Technology Accountability: IT Scares, Binance and AI Workers

Hello everyone, and happy Halloween, or at least the day before Halloween. " And Alan Shiml, who's not here with us at the moment but is here with us in spirit, wrote this article. it.

I highly recommend you check it out. And we're going to chat about some of those scary things because, well, they're different this year, and there's a lot more AI in the set. And let me introduce our panelists to discuss all this.

But our usual Friday lineup is Tracy Rigings here, Jeff Rich, Jack Pollard, John Schwartz, and joining us today is Wiki Wang, who we haven't seen in a while. Hi. Wiki, how you doing?

Good. Good. All right.

Well, let's just jump into this list a little bit, but there's plenty to talk about. But the two that left out at me that were AI-centric was, well, the number one was, hey, we're laying off all these folks in the IT and security departments, and everybody else is picking up their work on the assumption that AI is going to help them do that. But I don't know, in my experience, I haven't quite seen that play out just yet.

And of course, the other thing is we have AI agents now everywhere, and some of them have privileges that are highly elevated, and they do things in ways that we don't expect, and then we're surprised when the outcome is bad. But Tracy, as you look at this list, those are mine too, but what leaps out at you? Well, I like number six, the tiniest little element or package that your whole application depends upon.

We just had that. We had- Mm-hmm ... the PHP to Shell.

That was a Halloween nightmare for most people for the entire internet. So I just have to say, remember, the dead don't die. And like zombie servers, some of these lower-level dependencies that we rely on are so incredibly critical.

And when you have no control over them, and it's as bad as that one was, I think everybody is still trying to figure out how to fix their environment. I think we have to start thinking about how to fix these vulnerabilities a lot faster because they do become little zombies running around in our software that we don't have any idea about. So I like number six.

That's my favorite. All right. Jeff, let's go to you.

Anyone that leaps out at you in particular? Well, unfortunately, I've seen a few of these. I've had Halloween's past.

I think my favorite really is a zombie server, which, and I know, go ahead and at me and send me all the messages you want. Most of the ones I found belong to the marketing team. Ouch.

Because the marketing team set up something for just one promotion, and then they were done and walked away from it, and no one even knew the server was there. And then a year later, they found out that was the source of a compromise. Happy Halloween.

Wiki, a lot of these things are compliance related, so have you seen any of these things before? And is there anything that you find more scary this year than last year? Actually it is.

I do see there are some industry news, and I don't want to talk about specific company because it definitely add the pressure on them. But from the industry perspective, we can say there are a lot of old problems happening this year. Actually, AI helps speed up the way on the attack surface and other compliance issues.

Again, similar to Tracy, my favorite is number six, but I can say there are a lot of things related to AI, and we need to pay more attention to this year. All right. Jack, anything leaping out at you in particular and given your experiences?

Well, you're going to have to give me a second while I pull the dagger out of my marketing heart from Jeff, and I'll toss it- ... back at Tracy and say number five, the patch you're afraid to install on the system you're afraid to leave running. And yeah, we need to patch systems, but if you look at it and say, "Yeah, I know they fixed it, but I'm willing to take the risk because I have no idea what will happen with the patch.

" Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's a good one.

Yeah. And Jeff- Yeah. Our culture has really got to start changing about that.

We really have to be braver. I talk about this often, de-bloating, getting things smaller. But we are so afraid of doing things because we don't know what some of those underlying dependencies are, and we don't know the relationships.

" It's like, well, then let it break everything, and then you'll fix it. Theoretically, maybe we can fix it faster because we're using AI tools, but I don't know. We'll see.

But I think one of the things that leaps out at me about all of this too is that, I don't know, and I'll ask John this, but my sense is it's harder to be in IT and security than ever, even though we have AI. People, theoretically, were supposed to be less stressed out, but it looks like they're more stressed out. What's your take?

Yeah. In the short term, they are going to be more stressed out. I was thinking about this as kind of related to the Block C, and this whole idea that this whole operational trap of treating AI like a headcount replacement rather than an assistant.

So you slash your experienced systems engineers while you're expecting automated agents to maintain fragile architectures. It's, in a sense, in the short term, it's going to be an absolute nightmare, and it already is as we look at all these incidents that are happening. But in the long term, perhaps AI is part of the solution.

But for now, it's like everything with AI in the short term is pain for the long-term gain. And right now, I just don't know how long the pain's going to last. And I think it gets worse than that because what I'm seeing is organizations are spending more on AI, and so to pay for that, they are trying to cut back spending on the rest of IT.

And so they're cutting back on help desks and all these other things on the assumption that AI will take care of much of that. But it doesn't seem to be working out as planned, and organizations are not- Yeah ... pulling it.

They're not just- It's like this downward- ... applying a business, right? They're pulling everything.

It's like a downward spiral, right? In order to pay for these rising capital expenditures, which are out of control, they're slashing from the bottom line, which perpetuates the problems, so they spend more on the capital expenditures. It's this downward cycle.

So are they skipping a mortgage payment to feed their drug habit? It almost sounds like it. Hell yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The irony of this is that, as Tracy pointed out, we're so risk-averse, we don't want to break anything, so we won't even, where we can, particularly in IT, we won't use AI to automate parts of IT that we could because we're afraid, oh my God, it might do something wrong.

So we could actually do a lot more with AI than we're doing because we're afraid of breaking something. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

We've got to get over that. We have to. Yeah.

In fairness to some of the vendors, they are making an effort. We've been talking about this this week and last week. We're talking about it a lot, this kind of acknowledgement of what's being created, the issues that are being created, and the attempts by the big-name vendors to try to address these.

But it's just this weird catch-up where they never quite catch up, and then they tack to another product, and it just keeps moving and moving. John, it's not always the vendors. Sorry, Wiki.

Yeah. Real quickly, I had a discussion with an organization this week that's had a COBOL program running for over 10 years. They put in redundant backup power systems because they're concerned that if it ever goes down, it'll never come back up.

That's the exact issue that we were talking about. It's not quite a zombie. It's more of a ghoul.

Wait. I want to give Wiki the floor here for a second. Wiki, go ahead.

Yeah. I just want to talk back on John's idea on the blocks. I just feel like AI actually can help in a lot of ways, but people still the centric part.

We want to make people happy with AI's help and add all of the efficiency, but we don't want to let AI make people feel scared they're not secured. I guess maybe this is something like in company when they talk about their responsible AI strategy and how to adopt AI with responsibility. That's kind of something they want to talk more.

Mm-hmm. I don't know. Tracy, will we get to some point with AI, do you think, that we are going to be reasonably happy and content and things are more automated and our lives are less stressful?

Because that's been the promise, but in various forms, I've been hearing this promise for 30 years now, and it doesn't seem to ever come to be. So, is this all wishful thinking? I think AI is going to improve substantially over the next four to five years.

I think it's going to change completely the way we approach it. I think that the small models are going to be king. I think there's a lot that we have to look forward to with AI.

I really do. I believe in the technology. I just believe right now the way we're approaching it is wrong.

That's all. The foundational models are not the direction we should be going. But as developers start using AI and they don't want to have to pay for AI, they will come up with different ways.

Developers have always been very creative in that aspect. So yes, AI will improve. It'll get better, people will feel become more comfortable about it, and we will stop talking about it.

" Everybody absolutely hates it. The response from the people that are doing business with the government and having to use the term Super Intelligence instead of Artificial Intelligence, they are not happy at all. This has really caused a problem for the administration.

I got bad news for you, Tracy, that when the earnings calls Musk and Zuckerberg insist on using it now. They don't care. No, everybody in the government, if you're doing work for the government, you're not supposed to say AI.

And in fact, talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. They're going to have to change every document, every website from AI to SI. That's a big undertaking.

Talk about a zombie. Of all the things we need to worry about, right? Zia.

So does that mean artificial intelligence agents will become super intelligence agents, which stands for SIA? Zia? I don't know.

See you later? I don't know how this is going to work. But Jack- No, I think on the topic of agents, we're going to get better at that, too.

We are going to get better at having smaller agents, better control of what access they have, a better understanding of how to follow them, log them. So this technology will improve. It will.

All right. So Jack, what's your sense of all this? Is it the things that are scaring us, are they the technologies, or are they just reflections of us as humans and we are our own worst enemies?

Embrace the power of and. No, really, a lot of the items on the top 13 list and some of the other things we're talking about really are people process things rather than technology things. We talked a lot about applying patches and the zombie servers, and it's an emotional thing of fear of the unknown, right?

And that comes into play a lot, and that plus pure laziness, right? There is. Of all the things on my task list, the last thing I want to do is touch that thing over there, right?

And so I'm just not going to. I got better things to do with my time. Right.

Mickey, if I look at all 13 of these things, they all seem to come back to some form of change management issue that people don't really manage all that well in the first place, so is that what's really stressing us out, is that we don't have a good approach to change management on any level? From what I can see, majority of people, they're doing good things on the change management and follow the process. The thing is, currently we're, again, we're in a, what I call, super intelligence era time, and then things just move so fast.

So I do think there are some different project people running different instance parallel, so they can see the difference, and if there's some problem, they can roll back right quick. Just try to reduce the risk from that perspective. And I also say for some instance, they just use agile methodology and do the quick iteration.

But from the compliance perspective, we also need to use some continuity monitoring with some automations to keep up the speed as well. All right. So- Mike, nobody ever uses that term anymore.

I'm so happy you threw it out. Change management, configuration management, we don't do that anymore. We think it's DevOps, and that's what we're doing for change management.

But it's not. We don't really try to manage change, and we don't try to manage configurations anymore. We just don't.

And we seem to just tell people, "Go use AI to do something," but we don't give them any instructions, and they go out and play with stuff, and then it doesn't quite work or scale. It's- Yeah, is this a surprise at all? Given the rush to implement, make these major changes to these infrastructures and business operations almost overnight, of course there are going to be issues.

And it's of some of these companies' own making, and I think it's usually from the top down where it creates these issues. The CRV is dead. All right.

I'm going to leave this here, but I would take some comfort in the fact that if you are experiencing any of these issues, you're not alone. Because there's lots of folks out there and lots of company, and hopefully we all get better at this in the months ahead. But in the meantime, look around, talk to other folks, and you'll find out that they're all in the same boat with you.

So enjoy the weekend. I'm going to switch gears, though, to somebody else's new nightmare. 3 billion went missing from their crypto environment, and allegedly, of course, North Koreans might be at the heart of this thing.

But Jeff, is this going to be a regular thing right now? Because everybody and his brother's been talking about crypto for a while, and I know there's been a steady cadence of thefts, but this one seems to be up there in terms of numbers, and are we going to see more of this? The old saying goes, crime, just follow the money.

" Because that's where the money is. To Binance's credit, they did two things. They froze the remaining coins as soon as it was discovered, and they had a billion dollars set aside for just this sort of instance, because they made the statement that customers will be made whole through this.

The problem is I'm not sure they anticipated a theft of at least six times what they had in reserve to make their customers whole. They're going to have to go find another $5 billion somewhere, and it's not in my pocket. I'm not sure where they're going to find it.

I know it's out there. 3 billion yet. Mm-hmm.

They still have some accounting to do here. " But when you take that much value and put it on technology, which is designed by humans and have mechanical failures as well, you are increasing the risk of the value of what you have going away, and I think this was just proven. I don't think this will be the last, and I dare say it won't be the largest.

I don't know. Jack, is this real money, or do I just go in the back room and get out my GPUs and crank out some more crypto, and there's my $6 million, it's automatically back? What do you say?

I'll repeat myself. Embrace the power of and. 3 billion of gold takes a couple of tractor trailers full, right?

That's not easy. Digital theft is obviously a lot easier. But when you think about it, everything we do today is digital currency in one form or another.

I have all of my assets in banks, and they're not storing dollar bills for me. They're storing an entry on a ledger that says I have $5 in my checking account and $23 in my savings account, and if somebody comes in and steals it, or better yet Puts another zero behind that, so I have $230 instead of $23, I'd be happy. But again, it's just manipulating numbers, and that's the same thing as this hack is.

I think what's more important is that, A, as Jeff said, we have in the United States for our regular banking environment, we have federal insurance that up to $100,000 you're covered if it's a federally regulated bank. So no matter what happens, you'd be covered by the government. We don't have that for cryptocurrency.

Mm. Or let me rephrase that. We don't have that for non-federally regulated banks and federally insured banks, which I don't believe Binance is.

So it's up to the company to be made whole, and this is the same thing as you put $100,000 under your pillow and the guy Robert comes in in the middle of the night and steals it while you're out having a party in Halloween and doing booze and brews. You have nobody left to turn to except yourself. There's no backing behind it.

So in this case, I don't see a big deal. I'm much more interested in the fact that, and it's still early in the investigation, but the rumors are that this was an employee developer laptop that was compromised, brought back into the environment, and that's how the attackers got in. And that's a very well-understood compromise path that I would've hoped that Binance had put the appropriate controls in place for.

But right now, it doesn't look like it. I think they said it was a DevOps engineer's laptop. I know.

That's what- And DevOps- They should know better, right? Well, they have a lot of power. They don't get the credit.

People don't acknowledge that. Yeah. But they do have a lot of power.

They have a lot of access to a lot of servers. They just have a ton of access to just about everything. If they manage deployments, they have a lot of access, and sometimes those scripts, they just put the hard code, the passwords right in them.

Yeah, it can be messy. So, we need to shore up some DevOps pipelines, it sounds like to me. There you go.

" And then about an hour to two hours later, sometimes, maybe even a day later, everybody rolls over and hits the snooze button and forgets about it. Is there going to be change in terms of these digital currencies and the way we manage them and more compliance requirements, and do we need to shore this whole thing up a little bit? " Yeah.

I just feel like, again, it's similar to what we discussed in the last vlog. There are a lot of problems. They're not new, right?

People got attacked, those important people, they got phishing email, or got impersonated or something, and then the bad guys got their credential, hack into the system. Or even in this cyber security awareness week, month, you see how many incidents happened, right? Majority of the problem, they are still the same.

The weakness at the security system, or in the process, or people, and they're all the same in the past, but AI just speed up the way attackers try to hack into the system and make something wrong. Jeff, I'm losing- Yeah ... Jeff, I'm losing my sympathy for these folks who have these issues.

I understand that nobody should be robbed. But I'm also looking at this, and as I look into this in the early signals of it, I'm going, all these issues have been raised, discussed. Everybody knows that you should not let your developers have privileges that other people are going to exploit, et cetera.

I think this goes all the way back to SolarWinds for that matter. It's not much different from that initial attack vector. So if we're not going to do anything about it, my sympathy level is dropping.

Well, there's a level of sympathy from me that's pretty low in a number of places. One, by using Binance, and I'm not saying Binance is bad, but you need to recognize when you put a lot of value into something, it's essentially a bet. You are betting that it's going to work, and you're betting the value's going to go up, and you're betting that they're going to protect it.

And all of those, I don't know where it is on the poly markets, but I'm not certain it's real high. Certainly, it's dropped significantly recently. And then you add on top of that, what are the internal risks that organizations are betting on?

Speed over security. Time to market over change management or code reviews or any number of things in there. So as long as we focus on AI makes us fast, therefore, we should simply go faster, is like designing a car that can go even faster and not being concerned about the brakes.

Having no brakes at all. Mm-hmm. What did Willie Sutton say about robbing banks?

It's where the money is. Yeah. You're exactly right.

It's no surprise. It's almost inevitable that these state-backed cyber operations are going to evolve from disruptive espionage into macroeconomic funding enterprises. What'd they siphon like billions of dollars in roughly 20 minutes?

20 minutes. 20 minutes, yeah. And the worst part is, in the finance world, there's been a lot done to make sure that you don't have just one DevOps person that has the keys to the kingdom.

Things like separation of duties. We worked on that so hard to make sure that the person who is doing the build doesn't necessarily do the deploy. There is a staging area, and then somebody else pulls it from there.

But these Bitcoin companies, they don't have any regulations. They're not trying to pursue that. And I'm guessing they had one really important person who knew how to do the builds, knew how to do the deployments.

He had to do it from home, he had to do it at midnight, and it was just really easy to get into his laptop. Right. Jeff mentioned these containment efforts.

That's some hope, but still, was it Tether and Circle working with Binance and law enforcement to freeze approximately half of the stolen assets? But that isn't full as to what happened. Again, it's just always about the speed and the scale and the repercussions, and basically, as Jeff said, this is basically heightened gambling in a certain sense- That's true ...

with your money in these enterprises. But Jack, correct me if I'm wrong. We are getting better at tracking digital wallets, and if there was ill-gotten gains in them, we at least have some understanding that maybe this particular wallet is full of it versus a legitimate wallet.

How good are we getting with this stuff? That's actually where it gets very interesting on the digital currency side. We have fraud in the US government we're uncovering that's on an order of magnitude greater than these, but money in a digital account and normal money in a normal bank account is fungible.

If I have $100,000 in the bank account and where it came from and what I use, of course, very hard to figure out. If I have a digital wallet, every single transaction is tracked in one way or another. Now, the owner of the wallet may be anonymous, and there are ways to merge those funds back and forth.

But with some significant effort, and the FBI has actually been doing a yeoman's job at this, they've been able to backtrack other cryptocurrency-related crime, particularly ransomware payments, to go and actually trace back through all the different layers to be able to find and arrest ransomware actors. And so there is a possibility that the money wallet is gone from the bank accounts of, or the wallets of the original holders is now frozen and will never be able to be spent because it is tagged in some way or another. That's because it's in a digital wallet you can track.

It's a little bit different. Right. Well, I don't know, John, back in the day when we arrested somebody, there was a perp walk, and lots of photographers.

Are we going to see this kind of perp walk in the future here for these types of crimes, or are they always going to be anonymous, do you think? Yeah, I fear they're going to be anonymous for quite a while, and there are going to be more of them. And what's even worse than my thought is that we're just not going to know about them, period.

Right? They're going to happen underneath the radar. No one's going to catch on to any of this.

And yeah, it's right. With no regulatory oversights, I mean, this is a wild gamble people are taking with some of this stuff. Without some sort of controls and extradition treaties, the chances of a perp walk are pretty low.

So remember when there was online gambling, and they would try to bust these people, and the only way they ever were able to in the end was when they were traveling through the US for some reason or other, they'd grab them at the airport. Otherwise, when they were offshore, they were- Yeah ... untouchable.

And if you travel through the US, and you knew they were looking for you, you've got to be pretty silly to do that, but- These guys are getting caught doing it, too. So Jeff, though, what is the ultimate answer here? Do we need an FDIC fund for all this crypto stuff that'll be trillions of dollars to cover these losses?

How does this play out in your mind? " So, FDIC, if a bank or any financial institution is subject to the FFIC, the Five Financial Institution Examination Council, then they have to follow all the guidance of the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, at least in the US, before they can be insured by the FDIC. I think you're going to have to see that sequence of events, and I expect it to happen because cryptocurrency's not going to go away, for a lot of reasons.

People like it. So I do think there's going to be, within the US, some form of regulation, oversight, compliance, and eventually an insurance backing for it. All right.

Well, I'm going to leave this here, but let's hope that the currency is indeed frozen and can't be spent, because if it did go to the country that people are talking about, it's going to be used to fund missiles that are going to wind up in places like the Ukraine. So people will get hurt as a result of this. It's not a victimless crime one way or the other.

So cross your fingers and hope that the good guys are on top of this. All right. Shifting another topic that is about people at the end of the day, there's a union out there that's calling for giving the members more control over when and how they use AI.

And Jack, I know you've been tracking this, so I'm going to let you explain the particulars of this thing. But I'm having a hard time envisioning how this will actually work, but it does seem that workers and employees want more of a say in the matter. Well, I would say you used some very nice soft language.

The union itself, which is the United Tech and Allied Workers Union, which is a branch of the Communication Workers of America, and what Communication Workers of America have to do with high tech, I'm not sure. But they demand that all tech workers must have a right to refuse AI on the job for a variety of reasons. " This is just a little bit off the deep end.

What they want to do is say, "If I'm a worker, I don't want to be forced to use AI because AI is being used as an excuse for companies to lay off people," as if the companies needed that as an excuse rather than any of the other excuses they've used over the past 100 years to lay off people. Right? They also think AI would cause descaling of junior and early workers because they're not getting on-the-job training and mentorship and instead are using AI to do their jobs.

And I'm like, well, RTFM, read the manual. But this is the equivalent, to my mind, of also demanding that the union workers not be required to use computers and should go back to handwriting their missives and adding up by hand instead of using Excel, the world's greatest IT database. I mean, let's be serious here.

How can IT get its work done without using Excel as a database? But instead, we're going to add our columns up by hand because we're going to lose the ability to do math if we use Excel. And first I saw this, and I wasn't sure if this was a parody or what.

So I don't know. You can't be serious here, guys. It just can't be serious.

Come on. You never know. But John- Yeah ...

let me pose this to you. There are unions out there that will look at this a little bit, and at some point, there's this thing called the collective bargaining agreement. And do you think that AI is going to be a bigger part of the terms and conditions that show up in those agreements?

Yeah. So was it about a year ago? The Teamsters back east, maybe New Jersey, were pushing back against physical AI or robotics.

I don't know what the progress of that is. I'm sure they've probably been replaced since then by robotics. I'll just be cynical, I'll be honest with you.

I don't know how effective this is going to be. I mean, the unions are at a low ebb right now. I'm not going to go into the politics of it all, but I will say that Jack is absolutely correct about this AI is being used...

It's a convenient excuse invoked by management. It's the best excuse right now to get rid of people, to pay for your capital expenditures, going back to what we talked about earlier, and just look at the companies in recent days that are going to eviscerate their workforces. I'm thinking of Microsoft, American Express, Kroger, Goldman Sachs.

They've all invoked AI as a major factor, not the factor, but a major factor in restructuring plans that are going to eliminate tens of thousands of jobs. So the unions, God bless them, all the luck to them, but this thing is just going to gain momentum. We're going to hear from far more companies doing the same strategies.

Their quarterly results are coming, and they're making the announcements in some cases before they announce their results, which I haven't seen that in a while. No. We are a few days away from the midterm elections.

Am I going to hear more about this in the context of an election campaign? Because somebody's going to stand up and call for this as one of their reasons why that someone should vote for them? Yes, probably.

Yeah. I mean, we're in the final days. Data centers, they've used that quite effectively as a campaign tool, as a talking point.

So I think this is going to pick up momentum. I'm surprised it hasn't picked up momentum earlier. I'm surprised we haven't heard more members of either party talk about these job losses and AI job displacement.

But it's inevitable. Right. Now, I think everybody gets the, or at least understands the implications of what it might mean to their job and their role, and yet, Tracy, I don't know anybody using AI that wants to go back.

" So, even the union workers are probably acknowledging that fact as well. So, where are we with this AI stuff? I feel like we're talking out of both sides of our mouth sometimes.

Well, I think we have to remember, first of all, that SAG already had this battle, right? Mm-hmm. The Screen Actors Guild back in 2023 or something like that.

Mm-hmm. They fought it pretty hard. I know around this area, a lot of people were not working because of that, because the actors are really, really pushing against the use of AI in entertainment.

" There may be some real concern that productivity gains aren't really what they appear to be, and that workers might be asking to take responsibility for technology that they don't control, right? So they may be pressured to accept AI-produced work despite the concerns of being able to maintain it. So I feel like there should be a conversation at least.

I don't know if you can say we can never use it. That's kind of weird, but I think that there should be a discussion about some of the implications that it has. The other area that I think is a concern for AI is junior developers So our education system isn't necessarily caught up to teaching junior developers how to use AI.

And when they traditionally build their skills, they do it by troubleshooting, writing small pieces of code, reviewing code, and learning from these experienced engineers. But if AI handles all that foundational work, these new engineers may never have an opportunity to develop that judgment and technical expertise. So we should have a conversation about it from a broader perspective, and SAG did it, so why not this union?

SAG is a powerful, influential, high-profile union, and I applaud what they did. But you know what also kills me is that you have filmmakers like Martin Scorsese who are adopting or embracing the technology, and then you have the growth of the Tilly Norwood phenomenon, the AI actress. Even as effective a union as that is, it's still creeping in.

It's just inevitable in so many ways. No, it's inevitable, but there could be some- There's pushback from the guard rails ... pushback from the guard rails.

Yeah. I acknowledge that. But when you start having major filmmakers or major forces within industries adopting it, it undercuts the union's effectiveness.

" No, that's Van Halen and the brown M&M. Yeah, exactly. He was brown.

You're right, thanks. But I think Tracy is onto really what the right approach is going to be. Jack, you're right.

Do you really expect to stop this tsunami by putting your hands up? But I think what they can do, a good tact to take is let's take a look at the productivity and quality of what humans are producing, and let's measure that against what AI is producing. Not simply speed, but productivity, quality, and reliability.

And when they see that if it matches or better, they're going to have to adopt it. But I think they're going to find many cases where it's not ready to do that yet. " Yeah.

I also want to echo Jeff, but there are some facts I want to share here. So for the last couple of months when I talk to everyone close to me, they're all doing something automation with AI, either or harder. I think this is some trend we can't avoid.

This is number one of the facts. Number two fact is interesting enough, even when I talk to people who work on the AI agent or AI product, they agree most of the AI product they use actually is to helping people try to avoid the tedious work, like buying tissues from Amazon or something else. Or doing some type of work traditionally we don't have enough people to support, like AI sock area.

I think there is some sort of way we can figure this out. Like what kind of type of work AI is supposed to work better, which type of work humans supposed to be better. And then the third part is interesting thing we need to think about is at the SaaS solution time, not too many people against it.

Why? Because they add the productivity but still make human in a central position to manage it. It's like collaborative way between humans and emerging tech innovation.

Mm-hmm. I think some organizations should think about from this angle, how to protect people from using AI and how to use AI to educate our young people to be more capable in the current situation. Can I interject something that Jeff mentioned about original thinking?

And maybe this is a stretch, but I'm going to tie it into Halloween. Remember, so we have these two horror movies, "Backrooms" and "Obsession," which were original scripts, not big cast, not well-known cast, interesting concepts, and they did really well at the box office. And I compare that to something like "Disclosure Day," and I saw all these movies, and "Disclosure Day" almost to me seemed like an AI type of script.

It seemed like a hodgepodge of everything Spielberg had done, and that didn't do as well. And I sometimes think the audience is onto what's original and what is just derivative. Well, plus the graphics in that movie- They're terrible.

They were terrible. So here's my take on all of this, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's unreasonable not to look at owners of companies and realize that they're viewing AI through a certain lens, and that lens comes down to the cost of labor is usually their highest cost. It's the most expensive thing, and every time somebody walks out the door, the tribal knowledge that was in their head goes with them, and then they have to start over again and hire somebody else, and they're on this permanent treadmill for this.

So you can understand the appeal of AI to those folks. On the other side of it, though, if all they're ever doing is walking around and telling you that somebody with AI skills is going to replace you someday, or AI is going to replace you someday, then maybe you need to go work somewhere else because they don't get it. It's never going to be 100%, and I think that's the frank and honest conversation people need to have, and I think that this is going to play out a million times over in all kinds of organizations.

And the ones that get it right in terms of the balance between people and AI will win, and the others are going to find themselves with the employees that perhaps don't have the insights and the skills to get the most out of AI anyway, and then it becomes this endless circle that they're in until finally the company goes under. That's my guess. Fair?

Yep. Yeah. For now, that's what it looks like right now.

Yeah, that's scary. They're cutting as much to stay ahead of the revenue that's not coming in yet. Right.

Which actually will come in, but we don't know how long it's going to take. Right. Well, I think- Go ahead.

I was going to say, Mike, that's a long way around of quoting Justice Schumpeter's creative destruction, right? There you go. But I think the amazing thing about this to me is nobody seems to be willing to have an adult conversation.

They just want to either the management feels hostile to the labor in the first place, and so that's what gets them saying all this stuff. And then the employees feel hostile to the management, and so then the union reps wind up saying things that are equally silly. This isn't going to work out.

I think we're smarter than this, but who knows? Maybe I'm cautiously optimistic. Tracy, I'll give you the last word on this.

Well, I'll just say in IT, Halloween is every day. There's always a new problem that we have to resolve. Maybe treats, not enough threats.

Yeah. Whether it be AI or a zombie container or a new package that's brought down all of our websites, we have a lot to cover in this space. All right.

Well, sadly, some of our IT and cybersecurity friends will be working this weekend because, well, there's always something to be fixed. There's something to be protected. That's just the nature of the game.

But for those of you that can, please enjoy the holiday. Spend some time with your family and remember that this is a joyous adventure. In fact, this whole Halloween was invented by the Irish, so party accordingly.

I want to thank everybody for sharing their insights as always. I want to thank you all for watching the Techstrong gang. Please stay tuned for the replay of the Techstrong TV lineup right behind us.

And of course, we've got a word from our favorite sponsor, which is us once again. See you guys Monday.