The IT industry, not unlike biology, evolves at a measured pace. Innovations perceived as great leaps forward are more often usually just novel combinations of existing capabilities repurposed for new tasks. The wow factor generated by the latest vendor offerings is primarily due to their inventive approach to solving current problems, not the revelation of some unimaginably futuristic scientific advancement. It therefore behooves us to consider the solutions IT automation produces in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, terms.

One such executive taking this long view is Travis Greene, Director of Strategy for IT Operations Products at Micro Focus. As witness to a couple decades worth of progressions in IT operations, he has a clear-eyed perspective on where our industry is going, based on where we've been. Travis drops in to share his insights with us, and along the way we'll learn why developers will never be able to wish IT Ops away, the future role of humans in automated enterprises, & the biggest factors in making IT automation successful.

AI's impact on people, organizations, and countries is now so far-reaching there soon won't be any aspect of our lives left untouched by it. To even begin understanding how wide-ranging the effect of artificial intelligence is currently, we undertake a wide-ranging discussion with Neil Sahota, AI advisor to the United Nations. Neil takes us on a grand tour of some really exciting ways AI's capabilities are being used around the world today. He also introduces us to a thinking framework he developed that can guide us on how to harness AI's capabilities to create disruptive advances.

Along the way we'll learn what the biggest challenge is for organizations deploying artificial intelligence, the unheralded metric which best captures the impact of AI on business & IT operations, & what the biggest area of growth will be for artificial intelligence over the next 3 years.

We've all heard the term "growing the pie" in the context of enlarging an economic opportunity to enrich more people. That kind of pie growth is visible today in the automation & AI space, where swelling revenue streams are accelerating prosperity for software vendors & service providers. This in turn is driving the formation of an automation- & AI-centered business ecosystem which ultimately will have a significant macroeconomic impact on numerous industries. At least that's the prediction of Jay McBain from Forrester research who, perhaps more than anyone else, has devoted himself to studying this ecosystem.

Jay's insights are highly sought after, which is why Channel Partners Magazine named him their 2021 Channel Influencer of the Year. In this episode we catch up with Jay, who shares his vast erudition with us on the mind-boggling number of market opportunities going unmet by automation providers; the biggest disruptions we'll see in the coming years for the automation and AI ecosystem; & why every company is becoming a tech company.