Most AI teams aren’t losing to the model.

They’re losing to bad prompts.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT’s Liz Gattra breaks down the invisible tax of vague instructions, blind trust in outputs and endless iteration loops that quietly burn tokens, waste GPU cycles and drag down ROI.

As generative AI moves into production, AI literacy becomes operational leverage — not a soft skill.

We cover:
• A practical prompt blueprint that improves output quality fast
• Why “confident but wrong” is more expensive than you think
• How precision reduces token spend and compute waste
• When to switch between ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude
• Why system prompts, agents and context engineering determine whether AI scales or spirals

Every vague prompt compounds.

The teams that win don’t just deploy models — they train people to think clearly, structure intent and treat prompts like lightweight programs with measurable results.

If you care about AI ROI, compute efficiency, and scaling generative AI in the enterprise, start here.

Precision isn’t optional. It’s a cost control strategy.

Support for this episode provided by: ExtraHop

More about this week's guest:

Liz Gattra is Director of Product Ownership at World Wide Technology’s Application Services practice. A former Agile Coach, IT manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Business Analyst, she has led enterprise agile transformations and built product ownership capabilities across internal and client teams. Liz develops and trains product owners to deliver measurable business value at scale. She holds a Master’s in Biology and Biomedical Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis and brings nearly 20 years of cross-industry IT experience.

Liz's top pick: The AI Adoption Gap Isn't Technical. It's Human.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

AI pilots are easy.
Scaling AI across a live network is not.

As organizations move beyond experimentation, the challenge isn’t better models — it’s building AI that operates like infrastructure: reliable, secure, and measurable.

In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, Matt Shorts, AVP of AI at Cox Communications, joins WWT’s Greg Schoeny to share how Cox moved AI from isolated pilots into production across a customer-facing network where uptime, trust, and scale matter daily.

You’ll learn:

• Why operating conditions expose bad AI decisions fast
• How to modernize without waiting for perfect data
• The risks of rushing into closed platforms
• Why momentum beats perfection
• How framing AI as augmentation — not replacement — drives adoption

This episode is for CIOs, infrastructure leaders, and platform teams responsible for deploying AI in complex, regulated environments.

The bottom line: AI only delivers value when it behaves like infrastructure.

And infrastructure rewards discipline — not hype.

More about this week's guests:

Greg Schoeny is Senior Vice President of Services and Strategic Solutions at WWT, leading services sales, business development, and architecture for the Global Service Provider (GSP) business. His team delivers outcome-driven solutions across AI, cloud, security, mobility, automation, and advisory services, supporting customers with professional services, managed services, staffing, and strategic consulting.

Matt Cox is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience driving digital transformation and product innovation. He specializes in AI strategy, multi-cloud optimization, and building high-performing teams. Matt has led successful product launches, developed IP strategies, and architected IoT solutions that unlock new revenue and operational efficiency, aligning technology with measurable business impact.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.

As enterprises rush to deploy AI, observability is emerging as the discipline that determines whether those investments create durable value—or quietly erode it. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Ivan Wintersteiger, Cisco's Tapan Shah and NVIDIA's Shashank Sabhlok discuss why observability, when treated as foundational, becomes the connective tissue between infrastructure, applications, security and user experience.

More about this week's guests:

Ivan Wintersteiger brings more than 20 years of experience across IT leadership, engineering, and business development, with a consistent focus on end-user experience and security. In his current role, Ivan leads the End User Computing practice, driving transformational solutions across modern device management, application delivery, and identity management to help organizations operate securely at scale.

Tapan Shah leads the Splunk AIOps products—IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk On-Call—within the Splunk Observability portfolio. With more than 20 years of experience across observability, systems and network management, application performance monitoring, and AIOps, Tapan has worked closely with large global enterprises across industries, including a significant portion of the Fortune 100. Based in California, he focuses on helping organizations gain end-to-end visibility and operational resilience at scale.

Shashank Sabhlok is a senior product manager in the NVIDIA Enterprise product group, where he leads initiatives around AI factory design and enterprise adoption to drive scalable, high-performance AI across organizations. Prior to this, he was the lead product manager for IBM watsonx.governance, IBM's generative AI governance solution, where he successfully led the product from inception to launch and beyond. He holds an MBAi (MBA + AI) degree from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering, and a BASc in Electrical Engineering with Distinction from the University of Waterloo.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.