Techstrong TV March 18, 2026

Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong TV. You know, I'm literally packing to head to San Francisco for, to RSA in a few days, and news broke that is, pretty exciting. And I, so I, I apologize, I'm not in our Techstrong TV studio today.

I'm doing this one from home, but it couldn't wait, it couldn't hold. Let me introduce you to Cecilia Marignier, who of course runs the innovation, it's innovation and another part of the- Innovation- ... Scholars ...

Scholars Program- Okay ... for the RSAC, Alan. RSAC.

I'm gonna get you on it. Oh no, I'm glad you caught me early, 'cause I'm a little discombobulated today. No worries.

Uh, yep. Uh, Cecilia, it's great to see you, and I wanna introduce you all to Laura Koetzle. Laura, thank you for coming here on Techstrong TV.

Introduce yourself to the audience if you don't want to. Well, th- thanks for having me, first of all. And I'm Laura Koetzle.

I'm the head of community research for RSAC, so I produce a lot of the research about the cybersecurity community that's based on all the data that we collect as part of running all of the RSAC programs. Fantastic. And, and look, let's cut right to it, right?

Uh, the reason we, we kinda stopped the presses here is you guys recently came out with, a new rep- well, not recently. You just came out with a new report of, that I think is gonna be of interest to our audience. Cecilia, if it's okay with you, I'm gonna have Laura kinda l- Stage?

tell us about it. Yeah, go right ahead. Well, before I have Laura set the stage, I have to say this one small piece, which is everything is changing in cybersecurity.

It's so exciting. And the reason that we talked about stopping the press, the report is super interesting, but we also had a really big event happen, which was the Wiz acquisition. And it sets the stage for what Laura's gonna talk about, because the Innovation Sandbox Contest has consistently identified companies that have very, very strong trajectories after they've been on the stage.

And we're part of their story. We're not the only part of their story, but we wanted to make sure that we've got this whole thing set up for people to understand just how powerful the Innovation Sandbox is. And we hire, we have Laura here, who is the most awesome Laura, who actually is gonna share a little bit more about, like, why we came up with this idea, and then maybe set a little bit more of the stage of what to expect in the report.

Sure. Well, and the other thing we should say is that that acquisition closing was actually the least convenient possible time ever. Because we had finished this report and published it, and then about an hour later, the news that the Wiz acquisition had closed, came across the wires, which meant we had to scramble to update the report to contain the extra acquisition and the extra small amount of $32 billion in the amount of financing received, financing and investment received by the companies that have come out of Innovation Sandbox over the many years.

So the reason- You don't think they did that just to make your life difficult, do you? I'm certain I was the only thing on their minds- ... when they got approval to close their merger.

They're like, "Should we wait till next week? No, let's get it. " But ...

Yes, happy to report, l- as Cecilia said, the ink was, the metaphorical ink was not even dry on this thing when we had to update it. But we were happy to do it, because what better kind of proof could you see of the impact of Innovation Sandbox than we can't even put out a report before things change and more investment happens? So on the one hand, it's slightly irritating.

On the other hand, it's a great example of what we're trying to showcase. Fantastic. So l- let's give people, you know, we ju- I feel like I jumped into the middle of the movie.

It's, apropos Oscars were last night. Um, we can talk Oscars later, but- ... the beginning of the movie, the report really highlights the tremendous success that these companies who have been involved in the Innovation Sandbox program over, what is it, 21 years, Cecilia, right?

Yep. Exactly. Uh, over the 21 years.

Laura, is, is that fair to say, or is there That's, that's right. So what we tried to do was show kind of the overall trajectory of all of the top 10 finalists and winners from Innovation Sandbox. And I should say that one of the really interesting things you notice, in the presentation of, like, 11 years of Innovation Sandbox history, is the degree to which kind of upticks in categories of startups in Innovation Sandbox actually correlate with whatever major kind of trend there is in the cybersecurity industry the year after.

So there's a graph in the first bit of the report that shows this. Now, that's correlation, not cause, right? So it's not, oh, there are more Innovation Sandbox in this category, and that causes the next year application security or whatever it is to be the most important thing in cybersecurity.

But correlation's still pretty useful if you're trying to figure out where to place your bets and where to spend your money, whether you're a CISO or an investor, or a member of the community. So that was really noteworthy. " No, 'cause Wizen isn't even in here, and that, they just got acquired for $32 billion.

So the companies that are in... What we tried to do, Cecilia and I, with the companies that are in this, is to show kind of all the variety of successful outcomes that the companies in Innovation Sandbox exhibit. So there's three companies that were acquired by ...

And, and there's one entrepreneur who's had two acq- companies in Innovation Sandbox that have both been acquired, which, and there are a bunch of cases like that. In fact, one of my favorite bits of the report is that one of the companies that was acquired from Innovation Sandbox in 2025 was acquired by a company whose CEO had been CEO of another Innovation Sandbox winner before, whose origin- original, shall we say, in quotes, Innovation Sandbox startup was itself acquired by an Innovation Sandbox winner from even further back. So you can really see how much the Innovation Sandbox has influenced the industry over the years just by looking at these things.

And so in the report, in addition to the companies that have been acquired, you've got a company that has raised a whole bunch of different rounds of investment and is kind of aiming to become an independent software company by itself. And then you've got another one that's sort of much earlier in its journey, but where the entrepreneur's got a great story of how an investor called him the night before he was supposed to go on stage at Innovation Sandbox and said, "Okay, we wanna fund your company, but this offer is only good if you do not go on stage at Innovation Sandbox. " He refused the deal.

They went on stage. Mm. They won, and then they got a way better deal from sort of a much bigger group of investors later on.

" And the entrepreneur said, "No, thanks. " Yeah. So there, there are r- there...

and there are a ton of great stories like that from all of these entrepreneurs and from Innovation Sandbox throughout the years. So what the report tries to do is kind of bring that to life. Yeah, through anecdotes.

You know, the thing, Alan, that, like, I always give you the big numbers, like 18 point... 1 billion, but guess what? 1.

It's now 50 billion. It's 50 billion in investment you have, or, or an acquisition, and then on the other side you have over 100 of the 200 companies. So over 50% of them have been acquired.

So I'm always leading with that, Alan, because those numbers stick to people. But actually, if you go down and you dive into the stories of who these people are and w- how it, how it actually impacted them, that's what we wanted to get out of this report, is just to give people a glimpse of, hey, this c- this is exciting. You should be in the room to see what the next top 10 are doing.

And then also, if you're an entrepreneur, like, my goodness, like, why not apply next year? Because it could be you next. So I kind of feel like, we wanted to be able to give people some kind of, just a hook to, to learn and l- and be more excited about what we're doing at Innova- at, RSAC, and to let them know, like, just how much we feel that we like to support innovation, but we also have the anecdotal stories that tell you.

You know, those guys actually say it. 7 billion, was based on the fact that he got on that stage. He got the legitimacy of the, of the community behind him by having these judges select his company, and he feels like that really changed the way his company's trajectory landed.

And we wanted to make sure that got into the report. So Laura did a very nice job making it really easy to, to... It's very accessible, very simple.

Like, let's go. Just read the story. Know what, what we're trying to get across, and then also we have the stats behind us.

We're not just talking, and giving you just fluff, marketing fluff. This is actually data, which is why we love Laura, because she's making it real. Yeah.

I've, we've snuck enough numbers in there that I think, I think people, people will be a- the more data-oriented among you will be able to have a good time with the report as well. But the, the stories are the, I- in my opinion, the stories are what sort of make it memorable, and so that's what we're, that's what we were attempting, that's what we were attempting to get at. And you can also, so you don't think that Cecilia and I made this stuff up- ...

listen to the entrepreneurs on video themselves telling some of their story, some of their stories. So there are links in the report to some of the entrepreneurs in their own words. And so the reports are really, are distillations of all the facts and figures about their companies, what they have said in those interviews, and some other interviews that we've done with them th- over the years.

So we really encourage you to check it out, and Innovation Sandbox is next week. So if you are coming to RSAC conference, and if you are not, why aren't you? Uh, please come to Innovation Sandbox on Monday.

It's super fun, and if you can't make it, physically there, for whatever reason, we do actually put those pitches up online afterwards. But this year we're doing some, really fun things that you have to be in the room for. So definitely come and, and make the time.

This is definitely worth putting on your agenda if you're at RSAC. Absolutely. You know, so guys, look, I've been in security 30-plus years, not, not always in media.

I've, I've done several venture-backed startups. What you're describing, Laura, is the six degrees of separation in... Right?

Who, who's the, who... Kevin Bacon, right? Right.

The Kevin Bacon of, of how security works. This is how security works. You could trace-And there's been studies that, there's like IS- before your time, ISS was bought by IBM for, at the time, I think 60 billion, or maybe it was 200.

Not billion, million. They, they weren't doing billion dollar deals. But, but- It was a different era- Well- ...

when money was a lot harder to get by ... yeah, but I think it was all but as a result of that deal, the entire Atlanta cybersecurity community almost came out of, out of that ISS-IBM acquisition. Um, thi- this is, this is why it, it's, you know, it is, it's very, very...

I don't want to use the word incestuous, but it's very connected. Very connected. And- I'm glad you didn't use that word.

No And don't even mention it because Alan- Oh, ... it's like a tough word, man. That's a- Well- But I hear...

You know, the thing is, I like to think of it more like it's a community. Yeah, it is And the community identifies and connects with one another, and they support one another. It is very unusual where you have the competitors actually, you know, supporting one another.

At the end of the day, it's, that's part of it because th- everybody knows we gotta work together in order to really fight the good fight. So- It, it is a- ... maybe that would be framing it a little bit more gently.

How's that? No, we're, we're all, you know, we're all on this side of, of the, of the mission, right? Which is...

'Cause no one, I don't care, even Wiz or any company you wanna mention, they can't do it by themselves either. Right. We all, we all need to pull together, and that goes for both public and private.

Yeah. Not just public companies, I mean government, private industry, and everything else. That's the enormity of the task in front of us, es- especially in, you know, with what's going on in the world today with wars and cyber attacks and, and, you know, nation-state involvement.

We can't afford to build walls or, you know, or silos, right? We all need to be together, and I, and I think that's one of the nice things about, innovation, is it, it fosters that kind of sense of community. Now, real important, people watching this, they're gonna see this before next week because I'm, we're gonna, we recorded this on a Monday, in case you're listening.

And we'll have it up, hope... Well, by Wednesday, we'll certainly have it up, if not tomorrow. Where can we get the report?

We can give you, we can give you the link to put alongside the, a- alongside the podcast- We will put the link ... is probably the easiest, right? How about, well, if we go to the RSA site, can we look for it there?

RSAC. RSAC. RSAC site.

Yeah, if you go to... If you go to- Yeah, go ... com, you, and go to the library, you can, you can find it there.

So, and we'll also give you an easy link, so you just to click, so you just have to click. All right, we'll try to get that link into the notes then t- too as well. Laura, Cecilia, thanks for coming on today.

Appreciate it. This is a great thing, actually. You know what?

So many reports today are just facts and figures, and you've got your facts and figures, and 50 billion's a big number. But getting real people, i- in this case, real entrepreneurs, cyber entrepreneurs, talking about this and how important it was, and showing the connections and how the web of community kinda engulfs us is, is really, really important. So, thank you for doing that.

Thank you for doing what you do all y- you know, all year round, 'cause, you know, Monday's show day, but it's an all year round thing, th- th- running Innovation and Scholarship. So, I will see you guys out in San Francisco. We look forward to seeing you there.

All righty. Laura, good, great work, Laura Ket- Ketzel, and of course, Cecilia Marigney. Thank you so much, ladies.

We'll see you next week at RSAC. We'll go check out the report now to see, give you an idea of really what Innovation Sandbox has been doing for 21 years and why you wanna be part of it. We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong, and we'll be back in a minute.

Hey, everyone. It's Alan Schimmel from Techstrong again. Welcome to our next session in our recent Futurum Techstrong sessions with our friends at Microsoft.

Today's session is Patterns of Success, and it features Michelle Lancaster, general manager and partner for Glo- and global leader for business strategy and AI business solutions at Microsoft, and Futurum's own Mitch Ashley, software development life cycles. Michelle is gonna unpack the patterns of success emerging from the most transformative customer engagements Microsoft has seen. In this particular session, you're gonna see how organizations are successfully operationalizing AI through apps, agents, and chat to drive measurable outcomes.

It's not science fiction. It's not vaporware. These are real, live engagements that are with real outcomes and real metrics to look at.

You can expect a strategic overview of what is really working, why it matters, what's not working, and why that matters, and you can use these insights to drive and scale business impact with intelligent apps. Let's go to Michelle and Mitchell now. I hope you enjoy this session.

Thanks, Alan. My name's Mitch Ashley, and I am VP and practice lead of the software lifecycle engineering practice at the Futurum Group. And I'm Michelle Lancaster.

I lead business strategy in our go-to-market team for Microsoft's AI business solutions team. Michelle, I'm really excited to talk to you about this. The market is really energized around agentic business applications, AI agents, all of this.

What's your experience about how customers are approaching and, and reaching out to go after this to start to energize their businesses with these technologies? We've seen in the past six months or so a lot of the hype cycle start to turn into the tri-cycle, and that is not a three-legged instrument here. It's really how do we go from thinking about AI and applications as something that people want to dabble in into something that is the future of their business?

We're starting to see apps and agents and copilot come together, starting to see the power of taking automated applications powered with agents and humans, and running copilot over top of it as their overall UX system. " And we're starting to see some really impressive results in terms of not just time savings, but real dollars saved as well across many industries. Yeah, I'd love to hear s-some about the organizational patterns that are coming about that are helping enterprises successfully coordinate multi-agent orchestration across business functions to help them deliver an impact.

It's a big question. Well, maybe we'll try to take it bit by bit. Multi-agent orchestration is at the forefront of where real transformation starts to happen.

Having individual agents improve efficiency is one thing. Um, multi-agent orchestration can actually drive that business transformation. That orchestration layer brings us back into the heart of what I think the Microsoft value proposition is, which is not just the agents and the automation intelligence, but back to the core of security and governance.

You need to make sure that we have governance in place, we have rules in place, we have the group identities in place, and we've cleanly defined those. It turns out that's also the secret sauce of the organizations starting to move forward, finding the right use case and then starting with a foundation of security and a clear understanding of what the KPI is for that use case. Sounds relatively simple, but it is really the ticket to success of people going from launching individual agents, seeing full scale business process transformation.

You know, Michelle, it seems like we're kind of moving beyond the technology as the variants are really how we approach implementing AI, whether it's as a productivity aid or marking agents to do work force or even autonomous type agents. Can you talk a little bit about that progression and how, companies are approaching it? Yes.

We really see this as a concept that we've called the frontier firm. We see that evolution through three different stages. It really starts with humans using agents as assistant.

Think of copilot, where you can summarize a team note or be reminded of the most important email in your box. Really a individual worker aid around productivity, and we see lots of people experimenting in this space. We move into that second phase, which is humans working directly with agents, so more of an autonomous agent that is able to run a process but is human-led.

The human is directing it to do work, seeing the recipients of that work, and then continuing to move forward. People have started using researcher or analyst to summarize things, ahead of a, a meeting, so that agent's really taking on that research work for you and delivering the final product with that prompt. What's really exciting is the number of companies we see shifting into the third stage of this, which is autonomous agents working with other agents and working with humans.

Some of the places we start to see that advancement happening is in industries like manufacturing, where there are fairly complex processes where you are able to have multiple different types of agents working together to solve a problem. One of our customers has taken a look at supply chain management. They have an agent that's keeping track of the inventory inside all of their workplaces, and in the places where they need to ship products.

They have a reasoning agent going over top of that and saying, "Based on these numbers, based on what we're seeing in the predictive workflows, where do we need to up, increase or decrease the amount of changes? " That used to be a human being looking across multiple different kinds of spreadsheets, multiple different systems. The agents are there to work together to bring some of the complexity out, improve the efficiency, and then give that back with a human who's overseeing that work.

And some of those gains there are really impressive. You know, we've started to see things like thirty percent increases in order fulfillment and at a forty percent decrease in the overall sort of stock housing costs of extra inventory sitting on the shelves for too long. That's our aspiration, is to make sure all companies are starting to work across that flow.

You'll see productivity gains. We will see, ongoing transformation. That true sort of transformation takes place when you have all three of those opportunities realized inside the firm.

Yeah. Let's turn our focus to kind of the guidance that we can offer folks about how to successfully implement AI and agentic applications. First, could you share maybe an example of a customer who measured a meaningful business outcome from their AI implementation?

I might give you two, because the first one that always comes to mind for us is Microsoft, our, our own best customers. We get tons and tons of calls from customers, from everything about Xbox logins to changing their Windows application, to understanding why their Surface laptop is not working. Um, we're able to quickly sift through all of those issues, but the game changer has been the existing platform been built on a Power App.

How are we able to sort of assistance for those call center folks? We now have a set of agents that are able to classify exactly what type of issue it is, match it to the right human being. They're provided the latest information on any of the common outages, challenges that we're facing in that space.

They're able to get on the phone fully confident that they know exactly what is going on with... It has really helped the efficiency of folks in those call centers. That assistive technology was able to take an average person going from about a hundred calls a day to three hundred calls a day.

That's a pretty big increase in what a human being is able to do, and that's because they're able to more easily dispatch and resolve those calls with, a happy customer. And that's the second thing which I get super excited about. You don't always think of human satisfaction, in the space, but we should.

Our callers, they weren't waiting on the phone as long, they got more pertinent information, they were talking to somebody that was able to cut directly to the chase. That is a really exciting sort of value. Flip to the other side, we have seen in that industrial IoT space, large scale manufacturers operating heavy industry equipment.

They have had sensors on them forever, but those sensors have typically fed into an application. There's lots of data, there's very little insight. Introduce agents that can quickly make sense and build out the insights, and that customer was able to take that existing infrastructure, the work that they had already built on Power Platform to automate processes, and have agents go through to start to make the predictive maintenance decisions.

What they've seen is about a fifty million dollar, cost savings just in the first factory they implemented alone, and they're also able to see quite a bit of, improvement in terms of efficiency in servicing those. No longer do you have a single person checking the spreadsheet or checking all of the sensors, and you're able to precision, pinpoint. That's sort of the, the next frontier of that is when we're able to start to take human intelligence on those systems, combine it with an agent that's able to reason over data, and to make a recommendation that is then able to be followed.

You were talking about AI, but we're also talking about the human element. What are the cultural or team structural changes that are effective or essential for scaling AI? Uh, this is probably the most critical question, and that's an easy thing to say.

What we've seen is, largely learned through what Microsoft has gone through. We know that for the culture to be in place, you have to create... you have to start with security and governance, really starting with understanding.

You've got to make sure that people have a bit of psychological safety with the information being disclosed. You also build psychological safety with the fact that there is a future for humans in all of these work streams. When we talk about the frontier firm, there's not an instance where there is not a human being involved in those processes.

It becomes a question of how can you build trust in the data that's being provided so you feel like it's assistive and additive. There are also organizational protocols that are really important. That also goes back to security, and governance, but it also goes to some level of explainability.

We talk a lot about evaluations, we talk a lot about benchmarks, and that's not just to make the products better. It's also to really make sure that if you're trusting an agent to run a part of your business, you want to see some type of performance report, the same way that you want to see that from an individual employee. Are they doing their job?

Are they learning over time? That's why we've put a lot of focus into things like, agent observability, the ability to run that through the governance center in Power Automate. We've had this as part of the core of that product for a long time, something that we've built in throughout.

So it really starts with, you know, trust from the individual, trust in the process, and then trust in making sure that you have, some, level of observability into that process to continue to make it better. Michelle, let's talk about Power Platform and the role that it plays in simplifying multi-agent orchestration across different modalities like chat, apps, back-end systems, a-and also how we interact with that, because agents are a little different in how they have to be managed. It's a great question.

Um, it's one that I am really glad you asked because we are getting lots of questions about what is the future of Power Platform and apps, and what is the future of agents, and the answer is, they are better together. Agents interacting with different applications inside the business through the work that we've already done inside Power Platform tends to be the, the ticket to success. In fact, some of our biggest customers, we have seen Power Platform power users have become the fastest adopters of Copilot Studio and agents because that DNA is already there.

We have built the Maker Platform, the ability for observability, as well as the data feeds. And so that's really the, the fast path towards AI. The organizations that have already taken the time to organize data, secure the data, fig-figure out the right identities, and have the right systems in place to manage across are gonna be the one the first.

Um, and certainly some of our biggest users have done this from oil and gas all the way to financial services, have used Power App and Power Platform as the jumping-off point for their agents, and they started with those agents attached directly to those apps as really, sort of the people that are at the forefront of that frontier firm curve. It's really intriguing, the agent feed. Tell us more about that and how that works.

Agent feed is one of our secret weapons as AI adoption rolls out across the organization. What agent feed does is that it provides that level of observability into both the application and the agent interactions, so you're able to see agents, you're able to see the interaction of how that agent is interacting with all of your data sources, as well as the interaction with the application. And that's super important because it is the way that we can continue to have the human element.

We're making sure those agents are making the right decisions, that they're picking from the right data sources, and we're able to continue to make sure they are getting better at their jobs. That is something we feed back into all of the work inside our engineering teams. Part of both a continuous process loop.

It's also something that the makers and the creators and the owners inside the business can take to make sure that we're working on the highest order problems, that they're finding the right solutions and moving really quickly. How does agentic automation reshape the way applications are designed, deployed, even delivered, you know, built, especially by end users? Already, we've seen a great adoption of Power Platform, but it's still been a relatively IT-driven, activity.

We have lots of different types of makers, but when it comes to an application that is widely used through an organization, that is still largely more in the, the technical space. The intersection of these two trends, though, really start to open up the door for everyone. I've built three agents that are now working with one of the Power applications we have on our dashboard.

It has really changed the, the ability for folks to think about a problem, identify sort of what the parameters of that problem would need to be, identify some data sources, and move pretty quickly to get that done. So in my case, we are going from, you know, multiple meetings where you have multiple different asks, how do we synthesize those, and how an app is running and tracking our feedback. I no longer have to send a bunch of emails out to the field telling them that's what's happening.

The agents are collecting it, they're updating the information, the app is tracking. We've just given access to that. I am just one example.

We see many organizations with which we're working right now of where can you have someone who is able to identify a, a problem that's common to the rest of the organization, find a solution, and get it out pretty quick. And the beautiful thing about that interrelationship between Power Platform and that agent maker space is that it's not just someone, you know, off doing something that then gets stuck. But when you're using the defined identity group, you can go from a single maker to widespread, adoption.

And that's occurred, we see. Can everybody create, and can everybody create a solution that is common to many and being used in a sort of exponential effect? You know, you talked about end user builders creating applications.

We've been doing that, right, with technology, platforms that we've had up to this point. But you said something really interesting about going beyond what we're capable of doing today, building agents, you know, never imagining that that was something to do. Talk about what that, what that looks like, what that future...

What's possible for, for the end users in a world where they don't have to go to IT for everything? Yes, and I would be in big trouble if I cut my IT friends out. But I think there is a place where in the right sort of culture dimensions, you've already defined the identity groups, you've defined the problem, and you've, been, been able to put the parameters around security, so really being very clear about which information sources to pull from.

That part is also something that used to be a, a pretty complex task requiring a lot of negotiation. " As we think about widespread adoption, it is really shortening the curve to creation, and then being able to demonstrate value. That is the key crux.

IT professionals usually care about system access and the system id- identity pieces, 'cause that's what makes sure that nothing crashes. They also care about usage. Sure.

Making sure we start with security in mind, and then we solve the most repeatable use case tends to be the thing that has, enabled makers to create and then IT to love the stuff. You know, when we talk about builders, you, you might imagine starting completely from scratch. But we're really not.

We have a lot of things in place that IT has put in place, and also that are built into kind of the fabric of the tools, the capabilities. Talk about that a little bit, Michelle. Yeah.

And, when I talk about identity management, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about Entra and the many things that we have built in, to that. So when we think about defined identity, it's why starting with Power Platform is that shortcut. In many cases, we've defined through Entra what the IDs are.

We have also defined group identities. We define roles for what those different groups can access, what they cannot access, and at what time. And so it becomes very easy, and it gives an extra level of trust.

I'm really excited about the continuing investments that Microsoft is making here. That core strength of what we've had in Power Platform is joined by things like Purview, Agent 365, that is that control plane for agents. This is a great time to be in technology, but be in business where we're able to le- leverage AI.

Thanks for sharing your insights, you know, some of the learnings that you've had working with customers, even your own, 'cause you're building agents. So we appreciate you sharing that with us. Thanks so much, Mitch.

Appreciate it. One of the things that's most interesting to me about AI is not only what we can do with it, but how it's changed about how we think s- we can solve problems and who can solve those problems. We've had citizen developers and tools for creating applications in business units and outside of IT, and situations where they still need to come to IT to kind of get the harder parts done, and it seems like we're passing that.

We're moving past some of those barriers into a world where some of the constraints around what we can do with technology are being lifted or, or lessened and... of a burden on the end users. And that's when things change.

That's when systems fundamentally change, because you remove constraints, and now y- what's possible is actually even increased, the space of what you can do. It's really interesting to see how Microsoft has approached this, of having an embedded base of customers that are using the, you know, the current generation, if you will, of technologies, but helping them move into this agentic future. And it's not a jump off the deep end.

It's a process to move through that, but also helping customers understand what you can do and who can do that, and how to leverage those tools, while at the same time, security guardrails, governance, the things that you need from a corporate or an enterprise standpoint, not are, are checkpoints at the end, but are also built into the processes and tools that you have, so you can start to leverage that as well. It's really exciting to think about the future of agents and what they can do as we move into the, the second and third phases that Michelle talked about, around agents doing work for us and then working along, agents. I kind of think of it as not just humans in the loop, but humans leading the loop of agents that are doing those, that work for us.

So it's an exciting future, and I think we'll have a lot of opportunities to share our experiences along the way on this journey. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with John Isian, who's the senior vice president for Central Product Management at ServiceNow.

And well, now that the deal between them and VESA has been closed, well, we're gonna have a little chat about identity management and all this stuff, and where it fits in in the age of AI. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Mike.

It's a pleasure to be here. I think early on when this deal was first announced, a lot of people were skeptical. They were, kind of felt like, well, what does identity management got to do with ITSM and, and, and everything else that ServiceNow does?

But here we are, flash forward a few months later, and now everybody's going, "Wow, this looks pretty savvy," because essentially AI and AI agents are a new type of identity we need to manage. They're a persona essentially, right? That's exactly right, Mike.

I mean, we, for the entirety of our over 20 years as a, an enterprise software vendor, we've, established ourselves, as one of the de facto, asset intelligence providers for organizations. So if you want control over your software assets, your hardware assets, any other form of asset, you generally partner with ServiceNow, especially at the sort of high end of the market. It's a very natural expen- e- extension even to then want visibility initially, and then over time, control over who has access to those assets.

And in the world of agentic and system-to-system interaction, also what has access to those assets. So for us it's a very natural extension to evolve from a world of providing asset intelligence to a world of, providing asset and access intelligence, and it's that second dimension, access intelligence, that Veza, uniquely powers. How did you wind up picking these folks?

I mean, it seems like already there's a lot of players in the category. And, and is it a category, or is it gonna be just melded into the core platform? Um, I think it's both to start with.

I'll answer the second question first. It, it is a category. There is a category, called identity security.

There's a number of large cap and small cap, participants that play in that market. Customers have also rolled their own, tremendously, inclusive, Mike, on ServiceNow. So as part of the diligence that we performed, we were actually astounded to find the number of organizations, including actually a Fortune 10 organization, that had built an access, intelligence as well as an access governance application on ServiceNow using our, sort of custom, workload, builder, which is an essential part of ServiceNow.

And that again was another source of signal that told us that we had brand permission and essentially technical permission to participate, in this market. But then to directly answer your question, we will also be incorporating, core subsets of Veza that make sense, specifically that access graph into our overall platform, capabilities, such that other workloads built on ServiceNow can take advantage, of that access graph even if those workloads are not native ServiceNow workloads. Um, so that's essentially a part of our future direction of travel.

How should we think about AI agents? " But I also feel like there's starting to emerge these somewhat semi-autonomous AI agents that are performing a task on behalf of an organization that, well, I'm not clear who's responsible for those. Yeah.

We... So to us, the answer is both. Um, and it would depend on the workload, it would depend on the, prevalent security and other forms of policy that apply, for the organization.

So in summary, our capabilities all up enable AI workloads of all sorts to inherit human identities and then gain, from the pre-validated, pre-curated sets of permissions that have been associated with those human identities. That's one, modality that we could see. But if you look at our AI specialist construct, actually set of announcements that we made in February of this year, an AI specialist is essentially, a digital human that gets trained the way a physical sentient human gets trained, gets associated with policies and permissions, gets, associated with knowledge, that's part of the training, and in itself requires its own identity, and that identity then, benefits from incremental permissions in specific systems.

And by the way, Mike, some of those permissions are ephemeral. The permissions may last 10 seconds, 15 seconds, or perhaps even microseconds. So in that context, it's super important to have the ability to, to manage these agentic workloads as their own distinct identities, or where it makes sense, to associate their identities with existing human identities, and the flexibility of our architecture, allows us to support both, models.

Will this also become like the attack vector of choice now because the bad guys will be sitting out there going, "Well, these things have awesome amounts of permissions, and, we're really adept at stealing credentials, so we'll just steal the credentials of the AI agent, and away we go"? Yes. Yes.

Well, bear in mind, we are, well, the capabilities that we've acquired from Veza and that we're integrating into ServiceNow is an admin time construct. So, Mike, this is a who has access to what, what has access to what-Who should have access to what, what should have access to what. Those are representations of the kind of value that Vaiza provides.

When one wants to make a runtime access request, so Mike literally wants to access a system right now, an AI agent, wants to update, a clearing and settlement system right now, the subsets of the identity stack that power that are provided by, partner organizations. Uh, we are not in that business right now. Now, hey, we'll see where the future takes us as we continue to perform research and then develop against that research in this sort of early innings of the platform shift that we're going through, but as things stand right now, that capability, think about it as an IDP, is capability that partner, solutions provide as opposed to, ServiceNow.

Right. 'Cause there's one thing to provision the AI agent, managing it during its, post-provisioning cycle is a whole other day two motion, right? That's exactly right.

So the, the sort of constant change, and that's why those two, examples that I gave earlier of the AI agent inheriting human identities and permissions and the AI agents having their own distinct identities and permissions are so important. The, the ability to support those, I, I think... Both, excuse me, speak to the, specific point that you just made.

I think it's fair to say that maybe we're seeing a little irrational exuberance when it comes to deploying AI. We're, in a lot of organizations, we're ahead of our skis, as it were. Um, do you think at some point auditors are gonna come around and start asking some interesting questions about, well, what are these things accessing and how and why, and who said so?

They're already doing that. Um, you know, and of course I'll have to respect customer confidentiality, but this morning, Mike, I was on a call at 6:00 AM with an It- Italian financial services firm. I, I won't say any more, but the primary premise that drove the deputy CISO, chief information security officer, Mike, to reach out to us, and ostensibly perhaps other providers, was exactly that.

Um, there was essentially an audit finding, and he did not articulate if this was an internal or an external audit finding, but there was an audit finding nonetheless that required them to demonstrate tamper-proof, non-repudiatable evidence that they had control over both, coarse-grain permissions, so what do the agents and the service accounts have rights to access, but also fine-grain permissions. What are the specific CRUD operations that these, these agents can perform in different forms of target systems? And so that was the basis of a conversation that we started this morning with a specific organization, and we'll see where that goes.

And incidentally, Mike, we were already participating in conversations of this sort even pre-Vaiza, 'cause in that instance, we'll be describing how our asset intelligence will power a subset of the data that they need. But now that we're in both the asset intelligence and the access intelligence business, we believe that at least on paper, we are very well positioned to meet the entirety of the needs that this audit finding has, placed on this organization. How dynamic are these AI agents likely to be?

Because I think we had trouble just keeping up with the humans in, in comparison, they're relatively static. But it seems like with AI agents, you know, we may be not only provisioning new ones constantly, but also ripping and replacing the old ones. Yeah, but also the, the, the workloads themselves, the agentic workloads themselves can self-request incremental access, at least on paper.

They can, step up, permissions in a system they already have access to. They can execute on both the system and the human tasks necessary to change access privileges, again, on paper. I believe for enterprise AI to evolve to true full-blown ubiquity for this, platform shift to become truly mainstream, and I do believe that that, that it will happen.

In other words, these forms of workload will become mainstream. It's a matter of sort of when, not if. But I believe one of the anchor pillars necessary for this platform shift to evolve from, you know, kinda scale experimentation, which is where I would argue we are today, to true mainstream adoption, one of the pillars that need to be put in place is a pillar that addresses exactly what you just described.

Which is when, reasoning determines that an agentic workload needs incremental permissions, how do you ensure that the permissions that are granted are still consistent with internal policy and external regulation, even as those policies and regulations themselves, continue to remain dynamic? That is an unsolved problem for the industry as a whole, and we expect to play a role in solving that problem through a combination of existing IP, future IP that we may develop, and very importantly, the incremental talent that we're adding to ServiceNow b- b- through, you know, organic hiring and some of these, inorganic transactions that we've announced. So what are you seeing, even though it's still early days, people doing today that maybe we'll come to regret tomorrow?

Man, people have always done things that... You know, look, I'll give a philosophical answer. I...

Y- clearly there are some absolutely hard guardrails, constraints that we as organizations need to, um-Uh, align behind. You know, there's a, a, a difference between a rule, an explicit thou must not, and I expect folks, you know, even in this era of agentic to stay on the right side of such, you know, sort of Boolean rules. But, on that right side of those Boolean rules is sort of multiple shades of gray, and i- in that world, I, I expect, the combination of customers, enabling, providers like ours, third-party enabling providers, and many of whom we compete with but we also cooperate with, to, execute on the right forms of experimentation that enables...

I, I'll call it rapid iterative learning. It, it's almost like agentic AI terrain grabbing, and you're grabbing that terrain to solve business problems, but also to rapidly learn. It's no different, Mike, than the previous platform shifts that, you know, we've all been through in the past.

You know, client-server to web, web to cloud, the emergence of mobile as a dominant ergonomic form factor. We went through a comparable iterative learning cycle, through those previous shifts, and I don't see why this should be any different, as long as, again, we stay on the right side of those, Boolean rules and regulations that e- exist for a reason. I might argue that historically we've been kinda lazy in this space in this regard.

Uh, when we hired somebody, we set them up, and we would say, "They need access to X, Y, and Z," and then we'd be like, "Oh yeah, and they might someday need access to these 10 other things," and so we gave them access to that early on. And I wonder if we're in danger of doing the same thing with AI agents that are gonna be much more voracious in their, desire and enthusiasm for accessing data, and maybe, you know, all kinds of havoc might ensue. Yeah, including malfeasance.

Yeah, so that, that danger's real, Mike, period, and I think, it's our job to collectively defend against that danger. Like, I really do mean that. Um, I take my responsibilities as one of the custodians of ServiceNow's go-forward security strategy very seriously.

I don't expect to be able to solve problems of the ilk you described exclusively on my own. I think, customers and frankly governments and society as a whole, has an implicit expectation that we will collaborate with other asset providers, even if those asset providers are primarily competitive, to sort of come together to collectively defend against, the threats, that you're describing. The, the defenders are doing that, by the way.

They're collaborating on the deep dark web. They're sharing tools, techniques, procedures. They're sharing code.

They're sharing data. So we are at an inherent disadvantage if we don't fully imbibe, authentically the importance of collectively defending. Nobody, no single vendor can be best in class at everything.

We believe we're best in class across the asset intelligence dimension. Vaiza's given us an astounding leg up around access intelligence. But we're not necessarily best in class at endpoint usage intelligence or net flow or digital exhaust that arises from CSPM.

Sorry to use an acronym, but cloud security posture management. Y- we're not. We partici- participate in those markets, but I wouldn't argue that we're best in class in any of those.

It's our job, literally a hard responsibility, to partner with those vendors that are best in class in those representative categories to ensure that we can, define a collective defense architecture that makes sense for our customers for this emerging, age of agentic. All right. Well, folks, you heard it here.

Even before the arrival of AI agents, we were saying that identity is the new perimeter. What's changing here is that perimeter is not looking like anything we ever saw before. John, welcome.

Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate the opportunity to, to bond with you and your listeners. Cheers.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. You know, we're just, what, about two weeks out, maybe even less than two weeks, a week and a half out from our an- annual pilgrimage to San Francisco with the s- where the cybersecurity meets, the cybersecurity industry meets to talk cyber, RSA.

The RSA Conference is something I've been going to for 25 years. We put on every year our DevSecOps event there on Monday, and we'll be doing it this year again. This year it's on securing AI native dev, and it should be a good one.

And, and of course, we'll be on Broadcast Alley all week streaming live. One of the other really, like, can't miss things at RSA every year has become the Innovation Sandbox. I think this is the 20 or 21st year for the Innovation Sandbox.

And, you know, if you look at the roster, not just of the ones, the, the one company that wins every year, but if you look at the roster of the 10 finalists that get picked every year, I mean, it's a who's who of the security industry in, in terms of some of these companies. I mean, just yesterday G- you know, Google announced, that the transaction with Wiz closed, and Wiz was one of the Sandbox finalists. I don't think they won.

I think they were just a finalist. He might, they might win, who knows? But certainly one of the finalists.

I want to introduce you to Itamar Appleblat. Uh, Itamar is the CEO and co-founder of Token Security. Itamar, welcome to Techstrong TV.

It's great to have you on here. My pleasure. So we're gonna talk about Token, but first, let's talk about you.

Give us, give us your story, if you don't mind. All right. So, I founded the company together with Ido, my co-founder, and he's the CTO of the company, two and a half years ago.

Uh, we are old, old friends, so I know him from six- for 16 years. So we both joined the military servers, service together. We both served in the 8200 unit.

Uh, and from the first day, he literally taught me how to tie my army boots, so we are really good friends. Uh, I grew up in Tel Aviv, and started my career in cybersecurity when I was 18, so 16 years ago, and, and loved it ever since. So I joined the team that was in charge of securing the infrastructure and the data of the unit.

And that was such an exciting thing to do back in the days, because back in 2009, we've seen what we could have done, and then, we understand there's so many threats that this unit, is being targeted by literally nations, right? So- Sure ... so I learned so, so much during this time.

And, and the CISO of the unit, he was my, my commander, so I had to do whatever he told me to do, by law, basically. Uh, and we grew very fast. So from a team of 20, 20 engineers, we became 200.

So I grew up with that team and became an R&D group leader, so led few R&D teams, building... Basically, I had unlimited resources to solve whatever problem I cared about in the cyberspace, and there were some really complex issues, and a lot of them was in the space of identity. So, I have a lot of passion to what we're doing here in Token Security.

Um, and yeah, then so I did that for 10 years, then founded my own startup, had some success with it. It was in the fintech space. Uh, and we founded Token about two and a half years ago.

And about a year ago, I moved to New York, so I survived my first winter here. Congratulations on that. Spring is coming.

Well, first you're gonna get through April. You know what they say in New York, April showers bring May flowers. It rains a lot.

It rains a lot in April, but it's all good. At least it's not snow. Um, good for you.

So is your co-founder also in New York, or? No. So he's in Tel Aviv.

So, our entire engineering and product is in, in Tel Aviv. Uh, and our go-to market functions are in, in the US, spread across the entire state. Excellent.

Very cool. So talk to our... Itamar, it's a great story.

You know, I have a lot of friends from Israeli cybersecurity companies. No surprise. And, you know, this is sort of a common path we see, right?

They go into 8200. Some are doing offensive work, some are purely defense. I mean, I- you're the first person I've spoken to who actually had to defend the unit, right?

Um, but an interesting, an interesting way to really learn, right? Right? F- I mean, talk about getting thrown into the middle of it.

Yeah, exactly. So we, Ido and I is really the yin and yang of the unit. So he was in the offensive, and he became branch commander.

So he was leading hundreds of security researchers. Uh, and he also saw that identity is usually the easiest path in, right? So, we both came from a different direction, and I think that my experience as someone that building security products from such an early age was understanding that there's so many risks that the organization and the CISO need to, to f- to face, right?

And it's all about prioritization and how to become a business enabler, 'cause there's no organization in the world that their job is to protect themselves, right? There's always a bigger outcome than that. So learned a lot during this time.

I'm sure. Uh, there's no doubt. Let's, let's talk a little bit about identity, right?

So I've always felt if cloud security had a killer app, it was IAD, right? Identity and, or, you know, access control. IAC, excuse me.

IAC. Um, but identity, y- you know, as things get more complicated or sophisticated, so do our i- our identity issues become more complicated and sophisticated. So, you know, when we first started with cloud security, it was a, identity was about human identity, people's identity, cloud native, containerization, kube, all of these things.

And all of a sudden we started worrying about the identity of virtual machines, the ide- identity of containers, the identity of non-human assets. Then we had APIs, right? All of a sudden now API security became, you know, the hot, hot thing.

We gotta, gotta, we gotta understand what APIs we have out there. Are they locked down? What's their configuration?

We, we almost needed to have sort of an identity of API sort of thing. Now, of course, the, the rage is AI, agents, agentic AI. They also need to have identities.

We, we see it here at Techstrong with my own people experimentingTalk to us about how that kind of progression of identity has manifested into token security. Yeah. So actually, a funny story.

When we, when we started the company, we saw that identity is, is pretty much broken 'cause we saw so many identity solutions that are focused... They are human-centric, right? Right.

And you have some amazing leaders that are solving this problem and haven't really changed in the past 20, 30 years. Um, but then as you shared, there's so many new innovations, and we see that the robust, the largest amount of identities are tho- those non-human. And the funny story was that I was actually called back for reserve duty in the unit that I was serving at, and they gave me this, you know, third-party contractor account, and I was starting to do my job, and then I tried to log into a system, and I couldn't.

So I asked for permissions, right? It's, it's super bureaucratic. I, I waited and waited, literally, you know, sitting in my chair, getting paid from the taxpayers to do nothing.

So I was super frustrated. And then I tried to log in through a service account that I created back in the day, six years before. And because I remember the password, it, it was a funny password.

You know, we were young, young, soldiers back then. So tried to log in, and all of a sudden I was an admin in one of the most secure networks in the entire world, right? Oh my God.

So I went, "Whoa. " Then I asked my friends, "Why they didn't change the password? " Why didn't they just kill your account?

Yeah. Yeah. And they, and then they said they were scared.

They didn't know who's using that, that service, who, who's using this user, which applications are depend on that. " Then there was a new transition that happened in the world, and that's that right now every organization is racing to adopt AI, right? And very early on, we understand that adopting AI, the promise of it is not just a chatbot that answering questions, right?

It's, it's agentic AI. It's agents that take actions, that, that, that, write software, that, solve problems, right? So we were, we were trying to understand, okay, what's the risk over there?

And very early on, you understand that the agent risk is based on the level of access that they have into your business application and the level of autonomy. And I think this is a new class of identity we have to secure because it's a- it's all about the identity. So about two years ago, we, we, started to tackle this agent identity space that, that grew very fast, and we've seen our organization having so many challenges on even knowing about those identities, and then understanding the ownerss and which applications are connected.

So yeah, I'm very excited about it. And what I love about it is that adoption of AI is, is a must now, and AI agents is, is such an exciting technology, and we live in such an exciting time, and it's, it's great to be part of, a solution that helps organization to actually adopt it in a secure way, right? So I- Mm-hmm ...

I, I have a lot of passion about that. As you should, right? I've never met a successful founder, co-founder who doesn't have passion about what they do.

They don't have passion. So, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, called me this morning. He's, he's a, a money manager, financial, you know, planner, asking me a question about AI and, and how real it is and whether I'm using it, he...

whatsoever. And I told him, you know, I live in a world where I don't-- I-- what I used to measure in months and years, I measure in hours and days. That's how fast things are changing, right?

It's just crazy. I, I thought what we went through in November and December was earth-shattering. Like, stuff got real in around November, December, the latest iterations that came out of AI that...

But then the whole OpenCore thing and the agentics, the last month, f- I feel like we did five years in the last month. Um, it's gotta be... I, imagine from where you sit, it's a very similar thing, right?

You th- okay. I mean, the mission hasn't changed. You still want to lock down identities, right?

You still wanna make identity control, you know, feasible, doable, simple as possible. But it's just, you know, what, what's going on in the world is, it's gotta be... I don't know if it's terrifying, exhilarating, a little of both.

I think it, it, it is a, a little of both. Every CISO that I'm, I'm speaking with is sharing that their board, their CIOs, CTOs are really right now pushing AI 'cause they see how fast you can innovate, you can, you can excel, solve problems. But many don't understand exactly what does that mean and how does it look in a good end, in a, in an enterprise in a secure way.

So, I'm, I, I completely agree with that. And when you think about agent and agent identity-It's, it's a new class of identities, right? It...

You-- we cannot treat it as our human employees or even our, as our machines because it's a mix of both. It has, the flexibility of being unpredictable. It's non-deterministic.

It-- right? It doesn't fol-follow any script, but it's taking it in a much greater action and scale, like just like service accounts and machines id-identity. So it's, it's, it's an interesting mesh, and what we understand is that in order to secure this new, new type of identity, you really need to understand the purpose, the intent of the agent, right?

Mm-hmm. Uh, once you understand what this agent meant to do, what those actions are actually, what's the reason for those actions, then you can start to restrict their access, manage their life cycle, enforce your policies. Um, today it, it's, it's a bit tough to even, to organization to understand what, how organization adopting AI, but that will be the next, step, is understanding also the actual use case of those agents and then create a much more tailor-made experience and security processes for that.

Got it. Got it. Um, let, let's get, if you don't mind, Itamar, I, I wanna dig a little deeper into Token itself, into Token Security.

So then what a great name, right? For, for a company that's working on AI agent identity risk, Token's a good name. It's a good choice there.

Um, how are you doing this? Like, let's, you know, our audience is a technical audience. How are you doing this?

Yeah. So we basically, because we understand that agents, the risk of an agent is based on the level of access they have and to which business applications. So basically, our philosophy was, first of all, we don't want to create latency or stop the organization from adopting AI or create friction.

So we are creating a seamless experience by just integrating to both sides. So we have integrations into your business critical applications, over hundreds of different integrations, where we map all the identities that can interact with those resources. And on the other hand, we have integration to all of those AI applications where the agencies are running from, whether it's locally in your, in your own computer or through different SaaS applications or different engines, and then we connect the two.

We look at the agents and their activity, configurations, skills, ownership, and also look at what the actions are they doing and where. Once you connect those two, 'cause this is a data problem, then you can start to analyze the intent of the agent and enforce your policy. So, for example, if you want using Token, you can say, "Hey, I want that OpenClou will only run in this department.

Any other installation, I don't want it to, to-- I don't want it to have it. " Today, you can, you can't do that. You don't know which OpenClou instances you have.

You don't know what they're connected to, what's their mission. So with Token, you can do that by us connecting to those two sides of the interactions. Mm-hmm.

Excellent. Excellent. Um, you know, I wish we could show people, but we-- this isn't set up for that kind of demo.

Itamar, we're almo- we're probably over time already, and I, I, I, I don't want to ignore the whole Sandbox thing. We gotta mention it, right? Token is one of the 10 finalists this year for the Innovation Sandbox.

Uh, you know, the last couple years things have changed, right? Now you've got basically they put aside about $50 million in venture capital, 5 million per finalist, you know, available to you for being chosen one of the ten. Talk about what it was like applying and then making it to the finals.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, the, the application wasn't easy.

Uh, we were, we, we got ready. in, in cybersecurity and, and probably in, in the entire startup, ecosystem. So we were so honored to be part of it.

Uh, I remember me going to RSA, my first RSA, and looking at people in the stage. Uh, this is a, a, a great, a great group to be a part of. Yeah.

It is. You're in, you're in the, what's the word I'm looking for? You're in, like, very high, high, company, right?

Very distinguished company. Yeah. Good for you.

And then, of course, the Innovation Sandbox, on Monday of RSA Week, I, I wanna say it's the 22nd, May-- March 22nd, I think is that Monday, on the second floor there. They'll-- You'll be presenting to a panel of, of VCs and, and dignitaries, and then, of course, the winner will be announced. Uh, you know what we didn't mention, Itamar?

What's the website for Token Security? security. Excellent.

Yeah. Excellent. Hey, I wish you the best of luck going into, i-into the Sandbox.

You're all winners already. You made the finalists. You already won.

Whether you actually win the one who wins it or not, you already are a winner for it. So congratulations on what you've built and what you're doing. Continued success.

We will be, we'll be live all week there. Well, Monday we put on our event actually right in the room above you on the third floor. And, but the rest of the week we're there on Broadcast Alley doing videos.

Come by and say hello. Awesome. Looking forward to it.

And also come to our booth and, check it out. I'll be honest, I, I do one quick pass of that floor and get the h**l out of there. It's so overwhelming.

I- I know. You know what? I, I camp out by my, my Broadcast Alley booth there, and people come talk to me.

It's too much. And the other thing is it, it takes me... I mean, I, I'm going to RSA 25 years.

It takes me a long time- Yeah ... to say hello to everyone and get around that floor. But, anyway, again, congratulations.

Best of luck with Token. Thank you so much. This sounds like something we need, so good, good, good job there, man.

All righty. Appreciate it. Thank you.

It- Thank you. Itamar Appleblatt, CEO, co-founder of Token Security, one of this year's Innovation Sandbox finalists here on Techstrong TV. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be back. This week we consider the announcements from MWC in Barcelona and pre-GTC announcements from around the enterprise AI industry. This episode of Utilizing AI features Nick Patience, Brad Shimmin, and myself, Steven Foskett from the Futurum Group, discussing this globe-spanning conference no longer just focused on telecom.

We also talk about NeoClouds following the incredible two billion dollar funding round secured by nScale, perhaps Europe's largest funding round ever. We then turn to the current impracticality of local models for most users and finish with what we're looking forward to at GTC. Welcome to Utilizing AI, the podcast focused on practical applications of artificial intelligence from the Futurum Group.

Every Wednesday, we explore news and use cases of the ways in which AI is transforming enterprise IT and the industries it serves. I'm your host, Steven Foskett, president of the Tech Field Day business unit here at Futurum. And before we dive into this discussion, let's meet who's on the panel today.

Brad? Hi, everyone, Brad Shimmin. I am the VP practice lead for Data Intelligence, Analytics, and Infrastructure at Futurum.

And, as you imagine, I like data, I like AI. Hi, I'm Nick Patience. I'm the AI Platforms practice lead, so I get to focus on the, the things that are unique about AI.

Absolutely. And of course, we've got a bunch of other great folks that you've seen here on the podcast and hopefully, some more folks from Futurum will be joining us in the next c- in the, in the coming weeks. Uh, note to listeners, I know that GTC is going on this week as you're hearing this, but we are actually recording this, the previous week, so it, uh...

we will be covering that in the future. Uh, but everything we're saying here is not yet defined by the earth-shaking announcements that you are probably, maybe, could be hearing, this week. Instead, what we're going to do here is we're gonna talk about some of the news as we know it, the week before GTC, and that is going to be, I guess, headlined by what came out of Mobile World Congress, MWC.

Now, one of the ways that AI is affecting all of us is that it is, I was gonna say infecting, but it is appearing everywhere. Um, and Mobile World Congress is unique because it is both an enterprise conference as well as almost in a consumer edge, environment, 'cause you do see a lot of, of things that we don't always cover here. Um, Nick, let me throw it to you first.

Um, talk to me a little bit about what AI related tech did you see at Mobile World Congress, and what did you think of it? Yeah, Steven, you're right. It is, it is a kind of combination.

It's one of these shows throughout the year that's, I mean, not quite on the scale of GTC, but in terms of that has become a kind of you-need-to-go-to shows. Um, whether you're, you know... The, the mobile, name at the word at the beginning is, is now slightly misleading.

It's becoming a bit more kind of general purpose. So yeah, I was... I'm not a particularly, you know, I don't get particularly excited about phones, so I wasn't, like, going around, figuring out who's got the latest, latest models and, and things like that.

Um, I was there focused on, on AI as ever, and I think there's a few things that, that jumped out at me. Um, so sovereignty, so sovereign, sovereign AI is a, a key part of my, is my, of my coverage, and I think there was, there was a lot of focus on that. There was a big announcement from Telefonica on, on that, and there was, various panels.

I went to one with, Telefonica CEO, D- Deutsche Telekom CEO, and a couple of others. And it was kind of, it was kind of like European sovereignty in, in a microcosm. There was a lot of, "Why can't we all just get along and do things?

" type message. So it's quite similar. I hadn't been there f- I hadn't been to MWC for about a dozen years, and last time I went was probably, you know, the, you know, 5G is around on the, on the horizon.

Now 6G is on the horizon, and there was still kind of bickering about the same kind of things, but also promising pretty much the same things that 5G was gonna, you know, 5G was gonna change the nature of operators, and it was, yeah, it's not just about phones. It can do all sorts of things. The...

Remember the Internet of Things was supposed to be based on 5G. Um, what happened to that, you may ask. Um, and now 6G's coming along, and it's kind of sound-sounding pretty similar.

Now, that's not to say that the AI has not moved along massively since then. Obviously, obviously it has. We all know that.

But, so I think there's, there's a, there's a lot of opportunities for, European telcos, to, to some extent-Um, I don't wanna overplay this, take on the US hyperscalers. They certainly th- see themselves in that role. Um, and then that's where obviously the, the, the chip companies come in, like, like Nvidia, the equipment makers like Nokia and Ericsson, and all the software layers, are all kind of like, you know, hum-- you know, buzzing around this, trying to, you know, see where to, to, to place their bets.

So I think there's, you know, there was a lot of cool things there. There was, some of the stands there were just out of this world in terms of, you know, the, the production values. Uh, it's not like any , I think, it's not like any other s- show I've ever really been to in terms of that, the amount of money that is l- lavished on this.

Um, and there were, you know, huge presence from China. Um, all the k- all the kinda Chinese hardware companies of all k- kind of stripes you can imagine were there. Um, but also, you know, you know, the likes of, you know, Qualcomm and, and, Nokia and Ericsson and, and others had, had, had big shows, and then every country basically is represented.

You go, you know, there's, there's the British stand, there's the Estonian stand, there's the Argentinian stand. Um, and so, so it's, it's a, it's an interesting mix of, core technology, interesting AI stuff, which is quite cutting edge, telco stuff, which sometimes doesn't feel quite as cutting edge, and then geopolitics, all wrap- all wrapped in. So it was, yeah, it was quite, it's quite an, quite an experience.

Yeah, actually, I stand corrected. Um, I just looked it up, and indeed, it's just MWC now. It's not Mobile World Congress.

Uh, reminds me of RSA, the former- Yeah ... RSA Conference is now just RSAC. Uh, I guess GTC is just GTC.

Uh- Yeah ... we're, we're, we're postmodern now. Things don't stand for other things.

Uh, but you're right. It has always been such a cool conference. Because of the telecom angle, it does always bring in a lot of international flavor, and that is, I'm sure a refreshing, a g- g- w- gust of fresh air to people who are tired of hearing this, sort of Silicon Valley focused, narrative around all this stuff.

Brad, talk- Mm ... what, what is your impression? Well, fir- first and foremost, yeah, it is a, a sight to behold, this conference, and any, any conference that has people movers built in has to be, has to be big.

Uh, it's, it's like its own airport if you will. But, yeah, I, I think, you know, as, as you said, Stephen and Nick both, telecom plays a big role here, and it is, you know, so a lot of people, huh, boring compared to, you know, shiny new toys. But it is, I think, also very heartening to see these vendors, looking to extend their role.

I mean, yes, th- th- a lot of the news coming out of the show from the telecom providers was the shocking realization that AI might help them to optimize, automate, and, and streamline their, their networks to, you know, increase value and s- performance. That's their job. But, they, they seem to be quite aware of, of the fact that innovation happens everywhere, and so much so, I think it, it was, you know, shocking to me a little bit to see just how much that, that's played out on the mobile device part of this spectrum or end of the spectrum because, what was it?

There was, trying to think of the name of it now. There was a phone that actually had a little pop-up camera on it that would... A, a robot camera, they, they actually called it.

It was Honors, Honors robot phone. That's it. Yeah.

And it would actually dance for you, and follow you around the room as I guess you, you, practiced your TikTok video dance sessions, whatever it's built for. But my goodness, I, I think the funk, the strangeness, is, was certainly on display at the device end with AI really serving to drive a lot of that innovation. Yeah, I actually was in one of the kind of mini keynote sessions where the Honor CEO, was, was, was showing that one.

It was, some, some of it felt, like, incredibly innovative there. Some of it also felt like, remember when we used to add cameras to phones? Um, you know.

It, it kind of looked a bit like that, except obviously- Yeah ... it moves and it follows you, follows you around, and things like that. A couple other things I think stood out, I guess, there was y- the, when I talked earlier about the, the telcos positioning themselves as AI infrastructure providers, I, I, I don't wanna kind of, you know, knock it as, as kind of irrelevant 'cause I don't think it is.

It's, it's, so it's not only the telcos, but it's obviously all their suppliers. So, you know, obviously Nvidia has been, is, is pushing the telcos in that direction. We had a, I had a really interesting show floor tour with the, the, the person who runs, she's sort of GM for marketing for, for telcos for, for Nvidia.

And we were going around, you know, Nokia, Ericsson, the big, the big kind of companies, but also some of these much smaller, providers that are taking, like, DGX Spark boxes and building base stations for very little money. I mean, we're not talking six-figure amounts here. We're talking very little money, and it kind of, it almost kind of reminds me, you know, not being too tasteless about it, it's kind of drones versus, you know, very expensive missiles, and it's kind of a, a similar thing.

They're, they're very disruptive are those DGX Spark boxes from Nvidia, which are, are, are quite disruptive in that, in that world. Um, and I think, you know, I mean, Cisco was talking about inferencing grids, you know, in, in some of the, kind of I went to a kind of private session with the CEO of, of Cisco and, and, and a few of the executives there, which can't go into too much detail, but they, yeah, they're talk- they're talking about how important their stack is. Um, and Nvidia, sorry, Nokia framed this as a kind of AI super cycle, where, you know, obviously the data is much more bursty in, in, in, in, telecommunications and, and then in, obviously in Agentic it will be much more bursty as well, so they, they think they, they have a, they have a play there.

And then finally, I think, we hear a lot from Jensen Huang of, of Nvidia and others about physical AI. And this show, I think, that's the direction it will, you know, partly go in. Obviously, there will always be the consumer play around the phones.

Um, but I think, you know, this is, this is again, where, where Nokia was talking about the traffic differences, and, and, and things like that. Um, Nvidia had kind of partnerships with SK Telecom of, of, of South Korea, BT, NTT Docomo, and this is where obviously 6G, and going back to my point about 6G and the great promise of itIt's, I guess, for IoT with 5G, you think physical AI, with 6G. I think that's, that's the pitch.

Yeah, you, you know, like you said, Jensen has said many times over the last year that physical AI, the physicality of AI is the future. And certainly, you can see that reflected in how companies are building out automation for their supply chain as well as factories, et cetera. But it, it's interesting to see, you know, when you walk around MWC, just how many robots there are or were, you know, at the show on display, and none more interesting to me, by the way, than the DinoBot, which was a, a velociraptor.

Um, cheap price tag, only twenty-four thousand euro, to pick this up. But, you could have your own, you know, auto- au- autonomous velociraptor to follow you around and, and, scare off the neighborhood dogs if, if needed. Is that the key use case, you think?

I think so. Or, or to play parties and bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, I guess. It would be really good for that.

Cool. Yeah, so it's MWC, I think is, is, is, is something worth, worth looking at for the, you know, for the, for not, not just... It's not mobile so much anymore as, as physical and, all those good things wrapped up with, with AI.

So we, shall we switch gears, Brad? Actually, before we do, I wanna- Mm-hmm ... I wanna just chat briefly about Lenovo in particular, which had, a- as, you know, for those of you listening to this podcast, before we came on the air, we were talking a little bit about booth space at the show and just how expensive it is and how varied the vendors were in terms of how they spent their money, and Lenovo's was, was one of the more, or, or less extravagant ones comparatively.

But I, I have the feeling, like with when you look at some of what they rolled out at the show, in particular their ThinkBook Modular. If any of you haven't seen this, please look it up because it is, it is fascinating. Last year, we had, their laptop that would flip up and make a really awkward looking laptop for the coffee shop to show off the fact that you have a very high vertical screen.

This year, with the ThinkBook Modular, it's basically the back of the screen is a, is a screen, which is a second screen that you can pull out, set next to the laptop. The, keyboard itself can be removed from the laptop, and that screen could be placed on that partition, making basically a, a hinged side-by-side screen that you could put up in the coffee shop to show people just how you've, you know, your money is, is being spent. Um, but what struck me as, as really cool about this isn't, isn't this modularity for the keyboard and screen, but the fact that Lenovo now looks very much, like, I, I guess you, you would call it their rival Framework, the Framework laptop, which is very much, you know, plug and play.

I need a USB-C port, plug it in. I need, an adapter for SCSI, plug it in. Uh, and this, this laptop from Lenovo is built just like that, and I, I very much applaud their work here in moving us forward in terms of building laptops that are extensible, and it's more than extensibility actually.

It's, it's repairability. Um, for those of you who follow Lenovo, and, and perhaps are ThinkPad bigots like I am, you may have noted that with their recent, T14 release, I think it's Gen 7, that, they received a 10 out of 10 repairability score. They've always been great to repair, aside from a, a few models, but my goodness, to build a, a, a ruggedized, you know, enterprise grade laptop that you can repair any way you see fit, new keyboard, new RAM, new hard drive, new monitor, whatever you want, that is impressive.

So, I, I tip my hat to Lenovo here. Yeah. Sounds it.

I actually saw a video that, that, that, the laptop you're talking about on, on, on Twitter. I was, basically I probably walked past the Lenovo booth many, many times. I didn't go look at it.

But yeah, it was- 'Cause it's not flashy. Yeah, it was quite, it was quite something, but, but yeah. Cool.

Well, it is interesting because so many people are, you know, nerds, like us are very excited about like the Framework, laptops because they're, repairable. But it's really exciting to see a major brand leaning into that and- Yeah ... you know, not using proprietary screws and everything.

I mean, you know, it's all well and good that Apple stuff lasts a good long time because it's so well built, but boy, once it goes, it goes. And, and, and yet, you know, these things are, you know, they're, they're, they're not just, repairable, but, somewhat upgradable too. And that's a- Yeah ...

that's a question that I have too about, you know, some of the AI laptops and, and machines that are coming out there. Um, you know, what happens when, state-of-the-art advances and hardware requirements, need more? Um, you know, d- is, is it just gonna be a throwaway culture?

Are we gonna be able to upgrade these things like Lenovo's suggesting? Well, if prices continue as they are for silicon, I, I'm going to say nothing will be thrown away. As we're seeing in the gaming community, older devices are, are being utilized and reutilized regularly right now.

So I think this repairability and upgradability is, is gonna play a huge factor as we move forward for how hardware is built. You know, if, if, for instance, I don't need, you know, DDR5, I can get by with a slower RAM, maybe, you know, I have a laptop that can accommodate both, so I can use chips from five years ago and I'm still humming along. Just a thought, Lenovo.

Make it happen. I think that may end up being easier said than done on that particular point, but, um- Probably. Right.

I can dream. Yeah. But with the price of RAM, I mean, that's another interesting aspect.

Um, we also got, last week, Apple introduced the next generation of their M5 Pro and Max. Yeah. And, one point that, went really under the radar is that they've canceled the high RAM version of the, of the laptops.

I think that they had a 256 gig RAM option or something like that, and now it's down to 128. Um, what I've heard in, from insiders is that essentially it would've been priced out of the market because those chips are just not, you know, they're, they're just too cheap, which is incredible because, if you look at the, the pricing of those models, Apple has not raised prices. I mean, their RAM was always extremely expensive.

Yeah. It was always very expensive to go with the bigger RAM model. It is still very expensive, but actually no more expensive.

It is the same to the dollar as it was with previous generations. I wonder if they'll be able to continue that when it comes to RAM and SSD in the future, and I wonder, did you happen to notice, are other, vendors, either cutting back on RAM or raising prices due to the RAM crunch? Did you see anything with that, Nick?

I, I haven't seen anyone, dropping the, the amount of RAM back as- No ... except Apple, actually. No, I haven't.

Right, with the Neo- But as a, as an, as an Apple user, I know exactly what you mean. You've gotta buy your RAM up front, because doing it later is basically, technically- You, you can't ... impossible.

Yeah. With the M series, physically impossible. Yeah.

Right. Right. Yeah.

Um- $20 a step. It's, that's not cheap, but cheaper than a DGX Park. Yeah.

But that being said, you know, it is, it is interesting that they've managed to hold the line. So you didn't hear a lot of, 'cause in briefings and so on, I do hear a lot of vendors privately talking about the RAM crunch, and the expense of RAM, and the lack of availability. Did you see that at MWC?

I didn't, but I must admit, I probably wasn't looking for it. I I was, I was looking at, the different, different layers of the stack than, than the RAM and the, and the bus. You're whistling past that graveyard.

Mm-hmm. I do hear, outside of MWC from the, the storage players qui- quite a bit of discussion about this in terms of long-term options and what they, what they want, how they want to approach it, and by and large, it is, it is very much keyed around optimizing what, what they have to, to look for the bottlenecks and to squash the bottlenecks. That's, that's the key.

So in other news, we've been hearing a lot about NeoClouds. In fact, I was amazed to see, the term NeoCloud and Enscale specifically mentioned, in above the fold on, you know, New York Times, Wa- you know, Washington Post, you know, sort of, mainstream news sources this week talking about, what apparently is the largest C round raise in history for a European company. Nick, what's your perspective on Enscale?

Yeah. It's, it is interesting. " And they wouldn't be particularly, uh...

That's quite a justifiable position to, to have because this company didn't really exist, two and a half years ago. Uh, so Enscale has raised a $2 billion, a th- a Series C round, which it says is the largest, Series C round in European history. About six months ago, Mistral raised a $2 billion C, C round as well, so it obviously, there, there might be some currency exchange fluctuation going on there, but it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.

Um, it's, it's a lot of money, and I think the, you know, this also gives it a valuation of, just under $15 billion. Um, and then we've got, you know, we've got, you know, Aker ASA, and 890 Industries and, and some of these comp- these, these, these funders, coming in again for the company. So the company was es- essentially spun out of what was originally a Norwegian, Bitcoin mining firm.

And so, you know, this is, you know, this is a fa- familiar tale, with different countries inserted, I guess. And so the, the company, was part, last September in London when Jensen Huang came over, and sort of anointed his, his favorites, among the European, specifically UK startups, you know, they were one, and they said, "Yeah, I'm gonna invest in you," had the prime minister on the stage and all this kind of stuff. But at that point, they'd only raised $185 million.

" They haven't got any money. So of course they're- Other people's data centers, Nick? Well, no.

Is that how you do it? Well, well they raised some debt, they did some debt funding in, in late, late of 2025, and now they've raised, this money. So, putting aside, and it also, they, they announced a, a couple of, well, sort of three board members, Susan Decker, Sheryl Sandberg, who, who we all know, and Nick Clegg, who's the former deputy prime minister of this country, and, um- Oh ...

was, obviously on Meta, a policy guy for, for, for many, many years. So they're kind of, sort of throwing, trying to throw their weight around a little bit, in terms of, in terms of, building. And they're also part of the Stargate Norway, you know, star- project last year.

But anyway, it's, it's, it's interesting, I guess, from, you know, kind of broader, you know, sovereignty, issues. They're kind of, kind of threading a needle a bit though because they're kind of being a European sovereign play, while being sort of deeply embedded in sort of US companies like, like Nvidia, you know, providing with, chips, like Microsoft is partner in, in data center. Well, Microsoft's not doing the build, but Microsoft's, helping fund these things.

So it's, so it's a, it's a kind of, it's an, it's an interesting angle, and it's a very similar story, to the likes of CoreWeave, in the US, Nebius in, in the Netherlands, and Iron, which is an originally Australian company. I know it's floated in the US. Um, so it's, so it's kind of, it's an interesting play.

But one of the numbers, that, that kind of caught my eye was, the company said in the next five years, so that's, what? 2031, it needs to raise another $45 billion. To do what?

For data centers. So, so that's quite a lot of money. Yeah.

And so we've gone from like 185 million in September of last year to, you know, y- I, I guess, raised, you know, f- a few billion now, including this two billion round. And so it's... There's a lot of, you know, I mean, we know the story obviously of the 690 billion, committed CapEx from the, from the US hyperscalers, plus including Meta, who's not really the same business, but put them in the same bucket for this.

Um, but there's a lot of this going on in, in, like, in other countries, I guess, is the point. You know, we, we've heard about some, some of the ones in the Middle East in the past. Um, obviously, that's a slightly different situation now, perhaps.

Um, but there's, you know, there's British ones here, there's, there's French ones, there's German ones. There's... So it's, so it's a bigger story out there of, of, of what people are kinda calling the circa, you know, economy of, of, of this.

And so, you know, obviously be tracking them, pretty closely as to see, see what, see how, what they're actually, how they, how they're gonna be getting on, over the next, few months. And I have to say, I, I don't think that it's just pure speculation, although that does play a massive role in both the large scale data center build outs and the NeoCloud build outs. Um, but if, if you look at how the AI marketplace itself is building, the software that would ostensibly run in said data centers, you can see this shift right now toward, what I would call more a- ambient inferencing.

Uh, which if, if you think about, you know, even, even, last week with, ASUS, which now has the NUC, NUC name for the small, you know, devices, desktop, you know, PCs, that they stole from Intel, that, basic- basically, they now use- Editor's note, nobody stole anything here. Go ahead. Right.

Sorry. They, they, are now using, which I think is a wonderful brand, by the way. Um, anyway, the fact that what they're promoting is, this device, not as something that you do your spreadsheets on, but instead something you run your Claude bots or your, your OpenClau, or now your Microsoft Copilot CoWork, on 24/7 as an agent that just runs in the background, I think speaks volumes to what the vendor, landscape anticipates for AI in the workplace, and that is, as I just mentioned, this ambient, intelligence.

But it's, it's more than that too. Um, as we've known and we've talked about on this show for a while now, there, there are different classes of models that are your, you know, frontier scale that you basically, your Geminis and Anthropic's, Claudes, et cetera, that you are inferencing from a hyperscaler. Um, and then there is a smaller class of model that is more like what we've seen recently from the, the Qwen team, that is, you know, geared towards smaller 27 billion, you know, on down, let's say.

And those are all, you know, giving, builders in the enterprise much more optionality in terms of where they run their inferencing, where they spend their inferencing dollar. So, you might, for instance, have a plan with Anthropic, you might have a plan with Google, and you would have the ability to, to then supplement or extend that through NeoCloud partnerships, or running locally as well, all three, that you would use to, to sort of optimize your own spend on inferencing to route the request to the right model at the right time, at the right price. So we're seeing this, this sort of, you know, move toward being able to, to tailor your inferencing spend to the task at hand, and that's why we see such an opportunity for these, these NeoCloud providers in particular.

Yeah. And quite... I mean, you mentioned, Qwen there, Brad.

There's, been some, some developments, haven't there? Yeah, there sure have. It's, it's such a well-regarded family of models, and has been for a long time, especially for code generation.

5 release that they just came out with, the, the entire, you know, AI, you know, community was a quite abuzz, were they not, at, at just how good this family of models, you know, is. And, it was very strange that shortly thereafter, as in, what, what was it, Stephen? One day?

That we saw- Yeah, it looks like, one day. 5, and then suddenly, oops, gone. Yeah.

But... And, and, you know, to, to their credit, well, you would imagine they would do this, but, Alibaba ver- was very quick to say, "Look, look, look, we're not shutting this down. We...

This is going to continue. " And, at MWC, there was a booth that they had, with the Qwen glasses, which compete with the Meta, Ray-Ban glasses. Uh, it was very much on display, and had people talking about it, even though it was monochrome in green.

Uh, so fantastic that the text is in hacker green, by the way, in your, in your heads up on the glasses. But, it, it's, you know, is making some waves, and not just regionally, but globally. Mm.

And just talking of people who've left, interesting lab companies, just coming back and coming back to, to Europe for a second, if I may. Um, so it... I mean, t- ten years ago, you know, European rounds were like, you know, "Here's 5 million euros, here's 10 million euros," et cetera, et cetera.

And we've already just talked about Enscalen is 2 billion. 03 billion, obviously trying to translate the euros to get it over seed round. Um, which was quite something.

Uh, they're based in Paris, and they're gonna have office-- people in, in New York and Singapore and, and various other places. And, the Goo- the former Google, the DeepMind guy, David Silver, he raised a billion-dollar seed round last month- Mm ... led by Sequoia.

Um, he's in, he's in London for-- to develop, his, his company called, is it called Ineffable Intelligence, to build some sort of human, you know, super intelligence thing. So it's, it's, it's, so some of these people are leaving, amicably, some of these people leaving maybe, in Yann LeCun's case, perhaps slightly less a-amicably. Um, but they're chasing...

There's a lot of money chasing them, all over, all over the world, no matter where they might be. Yeah. One thing that, that I wanna fi- kind of, I guess, maybe finish on here, since we're getting to the, the end of time, not literally the end of time, but the end of this episode's time.

Hopefully. Um, maybe we're getting to the end of time too, I don't know. Um, but, I stirred up a little bit of a hornet's nest in social media this week by, suggesting that, local, LLMs are bunk.

Um, not generally, but, specifically with regard to, agentic applications like OpenClaw. " Um, a-and, and I'm raising my hand here and saying, "Point of order. Point of order.

No one is running OpenClaw locally, even though they think they are, because they're all using the, large SaaS, models online to actually do the, the work, the AI work," because no one has shown, or at least I haven't seen anyone who has been able to build a workstation powerful enough to handle the kind of context windows and the large-size models required to do the actual, any, any decent job of actually OpenClawing. Now, you could certainly use some local models, and I've seen some people try to do it, but the problem is, right now, the hardware just can't handle it, and the, SaaS models are so good, so much better that essentially every FAQ out there, including my own experiments with that, have shown me that you just can't run it locally. Now, do you think that's gonna change, or do you think that, these, alleged local captive-owned private agentic experiences built around OpenClaw, and, and similar technologies, do you think that that is actually gonna be able to be run locally?

Um, may-maybe, Brad? Yeah, I think if, if we can all afford DGX Barks, absolutely. Um, there's no reason why you couldn't run that locally with, with a large enough model.

But that's, as you, as you rightfully pointed out, Steven, is, is the problem. It's, it's simply physics in terms of the VRAM you need, and the context window that these agents require in order to function properly over time, and that is the real problem. I'm sure, you know, with, with a, a model that, that has a diminutive context window, you could offload certain tasks that your local OpenClaw agent might do, such as organizing your, your inbox or your, in downloads folder.

Do you really need a frontier model to do that? No. So you could route to that local model to offload from the cloud-borne agentic model where n- appropriate, necessary, and I, I would think that we will see more and more, sort of more mature implementations of this idea of a local agentic system that will incorporate those kinds of tactics, if you will, or best practices.

But for right now, yeah, you're, you're, you know, if you're gonna run this on GPT OSS 20, you know, 200, is it two or... No, it's 20 billion parameters, for example, you are going to have a very bad experience. Yeah.

Just full stop. And, and, and not only that, but it's, it's just really practically not going to work. " And the tr- the thing is, I've tried it.

I tried to run it with Ollama locally. I tried to run it with, you know, DeepSeek and, and Qwen, and some of these other models locally. Um, they're too slow.

They don't have the context window. They don't have the, reasoning ability to get a functional OpenClaw running. Now, again, maybe if you've got a DGX Bark.

I don't. Maybe if you have a, quad Mac Studio setup like, Jeff Geerling showed up on his blog. Daisy chain 12 of them.

Yes. You know? Yes.

That, then that's gonna work. " So, so we'll see if it is in the future. Again, I would love to see that become practical, but I think that that's gonna come head to head with the RAM crisis, at least for the next year.

Yeah. So before we go, again, as I mentioned at the top, this week, as you're listening to this, is GTC. Now, you probably noticed that we didn't, put our, you know, our crystal, our Palantirs, I'm sorry to mix metaphors there, and, look forward into the future of what GTC will bring because, you know, we can't really talk about it even if we were pre-briefed or even if we do have guesses.

Uh, but we definitely will be, coming back to you next week with another episode of Utilizing AI. Before we go, though, Nick, what do, what do you look forward to, that you can talk about as of now? Yeah.

So I mean, obviously, the-- we know there's gonna be some, some sort of chip announcements. I'm not-- I, I don't have privileged information on that, and I wouldn't obviously disclose it if I did. One thing, though, that I suspect Jensen might-- will be talking about is this five-layer cake, metaphor that he introduced at Davos.

Um, and he's actually just-- They've just published a, a blog post on it, Nvidia have, and it's the five layers are, are energ And chip slash, semiconductor manufacturing, computing infrastructure, including data centers, foundation models, and then applications. And what he's, he's arguing is essentially is that, you, you as a-- whether it's an enterprise or a government or an investor, really need to think about AI in, in all these levels. Um, and all that means is not just software, it's...

And it's not just the models we've always said. You know, we all know the models are not the applications, and the applications themselves are not enough. It requires all these things, to be looked at in, in sort of in a holistic, holistic way.

So it's kind of framing for, for investors, for enterprise leaders, and for policymakers. And I think that's partly, you know, NVIDIA's become a lot more active in the, in the lobbying and the policymaking, kind of domain over the last couple of years. And I think, you know, we're, we're talking about here for some sort of, you know, the way we look at energy and data centers and the interaction between those and the foundation models, just trying to put all that together, so to make people think about things like that.

So I don't know what's gonna be his keynote at this point where I'm, where I'm talking, but I'd, I'd be surprised if that's not mentioned. Yeah. And I would love to see, some mention and some work around their support of the open source community.

Uh, they have been, despite, you know, having a lot of locked down IP, and rightfully so, it is, it is theirs. They have been quite active in promoting and supporting the open source community. And I think that, before we came on the air, we were actually chatting about this a little bit i-it that, Jensen has some, sessions lined up for the show in which he's going to bring to the stage and, and talk, speak with the open source model makers about what they need, what can they look to NVIDIA to support them with.

So I like that. Yeah. It's a key...

That's a key session for them, I know. And, Jensen does one of these a year. Last year it was on Quantum, which was kind of sorry for messing around with your share price of you publicly traded- ...

companies. This year is about open. You say he's got the LangChain, Cursor, Reflection, Perplexity, Thinking Machines, Mistral, OpenEvidence AI 2, and Black Forest Labs.

Um, and so for them it's, it's great to have him be the moderator, and it's, it's a huge draw, and I think it's on the, on the, on the Wednesday. So yeah, that, that's, I think that'd be like, the highlight of the, of the entire show. Well, we will definitely be, covering GTC next week on this.

Again, we record, you know, on, on, on Tuesdays ahead of a Wednesday, episode. That's, you know... So, so it's gonna be a little bit, a little bit delayed.

Uh, but, if you want your fix, on GTC news, I would definitely keep an eye on the, analysts, researchers and community around the Futurum Group. Uh, we will be covering this live on our social media. We will be posting articles on the Futurum Group, website as well as the various Techstrong sites, including, Techstrong AI.

So do keep an eye on that. And of course, we will react on the nep- next episode of, utilizing tech or utilizing AI here. Um, before we go, I do wanna give y'all a chance to, pitch what you- what y'all are working on.

Um, I, I, I take it that neither of you is going to GTC, but I know that we do have some Futurum analysts going there, from, from the Tech Field Day team. Aleister Cook will be there. Um, Nick, what, what are you working on and, who else is going to GTC, if you know?

So Bre- Brendan Burke, our semiconductor lead, is going to GTC. I normally go, but I'm training for a marathon, and it's incredibly disruptive to that, so I can't. Um, but Brendan Burke will be there, and he'll be reporting back.

Uh, in terms of what I'm working on, I've just published, my new data set, the AI Decision Maker Survey. Um, so that's eight hundred plus decision makers in North America, Western Europe and parts of, Asia. And so we're looking in there into, you know, use cases, challenges, budgets, and of course, no kind of survey or these kind of reports is, is complete without a, a maturity model.

, the most mature, kind of companies are. So watch this space. There'll be, you'll be seeing more about that soon.

Yeah. And likewise, I'll be publishing, our decision maker for data intelligence, analytics and infrastructure as well. Uh, I don't, I don't have a five-stage model, may-maybe a two-stage rocket.

Uh, but we'll, we'll we'll need to compare notes, Nick, on, on that one. But, yeah, I'm very much looking forward to publishing that, in the next week or two. Uh, also next week I'm going to be at Microsoft's, Fabcom.

So the week you're watching this, I will be roaming around thinking about all kinds of knowledge graphs versus context graphs. So, stay tuned for more on that. I'll be writing about what I, what I see and hear there.

Excellent. Um, thank you for that and, I appreciate, having you both join me on this episode and every episode. I mean, it's always a lot of fun to talk to you and get your perspectives on what's going on in this crazy industry.

Um, and thank you everyone for listening as well. Um, this is, of course, Utilizing AI. Uh, and if you enjoyed it, we would love for you to subscribe.

Um, the easiest and most, you know, best way you get to see our pretty faces is if you subscribe on YouTube. ai, and the Techstrong TV app, which is available in most app stores. Uh, this podcast is brought to you by the experts and analysts from the Futurum Group, where insights meet AI.

Uh, thanks for listening, and we will catch you next week. Generative AI is more connected to the world of business intelligence and data analytics than any other area of enterprise IT technology. This episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, recorded prior to Qlik Connect 2026, features Brennan Grady of Qlik joining Brian Budden and Gina Rosenthal to discuss how this market is advancing.

Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT technical experts to discuss a single idea about key concepts in the industry. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day community and is often recorded in association with one of our events. Tech Field Day is part of the Futurum Group, and this podcast is also published on our sister company's site, Techstrong TV.

On this episode, as we look forward to Qlik Connect in April, we're talking about the ways in which business intelligence and data analytics have changed in the generative AI era. But before that discussion, let's meet who's on the panel today. Hi, my name is Brendan Grady.

I am the general manager of the AI and analytics business unit here at Qlik. Hey, my name's Brian Boon. I'm the managing director at BB Data Services, and I'm a nine-time Qlik Luminary and partner ambassador.

Hey there. I'm Gina Rosenthal, and I am the founder of Digital Sunshine Solutions, where we help businesses make sense of their very intense, technical products with AI and cloud and that kind of thing. Looking forward to Qlik again, so ready for this conversation.

And I'm Steven Foskett, organizer of the Tech Field Day events here, and a Qlik Connect veteran a bit, I would say. This is gonna be my third time joining the crew at Qlik Connect, and I'm really looking forward to coming back, to seeing, Gina, Brendan, Brian again. Now, for those of you who are listening and maybe aren't, you know, aware, so Qlik is one of the leading companies in the, data analytics business intelligence world.

Um, they have a really kind of a fanatical, fan base in this world, and it shows at Qlik Connect. The, the people that show up, the kind of discussions we have, the kind of goofy, fun stuff that happens behind the scenes, it really is, different from what you might expect at some sort of dry tech conference. And Qlik Connect also has some other interesting and, and fun elements.

Um, you know, the show floor is really, exceptional, and maybe we'll talk about that a little bit. But, one of the things for me that, that gets me the most is, like many conferences, there's an opportunity to talk to people and learn from them. That's really why I go to these events.

But Qlik really facilitates that, both in terms of the folks who work for Qlik as well as the folks who are attending the event. And I've had just some absolutely incredible conversations, you know, here and there and around the corner with, you know, attendees, whether they are presenters or staff or, frankly, even better, some of the folks who are coming and bringing their expertise and their learning from, what they've done out there in industry. Of course, last year we spent a lot of time talking about generative AI, and this year, we expect that to be even more of, of a focus area, a focus for Qlik.

So, Brendan, let's start with you. Uh, you've seen the in- you know, the, the secrets. You've seen the, the schedule, the agenda.

You know what's gonna be presented, and you can't talk about it. But I bet what you can talk about is some of the general the- themes. So, talk to us a little bit about this.

What can we expect from Qlik Connect, and what does that mean to people out there that are dealing with business intelligence and data? You're right, I can't really talk a lot about it, so this could be a very quiet section, Steven. However- ...

I am gonna give you a little bit, a little bit of a sneak peek of what we're going on here. All of us that are, that have been in this domain for many years have witnessed what has sort of happened with people's user experiences, and it all started with OpenAI's ChatGPT being released a couple years ago now, right? It, it feels like a, a lifetime ago.

So what you're gonna expect out of this particular event is to hear about how people's user experiences, whether in they're in the data engineer domain or whether in the analytics domain, those experiences are going to change. But that, how Qlik is in a position to support that evolution to this new world, which is really all about agentic AI. And then Brian and I were just talking about how every year there seems to be a shift in this technology, and I think, Brian, you and I agree that it's sort of every couple of months or every month there seems to be a massive shift.

So there's some things that we did since la- that have happened since last year that we'll really be able to hone in on specifically around agentic experiences and what that means for all of our customers and people that work with Qlik. Yeah, Brendan, as I, I think that's relevant. And as you talked about before, I think last year at Qlik Connect, there was a lot of groundwork being laid for AI, right?

There was a lot of, there was a lot of theory being passed around, and there was a lot of understanding about, well, how can we prepare for the onset of AI? And now, now AI has really migrated past that whole ChatGPT section that we talked about there, where people were just hacking in stuff into their ChatGPT windows, into something that is really authentic in terms of AI and BI. So what, what are some of the big steps that you've seen in that interim period?

Because like you say, this market is moving incredibly quickly. So what, what are your big observations in that area just now? So the big observations are, are still some numbers that are out there, Brian, around the am- per-percentage of organizations that have actually successfully implemented agentic AI.

Um, no big secret for everybody listening to you, Steven. It's not a very high percentage, right? And that's one of the things.

So where we've really been focusing on is let's get out of the science project area and sort of the laboratory and take advantage of what Qlik has always done extremely well, which is really make sure that we can give some context around what you're trying to understand around your business. 'Cause when there are humans involved, it's one thing. We can look at it and determine.

When this agentic world starts kicking in-There may be autonomous agents making decisions on your behalf, and if you don't have the context and you don't have data that you can trust, those agents are gonna make really bad decisions on your behalf. And then you know how, you know how challenging that could be. And then Gina, I know sort of your space, you trying to make it real, so it'd be really sort of interesting to get your perspective on sort of how we're thinking about it and some of the things that Brian and I just brought up there.

No, that, I'm looking forward to. That's one of the reasons I liked going to Qlik, w- in addition to what Steven said, just, there's so many... It's very obvious you put a huge amount of emphasis on your users and making that user experience amazing, which is great.

Um, yeah, there's so much hype, it's ridiculous. Like, how do you know what to do and how to do, and yet everybody's doing it. And we talk about this on our podcast a lot.

Uh, there's, even though there's so many horror stories, there's so many good stories. That's another thing I enjoy coming to Qlik about, people finding their way through the, the hype and honing in on their data and their people and their processes to make sure they can figure out what these agents are doing. So, if you, I'm really interested to hear if you guys have a way to easily help people understand what's agentic and what is people, because that's, I think, something that's huge and something people are worried about and people are talking about.

So nice teaser, Brendan. I, I'd love to tell you more on this session, but we're still about a month away, so can't really get into details. But I can tell you, Gina, I, I'll, I promise you that if you come and listen to that, you will hear how we can give that, that traceability, that lineage, everything you wanna understand to make sure that your ag- your agents are acting safely and in a way that you can trust.

So there, there will be a lot of talk about that at our, at, at the keynote. That's so huge. And I think for everything that gets talked about in AI, the biggest piece of a kind of the AI factory honestly is that data prep, and hardly anybody talks about it.

But, like, there's so-- It's expensive, a lot of people are involved, a lot of resources are involved, and to get the data right is, is so incredibly important, and I'm glad y'all are talking about it. And that was one of the things, if I can jump in on this, that, came through last year with Qlik Connect. We spent a lot of time talking about data quality and the impact of quality and what quality means, that it doesn't just mean, you know, that you have some data and that it's accurate data, but that you have that sort of, as you mentioned there, Brendan, lineage, that you have a sort of a quantitative assessment, a way to determine whether this data is truly high quality data.

I, I'm curious if that has gone, I, I guess, out of the lab and into the, into the world, into the customer world. Is data quality a vernacular that you're hearing from your customers, and is this something that has been implemented by them? So we're definitely starting to hear that, and I, it, it's, it's a little bit shocking to me that we're sitting here in two thousand twenty-six talking about data quality initiatives again.

I figured we would have solved that twenty-five years ago. But it's coming to the forefront. It's really interesting, and it-- and I'm gonna sort of date myself and say that, you know, as, when I got into this space way back in the early two thousands, data quality was cool, and it was all the rage.

You had to have the best data. Um, two thousand twenty-six, data quality is cool again. Hashtag data quality is cool again.

So what we're seeing is that customers don't wanna just make sure the data's real time anymore. " But the added thing with agents is around how do you make sure that there's context for those agents that may make a decision off of that data? 'Cause it's more than just the veracity, the volume, and all that, sort of the five V's.

It really gets down to, yeah, you have your data, it's trusted, and here's the context of what's behind it. And, you know, Brian, I think sort of you've been working with Qlik for a long time, and you know what our engine can do there. Uh, yeah, you used two words there, Brendan, I wanna pick out.

There's context, and there's trust, right? And last year, last year, trust was a, a huge thing about being able to not only understand that your data has a high level of quality, but how long does it take for an organization to be able to trust their data? That's not just a data quality issue.

That is a, a human trust issue as well. And you talk about the importance of being able to interject at parts of the AI pipeline and pass it on to human intervention to be able to ensure that that trust can grow in a consistent manner. So I'm hoping we see something more in terms of those, th- those opportunities to be able to interject.

And the, it sounds a bit backwards, right? Because it sounds like you want to say, "I want the human back in the loop," but you still need the human in the loop at the right times, right? And that's where the key part is as far as I see it.

I can confirm you will see some of that, Brian, on main stage and as well as in some of the breakouts. Yeah. I- isn't it funny that we're once again, once again, I me- I, I, I feel like the, the old Bernie Sanders meme.

Uh, yeah, we're, I'm once again here to, to talk about, you know, people processes, data quality, you know, the same thing we've been talking about forever. But it has become so much more important now because of these AI agents that people are trying to deploy because you have to figure out when people need to be in the loop. You have to figure out the, you know, AI is both a consumer of data and a producer of data, and so you have to figure out how, what that means for your overall business processes and business intelligence and data, you know, choices.

It would be very easy to, um-To lose sight of reality with AI out there confidently diving in and answering all your questions and doing your homework for you. But that's just not gonna work. Uh, Gina, we've talked about this a lot, that, you know, people, people should be using AI as a tool, not as a surrogate.

No, exactly. And you can't even use it as a tool without understanding the context of the data. So, it's fine to wanna go fast and, and to achieve great things with automated means.

Um, but especially in the case of generative AI, where it's just predicting the sequence of words, if the data is out of sequence, that is to say not situated correctly in the, in the data set. And, like, to just to give a real-world example of that, it's, it, you know, if what if it's, what if I'm trying to run a launch and the data that I'm using is from two launches ago, and I don't have all of the brand-new things I wanna hype on. Or what if my data for the market, if we're trying to figure out, well, where are we gonna, where are we gonna put these campaigns and who should-- who's gonna really wanna buy this?

Which are the first things a product marketer asks. Where's gonna... Who's gonna buy this, and where should we push on?

Like, how can you do that with data that is old? And if I go to, to do some sort of process, a-as I do, right, with clients, if the data I have is incomplete, which happens a lot with clients at the very beginning of things, or if it is old, then the results I give from doing something with generative AI will all be wrong, and I have to do them by hand anyway, so what's the point of using AI? Yeah.

Two things I wanna touch... No, it's great. That's, you're spot on.

There are two things I wanna touch on there. Um, just one anecdotal story. I had to write my bio for the website when I got my new job two years ago.

" It wrote the most amazing story about me. It was amazing. All wrong, but amazing.

I mean, that's, that's the funny thing. It, it said I had my PhD in applied math and physics from Cal Berkeley, and that I work with underprivileged children on the weekends. I wanted to post it on the website.

Um, but it was... So there was that. But it brings up a more important point in today's world, right?

So it's a funny story. The challenge with some of these agentic tools and some of these generative tools is that they're very good at getting, that unstructured data in a bit of a format of a story that you can tell. But when you start adding in what has been traditionally in our space, and I'll punt this to Brian in a second here, which has been that structured data so you can make business critical decisions, the LLMs stink at math.

They're just bad at it right now. They'll get there. But this is one of the things that you'll hear about at, at Connect, where we now have the ability, and this is, this is not a pre-announce, but we already talked about this earlier this year.

We have the ability to bring that structured and unstructured data together in the same type of analysis b- And that in and of itself, that is a massive leap forward for customers who are going down this agentic path. And Brian, you've been working with us for years, so you know why we can do that. Yeah.

I mean, Brendan, I would say that, that Qlik have really been in overdrive in terms of the private preview side of things this year as well, and really getting the right access to the right customers and partners to be able to evaluate this technology as you're developing it. And I think we, we all know that the structured and unstructured data, so effectively being able to take all of the documents that you have on all of your drives across all of your network and combine it with all of that real pure data quality, build data that you have in your apps, and fusing that has been an issue for a long, long time with a lot of da- a lot of data. And I think that's what's really cool about Qlik Answers and the new version of that, is it...

And I, I, I wondered whether to think about this as a criticism or not, Brendan, but I've decided that it's not a criticism, that it actually stops and thinks, right? A few comments I had were like: Well, why can't we have a fast button on this? And I was like: Hold up, hold up.

Do you really want to have the... Do you really want to be using Opus or do you really want to be using Sonnet for this? As an, just as a, you know, a cloud-based example here.

And this is the one time that you really do want to have that deep dive, and you really have to be a bit patient to wait a few more seconds to get the correct answer, because as Gina already said, if you have the wrong data coming from the right place or vice versa, and then you've got a bunch of sources, then that's when it starts to get, and I'm sure technically quite complex as well. So yeah, I think it's, I think it's a real positive that you have to wait for a little bit. Yeah.

Brian, I love the, you called it the fast button because the original name that I came up for the fast button was the Get to My, Get Me To My Incorrect Answer Really Quickly So I Can Spend Time Updating My CV, was a little bit long, right? I mean, but it's, you're, you're... A-and Gina, you're laughing 'cause if we get this, if customers get this wrong, there are consequences.

And it, it's not good consequences when, when this stuff goes bad. Yeah. I was thinking of my own, like, so I, the tool that I'm using, I always forget to switch it when I'm doing something technical to, to the, think really hard, use the newest model.

And, so I did some vibe coding, and I just was trying to build a little bot to do something silly. Um, but everything on Microsoft Teams had changed. It went to a platform since they had done the slow, the fast one.

So I had to redo the whole I'm going through the steps to, to build it together, to build th-this little agent, and I'm having to read through Microsoft documentation, which is you know? So it's, it's trying to figure out. So it, it's also just a, a human issue.

So, you know, imagine doing that in a big organization and it's not, it's goingGoes how you have the easy fast button, and it goes real fast, the trust is totally eroded, number one, so no one wants to use it. And then secondly, number two, you're spending more time trying to get to the actions you were promised were gonna-- it was gonna do for you. So it's, it's, it's a human issue always.

It's always a human issue. And, and, you know, losing that trust and making it so people don't wanna use it because it's not working correctly yet is really... That's a costly, costly mistake.

Not to get into our technology too deep, but I think there's an-- Well, I, I love what I'm hearing from both of you because it's, we actually in our early access programs on our latest set of capabilities, we actually implemented a few changes to make it quicker. " It was all wrong, but it was amazingly fast. So we actually, we, we guided Brian, sort of that user experience on the grounds that people need to make decisions off of this information.

More importantly, machines are gonna start making decisions off of this information. If it takes just a, a microsecond or two seconds or three or four seconds longer, we would rather have our customers be safe and confident because that's Qlik's history. That's what we've always done well, and we-we're going to maintain that.

And you'll hear that at Connect. Big theme. So one of the things that we've been hearing about from Qlik in terms of specific technology, Brendan and Brian, and i-is this, discovery agent and, and generally in the industry.

I know Gina and I have been talking about MCP. Um, Brian, what are you looking forward to from that, and, and what are your thoughts on the way that j-- that, that Qlik is, is working in the agentic world? I, I think, I think Qlik has quite rightly eased themselves into this, right?

I think we heard a lot about the, the potential of these concepts last year, but, you know, again, with the private previews now coming through for MCP and for Discovery Agent, that word trust again is really coming to the surface, right? And it's about Qlik trusting its customers and partners to have the right level of technical understanding of what they're trying to do and to not misinterpret that. Um, it's all great having MCP access and being able to pipe that to your favorite LLM, but if you're not educated on how to use that, and you don't understand the restrictions that are there, that's, that's an important thing.

But I think, I'll throw this one to Brendan as well. The Discovery Agent is one that my customers are really excited, probably most hyped about, if I'm allowed to use that word. Um, they, they care about, like, all of the technical stuff, but they really want the stuff that tells them, "Oh, my, my carrots were twenty-nine percent up overnight.

" Yeah, talk a little bit about Discovery Agent and why that's gonna make a difference for a lot of customers. Well, well, one of the things that everybody that's listening to this should understand is that Qlik is customer zero. Let that sink in for a second.

So we are-- We use our own products, and if you think about my, my own role, Brian, as the general manager of sort of the largest division of Qlik, I want to be able to understand what's gonna happen with my business. I'll be clear, I don't want to log into my dashboard to do that. I don't.

I want it... I want an agent sitting there monitoring the health of my business, whether it's around bookings, whether it's around customer support cases, things that may even be posted to social media that can proactively tell me, "You know what? " And that is the promise of the Discovery Agent.

That's what we're really, really excited about. The second thing that we talked about, and we brought it up here, is MCP. Uh, MCP, it's the, the latest favorite three-letter acronym that seems to be out there all the time, but it'll always be a three-letter acronym.

What I'm re-- what we're really excited and what our customers are telling us they're excited about is that MCP is going to allow our customers to bring the power of our trusted data products plus the engine to where users work. If you work within Claude, and that's the way you run your day. Gina, you talked a little bit about the product marketing world.

Probably spending your time in Perplexity or Claude to try to drive some things of what's happening there. Whether you use Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, I mean, we can continue the list, it goes on forever and ever. MCP is going to allow all of our customers to bring that power into that user experience, and that is gonna fundamentally change the way people engage with data.

And technically, why that's so inciting is the engine, our analytics engine has the ability to ensure that the data within those questions you ask through MCP, through Claude or anything else, that they're accurate, and they don't hallucinate. That is what is extremely exciting because I challenge anybody who's listening right now to dump a spreadsheet into any one of the LLMs. Actually, do, do something this way.

Dump five or six spreadsheets in and then start asking questions and have it build you a story. It'll be really pretty, but it'll be really wrong. That's what's so exciting about MCP.

We can address that problem, and the promise is there. We've delivered. We won't just do a nice pretty video on stage.

I happen to know we'll be able to do something live and in person with, with real use cases as early as next month. Really exciting times. Yeah, look, I think just, just to sort of tail off on that for you, for you, Brendan, I think that use case part is super important, right?

Um, I think g-getting past the hype phrases of Discovery Agent, MCP, Claude, I think a lot of people in the market who even have some, like, touchpoint there know about those things and that they exist, but I think the use cases are what, what's really gonna make this for the customers right now. That's what they want to see. How can I practically use this in my business?

I think you used that same phrase right at the start of the, the session, Brendan, so Sometimes technologists get enamored with technology for technology's sake, and it, it's cool, right? There's nothing wrong with that. " They have to be able to go with real use cases where they can apply it not nine months from now, not nine weeks from now, heck, nine days from now, they need to be able to do that.

And that's the promise that we want look to deliver against here over the, over the coming months, 'cause there's more than just the discovery agent. So stay tuned to Qlik Connect. There's more coming.

That's what we're really excited about. You know, one of the things I like to Qlik Connect too is your users force you to talk about what you announced last year . And I, I remember last year the, the different user, presentations that were there were really good because they came up with, "Yeah, this was announced.

Here's how we used it. " So, I'm hoping to see some of that again this year too. Well, that's actually a great question.

Um, you know, let's, let's kind of transition here into what we're looking forward to with Qlik Connect. I mean, you know, for me, it is what Brendan was just talking about, these kind of real world use cases. I mean, that's, that's where the gold is, when you get to sit down a-across the table from somebody who is implementing this stuff and hear how they're doing it, what they really think of it, you know, unfiltered.

Uh, you know, this is the real state of affairs. But of course, there's also a lot of oth-other things that happen. You know, we've got a couple of, keynotes.

Um, I, I'm hearing rumors that, one of them might be especially amusing, the second keynote there. Uh, the first keynote's gonna be all, technical, and we're gonna be live streaming, our, our feedback from that on the, on the Tech Field Day site. We're gonna be, doing a live blog, I should say, on that.

Um, Gina, you were at Qlik Connect, with us, previously. What, what are you looking forward to? What do you li-like to see again?

Uh, everything is good. Um, what I like... One of the things I did like, honestly, is the, the, the customers showing off what they have done and how they've been using it.

So you hear the customer use cases. And, and all the community events. Their community is super activated and not shy in any stretch of the imagination.

So they're very happy to tell you what's going on and what they like and what they don't like. Um, I think that's pretty much what I'm looking forward to. Yeah, yeah.

For me, it's, it's the energy on the floor. Um, I think you can go to many tech conferences, and you just don't have that. Um, and that's, that's twofold, really.

That's the, the customer energy that's on the floor, the, the buzz that's there. But I think, I think it's also fair to say that the, the Qlik exec team do a really excellent job of being around, and I mean around in the truest sense, right? Where they're there to mingle where they can, possible, and it's, it's really nice to have that.

It's a different kind of vibe from going into, a gray square and walking around a bunch of booths. Qlik Connect isn't really like that, or never has been in my experience. So I'm really looking forward to seeing some of-- 'cause we always get some surprises, so I'm looking forward to what's, what's around the corner this time.

And Brendan, you get a different perspective on the show, but, what's your perspective? Yeah. I'm looking at all the insider trading notes I ha- I have on here about what we're gonna announce.

Um, I'd love to share it on this. I can't. Um, my perspective is, so I was unable to atten-attend Qlik Connect last year 'cause I had a, a bit of a health crisis, so I'm actually just looking forward to going back, and seeing some of the customers, that I know and, and really respect.

I think, Gina, you said it well. Some of the customer stories, they're surprising at how much of an impact that we really have as an organization, but it's where we've already always tried to be successful and help our customers. And Bryan, just you've been in the ecosystem for years.

I'll just say I love watching some of the partners show up dressed in full-on green. Um, you know, whether it's the green shoes, the green so-socks, or, Dalton, if you're listening to this, your green tie, we love that. Um, I, I can promise you I will have my, my green Sambas this year, so we'll, we'll really get into it.

Um, but ultimately, it gets back down to talking to customers and the partners. That's, that's what really, really blows my hair back on this. So I'm looking forward to it, and then the surprises that we're about to announce in a couple weeks here.

And, and, you know, and one final thing too that I really enjoy about, Qlik Connect is the sort of the vibe on the expo floor. Um, sometimes, as Gina and I have experienced, for many years, and Bryan, I know, you know, you and I experience this as well at some conferences, it's a little lame. It's a little boring on the expo floor.

Uh- ... that is not how the Qlik Connect expo floor is. Uh, between the, the silent disco headphones, there's constant presentations.

There's, sure, there's partner booths and Qlik booths and so on, but it's very demo-heavy. It's very inviting. And also, there's always some other stuff on there, you know, whether it is bicycles or motorcycles or race cars or whatever.

You know, there's always something fun and, and different and interesting to see, and so I'm really looking forward to seeing that as well. And if you are going to Qlik Connect, please do stop by. We will be...

The Tech Field Day organization is gonna be doing a lot of stuff in the, the media area at the center of the expo floor. We would love to talk to you. Uh, also, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're saying, "Well, this kinda sounds kinda cool," you can still probably get there.

Um, I bet if you go to the Qlik Connect website, you could probably still, get yourself to OrlandoAnd, and join us, there's still time. So please do check that out. Um, before we go, I just wanna give each of you a chance to tell us where can we continue the conversation, where can we connect with you.

Uh, Brendan? com. That is our main website.

But I'd also encourage everybody that's listening in to connect with me on LinkedIn. Love hearing new perspectives. Yeah, same for me.

I'd, I'd love to meet as many of you as, as possible at Qlik Connect this year, but you can, you can mostly find me on LinkedIn. That's where I live, so. Yeah, you can, find me on LinkedIn as well, but I definitely wanna hear the tea.

That's what our podcast is all about, so, check in to Tech Aunties podcast, and if you wanna talk to me live while we're there, I would love to have that opportunity. Yep. And you'll find me, sometimes here on the Tech Field Day podcast, also, every Monday live with Techstrong Gang, which is a daily news program, as well as, Wednesday, on the Utilizing AI podcast, which I host, which is very much in line with our conversation here in that it's all about practical uses of AI rather than the hype that we're constantly living in.

So thank you both, all of you for, delegates, Brian and Gina, you know, Qlik, Qlik, Brendan, thank you for joining us. And thank you everybody else for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you enjoyed this, please do subscribe.

You can find this on YouTube, with video if you'd like to see our lovely faces, or of course, you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast application. Uh, this episode is brought to you by Qlik and Tech Field Day, and also, of course, the Futurum Group. com/podcast, or you can view us and learn more at Techstrong TV in your favorite streaming device.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next week.