Foundry’s Keith Shaw on AI burnout, non-traditional media, and what he looks for in pitches

If you’re a fan of Foundry (formerly IDG), you’ve likely listened to one of Keith Shaw’s interviews. Keith currently hosts both CIO’s “DEMO” and Computerworld’s “Today in Tech” series and has turned both into must-listen content. 

I recently had the opportunity to chat with him about what he really thinks of AI, the rise of non-traditional media, and what he looks for in a pitch. We hope you’ll enjoy his insights in the transcript of our conversation below. 

We love CIO’s “DEMO” and Computerworld’s “Today in Tech” segments. What made you want to lead these? 

For CIO’s DEMO—there’s not a lot of people that cover product news, product announcements, or product demos. From what I’ve seen, most of the product demos you see are usually marketing-animation type things that are trying to explain what a product is, but not actually showing what a product is. So, this is an opportunity to come in and talk to us for 15 minutes and have a brief interview with me, and then really just show the product. I guess that’s what I’m trying to get out of DEMO is—show me the product that you have and why it’s cool. This has resonated with a lot of the companies that we’ve been fortunate to interview with.

When I took over Computerworld’s Today in Tech I thought, “What would I be interested in?” And that’s kind of where I judge when I’m being pitched on something. I try to broaden it so that it’s not the 50,000 foot view, but it’s just one level below that.

Do you ever get burnt out on a certain topic (e.g., AI)? 

Every time I think that we may have exhausted the topic, some other news comes out and some other development happens. Whether it’s DeepSeek or agentic AI, there is always something that is moving the technology forward.

I usually cover the AI angle from the enterprise perspective. I think what the AI hype bubble people are missing is that they’re still covering it from a general technology or a general consumer front. And again, from what I’ve seen from the companies that have come in for DEMO is that they are getting real value out of generative AI. They are improving their existing products by adding generative AI and taking a careful approach to what they’re adding.

What are your views on the emergence of new media (e.g., podcasts, Substacks, etc.)?  How will they impact “traditional” media? 

If you work long enough in the industry, you start seeing that everything is cyclical. And so this is the same question with this type of media, whether it’s podcasting or Substacks, that we saw when blogging first started coming around. There’s a lot of media that’s now considered traditional media—TechCrunch, I think, started out as a blog.

There’s always a new media company out there that thinks that they have it, and then they go through ups and downs.

You must receive hundreds of pitches a day. What do you look for in a pitch? 

There are pitches that annoy me, and it’s generally pitches of people that don’t know what I do. Today in Tech [pitches] are tougher because I think a lot of PR people will be told, “Hey, John Smith is the CEO of Company X and Company X. Get them on a podcast.” Well, no, you’ve got to come with something better. You can’t just come on the show without a point of view or a topic idea.

Sometimes, I have to actually get the topic ideas out of the PR person. They’ll be like, “Hey, so-and-so wants to talk about the trend of generative AI.” Well, where have you been for the last three years? We’ve already done that. You don’t have to watch every episode of Today in Tech to understand how to pitch me, but read through the headlines and the descriptions of the shows I’ve done on generative AI. We did six episodes in January about agentic AI from all sorts of angles, so I need something that’s more than that, or I need something that I haven’t thought of yet.

If you can’t come up with an idea, just look at the last three weeks of news and then say, can you tie your topic to something that’s going on out there? The pitches that I get that annoy me—it just feels like people aren’t doing their homework. What I’m trying to do with Today in Tech for future episodes is deeper conversations about bigger ideas and bigger topics. I can’t just take up a CEO and just put them on the show.