The Shift: Your open questions about agents, honest discussions

For everyone looking to stay ahead of agentic change, this season of The Shift explores our rapidly evolving world from a full stack perspective, connecting technical professionals to the teams and tools that are here to help. Each week we create space for top questions from the community, bringing you unscripted conversations about critical cloud, data and AI concepts, so we can all level up together.

The Shift: Your open questions about agents, honest discussions is a technology podcast hosted by Microsoft, with 23 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Microsoft hosts The Shift: Your open questions about agents, honest discussions, a technology show with 23 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #8

  S2E8 | How do we draw agentic borders? — The Shift Podcast by Microsoft Azure

  Apr 28, 202629 minS2

  <p>As AI agents become more capable—and more autonomous—one question rises fast: How do we draw agentic borders? For many organizations, this is also a sovereignty question: what stays in-country, who can access it, and how do you enforce policy across systems and regions?</p><p></p><p>In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, leaders from Microsoft Azure explore the evolving boundaries between agents, humans, systems, and responsibility—and what it takes to keep trust and accountability as AI becomes more agentic.</p><p></p><p>The conversation covers:</p><p>What “agentic borders” mean in enterpr...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #7

  S2E7 | Should my IT team hire agents? — The Shift Podcast by Microsoft Azure

  Apr 21, 202628 minS2

  <p>As AI agents move from experimentation into real-world operations, many IT leaders are asking a new kind of workforce question: Should your IT team hire agents?</p><p></p><p>In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, members of the Microsoft Azure team explore how agentic AI is beginning to reshape IT operations, cloud management, and the future of technical work. Agents are emerging as powerful collaborators alongside humans in the loop—augmenting teams, automating repetitive tasks, and enabling a more proactive approach to managing complex systems.</p><p></p><p>This conversation digs into what agent ad...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #6

  S2E6 | Is Postgres the wave of the future? — The Shift Podcast by Microsoft Azure

  Apr 14, 202627 minS2

  <p>Postgres has long been a favorite of developers—but is it also the right foundation for the next generation of AI applications and agentic systems?</p><p></p><p>In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, members of the Microsoft Azure Database team unpack a question we’re hearing more frequently as organizations build AI-driven applications: Is Postgres the wave of the future?</p><p></p><p>The conversation explores how PostgreSQL databases are evolving to support modern workloads, including AI agents, cloud-native applications, and open-source innovation at scale. Our guests discuss what’s changing in the data l...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #5

  S2E5 | What senses do agents need to act? — The Shift Podcast by Microsoft Azure

  Apr 7, 202625 minS2

  <p>For AI agents to move from reasoning to action, they need more than text alone. But what “senses” actually matter?</p><p>In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, members of the Microsoft Foundry team discuss how multimodal inputs—such as text, vision, and speech—shape how agents perceive and interact with the world. The conversation explores what’s practical today, rather than assuming fully autonomous systems.</p><p>The discussion covers:</p><p>· Why multimodal AI expands what agents can understand.</p><p>· How vision, voice, and text models are combined in applications.</p><p>· The role of tools...

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #4

  S2E4 | Is context engineering the new RAG? — The Shift Podcast by Microsoft Azure

  Mar 31, 202628 minS2

  <p>As retrieval augmented generation (RAG) matures, teams are asking a new question: Is context engineering becoming more important than RAG itself?</p><p>In this episode of The Shift Podcast: Agentic Edition, members of the Microsoft Foundry team explore how context management, retrieval pipelines, and knowledge integration influence the quality of AI responses. The discussion doesn’t dismiss RAG—but examines how it’s evolving in more complex, enterprise scenarios.</p><p>Topics include:</p><p>· How context windows and retrieval strategies affect model behavior.</p><p>· The role of vector databases, knowledge bases, and hybrid search.</p><p>· Where rer...

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The Shift: Your open questions about agents, honest discussions. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.