Techstrong TV July 23, 2025

Be very quiet. I'm hunting CEOs. You're watching Textron Game.

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. It's Alan Shimmel and you're watching Textron Gang.

Yeah, it, it definitely seems like there's, uh, some bounties out there on CEOs. They're becoming a bit of an endangered species, though. The funny thing is, every time you lose one, you get one.

So sometimes with this new thing with co-CEOs, you get two. But we're gonna talk about that SharePoint, who uses SharePoint, but SharePoint security, uh, it spending all kinds of good stuff here on the gang. Today.

We got a great gang to talk about it with you. They're some of our regulars. Let me introduce you to them.

We have Skate Scar Seller with that r in there. Hard for me to do, but we got it. We've got our resident, uh, true North security person, Chris Blak, and Mitch Ashley, as well as the dean, Mike Ard.

Welcome, welcome gang. We got a lot to talk about. So, Mike, CEOs are dropping CEOs, excuse me, CEOs are dropping like flies.

And so would seem, there was a report out that suggested CEOs in general, the turnover is a lot higher and including in the tech sector. And of course, we've seen some infamous stuff now with the, the whole Coldplay scenario involving astronomer. And, uh, I believe Blackstone also replaced the CEO for, I think it's QTES Realty.

Is that how? I think that's how that said. But, um, apparently they felt that he wasn't driving the company maybe hard enough.

And, um, this also comes in the heels of, we saw turnover at Intel early in this year. We saw a lot of drama around open AI and not having a CEO for half a second. Um, Alan, what's you taking?

What's going on here? Is there just more pressure? Is this the bro culture at work or something else is happening around the economy?

Maybe. You know, like many things in life, Mike, there's no simple answer to complex problems. And I, I think in this particular case, there's more than one answer.

Look, I would start off by saying, if you wanna be a CEO, probably try to stay off the kiss cam with your mistress. Just say it. Right?

So, but you know, kidding aside, those poor two people ha well, poor, they look it. Um, but the, the bigger issue there is that all of a sudden morals matter, ethics and morals matter in this country, in this market. I know, Chris, you wanna jump in?

Go ahead, but, and then I'll come back. There's more to the why CEOs are dropping. Y you know, I, I, uh, I live, we have a roommate, you know, here, one of my oldest friends, Ian Nielsen, who's a musician and, and a sound engineer.

We talk a lot about the, the history of, of, of communications media, right? And it, we always come back to the fact that it's a fairly short arc. We're talking a hundred years.

You know, the oldest person alive today was born before there was radio and music and, you know, vinyl and everything else. And, and we, we've gotten through this process where we have sort of run through all the human stories and the, to this point, the, the, the, the Odysseus is a return, the hero's arc when, you know, this grand hero's gonna save the company and do the things. It looks pretty well for a while, but it's brittle.

And with a lot of transparency, you know, uh, Coldplay, um, it starts to show the weaknesses. But there are other stories. And we know in, in business that sometimes they work, you know, the heroes return, you know, when you leave and you come back and home is different, but so are you.

But that's okay, right? The hobbits return at the, of the Lord of the rinks, right? These are also stories that work.

And we know in companies, when you don't just perform, you actually do the things that tends to survive the problems that happen all the time. And if you don't and the world gets more transparent around you, well, it might not be a good plan anymore. Yep.

But the, the issue here is do we care about morals and ethics? Or if it's, to your point, Chris, if the CEO's bringing home the bacon, we don't give a crap who they're hanging out with at the Coldplay concert. But there's more to it too, guys.

There's, there's also an issue of, 'cause there's so many confluent things going on here, CEOs who aren't adapting to the new reality of ai, to the new reality of perhaps a new world order, right? Sovereignty, it, sovereignty in these kinds of things, CEOs, frankly, that have held on a really long time. And, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And then the reformers come in and, you know, want a clean house. Um, you know, I think it's all of these trends where the economic chaos, I, I, I put it in this article right about, you know, taco and I, I'm not talking about President Trump, taco, you know, you got tech ai, couple other things in there. And so there, there we we're.

It's sort of a perfect storm kind of, uh, moment where air fresh leadership is on the agenda. Fresh leadership is on the agenda. What worked before may not work going forward.

You've got to toe the line when it comes to listening to your board who holds the purse strings. You've gotta be a good advocate or hero or image for your customer. And look, maybe it is the end of the tech bro thing.

Maybe as I wrote in the article, the hoodie wear and tweet storming tech bro, CEO just isn't the cool dude in town anymore. Maybe that CE o's putting on a sports jacket now and wearing a college shirt. I'm gonna bring up ai.

'cause there's a lot of topics, a lot of discussion about can AI replace CEOs. And I know the AI lab at the director of the lab at A MIT said he thought about 80% of a CEO's job could be done by ai. But my question to you is, if AI could do a better job than a human CEO, would the board replace them without AI Today?

Maybe not, but in the future, absolutely. In a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.

If they could better financial performance of the company strategy, all that. Absolutely. I mean, it's gonna take someone who has the, the, the cahones to break the barrier, right?

Like Branch Rickey bringing Jackie Robinson in. Do you know what I mean? But once that dam is broke, I think you'll see it.

Chris, what were you gonna say? I was just gonna say, I think the question is not just for CEOs with the rest of us, when you have 80% of your time freed up, what do you do with it? And if the answer is nothing, yeah, in that case, the board's gonna replace you.

Sorry, Kate. I, I think, I think, hold on. Wait, hold on a second.

On that Mitch point. You can't replace CEOs with AI because somebody has to actually sign something and be accountable for the SEC and the rules and regs. So there's gonna always be somebody sitting there who can go to jail and things go wrong.

That's a great job for someone. I'll volunteer for that. I think at the, at the end of the day when we're talking about, um, I think like with the Coldplay situation, and, you know, this whole idea that the focus became more on what was happening for what the CEO was doing as opposed to what the company was doing, that's where things became uncomfortable for the company, right?

But what's interesting is how some morals play into companies and it's like, okay, well we can't have this. And yet within, I hate to say this, but within our government, some, some of these crazy, like, you can do whatever you want and, and you're still gonna be this leader. You know, it's, it really depends.

At the end of the day, it depends who your followers are. And there are some who are just te one, and it doesn't seem to matter what they do or what they believe or what they say. And there's others that, wow, you step out of line once and you're gone.

So I think it's a very complicated issue, But I, I think it is personality driven, to your point, and a bit of a cult of personality, right? And, and sometimes though, you know, the time comes where they overthrow the, the depo and the cult of personality doesn't work. But, but here's the thing.

You know, this is why I say there's so many different, you know, currents in this water. You're A CEO who highly believes in DEI, Tim Cook, or, you know, some of these folks, all of a sudden you find yourself at odds with, with, you know, present day, you know, uh, morals or you don't believe in DEI or you, you know, all of these things. And, and you know, because that pendulum swings.

And so do you want a CEO that swings with it? Or who has a true north At the end of the day, I think the true north matters because you want to be able to, I think as a CEO be predictable in, in the patterns. You have to be smart.

You have to know strategize, but they also have to know the horse. You have to know who you're betting on. Right?

Well, You gotta read the room too, Chris. You got your hand up, You know, Kalen, you know, I've had a longest of this conversation about this, you know, so, so we have a history of it, right? You know, and, and you know, I'm always talking, I'm always trying to look back and Kate, your comments make you just think of the environment that allows that to, you know, is that a stable environment or is that just transitory?

Is that something that worked for a couple years, a couple decades? Even a century. Things have changed a lot.

And I see in this the fragile story, you know, this whole idea, the comic, you know, the Sergeant Rock comics I grew up on, still love them. Um, where the bureau's gonna come in, and they do. And it's, we see it play out in Hollywood.

We've seen it play out in companies. We grew up with five companies. We can see now we see hundreds, thousands, millions.

And that's a fragile story. It's not sustainable. It'll work sometimes, but not often.

It's a saber tooth story, right? You know, they, it'll appear for a while. As soon as conditions change, it can't sustain it.

And Kate, you know, that, that we all, at the end of the day, I think I've done a decent job in my career, and I've been questioned on this, but I'm like, aside from morals and ethics, I don't have the time. I don't have the time for the bs, but I'd rather to focus on, I don't care what my competitors are doing very much, right? I'm not gonna spend my time trying to get inside their systems, move forward and just 'cause this, so this hero, you know, fragile hero cycle has worked for, you know, part of our lifetimes, or all of it doesn't mean it's gonna last.

And look at the world, everyone can see everything. It's not, you know, it's not the exile days, it's not secret, secret, hidden things. You may, you may see a lot of things that aren't true, but your, the, the ability to hide something that is true is tenable.

Well, just speaking from my own experience that, that it seems that companies that are, you know, built by a person, a self-made whatever, entrepreneur, startup person, or they start a grocery chain or whatever it might be, those tend to be where that person is, the strong personality of the company. And Alan, I think you might agree with me, you know, startup companies, smaller companies are very personality driven by the CEO. I mean, it's built around that person, even if it's not the person that started the company.

Whereas I think when you get into other companies where this CEO could be replaced by the next one, bottom, bottom line, it comes down to the financial performance of the company, the return to the shareholders, the stock price. And when things happen, when you know, what hits the fan, whatever the issue is, whether it's a security breach or an affair by somebody on the executive team with, you know, a subordinate, whatever it is, if it doesn't become a big deal, it's not a big deal. If it becomes a big deal, then the board notices and I'll do something about it, or the leadership will.

So it's all relative. And I don't mean to be jaded about that. I just think that's the real view of the world.

Because if you told me that, you know, a high flyin really well performing, uh, company that, um, you know, stockholders are just rolling in it, and the CEO has an affair with the, uh, VP of hr, they're not gonna let go of that CEO. They never would. Unless it's really gonna impact their business.

If suddenly customers are leaving, suddenly that's, that's become the, in the way of getting financial performance out of the company. That's just my view. And to your point, I don't think customers leave.

I mean, outside of that small company where maybe the head person is also the tech leader, but, um, in general, it seems to me a lot of organizations are not gonna, you know, rethink a million dollar investment in an IT product and strategy that they've got going simply because there's a new CEO. They, they might be a little unsettled, but they're not gonna switch horses. Let me, let me give you another example on play off of that though.

Mike, would, would the customer con consider moving his million dollar investment because the CEO is caught on camera with his girlfriend, his mistress, who's also an exec team member. Is that enough for a customer to leave, either wanna do business with a CA company that the CEO cheats on his wife? I think if the company didn't know about it beforehand, and then it's just water under the bridge, they got a new CEO, they recognize it.

And what, What about if you're right. So what about if the company said, look, that's his private life. It has nothing to do with how good my product is.

There's no reason customer that you should have to worry about that, Right? There are some customers who are not gonna be bothered by that, and there are others who might be, and they're gonna have to make a personal decision, Right? I suggest it's a business.

You should be aware of your, your customer environment enough to make a decision. And if you make the wrong one, then either you're not paying attention, or sometimes life's hard. You makes the wrong choice.

But lets A tough, let me, let me throw something at you. If we were going to take this and apply it to every president who's ever occupied the White House, would we have any presidents? Well, I, I I think it's less about the Coldplay thing.

It's a good, it's a good example, but Right. It's, it's the whole issue of caught doing right. You know, in this one, it depends, right?

I think Mike's exactly right. You understand your customers handle which way you like. But the whole idea that we can maintain a, a, a hero image from mid your right, the startup CEO think I like that role.

You got, there's two people, five people. But if it's gonna be mature, that's gotta be more than a, a person. And as long as it is, and there's too much about that, it is not too fragile a narrative that can survive real life, then that's not a good company decision.

Yep. Hey, I want to close this, this one out though. Let me just say, this is not just about the whole Coldplay astronomer thing.

Don't lose sight of the how important it is for CEOs to stay current on what today's trends are, what today's not, not just trends, but sort of currents that you have to swim in. You can't swim against these currents. And those currents today include ai, include surviving in the current political economic environments, as well as evidently, you know, minding your PS and Qs.

So, we'll take a break here on Textron Gang. Let's come back and we're gonna talk about it. Spending outlook.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back. And we're talking about the latest Gartner forecast on IT spending, which suggests that it's gonna be a little bit north of 7% and everybody's doing a little happy dance.

A lot of that seems to be driven by AI and data centers yet, yet, yet buried in there is, gee, the previous forecast was at 9%, so we lost 2%. So, Mitch, what's your take on what's going on here with spending? Is it all just AI and data centers and damn the economic news?

'cause people are just gonna invest in these emerging technologies no matter what. Well, forecasts are forecast, they're always made to be revised, right? Conditions change, it's just the way it is.

Whether it's garters or anybody else. We do our own futureum forecasts and, uh, you know, I handle the software SEC sector primarily around software development and cloud native, things like that. And, you know, our estimates are around eight and half percent growth.

CAGR of 10%, close to 10%. So it's in, it's in the same ballpark. I think the question is about the trend that you're bringing up is are we seeing a downward or are we seeing a shift in spending?

Are we seeing a lot more money going into data centers? I would argue that's true than what we were before because of ai. We're also seeing more money going into software, both AI software, software that has AI in it, and building AI into either our, the software we create or the products we create.

So there's, there's that rapid innovation of ai, I think is actually fueling, not obviously the chip market and also the data center market, but it's, it's fueling a lot of development. There's so much innovation happening because of ai. You almost can, you can't back off on spending.

Totally. And, uh, it's not the dark years of 2008 or something where everything just clawed back and where we are. I think we're gonna see pretty aggressive growth still.

Yep. Look, well, well, well, well, I, I think you're going to see infl. The fact of the matter is, you know, with the taco chacha on, in, on, uh, on, uh, tariffs, we haven't actually seen it bite yet, but it's going to bite and it will cause inflation.

But let, let's be clear it, to call it 7% is, you know, in my world when it's over seven five, it's closer to eight than seven. 9%, guys. So let's call it what it is, 8%, 8% to 9%.

And it's kind of flat, right? It's a percent down. It's not, it's not the end of the world.

I, I think it's more a question. This is like measuring cholesterol. What's the good cholesterol to the bad cholesterol?

Not saying spending on AI in data centers is bad cholesterol, but when it takes up an inordinate amount of that spend increase, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the sector, uh, uh, and it spending. And that's really the issue here, right? What's the mix?

I, and and I, I agree with what you're saying on, and I also think as we have spoken before on this show, is the idea that, for me, I personally think that at the end of the day, I, I mean, of course the energy in these data centers are, you know, there's, there's an issue there. But I also think that with innovation, things are going to become more efficient. And so these huge data centers and everything else that we're doing in this area, I, I think we're, we're putting a, we're projecting a lot more than at the end of the day than what we're actually gonna need.

And there'll be more of an evening, out evening. Evening, uh, anyway, equaling out a leveling. I like that better, uh, with software.

And, um, yeah, Kate, I think you're, I think you're spot on. I'm working with both a network, uh, data, data networking company for data centers and also one for servers, compute and storage. And that is the message.

It's around efficiency. It's around a, it's around not running just mission critical workloads. It's handling everything.

'cause things change. I mean, I can redistribute, you know, applications or virtualized systems or whatever it might be, network paths, all of these things become much more flexible and dynamic to be able to handle whatever we need, as opposed to, here's just a special purpose that's really good at running high volume transactions for this kind of a banking application. Well, you need those maybe in, in an edge case as opposed to everything's kind of got its own platform.

And I think that you're right, it's going to much more efficiency, including power and water, et cetera. Well, we had a great conversation in this, you know, last week, week before and, uh, about this, right? You know, and I don't, you know, uh, to be clear, I don't, I haven't been looked at the numbers.

I have no specific idea why, you know, the numbers are where they are. But this, if I was gonna think about it, I would expect that everything we're talking about is true, and that people are over, over focusing on the use cases we see right behind us, where, you know, a lot of us who think about where we are and where we're going are saying this is really out of, out of kilter and m what you just said. It's like you just, as you look at actual workloads, what needs to run on their GPU, what are we currently running on GPUs?

Are we forecasting that we're gonna keep using that? And I'm telling you, we're not. What does that imply towards the arms and everything else?

So, you know what, wherever the, whatever the details we're saying, I wouldn't expect, you know, spun, you know, huge growth on conditions right now or, or, or, or reductions. But who, who, I'm sure it's fascinating for the financial geeks out there exactly who's spending on and what probably tells a lot of the story that we were talking about last week. So Alan, let's get down to the heart of this thing then.

Yeah. Are we living in some sort of AI bubble? And when is It gonna pop?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Without a doubt, irrational exuberance. But that being said, let me give you another take on this.

You know, I remember back to the great recession in 2008, right? 2008, 2009. Um, the fact of the matter is though, it was extremely painful for so many of our friends and family in the world, in the US and in the world, the IT sector was not as badly hit.

In fact, spending probably never stopped in the IT sector, right? Mitch, you and I were working together then, right? It Shifted around, but it stayed about, it Shifted around, but it stayed.

And I think it's gonna be, you know, you spoke, you, I mentioned inflation before. I do think inflation is coming up. I do think interest rates are not going to go down.

If inflation goes up, it's gonna hurt. The housing market has, the housing market goes, the broader economy goes, we are gonna have some economic pain. However, I do think that things like ai, which will boost productivity, output efficiency will, will suck up dollars will soak up dollars as people look to get more bang for their buck.

And so it spending may not be hit as hard as the broader economy will. If, if the economy goes south, Well, Alan, one person's cloud boom cycle is another person's 3D TV boom cycles, right? You don't want to be the 3D TV manufacturer.

Um, everything has its overhyped, you know, phase and then kinda get through the tr dissolution. But, and I think what's interesting about AI is it's the constant amount of innovation in the, the kind of cycle time of that happening. We don't, haven't seen that slowing down yet.

I think it, it's everything because of the amount of business that's going in. And you could also claim that that, uh, China and Deeps seek, have heard reports of they're looking to replicate everything that OpenAI does to try to disrupt the market. You know, it is, it is truly a race like we haven't seen before.

Will we hit, will the gas kind of run out and we're gonna hit a certain RPM and that's the next Well, no. At some point though, it's put up or shut up, Mitch, right? You, you, at some point you gotta say, where is it really saving US dollars, right?

We saw Microsoft had a report. I think Microsoft's trying to claim that it AI saved them $500 million already. And that why it's, that's why it's okay, I guess to cut 20,000 jobs.

Um, The devil's in the details on those things, right? Yeah. We don't, we don't, we don't necessarily believe that that wasn't as a result of over hiring in the first place, though.

'cause you go talk to other mid-level companies and execs and they're saying, you know, we're not seeing that level of productivity gain from ai. No, but, but the but the mega guy, you know, the hyper guys are the Salesforces, the Microsofts, the Googles, right? And is it a tech bro, billionaire game.

Chris, you had your hand up. Yeah, it is funny, you know, as a narrative integrity person, I have to say that, uh, you know, to be clear, you know, I'm a CEO of an AI company using AI for these purposes, um, which is embedding a plug for my company, quiet wire. But it's, it's funny you go back to the last segment and to the point, if a CEO has 80% of their time freed up and does nothing with it, yes, you're getting replaced by an ai.

But my experience and just in the last 60 days, the experience of a, a huge, Alan, I haven't had a chance to catch up with you, talked to Gati ever and the GTFO, uh, prompt challenge, he runs every Thursday now a laundry list of the best people standing there with air, with AI saying, alright, for the last two months, we, me and my team have been doing this, and we're seven, we, we thought we would take seven years to do this. We're already done. And we're trying to figure out what we do with, so the acceleration as applied, and you know, what I think about the, you know, the state of the usage and the vendors of AI to date is inefficient as to be extremely kind.

But I see right now, this year, this quarter, you know, fascinating people in our community all around the world saying, wait, I can get this all done this fast. And no vi, I mean, I love vibe voting, the general theme of it, but look, when I vibe go, I'm sketching out architectures. There's real coating, which people do really well.

This allows us to do the development phase of things so quickly. And that implies too, to your point, Alan, economic impacts. I I, I am very bullish on this, in this environment.

Does it enough to compensate for all the downsides? You, you know, better than I, but this is a lifting economic force over the next couple years. 0, but, and it's about augmentation, augmentation of humans, human machine teaming.

And I think the more that we embrace this teaming concept, the more you can expect, um, from humans. We'll see. You might, going back to our first block, ask a question that says, geez, if X company, you know, laid off so many people, 'cause ai, maybe their CEO needs to be looked at a little more closely about how efficiently that company was operating in the first place.

Just saying, Let me draw a contrast. The people that you hear saying they're experiencing high levels of productivity, uh, because of ai, especially in software development, are tech companies. You don't hear, uh, GE saying, we're experiencing 80% of our code being generated by, or you don't hear Bank of America talking about it.

And not that they aren't also, but there, there's, there's multiple reasons for this. One is the tech companies are the ones that are investing in this. They're also the ones that have the most to gain, um, by the products and services that they sell.

So they're also applying it internally, and their messaging is always gonna be built around. Here's the, here's the benefits we've experienced using our own technology. You should be able to do that too.

It's, it's a pattern we see all the time, right? Switched our database, switched our whatever. Because here's the productivity gains you can see.

And initially, if you can't pinpoint to other customers, you point to yourself. And that's the phase orient. The real, what matters is when we see other companies starting to pronounce real numbers that affect the bottom line, when you see the GEs or the Bank of America or whoever, not the tech companies, And the technology is just laying around right now.

And Kate, you, you nailed it, right? You know, it's a teammate finding, and we discussed enough about this and, and frankly we clarity of it, but, you know, the AI and languages, whatever, as a teammate, look, I, I have had business relationships and working relationships with humans. I'm assuming I've never met or heard or seen their voice, nothing but text could be a basket of squirrels.

Who cares? Build a team, run a team. And that's not what we've been doing with AI at all, except for tiny use cases.

Every story is, you know, this big company using ai. What they're talking about is they have some little model and they're prompting things at it. They're not integrated into those teammates.

And that's where this is going. And if you do, holy cow. Well, it could be that the whole tech world is in a AI bubble induced by our tech, bro, billionaires, we'll come back here on Textron Gang.

Let's switch it to security. That ai, uh, application. Microsoft SharePoint recently had a little security mess.

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Hey, folks, we're back. And as Alan said, it may surprise you to learn that there was a security incident involving old Microsoft software. This time it's SharePoint, and apparently it involves on premises instances of SharePoint.

And, uh, Chris, I'm gonna start with you and your reaction on this whole thing, but I'm kind of sitting here just scratching my head a little bit, going, who in his right mind is running on premises editions of 30-year-old software? Well, yeah, he, he did, did mention the US government. So I, I, you know, that stands as that.

But you know, lot, lots of critical infrastructure as well. You know, Kendall's not picking on anybody too much, but, uh, it is fascinating. So, so yesterday, uh, in exactly this context, this con this story came up and Alan Friedman's, uh, uh, CSA Asba, uh, working group, uh, meeting, which, and he announced he is leaving, uh, yesterday.

So we all know that now, and next week will be the last one. But it's been this five minute, uh, time where we're small talk. And since it's a public, uh, uh, meeting, I'll say, I apologize to my friend John, sorry if you're watching this, but, uh, he brought this up right in the beginning, and I decided to take the curmudgeon approach knowingly and say what we had said on this show a week or two, a couple weeks ago, about, there was like 16 billion or trillion passwords stolen or another breach of the whatever.

And that conversation, we said, this does this matter. And, you know, so I, so in that five minutes, you know, I, I said, I reflected that back to them. I said, we were just talking about this in the show.

And it's like, honestly, yes, of course. I mean, uh, again, right? I'm shocked, shocked.

So how much does it matter? And, you know, so in, in, in, uh, respect to John, you know, I get it. And, and it is big, but, you know, isn't this kind of what we expect to see all the time?

To your, to your question, Mike, who's running this old stuff, we kind of know, you know, federal agencies, railroads, blah, you know, what's the patching? None, you know, is it gonna be vulnerable to and exploited by? Yeah.

So what do we do next? You know, it's just old hat at this point. But again, I think we have the tools to go forward.

We just need to spend more time talking about those and less talking about breaches. I, if I could just add, I though, Chris, um, I think one of the things that, that I believe that we've seen, uh, being cybersecurity folks, is that oftentimes breaches can be, um, almost like test beds. Like, you know, what can I do?

And, and that's what I feel like I see when I read about this situation. And the other concerning thing is the attack methodology, the way they did the, you know, lateral movement, which is, it's not that we haven't seen lateral movement, and it's not that we haven't seen, you know, privilege, access and gain, you know, all those parts of, of, of the methodology of attacks. But it, it, to me, it it was almost brilliant, um, that they have to, you know it, right?

Well, and this, it just exacerbate my point. This is why I, I why I said it this way and, and, uh, and, uh, because I, I'd nor normally not on mic, on their show, on the call, right? And I just saw this one coming up and I thought, I'm just going to make a big noise and saying, we're not talking about it, rah rah.

But you're right, it's a beautiful one. But in that room, in that, and particularly at the end of seven years of conversations with Alan, by Alan and Josh Corman and all these wonderful people, and we're gonna spend, you know this, and because I knew, you know, I was leaving, and we, we enjoy these things and we're gonna go there again on this, spend the whole five minutes talking about another breach, even if it's that beautiful. Instead of saying everything we've been building so far actually gets to that.

The whole point is that not only can people get away with c antics, silly cybersecurity and narrative, you know, attacks, you know, as they have our whole career, but we're right at the point where even something like that in a supply chain conversation where we're just finishing up on the software inventory, the software bill material, whole thing. It's not finishes, but it's embedded in the planet. That's everywhere.

What's the next step? The next step is systems that are aware enough that even that sort of thing where there's really smart people on the other side isn't so obviously going to work Always works. No.

And why isn't it obviously going to work? I'll tell you why, because I think system Probably better. No, Chris, I'm gonna tell you what, me, you, Mitch, Mike, Kate, probably most of the people watching this live in a tech bubble.

We, we know what we do when we're talking about MCP servers and, and gen AI and, and SBOs and, and all of these things. We know exactly what we're talking about. What we forget is that the civilians out there don't, and no matter how much time we spend talking about SBOs and generative AI and, and, you know, tech Bros and all of the things that we spend our days talking about, we can't lose sight of the fact that a lot of parts of this world run on 30-year-old software.

0, moving to the cloud versus a, in a cloud native architecture versus monolithic. They don't know. They got something called SharePoint that they've been using for 20 plus years.

That's all that matters to them. And, and so I've seen this in tech in my whole career. While we live in this bubble of early adopter, most of the world lives in that second 35% of the mainstream, right?

But, but again, this, this is, we all know this, everything you said, you and I know we all complain about all the time. It's all true. And I, I, I would posit that we've built systems that are now at the point of being able to take that into account.

You know, no, we're not gonna get everybody to get rid of their SharePoint. That's not the answer, obviously. No, we're not gonna shame them all into doing part.

But I think we have enough pieces. And with Agent ga, AI and all these, you know, no one part is magic. Firewalls aren't the solution, but history doesn't literally repeat forever.

It rhymes for a long time. And if it's annoying enough, you know, we get the harmonics tuned out. And I think these problems are so extreme, and we're at such a point, but we have enough the right tools, and I think old folks like you and I, Alan, you know, can maybe see the end of it, you know, in our lifetimes and maybe even our careers.

We'll see. Oh, Out, out there somewhere. Is this, go ahead, Mike.

Sorry. I'm of a completely different opinion. I'm gonna be extreme.

If you are running software that's more than 30 years old and you get hacked, I'm kind of willing to say, we should just find your ass into oblivion, and you may be subject to jam. The the only problem, Mike, is that a lot of our, uh, v energy grid actually has, you know, Microsoft, you know, xp. So, um, I hate to say that, but it means that we would be going into the dark.

This is, You know, out there somewhere is a, i, somewhere out there is an IBM XT computer running, VisiCalc supporting, Hey, some dude's office. Hey, OS two Warp, right? I love OS two Warp.

Don't go there. You know, I still think it's better than Windows, but DOS 3, 4, 1 baby. No, But it's, I mean, this is the world we live in, right?

I mean, a lot of industrial manufacturing, you know, if they, they, they work by, if it, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, They're right, right? You know, the security person, they say otherwise, but you're, look, you're a little tiny electric co-op in Warner Robins, Georgia, you know, and the back co operator is the IT person.

And Sue, go ahead and sue them. You know, they're not upgrading. They shouldn't It, all this stuff is broken, and we know it, it's called reckless disregard for the facts.

I love old cars and machines, and they're always broken a little bit. My boats are always broken a little bit by sailing thousands of miles. Mm-hmm.

So you hit, But look, it happens, right? So if you are using SharePoint, make sure that I think there's a patch out, but it doesn't, it's not for every SharePoint. It doesn't close the whole thing off.

You Need to harden your system too. Not just Patch, I'm sorry, but that's not just the point, right? It's not just the patch, it's, it's, they actually have to do some extra serious steps on this situation.

But I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, No, I, I, and, and it's time, it's time for the, for the checkup, Chris. Well, let me get specific for a second, right?

You know, this is literally where AI can help, right? You know, if you have an a, a, a sophisticated AI working with you as a teammate, and you're looking at communication structures, and you ask the question like you would of, of, of somebody who can get you the answers, you know, is it possible to deal with this issue at this small co-op or these six co-ops that I'm, that I'm dealing with? And you can get an answer, then the answer is yes.

And now I'm guessing as you go through that, and you'll write a lot of scripts, you'll build a lot of stuff, but you'll find that that takes about three hours, and you'll have some system that isn't gonna replace those, but will give you enough visibility that you can have a, a operational level of comfort with it. And I see that to our point, Mitch, you, you know, I can see we can, this is not about ai. This is about using these tools, these systems for things.

Pick one, this is a good one. If somebody does it in 90 days, I guarantee they, they'll have a textbook for us. And, and to Mike's point, maybe it's just time to retire, be, you know, The SharePoint Well, I thought that Microsoft, I forget what they call their SharePoint thing now, but anyway, I think, I think as soon as that AI agent discovered it's running in a SharePoint environment, it's gonna be asked to turn off.

So forget it. What, they'll build a business justification to get the budget or not, instead of just being this thing that people don't wanna talk about. That's, of course, you didn't want retire the old stuff, but we, I see the fault in our community of just walking up to people who have been running something for 27 years and saying, check that out without saying, oh, you have budget and the budget is controlled by local, political, whatever.

It's right, these agents, you know, these, these teammates we can bring in will make, give us that clarity so we can look at it and say, the solution is tear it out, buy a new one, put a pack, whatever. It's, and It's not even a question of budget and all that. It's what people are comfortable with if they're comfortable, right?

And they, they don't like to use this stuff. Alright? Hey, but we're outta time, so we're gonna pull the plug on this version of Textron Gang.

I hope you've enjoyed it. We've got our usual Textron TV coverage immediately following, so check that out. Um, we'll be back tomorrow on Wednesday with fresh topics and more gang folks, but until then, this is Alan Shimel for Text on Gang.

Thanks for joining us, everyone. We're out. Hey everyone.

Welcome back here to Text Drunk tv. You know, this next guest has been doing Text Drunk TV interviews with me since we started Text Drunk tv. He's been at Sonatype even longer.

He's the co-founder CTO with Sonatype, my friend Brian Fox. Hey, Brian, welcome back. It's great to see you.

Hey, Alan. Good to see you again. So not, not to, uh, hammer in on that.

We're getting older, but you've been at Sonatype for a little little while now, haven't you? Yeah. Um, coming up on 18 years at this point.

Yeah, it's been a long ride. It really has a great ride though, too. And along the way though, Brian, of course, you know, Sonatype changed a lot from the initial sort of mission and what it's expanded into, but also you've become, I don't want to use the word influencer, that's such a phony kinda word, but you, you know, you've become a presence.

How's that a presence in the open source and open source security world, uh, a leader, a thought leader there, an Opinionated kind of guy that tends to happen. Yeah, it ha well, if you live long enough too, right? But you know, you have, and, and thank you for what you do actually, right?

We need, we need, especially in today's world, we need voices out there talking about, Hey, what's the right thing to do security wise? What's, how do we handle open source security and, and so forth. Um, for people who aren't familiar with Sonatype, Brian, how would you describe it to them?

Well, that's a, that's an open-ended question, isn't it? So, uh, Sonatype, we, you know, in the early days we were all about Apache Maven. Uh, we still run the Maven Central repository, which is the repository of all the world's open source Java components.

And then, uh, we, we have, um, nexus repository manager, caching proxy for Maven and all the other ecosystems, basically Pi, pi, Docker, NPM, you know, you name it. Um, and then we started doing, uh, SCA software composition analysis and software supply chain analysis before those were terms that people used, uh, so a very long time ago. So, um, you know, we're, we're kind of involved in all things, uh, software supply chain and, um, you know, we're, we're kind of in the middle too, where we run that giant repository, so critical infrastructure as well.

Absolutely. Very cool. Um, Brian, let's turn to, uh, what we want to talk about today, our topic of discussion, which is the, uh, release of the Q2 2025 open source malware index.

Why don't you first explain for maybe people who aren't familiar with the index, what exactly it is? So This dates back to about 2017, I suppose, when we first started observing this at the time, new trend of intentional attacks on the open source supply chain. You know, prior to that it was, uh, you know, my talking track was you basically needed to be able to update your dependencies faster than the VAD guys could exploit the vulnerabilities when the CVEs were announced.

So it was a race, right, um, to patch before you got hacked kind of thing. Um, but then we started to see that rise of, uh, intentionally malicious open source components that were, had no other purpose than to cause harm. Um, that trend started around 2017 and it's just exploded ever since.

And so, you know, this is something we've been raising awareness of through our annual state of the software supply chain report. Um, and then, uh, this year we started doing more quarterly updates of those, those statistics to kind of continue to beat the drum on this because, um, even though I've been talking about it now for what, that's eight years at this point, um, it's still a new topic for a lot of people. They don't really understand the difference between open source malware and your typical vulnerabilities and, and frankly, from your traditional malware as well.

It's a, it's a little bit of a, a, a sort of a, a focused part of this, uh, this problem space. You know, for me, for me, the switch flipped Brian, when I, when I started seeing the rise of like SCA tools, you know, software composition analysis. I, I, to me, I still call them open source vulnerability scanners, but I, I get it, they're called SCAs.

But it really, for me, signified that people began to realize that open source security was a, a bit of a different animal, right? Than, than a lot of the other stuff, other security type of chores and, and, uh, vectors that we, we defend against, you know, surfaces if you want to call it. Um, so we've been doing this malware index, open source malware index since 2017.

Now is, is it done quarterly? We we're doing it quarterly now, 'cause yearly is not okay to keep up. Yeah.

So the, the state of the software supply chain's a yearly thing, the quarterly index, you know, and so, um, you know, the, the, the, the challenge is that, you know, um, people want to think, well, I have malware protection, and they probably do, right? Like traditional malware would look like viruses and root kits and back doors. But those things traditionally work by looking for specific behaviors or fingerprints of code.

Um, open source malware is very different. It's not showing up the same way. Uh, traditional malware tools don't have those fingerprints and those behaviors.

And, and the reason for that is because the development infrastructure that is targeted by these components, so they put a, they put a, a malicious component out in a public repository like PM um, with a confusingly similar name though. Popular, popular package developers download it, um, it executes as soon as they download it and does its thing, right? And so in the context of a development environment, that's usually a form of a trusted environment.

Things are in predictable known places like environment variables for Amazon Keys, uh, you know, other, other types of things. And so this code is quite literally like open source malware. It's new created code that that is just trying to look around and do a smash and grab kind of, kind of data exfiltration, um, on development infrastructure.

And so it's rare that you see the same fingerprints again. So it's not like these tools are trying to use root kits and drop those kinds of things. I mean, that does happen, but a lot of 'em is, uh, they're literally just more like a, a phishing attack on your developers.

The intent is to, to get in, get quick smash, grab as much data as you can that they might use to come back later to actually perpetrate perpetrate a a, a more in depth type of attack. And so, like, what happens is these types of components, these types of attacks are falling between the cracks. It's not a vulnerability, you know, where you have a component that might have a problem that might get exploited in production, and it's not your traditional root kit trying to hack the operating system.

It's something that happens on a developer machine. Uh, oftentimes these components, they don't even compile and pass a test, so they're, they're never gonna get checked in where they might get picked up by other infrastructure. It literally happens on the machine just like a phishing attack.

You know, you click that link, something bad happens and it's over, it's too late. You can't unclick the link. And, and that's kind of what's happening with this development infrastructure and, and, um, frankly, just not enough people understand that it is a new and novel type of attack and that your traditional defenses are, are powerless to stop this, basically.

Yeah. So we, you know, we record text on gang every morning. We were talking today, I had Ira Winkler on with us.

He's a regular on text, Sean Gang. And we, and I ended the show with I, with I, what I thought was a positive note to all my friends in security. I mean, I've been in security 30 years, right?

That I know things are not great, right? We know all of these attacks, but don't lose sight of the fact that we fight a good fight every day, right? That we, we, we try to do the right thing.

We we're out there. You know, we may not win the Super Bowl every year. We may be the team that never wins the Super Bowl, but that doesn't stop us from competing and doing it.

But then you see this kind of stuff, Brian, and you've been in security as long as I have, if not longer. How do you not just, you know, you keep banging your head on the wall, either your head or the wall gets soft. I mean, you keep, you, you keep climbing the hill, um, they knock you down and keep going.

You know, it's like they say the defenders, you have to, you have to win every single one. The attackers only have to win once, right? Um, and that's kind of the problem we have here.

Uh, coupled with, uh, the continued evolution, the escalation, the scale of all these types of things. There's so many different types of attacks, it's very hard for people to hold them all in their head. Um, that's absolutely true.

Uh, it just, I get super frustrated when when we have conversations with folks that are like, Hey, we can see that in your repository you have cached some of these known malicious components, which means a developer or more on your infrastructure caused those to be downloaded into your infrastructure. They didn't get there by themselves, right? So it's a little bit like finding bullet holes in your wall that just didn't show up, and you wouldn't be okay with that to be like, well, they're just holes in the wall.

Nobody died. I'm just gonna live on, no, you'd be like, who's shooting at me? Why are they shooting at me, me, and how do I defend against it?

But that reaction doesn't happen when we point out this stuff to people. They say things like, well, I have a vulnerability program. It's like, that's great.

I'm glad you do. And it has literally nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Prioritizing potential flaws that you might fix in your next release is different than understanding you've been attacked.

You might want to investigate if data actually was leaked, you know, and, and, and start to think about how you stop that next attack and, and that mental connection people still struggle with. And that part, I've struggled with years to try to get people to understand the importance of that. I, I, I agree with you.

Um, look, I did see another survey today. I, I don't even remember who put it out 49% or was it 50, 59% of organizations are claimed to have little visibility into their software supply chain security. I didn't see that stat, but it didn't surprise me.

I mean, there's Still organizations. No, I, I'll get you the report. I, we, we discussed it on one of the videos.

We still see tons of organizations consuming known vulnerable versions of Log for Shell, right? About per j. Um, I'm pretty sure they're not doing it on purpose, but yet they don't have a deep understanding of the dependencies being used in our software.

This is the whole SBO conversation, right? If you, if you don't actually, that's What we're talking about. That's what're, how, how are you supposed to be able to make better choices about those, those things.

Yeah. Actually, I brought up one of the, I had gotten this from one of your reports. Remember?

The, uh, oh, uh, what something two, what was the big Equifax? What was the Strut two? Yeah, I remember seeing it in the Sona type report back like a year, maybe two years after Strut after the attack.

People were still downloading the vulnerable version. Yeah. Of Struts two.

Yeah. Couple things, Brian. Number one, where can people get a copy of this at report or the Open source malware index?

com, Right? com. Yeah.

Yeah. Number two, what, what can we do? What can we do?

What can we, I mean, how much time do we have? Not, not, not Brian and Allen, I mean the people out here watching this, right? What, what could our listeners watch Watchers do not to be?

I mean, I think I would say go read the index. The point is to try to try to expand upon the things that I've touched on here. If you don't completely understand why this is different and why your existing tools don't have coverage for this, you need to go read more.

We're happy to help explain it as many times as it takes, you know, and it does take a lot of time. So the light bulb goes off for folks, but this is a, an active and growing trend. You know, the number of these things we've cataloged is now up to 845,000 components.

Um, it grew 188% over the last year, right? I mean, so we're still seeing large growth on huge numbers. And that means these attacks are effective.

The bad guys are just as focused on the ROI as the rest of us. They're not gonna do things that aren't, aren't providing payback. And so they're doing it more and more, which means they're effective, which means most people don't have defense against it.

So if you don't understand why, go take a look at the index. That's what we're trying to do. That's why we're continuing, continuing to try to show examples and provide feedback and advice.

You know, one way of looking at this is the same way we shifted security left. The bad guys have shifted their attacks left. Yeah.

'cause they recognize Right. Getting in earlier here makes it a lot more, you know, instead of doing onesies and twosies down the road, you're getting everyone who, who, who uses that software. Yeah.

Like I said, I think the, I think the right model is, it's, it's, it's a form of a phishing attack on your developers using the dependencies. That's exactly what it is. It's A smash and grab, it's hard to defend against.

Once it happens, you, it's hard to undo. Um, you know, you need to be able to stop it before it lands. Hmm.

Hey, you gonna be a black hat? I am. We're gonna be there doing video.

Maybe. We we're doing video on the show floor this year. Okay.

I we're allowed to. They're allowing us, so. Well, You always grab me every time I walk by, so I'm sure.

I Always, no matter what show we're in, I grab you. I know, but I'll, I'll be on the lookout for you in blackout. All right.

I'll stay there. Giving A fair warning, man. All Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Brian, as always, thanks for everything you do.

I appreciate it. And more importantly, the people out here appreciate it. I know you put a lot of time and effort into open source security and, and whether it's lobbying governments or congresses or eus and so forth, or, you know, just educating it, it's, it's much appreciated.

Thank you. All righty. Brian Fox, CTO co-founder at Sonatype here on Tech Trunk tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong AI Leadership Insight series.

I'm your host, Mike Vara. Today we're with Femen Gong, who's CEO from Meta Food X. And they're applying AI to the way food gets managed in commercial restaurants and other kitchens with an eye towards reducing how much food we do waste, which is today considerable hangman, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Good morning. People have been talking about this issue for a long time and it seems like it's always been something that we could never quite solve.

So maybe walk us through here what you guys are doing with AI to kind of get us to the point where we are using the food that we have more efficiently and maybe not wasting nearly as much. Yeah, absolutely. And of course if you look at the big wine, uh, food waste could, a loss can happen right?

During the transportation from the farm all the way to the table. Then you have a big part is the food operation, right? And consumption and then all the way right to post-consumer.

Uh, then when we look at this issue in the past, there has been a lot of effort, great effort, that are very effective at creating the awareness about food waste. As you are fully aware, there are many solutions choose to look at before the thing going to the trash bin, right? And that's where we have the most progress.

And today we really figured it out, says, okay, that is great. We have been doing recycling, repurposing the food and helping the environment. But then there is a huge part to tell us that we are doing it too late.

Too little. And this is where, uh, to your question, I mean my background is in cybersecurity, right? I have been doing that for many years.

One of the concept we learned there is this notion of, uh, look left right? Or shift, shift left. I mean in this, in that case, we are looking at it where is the root cause of the problem?

What is the most effective way to prevent right? Threat and damage? So in this case, applying to the food waste.

And we realize that one of the biggest challenge for the food service operation is really lack of visibility from prep to consumption. And then we end up, we don't have the data to do accurate forecast planning. And if you can do that, then what happened is you solve the efficiency, you have the efficient operation, but then food waste problem becomes solved as part of the prevention.

So then almost like when you solve the problem, solve the infrastructure gives the operators the tools to actually put into place a lot of best practice. They have actually accumulated in years. Uh, such as right small batch just in time cooking.

When they serve the food, they try to do first in, first out. It's interesting that they have all those, but they simply lack the tools to know where is the issue, right? How much they should make and where they should actually, how they can implement this best practice they have accumulated in years.

Because even the uh, face the issue with the labor, right? Um, the food cost. This is where if something takes a ton of effort for the operators to do manual work, uh, it's not gonna fly.

So those are just quite a few things we learned and we put into our solution to help the operators. Yeah. Yeah.

So why do we lack the visibility? 'cause we've been ordering food forever in a day and people I guess have, you know, they have spreadsheets and all kinds of stuff to manage the process. But it sounds like some aspect of this thing is fundamentally flawed.

So what is it? Yeah. And you, you absolutely and you know, it's uh, now in the head when you mention we have the spreadsheet, you know, soter, right?

Probing things and those indeed that's what people are trying to do today. But if you look at, come back to the visibility, right? If you use restaurant as a simpler case of a reference, what end up happening is people have been watching very diligently what they bought, right?

And that's their income inventory. And then some places they would use the POS to actually to know how much they have sold. And when they talk about profit and loss that the two ends, we put the numbers together, see what it is.

And then if you now look at it in that process, there are actually a lot of blind spots. 'cause the issue is what you bought is the raw material, the ingredients and what recipe you are serving. How people are doing from the kitchen prep framing, all the way to preparing the dish.

What get consumed is actually the dish, right? One dish may have five different ingredients in them and that all become by assumption, right? When people do today, when they do the purchase, they do rough guessing because that's the best way they can, they try to do a little bit inventory at the end of the day or some of them doing like much less frequently.

But the huge amount of guesswork is in there. Of course, if you scale that up to a commercial kitchen environment when you are serving right? Thousands or several tens of thousand people daily, that's where the things adds up.

Uh, one of the biggest issue in that environment is simply overproduction. 'cause you don't have a better way of managing it than people go and buy experience, then they have to earn on the side to make sure people do not have go without food, right? So that, that's the issue there.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Do I also need to get smarter about the menu planning?

'cause maybe I wanna put something on the menu that lines up with whatever I'm ordering in a way that uses that more efficiently. And I may not want to have the same food on every meal, but at the same point, I, there's a lot of ways to cook chicken, right? Yeah.

And, uh, this is absolutely a very important point the way, uh, with the data, right? We enable the staff and the team able to do typically two most important things. One is exactly the manual optimization because people do manual optimization all the time.

Of course, you know, both for flavor for change and also today, right? There is stronger demand for eating healthy eating sustainably, uh, sustainably. So then that in increased a lot of, uh, chances or needs for manual change.

But you cannot do many change in the blind. And so these were the data, again, come in because with the right solution, if you track the consumption in day out based on manual cycle, you actually see what is the popular one, what is the least popular one, how they lined up. So that's one of the critical input for it.

And then another aspect just to add to it, is actually, you know, day of the week, right? And even during the day, you can imagine there is actually rush hours and peak and valleys. So those data that operator are using today before they don't have it.

Now when they have that data, all of a sudden the just in time small batch processing become so much more effective that actually help both experience the quality of the food and also the waste. Mm-hmm. And does that not also impact my staffing requirements?

Because, um, different recipes and different times of day may require different numbers of people and different levels of expertise, but if I don't have visibility into that, I'll misalign the staff with the amount of food that's showing out the back door, right? Yeah, you are absolutely right because those are two ways of that. One is if you do accurate forecast, accurate planning, and then you actually can schedule staff, because a lot of staff in that environment is also on hourly staff, right?

And so that, that's definitely one thing. And in university is actually interesting also because they leverage a lot of student for student both for as part of the education and helping out. So that's where this become like very, very relevant.

Not only you can schedule ahead of time and reduce the amount of overproduction, so you do not need to use like the staff where you used to think you need. And the second aspect is actually you can schedule the staff out based on their hour. So both of them.

And, and there is an other added benefit, um, which we have got feedback from the operators who use it. That is, uh, they actually realize it our solution, right? If you have a solution that is systematic, let's say you make the food consumption tracking very easy by staff following very simple instruction, then all of a sudden you find out you have very consistent complete data on consumption.

At the same time you actually reduce the burden on the staff, on the staff with the children, uh, on staff training and so on and so forth. So that actually is very interesting also helping with the, uh, labor challenge. Um, a lot of folks will say, well, won't that just reduce the amount of food that, uh, theoretically these kitchens might be sharing with various charities 'cause they've overcooked or whatever.

But, um, correct me if I'm wrong, most of that food doesn't make it there anyway, just 'cause we don't know how they actually distribute it in the, the, the supply mechanics of doing that are too overwhelming as well. Uh, yes. And I think both, on the one hand we give credit, right?

There are folks that actually create that ecosystem for the food donation. Uh, indeed. Um, although, you know, if you look at Reed right data, uh, unfortunately the participation rate is still low.

The one of the reasons cited there is exactly because one is the logistics because when the food production operators are already under the pressure for, you know, producing the food, serving and then that donation. So it's, it's additional effort for them to do. And then there is also a second aspect because we do not have very clear, well-defined guidelines and safety requirement.

So, so that also put an additional burden. Now that said, uh, indeed there is room, right? Regardless what we do, um, there is always gonna be the food waste.

So the idea is by introducing the right solution, not only we track, let's see how much it have, how much it gets served, how much is still sitting in the cooler right, than the warmer. And now with this degree of tracking, we actually not have a piece of exactly the kind of food where out, what condition and should we make the job right? To connect that with the ecosystem that actually distribute that food more than needy and then that everything become more efficient.

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of that wasted relates to food that wasn't even cooked yet. So that's part of the other side of the issue as well.

Yeah. Um, Is this something that is applicable to commercial kitchens, AK k organizations that are, I don't know, running kitchens for dorms or can I apply this all the way down to my local pizza shop or the local restaurants in my town where there's just a lot of turnover? 'cause a lot of those people, their first love is cooking in their second love or maybe even hatred is spreadsheets.

Yeah. And uh, very good question because we started with let's say college and university because that actually presents the most challenging environment, the students, their case, their demand, uh, always kind in the frontier. And then we have, we have gone, we have, uh, just last week we have, our first customer actually is Mayan, uh, resort.

So we are very happy. And then we also have our first, uh, quick service restaurant. And you, you mentioned restaurant because we know it's very important.

There are of course from, you know, the quick service, right? All the way to, uh, fine dining. They very, uh, they manage it slightly differently.

I would say with probably today, uh, in terms of product form directly, uh, the food dining, it might be the last one we'll go to the food dining does have need that they have communicated to us that is actually the food quality control at the, uh, expedition. We actually, because our scanning, quick scanning technology, getting temperature and food condition, everything. So there is a use case there.

But of course we need to, uh, study more on that. But in the other cases where anytime we do have ra volume of the food moving through, they do use, uh, in addition to made to order, they do use, even if it's a very small batch, right? They are very flexible.

They'll do small batch, some small batch, some are not. This is where number one is that efficiency forecasting is still important because today this still cannot manually track right? Throughout the day, day of the week, how the traffic is going, right?

That's one example that this data will have. The other thing they actually care dearly is about the quality, about the freshness of the food, about when it's going out. And we have this first quick service restaurant customer, they actually leverage our system where when the food is going, coming out, when you scan, it takes a timestamp based on your need, based on the dish.

You say, okay, this need to be checked in 15 minutes or in 45 minutes, I want it to be pulled and replaced. So that, that is how it's becoming part of that infrastructure because they care so much about the quality. But if you devote right human, then human is creative, but they are not very mechanical.

That's where I think we, we can see the technology mesh. Uh, with the staffing. Well, yeah.

Right. Last question, my friend. You mentioned you worked at a security company.

It's a big jump from security to food preparation and, uh, let me try that whole thing. Yeah. All right.

Last question my friend. Uh, you worked in security prior to this, and I think you were one of the early founders of Palo Alto Networks. It's a big jump from cybersecurity to food distribution and preparation.

How did that come about? Yes, and very good question. I would say if there is a little step up for me for tackling this, I believe it's a very highly impactful mission is because I did the first small step that was, I went to a ride sharing company.

What attacked me there was the first step says, okay, daily on the platform you're talking about, you know, 10 million or 30 million of the people riding it is the transportation impact everyone. And there is of course a lot of issue to be dealt with. That was my first step.

I actually spent time there, learned about getting closer to something, uh, affect a mass amount of people versus right. IT and enterprise. And then of course, the biggest impact for me, biggest motivation for me is I feel learning enough about the technology, seeing the technology apply differently.

Although in cybersecurity, solving different problems, right? From enterprise endpoint to the cloud, um, this is where I feel confident once I learn how bad the food waste problem is. That's really the beginning point.

The moment I learned, you know, we are talking about 300 to 400 billion a year just in us, that total loss, that translate to dollars because how we are managing our food supply, I just felt yes, and we can do something and we actually now went ahead and proven it. So we are really happy seeing the impact, right? Going to the customer and what they are seeing, what this helps them in terms of efficiency, in terms of then preventing the food waste.

Yeah. All right, folks, you heard it here. AI and advanced analytics can make a massive impact on, uh, food wastage.

But it's bigger issue than that. When you think about it, I mean, it goes all the way back to, um, how many cows do we need to have, how many pigs, how much, you know, vegetables and farming and all of that requires energy and all of that consumes money and creates carbon and has impacts on the planet. So it all starts with one small thing, but it can have a big impact.

Hey buddy, thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much, Mike. All right.

And thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Techstrong AI Leadership Insights. Here. You can find this episode and others on our website.

We invite you to check them all out. Until then, we'll see you next. I am nearly Noelle a synthesized avatar here to help with the introduction.

Get ready to meet the incredible Noelle Russell. She's not your ordinary technologist. She's a game changer with her entrepreneurial spirit and expertise in conversational ai, generative AI and language models.

Noelle has revolutionized the tech industry. But here's the best part. Noelle is so much more than her professional achievements.

She's a true inspiration for balancing work and family life. As a wife and mother of six, she embodies the definition of courage and determination. Get ready to be blown away by Noelle's spectacular journey.

Join me in welcoming the phenomenal Noelle Russell. Yay. I always have to, you gotta start an AI talk with a deep fake, I mean, that's like a thing if, if you didn't know it is a thing.

Uh, I, I enjoy it because this platform, I've kind of grown up in this platform. Hey, Jen, um, I was one of their beta. I I do a lot of beta testing, um, of AI models, and this was one of them, uh, quite a few, I guess four years ago now.

But, um, but this is actually a year old and it's pretty good. Like I haven't had a reason to change it. I do.

However, the reason I do like, hey, Jen, is because any one of you today could just take out your phone and talk to your phone in a normal sounding voice for about two minutes. Upload it takes about seven minutes, and you can create a synthesized version of yourself that not only synthesizes your like it likeness, but also synthesizes your voice. Yay.

Right? Like, that sounds awesome. Um, in my house we have a term called nerve sighted, which is this combination of like terror and excitement, nervousness and excitement.

Um, and that's kind of how I do a lot of work in regulated industry. And that's kind of how they feel about this whole AI thing. Um, I actually feel like 10 years ago they felt that way about cyber.

Um, and so they've got a new thing to focus on, but the work is not done. And so that's what I'm going to share with you is the journey that I've been on, the work that I get to do. Um, it is definitely a little bit more of the human side of this technology.

I'll give you a couple chances to connect with me. Um, number one, I have a very cool network. As a matter of fact, some of my network friends are in the house today.

Um, so super cool to, to see people I know. But for those of you who are not my friend yet, I haven't said anything. So you might not, you might not know, but at the end you'll be like, oh, darn.

Did anyone get that QR code? So here it is, it's my LinkedIn. You also might not be a QR code clicker kind of person.

Totally get that about you. Um, so you could just Google me, Noelle, ai, women in AI leading technology, like any of those, will, will bring it right up. I got my first Google Knowledge panel a couple years ago, and my kids told me I made it, and I was like, great.

So I have a knowledge panel, so if you just Google my name, um, with or without ai, uh, you can also connect with me that way. So I do like to start with just as Mark said, the human side of things, how I got into this technology. I won't bore you with all of the details, but it's not really boring at all.

It's kind of a crazy story. Um, but I do have six kids. Nearly Noelle did accurately portray that information.

I have six kids, and actually I got into this world of emerging tech because my very first son, my very first child, I was pregnant. He was actually late. I didn't know babies could be late back then.

Um, but he was like a week late. He was born. Um, and about, I don't know, two days everything was going good.

I thought it was going great, actually. I didn't know anything about motherhood, but I thought it was going pretty good. And, uh, they whisk him off on day two to the neonatal intensive care unit, which I now know is not great.

But, uh, they whisk him off and they come back about 24 hours later with a diagnosis. Um, and he has down syndrome. And then when he was four, we got the double diagnosis of autism, which is huge fun.

Um, but I, I'm a solution architect. I am in my profession. I'm also this way in life.

It's like part of my DNA. So when he was born, I was like, oh, wait, I, I got this because I was around the first time the world was gonna end Y 2K, and I was in like the bowels of many financial organizations sleeping on the floor, running DR. Processes.

And so I felt like I could do anything, honestly. Uh, you're welcome by the way. We did save the world.

For those of you who are in those rooms, thank you for your service. Um, but Y 2K was legit. Uh, most of us have forgotten it, but it was real, even though the thing wasn't real.

Us working like crazy was definitely real. Uh, but it taught me that ai, specifically when I got into the world of ai, it taught me that AI technology things I did not fully understand could change the world for my son. And that's really what launched me on my career.

I fast forward, I ended up at Amazon as a principal cloud architect. It was at VMware when they were creating cloud. Um, but uh, I ended up at Amazon Web Services.

I get an email from Jeff Bezos, and, uh, he's inviting me to join a brand new team, uh, to build the Star Trek computer. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's me. And the reason why is because that guy right there, the, that's my dad that I'm pictured with, um, up in the corner, I, I asked him, I'm like, dad, like your normal face, and this is what he did.

He is like, this is my normal face. I'm like, oh, okay, fine. Uh, but he introduced me the golden age of science fiction when I was about six years old.

I read the Foundation series for the first time before the age of 10. I've written, I've read it dozens and dozens of times since then. Uh, but he introduced me to a, you know, asthma Bradbury, Arthur C.

Clark, where in these stories, there was a huge level of symbiosis between humans and machines. So I grew up kind of thinking about this long before I got that email from Jeff Bezos. Now, granted, I did find out later, it wasn't from Jeff at all.

It was like from his recruiting team, but I felt like he was speaking to me. So I still, I still think that he was speaking to me in that email, even though it was manufactured to hire a brand new team. And by the way, it was on the heels of a complete failure called the fire phone.

I don't know how many of you remember this, but nobody wanted to join Alexa because the fire phone just happened and no one wanted to be on another failing tech thing. That was Jeff Bezos's pet project. So it was a unique moment for me.

I then though, uh, ended up employee 10 on Amazon Alexa. I ended up everyone. He, he came in and he built out this like whiteboard.

He rolls in a whiteboard and he is like, alright, I want you to build these skills. And he wrote on the whiteboard 20 Skills he wanted us to build. I don't know if you remember this part of Jeff Business' Life, but like, one of them was like workout apps one, and then it was like triceps for 30 days.

And I dunno if you remember this time, but Jeff Bezo was like, like trying, like, so he was very workout focused, which I am, but not really. Uh, and then the others were recipes and music. And I wanted to do something different.

And so I built out an entirely new category on Alexa called Mindfulness. And at the time, everyone said, has good ideas. If you have a good idea, I can assure you that the most trusted people you share that idea with will tell you you're not the one, you are not smart enough.

You don't have the history. You don't have blah, blah, blah, all the things that they tell you. But I have this GPT like thing that happens in my brain when people tell me, no, I turned it into Let's go.

Um, and so I did it anyway. And I went around my boss and created a bunch of drama. But I joined Alexa for a reason.

I wasn't telling anyone, which was to help my son. Like I realized if I could, could create technology that he could just talk to, everything would change. The only thing I'd have to teach him is the ability to speak.

If I could teach him to talk, he could unlock financial services, healthcare services, like the whole world would unlock. And I was like, I'm all for that. So that's what motivated me to get into the world of ai.

When I had zero business being there, I was a cloud architect, and my data scientist and linguist team let me know every day that I wasn't really their people. But that's okay. 'cause they needed me.

Uh, and I'll share with you some of that as well. This is a funny story because I found out about this quote. Jeff Bezos, uh, tweeted it on back then it was the Twitter, but, uh, he tweeted it out.

He took a picture of his fridge and he said, this is what I have my kids read every day. And I thought it was pretty cool because well, it defines success. So I'll read it to you, which I shouldn't do.

'cause you're not supposed to read stuff on stage, but I'm gonna read it to you and then tell you why I thought it was such an interesting story for our work that we're doing. What is success? To laugh often and much to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and be endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate the beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or redeemed social condition to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded.

Now, I personally was like, Jeff, no matter what they say about you, that's kind of cool. Like, I, I like where you're going with this. So I, I started quoting it, but on when I found it from Jeff, he told me Ralph Waldo Emerson was the guy who wrote it.

And if you Google it today or perplexed it, it will tell you that Ralph Waldo Emerson was the author of this. However, I get off stage one day and a nice older gentleman walks up to me and he is like, you should research that. And I'm coachable.

So I researched it and not on page one, not on page two, but on page three, many good stuff on page three, nobody ever gets there, but many good stuff on that page. I found out that it was actually Bessie Anderson Stanley, who wrote this quote. And I was like, what nefarious is this?

I was like, feminist movement. I, I was sure there was like some go to the mattresses moment that happened between them. That's not exactly how it went down.

They ended up on the same stage, like me and many of the people that were here today. And, uh, Ralph borrowed from Bessy, uh, all the time. Um, but borrowed this quote, and then Bessy went first.

She passed on, Ralph kept talking, and then eventually Ralph Waldo Emerson passed away. And then when people were like, who said that? Well, nobody could say that Bessy wrote it, so people just were like, I think it was Ralph, he seems like, and I then was like, wait a second, let me read this again.

If you reread this quote through the eyes of Bessie, which is my job as a data scientist, if I reread this through the eyes of Bessie, I'm like, it's got Bessy written all over it. Now, I'm not saying that Ralph Waldo Emerson isn't a garden patch kind of guy or likes healthy kids, whatever. But I am saying, and this is kind of what did it for me, there's nothing like to a woman, the betrayal of false friends.

I was like, that came from a woman. Um, I know I don't hear my husband ever saying things like, darn Mike man really got me. Really, I'm really sad about.

Like, he never talks about the betrayal of his friends. It might happen, but he doesn't write a poem about it. And I realized that my job as a data scientist, as I collect data, that if I don't do a good job, the lineage of where that came from will get lost.

I used to have a shirt that said, save the besties because I cared so much about this problem, but people got that all wrong. So I had to change it. But they understand, like, I'm not wearing it today, but I normally wear a shirt that says, I love ai.

And I wear that because I want people to know I pre-frame my experience with this technology in a positive way. And I do that because it is my responsibility. If I don't pre-frame it positively, I won't care about Bessie.

I'll just be like, ah, I don't care. It doesn't matter. I don't even ask the question.

This is the biggest challenge I run into in corporate organizations implementing ai. They don't even, they don't even ask the question, where did that come from? It's super important and super simple question to ask, and nobody asks it.

It's really, and when I ask them, so where did that come from? They're like, huh, get Sarah in here right now. Um, like, they go and call on like their data science team.

And their data science team was like, well, I, I don't know exactly, but we could probably figure it out. And I was like, yeah, we should lead with who are the besties in that situation. So that's how I got my name.

I ended up getting recruited to go work at Microsoft. I, uh, ended up adopting a bunch of baby models in research and being asked at a very quick pace, kinda like the open AI stuff that happened at, uh, Microsoft recently. But this was for just traditional, what we call heritage AI models, the old fashioned kind.

Um, but we would build these models and they needed someone to help get them from research into production, which is hard because academics don't care about schedules or deadlines or failures in production, or millions of dollars of losses. They, they're like, well, I don't even understand. So we created a campaign not only to help educate our teams, but also to educate the world.

Some of you might recognize it, it was a Super Bowl commercial, but let's go ahead and take a look at and see if you like it as much as I do Today. Right now, you have more power at your fingertips than entire generations that came before you. Think about that.

That's what technology really is. It's possibility, it's adaptability, it's capability, but in the end, it's only a tool. What's a hammer without a person who swings it?

It's not about what technology can do, it's about what you can do with it. You are the voice and it's the microphone when you are the artist. It's the paintbrush.

We are living in the future we always dreamed of. We have mixed reality that changes how we see the world. And AI empowering us to change the world.

We see you have more power at your fingertips than entire generations that came before you. So here's the question, what will you do with it? Every time I see it, I'm like, let's go, let's go build something.

This is amazing. The most important words that were in that entire script that yes, we wrote for him was AI is just a tool. This was a message we sent out to the world in 2018 before the AI winter was over, I guess.

But definitely before chat GPT launched. In my experience going from Amazon Alexa, where I tried to teach everyone, voice is everything. Voice is everywhere.

You'll use voice. Voice equals a very large set of complex AI models, by the way. But the fact that you can talk to a machine and it will do what you say, I always, I like to take a little credit.

Like if you got Chachi bt and you didn't have years of yelling at Alexa and Siri before that, you wouldn't have done as good. You wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much. Um, so I feel like I did a service, but during this time, I, I mean, I went from Microsoft, I deployed, I I have this, so you might wonder, I went to MIT and somebody posted about me afterwards.

One of the reporters was like, it takes some, something about someone to come on stage with an emotional support animal at MIT in an academic conference. And I'll say, yes, that is me. I'm very, I am neurodiverse, but the reason I do this is to give you a very clear picture of what my life was like.

So those 17 research models were like baby tigers, like adorable, cute baby tigers, as many organizations are today, little baby AI models running amuck. Um, and nobody, like, when I look at a baby tiger, I'm like, huh, baby tiger. Look at those paws.

How big are you going to be? Or razor sharp teeth at birth. Like, what are you going to eat?

Where are you going to live? How are we gonna take care of you? How like, oh wait, what happens if I don't want you anymore?

Then what do we do? We don't just unleash you on times Square, though. It has been done.

That's a bad idea. But this baby tiger concept grew very rapidly in my mind because I was surrounded by people enamored with technology. This was in 2018.

Now the world is enamored, 3 million daily users on chat, GPT. The world is enamored with this. And I can guarantee you from my conversations, they are not asking any questions whatsoever of the cute little baby tiger that they are building.

They do not know how big it's going to be or how big it is, and they have zero clue how to use it safely and responsibly. So this became the mantle upon which I put on, and I helped lots of companies. I went from Microsoft to NPR and National Public Radio during the other election.

Uh, that happened right before COVID. Uh, at that time we were worried about deep fakes and misinformation. Unfortunately, that was not, I mean, it turned out that humans were saying way crazier stuff than deep fakes were saying at that time.

So that was a shock. And then deep, and then COVID happened. So we ended up moving into DevOps.

Literally my entire like engineering team became DevOps engineers during COVID because we were NPR. So our volume doubled every day for nine months, every day. Like we had no idea.

And I don't know if you know this about NPR, they're still of the mind that yeah, clouds, I guess kind of cool cloud formation. Me. Um, and more importantly, like scripting, you know, infrastructure as code was like a dream idea.

It, it isn't. Now COVID changed that for them, but at that time they're like, I don't know, this DevOps thing, it sounds kind of cool. We'll rename our cis admin teams, DevOps.

That's what happened. And lots of companies do this. But anyway, we end up, COVID happens and uh, we end up literally like having to figure out like all the infrastructure was sitting in-house on the basement of NPR.

And uh, anyway, it was quite, it took me back to Y 2K days where we were sleeping on the floor trying to save the world. Um, literally. So I went to NPR, that was super fun.

I like working with AI in production. Unfortunately, it is how you learn about ai. We heard all morning about reinforcement learning with human feedback.

And we now know that about, I don't know how many of you using a model, everyone's hand pretty much raised. And I feel like if you didn't raise your hand, it's not 'cause you didn't use it. It's just 'cause you're like, I'm not a hand raiser.

And that's okay. But if you've ever seen a model, you probably have seen some image that looks like this. Thumbs up, thumbs down.

It's the most rudimentary form of feedback you can give a model. The biggest challenge I ran into is that one, nobody on the other side of that model's going, oh, thumbs down. We should change that.

Nobody's like, there is no commissioned team to care for this feedback. Um, and number two is that 72% of people who use a model and it lies to them or does something bad, they take a picture of it, put it on Twitter, but they do not actually click that button. A data scientist has no idea what's wrong with the model if you don't tell them.

And that's the only mechanism upon which we've given you. And 70% of you won't click on that. So one thing I'd encourage you to do from now on, you have been knighted into the world of responsible use as a user of this technology.

Please, for heaven's sake, just click the that's a good answer. That's a bad answer. Most importantly, that's a bad answer.

And then the text box pops up and just type GPT an answer in there if you've got to. But put something in there because all of the biggest companies that have had the largest failures came from very, I mean, you know, this, if you're in cyber, um, came from very simple things that could have been avoided. Literally the story of every cyber like nonsense that most Fortune 500 companies deal with.

I walk in and go, so you do know that that that's like documented, it's like part of the well architected framework that every cloud professional should know. And they're like, yeah, we, well, we really needed to get this out. We kind of skipped that part.

Or here it is the PDF, they print it out with coffee stains on top. Um, so these strategies are ways that I get in a company now. I started my own company in 2016 to help companies adopt AI safely.

And I created this framework, it's called Lead ai. It's actually in this new book. So I am not, I don't like writing.

I do like talking. And so Wiley came up to me and they're like, what if we just put your keynote in a book? And I was like, that would be amazing.

That's it. And so I was like, yeah, sign me up. I signed the line and 18 months of horrible, awful experience later this beautiful thing came out and it's actually really good, but it hurt me to write it.

So I hope you benefit from it. I took all of my stories that I'm telling you now, right? There's a lot of fluff kind of in these stories of like Jeff Bezos, but there's a lot of nonsense that went on in these conversations between each one of these stories.

And so I documented all of them. But I have four principles that I have learned, hard learned, um, over the years. I did end up at Accenture.

I helped them build a new practice. This was November, 2022. You might recall, if not, you can like look it up.

Um, but it was a big month for us because Chachi, BT finally after seven years of failure, finally decided to launch to the public. And I was a beta tester on it from COVID. So I was a a Microsoft MVPI got a chance to, I was on Codex, which is what today is one of the heads of GitHub copilot and the code engine that's inside chat GPT.

So I was beta testing this back in the day. I didn't like it anyway, but, um, but I was beta testing it, providing feedback, thumbs up, thumbs down, really, uh, detailed feedback. But what I noticed is that I started a practice in January of 2023.

By November, we had made $300 million in sales of a solution that included responsibility and I, because I wove it in. And this is what I'll tell people when you build technology, especially AI systems, you have to weave in responsible use like water in a wave. It's not a raisin in a bun or, um, chip in a muffin chocolate chip in a muffin.

It's like water in a wave. Which means I, I've watched this now happen, I used to say this anecdotally, you are one acquisition away from the death star. Like literally some leader can come in and dismantle everything that you did.

All your governance policies, all your committees can get fired. I've watched it happen. I've been part of that.

If you weave it in, if you make it the DNA of how you build projects, they can't pluck it out. And that's what I became passionate about. So these principles, thank you.

These principles help you understand kind of how do you design this way. Now these are well-defined in in my books. You're welcome to look it up.

But my favorite is designing with inclusivity because if you remember, I started with my son. That was the whole reason. But never build for people without them.

Never build for someone without them standing right next to you. Now, I want to deliver to you two things in my last two minutes that I think it changed my entire career. And it was proof in the pudding proof that this technology when implemented safely and responsibly actually generates value for companies.

This is an IDC report. They do it every year. This is the latest version.

The numbers went up tremendously from 2023 and 2023 was the first year ever. So these numbers are gonna get crazy. But what I wanna share with you is they were all built on a system.

You've heard, I don't know if I didn't see anyone write it down, but the policy documents that Meta Anthropic and Amazon and Microsoft have created, they are like cheat sheets, cheat codes to building software that scales. They call it responsible AI policy, but that's what it is. These are the 16 use cases that generate three x returns based on that report.

But that's not the magic. This is, these are the four that generate 10 x returns. People ask me, how did I make 300 million in nine months?

I made it because I only did the stuff that works, that generates massive returns. So if anything that I said sounds interesting, if you wanna know how I did it, let's be friends. I got a cool book.

Maybe we could all say this really cool thing together. Do you know this quote With great power comes. Okay.

So the eight of you that said it, like, be friends with those people 'cause when they come and take over, like you're gonna wanna be with one of those. Um, but thanks for having me. It was my pleasure.

Hope for we'll be friends. GPU Hammer time cloud native security, slow AI coating the FCC resale shenanigans. Continue AKA's agent tick ai.

Somebody got swept up in a typhoon. Google goes windsurfing. And we have some new reports from the Future Room Group in this week's episode of the Tech Field Day rundown.

Hello everyone, welcome to this episode of the Tech Field Day rundown. It is July 16th. Are the odds of July a thing?

I don't think they are. Uh, we could ask Caesar, but of course, you know, uh, he's too busy making salads and, and whatever else that he does. What you should be doing though, is checking out this wonderful edition of the Rundown, because I wish I was kidding.

It really is National AI Day. So how's that different from the other 364 days a year? Well, this time you actually have to get AI a gift.

Um, I recommend something in the electrical variety. Um, but uh, one thing that is never shocking is the intelligence and charisma of my amazing co-host, Mr. Alistair Cook.

Al, welcome to the show. It is truly hard to be shocked by the completely absent. Thank you, Tom.

It is a delight to be here with you on national personal shift day and hopefully your personal chef is going to make some nice dish for your AI and order it out. Future AI overlords look kindly upon us. Yes, yes they should because we always talk so highly of them here on the rundown and would never hope that they would troll the internet, uh, video archives to punish us in the future.

With that being said, let's jump into the episode because things may not be looking so rosy for AI right now. That's because Ro Hammer is back. Yeah, that's not the one that Thor uses.

Instead this is a huge CPU exploit. Well, guess what? It's not just a CPU exploit anymore because it has been demonstrated to be effective on the Nvidia RTXA 6,000 GPU.

That means that you could potentially lead AI models on that GPU to produce inaccurate results. The research team that found this little Juul, uh, said that the effect of the attack was like giving a GPU catastrophic brain damage, which is kind of how I feel when I have to read another AI story. Uh, this thing though, it's only possible in a research lab, right?

Al Like there's no way that someone could potentially give my, uh, AI application brain damage, right? Sure, we'll tell ourselves that. And that's the thing.

This has only been done in in a research lab. Uh, however, RO Hammer is really well known. I mean, CPU Ro Hammer has been a known thing for some time.

The ability to attack one section of the memory within a physical server and have that cause a a bit flip a corruption in the data. And another section of memory, the mitigation for this has always been error correction and preferably multi bit error correction. So that, uh, if a single bit or a couple of bits get flipped, you can correct that because you've stored additional data.

Now, the problem with storing that additional data, that error correction data is it takes up more space and then computing the actual error correction codes on a regular basis also adds more load to the CPU to do these functions. So there's protection against it and it's gonna come at an expense. So who needs that protection?

RO hammer and now GPU hammer, which is the, the name of the script that they used here. Uh, these are most dangerous on places of mixed trust. So places where you have some high trust applications using exactly the same physical hardware as applications you don't trust, I would ca categorize that as public cloud.

Another tenant could be right alongside your workload. Now, their ability to know that you're alongside their workload is pretty limited. Uh, but their ability to damage your workload is, is less limited than possibly we thought it was before.

So I think we'll see some moves towards more dedicated hardware for this. If I am controlling all of the workload that's on a specific GPU as well as its associated CPU, I'm much less exposed to some sort of behavior that another tenant is doing. So this doesn't necessarily mean that everything has to come back to on-premises to mitigate this.

Uh, couple of techniques if you're staying with multi-tenancy, then use a multi-tenancy that uses error correction code in the memory. And then the other mitigation is to use dedicated hardware actually on the cloud rather than using multi-tenant hardware. Is this something that an, an attacker could use as a way of doing a distributed denial of, or a denial of service against your application, right?

Giving your AI application brain damage because it's running right alongside it, yes, technically could happen. In fact, it's more likely to happen on premises because then the attacker knows what applications residing on the same GPUs and cpu. Uh, it's less likely that you'll be the target of an attack on public cloud since there's less of that awareness.

But you could just be unlucky that some person of questionable character, uh, is experimenting that with this on an adjacent GPU or is just ha has been compromised by somebody who just means the world ill who just wants to see the world burn. Should you be worried about it? Yes, you should, should be aware that this is a possibility and that it really does tank the results of your AI application.

One of the things they said is they benchmarked the accuracy of the results of an AI model that is running adjacent to this GPU hammer. 1% accuracy. It really is that sort of catastrophic brain damage that we definitely don't want in our application.

So yeah, the, uh, the impacts are pretty severe. The probability of being affected by it, it's fairly low to protect it self against all kinds of, uh, unpleasantness. Some sort of cloud native security fabric might be very useful.

Maybe is building just this to simplify and cut clouds, either security costs by enabling real-time policy enforcement as well as traffic encryption. This approach aims to fix current challenges, outdated tools and security gaps across multiple clouds. How important do you think it is to have these cloud native solutions across multiple clouds?

Tom? So lemme ask you this question. How would you configure an access list on a Palo Alto firewall to restrict all inbound traffic from a certain geolocation ip?

Now I need you to translate that into AWS Azure, Oracle and Google too late if you didn't already immediately know how to do that. You've been violated and breached and you're gonna be in the news. Sorry, that sucks.

One of the reasons why we have such a hard time securing workloads in the cloud is because the way that our tooling operates is very much stuck in a bastion host on premises methodology. And that doesn't work in the cloud folks. You, you cannot secure things VPC by VPC.

You. Well, it's like, remember the old days of managing things server by server by server? Some of you probably are wistfully looking off into the distance.

Oh yeah, the good old days as you, I don't know, puff on an old pipe and, uh, complain that your joints are getting creaky. 'cause the weather's changing outside. Anyone under the age of 50 is gonna go, no, it's horrifying to think about managing things server by server.

That's why we invented virtualization containers. So many other things. The same thing applies to security and even more so because security rapidly evolves.

So you've gotta be on top of those things. And I think what aviatrix is building here, a cloud native fabric that spans multiple clouds is absolutely critical because it means that you only have to build your policies once. And then when you tell the system to deploy those policies across whatever clouds you're using, that means that you don't have to worry about all those translation mechanisms.

What did Amazon call it? No crap. What does Microsoft call it?

Is it the same direction? Does it apply at the same location? It's all taken care of for you.

And when your executive comes back from their latest meeting and gets told, oh, we, uh, we need to be in this other cloud now because they're great for insert and main reason that salesperson told them here, now you just click a couple of buttons in the aviatrix Cloud native security fabric and you can be secure by default over there instead of scratching your head for a few hours trying to figure out how they do an object contract policy model remediation. Yeah, I'm already lost. So bravo to the folks from Aviatrix for, for taking a look at this.

You may have seen them previously at, uh, field day events in the past Cloud Field Day Networking Field Day. We'd love to see 'em at Security Field Day to talk about this. So, you know, Aviatrix, we'd love to get an opportunity to check that out.

Uh, we do offer security field day events throughout the year. You've probably heard about AI helping you code things. Well, someone actually did the math and they did a study of 16 experienced developers, uh, that have completed hundreds of coding tasks.

And they found that having an AI coding assistant is making these developers less productive. The developers believed they were nearly 20% more productive with assistance like Cursor Pro or Philanthropics Claude. However, the study found the exact opposite.

The tasks took 20% longer to complete using the ai. I guess the question that I have to ask Al is AI the new Cliffy. Well, that's a an interesting parallel because you know, Cliffy didn't do a heck of a lot for us, but he certainly took a lot of our attention.

And that's, uh, what we're seeing here is that these AI coding assistant are more useful than clip it, but they are taking a lot of attention. So this specifically was some senior experienced developers working on open source projects, working through about 260 different tasks. And the developers themselves as, as I said, they've, they've reported somewhere around 19 to 20% more productivity felt productivity than without using the AI tool yet it took them 20% longer to complete that productivity, which doesn't sound like greater productivity to me.

Uh, the study looked a little bit deeper. One of the things was that, uh, these developers spent a lot of time reviewing what AI had provided them as code, as well as spending a lot of time crafting the prompts to get AI to give them what they wanted. And so it feels like there's still an awful lot of work that needs to be done to get assistance from your assistant.

But I should caveat though, that these were some experienced developers and so they knew what they were working with. They knew the environment, they knew the, the tools that they were using. So one of the use cases for these AI assistance is to speed up the training of less senior developers, uh, make it easier to work with things you are less familiar with.

And I suspect the results would've been better in that use case. So making software development more accessible for junior developers and people who are just starting out, I think is the place where these coding assistants are very useful at the moment. Uh, I think we're a little way away from these coding assistance.

Being an expert programmer and making expert program is more productive. Uh, that's definitely the direction they're heading for, but the study suggests that we're not anywhere near there yet. They also tell us that we're not very good at judging our own productivity.

A new law restores the fccs authority to auction spectrum and requires at least 800 megahertz be sold, potentially pulling it from the six gigahertz and CBRS bands currently used by wifi and rural broadband providers. While mobile carriers like at t and Verizon support the move to give them more bandwidth, uh, for 5G expansion, critics want it could slow your wifi and harm small ISPs that rely on these bands. The law reverses earlier efforts to protect six gigahertz for unlicensed use and reflects growing pressure from the wireless industry now backed by former FCC High who leads a major telecom lobby, Tom, 800 megahertz.

Is that a lot of bandwidth to pull out of these bands or is it just around the era? It's only a flesh wound. How bad could it be?

It's not like the six gigahertz spectrum is 1200 megahertz in whip. Oh wait, that's exactly how big it is. Yeah.

My political soapbox for this little story is probably gonna be more like one of those CrossFit box jumps. It's like five feet tall. So allow me to elaborate on that.

We opened up these two bands and, uh, we opened them up under extreme pressure from lobbying groups. The first band, of course, was CBRS, where, uh, you've probably heard of this for things like IOT or for warehouse locations that are not well suited to wifi that need large coverage for devices. And, uh, we had to play with some certain rules.

Uh, the CBRS band is lightly licensed, which means that there are people who can buy a license in that band and then they can operate in that band. And then if you are trampling all over their license, you have to move. Uh, so there's, there's the ability to operate unlicensed in that band.

Then we have the six gigahertz band. And, uh, this is an interesting story. Uh, the short version is, is that, uh, when they were doing all the original surveys, they got a lot of feedback from saddle leak providers and from telecom companies who said, oh, we need way more studies before we can let you use this.

And the incumbent wifi companies like Aruba and Cisco said, no, you don't. Uh, we've proven that it doesn't actually interfere with anything and there's no problems and you should open it up. And they did under AGI PI when he was the FC chairperson.

And then we come to this year when someone snuck a little rider into the bill that was passed, it was neither big nor beautiful. It was kind of a pain in the neck. Uh, among other things, you know, like trying to repurpose the space shuttle discovery to Houston, they also said, well, remember those things that we set aside for everyone to be able to use wifi?

Yeah, we would like to sell those to somebody. Now, well, who was the first group of people lining up at the door cup in hand ready to pay for the thing that they claimed they needed more time to sort out? That's right.

It's the telecom providers. And who's the lobbyists for the lobbying group that's working on behalf of them? Oh, that would be the same person who opened that spectrum up a few years ago who got fired or was departed from the FCC and got himself a nice Cushing lobbying job.

Hopefully he's drinking out of a 55 gallon drum instead of that comically oversized coffee cup that he loved to put on TV so much. This isn't about coffee. This is about going back on a promise, a promise that said that we're gonna give you this band to expand.

4 gigahertz recently because that's a trash band if I've ever saw it. And two, it's funny that that's what they're telling the government because what they're telling the investors is, oh, we got plenty of room to expand. This won't be a problem.

Please don't let the stock price dip because we lied to you. Huh. That's really weird.

It's almost like they're talking out of both sides of their mouth, which honestly is not something I should be surprised about because it's a political discussion. If you wanna know why AGI pi was so, uh, ready to say that six gigahertz isn't being well utilized, maybe you could go back to the FCC and ask them about why they had so many crazy rules in place that wouldn't allow six gigahertz operations outdoors without, uh, the uh, a FC databases being brought online and having tons of studies done before you would even light it up. And oh my God, if you ever get a radar hit in an airport, we gotta shut this thing down for six months to figure out why the airport radar systems are so comically backwards that they don't operate well with anything.

Because that was another group of people that kept saying that they can't operate in those bands. And guess who was the other group behind the airports trying to get six gigahertz shut down. That's right.

It was at t and Verizon. So you'll have to excuse me if I think that maybe the motto of the US government should not be, why do we give away things we could sell to people? Do better guys and quit trying to sneak these things into must pass bills because if you don't, well, who knows what might happen the next time somebody is in office who actually understands how technology works there.

I'm gonna jump down off my soapbox. Now. Let's talk about something more fun because ACA has unveiled a new suite of integrated tools that they're calling ACA orchestration, ACA agents, aka memory and ACA streaming, which is designed to speed up the creation of agentic AI systems.

The platform promises three times the performance in just one third of the compute cost with the support of wide range of applications from autonomous and adaptive systems to real-time and edge use cases developed in close collaboration with customers who are managing massive AI workloads. Uh, some of those are exceeding over a billion, that's with a b tokens per second. The new offerings are now available to all existing ACA license holders.

A live demo and deep dive are gonna be scheduled for webinar tomorrow. Al, what has you excited about acas new lineup? Well, for a start, you've gotta put this in a, a context of what ACA is.

Uh, ACA is, well, it's a company, but it's also a framework for building distributed applications. And it's that basis of we've gotta distribute application framework and what feature set the people want to add to their distributed applications. Ai and particularly in a distributed architecture, agentic ai, this is where the AI takes some input, does some action, and then produces some next step in the process.

And often we we're expecting to be seeing one agent talking to another agent. And these, these agentic AI is in some ways is like the microservices version of ai, where the microservices talk to one another while these AI agents talk to one another, each one achieve some small task, but together they achieve a much larger task. So having this capability as a platform that you don't have to build yourself all the way from the ground up as here's a, a set of capabilities, a set of libraries that you can use to build an agent AI application.

And they're using all of the right acronyms in here like MCP and having, um, uh, really nice API integrations for this. The ability to tie these things together in in large scale. Um, this looks really cool.

So having orchestration of an entire workflow that might go through multiple different AI agents running those agents themselves, uh, through HGDP APIs for the agents themselves. Uh, one of the nice things is separating out a section called is the ability to persist all of the context information that's associated with a particular query or a particular sequence of queries or discussions that are happening between these agents. Transferring that, that context information from agent to agent and persisting it over a long time is gonna be an absolutely vital one.

Here, here, uh, some nice interesting things about, uh, streaming in here. So, streaming data rather than just transactional data. Uh, streaming data methodologies for driving in, having this stream of data coming in triggering the a triggering the agents to run and get some insights from these individual units of data.

Streaming it again, we've got this, uh, ACA platform that allows you to build large complex applications that just say billions of tokens per second, sorry, billions of tokens per second. Uh, as as we're getting the, these big applications running through. I think this is really cool.

I think this is going to be incredibly useful for building out these large applications or more likely adding a agent AI features to the large applications you are already building with aca. Alright, Tommy, you're ready for your soapbox again, actually, I'm, I don't think this one's gonna be the soapbox. I think you're just gonna be, uh, frothing at the mouth with joy on this one.

US officials want to extradite Jews' way, uh, Chinese man arrested in Italy working for the silk typhoon, a Chinese government-backed hacking group. He's accused of helping steal COVID-19 research from US universities and joining the 2021 Microsoft Exchange server attack. Uh, prosecutors say he was following his orders from Chinese intelligence to serial sensitive data.

His family and lawyer say he's innocent and may have been hacked himself. Experts say the arrest is a rare win that silk typhoons tie, the cyber spying is still likely to continue, isn't it, Tom? It's, and the reason why is because as we all surmise, the people backing the typhoon groups are well connected and are basically training people to kind of accomplish things that they could get in trouble for otherwise.

And unlike Elmo this week, I don't think our friend here was hacked. I think that it was quite the opposite that he was on the, the receipt on the producing sign of that. And again, this is all alleged, this is, you know, what's happening.

But what's important here is the fact that this was a, an arrest made in Italy on behalf of the US government that immediately filed for extradition. They want somebody to hang this on. Yes, stealing COVID research data five years ago.

Bad Microsoft really wants to hang the exchange hack on 'em, but here's why it's important. 'cause if you remember the other Typhoon group, salt Typhoon was responsible for a massive hacking campaign just last year that hit a lot of people that are currently in power, and they have the potential to be embarrassed at the comically inappropriate time, like during a negotiation with a foreign power over trade deals, for example. And I think that this is trying to send a message to a group that allegedly is state sponsored, knock it off, quit hacking us, or we'll start arresting your people in every country in the world, at least the ones that we have extrajudicial treaties for.

Now, the question is, does this cause the typhoon groups to back off of certain campaigns or does it cause them to escalate? Well, if you're gonna threaten me, I'm gonna get enough black male to threaten you right back. I don't have a good answer for that because we know we have never seen hacking on this scale with this many involved people.

And honestly, I don't think one person is gonna turn that tide, especially if they can't get 'em out of Italy, because as we've seen, the Chinese government can be very, very convincing when they want to keep one of their nationals out of an unfriendly country where they could potentially be prosecuted for something that quite honestly, the Chinese government doesn't think is a crime, or at least the way that it was directed. Or maybe they cut 'em loose. I don't know, maybe they're like, yeah, you can get your sacrificial lamb and while you're busy putting 'em on trial, we're gonna steal a whole bunch of other stuff, folks, the typhoon thing isn't going away anytime soon.

If anything, I expect to see four more typhoon groups come up out of this and they're all gonna be named some other kind of element that will eventually form the Typhoon megazord. And then we're gonna have a kaiju battle on our hands and it's gonna get real entertaining. So make sure you stay tuned, because this one's about to get juicy folks.

OpenAI has been buying everything that's not nailed down, but they missed out on something because the $3 billion deal they had to buy, AI startup Windsurf collapsed. So guess what happened? Google quickly hired Windsurf, CEO co-founder and a whole bunch of other staff to its DeepMind team focused on Agentic coding.

Google also got themselves a nice little license to use some of Winder's technology. However, it doesn't own the company, it just owns most of the people who work there. There failed deal comes among growing tensions between open AI and their daddy, Microsoft, who, uh, it's highlighting the fact that there's fierce competitions among tech giants to be the leader in ai coding experts say that open AI is facing challenges while rivals like Google and Anthropic are able to move faster in this space and potentially challenge to take the Crown.

Al, did Google get themselves a real win by effectively buying everything from Windsurf, but the name, It feels like that, doesn't it? And you, you take the CEO, you take, uh, co-founder, you grabbed some of the, well, apparently had 250 staff and most of them are still there. But if you pulled the guys out at the top, the founders, the people who had the foundational knowledge for this, how much is lift?

It's an interesting thought. Uh, Google is also not saying how much this cost to pull these people in can imagine that when the current, uh, massive demand for skills around building AI applications that these people are, are demanding pretty serious amounts of compensation. Uh, that $3 billion is probably a little more.

The, the, again, uh, the $3 billion open AI was gonna spend is probably a little more than the salaries that these people are getting from Google, but maybe just the, the joining bonus will be up there. So joining, um, it'll be interesting to see what's left of Windsurf, how long and, and how far Windsurf continues. They are formerly known as code and are a provider of AI coding assistance.

You may recall my earlier story on AI coding assistance. Uh, definitely good to see the Google team making commitments to, to getting hold of some more great skills to add to their existing amazing skills in, in the DeepMind team, building all of the AI engines and, um, building some pretty cool technology within Google there. Um, does this mean that OpenAI is, is gonna sort of fall off a little bit and not succeed so well, a little too early to say?

Uh, it is definitely a, a fractious relationship between the various players here, because whoever builds the best generative AI foundation model is gonna be in a position to license those models out to the commercial organizations that are gonna going to build AI applications, commercial organizations, Aren gonna build foundation models. They're gonna fine tune those foundation models that they've licensed or they're gonna use technique, slight retrieval, augmented generation to get some business awareness to those foundation models. But it is ridiculously expensive to build a foundation model.

And so it's high stakes fights between the various people who are building these, uh, foundation models. It'd be interesting to watch this from the sidelines with, uh, a, a big bucket of popcorn and a nice cold drink. New report from the Futurum group.

Of course, our great friends, and, uh, lemme try that again, again. A new report from the Futurum group highlights some big news in the data intelligence space. The global data intelligence, analytics and infrastructure di ai market is projected to grow significantly more than doubling from 40 409 billion to 876 billion going from 2024 to 2029.

5% compound annual growth rate according to our future and group study. Uh, rum intelligence is an awesome part of the wider futurum group, which of course includes tech fields. A, the surge in, in the, this surge in the DIAI is primarily driven by the accelerated integration of AI into enterprise data infrastructure, making data, a crucial investment for future-proofing businesses through AI driven automation and real time decision making.

Tom growth in storage is unsurprising. Is this something slightly different? It, it's a little bit different.

And normally I'd say, you know, more data people are munging through it. That's, that's one thing. But when you look at the fact that this is literally what AI runs off of, like you, you'd be crazy not to think about that.

Look, that data intelligence, that is the raw materials that your algorithms, your models are running on and running AI without good data intelligence is a lot like buying a Ferrari and then parking it in your driveway. If you don't have the place to run it, why have it? And look at all the things that go around this.

I mean, we've been talking about this for over 10 years. Remember we used to do data field day and now that we've kind of come to where we're at with ai, it's like the new data field day. And yeah, I, I get it.

Everything old is new again. But more importantly, what people need to understand is that everything that surrounds AI is growing at a rapid rate. I mean, look at the number of news stories that we've done already this year about power consumption.

Like the electricity market is doing gangbuster business. If we can figure out a way to do cold fusion, I mean, AI will eat it up. But more importantly, what is the other thing you gotta think about is like the, the data inputs are gonna be growing and how do you store those?

Because I promise you AI hates unstructured data. You've gotta be able to look it up in a table. You gotta be able to index it.

You gotta be able to do all of these things. And that means that organizations who have historically done a terrible job of holding onto that data are gonna try to find a better way to do it. And that means they're gonna be investing in all of these things.

It's like cleaning up your house before you buy new furniture, right? We want it to be good. We want everything to be ready so that when we get the new stuff in here, it, we don't need to clean around it.

And one of the things that all of the great people over at the Futurum group have done is they have put together the numbers, you know, one of those amazing reports that, uh, you know, is easy to read, easy to consume, and can give you an idea of where the growth areas are and what people are using it for. And don't forget that you can head over to the Futurum intelligence platform. And if you're already a customer, you can download this.

If you're not, you can sign up and get access to it. We'll, uh, link to the blog post with the announcement there where you can get all the information that you need. So congratulations to that team for putting out an amazing report.

I think that it's really gonna help people understand not just where growth is in ai, but all of those satellite industries, right? Like when you see like a neighborhood being built, what's your first thought? I need to put a Walgreens here somewhere because somebody is gonna need to go to the drugstore sooner or later.

That's what we're talking about here, folks. We didn't have time for a closer look this week 'cause we had so many stories we had to cover that, uh, you know, we just wanted to make sure that you knew everything that was going on. Just like we wanna let you know everything that's going on in the world of Tech Field Day, because that's what's near and dear to our hearts.

The next thing coming up is actually in just about a month, we're gonna be Tech Field Day extra at Share Cleveland. That's right. Steven Foskett is back and he's gonna be having some great presentations from an amazing lineup of presenters.

You can find more information about them on the Tech Field Day website, and I'm sure that Stephen's gonna have, uh, a little promo coming out pretty soon with a list of who's gonna be presenting, as well as a fun little podcast that you're not gonna wanna miss. Uh, but coming up after that is Mr. Alistair Cook.

You're back in the US for some fun, aren't you? I am. I'll have a little bit further of a commute than Stephen does, getting up to Cleveland.

I'll be back for AI infrastructure field in the, uh, San Francisco area. Uh, it's gonna be fun. We're gonna have Broadcom and, and Hammer space and tis all turning up for that one plus a few more that will be added.

If it's gonna be anything like the last infrastructure field day. There'll be a lot at this event. Of course, couple of weeks after AI Infrastructure.

Field Day is Security Field Day. That's a Tom event. It is a TOM event.

And, you know, we talked a lot about security in this presentation lineup. Um, we had a lot of great stories about security. Think about all the ones that we've had so far.

Uh, we got some cool stuff coming up that you're gonna wanna talk about. And I actually wrote a blog post about the one of the companies we've got presenting Secure X. Uh, but more importantly, we'd love to see more great companies.

I talked about Aviatrix here, but we'd love to see some of the data protection companies out there. We'd love to see some of the companies doing endpoint security, XDR, whatever. We, we wanna open it up to as many people as possible because we want you to get a full understanding of what goes on in security.

There's more to it than just changing your password every 30, 16, 90 days, whatever it is. Um, so make sure you tune in September 24th and 25th. Consider it a birthday present to me because my birthday is that week and I would love to be able to celebrate with a very full event and cake, mostly a full event.

'cause I don't need anymore cake. But what you need is more of us on the rundown every week. You know where to find us.

We're here on Wednesdays, we publish our videos in the afternoon so you can, uh, drink that afternoon cup of coffee, stretch out and uh, hear us wax intellectual about the news. But more importantly, you can listen to us in audio podcast format. Maybe you're, uh, stuck on a long commute and you need something to pass the time.

And you wanna listen to the dulce tones of the Kiwi and the Nerd talk all about all of the stuff that happened this week. Well, if you do that, just search for Tech Field Day rundown. I actually told someone who's not in tech about that yesterday.

So, Kristen, if you're listening, I hope that you enjoyed this little shout out and I hope that this didn't bore you to death, because I know that tech isn't your primary job. You're just doing this because you think I'm cool. Let's be fair.

Nobody thinks I'm cool. Uh, but we think you're cool and we love that you are part of what we do here at Tech Field Day. And on the rundown, we hope that you tune in for all of our events.

But more importantly, we hope that you're back next week for the rundown. Like, share, leave a comment, let people know what we're all about because that's how we get more listeners and we want to hear from them, from you, from everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

I know it's the summer, at least up north. It's the summer down south, it's the winter. Stay warm or cold as appropriate.

And we'll see you next week for another great episode of The Run. Hi, I am Melody Brew from More Insights and Strategy. Welcome to this six five Summit AI Unleashed.

Today I'm joined by Mary Dewa, Saki, chief Sustainability Officer at Cisco. We're gonna explore how Cisco is building digital resilience while advancing sustainability from AI infrastructure to circular business models. How are you?

Thank you for joining us. Wonderful. Thank you for having me here today.

Yeah, Really excited to get into this conversation. Let's dig in. Let's just start with kind of a general overview about Cisco's sustainability strategy.

Well, you just mentioned digital resiliency and I, and I think about that coupled with our purpose to power inclusive future for all. And so when I, when I think about what does that inclusive future look like, I think about resiliency. I think about what sustainability can do.

And so that's how we build our strategy. There's three key pillars. One, how do we accelerate the transition to clean our energy?

And we know our products and services can help our customers do that. Second critically moving more and more from a linear model to a more circular. And the third, it's all about how we can leverage technology to create resilient ecosystems and communities.

So Cisco is leading in AI infrastructure. Mm-hmm. How does that fit into your sustainability model?

I, Cisco's a technology company, so you're always grappling with how does technology become an enabler. I've also been with Cisco for a few decades, so I've seen how these technologies emerge. And so one of the things that you do is how do you think about the transformational impact that AI can have?

And the first thing I focus in on is how do you incorporate that into the way you design your product? So take for example, Silicon one, the ability for our engineers to grapple with how do you create more bandwidth, more compute at the same time balancing that with ever increasing energy efficiency that connects right back to strategy. I think another thing that's important after you've designed it, let's say into your products, how can you give more ability for the tech leaders to kind of manage it and observe what's going on?

Hmm. This allows tech leader to maybe choose when they upload the, the latest software update or maybe shift workload models. So it's really building that intelligence in.

And I think one of the key things is just connecting the dots between these technology innovations and how that ult ultimately creates a more sustainable impact as well. Yeah. So let's connect the dots between the sustainability, the growing demand for AI and how it relates to data centers.

I think we all are excited about the opportunity that AI can provide, whether more efficiencies or I think of how it could really tackle some of the biggest challenges that we are facing. But I also recognize that it does require increased energy. And so I don't think you can really decouple thinking about AI without thinking about energy innovation as well.

And so this again is how, how are you designing your products to be more energy efficient? How are you designing intentionally an AI ready data center that's gonna provide that capability, but you're grappling with, is it secure? How is the energy, um, really connected to your outcome?

I think beyond that, one of the key things is really how you design it in the field. I started my technology career as a systems engineer. So I'm always really routing and rooting for those folks of going, are you designing it in the field to really, um, be the most energy efficient?

I've seen examples where let's say you refresh a data center, it could be half the footprint. So you think about that, the ability to manage it, but there's also really interesting innovations, whether it's liquid cooling in the data center, but I also know we're going to need new and more energy. So for example, Cisco corporate have invested in a new form of energy, it's a wave technology.

So imagine a humongous buoy in the ocean and the ocean just, it keeps going up and down. So permanent energy, uh, ability to create so that all of us, as we're thinking about the future, how can we invest and signal the demand for more energy and really use that patient capital to help take it from idea out of the lab into the pilot and ultimately into scale. So as we're thinking about AI and infrastructure, how does that impact security?

I think you need to look at it in a couple different ways. The first thing, as we mentioned, you can't really decouple the opportunity of AI and the energy demand or the energy innovation that we require. So when I think about it, we know that AI ready data centers are going to require energy.

Well, how do you get the energy there? You ultimately have to connect to your grid. Where is that?

What is the ability for your grid to provide that reliable, secure energy? And I think this is again, where networking is critical as we really think about all different types of energy coming together. So you've got more diverse energy, you need more flexibility, and the ability to have, uh, each endpoint secure is critical.

That smart modern grid, if we're not thinking about that now, it is gonna be a headwind, I think for achieving that opportunity. I think one of the other things that I always think about AI is at the end of the day, you think about the data that it's learning from or the data that's providing the insights and the inference. And so that's another area that you need to think about.

How are you grappling with your responsible AI framework, the ability to think about transparency, the ability to think about the privacy aspect of it. So to me, I always, I just don't think that we can imagine that future without really grappling with the ability to create and transmit secure variable dynamic energy. Mm-hmm.

You talked a little bit about the people aspect of this and people are gonna really have to change the way they work with ai. How does the sustainability aspect of that come into play when people are starting to think about AI as their their work partner? I think this is another super interesting, uh, dynamic that we're grappling with.

How does AI redefine the way we work and reshape leadership? I think we talk a lot about AI creating efficiency. I can talk about it in let's say the network and the data center, but think about how it's gonna change the way we work and the efficiencies.

So I do think this is going to allow us to rethink what your job is and what that looks like. And how are you using AI to automate. Um, for example, I'm using it right now in terms of how I can leverage it for my own research and benchmarking, giving me that first draft.

Mm-hmm. I do think you're going to also see it, um, imagine that day where I have that digital twin. We talk about a digital twin in a data center all the time.

But imagine you've got a digital twin that has your experiences the way you think. Hopefully for me, my sarcastic sense of humor, but in a way that translate across. I mean, one of the things that we grapple with in work is we're a global company.

I bet you also have clients around the world, but do we have a digital twin or that AI assistant or coach that can allow me to attend a meeting that is at 1:00 AM in the morning and being able to provide my input and then update me the next day? I think it's also gonna be an area where this AI coach is going to be providing me with ways that I can be a better leader. Um, I'll have to share with you that I'm dyslexic, so I often use very little words and very basic words when I write, because sometimes what I think I'm typing may not be what shows up.

Yeah. So the ability to have an AI coach that allows me to take what I intend and potentially make it more detailed or more inspiring or making sure that the tone is appropriate, I think is gonna really help me in the future. But then as a sustainability leader, you always want to balance that use case and how, what is the real benefit to productivity, to efficiencies and effectiveness?

How does it help you create more wellbeing in your workforce? Mm-hmm. And at the same time, grapple with the fact that it is gonna require more power.

And this is where the ability for us to design the products with energy efficiency, the ability to provide that ability to manage, to observe, to give choices in terms of where and how we leverage shifting of workloads or uploading of information is gonna be critical. And then at the end of the day, this is another area where I think AI is gonna help, is how I understand what really is the carbon footprint of our product, our software, and our use cases. That again, gives me as a sustainability or more information to work with our technology leaders about the choices they make.

Mm-hmm. So you're not just talking about sustainable for the environment, you're actually talking about sustainability for humans at that point as well. Exactly.

And that's why I always kind of anchor in resilience because I do think that we are living in an ever-changing world from the technology aspects as well as just our own family dynamics. And the ability to design in that resiliency to the, to the individual, to your company, to your community is critical for the future. And technology, I think is gonna be a huge enabler of it.

And So how do you think that changes the conversation around sustainability, how people are looking at initiatives of sustainability? I think it actually is ever increasingly connecting it to the business outcomes that we all are looking for. Yes.

I think maybe we've thought sometimes of kind of two value profiles of look at what value we're creating over here for sustainability of the planet and look at the value we're creating for ourselves, our customers, our partners, but quite frankly, you're really seeing the interdependency of it. So I do think I'm seeing more and more of the ability for me to articulate the business outcome, but then sometimes translate it for that chief sustainability officer or the financial team, or going back and taking how I think about sustainability or carbon or circularity and translating that for our technology leader as well. So I'm a bit of a translator as well.

Yeah. I it kind of makes the conversation easier to have in a way. Yes.

You know, it's not one or the other. They work together now. So you talked a little bit about circularity.

So can you talk in practical terms about what that means and how that fits into your sustainability style? Absolutely. Now, I grew up in a world that was very linear, right?

You would make something, you would use it and you would throw it out. And as you think about that business model, you realize that you're actually leaving a lot of value on the table because you could have had, take that one product and maybe have multiple life cycles of it. Do you also could recycle or, or use the material differently.

So circular is really about how you are designing for multiple life cycles, how you're reducing or designing out waste, how you're designing your product to be more modular, more easily assembled, disassembled. How are you thinking about the end of life? And, and that ties right back to your materials.

Are you using a particular material that's more regenerative, let's say fiber, um, packaging in your product? Um, or is it more you using more recycled material as you develop this? For example, our iPhones are a great example of using, I think over 70% of post-consumer recycled material played there in the product.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Some of the devices that I've seen on the, on the Cisco side, they're, they're designing completely around sustainability.

I mean, they said some of the device people that I spoke to and also said that even they thought that it was impossible to do what they were trying to do. And, And I'll tell you one of the things that I don't think everyone realize is how much by introducing, let's say energy efficiency requirements or more circular, creates more innovation and inspiration in our engineering or our supply chain team. I was so pleased to be able to sit down with some of our tremendous hardware engineers as they showed our latest Cisco 93 50.

And they, they pulled it apart and they're like, look, we just shifted how this fan, um, was moving air within this device, or we remove this piece of plastic and look what we did. So what it ends up doing to, in my mind, is actually creating more disruptive innovation because you're adding in a new component to how the engineers are, are thinking about delivering that next version of the product. But I also think it is, um, and this is where maybe where purpose comes into a certain extent, to see the pride and the inspiration and the problem solving that, that we're asking them to do.

It really, to me is one of those like value drivers that I don't know that we always think about is this is critical to innovation, thinking about how our products will be not only more resilient and more sustainable in the future. So with all of that in mind, how do you, how can companies integrate sustainability into their core operations rather than treating it as an add-on? 'cause as you said, these are things that affect the design, the observability.

I mean, everything about the product is different when it's not an add-on, when it's built in. You know, I think I would suggest you start with answering the question of how can sustainability be a value creator for you and your customers? And just like you mentioned, I I think the resilient future really requires us to embed sustainability and not as an add-on, but really that driver of value, of innovation, of trust.

It's, it's really how do you, how do you weave it into how you design your products, your services? How do you think about it as a risk mitigator, as as part of your procurement strategies, really how you serve your customers and your partners. To me, you do that.

You then create more scalability of that business model, the way of thinking, but ultimately you're just turning your strategy into real impact. That's great. Well, thank you so much.

This was really insightful, and thank you for joining us for this six five Summit. com or follow Cisco on X and stay with us. There's more ahead at the six five summit.