Why Observability Has Become the Control Plane for Enterprise AI

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.