The Digital Revolution with Jim Kunkle

When Every Millisecond Matters: Observability at Massive Scale with Todd Persen

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2281303/fan_mail/new] A 10 minute delay between an incident and the data that explains it is not a tooling problem, it is a business problem. We sit down with Todd Pearson, CTO and co-founder of Hydrolix, to unpack why milliseconds now determine whether you stop fraud, keep a streaming event online, or lose a customer before your team even sees the alert. We talk about the real mechanics of modern observability across distributed systems: where latency hides in the pipeline, how it inflates MTTR, and why “monitoring everything” collapses when log volume reaches petabyte scale. Todd shares what he learned building time series infrastructure at InfluxData and why general purpose stores can become painfully expensive for logs, metrics, traces, and high cardinality fields like user IDs. If your observability budget is growing faster than your infrastructure budget, you will recognize the pattern immediately. From there we go forward into 2026 trends: edge computing and CDN telemetry, bots that look human thanks to agentic AI, and the shift from human dashboards to agents that query data directly. We explore what “headless” observability could look like, why query performance becomes the limiting factor for AI SRE, and how predictive approaches may finally start to shorten time to remediation toward zero. If reliability is your moat in a world where code gets cheaper, this is the playbook. Subscribe for more conversations on digital transformation, share this with your SRE or platform team, and leave a review with the biggest observability challenge you are facing right now. Referral Links StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/c/5142511674195968  Contact Digital Revolution  * Email: Jim@JimKunkle.com  Follow Digital Revolution On: * YouTube @ www.YouTube.com/@Digital_Revolution  * Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/digitalrevolutionwithjimkunkle/  * LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14354158/  If you found value from listening to this audio release, please add a rating and a review comment.  Ratings and review comments on all podcasting platforms helps me improve the quality and value of the content coming from Digital Revolution.  I greatly appreciate your support and Viva la Revolution!

The New Industrial Workforce: Humans + AI Agents On The Shop Floor

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2281303/fan_mail/new] AI is quietly rewriting industrial work, and it’s not the “robots are coming” story people expect. We’re seeing AI agents show up as proactive teammates on the shop floor, watching sensor streams, spotting anomalies, generating work orders, and guiding technicians step by step. When intelligence moves from a passive tool to a digital coworker, the day-to-day reality of manufacturing, energy, logistics, and maintenance starts to change fast. We walk through why this is happening now: industrial systems have become too complex for any human to monitor in real time, the skilled trades workforce is aging and retiring, and edge computing finally makes it practical to run AI directly on equipment and rugged devices. The result is support at the moment of need, not after the fact, with knowledge that scales across shifts and sites instead of living only in a few veterans’ heads. From the leadership side, we dig into what augmented intelligence looks like for supervisors and plant managers: clearer maintenance forecasts, smarter staffing, visible training gaps, and safety that becomes predictive instead of reactive. We also tackle the big fear head-on: AI agents don’t replace the deeply human parts of industrial work like improvisation in chaotic environments, ethical judgment, and responsibility for outcomes. The real future is a hybrid workforce where humans bring judgment and hands-on skill, and AI brings speed, memory, pattern recognition, and 24/7 vigilance. If you’re thinking about predictive maintenance, AI in manufacturing, digital twins, or the future of the industrial workforce, this conversation will help you see what’s practical right now. Subscribe, share this with a teammate, and leave a review with your take: where should an AI agent help first on your shop floor? Referral Links StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/c/5142511674195968  Contact Digital Revolution  * Email: Jim@JimKunkle.com  Follow Digital Revolution On: * YouTube @ www.YouTube.com/@Digital_Revolution  * Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/digitalrevolutionwithjimkunkle/  * LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14354158/  If you found value from listening to this audio release, please add a rating and a review comment.  Ratings and review comments on all podcasting platforms helps me improve the quality and value of the content coming from Digital Revolution.  I greatly appreciate your support and Viva la Revolution!

Is Artificial Intelligence a Chaos God?

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2281303/fan_mail/new] AI is starting to sound like mythology. We hear that it “wants,” it “decides,” it’s “out of control,” and it’s “taking over” and the more complex the systems get, the easier it is to treat them like forces beyond human control. So we tackle a question that’s provocative for a reason: is artificial intelligence a chaos god, or are we projecting ancient fears onto modern machines?  We walk through the human habit of mythologizing what we don’t fully understand, then connect that pattern to today’s machine learning and generative AI boom. We break down the traits that make AI feel supernatural: unpredictable behavior from probabilistic models, the illusion of omniscience from massive training data, omnipresence as AI becomes infrastructure, shape-shifting personas, and the growing reality of agentic systems and autonomy drift. If you’ve ever felt like AI is simultaneously everywhere and impossible to pin down, there’s a clear reason and it isn’t magic.  From there, we get practical. The real risks aren’t “AI becoming a deity,” but leaders acting like it is: surrendering human agency, outsourcing ethics, freezing governance because the tech feels too complex, and letting extreme narratives replace disciplined decision-making. We ground the conversation in what AI actually is: mathematics, computation, optimization, and pattern prediction at scale. And we offer better working metaphors for business and policy leaders: AI as a mirror, a force multiplier, a probabilistic engine, and a new layer of infrastructure.  If you want clearer AI strategy, responsible AI deployment, stronger data governance, and better human-in-the-loop decisions, hit play. Then subscribe, share this with a leader on your team, and leave a review with your biggest question about using AI without giving up control. Referral Links StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/c/5142511674195968  Contact Digital Revolution  * Email: Jim@JimKunkle.com  Follow Digital Revolution On: * YouTube @ www.YouTube.com/@Digital_Revolution  * Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/digitalrevolutionwithjimkunkle/  * LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14354158/  If you found value from listening to this audio release, please add a rating and a review comment.  Ratings and review comments on all podcasting platforms helps me improve the quality and value of the content coming from Digital Revolution.  I greatly appreciate your support and Viva la Revolution!

The Rise of Micro‑AI: Why Small Models Are the Next Big Disruption

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2281303/fan_mail/new] The AI world loves a spectacle: huge cloud models, massive parameter counts, and data centers that feel bigger than the problems they’re meant to solve. But the real shift is happening somewhere quieter and far more useful: micro AI, compact on-device models that run directly on the tools people actually use. When intelligence moves to the edge, it gets faster, more private, and more reliable, because it no longer depends on shipping your data to the cloud and waiting for a response. We walk through the core reasons edge AI is taking off right now. Hardware finally caught up, with neural engines, GPUs, and accelerators showing up in everyday laptops, phones, and industrial controllers. Model optimization techniques like quantization, pruning, distillation, and architecture tuning are shrinking models by orders of magnitude while keeping strong performance for specific tasks. And industry pressure for real-time inference is only rising, especially in manufacturing, energy, logistics, aviation, and healthcare where milliseconds and uptime are everything. We also dig into what makes micro AI different from generalist “do-everything” systems: it’s mission-specific. These specialist models can detect a particular defect, interpret a narrow set of sensor patterns, or support a defined workflow with more predictability and lower cost. Running locally keeps sensitive data in place, strengthening privacy, compliance, and data sovereignty, and the economics change dramatically when the marginal cost of inference approaches zero. If you’re thinking about practical AI deployment, edge computing, on-device privacy, or building a hybrid strategy that pairs big models with small models, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s tired of cloud-only answers, and leave a review with your biggest question about micro AI. Referral Links StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/c/5142511674195968  Contact Digital Revolution  * Email: Jim@JimKunkle.com  Follow Digital Revolution On: * YouTube @ www.YouTube.com/@Digital_Revolution  * Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/digitalrevolutionwithjimkunkle/  * LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14354158/  If you found value from listening to this audio release, please add a rating and a review comment.  Ratings and review comments on all podcasting platforms helps me improve the quality and value of the content coming from Digital Revolution.  I greatly appreciate your support and Viva la Revolution!

Making AI Work: Marvin Martinez’s Playbook for Real Results

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2281303/fan_mail/new] Most leaders don’t need another AI tool. They need a way to make AI work inside the enterprise without the projects drifting into a quiet “proof of concept” graveyard. We get practical with Marvin J. Martinez, co-founder of Bandsaw.ai, on why AI initiatives stall and what it actually takes to operationalize AI with speed, clarity, and measurable business impact. We talk through Marvin’s “one problem, one win” rule for AI implementation, plus a grounded view on data readiness: you don’t need perfect data, you need useful data. Emails, CRM notes, spreadsheets, and support replies already contain the patterns your team follows every day. The key is to start with what you have, build a simple MVP quickly, iterate, and retrain based on real feedback instead of waiting months for an overbuilt system. We also dig into the human side of AI adoption, including how leaders can reduce fear, involve frontline experts, and keep humans in the loop so AI augments work instead of threatening it. You’ll hear concrete workflow automation examples from staffing and service businesses, plus a locksmith story that shows how one missed call per week can quietly add up to thousands in lost revenue and how a lightweight AI agent can help capture it. If you’re serious about enterprise AI, customer service AI, and AI workflow automation that improves KPIs, response times, and ROI, this conversation gives you a repeatable playbook you can apply immediately. Subscribe for more practical AI and digital transformation insights, share this with a leader who’s stuck in pilot mode, and leave a review with the workflow you want to improve next. After the episode, please visit Bandsaw.ai  Referral Links StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/c/5142511674195968  Contact Digital Revolution  * Email: Jim@JimKunkle.com  Follow Digital Revolution On: * YouTube @ www.YouTube.com/@Digital_Revolution  * Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/digitalrevolutionwithjimkunkle/  * LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14354158/  If you found value from listening to this audio release, please add a rating and a review comment.  Ratings and review comments on all podcasting platforms helps me improve the quality and value of the content coming from Digital Revolution.  I greatly appreciate your support and Viva la Revolution!