TheCUBE team descended on the iconic New York Stock Exchange last week for an electrifying blend of cutting-edge discussions for theCUBE + NYSE Wired Cyber & AI Innovators Summit, set to broadcast on Dec. 17.

During the latest episode of the CUBE Podcast, theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) unpacked the latest trends shaping AI, cybersecurity and business transformation. The week wasn’t without surprises, with a sudden visit from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. But at the heart of theCUBE’s coverage was a new initiative: building a digital bridge between theCUBE’s Silicon Valley and New York studios. By connecting these physical locations, theCUBE is pioneering a hybrid content creation model.

“This isn’t just about content,” Furrier said. “We’re creating a real-time, open-source media ecosystem — a kind of video LinkedIn that empowers communities across industries.”

With conversations spanning AMD’s competitive edge against Nvidia, Broadcom’s trillion-dollar trajectory, the future of AI-driven business models, Trump’s surprise visit and the future of Lina Kahn, chair of the United States Federal Trade Commission, theCUBE team set the stage for insightful dialogue at the intersection of innovation and enterprise.

NYSE Wired insights and Trump’s visit

After being named Time’s “Person of the Year,” Trump rang the opening bell Thursday at the New York Stock Exchange. While not everyone has been a Trump supporter, it’s hard not to hope the economic outlook turns positive, according to Vellante.

“You know I’m not a MAGA red hat. But I mean, how can you not be rooting for this guy to drive the economic growth?” he said. “There’s so much momentum now behind the economy — if we can get GDP growth up to 4 or 5%. We [have] to talk about what he’s thinking about doing with crypto. There’s kind of a conundrum there.”

Cryptocurrency has been experiencing a price surge since the U.S. election, and Trump has advocated for a national bitcoin reserve. It’s challenging to square that circle, Vellante added.

“It’s kind of Trump logic, right? On the one hand, he’s saying, ‘Look, the U.S. has to be the reserve currency. All these BRIC companies trying to take us on, no way. We’re going to penalize you if you try to make your reserve currency the reserve currency,’” Vellante said. “But at the same time, what do you think the biggest threat to the U.S. reserve currency is? I would think crypto is a big threat to any currency.”

Lina Khan being replaced

Last week, Trump said he would name Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Lina Khan. That’s not necessarily great for big tech, Vellante pointed out.

“I think it’s going to be OK, because I think he wants to drive tech leadership. I think he wants to end big tech censorship of right-wing narratives, and so that’s probably where his focus is going to go,” Vellante said. “But Ferguson said he’s going to focus on ending major firms’ vendetta against competition, and so not sure exactly what that means.”

Censorship is likely to be a focus, according to Vellante. But a big question remains.

“If he’s for U.S. competitiveness and U.S. exceptionalism, what happens to the thrust to try to break up Google or try to break up Amazon, or stick their foot on the neck of Microsoft?” he asked.

Predictions for 2025

Looking ahead to 2025, theCUBE will continue to provide coverage, whether that’s via NYSE Wired or elsewhere. Next year, there will be three key areas to keep an eye on, according to Furrier.

“Cybersecurity is going to continue to be hot. You’re going to see cloud-native and application developers, as the gen AI wave starts preparing, are things like Kubernetes, getting infrastructure layers above the hardware hardened for growth, and the foundational piece,” Furrier said. “Then the third layer is the data AI interactions. Those will be the three main pillars in our core area that will explode in conversations, content, events, topics, keynotes, benchmarks.”

In terms of big sweeping areas, there’s likely to be the emergence of some large-scale use cases that are first-generational in the tech industry, according to Furrier. That will involve large-scale managed service providers around things like call center services that only big companies, such as Nvidia Corp. and Amazon.com Inc., could have.

“I think Nvidia, the Databricks, the Snowflakes will have use cases of large-scale data layers that are hard to replicate,” Furrier said. “You’ll start to see emergence of scaled platforms, meaning stuff that only big, scaled-up players will do.”

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Donald Trump, 45th U.S. president and 47th president-elect
Brian J. Baumann, director of Capital Markets at NYSE
Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam Software
Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong
Bill McDermott, chairman and CEO of ServiceNow
Brian Benedict, co-founder of Arcee.ai and Hugging Face
Ramine Roane, CVP at AMD
Ron Turcotte, Canadian jockey
Kevin Hawkins, regional head for capital markets at NYSE
Lynn Martin, president NYSE Group
JD Vance, U.S. senator
Kristen Welker, American television journalist
Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Andrew N. Ferguson, chair of the FTC
David O. Sacks, South African-American entrepreneur and author
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom
Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Molham Aref, CEO at RelationalAI
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase
Michael Saylor, founder and executive chairman at MicroStrategy
Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States
Bruno Aziza, Group VP, Data, BI and AI at IBM
John Mack, former CEO and chairman of Morgan and Stanley
George Gilbert, senior analyst at theCUBE Research
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla
Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and educational technology at NYU

Here’s the full episode of theCUBE Pod:

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Photo: SiliconANGLE