Every vendor in the industry is slapping the word "agentic" on their roadmap. But, what is agentic AI, really? And should IT leaders care?

In this episode, we bring together three voices with very different answers: a skeptic who says it's rebranded orchestration, a strategist who says the reasoning layer is genuinely new, and a founder betting his company on it. Together, they cut through the noise and answer the question every IT leader is quietly asking: what should I actually do about agentic AI in 2026?

Key takeaways:

• Why 80% of AI projects fail — and it has nothing to do with the technology
• The difference between "embedded agents" you're already using and custom agents you probably don't need yet
• "Start with your decisions, not your technology" — a practical framework for mid-market teams
• How to move AI from "pet project" to operationalized infrastructure

Featuring: Sean Larkin, Principal Architect at Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company | Scott Trump, Founder & CEO of Treva AI (former AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle) | Skip Vanderburg, Founder of Prioriti AI

#AgenticAI #MidMarketIT #AIStrategy #TheCatalyst #Softchoice #ITLeadership

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

When David Koopmans' IT manager started sending strange messages to employees, David knew something was wrong. By then, threat actors had been inside his network for 30 days.

What followed was a ransomware nightmare that cost $14 million, put David in the hospital, and ended with him being let go—despite years of warning leadership they needed to invest in security.

In this episode, we follow David's story from chaos to recovery, with expert context from Fortinet's incident response team on what actually happens when the call comes in (spoiler: it's always Friday afternoon), the critical mistakes that make attacks worse, and why 30 minutes a week of preparation could be the difference between survival and catastrophe.

Key Takeaways:

• Why "we're not a target" is the most dangerous assumption in securit
• The common mistake that lets attackers hit you twice
• How tabletop exercises helped one company respond to a near-identical real incident
• The 30-minute weekly habit that separates prepared teams from overwhelmed ones

Featuring:

David Koopmans (CIO, MMT Ambulance), Josh Brewer (Softchoice), John Simmons (FortiGuard IR Lead, Americas), John Hollenberger (FortiGuard Proactive Lead)

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This episode is brought to you by Fortinet

When a cyber incident hits, the difference between chaos and recovery comes down to preparation. Learn how FortiGuard Incident Response Services can help your team respond faster and recover stronger at softchoice.com/fortinet

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Resources

• FortiGuard Incident Response Services: softchoice.com/fortinet

• Book: "Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises: From Planning to Execution" by John Hollenberger (No Starch Press, October 2024)

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.

Multi-cloud used to be a dirty word — something that happened to you through mergers, shadow IT, or teams gone rogue with corporate cards. But the walls came down, the standards converged, and best-of-breed finally seemed within reach. Then AI arrived with a whole new layer of complexity.

Or did it?

In this episode, we explore how agentic AI might actually solve the thing that made multi-cloud hard in the first place. Three cloud experts—Jack French from World Wide Technology, Alex Kozaris from Softchoice's AWS practice, and Ron Espinosa from Softchoice's Google Cloud team—break down what's changed, what matters for mid-market teams, and why the "gold record" might finally be possible.

Key Takeaways:

• Why 90% of organizations are already multi-cloud (whether they planned to be or not)

• How abstraction layers and platform engineering help smaller teams manage complexity

• What each major cloud does best: AWS for builders, Microsoft for productivity, Google for data/AI

• The compliance curve ball forcing some organizations into multi-cloud for AI governance

• How agentic AI creates "connective tissue" that makes integration problems irrelevant

Featuring:

• Jack French, Senior Director of Cloud, World Wide Technology

• Alex Kozaris, Public Cloud Leader for AWS, Softchoice

• Ron Espinosa, Google Cloud Category Director, Softchoice

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology.