AI Doesn’t Break Where You Think: How Storage and Data Readiness Now Decide AI Success

AI is working. Until it isn’t.

Not because the model failed, but because something behind it did.

In this episode, recorded live at NVIDIA GTC, WWT’s Mike Trojecki and Everpure’s Kaycee Lai talk through what starts to show up once AI moves into real use. Data that’s harder to access than expected. Systems that slow things down. Security and governance questions that weren’t part of the original plan.

It’s a different kind of conversation than most. Less about what AI can do, more about what it takes to actually run it inside a business.

There’s a shift happening underneath it all. AI is starting to behave like a core application, which means it inherits the same expectations around reliability, performance and control.

And that’s usually where things get complicated.

More about this week's guests:

Mike Trojecki brings 25+ years of experience across security, cloud, and AI, starting with his service in the U.S. Air Force supporting White House and Air Force One missions. He’s led emerging tech practices at top integrators and now leads the AI Practice at World Wide Technology, driving high-performance AI infrastructure and data strategies.

Kaycee Lai is a data and AI leader with 20+ years of experience driving innovation and enterprise transformation. At Pure Storage, he leads Enterprise AI and Analytics strategy. As founder and former CEO of Promethium, he pioneered Data Fabric, helping organizations unlock more accessible, usable data.

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.