Adapting to the AI Revolution with Testlio’s Dean Hickman-Smith

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to another Tech Drunk TV interview. My guest for this segment is Dean Hickman Smith.

Dean is the CRO Chief Revenue Officer over at Telio, and let's welcome him. Hey, Dean, welcome to Text Drug tv. It's great to have you on here, Alan.

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, and, uh, looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely.

So, Dean, you know, we were talking off camera, people wanna know who they're talking to and you know, what cred they have and so forth. Give, you know, this isn't your first stop on the, on the railroad. Give people a sense of, you know, what your, what your trip has been like.

Yeah, my trip has been very interesting, Alan. Thank you. Um, I guess I've had many stops on the, on the railroad, as you say.

Mm-hmm. Uh, I came from the uk from the old country, from the old south, from London. Uh, Uhhuh landed, uh, landed on these Fair Shores about 20 years ago, and, uh, that's when my journey in the, in the tech world, you know, really started, started off life in the military, um, got into tech and I've loved the journey ever since.

It's been a fascinating one. I came to America with a company called Net Screen back in around 2000. Sure.

I remember it well, and, uh, yeah, we were quite Absolutely Juniper. Yeah. You know, it's good to be lucky sometimes, and you, you, you arrive with an amazing team of people doing something incredible and, um, that went really, really well.

And, uh, then we were acquired by, you know, Juniper Networks, and I was the VP of Emerging Technology at Juniper Networks for a while, which, uh, was a much more technical role introducing new products to the world. And it gave me my first real insight into, you know, the wave that it was back then, which was, um, uh, essentially the emerging cloud, um mm-hmm. Service providers that were coming.

So we were providing, uh, deep inspection, security technology, very, very deep in the weed stuff. But, uh, that went really well. And then I was at Proofpoint for a good while, and we took that one from, uh, you know, small to familiar with that, to an IPO.

So Proofpoint, we did a lot of messaging security, so I've seen Yes, network security, I've seen messaging, security. And then, um, I got into identity, did a couple of identity companies, got into the biometric space and, uh, and that, that actually then introduced me to a kind of called Hacker One. So we did, uh, sure.

Crowd crowdsourced ethical hacking, uh, that was at big scale million, million plus people in the community. And I learned all about this kind of crowdsourcing space. So I guess what I'm saying, Alan, is that my journey has actually ultimately prepared me for life at telio because each of those different things that I've learned, you know, new emerging technology, different types of security technology, different types of experiences, and also that combination with the crowd has equipped me well to, uh, to feel very comfortable in my, in my slippers here at, uh, Telio and at Telio.

I am, I'm leading our global expansion. It's an exciting time to be here. So we're in growth mode, scale up, and, uh, there's a big boost from this whole AI thing that's happening right now.

I'm gonna wanna hear about that. You know, Dean, I, I, look I remember net screen. I, I, I've done four or five venture startups myself over the years and in security a lot for about 25 years plus.

Um, I do remember net screen, wasn't it the We Brothers, right? Were the founders? Ken, Ken, and, Yes, exactly.

Um, the, uh, they went off, uh, ultimately now they're at, uh, Fortinet, Ken Z Yes. They started Fortinet after net screen. They did pretty well for themselves.

I got to work with, I got to work with not, not only them, but also the, you know, the Zu who went off and Lee Clara went off to go and, uh, to Pao, Palo Alto Networks. And yeah, it was a cast of characters doing amazing things at that time. And I, I, It was, it was, it was a good time to be in, you know, I was, so, I had founded a company outta Boulder called Still Secure, and we were, we were intrusion prevention, vulnerability management, network access control neck.

Yeah. And, um, that was in, those are interesting times in security. Um, but as you say, you know, we are, um, AI's changing everything and these are very interesting times to be doing anything in tech that, that AI is touching on like this.

So, but I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just worried a lot of folks out here may not be familiar with Telio. So before we jump into some of the higher level things I want to discuss with you, give me a, give our audience a sense of who telio is and what you guys do. Uh, I'd love to, yeah.

Telio has spent over the last decade testing customers digital product offerings. Uh, it's a crowdsourced, um, a global crowdsourced offering. We have about 60,000 crowdsourced testers on the platform.

And basically we provide access to projects. And projects really are customers expose their digital assets to us and we test them, uh, and we test them deeply. We've tested over two and a half million, uh, test runs over, over the period of the company in 150 different countries on about 600,000 different appliances.

Wow. So we give as close to a real world non-biased test experience as a customer can get. So we have an amazing diversity of customers that are in tech, they're in finance, they're in the sporting world, and they test their apps on our footprint of, of testers, and we give them direct feedback.

So it's kinda like a customer simulator for want of a better word, where we test the real world experience. And what it also gives you is real world experience of things like the demographic, uh, that's testing it, the network, it's being tested on the type of device that's being used so the customer can really get an experience of, okay, what's it gonna be like if I launch my new Premiership football app in Indonesia or in Columbia, what's the customer gonna experience? So we work with global brands that care about their brand identity, care about their digital product, working straight, uh, outta the box, and we give them real world feedback so that they can feed that back into their development loop and make a better product.

So essentially we're helping global brands build better products in a very, very efficient way. Excellent. I love it.

Dean, of course, as I, I've inferred earlier, AI is having a tremendous impact, especially in tech and, and within tech, certain areas or sales and marketing if for one. But testing is one area where, hey, look, AI just makes a lot of sense, right? If you could train the AI to figure out what tests to run and then run those tests, that's, that's a pretty good thing.

But of course, you know, nothing's perfect. The ais have bias built in. They do hallucinate though.

They're getting better. I'm not gonna deny that they're getting better. Um, and then from a compliance point of view, if you don't have a human in the loop, did it really happen?

These are all kinds of things that we're running into from where you sit, right? Are these issues that, number one, we, we we're dealing with, and number two, what, what's Telio and our QA folks out here to do? Yeah, no, I think it's the tremendous opportunity for testlio to continue to add massive value to our customers.

And we, you know, we talk, I love getting out and seeing customers, Alan, it's probably the best part of my, uh, of my job is to go and see customers globally and get, get an understanding for what they're doing. And I see, um, I talked about those different evolutions of stuff that I've been involved with, right? I came to America when mobility, when the, when the iPhone kind of went, went wild and everybody started working remote.

So we did a lot of remote access stuff. We did a lot of device security, then it was all about cloud. Then the next wave after that, I think I can probably say was shadow it.

I dunno if you, do you remember that kind of era where we do, people were worried about, okay, what apps are we really worrying? Or what are we really using? We running well, people were whipping out credit cards and just spinning stuff up.

But yeah. And now honestly, I see a similar kind of shadow AI world. Absolutely.

Everybody's using it. If, if you don't think your team's using it, you know, just think again because they are. So, I think everybody now is, is struggling.

They're running hard because they've got board pressure to use AI to increase efficiency, uh, to roll out new services, to roll out software faster than ever. And that's compounding the fact that underneath the ai, it's still learning. It's, as you said, it's improving.

It's much better every time it comes out, but it's still improving. So we polled our customers and you know, we are seeing that like 82% of the bugs there now, reporting are coming from AI hallucination, just AI trying to give you an answer when inherently it doesn't have enough data yet. So we are in a way policing AI at te, you know, we are helping AI get better.

I think it's exciting for me because of two things. Number one, we are helping, we are very, very involved with AI testing, AI policing a, the AI experience, verification for customers, giving customers an understanding of how confident they can be in with ai. And then secondly, we're creating very meaningful work for our crowd community to be AI testers.

So we've created an AI testing program, a prompt injection program, a whole, um, category, a new category in our, in, in our testing world where people can come and learn how to be testers and be valuable in that kind of AI feedback loop. So I think it's great to always be the helping humans, uh, you know, globally and we're creating meaningful work with this AI testing program that we're embroiled with right now. So, super exciting time, huge opportunity.

But I think what we're trying to do, Alan, is give customers confidence in their commercial adoption of AI and helping them avoid very costly pitfalls if they get it wrong. I agree with you and interesting, Dean, I was talking recently with a friend of mine who's involved in another company that uses crowdsourcing to help deliver the goods. Um, and they were saying that to a certain extent they could set up ai, I dunno if you wanna use the word simulations or, or what have you.

But in essence, they don't need as many people doing the crowdsourcing. 'cause the AI can simulate, you know, thousands of people doing this. Um, I'm wondering, is that, is that a good thing or a bad thing for us?

And you know, Uh, I think it's an interesting thing for us. Like, yes, AI is good at replacing repetitive work for us, and it's good at doing repeat tasks that it has a good data set from. I think we're a way off having the reliable data set, but I do think that, and we see it, of course, a lot of the data that we're gathering is coming into our own platform.

5 million plus test runs that we run. Um, and turning that into insights that can be predictive in nature for our customers rather than reactive. So I agree that you can do more, um, with AI than we, uh, historically could.

The question is, can we do the insightful stuff that we need to do to make sure that AI is constantly improving for good? And I think that's where Testlio comes in. We've always got the human in the loop that's gonna be able to challenge ai, reinforce the learning, uh, of, of the, of the, of the ai, uh, data set, and continually feed that back to our customers in a way so that over time we can give them good predictive.

It's a bit, little bit like, um, I forget the name of the movie now. The, the, you know, the Tom Cruise movie. Um, where, where, where we're giving, uh, proactive advice to customers about going into a market, what they should be worried about before, uh, before they go into a Mark Minority Report, minority Report.

Thank you very much. Yeah, Exactly. Yeah.

They get arrested for what they're thinking. Um, I don't think I, I, that's not as far out as it used to be. I agree.

Uh, I, I get it though. Uh, look, it's certainly interesting, interesting times to, to be doing all this. And I, I think, you know, if the bar is here today about how much of the AI versus how much of the human in the loop, I, I think over time as we gain more confidence as these models get better, you know, as things happen along those ways, that that bar is gonna move too, right?

And, um, I don't know if it'll ever go fully automatic or fully automated, whatever you want to call it. I think you're always gonna need some human in the loop kinda stuff. I just, you know, I think it, it, as the AI gets better, like it, and it's not just ussing, this is everything, right?

Yeah. I I Think it's better To, you know, I speak to a lot of interesting people in, in, actually, I speak to more interesting people here because we work with such a wide set of industries, right? So we, we work a lot in, in the, in the media.

So we do a lot of TV streaming media. So you meet a lot of creative people. Sure.

You know, they don't want AI to replace the creativity. They want AI to replace the mundane so they can focus on the creativity. Uh, I see a lot of people, you know, myself included, I've got more time to think strategically now, um, than I have before because AI is helping me with a lot of the mundane stuff that, that I, you know, I used to need to do.

So I'm an optimist, uh, Alan, I, I think that we can use someday I, you know, to lift a lot of the load. It's kind of, it's like the industrial revolution all over again. You can either sit there and you can destroy the machines because you think it's gonna take your job, or you can get on board with it, embrace it, and then become more efficient and, and embrace AI that way.

And I actually, I used that analogy twice already this morning. I'm getting boring with my industrial revolution. Yeah.

But, but you know what it, so they, you know, I think, look, I think the fund's really gonna start when the robots start using the ai and then we're truly gonna have, I don't know if it's the fourth or fifth industrial revolution, or it'll be a combination, but you get AI with robots and, and, uh, quantum computing. It things get real exciting. You know, it gets real interesting.

We'll have to see where it goes. I wanna Talk to you about quantum computing sometime. 'cause that's my next big passion project, right?

It's, is It, you know what it is? Don't wait too long, Dean. 'cause it's happening post quantum.

There's stuff happening every day. Every day. We're seeing it's building, it's building.

You know, they call this so-called Q day, right? Where we, yeah, sure. Yeah.

We need to get into, into really interesting encryption when, when quantum hits, right. All sorts of Tic stuff. Well, we've gotta get out in front of it.

You can't wait till it to hit. We gotta be in front, you know, like you love your job. This is one of the reasons I love doing what I do, right?

I, I get to talk to people about all of these things all day. And so most people much smarter than me. So I really, it's fascinating, fascinating stuff.

Um, Well you actually, you talked about the robot stuff, right? I, I mean, Silicon Valley right now has got so much interesting. Well, we were in, uh, in Amsterdam last week.

We're seeing a financial services customer that's, it's using a lot of robotics to test payment devices. It sounds like. It's just incredibly efficient.

They've got fabulous robots just sitting there trying to, trying to break payment devices instead of a human having to do it. Yeah. I've got an old boss now who's running a swarm warfare company, and they're making swarm AI driven drones to a company humans on missions.

It's fascinating. The, the, the, the breadth and diversity of, it's crazy. The, the applications of you wanna, you wanna go check out something, go look up a company figure, I don't know if you're familiar with these guys.

F-I-G-U-R-E? No. Go on YouTube and look at their, they, their newest model is called Figure three.

So this is the company that BMW uses to build BMWs. Okay. And, uh, they're retiring the robot that MW is using.

That's the figure two. Go look up, figure three, figure three washes your clothes, folds, your t-shirts, plays, fetch with your dog. It's, it's, it's both exhilarating and frightening, right?

Is the best way I could tell you because I love it. They have them like delivering UPS packages. They have another one at the hotel desk checking you in, giving you your keys and telling you where to go.

The, the hands on it and the movement of it is human-Like, it's, It's crazy. It's fascinating. I, I, um, I wake up every day excited about the potential.

I, I'm, I'm a pilot. It's my, my, my other passion is flying. And, um, Look what it's doing there.

I was at an air show where they had full ev to, you know, electric personal vehicles. Um, yeah. And interestingly, it's, they're basically run by iPads.

It's, it's Uber. Oh, you know, you know, in the air, you sit in the thing, you press where you want to go and it delivers you to an alport somewhere, somewhere close. But the interesting thing is the, the micro meshing of these things.

So you can have hundreds of them in the same airspace at the same time. Auto de conflicting Over a safe, as long as there's not a person there because a person involved in the loop screws the whole thing up. 'cause we don't, we don't always act as logically, interestingly as the machines You say there.

So at the moment, there is a human in there ready to pull the handle in case it goes wrong. Oh. In case they've gotta pull the parachute handle.

But yeah, like there's so much innovation happening at a pace that Good time to be alive. Right? It Is.

And isn't it exciting to be here right now? I mean, it, you know, we've, we've both lived a bit and we've seen these things before, but hopefully, But not at this scale, Dean. We, we have lived a bit, we've seen the advent of the internet.

You know, we've seen the cell phone. We, we've seen, you know, landing men on the moon, though we did it once and we haven't done it, you know, a couple times and we haven't done it since. Um, but this the, the promise of how this affects not just you and I.

Right? You're, you've had a good career. I've had a good career, but I'm, but just like lifting up humanity, right?

E Elon Musk last week said, you know, with human, with robots andis, you might eliminate poverty. You might eliminate money too. But you know, the whole human condi, I mean, this is at a scale I don't think we've seen before, is the potential if we don't kill ourselves first.

But that's a whole nother story. I got into a very deep conversation on Friday night about AI ethics with a medical friend and, uh, Uhhuh, we were talking about healthcare in North America and how AI can assist. It can prolong life, it can provide medication, but it could also at some point decide that, uh, you know, certain people aren't worth saving, certain demographics aren't worth saving, or certain age groups aren't worth saving.

So where does the human ethics come together with AI at that point? Well, that, and that's the flip side. What if they decide humanity's not worth saving?

Right. At some point in the future, it's crazy. But hey, right now we're just worried about crowdsourcing some testing and getting that done done right.

Did we go Piece a little bit there? Sorry. Yeah, we, we got a little off there, but it's all right.

Hey Dean, a pleasure having you on. We didn't mention Tess Leo's website though. Can you give us the website?

Yeah. com. Um, love to, you know, we've got a bunch of case studies and stuff, and we're in a period of, I think, excitement at Telio because we've got so much stuff that we wanna educate people on.

com and I'll be very happy to connect with the right people in the right countries. We've got people all around the world, uh, customers in 150 different countries. So it'd be great to connect and, uh, yeah, really enjoyed meeting you, Alan.

It was Nice meeting you as well. All right, de good luck. com.

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