Smart manufacturing has many facets. There's the convergence of IT and OT, and the security challenges that brings. In recent years we've seen Private 5G coming up, at least as a topic of conversation if not in actual adoption. Finally, the edge environments of those factories recently fell under the spell of AI too.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, we talked to Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at NTT Data, about all of these topics. What does Edge AI bring us and is private 5G finally delivering on years of promises? And what about the security issues associated with the convergence of IT and OT? And finally, how are all these developments interconnected?

Listen to this new episode of Techzine Talks now and let us know what you think.

A little bit of a change of pace this week, as we talk about how big technology companies invest in other companies and what underpins their acquisition strategy. During Cisco Live we had the opportunity to sit down with Derek Idemoto, SVP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments.

The pace at which Cisco launches products and services in the past four to five years is quite stunning. Especially when compared to the rather pedestrian pace at which the company moved forward prior to 2020, the difference is striking.

Cisco's strategy has never been to build everything from scratch, at least not in the past three of its four decades. It has done many acquisitions and also invests in a lot of companies. Sometimes investing turns into acquiring after a while, sometimes it doesn't.

In our chat with Idemoto, we talk about the rationale behind Cisco's approach. We specifically touch on the billion-dollar AI Investment Fund it set up last year. We dive into how Cisco determines when to invest and when to buy, what that means for the rest of the organization, what are some interesting areas of investment at the moment, and much more.

The work that Idemoto and his team are doing is a crucial part of how Cisco operates. It is therefore a crucial part to understand if one is to understand Cisco properly. If only because it means that the statement by Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel that Cisco is "the world's largest startup" actually holds water. It can move surprisingly quickly because of all of the investments and acquisitions, even though these also put a strain on the own organization.

Listen to this - in our humble opinion - interesting conversation now.

During PegaWorld, the annual conference where Pegasystems outlines its vision and has customers share their stories, we sat down with Pega CTO Don Schuerman and talked about what agentic AI means in the fields they're active in.

The Pega CTO sees a tendency in the industry to label anything with "a sprinkle of large language model fairy dust" as agentic AI. That's not how he and Pega look at it. He talks about a more comprehensive vision: true agentic AI designs, automates, executes, and optimizes the workflows and decisions that businesses depend on. This isn't about deploying thousands of agents indiscriminately—it's about implementing a few strategic, pragmatic agents that drive substantive business outcomes.

In this episode of Techzine Talks, we discuss the various GenAI and agentic components of Pega's platform, and how they interact to make agentic AI appealing to its customers. Pega Blueprint, a workflow designer, is an important part of it, but Pega will also add agentic capabilities to its appdev environment, and will introduce an Agentic Process Fabric to tie all of it together in an orderly and most importantly well-governed fashion.

According to Schuerman, it's a mistake to assume that underlying architecture is irrelevant in an AI-driven world. Listen to the podcast episode to hear why he thinks that is, and to hear much more about Pega's agentic vision, but more broadly also about agentic AI in general and how this relates to deployments in more challenging environments.