Your AI bill just stopped behaving like a software bill. For twenty years, IT leaders got very good at counting seats: buy a hundred, pay for a hundred. Then AI swapped the seat for a meter, and the number stopped holding still. This episode follows the burn from three vantage points: a financial analyst rationing a $250-a-month token budget he tore through in two days; the tech executive who watched enterprise AI bills climb 7x, 10x, 20x; and the IT leader at a 300-person company who refused...
Jul 29
27 min
Almost every machine you can buy today is technically an “AI PC.” Which is exactly why the label can’t tell you what to buy. This episode skips the hype and asks the question IT leaders are actually wrestling with: why now, and what happens if you wait? Because two things just landed on the same calendar — the end of Windows 10 support, and an AI-driven memory shortage pushing hardware prices up every quarter — and together they’re quietly taking the refresh decision out of your hands. In thi...
Jul 16
19 min
If you read the headlines, you'd think nearly every major employer marched its workforce back to the office five days a week. The data says otherwise. And so does the human cost when companies push it anyway. In this episode of The Catalyst, Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward, an anonymous 30-year IT veteran and former Marine, and Softchoice's Lisa Walkden lay out what return-to-office mandates are actually about — and what they cost the leaders who issue them. Here's what you'll take away: W...
Jul 1
31 min
There’s a quiet crisis running through IT leadership that nobody names in the meeting: the certainty that you’re in over your head, and that any minute now, someone’s going to find out. It comes with the job. And for women in tech, there’s a second layer underneath. In this episode of The Catalyst, from Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company, host Katey Teekasingh sits with three women who’ve lived imposter syndrome from every altitude: an IT director who wasn’t the first pick for her ro...
Jun 17
21 min
Somewhere in your organization, an AI decision is sitting on someone’s desk right now. Who owns it? In most mid-market companies, nobody does — or rather, it’s landed on the IT leader who was already doing three other jobs. In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Jeremy Wight, CTO of CareMessage — a patient engagement platform serving 22 million low-income patients across the US — who had to write his organization’s AI policy himself. No committee. No playbook. Just the weight of getting i...
Jun 3
27 min
Every IT leader has a “day one” story. The moment they opened the server closet, logged into the admin console, or reviewed the vendor contracts and realized the job they were hired for isn’t the job they actually have. In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Chris Schopf, an IT operations team lead who walked into a new job to find twelve-year-old servers, two unfinished infrastructure projects, and a team that had been poached by the outgoing manager. Then we hear from Leon Adato, a 37-y...
May 13
28 min
After our biggest season ever — nearly 80,000 downloads, a top 2% global ranking, and a documentary-style approach unlike any other show in B2B tech — host Katey Teekasingh is back to set up what's coming next. Season 8 takes on the questions mid-market IT leaders are quietly wrestling with right now: the rise of accidental AI ethics officers. The imposter feeling that follows even the most senior leaders. The SaaSpocalypse threatening to undo years of cost optimization. What happens when you...
May 7
2 min
For decades, building software meant doing eighty percent of the hard work before you had anything to show for it. AI just flipped that equation. And it's creating a risk nobody planned for. In this episode of The Catalyst, host Katey Teekasingh explores vibe coding — the technology that lets anyone build software by describing what they want in plain language. It was named Collins Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year. It's already inside your organization. And in late 2025, it might have taken...
Apr 22
24 min
What got you here won't get you there. For most IT leaders, the path to the top was paved with expertise — knowing the systems, owning the decisions, having the answers. But something happens when that playbook stops working. Not a crash. Not a failure. Just a quiet plateau that tells you something needs to change. In this episode of The Catalyst, we explore what's on the other side of that wall: a shift toward curiosity, empowerment, and a fundamentally different way of leading. Featuring le...
Apr 8
24 min
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 age...
Mar 11
28 min
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