How can the U.S. government keep pace with AI innovation while safeguarding its most sensitive data? In Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE+ NYSE Wired co-host Gemma Allen sits down with Knox Systems CEO Irina Denisenko to unpack the realities behind the high-stakes infrastructure powering federal cloud adoption. Denisenko traces her entrepreneurial journey from Class.com to founding Knox, revealing how firsthand experience with a costly, three-year authorization process inspired a radically faster model. She explains how Knox’s AI-managed cloud is cutting both time and cost, opening the door for SaaS innovators to serve government agencies without sacrificing security or scale.
The conversation goes deeper into the shifting threat landscape in the age of agentic AI, real-time monitoring and supply chain risk. Denisenko outlines why continuous observability and automated remediation are becoming essential as cyberattacks accelerate. She also explores the strategic implications of AI governance, arguing that speed and trust now define competitive advantage in public-sector technology. From supporting customers like Adobe and Celonis to preparing for new partnerships and product announcements at the AI Agent Conference, Denisenko lays out a roadmap for building resilient, future-ready systems at the intersection of innovation and regulation.
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Ashwarya Poddar, ConverzAI
How can the U.S. government keep pace with AI innovation while safeguarding its most sensitive data? In Mixture of Experts segment, theCUBE+ NYSE Wired co-host Gemma Allen sits down with Knox Systems CEO Irina Denisenko to unpack the realities behind the high-stakes infrastructure powering federal cloud adoption. Denisenko traces her entrepreneurial journey from Class.com to founding Knox, revealing how firsthand experience with a costly, three-year authorization process inspired a radically faster model. She explains how Knox’s AI-managed cloud is cutting both time and cost, opening the door for SaaS innovators to serve government agencies without sacrificing security or scale.
The conversation goes deeper into the shifting threat landscape in the age of agentic AI, real-time monitoring and supply chain risk. Denisenko outlines why continuous observability and automated remediation are becoming essential as cyberattacks accelerate. She also explores the strategic implications of AI governance, arguing that speed and trust now define competitive advantage in public-sector technology. From supporting customers like Adobe and Celonis to preparing for new partnerships and product announcements at the AI Agent Conference, Denisenko lays out a roadmap for building resilient, future-ready systems at the intersection of innovation and regulation.
play_circle_outlineConverzAI CEO Ashwarya Poddar on Agentic Virtual Recruiter Boosting Contingent Staffing Firms' Revenue via Phone, Text and Email Outreach
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play_circle_outlineHigh-Velocity Staffing Fixes Ghosting: NPS-Proven Improvements to Candidate Experience
In this interview from the Mixture of Experts AI Agent Conference 2026, Ashwarya Poddar, chief executive officer and founder of ConverzAI, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how agentic AI is transforming the high-velocity world of contingent workforce recruiting. Poddar explains how ConverzAI's virtual recruiter handles the full hiring workflow — sourcing candidates, engaging them across phone, text and email, and surfacing qualified applicants for final review. The platform directly addresses a defining industry failure: 95% of job applicants were hist...Read more
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Can you give a brief overview of your company—when it was founded, what you build, and the value it delivers to staffing firms?add
What problem were you trying to solve in the staffing industry, and how does your technology/agent improve recruiters' workflows and the candidate experience?add
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here at our NYSE CUBE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio that connects Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our Mixture of Expert Series, but also a preview of the Agent Conference coming up in May. Simon Chan and the growing agentic infrastructure builders are now grown into a full-blown conference. There'll be builders, there'll be operators, there'll be investors all coming together to figure out the agentic future. Ashwarya Poddar is the CEO and founder of ConverzAI. Thanks for coming on this preview, but also sneaking you into the Mixture of Expert Series. We actually have real experts, humans on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on.
Ashwarya Poddar
>> A pleasure. Thanks, John.
John Furrier
>> The conference is coming up, agentconference.com. They got a great URL. This is growing into being essentially a big conference. Started out as a community, builders, entrepreneurs, really mostly technical folks. Now it's coming into full-blown agent conference. This is the hottest area, and AI is actually creating a lot of value. Your company is in a really great vertical domain, highly targeted, and a great example. So take a minute to explain what you guys have built, what you're doing, what's the value proposition. Then I'll go into some of the cool things that you're building.
Ashwarya Poddar
>> Sure. Thanks, John. The company was started in November 2019, and we are focused on staffing. And in US, a large labor market is contingent workforce or contract workers, and it's a speed high velocity problem in that industry. We built a full agentic platform where our virtual recruiter is able to find candidates, talk to them over all kinds of channels, which is phone call, text, email, then really have a dynamic conversation with them, and then land them in front of the recruiters who then take decisions of which candidates are the best fit for the job. Essentially, we have really scaled the entire hiring efforts for these staffing companies, and are able to make a direct impact to the US labor market today. We feel proud to be part of this story and making an impact to the economy and helping more and more people get work. And the beauty in all of this from a technology standpoint, in terms of value prop that you said, for staffing companies, we are impacting their top line, obviously, as they're able to place more candidates for jobs, but also impact their bottom line because they are able to do it with the same set of folks in their team, but just to a lot more placements.
John Furrier
>> I mean, it's a great example of a workflow. And everyone has run a business or started a business or has worked in a department that says, "Hey, we need to hire more people," knows the problem. And the problem goes like this. Someone's busy, they hire someone to be a recruiter, or they hire a project manager and they go in, they send out resume, get resumes come in. It's a process. A lot of paper involved, a lot of manual work, but it's an end-to-end known process. Okay, so good fit for AI. The question I have for you is, one, what's some of those pain points goes away? Obviously velocity increases, but does this limit you or you have all verticals open? Talk about the new world, because this is a clearly great use case for a Copilot, an agent, a coworker. I mean, if you get it right, it can bring a lot of flow in, do the reasoning on credentials. What's the aperture of the application?
Ashwarya Poddar
>> So again, to some of the points here, John, is firstly, we are focused on the entire labor market, so we are not limited to a type of job. Second is the hardest problem that we started with was that 95% of candidates were applying for jobs and never hearing back, so they were completely ghosted. And the reason for that is because staffing is a high velocity space. So recruiters have to find candidates within 24 to 72 hours and bring them in front of their clients so that they can make the decision to hire. At that point, when you have a lot of jobs, a lot of candidates applying for roles, the problem suddenly becomes very acute. And so with the power of technology and with the agent running the full workflow, we supercharged all these staffing companies to really scale their outreach and find candidates and really talk to them. And for the candidates, now everybody is hearing back from these staffing companies. It was interesting that yesterday, CEO of a well-known staffing company mentioned that the total NPS score of the entire industry in 2022 was about 19. And then in 2023, it went to 30 and then 40, and it's been growing. And he said, "Ash, congratulations for what you have done for the industry and for the candidates." And so I think this problem is just, we are just getting started with the power of agentic AI.
John Furrier
>> Well, congratulations. And I think it's a great example of what Jensen Huang was saying at NVIDIA GTC. It's a horizontally scalable, large scale distributed computing market with data, and then you got the domain expertise where agents can play. But when you have this kind of automation with well-known workflows like hiring, you can really do some really good things and staffing is one of them. I got to, talk about the momentum. Where are you guys now? Obviously, it's a perfect product market fit. What are some of the milestones and momentum points for you?
Ashwarya Poddar
>> For us, right now we try to measure things in terms of our scale. We are processing about 300,000 unique jobs in the US labor market today and communicating with about a million plus candidates every month. So when we say communicating, which means making phone calls, text, email, all forms of communication, inclusive. And then as we look forward, and we are putting about tens of thousands of candidates to work today in the year. We want to eventually move the entire unemployment rate needle. That is what is the ultimate for us.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations. I guess my final question for you is, what's going to be on your mind at the Agent Conference in May in the Hilton and New York City, the big event, agentconference.com? What are you going to be talking about? What's the top track? What are you thinking about? What's the narrative? What are some of the conversations? What are you looking to accomplish? Take us through what's going to happen in May for you.
Ashwarya Poddar
>> For us, firstly, it's also about education. It's about letting everyone understand that now is the time. You don't want to lose out on thinking whether you want to bring in agent AI into your workflows. It's already getting late so it's time now. That's number one. The other aspect is also trying to understand what everyone else is, what are use cases and workflows where people are putting in the agent power. And thirdly, for us, what matters is how have we done it so that we can share what a true agentic platform is versus an LLM workflow versus an agent workflow? What's a true autonomous agentic platform looking like and how that creates a compounding effect in any business and give the example of what we have done for staffing business to show the real compounding effect power.
John Furrier
>> Well, it's awesome news. And again, this is just an AI native world kicking in. I like it because it's got cloud native scale and AI native interface and value. Congratulations, and we'll see you at the conference.
Ashwarya Poddar
>> Thank you. Thank you, John. Have a good one.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with a preview of the agentconference.com, but also part of our Mixture of Expert Series here at our NYSE student part of the NYSE Wired program, a CUBE original and an open network. Brian Baumann and the entire team here at theCUBE really looking forward to this event. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier