma, to explore one of the most underappreciated problems in enterprise AI deployment — agents that appear to work but silently degrade the moment they hit real-world production. Jerry opens with the founding story: two college friends who met as freshmen at USC's startup incubator, went off separately to build AI agents at companies on opposite ends of the industry — healthcare and chip design — and came back together after realizing they had been solving the exact same frustrating

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Shenbo Xu, MIT PhD and co-founder of Kapnova, to make a distinction that most business leaders have heard but rarely internalized — and that costs companies millions when they get it wrong. Shenbo opens by tracing his path from MIT's AI lab through quantitative research at Point72 and foundational model training at Scale AI, explaining that each stop sharpened the same core insight: prediction tells you what will happen, but causal inference tells you what happens if you actually do something about it. Those are

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Katrina Purcell, growth operations consultant and former chief of staff, to explore the messy, often overlooked work that actually makes scaling companies succeed. Katrina opens with a career that wound through media, project management, and an executive MBA before landing her in the chief of staff role at IAS — where guiding a company through its IPO taught her that her real gift was bringing people along for the ride, not just building the strategy. She explains why she took that skill set independent: compani

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Adam J. Schwartz, founder and CEO of DocumentReview.law, to explore what happens when a practicing attorney gets frustrated enough with existing tools to teach himself JavaScript and build a better one. Adam opens with the breaking point that sparked everything: a case with a few hundred documents where every existing platform was built for millions, making it both overkill and cost-prohibitive for the client. So he sat down in his converted garage in Los Angeles, dusted off his JavaScript knowledge, and spent t

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Aidan McCarty, co-founder and co-CEO of Verified, to make the case that the way we prove who we are on the internet is about to look as dated as the fax machine — and that a phone number is the identity primitive that survives what comes next. Aidan opens with the Stripe analogy at the heart of Verified's thesis: Stripe didn't make payments better, it made payments disappear, and that is exactly what Verified is doing for signup. Where a typical fintech onboarding flow takes 161 seconds, 16 clicks, and loses for

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jen Grogono, founder and CEO of uStudio, to explore why the future of enterprise training and internal communications looks a lot more like Spotify than a company intranet. Jen opens with the founding story of ON Networks in 2006, where the challenge of syndicating original content across a hundred different endpoints — each with different metadata, formats, and technical requirements — planted the seed for what would become uStudio. When she saw enterprises building massive libraries of training and marketing c

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Kevin Pickhardt, Executive Chairman of Pharos Systems International, to make the case that one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in enterprise IT is sitting right there in the corner of every office floor — the printer. Kevin opens with a career that began at Xerox forty years ago and traces the surprisingly consistent thread through every transformation since: printing never went away, but the infrastructure managing it never kept up. He explains why printing has been uniquely resistant to modernization —

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Shannon Flanagan, founder and CEO of Retail Women in Tech, to make a case that the most important thing missing from most AI transformation efforts isn't better technology — it's the right people in the room. Shannon opens with a career that started at 18 folding jeans and evolved through merchandising, consulting at Accenture, and leadership roles at Gap, Lands' End, and Macy's, shaped throughout by a single question she discovered at 25: what does it take to create the conditions where people love what they do

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Allen Dine, Chief Business Officer at Care2You, to explore what it actually takes to deliver emergency and hospital-level care inside someone's home — and how AI is making that possible at scale across one of the most complex urban environments in the world. Allen opens by tracing a career defined by a refusal to wait for someone else to solve the problem, from learning SQL to build his own data warehouse to deploying AI voice agents for patient intake — because in home care, if you want change, you have to buil

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Furkat Kasimov, London-based entrepreneur, angel investor, and author, to explore what it takes to build and invest wisely in the AI era — before the crowd figures it out. Furkat opens with a origin story that predates the current AI boom by a decade, tracing his first investment to an InsureTech conference where he spotted a deepfake detection company called PinDrop Security and recognized that every dangerous technology creates a market for its antidote. That insight became the founding logic of Applayerai, a

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Edwin Miranda, founder of Konsultora, to explore what it actually means to build an organization for the AI era — not just one with more tools, but one with less distance between a signal, a decision, and an action. Edwin opens by tracing the common thread across his career in advertising, political strategy, and customer experience: competition and decision-making. Every domain is ultimately about understanding what is changing, making better decisions faster, and adapting before your competitors do. AI, he arg

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Antonio Mallia, founder and CEO of Seltz.ai, to explore one of the most overlooked infrastructure questions in the AI era: what happens to web search when the user is no longer a human? Antonio opens with a career that runs from the University of Pisa's information retrieval tradition through a PhD at NYU to research roles at Amazon, Pinecone, and Bloomberg — and traces the moment the idea for Seltz crystallized while building Alexa's question answering engine, when it became clear that the next consumer of sear

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Harvey Liu, CEO of LevX Exchange, to explore what happens when traders stop using exchanges and start building their own. Harvey opens with his origin story — one of the first Bitcoin investors in China in 2013, conducting due diligence on early exchanges like Huobi and OKCoin from a VC firm at a time when blockchain was still the Wild West, and nobody on an investment committee wanted to hear about it. Over the following decade, he tracked the industry, moved to Singapore, reviewed over fifty Web3 projects, and

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Michael Ashoori, founder and president of Ashoori Law, to cut through the confusion that surrounds U.S. immigration for entrepreneurs, investors, and skilled professionals. Michael opens with the personal foundation of his practice — as the first American-born member of an immigrant family, he brings an empathy to client relationships that goes beyond legal expertise, drawing directly on his parents' experience of building a life and a business in a new country. He then tackles the most common misconceptions he

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Tarek Saab, CEO of Texas Precious Metals, to explore why where your gold sits matters more than most investors have ever stopped to consider — and what it took to build the infrastructure to do something about it. Tarek opens with the founding story of Texas Precious Metals in 2011, when the precious metals industry was still largely offline and shipping high-value packages safely across the country was a logistical and insurance puzzle nobody had cracked. He traces the company's growth from a pioneering e-comme

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Sahil Aggarwal, founder of Von, to make a blunt case that the go-to-market function has been left behind while every other part of the business got transformed by AI — and that the window to fix it is now. Sahil opens with a decade of conviction built from doing B2B sales himself, building software for it, and advising large pharma companies on sales efficiency: the deals were never won because of the product or the CRM. They were won because of the workflow around it, and that workflow has always been broken. H

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Gary S. Michel, former Chairman and CEO of JELD-WEN and author of Decomplify, to explore why the most dangerous thing a leader can do is mistake busyness for progress. Gary opens by tracing his path from mechanical engineer to global CEO, noting that he never set out to run a company — he just kept chasing bigger problems, until he realized the hardest ones were never technical. They were organizational. That insight became the foundation of his leadership philosophy and his book, which centers on a single uncom

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Christopher Sprague, CEO and co-founder of Enluma Leadership Group, to make the case that one of the most valuable investments a company can make has been locked behind a velvet rope for decades. Chris opens with an unlikely origin story — a high school calculus teacher who created an environment where students worked harder than they thought possible and actually loved doing it — and traces how that memory followed him through a PhD in toxicology, twenty years of leading complex transformations across Fortu

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, to challenge everything the industry thinks it knows about AI in the contact center. Pedro opens by drawing a straight line from the dot-com boom to today's AI wave — both rewarded the same thing: speed of execution, willingness to experiment, and relentless focus on customer value. He then breaks down Talkdesk's Customer Experience Automation framework — a discover, build, orchestrate, and measure cycle that starts not with a vendor pitch but with a company's own data, ident

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mohan Gulati, CEO and co-founder of Thinkrr.ai, to explore how voice AI is quietly transforming one of healthcare's most overlooked touchpoints — the independent pharmacy. Mohan opens with the moment that pushed him out of the enterprise world: watching Fortune 500 companies freeze in the face of AI while smaller businesses were eager to move fast and get started. That energy drew him toward SMBs, and eventually toward independent pharmacies, where a group of progressive owners reached out looking for a solution

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Peter Carnochan, psychologist, psychoanalyst, executive coach, and author, to explore what happens when three decades of deep clinical work meets the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley leadership. Peter opens by tracing his unusual path from studying Nietzsche at Harvard to working with troubled youth, explaining that philosophy and therapy were never separate pursuits for him — both were attempts to get to the bottom of things. He then unpacks countertransference, the central concept of his book Looking fo

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Allie Kline, interim CEO of Innovation Labs at Identity Digital, to tackle one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in the AI era: accountability. Allie opens by drawing a through line across her career — from AOL's separation from Time Warner to the Yahoo integration — arguing that every major technology shift creates a moment where foundational infrastructure either gets built or gets retrofitted painfully later. AI accountability is that moment right now. She explains why the current gap is so dangerous

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee, to explore why the infrastructure built for the API economy is fundamentally unprepared for the agentic era — and what it will take to fix that before the risks outpace the rewards. Rory opens with the story of joining Gravitee during the pandemic, taking a fifty percent pay cut to bet on a four-person company he believed in after using the software himself, and scaling it to over 180 employees and forty million in revenue. He then makes a sharp argument: traditional API gateways

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mandi Bateman, CEO and co-founder of Profile Health, to explore what happens when whole genome sequencing, longitudinal patient data, and clinical intelligence come together to give physicians a complete picture of who their patient really is. Mandi opens with hard-won lessons from her previous startups — most importantly, that precision medicine direct to consumer is a race to the bottom, and that the right path to scaling this kind of complex, data-heavy care is through the hands of physicians who have the tra

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Alfredo González Briseño, policy innovator, author, and founder of fAIrly Simple, to explore why the biggest gap in AI governance isn't what governments are regulating — it's how they're doing it. Alfredo opens by drawing a direct parallel between building a successful business and building effective regulation: both require a managed life cycle, stakeholder input, evidence-based decisions, transparency, and ongoing review. Skip the process and you get what he calls weekend rules — surprise announcements that no

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jason Allan Scott, serial entrepreneur, nine-time exit veteran, and founder of the Soul Method, for a masterclass in building businesses that create freedom instead of obligation. Jason opens with two defining moments: a childhood film that planted the belief that what one person can do, another can do too — a mantra that carried him out of poverty and civil unrest — and a later realization that he had been measuring the wrong thing entirely. Chasing revenue, he discovered, builds golden handcuffs. Chasing optio

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Chirag Patel, physician, founder, and ESPN injury analyst, to explore what happens when clinical precision meets elite sports, investment strategy, and the drive to democratize access to world-class care. Chirag opens with a deceptively simple insight — the foot is the body's smallest lever with the largest downstream effect — and traces how following that constraint led him from podiatry to professional sports medicine to enterprise development. The moment that crystallized everything was two patients with

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Brian Trzupek, Senior Vice President of Product at DigiCert, to explore what it means to build digital trust in a world where AI agents are multiplying faster than anyone can track them. Brian opens with a career arc that spans founding Creduware, fighting cybercrime at Trustwave, and testifying before Congress on the 2013 Target breach — experiences that sharpened his ability to translate deeply technical security concepts for non-technical audiences, from policymakers to boardrooms. He then unpacks DigiCert's

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Moody Abdul, co-founder and CEO of Klarify, to explore how a deeply personal journey through therapy — and a family shaped by the Lebanese Civil War — became the foundation for a company built to give mental health professionals their time back. Moody shares how his own therapist's frustration with documentation tools sparked the idea for Klarify, and how that insight led him to leave his previous startup and build something that could give back to the people who had given so much to him. He breaks down the fund

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Angie Lillie, Chief Compliance Officer at Mentavi Health, to explore what it actually takes to build trust in a digital-first mental health company operating across all 50 states. Angie opens by reframing what compliance really means — not bureaucracy, but protection and accountability, the foundation that lets clinicians walk into patient encounters knowing the environment around them is safe and ethical. She then breaks down how Mentavi's AI support tool, the Mentavi Concierge, handles intake and administrativ

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Itai Green, global innovation strategist and author of Innovation or Elimination, to make the case that in today's AI-accelerated world, innovation is no longer a competitive advantage — it's a survival requirement. Itai opens with a perspective only a founder-turned-advisor can offer: corporations that want to partner with startups must learn to speak startup, move at startup speed, and respect the very real financial stress that most founding teams are operating under. He then explains why the stakes have fund

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Joe Ochal, founder and CEO of The Chimney Scientist, to explore how a microbiology graduate turned a part-time chimney cleaning gig into one of the fastest-growing home services companies in the United States. Joe shares the moment the math clicked — staring down $250,000 in medical school debt versus a blue-collar business he actually loved — and choosing the path that made more sense on paper and in practice. He breaks down what separates The Chimney Scientist from the rest of the industry: not just better too

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Ashwin Rao, Executive Vice President of Next Gen AI at o9 Solutions, to explore why large language models alone are not enough to power the autonomous enterprise — and what it will actually take to get there. Ashwin opens by tracing the common thread across his career on Wall Street, at Stanford, and in retail supply chains: every domain ultimately comes down to translating messy business problems into clean mathematical models, then building software to solve them. He then makes a compelling case for neuros

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mitchell Amador, founder and CEO of Immunefi, to pull back the curtain on the escalating cybersecurity battle playing out across the blockchain ecosystem. Mitchell explains how founding Immunefi in 2020 was less about certainty and more about conviction — recognizing that DeFi's explosive growth was creating security gaps that criminal networks would exploit at the same viral speed that made crypto successful in the first place. His answer was to corral the global white hat security community into a crowdsourced

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mahesh Thakur, executive coach and former product leader at Microsoft, Amazon, Intuit, and GoDaddy, to explore what it truly takes to lead in a world where AI is rewriting the rules faster than most organizations can keep up. Mahesh opens with the turning point that shifted his career from building products to developing leaders — a high-performing Fortune 100 team with every advantage imaginable that kept stalling, not because of strategy or resources, but because trust between leaders had broken down. That exp

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Joel Perez, CTO and co-founder of Mindful Software, to explore how a deeply personal experience with dream interpretation sparked the creation of My Dream — an AI-powered app designed to help people decode what their subconscious is trying to tell them. Joel shares how a year off traveling with his wife Amy, followed by a career pivot from IT infrastructure to software engineering, shaped the resourcefulness and curiosity that now drives his work. He explains how Amy's own life-changing dream — one that finally

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with John Sampogna, CEO of Wondersauce, to explore what it really takes to build a brand that outlasts any ad budget. John reflects on scaling Wondersauce from a two-person shop to a hundred-person agency, crediting much of that early success to the "optimistic naivety" of not knowing enough to be afraid — a mindset he says is surprisingly hard to recapture once experience loads you down with risk filters. He breaks down what makes Wondersauce different from a traditional agency: a relentless focus on business outcom

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Neil Marley, CEO of Neologik, to unpack why so many mid-market companies are stuck in AI pilot purgatory — and what it actually takes to break through to real transformation. Neil shares how an early encounter with ChatGPT convinced him that AI would reshape information worker roles and that mid-market companies, more agile than large enterprises but more resource-constrained, stood to gain the most from moving fast. He explains why governance and scaffolding matter as much as automation — because businesses nee

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Geoffrey Mattson, CEO of SecureAuth, to discuss why the way we think about identity and security is being completely rewritten. Geoffrey traces his career from network engineering to identity security, explaining how the core question has always been the same: who are you, and what are you allowed to do right now? He breaks down why the traditional perimeter firewall and static login model are no longer enough — credential theft, SIM swapping, and session hijacking have made one-time authentication dangerously o

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Ryan Horst, CEO of Altcoin Pro, to explore how his background in sales, psychology, and business coaching shaped a unique approach to crypto education. Ryan shares his firsthand experience surviving the 2017 altcoin bull run and the humbling losses that followed, and how those lessons drove him to build a system for repeatable investing results. He breaks down the most common psychological traps crypto investors fall into — from emotional attachment to single coins to the illusion of diversification — and explai

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas welcomes Warren Myers, Co-Founder and CEO of AURA, to discuss how technology is transforming emergency response around the world. Warren shares how AURA was born from a critical challenge in South Africa—where millions lacked access to reliable emergency services despite an abundance of underutilized private security and medical resources. By creating an intelligent dispatch platform that connects people to the nearest vetted responders, AURA has built South Africa's largest private emergency response network and is now expand

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Bradley Taylor, CEO and Co-Founder of ClareCast, to discuss how predictive workforce intelligence is reshaping business strategy. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in employee benefits, insurance technology, and private equity-backed organizations, Bradley explains how the frustration of making high-stakes decisions with incomplete data inspired him to build ClareCast. He shares how AI-powered forecasting helps companies predict workforce trends, improve revenue planning, and replace guesswork with con

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jana Radojcic, Director of Organic Growth at Alpha Market Flow and Co-Founder of GetStuffDigital, to explore how SEO is evolving in the age of AI search. Jana shares her journey from academic research writing to becoming a leader in authority building for fintech and SaaS brands, explaining why trust, reputation, and strategic digital PR have become the foundation of sustainable organic growth. Jana dives into her PR Intelligence framework, which helps companies proactively measure and strengthen brand trust be

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Matt Serna, Head of Go-To-Market at Lightfield, to discuss how AI-native CRMs are transforming the future of sales and customer engagement. Drawing on his experience at leading AI companies including Replicant and Notable, Matt explains why traditional CRMs have long struggled with incomplete and outdated data, limiting their ability to deliver real value to sales teams. Matt shares how Lightfield’s agentic CRM automatically captures and structures customer interactions across calls, emails, meetings, and messa

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas welcomes Amy Farner, Executive Vice President and Head of Research and Product at the Josh Bersin Company. Amy shares her 25-year journey helping HR organizations leverage emerging technologies—from early employee engagement platforms and workforce analytics to today’s AI-powered transformation. She discusses how the company’s Galileo platform evolved from a research assistant into an intelligent workflow engine that helps organizations operationalize insights, personalize decision-making, and scale HR expertise across the ent

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas speaks with Jason Wood, Founder and CEO of Specificity, about the growing challenges facing digital advertising and how AI is reshaping the future of customer acquisition. Drawing from his entrepreneurial journey in sales, marketing, and technology, Jason explains why he launched Specificity to combat bot traffic, fake leads, and the declining transparency created by major advertising platforms. Jason discusses how the rise of agentic AI is fundamentally changing how consumers discover brands, shifting attention away from tra

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Nir Weingarten, Co-Founder and CEO of Eikona, to discuss how artificial intelligence is transforming one of marketing's most overlooked areas: lifecycle marketing. Drawing on his background as an AI researcher and machine learning expert, Nir explains why email, SMS, and push notifications represent one of the biggest untapped opportunities for AI-driven automation and personalization. Nir shares how Eikona uses reinforcement learning—the same foundational concept behind modern AI systems—to continuously optimi

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mark Stouse, Chairman and CEO of Proof Causal AI, to explore why traditional marketing and go-to-market analytics are failing in today’s volatile business environment. Drawing on more than 25 years of leadership experience at companies like HP, BMC Software, and Honeywell Aerospace, Stouse explains how reliance on correlation-based analytics has left organizations unable to accurately measure performance, optimize investments, or prove business value. Mark breaks down the difference between correlation and caus

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas welcomes Dr. Ali Ashraf, Dean of the Hassan School of Business at Colorado State University Pueblo, to discuss his inspiring journey from Bangladesh to academic leadership in the United States. Dr. Ashraf shares how a deep appreciation for education, combined with a passion for finance, research, and student success, guided his path from central banking and doctoral studies to becoming a dean dedicated to expanding opportunities for diverse and first-generation students. Dr. Ashraf highlights the Hassan School of Business’s c