Techstrong TV – February 24, 2025

Has Microsoft discovered a new state of matter? It's quantum to me. You're watching Text on Gang.

Hey, everyone, happy Monday to you. It's Alan Shimel coming at you with a, a start of a great week of Textron Gang, and he can't get any greater than the lineup we've got for today. We're very excited.

We're gonna be discussing some really meaty or maybe media not meaty at the same time, uh, type of topics. Let me introduce you to our gang members who are gonna do the discussing today. First of all, joining us from out at Sea, though I think he's actually anchored somewhere in the Keys right now.

He is our resident security expert. Hockey. Well, he is not really a hockey fan.

He's married to a hockey fan. Uh, one and only Chris Glass. Hey, Chris.

Good to see you. Good to see Alan, everybody. Yeah.

So I'm for the, uh, where's Waldo exercise of the day. If you, uh, look on Google Maps for half Moon key near Key West, you'll find a little channel in the northwest corner of it, and that's what you see out the back window. Very cool.

Very cool. All right. Joining us from, it looks like he's home, I guess, in Auburn, hoping the, uh, NCA basketball.

I I just got my tickets last night, man. Very cool. Well, let's you, you, you haven't been exactly a good look.

No, no, I agree. But that I could steal one second. That was my son's argument of not getting the tickets is that what Make Lose We're kind like in the Bronx is all.

It doesn't really work that way, but he is our AI cloud DevOps, just all around Guy. God, Willis. Hey, John, great to have you on.

All right. And then joining us, I would say she's home in New Mexico as well. She's the c I'm now Yep.

For a short time. But she's the CEO of Deploy hub, open source aficionado. Uh, she's Tracy Reagan.

Hey, Tracy, thanks for coming on. It's good to see you. Hey, Alan, just great, great to be here.

As always. I love this particular team, so this will be a fun day. Good.

I hope so. I think it will be. And then joining us from up in Harrison, New York where it, it's cold.

Uh, he's our Chief Content Officer from the Bronx, Mike Bazar. Hey, Mike. I'm well.

How are you, sir? You're you're good. I'm still where it is called.

You were actually by me, so there you go. Yeah. But yeah.

Well, but you know what? It's home and it's good to be home. Uh, all right.

So guys, let's jump right into it. You know, Microsoft made some big news when I first read it. I was like, oh my God, they, they invented a new state of matter.

It's not a liquid, it's not a solid, it's not a guess. Is it, you know, faster than a speeding bullet? Well, you know, is who knows?

And, but it's a, and and, and they're making their own chip with it to, you know, have potentially million cubic kind of quantum computing. I don't know. Is this tabletop fusion?

I, I am not quite sure, but Mike, why don't you kick it? Well, they're calling these things topo conductors, and this first one is eight qubits, but they think they'll be able to get up to millions of qubits eventually. It's not clear how they're gonna manufacture these things at scale yet.

But, um, John, I know you've been following this, and I think they still haven't quite put this in. They're promising they describe this in an upcoming issue of nature, I think, in this. So there's a lot of people who are skeptical going, well, is this real or not real?

But John, you've been following quantum computing. What's your take on all this? Yeah, You know, I think I, I like to say I am, you consider me, uh, like a sports journalist on this subject, right?

I don't actually play the field, but I do have opinions, and I do keep up on it as, as much as sort of any other interesting subject. And I, I'll go back to a little bit on when my oldest son was going into university, um, about a year before. This is about probably seven years ago.

Um, I, I, there's some think tanks I've been involved with was there are true experts on quantum computing. And, and every year I would go, I would, uh, the first year it was like, it was about a year when my son was a senior. I was like, is this an area that he should, um, get into?

And almost every, all the experts said, no. They said, this is, you know, 15 years, this is seven years ago. They were saying 15, 20 years out, right?

And, and so, but I've kept my sort of eye on this thing. And, and being in a university town, periodically they have, uh, uh, uh, experts come in. I wind up catching the thing.

So I've been follow. What was interesting is, you know, what, last year Google sort of announced their breakthrough quantum moment, right? And, and, and how they were gonna sort of change the game.

And, and it got ridiculous amount of press, right? And it was over hyped because, you know, the net net, even today, most experts would tell you that, you know, I think when we, when we talk about what a fully fault tolerant universal quantum comput, that means the thing actually works. You can actually do real work on it without just losing the states and these, what they call qubits.

And so most people would say, you know, aggressive people, and even in the Microsoft announcement, they would say 2030 or later, uh, most would say 10 to 20 before we have a sort of a universal quantum machine that actually can do business work, right? Um, and then the interesting thing becomes, I mean, the, the, you know, the, that, that idea of this, uh, what they call topological qubits or these, uh, you know, material science work, that's basically gonna give you more fault tolerant qubit states, right? The problem with these states is they, they can do a massive amount of potential, uh, compute crunching, but today they're the, the ability to get the proper states if you turn thing off, you know, recover.

There's just so many operational issues with these things. Here's the net net, right? Google talked about this announcement last year.

Everybody went nuts. About a week later, people realized we're still 10 years out. Um, if you compare sort of Google's announcement and Microsoft's announcement, Microsoft is really more theoretical.

And even Google with their announcements last year on, on their quantum computing breakthroughs, we're still 10 years out. And they have examples. The, the report here is really just all theoretical.

So the net net is, this is all good. Um, because the, the, the net net is now the, um, private sector is actually investing in taking this serious where most of the sort of quantum comput, serious quantum computer, academia or CERN areas like that. And then one last thing, unless anybody wants to go any deeper, which I don't really care to, uh, but is that I, IBM's been doing this for 40 years, and they get no press, no big announcement.

And in, in the last 10 years, they've been incredibly serious. In fact, if you listen to, as I do, some of these professors that are actually talking about real projects that are happening in research, they'll always point to the IBMQ experience and that stuff. So it's just ironic that, you know, like we today, you know, now we get this major, Microsoft's gonna change everything.

It's, it is sort of a turf war of something that's 10 years out. And, and, you know, and again, I think it's really interesting, and IBM's been slow and steady wings the race on this topic for 40 years, and certainly 10 years in modern quantum computing to sort of qubit architectures. Yeah, that's all I got to say about that.

Tracy, I'm not at your take on this, because when I look at this, I'm like, okay, well, that seems interesting, but where does the software for this thing come from? And what am I actually going to maybe program against? Well, the first thing I thought when I saw it was like, oh, no, it's closer than we thought.

We better figure out how to do better algorithms because encryption, because the first thing it will be used for, for it will be for breaking encryption. No doubt. That's where my head went.

But I also thought about a conversation that Alan and I had maybe in the fall that we brought up Quantum. And Alan was like, ah, but it's, it's 10, 15 years out. The thing about it is, you know, time flies when you're having fun.

And maybe we're 10 or 15 years out, and maybe, um, what, uh, Microsoft is introducing is somewhat of a game changer so that we can pursue it in a more aggressive way, because it is, we're fault tolerant. I'm excited about it. Let's hope it is real.

Uh, I know that there's debate if it's a, if, if it's, you know, if it's hype for their 50th anniversary or 50th birthday, or if it's something that they've really delivered. I'm hoping it's the later, because it's time that we stop talking about ai. I wanna talk about something else.

Let's talk about quantum. It's a much more interesting topic, and I wanna learn more about qubits and what they're doing with this topological qubit. Just to point out, one last thing on there is, it, it is, it is not a game changer at this point, right?

It's not, it hasn't even been peer reviewed. The paper hasn't been peer reviewed. So, um, it's hype, it's promising, it's interesting.

It's great that the private sector is investing money in this space more aggressively, you know, meaning I, IBM's been doing forever, but, and now you've got like, you know, Google and Microsoft, but, but at the end of the day, um, it doesn't, it won't deserve the hype that it's gonna get. But if we have hype then and we have more investment, won't we get there faster, right? So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.

I think the Chinese are gonna beat us anyway, so I don't know. That Matters. Fair point.

I think you're probably right. True Patriot, Especially when they call, when you talk about encryption, right? So, yeah.

Yes. So, so here, here's the thing. I I have a couple of thoughts on this.

Number one is, I think Mike Ard and I had a conversation when we were in person this week. This ain't the first time Microsoft's made such an announcement, right? Mi Microsoft claimed this, not Topographic Oceans, that's a yes album, but, uh, what, what do they call the material top, top of something they call Topological majority Topuc.

Yeah, but topological qubits. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like top of the morning, but top O conductor. Yep. Well, they, they claim to kind of event this state of matter a few years ago, only to subsequently kinda withdraw the claim.

Who knows? You know, I mean, I'm not saying they're lying or they're trying to grab some publicity, but who knows? Both things can be true though, right?

Like, they're providing research to Tracy's point, and that's a good thing. They're getting some, you know, good mojo out of what they are and who they are. Well, that's the whole purpose of quantum, right?

Two things can be true of us, right? Yeah. That was good.

Mike, Jay, I, I, I feel very fusion energy about this, right? You know, will we get there? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, almost certainly, you know, on both, right? You know, exactly when, yeah. I don't know.

Right? And it's, it is one of those things where the probabilities aren't much stronger three years from now than 30 years from now, right? And as, as we're talking about here, there's lots of signs that three years from now or 13 years from now, is probably closer than 30 or 33.

But for those of us who've been watching this infusion energy for a long time, okay, I'll believe it when I, You know what? Quite frankly, there were those people who were watching AI for a really long time and kept saying, it'll be there, it'll get there one day. It'll get there.

And then all of a sudden that day comes, and no matter how long thing it's gonna get there, it kind of surprises you, oh, I Have a book coming out that next month. You Write a book. Exactly.

How was your segue? That was my, that was my, uh, that was my softball to you. But, you know, the other thing is, quite frankly, and maybe it's because I know so many people who are in the security world, the only thing I hear about what, what, what, what's quantum computing guy?

Is it, how's it gonna change the game? Oh, it's gonna break encrypt. It's gonna encryption, Break encryption immediately.

But you know what, yes, it may break encryption, though. We now supposedly have quantum proof algorithms we're going to use, but there's so much more that quantum computing might be able in, in terms of like, you know, climate calculations, nuclear reactions, protein folding, you know, real earth shattering kind of uses that this could shepherd a new era in I, If you don't scare easy, um, I, I wouldn't read this book if you, if you're a paranoid person, but it's, uh, by one of the ex, it's called the Coming Wave by, um, I think it's m I'm trying to molt just the coming wave. Uh, I won't pronounce his last name.

Um, he, he does, he does this, he breaks out the, like, what, you know, what AI and quantum can do. And it, it's, and he, he, he's a, he is a, he was a ex bigshot at, at Google, and, and it's a scary book. I mean, it is a really scary book about like synthetic biology and, and like, yes, his, his main theme of that book, and I, I, I regret reading it, it was so scary.

But, um, his main theme is when you start moving AI and, and, and real quantum together, the, the positive and the negative effects are going to be, uh, eerie. Well, on a positive note, we have a really cool new term exotic quasi particle. I've on a t-shirt that just says exotic quasi particles.

So yes, that's a great idea. I might do that. I'll send you one if I do It.

Okay. I think, I think Chris, Chris is a Walking example of an exotic quasi particle. Aw, I'm, well, not to be too optimistic about it, but you know, there was that, uh, uh, men in black closing line, you know, there's always a, a vo on death flee coming to destroy the world, right?

We are living today and have all our lives with all these huge potential negative consequences. We agonize over 'em a lot. And to date, you know, we have largely avoided them.

You know, what we're talking about here contains a whole bunch of new ones, fantastic opportunities folding Oh my God. But huge risks. Oh yeah.

So Chris, to that point, Chris, to that point, the security world talks about Q Day, right? It's some unknown day when these quantum machines are available and start destroying all these encryption algorithms. Is that a real fear or is that something that you know, is out of the movie?

Well, you, the way you rate a bank fault or a safe is by time, right? You know, how long will it take, you know, the expected adversary to open, not if when, but just when. So anything you're encrypting ever or that has ever been encrypted will at some point be revealed.

So when you're looking at securing data, you're saying, how long do I need this too? So, yeah. As, uh, as computing power cranks up, you know, and I did, you know, again, it's not just quantum, but quantum is one of those obvious things when you just exponentially go up a couple of numbers.

Yeah. Your old stuff is gonna get read. So there you go.

All right. Start the meeting those piles now. Yeah.

Or start, well, in risk management, you know, you have to assume if this is compromised, then what? So kind of building that into your security thoughts, you know, actually deal with the consequences, you know, put all your controls in place, have an idea what to do if it's revealed, or if that's what we're talking about here, you know, your encryption being broken, somebody reads data, you know, want them to have, what do you do next? Maybe it's gonna happen.

Well, you know, and I, one last thing, Chris, is a really good point, because I've always tried to explain that not being a total expert in security or in quantum, but I, the, the thing that scared me the most, which was it will get broken. And so anything that's been out there is compromise at some point. And then, so your point, I've never had that follow on answer, which is you really need to prepare for what to do when it does get caught, because it will get caught data that it's not like you can just re you know, encrypt the data.

That data is out there. It's, you know, like somebody has it, you know, like Hillary's emails, right? Like literally, once the data was out there, it's out there.

And, uh, well, it, Yeah. And, and I think it gets to, you know, it gets to the core philosophy about security. We accept all sorts of risks all the time.

Our companies and ourselves will not last forever, right? You know, let's not over secure things. Let's secure the things that we need to the level that need to be secured and the rest of it.

And quite often when you think about what happens if this thing happens, you realize it's not that bad and is way more expensive and impeding to stop it. So, and maybe it doesn't happen, move on. You know, my advice is don't let it take up space in your head.

I, I read that from some crazy guy on Facebook. You have enough to do already Uhhuh you. All right, let's take a break here on Textron Gang.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, we're back in. Well, we did quantum, so we might as well move on to AI because, well, you know, that's just the topic of the day.

And it's interesting because Amazon is talking about a next generation Alexa device, which will be a lot more interactive thanks to ai. It's supposed to be out in the next couple of months or so. And our full disclosure, we used to have Alexa in our house, and, um, I just kind of got bored with it, and so did my wife and just turned it off and forgot about it, and it just kind of went away.

And I, frankly not missing it. But Tracy, I don't know if you guys have Alexa, if you're still engaged with it, but do we need a more interactive flavor of Alexa to make it interesting again? Well, I think in order for Alexa to remain relevant, we have to have a more engaging Alexa.

That's for, that's an absolute truth. Um, we do use Alexa, but you know, Alexa, tell me what the weather's gonna be in Las Vegas. Alexa, you know, play Radio Paradise, mellow mix on stereo.

There are some things that I just tell her over and over and over, but I haven't, I haven't ventured beyond that. And at this point, you know, it's been a year and a half, I believe since we've had an upgrade. I think we've all established a relationship with Alexa that may or may not change.

I would hope that we could have a more engaging experience with Alexa considering how far we've gone in ai. And I keep complaining about AI is great, but it's great for businesses. It's not so great for consumers.

So can we now start delivering AI that has benefit to every person's home? You know, it would be great to be able to say, if you're a parent and you've got a, uh, you know, you'd like to know how well your kid's doing in school. Alexa, can you give me the last grades?

My child just got his last test. Wouldn't that be an interesting experience? But I think what, what we could have the potential of is to reimagine how we interact, even with chat GPT.

So if we could just have a conversation instead of typing on our keyboard while we're sitting there cooking dinner, I think that that changes the world for consumers. So yes, let's, let's keep moving this product forward, and let's get new habits, because it can do more than tell me what the weather is or turn on the stereo. So I have some thoughts here.

So, first of all, it can give you your child's grades, depending how old they are. 'cause it's a privacy requirement. But with that being said, I, I, I very much have a love-hate relationship with Alexa, right?

I'll, I have Alexis throughout my house, and I'll say something like, Alexa playing music, you know, while I'm in the shower and getting washed up. And it'll stop playing music. Or it'll say, oh, music is playing on another device.

Would you like to play it here? And I say, yes, play it here. Music's playing on another device.

Would you like the Amazon Family music plan? So you can play on more than one device? No, Alexa, play it here.

Well, music playing on another device, well switch to this device. If you don't give it its magic words. It's like, I need a magic key.

And I forget the magic keys all the time, but I don't wanna just bang on Alexa. You know, I have the same problem with Siri. I had the same problem with Google Home.

All of these things, you know, these, these agents that were supposed to miraculously help us so much. I have been somewhat disappointed. The tasks we use, I can't get my Alexa to play my Sonos, even though there's an integration.

They, they've been somewhat disappointed in limiting. I do. Um, let me, let me hit this one last point, judge.

I do think that AI can make them better. I I absolutely do. But chay, the, the problem you outlined to me is not an AI or intelligent agent problem.

The problem is that we're still stuck in the 1970s park, spark, whatever out in Palo Alto lab of how we interface with our computer technology, which is still primarily mouse, windows and keyboards. What happened to Scotty, you know, in the Star Trek with the whales where he says, hello computer. That's my my point.

So the, the main main point is how did Apple and Amazon drop the ball here? Because I don't know if I've been using, I don't use it for home use, but like, I drive to Atlanta to the airport from Albert, and it's a 90 minute drive, and I just have deep conversations with chat GPT and, and like, I mean, I'm literally like research level Fulfilling then Chuck. Yeah.

Off the chart, fulfilling. Yes. Um, again, do you have to know how to talk to it?

It's not the end all, be all. It doesn't, is it gonna drive my car? Yeah, I'm married 35 years.

I'm just figuring that out with po. But I mean, like, I tell you what I'm not using in my, sort of the things that really excite me other than like, Alexa home, like, what time is it? You know, what's the weather?

What in, uh, Siri, gimme directions, you know? Um, or, you know, but, but what I'm really doing is I'm spending a lot more time thinking about research or things I'm writing or the books I'm working on. I'm not having those conversations with Siri, right?

And, and at the core of all this too is, and is a very simplistic high level, is those products, Siri and, and Alexa got stuck on NLP and, and, and sort of open AI and this sort new LLM transformer. They, they adhere to a transformer model and the transformer attentions all you need changed everything. And now go back to how did they miss this?

Google wrote this paper. They, you know, and, and like, they missed the AI assistant window by moonshots, right? So that's the thing that just like, it perplexes me is how they, they had all the ingredients, particularly Google, um, and, and literally are just like, it's comical, you know, having a conversation.

You Know, I have some thoughts on that, why they missed it. I think that if I was Google, I would be looking at, um, Alexa and trying to figure out how to build ads into it. And I don't think it works that well.

I would be really annoyed if I was having a research conversation with chat GPT by the way, I call my best friend now because I'm using it so often to do research. But I never thought once to go and ask Alexa, Hey Alexa, I need to buy a new car. What's the best hybrid SUV on the market?

Never once did I think to do that. And I don't believe that. And instead, I went to Google and looked at it, and I got a ton of ads.

So I, I believe that Google doesn't wanna disrupt their, their revenue model, and I could be completely off. But, uh, you know, capitalism likes to capitalize on, uh, you know, reinvest things that make a profit, and does Alexa really make a profit? Does this kind of technology make a profit for them?

If we're taking out the ads, which I would love that idea, and I think that's gonna happen over time, that That goes back to, and I definitely wanna hear towards Chris, but that goes back to like the, uh, summits next start with why, right? It's like missing, you know, if you've read that book about how, you know, the, the, the transformations, how these companies just completely missed always. And I, I think in some ways, you're right, it is about their commercial vehicle, but then the driving mindset of innovation there wasn't focused on, oh, AI assistance are probably gonna be the next big thing.

So anyway, I, I just, you know, I, I agree with that absolutely. Everything you say, I, I'm gonna take the, uh, this approach. So, so bear, bear me out.

I love Alexa, right? It is, as you guys know, I have multiple built in these boats. I use 'em in control, and I've had 'em in homes from day one.

I've been playing with 'em. And you're absolutely right. You know, number one, you know, they totally suck.

They're not very good. They don't not good at the job. And Tracy, totally right?

Yeah. This is a money losing thing, you know, I don't know if, you know, I supposing Jeff Bees was just somebody in Amazon just decided to keep it going. For the heck, I'm always concerned they're gonna cancel it.

'cause it's so useless. However, right? It's like the first generation of Hi-Fi stereos, right?

Honestly, to have a voice activated thing, you know, for the casual stuff to set the lighting in my room, 'cause it's evening and I just wanted to change the colors or, but on these boats, both of the pros and cons, it is such a low, but yet barely functional maturity level that if I enunciate clearly, it's very handy to control lights and pumps and, you know, things that I use, you know, navigating the boats when time is really precious, right? I just, or yeah, I just don't want to get up and hit the damn switch, or I just, you want to, uh, or, you know, things are going on in real time. So there's these wonderful advantages that you can see in this terrible package that, you know, and as I was mentioned a number of times compared to the chat GPT and what we see out there, it's just this stunningly stupid product that you would literally have to speak very clearly at, or it'll, you know, do the wrong thing and blow up.

But the fact that it exists and it actually manages to deliver some value at such a primitive level tells me that it, we have to be close. And I think the speaking to the world, you know, the, if not Star Trek, maybe at least, uh, the expanse level, you know, is not that far away. The, the next five and 10 years, the commercial drivers will wind up to, so the Amazon and the other providers will give us things.

We can, you know, it's like you're saying, John, they're there right now, if you know about it. So in 3, 5, 7 years, it's gotta work its way into all this stuff. I think this thing is gonna be super annoying and it's gonna be in your face all the time going, can I help you with this?

Can I do this? Can I, you know, I see that you're doing this. Uh, if you want me to do this, that, and the other and all these other things is gonna be helpful.

And this will be the last thing I say on this whole thing, folks. And I'm gonna help you right now. 'cause you all have Alexas that are probably lighting up like crazy as you listen to this.

So Alexa, off You're way down this one. All right, let's take a break. We're gonna come back for our last, uh, block for, for this beautiful Monday.

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Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna have a little chat about cybersecurity and how the cyber attacks are changing. Darktrace has a report out and there's an article on Security Boulevard that you can check out about this that sends it well over half now, of these cyber attacks can be traced back to the so-called cyber criminal as a service platforms. And these are basically automated systems that have been set up to help just about anybody launch a cyber attack these days.

Chris, it, I think people still have it in their heads that cyber criminals are dudes in hoodies and basements and kinda leaning over keyboards, but it feels like the whole thing has got automated to the point now, like I look at these things and I go, my God, these people are using DevOps to attack us. Mm-hmm. That's funny.

There's nothing new in the world, basically, right? You know, I, I had the names just before this segment, I'm blanking on it right now, with the slick Willie. There was that, uh, uh, famous, uh, thief, mid nine, uh, 1950s kind of thing, who was asked by the FBI, why do you always rob banks?

And his answer was, 'cause that's where the money is, right? And organized crime organizes around crime, you know what the crime is doesn't really matter, right? You reach a level of re repeatability, you know, like any sort of conflict, right?

You're having a conflict with the policy structure with the law, and you find gaps, and you can exploit them individually, randomly, like you say, in a hoodie in early computer days, but reaches the point where it's not about the computers anymore, it's about the, the money. And there are always organized crime organizations, you know, literally the, the mafia, you know, and versions of that and nation state operations and rogue nation state operations and so forth that, that build up around them. So we're at this stage, which anybody involved in the early days of the internet, again, forecast because at some point, this security stuff gets serious.

You know, and pretty well, all of us, you know, on this call probably remember those days about 20, 30 years ago, when you're saying to whomever, you know, DOD military people or whatnot, at some point you're gonna be able to turn off the grid remotely. You know, site seems like sci-fi, that's the world ridden right now. So we're in the world where you can make a lot of money with cyber crime.

So all the traditional organized crime organizations are doing it. North Korea, for example. So it's mobsters who code is what you're saying.

Well, They're even code, right? They just hire coders. Yeah.

Well, uh, so that at the nation state level, that's very true. And, and it is what it is. But I will also say that not all cybercrime is nation state related.

There are, there are huge criminal enterprises and not only enterprises. What does this report really focuses in on is that there's a criminal, we, we call it the dark web or what have you, an ecosystem. So what happens is, you know, you, you've got the developer class who come up with their, their rat, right?

And, and then they make that particular cybercrime as a service available to the ecosystem at the high end of the ecosystem might be the nation state people, or the, you know, the big fish, or we're going after big bucks and particular things. But when they're done with it, you know, then the hyenas, the jackals and the vultures come in, who, and they all take their slice out of these, of the carcass of the cyber crime victim, right? Some are looking for passwords, others are looking for HIPAA data, others are looking for financial information.

So one, you know, one particular, uh, SaaS, uh, crime is a, uh, what do they call it here? Cyber crime is a service, kind of application services, five or six different levels of this criminal, you know, dark web ecosystem. Who then, and they all resell it too, right?

I, I got, you know, I, I took the, this, I skimmed the cream off the crop, but if anyone's interested in, you know, four field data on 150,000 people, you could buy this file and have at it, right? And that data may be your address, phone number and a password or something. Um, so this is, you know, but this is not new either.

This has been going on a long time. The good news is, John, you made reference to Josh and cisa, you know what? Both at the government level, you know, we we're in the us so we focus on the us but not only the US Europe, rest of the world at the government level, as well as at the, the good guys, the white hat level.

We've been fighting this skirt for years. The problem is, if it's not gonna be a priority going forward, and if you look at recent actions about how they're just exposing confidential data as part of this doeg, I I question whether What CSA is gonna look like. Well, here's why I'm scared to death, right?

Um, well, I mean, it's three, there's three topics I think a lot about, again, not being a cyber person, but thinking a lot about what AI though. I mean, the first is everything old is new. Again, that means all these, um, attacks, vectors and things that just are been common that people like Chris and Tracy are experts on, um, now create a whole nother level with ai.

Because most of the AI infrastructure is just infrastructure. So they're building these things, and they're not hardening them. They're being built.

We've, I've had this conversation many times on this show, right? About how new infrastructure's being built by, uh, chief AI officers. That's one level of we I've discussed that.

The, the second is the new infrastructure bugs. And I, I feel that not enough ai, uh, security experts are staying up to speed on what is happening with Jailbreaks and all that. But the thing that keeps me up at night is a, about a year ago I had a conversation with Josh Corman about cyber infrastructure.

And he, you know, he will tell you stories about how easy it's to take out a city's water supply and how it may take three to four weeks to fix that water supply, and how many people will die when that happens, and how, and, and if. And so I started following some, a bunch of newsletters on this. Um, and like, if you've heard of Salt, typhoon and Vault Typhoon, right?

These are real scary things. And here's the nexus of why I'm having trouble sleeping, and I want to hear Chris and Tracy's theory ideas on this is also in these same sources that I've been following in the last three or four weeks. I'm watching government agencies tell me how CSA and, and NIST and the people who are really been the, the stuff that was going on in csa.

Now, Josh worked there, they, I, I think they've been tracking things like SA Typhoon, and these real, um, nation state cyber groups that are literally looking to disrupt our telcos, our water supply, our electricity grids, and the people that were doing the most serious work, according to what I've led. And, and also what Josh has confirmed to me are all getting axed right now. And so probably at the height, and then you take that deep seek moment three weeks ago, and you throw that all together, and we are letting our guard down at 11, I feel, and I'm scared that we're letting our guard down at the worst possible time to let our guard down.

I completely agree with that. I do. We are so letting our guard down.

Um, I mean, maybe we need to remind, um, our government why we need to do this. And you know, that article pointed out that one of the areas of, of, of their favorite attack are edge devices. Okay?

Let's think about our military. Our military in the field, boots on the ground. They all, everything is based on an edge device.

Everything that we do, walkie talk, everything is an edge device in the field. They don't have a local, you know, cloud that they're, they're working from. So, I, I really do have a belief that we, we believe that we, a community, believe that we have solved most of the, the problems with security.

We have SaaS testing, we have das testing, we have PIN testing, but we don't do anything on edge devices to be quite honest. We might do SaaS before we deliver or anything embedded, but once it's out there and vulnerability hits, it's hard to up update those devices. So maybe we can ask our, our, our new government that, you know, they created Space Force, maybe it's time to create cyberforce that's part of the DOD that can focus on this, because that's where we are most exposed when it comes to our military.

We're talking satellites. We have satellites now that are, uh, that are software driven satellites that they could take over those and make 'em crash into each other and destroy our, our entire GPS system. But I don't know if the, uh, I, I, you know, I know that there are really good people in the DOD that are thinking about this, but I do believe that NIST and CISA were the, were the, were was who was really focused on it.

And maybe we just have to shift where the focus is and make it a, a military issue as opposed to a general cybersecurity issue for enterprises as well as government. So we have to set their hair on fire somehow in order to make this happen. And there on jailbreaks, okay?

I've never thought about playing on any of these tools that I hear, but one came up last night that we, uh, we discovered Steve Taylor, it, I don't know how he found it, but he said, Hey, there's a new Jo Jailbreak called Indiana Jones, and it will allow you to prompt, you know, LLM, take a chat, GPT, and it will help you prompt it so you can find all the back doors. Now, I wanted to go find it and start playing on it immediately. And that's terrible.

That's a terrible thought that, you know, somebody like myself and security wants to say, oh, I wanna learn to do that. Let's see if we could get into a back door. So these, these, you know, these cyber, uh, as a service, uh, uh, tools are a real threat, and they're going to cause young people to wanna play on 'em.

And it's just gonna create a whole new brand of cyber criminals that we don't even know we we're doing it because it looked like a fun tool to play on, right? Indiana Jones, what's, what? Better name for it.

So, so curiosity still kills that cat, right? Is that what you're, So, so, you know, let me first endorse the cyberforce. I think that's actually literally correct.

I think the DOD we, you know, Cyberforce military, uh, focus and and structuring process would be a great idea. And look, this is a high consequence, high risk, high likelihood time. You know, there's a lot of moving pieces as you know, as has been said already in the last couple of minutes.

Um, I don't think there's a lot of fans of the policies being enacted on our behalf for the nation at the moment. You know, there's a lot of, you know, risky moves at the very least, if not stupid moves, um, you know, increasing all the risk. Um, but as we're talking about in the green room, right?

You know, you know, so Tracy and, and John, you know, we're all boaters, you know, and so are you, Alan, right? And you're out on the water with your boat, and the thing happens, motor blows up, you know, you know, we have pon, we all have pontoon boats, so, so you lose a pontoon, and that's nothing good about that. However, you're out on the water.

What are you gonna do? And having, you know, both lived through the time I have and worked in this, in this, uh, industry to, to the time I have, I've been through a lot of similar eras, right? You know, from the Cold War now, right?

You know, this is, like I say, every individual, you know, there, history does not repeat. It rhymes. This situation rhymes with other stupid times we've been in.

There's a lot of stupid stuff going on that has huge risk. However, right? You know, there will, there will be a morning after, you know, something will be here 30 years from now and 50 years from now, and a lot of these issues will have been solved by definition, because they can't continue to go at this rate.

We cannot continue to function with a John Deere point, right? I've watched from zero the development of what we see called DHS and cisa, and, and all these, you know, federal government functions. It didn't use to exist.

The risks were basically the same. You know, the, the ability to exploit those risks wasn't so high. Um, and now they're kind of going away, but not entirely.

And I, you know, Josh has a meeting experience, you know, huge respect. You know, I'm, you know, I'm the more optimistic of the two of us. You know, I think things will continue to happen inside the beltway that aren't completely stupid, and there's certain momentum going forward.

I, I wanna keep, if you finish, I wanna point out that he is more aligned with what you're saying and actually made me feel better. In fact, one response, very similar to the response, just, just not play him as he's, he's really, he's actually, I'm more pessimistic than he is, and he sounded more like you. But anyway, well know, 20 19, 20 20 when I first, you know, took a really hard look at the presidential orders about supply chain across the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and now Trump administrations, they all, with very different ideologies and approaches.

They actually form a, a very coherent line because the, you know, different reasons for doing, doing similar things. But when you turn to people who do this stuff for a living and say, what can we do in supply chain for whether to secure it or punish some other country? Here are your options, right?

And that institutional memory and momentum, you know, moves forward even in times of chaos. Alright? Keeping With that boning metaphor, I am reminded, however, and maybe I'm showing my age here, of the Poseidon Adventure, and the theme song for the Poseidon Adventure was a song called The Morning After The Ship Sink.

Yes, that also happens, yes. And sometimes the ship does sink. And, and as a result, we learned to build better ships or iceberg detection.

But in any event, guys, we're about outta time. What a great way to kick off our week here on Text Drunk Gang. We've got a full day of text Drunk TV following this, so don't go anywhere if you're watching this as part of the text on TV stream.

Um, we're gonna be doing some interesting things with Textron Gang coming up, and, uh, we'll get back to that. But until then, John, Chris, Tracy, Mike, thanks for joining in. Thank you for watching.

Stay tuned for more. You've just watched Textron Gang. We're outta here On, Hey, everyone, welcome to our Predict 2025 virtual event.

If you've watched any of this, any of the sessions so far, you know, we've got an amazing lineup of some very, very smart people who are giving us their best guesses, their best feelings about what are the big stories in 2025, what will the big stories be in areas like DevOps and cyber and Cloud Native and AI and ITSM, um, technology in general, and it, so speaking of smart people, let me introduce you to one of my RUM group partners. Uh, he's also well known as the founder, CEO of Tech Field Day, which is another business unit within rum, and we work pretty closely together. I've struck up a great relationship with Steven in a relatively short time.

I wanna introduce you to Stephen Foskett, CEO, founder of Tech Field Day, part of UR Group. Stephen, welcome to Predict 2025. It's great to have you here.

Well, it's great to be part of Predict 2025. I, I hope I don't have egg on my face at the end of the year. Well, if you pay us enough, we don't replay this at the end of the year.

If you don't, we do. And then I hope your predictions were, were good. Um, but seriously, Stephen 2024 was a, in many ways, a watershed year, not just in technology, mind you, world event civilization, uh, technology obviously, but things like climate and, and all sustainability.

And there have been so many things on our wars and peace and so many things on the horizon, but it was certainly quite a year in technology. And if there was a technology of the year, it would obviously have to be ai. So it's easy to say 2024 was the year of ai, but as we sit here now, you know, on the cusp of 2025 already in the beginning of first weeks of 2025, is AI the 2025 story, and if so, what, what, what aspects of it do you think?

Yeah, I actually think that 2025 is gonna be the year of AI and not 2024. Um, even though AI was very much in the news and in the public consciousness in 2024, from an enterprise IT perspective, I think 2025 is the year that all this stuff gets real. I expect companies to be deploying custom models right and left, and not just chat bots that pop up annoyingly in the corner of the screen when you're trying to use their website, but actually useful AI applications.

I'm really excited about seeing what happens with ag agentic ai, um, basically AI agents that talk to each other and have, uh, private, uh, AI to AI conversations on your behalf. And I'm also really excited to see what's going to become of, uh, the transition from focusing on AI as the domain of a few large companies with incredible resources who are developing these foundational models to the, the world of, uh, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 2000, uh, de developing their own fine tuned models, uh, developing their own custom applications built off of AI and broadening beyond the chat and LLM space. Absolutely.

I, I think in many ways we may look back and say 2024 might have been agen, uh, not, not agent, excuse me, generative AI 2023 was too, for that matter, 2025 is where agentic AI really, you know, rubber meets the road. Um, Steven, you made a good point. Enterprises usually are slow, slow to change budgets, slow to adopt new things.

They may dabble, if you will, but to really jump in with both feet, it, it takes them longer, but, you know, once they jump in, they jump in and it, that, it's like the inertia of moving that big ship. When do you think, I mean, are we, are we looking at the end of 2025 for this, or do you think we'll start seeing things let's say by the spring? I think, I think it's gonna start happening pretty quickly.

Um, I'm seeing some really incredible products, uh, coming to market that are essentially AI platforms for the enterprise. And a lot of the companies that had been previously focused on, for example, process business process automation or on, uh, CRM are building ai, uh, platforms that, you know, if you squint a little bit, you could say this is an agent AI platform. Now, I'm not sure that, uh, tarter term specifically is going to take hold forever, but you know, if you, if you kind of step back and think it, AI agents that are deployed to perform business functions autonomously in the background, uh, those are coming from basically everybody in the space.

I mean, certainly the, the, the biggest one is Salesforce, and they have done incredible work to bring AI to their platform. But essentially every enterprise platform now is building out the, the capability for enterprises to deploy AI that actually does business things. And again, that, that's what I wanna get back to.

We're not just talking about LLMs that are generating text or, you know, apple image playground. We're talking about having a special purpose AI agent that does a thing on your behalf. And one of the ones I think that's gonna come first is normalizing data.

Essentially. I have a strange input of data sets. You know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a lawyer's office and I'm dealing with all this paperwork and forms and stuff, or we're in the medical space and we're dealing with all sorts of doctor notes and reports and so on.

And what we need is we need to normalize all that and structure it and build it a, a data system, a data solution out of that. All of that can make use of ai, uh, models that exist today. And I'm seeing more and more companies that are developing the models that are going to make that happen in the enterprise.

And many of these are basically ready to go and, and, and in, in fact, a lot of them are already getting deployed. So I think that we are gonna start seeing AI agents doing data processing on behalf of companies well, basically now. Excellent.

You know, one of the things that scares me though, Steve, is we hear so much about big tech, big tech, right? Are they a monopoly? And, you know, given the current or the incoming administration and and governments around the world, uh, what kind of appetite is there to keep this curb, to keep, keep, you know, a few companies from dominating the, the marketplace?

And, and I think this is true in ai, where you see, you know, the hyperscalers who have put their money where their mouth is, and they're investing billions of dollars in, into, you know, some of the leading AI companies. And is that really, is that raising such a barrier of entry that we're not gonna see sort of a Cambrian explosion, if you will, of AI companies and AI solutions because you're gonna need to be one of the, one of the big boys to play in this game? Well, I can see how it might seem that way, especially with the level of investment that's gone into companies like Open ai, uh, anthropic, um, a lot of these, uh, hyperscalers building their own models.

But I think that it's gonna be very different than that. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that ultimately companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna have to pivot their bo their model away from focusing on building ever bigger foundational models and toward building, uh, the capability of fine tuning those models to special applications. We've already seen Meta's investments in Lama, uh, kicking off really a Cambrian explosion of AI capabilities from companies that never would've invested the kind of money needed to train the foundational model.

But the fact that those models are available to them and open to them licensing wise, they're able to use those models to do things that they could not have done. That's gonna happen way beyond meta, way beyond llama. And again, I think that's gonna be a big trend in 2025.

We're gonna be talking about all the incredible models that we can download and use that we don't have to invest in at all. Uh, you know, I use the whisper model from open AI every single day on my desktop Mac. And, um, it is just an incredible capability for me to have more incredible is the fact that I paid this $0 to use that.

Essentially I have a capability that I never would've had. And that's, I think, what we're gonna see across the space. If you look at hugging face, if you look at the open models that people are able to download and put into process and use, it really shows that that core development of foundational models.

I don't wanna ascribe some sort of, um, uh, I don't know, generous generosity to these, uh, to these big companies because clearly they intend to some, to, to use their foundational models to somehow corner the market for ai. But at the same time, this whole, um, mindset of openness and open source, open weight, um, the, the, the way that the internet is now, much of this stuff is being given away for free in a way that is causing an explosion of availability, an explosion of interest and explosion of models. And I think that that really is going to lead to AI just infiltrating every portion of modern business in a way that doesn't actually put AI from open AI or Anthropic or Xai or one of these companies in the center of, of, of it.

And in fact, almost sidelines them because all the interesting stuff is happening on hugging spa, hugging face. Agreed. And then, you know, the old, you know, the old adage, nothing, nothing is free in life, right?

And, and they all come with a cost. Well, somebody had pay to develop those models. I'm glad they did.

Uh, I'm also glad that we don't need to pay billions of dollars back for it. Absolutely. But they will, they'll get their pound of flesh one way or the other, Steven, typical tech industry stuff before we even digest what's on our plate.

Right now, we're already looking at what's next. Right. And I've heard a lot recently over what they're calling physical ai, right?

Jensen Wong was out at CES, uh, last week and, you know, they, they brought out the robots, the march of the wooden soldiers, the robots came marching out, and some people are calling that now, not robotic ai, but physical AI and that of self-driving cars and vehicles and planes and drones and all of this stuff. Do you think that's a 2025 story, or we're just out ahead over our skis on that? I think that's more of a 20, 28, 20 30 type story.

Um, really That far out. Yeah. I, I think it's gonna take quite a bit of of development.

Because essentially, if you think about it this way, what was the, the capability that made LLMs work, essentially, it was that they were able to study the relationship between words to such an extent that maybe there's emergent behavior in terms of, uh, quote, understanding of, of concepts, of written concepts. But if you look at the generative video, uh, that everyone was going nuts about in 2024, it's terrible. Uh, there's no concept of real world physics, et cetera.

It looks beautiful, but the problem is, it, it, it lacks any kind of coherent, um, framework that that matches the real world. What, uh, Nvidia, what what Jensen was talking about on stage at CES? Well, it made a lot of sense that we need to build a, a model of the real world.

We need to build a digital twin of physics in order to have things like physical concepts, gravity, inertia, uh, permanence of, um, dimensions and, and, and things like that. All of those things need to be developed in, in a new way so that we can then develop systems that can simulate activities in that real world, and then we can apply them to the real world. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money.

It's a lot of investment. I, um, suspect that Nvidia is signaling that they stand ready to help fund the development of that and help support the development of that through their hardware and software efforts. But that's something I think that we're gonna see, uh, the next generation of, of AI giants working on, basically building a, uh, a virtual world that is comprehensible to a different kind of AI model, as you said, like a physical AI model, so that they can then do things, avoid doing things like the, um, the bicycle that morphs from, from front to back to back to front, or the, uh, you know, the, the, the people that, um, have grow magical extra arms or something while they're, while they're walking through space.

So that AI will kind of quote no, that that's not possible in the physical world. And only then will we be able to take AI and apply it to physical machines in the real world and have it successfully navigate those machines. And if this sounds like, uh, bad news for, um, autonomous driving and applications like that, I think it is, I think that it's gonna be a while before we are able to have AI acting in, in real space.

Absolutely. Steven, I want to turn around a little bit here, or not turn around, but pivot a little bit. Um, well turn around is sort of pivot, but we could talk about that in another show.

Uh, you know, AI was certainly a bright spot in the tech horizon for 2024, but a lot of our colleagues, people, you and I both know, good people were laid off in 2024. We saw companies being sold for way, way below, you know, market cap, uh, capitalizations of monies they had raised. We, you know, we, we start consolidation, you know, not, not the general oh, UBIA, you know, kinda liquidity event, but hey, we had to do something.

Um, when we look at the story of 2025, do we, do we get back to a more normal or is this the new normal? Are are happy days here again? What, what's your outlook on the tech industry for 2025, Stephen?

I, I think the tech industry has been dramatically disrupted. Um, the pandemic certainly had a huge, um, impact on the tech industry, mainly in terms of the sort of energy and vibrance of conventional, uh, data center IT companies. Uh, I think a lot of them really found themselves, uh, you know, parked on the side of the road while smaller, more nimble, cloud focused cloud first companies, remote first companies, uh, leaped ahead of them.

At the same time. We, we've talked about how AI has disrupted the, the market. Every company is turning toward ai.

It's, it's really funny for me to talk to companies that I've known for a decade in networking or storage or security and having them say, no, no, no, we're an AI company now we're a hundred percent in on ai. Some of them, um, have, and even, you know, renamed their products or, or completely changed their focus to be absolutely, we're an AI company. That's it, that's our bet, because that's where the money is.

Who can blame them? I do think that, uh, everything has changed and it's not going to get back to normal, especially for those companies that really were asleep at the wheel for the last couple of years. Um, if, if you were, uh, willing to go out there and invest and try to build, uh, sales and build market, uh, you could absolutely succeed as a conventional enterprise IT company.

But some of them absolutely didn't. I think some of them really, they had no product announcements. They had no, uh, marketing exercises.

They had no, uh, public presence in the last couple of years. Uh, those companies I don't think are ever gonna find their footing again because Amazon and Google and others are just waiting eagerly to eat their lunch. So we are in a really strange position now where companies have laid off people.

In fact, some companies have laid off some very good people, either because the company itself is suffering because it can't seem to find its footing in the market, or because there's been a big acquisition as of course, the case with, uh, VMware by Broadcom, or because they simply got left behind as, uh, all the attention and energy and investment dollars turned to ai. But I think that there's a bright spot, which is, uh, we are still seeing companies that having success, companies selling products into the market, uh, the ones who remained focused, the ones who, who saw a market for their products. Um, you know, for example, in the edge space, there's a lot of companies that are growing rapidly and, and selling a lot.

Um, there's even hardware companies. Uh, you know, one of the most exciting companies we saw this year, oxide computer, uh, a big old fashioned hardware company. I love it.

It's so much fun to see it. Why are they successful and others aren't? Well, for, for, for one, they're a startup.

And, uh, a few sales can make a big difference to a startup, but also because they are energetic and they're committed to the market and they see a need and they're trying to build a product that meets that need. You know, the old fashioned stuff that people used to do before they were just chasing, uh, VC dollars. So I think that there is the opportunity for startups, for established companies, even some of the biggest companies to be successful in 2025 and beyond.

But, uh, frankly, if you've been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years, you're not gonna wake up and find a good situation now. So some of the sleeping giants, well, it's gonna be sad to see them go, but I think we're going to. Excellent.

Steven, you mentioned a few times companies that you had seen this past year, and, and for many of them, that means they presented at one of your Tech Field day conferences, and you did, I forget how many, it was a couple of dozen Tech field day, certainly in in 2024. I'm gonna ask you now a little self-serving, but what do you see specifically for Tech Field Day in 2025? Give us a preview.

Well, We're trying to do some different things with Field Day. First off, uh, we're trying to work with this, uh, tech Strong group. If you've heard of them, uh, you know, they, they vaguely, they, uh, do a great job, essentially, tech Strong is bringing a lot of the things that we've never been able to do with Field Day, uh, in terms of, of, of audience, in terms of demand gen, in terms of connecting the, uh, very, uh, high level, um, uh, or top of the funnel kind of, uh, activities that we do with Field Day, with the rest of the funnel, with the rest of the sales funnel.

And that, frankly, is, is just great for everybody involved because it means that the presentations that are from field that happen at Field Day can then be connected in with, uh, you know, to, to help interested people learn more and connect with these, uh, with these companies. Another thing topically that we're doing is we're, um, looking at new spaces, uh, you know, rather than, you know, doing another com, another event focused on storage arrays or network switches or whatever, uh, we are going to be looking at new topic. So, for example, we have a proposal out for another data field day.

We have a proposal out for a, uh, CRM Field day. We have a proposal out for other topics that you might not have thought you'd see at, uh, tech Field Day events. Um, but that's because frankly, there's a lot of really exciting technology.

There's a lot of companies we haven't spoken with yet, and we're, um, interested in and now able, thanks to the help from the future, uh, team to address these spaces. So I'm pretty excited about where we're going in, in 2025. Uh, we're doing a lot of different things.

Uh, I, I love it when I get to go to a Field Day event, even behind the scenes, you know, I'm standing, uh, you know, behind the table instead of sitting at the table, but I'm able to learn something new. Um, I really enjoyed, uh, going to App Dev Field Day and seeing how modern applications are developed. I really enjoyed going to a mi, a mainframe focused Field day event and, and learning how things are doing, uh, you know, in that mainframe world.

And, um, I'm really looking forward to being the one to, to stand there and learn about, uh, you know, process automation or CRM or AI or security. So that's really what's driving me in, uh, 2025, uh, with Field Day. We're also doing a lot more stuff, uh, behind the scenes.

So, uh, you, I'm, I'm gonna be, uh, participating more in, in, in the strong, um, uh, media activities. Uh, we are participating more in podcasts and so on, essentially to help spread the word about these things that we're learning. So it's not enough for me to learn it.

I wanna be able to help share what I'm learning in real time with the rest of the world. And, uh, Textron gives me that ability. So it's, uh, it's a really great partnership.

And same here. We're, we're excited with that. So Steven, you know, my, my friend Brad told me that 99% of what we do in tech is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

And even with some of these phal kind of things we're talking about with AI and agent AI and, and, and physical ai, and, you know, we've spoken on text and gang about quantum coming down the pike and quantum computing and all of this, A lot of it is very evolutionary, right? The, the whole idea of AI taking off seems sort of revolutionary. But when we look over the arc of the next, of the last two, three years going into the next two, three years, we, we see this evolution taking place.

But if I had to ask you, Steven, what's the moonshot? What's a potential moonshot in 2025 from a tech point of view? What, what might be, and, and granted, there are long shots, by the very definition they're moonshots.

But if, if you had a, if you were a betting man, what, what are some that may be worthwhile throwing a couple dollars on? I dunno about, I'm not gonna give you any advice to throw any dollars at anything. Um, I, I'm famous for making poor decisions there, but, um, I will say, uh, there are some really Cool Transformative things happening in this space.

Now, we're still waiting for quantum. Could quantum happen in 2025? The answer is yes, will it?

Probably not. We're waiting for a breakthrough there, and I think that that could be something that could surprise us. Uh, another area that I am pretty excited about is the potential for, um, alternative energy sources.

Um, I think that despite what it sounds like from Washington and from, um, Canada and Europe and, and the rest of the world, uh, I think the horse, as I've said many times from Textron Group, the horse is out of the barn as, as far as solar. And solar is increasing in, um, value per dollar to such an extent that we could see as soon as the end of 2025, uh, solar being suddenly transformative and, uh, massive investments going into farms and fields of solar to power data centers and things like that. I could also see other alternative energy investments, uh, taking hold.

Um, for example, you know, small nuclear reactors. SMR doesn't exist, it's just a concept. But if some of these things can take hold, and they've, uh, attracted the attention of some serious investors and some serious companies, I could see a small modular nuclear reactor being rolled out by the end of the year and having that kickoff a, uh, power revolution like we've never seen before.

And if we just look at the technology in front of us, um, there's some really neat things and, and neat possibilities that could happen when we combine, um, IOT devices. Uh, when we have, um, low powered chips from arm, uh, maybe risk five, uh, maybe there'll be a re breakthrough on a, on a risk five processor, uh, you know, maybe the Raspberry Pie Foundation, um, e even smaller than that. If we look at, um, microcontrollers and what's happening in the ESP 32 market with, uh, MQTT and things like that, if you don't know what these things are, just Google them.

They're very cool. And all of these things could kind of come together to transform everyday life for people. Um, maybe the matter protocol takes off in, uh, home iot, maybe not.

Um, um, maybe, you know, uh, we start seeing, uh, low powered, uh, thread routers in everybody's houses and in every, every appliance, uh, things like that can really be transformative and can kick off new industries as well. So we'll see what happens with all of this. And then one more thing on the energy side.

I am, I'm kicking myself for not mentioning it, battery technology. We are on the cusp of some really big breakthroughs in terms of making, uh, rechargeable battery systems that don't use, um, difficult rare earth that are solid state. Um, there are a lot of patents, there's a lot of companies working on it.

There's a lot of investment happening in that space. And I could absolutely see sometime in 2025 having a solid state, um, maybe an iron based battery or a sodium based battery. Absolutely, uh, seizing the, the news at a very low cost, um, very, you know, high safety, uh, low environmental impact, and that would really transform a lot of the stuff that I've talked about and a lot of the stuff that we look at every single day.

So, uh, there's a lot of exciting tech out there, Some bullish on 2025. Steven, I am, I'm, you know, you, it's easy to, to be disappointed in, uh, in what's going on in the world right now. But there's a lot of cool stuff, and there's a lot of people working on neat things.

And, uh, I'm excited to see where we go this year. Fantastic. Hey, I want to thank you for coming on here and sharing with our audience here at Predict 2025, your outlook.

You did not disappoint you. You gave, you gave people something to hang their hats on here, and I appreciate it, and I'm personally looking forward to working with you in 2025 and doing some great things. Thank you very much for coming on here.

Thank you for watching. Uh, by the way, if you're interested, you should go check Ad Tech Field Day. Uh, they, they do do a lot of very cool, uh, events and, uh, if you want to get involved, it's a, you can go on their website and check it out.

Um, but for now, that's it. Stephen, thank you for joining us. We've got a full day of Predict 2025 here, including the announcement of the DevOps Dozen award winners.

So stay tuned for that. Or for now, this is Alan Shimmel, enjoy the rest of Predict 2025. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong AI video series.

I'm your host Mike Resort. Today we're with Andrew Wells, who's chief data and AI officer for NTT data. And we're talking about a report that they did that kind of shows that business people are, and tech leaders too, are a little uncertain about the future and the absence of AI regulations, and that's affecting their investment strategies.

And you're welcome to the show. Great to be here, Mike. And, uh, very interesting what our survey found.

Yeah, I mean, well walk us through the high points, but you know, today we live in an era where everybody's running around saying, you know, we don't need regulations. And yet here we have business and IT leaders saying that in the absence of them, they're uncertain of essentially of how to proceed. How do we, this is a bit of a quandary as far as I can tell.

Yeah. You know, there's a dichotomy that exists with leaders that are wanting to drive a strong innovation agenda, but also want to do it in a responsible manner. And that tug of war, you know, exists you and that gap between those two, or it's probably wider than it's ever been, the technology sit changing so fast.

And you have this, you know, energy that's pushing you to want innovate and make sure that you continue your leadership position, or this is an opportunity to create a moat for your business, um, uh, by, uh, leveraging the technology change and doing a business process different. Uh, but, you know, you gotta do it in a responsible way as well. And it's that chasm, it's that, uh, it's that, uh, gap in between those two that I think a lot of the leaders are struggling with.

What is it that you guys are recommending folks do to navigate that? I mean, do I just kind of follow the, uh, most stringent rules I can find on the assumption that everything else will be fine somewhere else? Or do I have different strategies for different geographies based on the regulations of the day?

Yeah, boy, I think it's very bespoke and probably one of the reasons why regulations are challenging in this space, because it really depends on the type of company you are. You know, if you're, um, manufacturing heavy or you got a heavy workforce, safety is a big issue. And, um, you've gotta really be fairly pedantic and, um, you know, concerned about the approach you take with the level of automation you drive with gen, AI and gen to make sure people are kept safe, but you still need to lean in the change and solve for, well, how can this drive a better customer experience?

And how could I leverage this technology to do things, um, maybe faster or less costly or drive product? What most people are finding is it's driving productivity into the system to allow people to do more or do things faster. Do I kinda, as a business leader, am I worried about having to roll something back because I, from, once I roll it out, and then I'm worried about some regulation that might show up six months from now, and I don't have a lot of clarity into it.

So does that make me a little more hesitant to invest in ai? Yeah, what we're finding is there's a lot of proof of concepts, but maybe one in 10, uh, are getting scaled into a production. So, and that's for a variety of reasons.

Some of them, it's, the technology's just not there yet, and there's not the efficacy around, um, the business case for rolling it out. But in some cases its impact. It's what we are unsure of the impact to our workforce or our customers, uh, to be able to roll this out out.

So we are going to, um, we're gonna wait and gauge it a little bit more, maybe continue to evolve it, but not scale it yet. Am I anxious because I'm worried that somebody else may not wait, and then I'm gonna have a competitive disadvantage be A lot of the times, uh, you know, you hear the phrase fomo if you're missing out. Yeah, yeah.

No, I definitely think there's a lot of that. I think maybe people are waiting for other people to move first before they roll something out or scale, although we're, we're not experiencing as much of that. But I do think, uh, people are racing to drive the innovation, um, but they're also trying to gauge, well, how do I best drive the innovation responsibly?

And there's, you know, we sort of think about it in four dimensions. One is leadership, and it needs to come from the top that as you innovate, you need to do it in a responsible manner. And that we need to, um, carry both, uh, the ethics and the, um, the policies of our market and our organization into the work we do.

I think second for us is, you know, designed by responsibility in the things that you design and things that you develop. Make sure that responsible responsibility is inherent in those designs. Third for us would be governance.

You know, make sure you have multilevel governance in place. So if there are things that are being designed or, um, that you release, you can walk in the back fairly quickly. And then last is probably workforce readiness.

How are you upskilling your workforce to really take advantage of these tools and understand how to use them in the right way? It seems like to me too, we haven't quite fully solved this whole hallucination issue. And, um, the models themselves are probabilistic, and that's a long fancy way of saying that they don't quite do the same thing the same way every time.

Yeah. Have a lot of business processes that are deterministic where they have to be done the same way every time, so mm-hmm. Is that a source of my, um, anxiety, because I'm not entirely sure what the outcome of these things is gonna be, even if it isn't malicious, it's gonna be different.

Yeah, that's definitely a concern. You know, especially when you think about agent and actions, the models may take, um, as well as just analytics, you know, if you're looking to look at numbers that, um, you wanna make sure that the numbers that provides are accurate, it's, it's great right now for creativity, it's great. Now, right now for writing, um, we do find a lot of efficacy in it around some of the analytics, but you need to, there's, there's methods and approaches for making sure that you can get tighter, um, answers back from your models, either through leveraging some rag techniques or through, uh, developing smaller models or training models, um, on your specific dataset.

So it knows that, um, you know, it's got a tighter universe in terms of the answers it wants to provide, but it's, it's a challenge. And you've gotta make sure that either if it's something that involves a, an important and impactful decision that a human's in the loop, uh, and or that you are looking at, well, what, what are the implications of this? And then how am I managing risk around it?

So you put in plenty of safeguards, but it, it is a concerned industry of where the models are now. The models are getting better though, and there are techniques you can, uh, deploy for driving accuracy. Is there anything in the report that kind of surprised you that you didn't think you'd see there?

Yeah, you know, I think the biggest one was the gap, uh, that we saw between, um, the two in terms of innovation and, uh, responsibility, uh, the, the, the tug of war of as well between executive leadership and then people that are implementing, uh, the technology sort of was another surprise. Executives are considerably more bullish on the technology than, um, maybe the people on the ground that are having to sort of stumble their way through it, because the technology is still very nascent. I think we find that most technology leaders or most leaders and organizations see the promise of the technology and what it could do to, uh, a particular process or a particular business, either, you know, creating a competitive differentiation for it, or driving revenue or saving cost.

But the people that are on the ground having to implement it are having to solve for, you know, a lot of the, um, a nascent stage of it. And there's a lot of bubblegum and, you know, uh, duct tape being used to sort of piece things together as, you know, uh, people put together the solutions. But just like any big wave and technology at the very beginning, it is, it's a little messy as, uh, the market innovates, but eventually it tightens up and, um, you know, you get solutions that are more scalable and, um, uh, drive a, uh, broader range of capabilities.

If I do start implementing all these AI capabilities and agents, it's not clear to me how much transparency do I have to provide to my partners and customers, uh, about those agents because they are, um, shall we say, potentially inconsistent at the very least. So, do I need to disclose every time I'm using these AI agents, or how will that play out? I do think there's going, especially around, uh, a decision that impacts something related to a customer, I think you're gonna find yourself needing to disclose the decision process.

And there are techniques that you can use to determine, you know what, maybe it's the weightings inside of a model, or maybe it's the reasoning behind the decision that you will, you know, I'm sure regulation's gonna come out and say, you eventually need to disclose those. So you need to build those into your solutions today to understand, based off of the decision at this time, what did the model look like? Or what were the weights that were used or tell, have the model tell you, well, why, what was the reasoning path behind it?

So you can record those and make sure that you are, you know, being fair. And, um, you know, as you think about risk management, risk mitigation, you can look back and see, okay, well what was the model deciding? And then catch, even if it's in arrears where there may have been an issue, Ultimately, what are the business leaders supposed to do?

I mean, am I quite literally gonna write my congressman and tell 'em to get their act together on regulations or, um, how will they make their voices heard? Gosh, I'd be surprised if anyone raises their hand and says, regulate me. But I do think that, um, you know, if what we advise our clients to do is just make sure it's a principle responsible led approach, and that they are looking at how these decisions impact both their employees and their customers, and that they're putting in governance to that decision making process.

So one, they can feel good that they're being responsible, and two, they can catch anything that is going on that may be because of a model hallucinating, or, you know, the fact that these technologies are new. Do you think that the employees that work on these projects will be the source of that kind of observation and information? And maybe they, we all need to do a better job of listening to the folks in the front lines because, um, sometimes, you know, there's several layers removed from execution and the managers who assign this thing.

So, um, will we need to have a a, a tighter loop of process re-engineering, I guess, between the employees at the front end and the execs at the back end? Yeah, it's gonna get really interesting, especially as, you know, gen AI starts to do a lot of the automation tasks. You know, when it can, when you can tell Gen AI to go write a script for you and it does it, then how do you test it for its, um, you know, it being the script drives a responsible action.

So, you know, my, my guess would be, and this is a guess, is that as these models get better at doing development, there's going to be models that are specifically created and reporting that specifically created to tease out, well, where could some issues lie or where do the issues lie? So there will be safety checks that get put in place to make sure that, you know, the code that's written isn't nefarious or doesn't drive a bad action. But that's, it's a great challenge, and it's gonna be one of those that I think the market's gonna solve for.

Well, I did scratch my head about that very thought. 'cause in theory, I could use AI models to track the governance and the safety of the other AI models, but then how do I track the safety of this AI models that I put in place to make sure the other ones are safe? Follow me?

Yeah. That's sort of what Philanthropics doing. I mean, anthropics niche in the marketplace is we're responsible ai and we're teaching our model to be more ethical than other models.

And it's a really interesting niche that they're, they're heading down. So I do think it will exist. I do think that, that it has a place in the marketplace.

It has a space in the marketplace, and someone's gonna close it all. Right? Yeah.

You could get in an infinite loop of is my AI corrupting my AI to get the AI to do something nefarious. And, and if we got to that point, then We'll, we'll have different sets of problems then. Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, funks, you heard in here. Here's a thought.

If it feels bad, it probably is. So you should take another look at it before you go and implement this thing and have a conversation about it. Andrew, thanks for being on the share.

Thanks, spike. All right. And thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Techstrong AI video series.

You can find this episode and others on our website. We invite you to check them all out. Until then, we'll see you next time.

I am Tiffany Bova, chief of strategy and research at the Futurum Group. With 2025 upon us, I'm reminded of one fundamental truth. Disruption waits for no one organization and leaders who can anticipate, adapt, and act quickly will thrive.

At the Futurum Group, we are focused on helping you decode the complexity of today's digital first world, so you can stay ahead of the curve. This year's predictions dive deep into the trends reshaping industries from AI's pervasive influence across enterprise applications to seismic shifts in hardware, cloud, and customer experience. Our team of analysts, some of the brightest minds in research and strategy, have dissected the forces driving change, and outlined actionable insights for what's next.

Whether it's the rise of ag, agentic, AI disrupting software consumption, cloud marketplaces revolutionizing go to market strategies, or the accelerating impact of I PCs on productivity, the message is clear. We are entering a new era where business agility, intelligence, and innovation are the ultimate differentiators. The insights shared in our prediction series are not just about spotting trends, but about preparing for transformation as customer expectations soar and the competition intensifies.

Companies that embrace change as an opportunity rather than a challenge, will set the pace for the next decade. I invite you to explore our predictions, listen to our analysts, share their insights, and download the reports so you can reflect on how your organization can harness these shifts to drive growth, improve outcomes, and elevate experiences for customers and employees alike. Don't forget to download our Futurum 2025 prediction ebook, and we look forward to meeting the future head on to together.

Hi, I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, research director, enterprise applications for the Fuge Boom group. Today I'd like to talk to you about the market and offer a bold prediction that I have for 2025. Now, there's a lot going on in the enterprise application market.

Generative AI is predicted to deliver exponential productivity, efficiency, and accuracy, and in large measure has dominated nearly every buying conversation. Now, gene AI technology is being delivered either as an add-on feature at an additional cost, or as a fully integrated or embedded capability directly into business applications such as C-R-M-E-R, PCDB, and countless other line of business applications, though without a discreet additional charge on top of the base license. Now, how generative AI is actually being delivered to customers, it's largely dependent upon the individual vendors' technology stack and footprint.

Some vendors such as Oracle or Zoho, while they own the entire technology stack, including the data centers in compute, that will power AI model training, tuning, and inference test, all the way to the end user facing applications. Now, other vendors, they only own the application itself and they have to procure or cobble together compute resources, AI model, training and development, and other ancillary services to actually deliver real value to organizations. This latter group, there are significant concerns around balancing these costs being heard for delivering AI, while actually ensuring that they can deliver new innovations on a continuous basis, not just on a quarterly cadence, but on a continual basis to satisfy their customer's thirst for quickly utilizing new innovations like prediction for 2025 is that we're gonna witness the introduction and growing usage of new packaging and pricing models in terms of how software is actually delivered to the market.

This will largely be based around the growing utilization of generative AI co-pilots for assistance, AI agents, and embedded AI technology. Now, if you'd like to learn more, please be sure to download our ebook future and research 2025 key issues and predictions. Thanks and we'll steer you throughout the year.

Hello, I'm Krista Case Research director on the team here at the Futurum Group, and I'm here today to walk you through three of the key trends that we're going to be watching in the cybersecurity space. The first topic is the fact that AI is accelerating the race between attackers and defenders. The second topic is the fact that attack surfaces are sprawling, and this is really creating the perfect storm.

Number three is the fact that data protection is evolving into cyber resiliency. So let's look at the first topic. AI is accelerating this race between attackers and defenders.

The meteoric rise of deeps seek so far this year in 2025 has really shown a limelight on the fact that attackers are not only using AI to kind of up their game, create more innovative and more efficient, you know, attack techniques, but at the same time, they're also targeting large language models and things of that nature to be able to do things like capture user, um, personal identifiable information and other things. The other flip side of this coin is how we're seeing enterprises use AI from a defensive perspective to try to, as much as they can, keep a step ahead of how attackers are evolving. Their techniques speak a lot with practitioners, and they're really looking to their vendors to be able to make capabilities like detection of anomalous activity and to be able to identify, you know, potential breaches sooner, and also to be able to respond to them more quickly.

So again, it's certainly something that just as attackers are not sleeping on, the opportunity for AI defenders certainly are not as well. The second topic, sprawling attack surfaces an explosion in the number of SaaS applications in use by the given enterprise. For example, we have the rise of remote work and the myriad of devices that enterprises are accessing corporate data from.

We have a growing number of iot devices and growing OT environments, for example, we also have supply chains that have become more sprawling than ever before. So as attackers have become more innovative in their approaches, the potential attack surface is also much more difficult for security practitioners to be able to get visibility into an established control. Over our third topic, data protection evolving into cyber resiliency.

This topic is very closely interweaved with our first two topics because it is naturally the data at the end of the day that attackers are targeting as it becomes more difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of attackers and prevent them from getting in. The precedence is placed on recovering data as quickly as possible and getting these critical business services back up and running. So for data protection companies, what this means is it means baking in capabilities like that anomalous detection that we talked about of potentially in nefarious activity.

And then to be able to potentially take action like creating a snapshot as soon as that activity is detected and automatically uncovering the best recovery point. There's also a growing correlation between data protection vendors and incident response that we've seen both through partnerships and acquisition activity. So the takeaway from these three key trends is really that there's new technology requirements that really have been emerging over the last 18 to 24 months.

Buyers are evaluating all of the vendors that they're working with across the cybersecurity space, and they're really looking for ways to address these new threats, shore up their security posture and any potential goals, and to be able to mitigate any business impact if they are breached. So with that, I wanna thank you for joining me. Please make sure to also check out the video from Fernando Montenegro, our VP in this space.

He's gonna be covering some other trends, um, that we're gonna be watching in cybersecurity this year. And make sure to check out our ebook, um, for a discussion of all of the trends and topics across, um, the technology space that we're watching. Thank you so much again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

Has Microsoft discovered a new state of matter? It's quantum to me. You're watching Text on Gang.

Hey everyone, happy Monday to you. It's Alan Shimel coming at you with a, a start of a great week of Textron Gang, and he can't get any greater than the lineup we've got for today. We're very excited.

We're gonna be discussing some really meaty or maybe media not meaty at the same time, uh, type of topics. Let me introduce you to our gang members who are gonna do the discussing today. First of all, joining us from out at sea, though I think he's actually anchored somewhere in the Keys right now.

He is our resident security expert. Hockey. Well, he is not really a hockey fan.

He's married to a hockey fan, uh, one and only Chris Glass. Hey Chris. Good to see you.

Good to see Alan, everybody. Yeah, so I'm for the, uh, where's Waldo exercise of the day. If you, uh, look on Google Maps for half Moon key near Key West, you'll find a little channel in the northwest corner of it, and that's what you see out the back window.

Very cool. Very cool. All right.

Joining us from, it looks like he's home, I guess, in Auburn, hoping the, uh, NCA basketball. I I just got my tickets last night, man. Very cool.

Well, what's you, you haven't been exactly a good look. No, no, I agree, but that I can steal. One second.

That was my son's argument of not getting the tickets. Is that what make Lose We're kind like in the Bronx. It doesn't really work that way, But he is our AI cloud DevOps just all around guy.

God, Willis. Hey, John, great to have you on. Alrighty.

And then joining us, I would say she's home in New Mexico as well. She's the CO of I'm now. Yep.

For a short time. But she's the CEO of Deploy hub, open source aficionado. Uh, she's Tracy Reagan.

Hey, Tracy, thanks for coming on. It's good to see you. Hey, Alan, it's great, great to be here.

As always. I love this particular team, so this will be a fun day. Good.

I hope so. I think it will be. And then joining us from up in Harrison, New York where it, it's cold.

Uh, he's our Chief content officer from Deb Bronx. Mike Baard. Hey, Mike.

I'm well. How are you sir? You're You're good.

I'm still where it is cold. You're actually by me, so there you go. Yeah.

But yeah, well, but you know what? It's home and it's good to be home. Uh, all right.

So guys, let's jump right into it. You know, Microsoft made some big news when I first read it. I was like, oh my God, they, they invented a new state of matter.

It's not a liquid, it's not a solid, it's not a guess. Is it, you know, faster than a speeding bullet? Well, you know, is who knows?

And, but it's a, and and, and they're making their own chip with it to, you know, have potentially million cubic kind of quantum computing. I don't know, is this tabletop fusion? I, I am not quite sure, but Mike, why don't you kick it?

Well, they're calling these things topo conductors, and this first one is eight qubits, but they think they'll be able to get up to millions of qubits eventually. It's not clear how they're gonna manufacture these things at scale yet. But, um, John, I know you've been following this, and I think they still haven't quite put this in.

They're promising to describe this in an upcoming issue of nature, I think, in this. So there's a lot of people who are skeptical going, well, is this real or not real? But John, you've been following quantum computing.

What's your take on all this? Yeah, You know, I think I, I like to say I'm, you consider me, uh, like a sports journalist on this subject, right? I don't actually play the field, but I do have opinions and I do keep up on it as, as much as sort of any other interesting subject.

And I'll go back to a little bit on when my oldest son was going into university. Um, about a year before. This is about probably seven years ago.

Um, I, I, there's some think tanks I've been involved with, but there are true experts on quantum computing. And, and every year I would go, I would, the first year it was like, it was about a year when my son was a senior. I was like, is this an area that he should, um, get into?

And almost every, all the experts said no. And he said, this is, you know, 15 years, this is seven years ago. They were saying 15, 20 years out, right?

And, and so, but I've kept my sort of eye on this thing. And, and being in a university town, periodically they have, uh, uh, uh, experts come in. I wind up catching the thing.

So I've been following what was interesting is, you know, what, last year Google sort of announced their breakthrough quantum moment, right? And, and, and how they were gonna sort of change the game. And, and it got ridiculous amount of press, right?

And it was overhyped because, you know, the net net, even today, most experts would tell you that, you know, I think when we, when we talk about what a fully fault tolerant universal quantum computer, that means the thing actually works. You can actually do real work on it without just losing the states and these, what they call qubits. And so most people would say, you know, aggressive people, and even in the Microsoft announcement, they would say 2030 or later, um, most would say 10 to 20 before we have a sort of a universal quantum machine that actually can do business work, right?

Um, and then the interesting thing becomes, I mean, the, the, you know, the, that, that idea of this, uh, what they call topological qubits or these, uh, you know, material science work that's basically going to give you more fault tolerant qubit states, right? The problem with these states is they, they can do a massive amount of potential, uh, compute crunching, but today they're the, the ability to get the proper states if you turn thing off, you know, recover. There's just so many operational issues with these things.

Here's the net net, right? Google talked about this announcement last year. Everybody went nuts.

About a week later, people realized we're still 10 years out. Um, if you compare sort of Google's announcement and Microsoft's announcement, Microsoft is really more theoretical. I mean, even Google with their announcements last year on, on their quantum computing breakthroughs, we're still 10 years out.

And they have examples. The, the report here is really just all theoretical. So the net net is this is all good.

Um, because the, the, the net net is now the, um, private sector is actually investing and taking this serious where most of the sort of quantum comput, serious quantum computers, academia or CERN areas like that. And then one last thing, unless anybody wants to go any deeper, which I don't really care to, uh, but is that I, IBM's been doing this for 40 years, and they get no press, no big announcement. And in, in the last 10 years, they've been incredibly serious.

In fact, if you listen to, as I do, some of these professors that are actually talking about real projects that are happening in research, they'll always point to the IBMQ experience and that stuff. So it's just ironic that, you know, like we today, you know, now we get this major, Microsoft's gonna change everything. It's, it is sort of a turf war of something that's 10 years out.

And, and, you know, and again, I think it's really interesting that I, IBM's been slow and steady wings the race on this topic for 40 years, and certainly 10 years in modern quantum computing to sort of qubit architectures. Yeah, that's all I got to say about that. Tracy, I'm love to get your take on this, because when I look at this, I'm like, okay, well that seems interesting, but where does the software for this thing come from?

And what am I actually going to maybe program against? Well, the first thing I thought when I saw it was like, oh no, it's closer than we thought. We better figure out how to do better algorithms because encryption, because the first thing it will be used for, for it will be for breaking encryption.

No doubt. That's where my head went. But I also thought about a conversation that Allen and I had maybe in the fall that we brought up Quantum.

And Alan was like, ah, but it's, it's 10, 15 years out. The thing about it is, you know, time flies when you're having fun. And maybe we're 10 or 15 years out and maybe, um, what, uh, Microsoft is introducing is somewhat of a game changer so that we can pursue it in a more aggressive way because it is more fault tolerant.

I'm excited about it. Let's hope it is real. Uh, I know that there's debate if it's a, if, if it's, you know, if it's hype for their 50th anniversary or 50th birthday, or if it's something that they've really delivered.

I'm hoping it's the later, because it's time that we stop talking about ai. I wanna talk about something else. Let's talk about quantum.

It's a much more interesting topic, and I wanna learn more about qubits and what they're doing with this topological qubit. Just to point out, one last thing on there is, it is, it is not a game changer at this point, right? It's not, it hasn't even been peer reviewed.

The paper hasn't been peer reviewed. So, um, it's hype, it's promising, it's interesting. It's great that the private sector is investing money in this space more aggressively, you know, meaning I, IBM's been doing forever, but, and now you've got like, you know, Google and Microsoft, but, but at the end of the day, um, it doesn't, it won't deserve the hype that it's gonna get.

But if we have hype then and we have more investment, won't we get there faster, right? So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. I think the Chinese are gonna beat us anyway.

So I dunno if that matters Their point. I think you're probably right. True patriot, Especially when they call, when you talk about encryption, right?

So, no. Yes. So, so here, here's the thing.

I I have a couple of thoughts on this. Number one is I think Mike Ard and I had a conversation when we were in person this week. This ain't the first time Microsoft's made such an announcement, right?

Mi Microsoft claimed this not Topographic Oceans, that's a yes album, but, uh, what, what do they call the material top Tapo? Something they call Majority. Yeah, but topological qubits.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like top of the morning, but Tapo conductor.

Yeah. Well, they, they claim to kind of event this state of matter a few years ago, only to subsequently kinda withdraw the claim. Who knows?

You know, I mean, I'm not saying they're lying or they're trying to grab some publicity, but who knows? Both things can be true though, right? Like, they're providing research to Tracy's point, and that's a good thing.

They're getting some, you know, good mojo out of what they are and who they are. Well, that's the whole purpose of quantum, right? Two things can be true of us.

That was good. Mike, Jay, I, I, I feel very fusion energy about this, right? You know, will we get there?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, almost certainly, you know, on both, right? You know, exactly when, eh, I don't know.

Right? And it's, it is one of those things where the probabilities aren't much stronger three years from now than 30 years from now, right? And as, as we're talking about here, there's lots of signs that three years from now or 13 years from now is probably closer than 30 or 33.

But for those of us who've been watching this infusion energy for a long time, Okay, I'll believe it when I, You know what? Quite frankly, there were those people who were watching AI for a really long time and kept saying, it'll be there, it'll get there one day. It'll get there.

And then all of a sudden that day comes, and no matter how long you thing it's gonna get there, it kind of surprises you. Oh, I have a book coming out that next month. You A book.

Exactly. That was your segue. That was my, that was my, uh, that was my softball to you.

But, you know, the other thing is quite frankly, and maybe it's because I know so many people who are in the security world, the only thing I hear about what, what, well, what's quantum computing guy? Is it, how's it gonna change the game? Oh, it's gonna break encryption.

It's gonna Break encryption immediately. But you know what, yes, it may break encryption, though. We now supposedly have quantum proof algorithms we're gonna use, but there's so much more that quantum computing might be able in, in terms of like, you know, climate calculations, nuclear reactions, protein folding, you know, real earth shattering kind of uses that this could shepherd a new era in I, If you don't scare Easy, um, I, I wouldn't read this book if you, if you're a paranoid person, but it's, uh, by one of the ex, it's called the Coming Wave.

I, um, I think it's mt I'm trying to mult just the coming wave. Uh, I won't pronounce his last name. Um, he, he does, he does this, he breaks out the, like what, you know, what AI and Quantum can do, and it, it's, and he, he, he's a, he is a, he was an ex bigshot at, at Google, and, and it's a scary book.

I mean, it is a really scary book about like synthetic biology and, and like yes, his, his main theme of that book, and I, I, I regret reading it, it was so scary. But, um, his main theme is when you start moving AI and, and, and real quantum together, that the positive and the negative effects are going to be an eerie, Well, on a positive note, we have a really cool new term exotic quasi particle. I've on a t-shirt that just says exotic quasi particles on it.

Awesome. Yes. That's a great idea.

I might do that. I'll send you one. I do it.

Okay. I think, I think Chris, Chris is a walking example of an exotic quasi particle. Aw, I, Well, Not to be too optimistic about it, but you know, there was that, uh, uh, men in black closing line, you know, there's always a, a vo on death flee coming to destroy the world, right?

We are living today and have all our lives with all these huge potential negative consequences. We agonize over 'em a lot. And to date, you know, we have largely avoided them.

You know, what we're talking about here contains a whole bunch of new ones, Fantastic opportunities, Protein folding Oh my God. But huge risks. Oh yeah.

So Chris, to that point, Chris, to that point, the security world talks about Q Day, right? It's some unknown day when these quantum machines are available and start destroying all these encryption algorithms. Is that a real fear or is that something that you know, is out of the movie?

Well, you know, the way you rate a bank fault or a safe is by time, right? You know, how long will it take, you know, the, the expected adversary to open, not if when, but just when, right? So anything you're encrypting ever or that has ever been encrypted will at some point be revealed.

So when you're looking at securing data, you know, you're saying, how long do I need this too? So, yeah. As, uh, as computing power cranks up, you know, and I did, you know, again, it's not just quantum, but quantum is one of those obvious things when you just exponentially go up a couple numbers.

Yeah. Your old stuff is gonna get read. So there you go.

All right. Start the meeting those piles now. Yeah.

Or start, well in risk management, you know, you have to assume if this is compromised, then what? So kind of as building that into your security thoughts, you know, actually deal with the consequences, you know, put all your controls in place, have an idea of what to do if it's revealed, or if that's what we're talking about here, you know, your encryption being broken, somebody reads data you don't want them to have, what do you do next? Maybe it's gonna happen.

Well, you know, and one last thing, Chris, is a really good point, because I've always tried to explain that not being a total expert in security or in quantum, but I, the, the thing that scared me the most, which was it will get broken. And so anything that's been out there is compromised at some point. And then, so your point, I've never had that follow on answer, which is you really need to prepare for what to do when it does get caught, because it will get caught data that it's not like you can just re you know, encrypt the data.

That data is out there. It's, you know, like somebody has it, you know, like Hillary's emails, right? Like literally once the data was out there, it's out there.

And, uh, well, it, Yeah. And, and I think it gives to, you know, the, gets to the core philosophy about security. We accept all sorts of risks all the time.

Our companies and ourselves will not last forever. Right? You know, let's not over secure things.

Let's secure the things that we need to the level that need to be secured and the rest of it. And quite often when you think about what happens if this thing happens, you realize it's not that bad and it's way more expensive and impeding to stop it. So, and maybe it doesn't happen, move on.

You know, my advice is don't let it take up space in your head. I, I read that from some crazy guy on Facebook. Do you have enough to do already Uhhuh You?

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All right, we're back. In, well, we did quantum, so we might as well move on to AI because, well, you know, that's just the topic of the day. And it's interesting because Amazon is talking about a next generation Alexa device, which will be a lot more interactive thanks to ai.

It's supposed to be out in the next couple of months or so. And our full disclosure, we used to have Alexa in our house, and, um, I just kind of got bored with it, and so did my wife and just turned it off and forgot about it, and it just kind of went away. And I, frankly not missing it.

But Tracy, I don't know if you guys have Alexa, if you're still engaged with it, but do we need a more interactive flavor of Alexa to make it interesting again? Well, I think in order for Alexa to remain relevant, we have to have a more en engaging Alexa. That's for, that's an absolute truth.

Um, we do use Alexa, but you know, Alexa, tell me what the weather's gonna be in Las Vegas. Alexa, you know, play Radio Paradise, mellow mix on stereo. There are some things that I just tell her over and over and over, but I haven't, I haven't ventured beyond that.

And at this point, you know, it's been a year and a half, I believe since we've had an upgrade. I think we've all established a relationship with Alexa that may or may not change. I would hope that we could have a more engaging experience with Alexa considering how far we've gone in ai.

And I keep complaining about AI's great, but it's great for businesses. It's not so great for consumers. So can we now start delivering AI that has benefit to every person's home?

You know, it would be great to be able to say, if you're a parent and you've got a, uh, you know, you'd like to know how well your kid's doing in school. Alexa, can you give me the last grades? My child just got this last test.

Wouldn't that be an interesting experience? But I think what, what we could have the potential of is to reimagine how we interact even with chat GPT. So if we could just have a conversation instead of typing in our keyboard while we're sitting there cooking dinner, I think that that changes the world for consumers.

So yes, let's, let's keep moving this product forward and let's get new habits, because it can do more than tell me what the weather is or turn on the stereo. So I have some thoughts here. So first of all, it can give you your child's grades, depending how old they are.

'cause it's a privacy requirement. But with that being said, I, I, I very much have a love-hate relationship with Alexa, right? I'll, I have Alexa throughout my house, and I'll say something like, Alexa playing music, you know, while I'm in the shower and getting washed up.

And it'll stop playing music. Or it'll say, oh, music is playing on another device. Would you like to play it here?

And I say, yes, play it here. Music's playing on another device. Would you like the Amazon Family music plan?

So you can play on more than one device? No, Alexa, play it here. Well, music's playing on another device.

Well switch to this device. If you don't give it its magic words. It's like, I need a magic key.

And I forget the magic keys all the time, but I don't wanna just bang on Alexa. You know, I have the same problem with Siri. I had the same problem with Google Home.

All of these things, you know, these, these agents that were supposed to miraculously help us so much have been somewhat disappointed. The task we use, I can't get my Alexa to play my Sonos, even though there's an integration. They, they've been somewhat disappointed in limiting.

I do. Um, let me, let me hit this one last point, John. I do think that AI can make them better.

I I absolutely do. But Tracy, the, the problem you outlined to me is not an AI or intelligent agent problem. The problem is that we're still stuck in the 1970s park, spark, whatever out in Palo Alto lab of how we interface with our computer technology, which is still primarily mouse, windows and keyboards.

What happened to Scotty, you know, in the Star Trek with the whales where he says, hello computer. That's what my my point. So the, the main main point is how did Apple and Amazon drop the ball here?

Because I don't know if I've been using, I don't use it for home use, but like, I drive to Atlanta to the airport from Albert, and it's a 90 minute drive, and I just have deep conversations with chat GPT and, and like, I mean, I'm literally like research level Fulfilling then Off the chart fulfilling. Yes. Um, again, do you have to know how to talk to it?

It's not the end all be all. It doesn't, it, is it gonna drive my car? Yeah, I'm married 35 years.

I'm just figuring that out with bond. But I mean, like, I tell you what I'm not using in my sort of the things that really excite me other than like electric home. Like what time is it?

You know, what's the weather? Or in, uh, Siri, gimme directions, you know, um, or, you know, but, but what I'm really doing is I'm spending a lot more time thinking about research or things I'm writing or the books I'm working on. I'm not having those conversations with Siri.

Right? And, and at the core of all this too is, and it is a very simplistic high level, is those products, Siri and, and Alexa got stuck on NLP and, and, and sort of open AI and this sort new LLM transformer. They, they adhere to a transformer model and the transformer tensions, all you need changed everything.

And now go back to how did they miss this? Google wrote this paper. They, you know, and, and like, they missed the AI assistant window by moonshots, right?

So that's the thing that just like, it perplexes me is how they, they had all the ingredients, particularly Google, um, and, and literally are just like, it's comical, you know, having a conversation. You know, I have some thoughts on that, why they missed it. I think that if I was Google, I would be looking at, um, Alexa and trying to figure out how to build ads into it.

And I don't think it works that well. I would be really annoyed if I was having a research conversation with chat GPT by the way, I call my best friend now because I'm using it so often to do research. But I never thought once to go and ask Alexa, Hey Alexa, I need to buy a new car.

What's the best hybrid SUV on the market? Never once did I think to do that. And I don't believe that.

And instead I went to Google and looked at it and I got a ton of ads. So I, I believe that Google doesn't wanna disrupt their, their revenue model, and I could be completely off. But, uh, you know, capitalism likes to capitalize on, uh, you know, reinvest things that make a profit and does Alexa really make a profit?

Does this kind of technology make a profit for them? If we're taking out the ads, which I would love that idea, and I think that's gonna happen over time, that It goes back to, and I definitely wanna hear towards Chris, but that goes back to like the, uh, summits next start with why, right? It's like missing, you know, if you've read that book about how, you know, the, the, the transformations, how these companies just completely missed waves.

And I, I think in some ways, you're right, it is about their commercial vehicle, but then the driving mindset of innovation there wasn't focused on, oh, AI assistance are probably gonna be the next big thing. So anyway, I, I just, you know, I, I agree with that absolutely. Everything you say about, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the, uh, this approach.

So, so bear, bear me out. I love Alexa, right? It is you.

As you guys know, I have multiple built in these boats. I use 'em in control, and I've had 'em in homes from day one. I've been playing with 'em.

And you're absolutely right. You know, number one, you know, they totally suck. They're not very good.

They don't not good at the job. And Tracy, totally right? Yeah.

This is a money losing thing, you know, I don't know. You know, I supposing Jeff be, was just somebody in Amazon just decided to keep it going for the heck of, I almost concerned they gotta cancel it 'cause it's so useless. However, right?

It's like the first generation of Hi-Fi stereos, right? Honestly, to have a voice activated thing, you know, for the casual stuff to set the lighting in my room, 'cause it's evening and I just wanted to change the colors or, but on these boats, both of the pros and cons, it is such a low but yet barely functional maturity level that if I enunciate clearly it's very handy to control lights and pumps and, you know, things that I use, you know, navigating the boats when time is really precious, right? I just, or yeah, I just don't want to get up and hit the damn switch, or I just, you want to, uh, or, you know, things are going on in real time.

So there's these wonderful advantages that you can see in this terrible package that, you know, and as it was mentioned a number of times compared to the chat GPT and what we see out there, it's just this stunningly stupid product that you would literally have to speak very clearly at. Or it'll, you know, do the wrong thing and blow up. But the fact that it exists and it actually manages to deliver some value at such a primitive level tells me that we have to be close.

And I think the speaking to the world, you know, the, if not Star Trek, maybe at least, uh, the expanse level, you know, is not that far away. I think the next five and 10 years, the commercial drivers will wind up to, so the Amazon and the other providers will give us things. We can, you know, it's like I saying, John, they're there right now, if you know about it.

So in 3, 5, 7 years, it's gotta work its way into all this stuff. I think this thing is gonna be super annoying and it's gonna be in your face all the time going, can I help you with this? Can I do this?

Can I, you know, I see that you're doing this. Uh, if you want me to do this, that, and the other, and all these other things, it's gonna be helpful. And this will be the last thing I say on this whole thing, folks.

And I'm gonna help you right now. 'cause you all have Alexis that are probably lighting up like crazy as you listen to this. So Alexa, off Your way down this one.

Alright, let's take a break. We're gonna come back for our last, uh, block for, for this beautiful Monday. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more. com has the largest selection of security content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. com to learn more.

com. Home of security bloggers network. Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna have a little chat about cybersecurity and how the cyber attacks are changing.

Darktrace has a report out and there's an article on Security Boulevard that you can check out about this that sends that well over half now of these cyber attacks can be traced back to the so-called cyber criminal as a service platforms. And these are basically automated systems that have been set up to help just about anybody launch a cyber attack these days. Chris, it, I think people still have it in their heads that cyber criminals are dudes in hoodies and basements and kind of leaning over keyboards.

But it feels like the whole thing has got automated to the point now, like I look at these things and I go, my God, these people are using DevOps to attack us. Mm-hmm. That's funny.

There's nothing new in the world, basically. Right? You know, I, I had the names just before this segment, I'm blanking on it right now, with the slick Willie.

There was that, uh, uh, famous, uh, thief, mid nine, uh, 1950s kind of thing, who was asked by the FBI, why do you always rob banks? And his answer was, 'cause that's where the money is, right? And organized crime organizes around crime, you know what the crime is doesn't really matter, right?

You reach a level of repeatability, you know, like any sort of conflict, right? You're having a conflict with the policy structure with the law, and you find gaps. And you could exploit them individually, randomly, like you say, in a hoodie in early computer days.

But it reaches the point where it's not about the computers anymore, it's about the, the money. And there are always organized crime organizations, you know, literally the, the mafia, you know, and versions of that and nation state operations and rogue nation state operations and so forth that, that build up around them. So we're at this stage, which anybody involved in the early days of the internet, again, forecast because at some point this security stuff gets serious.

You know, and pretty well all of us, you know, on this call probably remember those days about 20, 30 years ago, when you're saying to whomever, you know, DOD military people or whatnot, at some point you're gonna be able to turn off the grid remotely. You know, site seems like sci-fi, that's the world ridden right now. So we're in the world where you can make a lot of money with cyber crime.

So all the traditional organized crime organizations are doing it. North Korea, for example. So it's mobsters who code is what you're saying.

Well, they don't even code, right? They just hire coders. Yeah.

Well, uh, so that at the nation state level, that's very true. And, and it is what it is. But I will also say that not all cyber crime is nation state related.

There are, there are huge criminal enterprises and not only enterprises. What does this report really focuses in on is that there's a criminal, we, we call it the dark web or what have you, an ecosystem. So what happens is, you know, you, you've got the developer class who come up with their, their rap, right?

Uh, and then they make that particular cyber crime as a service available to the ecosystem at the high end of the ecosystem might be the nation state people or the, you know, the big fish who we're going after big bucks and particular things. But when they're done with it, you know, then the hyenas, the jackals and the vultures come in. Who, and they all take their slice out of these, of the carcass, of the cybercrime victim, right?

Some are looking for passwords, others are looking for HIPAA data, others are looking for financial information. You know, one particular, uh, SaaS, uh, crime is a, uh, what do they call it here? Cyber crime is a service, kind of application services, five or six different levels of this criminal, you know, dark web ecosystem.

Who then, and they all resell it too, right? I, I got, you know, I, I took the, this, I skimmed the cream off the crop. But if anyone's interested in, you know, four field data on 150,000 people, you could buy this file and have at it, right?

And that data may be your address, phone number and a password or something. Um, so this is, you know, the, but this is not new either. This has been going on a long time.

The good news is, John, you made reference to Josh and cisa, you know what? Both at the government level, you know, we we're in the us so we focus on the US but not only the US Europe, rest of the world at the government level, as well as at the, the good guys, the white hat level. We've been fighting this scourge for years.

The problem is, if it's not gonna be a priority going forward, and if you look at recent actions about how they're just exposing confidential data as part of this doeg, I I question whether what cisa is gonna look like. Well, here's why I'm scared to death, right? Um, well, I mean, it's three is three topics that I think a lot about.

Again, not being a cyber person, but thinking a lot about what ai, I mean, the first is everything old is new. Again, that means all these, um, attacks, vectors and things that just are being common, that people like Chris and Tracy are experts on, um, now create a whole nother level with ai. Because most of the AI infrastructure is just infrastructure.

So they're building these things, and they're not hardening them. They're being built. We've, I've had this conversation many times on this show, right?

About how new infrastructure's being built by, uh, chief AI officers. That's one level of we I've discussed that. The, the second is the new infrastructure bugs.

And I, I feel that not enough ai uh, security experts are staying up to speed on what is happening with Jailbreaks and all that. But the thing that keeps me up at night is, uh, about a year ago I had a conversation with Josh Corman about cyber infrastructure. And he, you know, he'll tell you stories about how easy it's to take out a city's water supply and how it may take three to four weeks to fix that water supply and how many people will die when that happens, and how, and, and if.

And so I started following some of a bunch of newsletters on this. Um, and like, if you've heard of Salt, typhoon and Vault Typhoon, right? These are real scary things.

And here's the nexus of why I'm having trouble sleeping, and I want to hear Chris and Tracy's ideas on this is also in these same sources that I've been following in the last three or four weeks. I'm watching government agencies tell me how CSA and, and NIST and the people who are really been the, the stuff that was going on in system. Now, Jo Josh worked there.

They, I, I think they've been tracking things like salt, typhoon, and vault, these real, um, nation state cyber groups that are literally looking to disrupt our telcos, our water supply, our electricity grids, and the people that were doing the most serious work, according to what I've led. And, and also what Josh has confirmed to me are all getting axed right now. And so, probably at the height, and then you take that deep seek moment three weeks ago, you'd throw that all together, and we are letting our guard down at 11, I feel, and I'm scared that we're letting our guard down at the worst possible time to let our guard down.

I completely agree with that. I do. We are so letting our guard down.

Um, I mean, maybe we need to remind, um, our government why we need to do this. And you know, that article pointed out that one of the areas of, of, of their favorite attack are edge devices. Okay?

Let's think about our military. Our military in the field, boots on the ground. They all, everything is based on an edge device.

Everything that we do, walkie talk, everything is an edge device in the field. They don't have a local, you know, cloud that they're, they're working from. So, I, I really do have a belief that we, we believe, we a community believe that we have solved most of the, the problems with security.

We have SaaS testing, we have das testing, we have PIN testing, but we don't do anything on edge devices to be quite honest. We might do SaaS before we deliver or anything on embedded, but once it's out there and a vulnerability hits, it's hard to up update those devices. So maybe we can ask our, our, our new government that, you know, they created Space Force, maybe it's time to create cyberforce that's part of the DOD that can focus on this, because that's where we are most exposed when it comes to our military.

We're talking satellites. We have satellites now that are, uh, that are software driven satellites that they could take over those and make 'em crash into each other and destroy our, our entire GPS system. But I don't know if the, uh, I, you know, I know that there are really good people in the DOD that are thinking about this, but I do believe that NIST and CSA were the, were the, were was who was really focused on it.

And maybe we just have to shift where the focus is and make it a, a military issue as opposed to a general cybersecurity issue for enterprises as well as government. So we have to set their hair on fire somehow in order to make this happen. And there on jailbreaks.

Okay? I've never thought about playing on any of these tools that I hear, but one came up last night that we, uh, we discovered Steve Taylor, it, I don't know how he found it, but he said, Hey, there's a new Jo Jailbreak called Indiana Jones, and it will allow you to prompt, you know, a LLM, take a chat GPT, and it will help you prompt it so you can find all the back doors. Now, I wanted to go find it and start playing on it immediately.

And that's terrible. That's a terrible thought that, you know, somebody like myself and security wants to say, oh, I wanna learn to do that. Let's see if we could get into a backdoor.

So these, these, you know, these cyber, uh, as a service, uh, uh, tools are a real threat, and they're going to cause young people to wanna play on 'em. And it's just gonna create a whole new brand of cyber criminals that we don't even know we're doing it because it looked like a fun tool to play on, right? Indiana Jones, what, what better name for it?

So, so curiosity still kills that cat, right? Is that what you're, So, so, you know, let me first endorse the cyberforce. I think that's actually literally correct.

I think the DOD we, you know, a Cyberforce military, uh, focus and and structuring process would be a great idea. And look, this is a high consequence, high risk, high likelihood time. You know, there's a lot of moving pieces as you know, as has been said already in the last couple of minutes.

Um, I don't think there's a lot of fans of the policies being enacted on our behalf for the nation at the moment. You know, there's a lot of, you know, risky moves at the very least, if not stupid moves, um, you know, increasing all the risk. Um, but as we're talking about in the green room, right?

You know, you know, so Tracy and, and John, you know, we're all boaters, you know, and so are you, Alan, right? And you're out on the water with your boat, and the thing happens, motor blows up, you know, you know, we have pon, we all have pontoon boats, you know, so you lose a pontoon, and that's nothing good about that. However, you're out on the water.

What are you gonna do? And having, you know, both lived through the time I have and worked in this, in this, uh, industry to, to the time I have, I've been through a lot of similar eras, right? You know, from the Cold War now, right?

You know, this is, like I say, every individual, you know, there, history does not repeat. It rhymes. This situation rhymes with other stupid times you've been in.

There's a lot of stupid stuff going on that has huge risk. However, right? You know, there will, there will be a morning after, you know, something will be here 30 years from now and 50 years from now.

And a lot of these issues will have been solved by definition, because they can't continue to go at this rate. We cannot continue to function with a John Deere point, right? I've watched from zero the development of what we see called DHS and cisa, and, and all these, you know, federal government functions.

It didn't use to exist. The risks were basically the same. You know, the, the ability to exploit those risks wasn't so high.

Um, and now they're kind of going away, but not entirely. And I, you know, Josh has a meeting experience, you know, huge respect. You know, I'm, you know, I'm the more optimistic of the two of us.

You know, I think things will continue to happen inside the beltway that aren't completely stupid, and there's certain momentum going forward. One, I I wanna, if you finish, I wanna point out that he is more aligned with what you're saying and actually made me feel better. In fact, one response, very similar to the response, just, just not play him as he's, he's really, he's actually, I'm more pessimistic than he is.

And he sounded more like you. But anyway, well, You know, 20 19, 20 20 when I first, you know, took a really hard look at the presidential orders about supply chain across the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and now Trump administrations, they all, with very different ideologies and approaches. They actually form a a very coherent line because the, you know, different reasons for doing, doing similar things.

But when you turn to people who do this stuff for a living and say, what can we do in supply chain for whether to secure it or punish some other country? Here are your options, right? And that institutional memory and momentum, you know, moves forward even in times of chaos.

Alright? Keeping with that boning metaphor, I am reminded, however, and maybe I'm showing my age here, of the Poseidon Adventure, and the theme song for the Poseidon Adventure was a song called The Morning After The Ship Sink. Yes.

That also happens. Yes. And sometimes the ship does sink.

And, and as a result, we learned to build better ships or iceberg detection. But in any event, guys, we're about outta time. What a great way to kick off our week here on Text on Gang.

We've got a full day of text on TV following this, so don't go anywhere if you're watching this as part of the text on TV stream. Um, we're gonna be doing some interesting things with Textron Gang coming up, and, uh, we'll get back to that. But until then, John, Chris, Tracy, Mike, thanks for joining in.

Thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more. You've just watched Textron Gang.

We're outta here. The six five is back, and we are back from Davos, Switzerland. This is our first podcast that we're doing here.

It's great to be back, Dan. And boy, we talked a lot of AI when we were out there. Uh, a lot of the discussions, right, were, were the, the, the, the one two punch, and that was, okay, we wanna bring this AI in, but we wanna make sure it's resilient.

We wanna make sure it's safe. And that even carries through, uh, with client computing. Yeah, it absolutely does.

And you know, companies right now, they're trying to find the efficiencies. They're trying to find the productivity, they're trying to find the reliability. They're trying to find the security.

You know, they're really tying threads together. Pat, I talk a lot about A-I-R-O-I and that being a big part of the year, but look, the blocking and tackling the core ability for your workforce to be productive is massive. And taking it out to the edge, bringing it on device, pat, uh, do not be mistaken.

Everyone. Client is a big thing. It's important, and it's really where a lot of the work gets done.

Yeah, it's, it, it's amazing. Uh, things like resiliency and, and security, uh, get a lot of lip service sometimes when it comes to the forefront, is when there are, are outages, but there are technologies to limit your risks in, increase your resiliency. And I can't imagine a better person to have this conversation with than Veen from Intel.

Veen, great to see you. Great to be back. No, it's great to have you on the show.

I mean, as Pat and I were kind of saying in the preamble, I mean, there's not a topic right now that's more front and center than ai, but of course it just, that, it's like, that requires so many different partitions, right? Of what AI is and where it takes place and how it works. And, you know, something we got to spend some time about when we were actually with you in Santa Clara doing a series of six, five videos about a I PCs was, we spent a lot of time talking about the management.

I remember that was around the time that there was that massive outage with CrowdStrike, and there was, you know, some significant, uh, determinations of kind of how to blame, how to fault, how to fix, what to do and go forward. We had some great conversations. And so, you know, I want to, you know, pivot Pat, if you both are okay.

And talk a little bit about vPro with you. Talk a little bit about this topic, because frankly, it's refreshing to talk a little bit about more, more about something other than just ai. But like, you know, the refresh, for instance, is a hot topic.

The A IPC is driving part of it. Um, you know, how do you see the ability for organizations to kind of balance the, the forging ahead with the most advanced AI enabled tools, but also ensuring that some of those core manageability and functionality tools are still being put into place to optimize performance? Yeah, Absolutely.

So similar to, uh, when we talked last time, you know, when you think about AI coming into the, uh, enterprise, there's things like content creation and productivity, but really we're, we're focused on what it means for it as well, right? Um, and for it, you can kind of split it in a few different ways. One is around intelligence on the PC delivering this predictive proactive style PC where it's not it reacting to issues, but rather being more proactive and, and, uh, highlighting what is going on on the PC and taking action to remediate it.

And we've seen progress even since last time we talked. Um, you know, we've been working with, uh, Lakeside who is in the digital employee experience space. And you know, they, they just, uh, announced at CS with us around optimizing for that AI PC hardware that we're delivering into the market.

And so what customers are gonna be able to see is AI and intelligence on the PC driven in a efficient way that gives employees a better experience and then delivers cost savings for it. And that's in the, I would say, more insight space, but as we'll, we'll probably talk a little bit more about today when we think about like, remediation, you know, that's like the meat and potatoes of what you need to be able to deliver, uh, in your enterprise. And so that's, that's the, the, the heart of vPro, if you will, in that vPro manageability space where you can get your devices back up and running in a matter of minutes.

And so, when we think about the outage from, uh, from a few months ago, you know, many, many customers of vPro were able to get back up and running in a matter of minutes, uh, because they could reach those devices regardless of where they are in the world. And OS was down, get a patch back up and running, you know, so it's pretty amazing. So let's do a double, let's do a drill down, uh, on that.

You know, we pointed out, you know, you had Delta big disruptions. American seemed to recover a lot faster, uh, as in like, not weeks, but um, hours. And, you know, I do my best research, uh, on social media platforms.

That's a joke. Uh, but my snarky comment that I had with immediately within minutes of seeing this is, okay, it's either old PCs, uh, or old or new PCs that, that they didn't turn on, uh, certain features or they bought brands of PCs that didn't have features where you could do, uh, a fast rollback, right? Or if you put, you know, something got corrupted in the bios, you could update that.

But, but I'm curious, let's get a little bit more specific. How exactly does vPro, uh, assist? And, and I feel I, I know that you've made it easier, uh, as well because there's a lot of organizations who buy it, uh, and some, some don't turn it on.

That's right. Yeah. So with vPro, um, and baked into the hardware, we give customers the ability to, to reach that device regardless of the OS state.

So that means, you know, say you can't boot into Windows, what are you gonna do? Right? Um, and you're either gonna go hunt that device down and manually go in and, and take action.

That's not efficient, right? Um, and largely, uh, a lot of folks, uh, dealing with the outage from a few months ago had to do that, and it's in incredibly painful. Uh, but with vPro, what you end up doing is using, you know, the software either directly from Intel or from, um, your UEM provider, getting direct access to vPro on your own terms, right?

You, you go in and activate it and you, you control that flow. Uh, but what it gives you the ability to do is do remote KVM, um, at a hardware level, so you can frankly go into bios if you wanted, um, or recovery mode, uh, remotely. So, um, in that outage scenario where you couldn't boot into the os, uh, folks were going into recovery mode remotely, um, because that device is in constant connection with, uh, um, with the software.

So it was fantastic to see those, uh, customers who have vPro and have turned on the management capability, get right in there, get those devices back up and running, um, and like we said in a matter of minutes, uh, versus sending somebody out there touching every single device in your fleet trying to get it back up and running, We're gonna, we're gonna drill on that in a minute. Naveen, pat, all I could think about when you were asking the question, talking about the airlines, was you and I standing in line in Zurich when we were leaving Davos, and we were trying to, you know, head home and watching this, them trying to turn these terminals on and check people in, and it was like eight people in two hours to check in. I mean, it was just incredible.

And all, you know, you think about, you know, sometimes how, uh, much this equipment ages out and how poorly it's managed at times. And then, you know, the risk, and it's just, to me, I mean, I think we were trying to do the, the math Novem, but I mean, it, it had to be a eight to nine figure difference between American and Delta, both near and long term. Because the thing is, is like you can kind of equate the loss of having be the time you were down and the refunds you had to give, which you can't, uh, immediately equate is the actual cost of customer that just absolutely was fed up with the situation, uh, employees that took abuse that decided to leave and not come back.

And all of this could have been fixed with a simple manageability tool, which, you know, just absolutely blows my mind. So, you know, that's one use case, but there's obviously a lot of less severe use cases where just having vPro can deal with basic things like intrusion, detections and risk managements, and of course, optimization of, of the user. You can drive ROI you can drive cost savings.

You know, you've been looking at this more holistically. What do you see typically when it comes to the value that this tool implementation can create? Yeah, typically what we see, um, is around a two XROI, uh, on, on their investment, which is fantastic, right?

I mean, because you're gonna buy, uh, a PC for your employees anyways, right? So the incremental adder, um, you know, buying a a, a vPro system, you're gonna recoup. Um, and, and that incremental investment, like I said, you see a two extra turn on it, not just because, you know, it essentially protects you out of a global outage like we've been talking about.

But on your day to day, um, you know, uh, environment, you have employees that run into issues, corruption that may not be triggered by a global outage, you still need to be able to step in and remediate those PCs. And the alternative is productivity loss or setting a device back in, or, you know, um, you're going into a IT shop to try to fix it, give 'em a loaner device. None of that is frankly a good employee experience, let alone the cost of trying to ship a device back in and, and get a new device back out.

Um, and so we give, uh, our customers ability to really just get in there, remediate as fast as possible, and get employees back up and running. Uh, it's interesting, we talk about, you know, that global outage, we've seen, uh, estimates of, you know, $5 billion plus, uh, uh, you know, in terms of business losses. Those are direct business losses, let alone productivity loss and things like that.

So when you think about making, um, the choice around what, what PCs you're issuing, um, it's that holistic picture, the day-to-day, you know, how do you get people back up and running, and then the, the assurance that you can deal with a significant outage, um, and get your business back up and running. So that's, that's, uh, what we end up, um, discussing a lot with our customers. Um, and, and that's where they see the value.

So we talked a lot about, uh, airlines and maybe, uh, I forced that in, uh, with the Davos conversation here, but, um, and all the trains, planes and automobiles, uh, we're having. But I, I would suppose that the applicability of vPro is not just for aviation, it, it's for other industries. Maybe, uh, any place that you see an industrial pc, uh, is a, uh, used by, uh, back office, uh, back office workers, seems like there would be some applicability.

Uh, do you have a lot of customers in other industries? Yeah, I mean, we see it all across the board, but I'll give you a specific example. You know, um, back to that outage, I had, uh, a couple, um, hospital networks give me a call during that outage.

Like Naveen, I have to send a IT person into an operating room to get a, a PC backup. I mean, they've got the, the small form factor PCs plugged into a screen, right? Um, they're, they were having to send it folks into operating rooms to get those backup and running.

So I mean, you never want that to happen, right? Not when I'm getting surgery done. Yeah, that's for sure.

For my family members. Exactly. So my point there is, uh, you, you see a lot of this, it's not just employees that are dealing with, um, with some of these pains.

It's, it's across the board. I mean, there's PCs in every nook and cranny of a, of a, um, company. And so you gotta ensure that you can reach those devices, um, and remediate whatever issue might happen.

And again, it, it doesn't have to be a global outage, right? If that operating room, uh, PC goes down, do you still wanna send an IT person out there to go fix it or, uh, remediate it remotely? Um, and so it, the applicability is across the board, but, you know, just to highlight a, a, a real world example, um, and the in the hospital network, So Navin, you know, our team is, uh, collectively working on some research that's trying to do a little bit more hypothetical evaluation of what's going on here, customer use cases, um, as well as kind of real, the real consequences, everything we've already talked about throughout this conversation.

Um, you know, you've, you've been involved and been interacting throughout this process. Curious, kind of, what are some of the insights that, that you found most interesting, and what are some of the implications that you're really focused on in terms of how this can help communicate better going forward to get more people to, to work with Intel and with vPro? Yeah, the one thing that we've heard loud and clear is the simplicity of what customers are asking for.

You know, you rewind, um, you know, let's say five years ago to get this remediation capability. Um, it was frankly a, a a difficult process for it, right? Setting up servers and, uh, installing, uh, software in order to gain access to the out-of-band capability today, right?

We've, we've invested so much in modernizing vPro and making it, uh, cloud connected that, uh, you know, we've, we've looked to make it as simple as possible. Um, and one of the things that we just announced, uh, a couple weeks ago is, um, called vPro Fleet Services. com, log in and, uh, activate vPro manageability, and then, uh, gain access to their power control and remote KVM directly from, uh, that console.

So we, we try to make it as simple as possible. My, my challenge to the team was I wanna see my 8-year-old be able to pull up the site and, uh, and be able to activate vPro and then click the button to get, um, remote KBM. And we've done that.

Uh, and so we've really been investing in making sure that, uh, vPro is simple to deploy, simple to use, uh, so that everybody is taking advantage of the manageability capability. So you're gonna see a lot more, uh, from us in this space to ensure that it's dead simple to use, um, because, um, you know, our customers say they, they're, they need the Outand capability. They just need a simple way to get access to it.

Well, Naveen, I, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time and going through all this with us. We see this as a very important trend. We know that the inflection around the next generation of ai, PCs and copilot PCs is going to bring a wave of enthusiasm as software continues to proliferate.

Um, we want thinner, we want lighter, we want faster, and of course we want more manageable. Um, right? And I think sometimes that, that last part maybe gets missed.

And hopefully everybody that's out there listening to us right now and, and, and joining in this conversation, reading Patrick and my commentary, reading the collective commentaries from our firms, um, really understands this. And the fact is that there's 7, 8, 9 figure risks that go with large fleets and deployments, because really keeping systems up and running is a much bigger deal than just access to your pc. So Naveen, let's do this again sometime soon.

Thanks so much for joining the six five. Uh, it was great to see you. Yeah, great to see you guys again.

And thank you everybody for tuning into this episode of this six five, this special webcast brought to you in partnership with Intel. We appreciate everybody tuning in, being part of our community, subscribe, join us for all of the great content here on the six five. We gotta say goodbye for now, but we'll see you all really soon.

Bye-bye. Hey, everyone, welcome to our Predict 2025 virtual event. If you've watched any of this, any of the sessions so far, you know, we've got an amazing, amazing lineup of some very, very smart people who are giving us their best guesses, their best feelings about what are the big stories in 2025, what will the big stories be in areas like DevOps and cyber and Cloud Native and AI and ITSM, um, technology in general.

And it, so speaking of smart people, let me introduce you to one of my FU group partners. Uh, he's also well known as the founder, CEO of Tech Field Day, which is another business unit within fu and we work pretty closely together. I've struck up a great relationship with Stephen in a relatively short time.

I wanna introduce you to Stephen Fst, CEO, founder of Tech Field Day, part of Futur Room Group. Stephen, welcome to Predict 2025. It's great to have you here.

Well, it's great to be part of Predict 2025. I, I hope I don't have egg on my face at the end of the year. Well, if you pay us enough, we don't replay this at the end of the year.

If you don't, we do. And then I hope your predictions were, were good. Um, but seriously, Steven, 2024 was a, in many ways, a watershed year, not just in technology, mind you, world event civilization, uh, technology obviously, but things like climate and, and all sustainability.

And there've been so many things on our wars and peace and so many things on the horizon, but it was certainly quite a year in technology. And if there was a technology of the year, it would obviously have to be ai. So it's easy to say 2024 was the year of ai, but as we sit here now, you know, on the cusp of 2025 already in the beginning of first weeks of 2025, is AI the 2025 story, and if so, what, what, what aspects of it do you think?

Yeah, I actually think that 2025 is gonna be the year of AI and not 2024. Um, even though AI was very much in the news and in the public consciousness in 2024, from an enterprise IT perspective, I think 2025 is the year that all this stuff gets real. I expect companies to be deploying custom models right and left, and not just chatbots that pop up annoyingly in the corner of the screen when you're trying to use their website, but actually useful AI applications.

I'm really excited about seeing what happens with agentic ai, um, basically AI agents that talk to each other and have, uh, private, uh, AI to AI conversations on your behalf. And I'm also really excited to see what's going to become of, uh, the transition from focusing on AI as the domain of a few large companies with incredible resources who are developing these foundational models to the, the world of, uh, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 2000, uh, de developing their own FiNet tuned models, uh, developing their own custom applications built off of AI and broadening beyond the chat and LLM space. Absolutely.

I, I think in many ways we may look back and say 2024 might have been a gen, uh, next, next agent, excuse me, generative AI 2023 was too, for that matter, 2025 is where agentic AI really, you know, rubber meets the road. Um, Steven, you made a good point. Enterprises usually are slow, slow to change budgets, slow to adopt new things.

They may dabble, if you will, but to really jump in with both feet, it, it takes them longer, but, you know, once they jump in, they jump in and it, that, it's like the inertia of moving that big ship. When do you think, I mean, are we, are we looking at the end of 2025 for this, or do you think we'll start seeing things let's say by the spring? I think, I think it's gonna start happening pretty quickly.

Um, I'm seeing some really incredible products, uh, coming to market that are essentially AI platforms for the enterprise. And a lot of the companies that had been previously focused on, for example, process business process automation or on, uh, CRM, are building AI platforms that, you know, if you squint a little bit, you could say this is an agentic AI platform. Now, I'm not sure that, uh, term specifically is going to take hold forever, but you know, if you, if you kind of step back and think it, AI agents that are deployed to perform business functions autonomously in the background, uh, those are coming from basically everybody in the space.

I mean, certainly the, the, the biggest one is Salesforce, and they have done incredible work to bring AI to their platform. But essentially every enterprise platform now is building out the, the capability for enterprises to deploy AI that actually does business things. And again, that, that's what I wanna get back to.

We're not just talking about LLMs that are generating text or, you know, apple image playground. We're talking about having a special purpose AI agent that does a thing on your behalf. And one of the ones I think that's gonna come first is normalizing data.

Essentially. I have a strange input of data sets. You know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a lawyer's office and I'm dealing with all this paperwork and forms and stuff, or we're in the medical space and we're dealing with all sorts of doctor notes and reports and so on.

And what we need is we need to normalize all that and structure it and build it a, a data system, a data solution out of that. All of that can make use of ai, uh, models that exist today. And I'm seeing more and more companies that are developing the models that are going to make that happen in the enterprise.

And many of these are basically ready to go and, and, and in, in fact, a lot of them are already getting deployed. So I think that we are gonna start seeing AI agents doing data processing on behalf of companies well, basically now. Excellent.

You know, one of the things that scares me though, Steve, is we hear so much about big tech, big tech, right? Are they a monopoly? And, you know, given the current, are they incoming administration and, and governments around the world, uh, what kind of appetite is there to keep this curb, to keep, keep, you know, a few companies from dominating the, the marketplace?

And, and I think this is true in ai, where you see, you know, the hyperscalers who have put their money where their mouth is, and they're investing billions of dollars in, into, you know, some of the leading AI companies. And is that really, is that raising such a barrier of entry that we're not gonna see sort of a Cambrian explosion, if you will, of AI companies and AI solutions because you're gonna need to be one of the, one of the big boys to play in this game? Well, I can see how it might seem that way, especially with the level of investment that's gone into companies like Open ai, uh, anthropic, uh, a lot of these, uh, hyperscalers building their own models.

But I think that it's gonna be very different than that. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that ultimately companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are gonna have to pivot their bo their model away from focusing on building ever bigger foundational models and toward building, uh, the capability of fine tuning those models to special applications. We've already seen Meta's investments in Lama, uh, kicking off really a Cambrian explosion of AI capabilities from companies that never would've invested the kind of money needed to train the foundational model.

But the fact that those models are available to them and open to them licensing wise, they're able to use those models to do things that they could not have done. That's gonna happen way beyond meta, way beyond llama. And again, I think that's gonna be a big trend in 2025.

We're gonna be talking about all the incredible models that we can download and use that we don't have to invest in at all. Uh, you know, I use the whisper model from OpenAI every single day on my desktop Mac. And, um, it is just an incredible capability for me to have more incredible is the fact that I paid this $0 to use that.

Essentially I have a capability that I never would've had. And that's, I think, what we're gonna see across the space. If you look at hugging face, if you look at the open models that people are able to download and put into process and use, it really shows that that core development of foundational models.

I don't wanna ascribe some sort of, um, uh, OI don't know, uh, generous generosity to these, uh, to these big companies because clearly they intend to some, to, to use their foundational models to somehow corner the market for ai. But at the same time, this whole, um, mindset of openness and open source, open weight, um, the, the, the way that the internet is now, much of this stuff is being given away for free in a way that is causing an explosion of availability, an explosion of interest and explosion of models. And I think that that really is going to lead to AI just infiltrating every portion of modern business in a way that doesn't actually put AI from open AI or philanthropic or Xai or one of these companies in the center of, of, of it.

And in fact, almost sidelines them because all the interesting stuff is happening on hugging space, hugging face. Agreed. And, you know, the old, you know, the old adage, nothing, nothing is free in life, right?

And, and they all come with a cost. Well, somebody had a, to develop those models. I'm glad they did.

Uh mm-hmm. I'm also glad that we don't need to pay billions of dollars back for it. Absolutely.

But they will, they'll get their pound of flesh one way or the other, Steven, typical tech industry stuff before we even digest what's on our plate right now, we're already looking at what's next. Right? And I've heard a lot recently over what they're calling physical ai, right?

Jensen Long was out at CES, uh, last week, and, you know, they, they brought out the robots, the march of the wooden soldiers, the robots came marching out, and some people are calling that now, not robotic ai, but physical AI and that self-driving cars and vehicles and planes and Jones and all of this stuff. Do you think that's a 2025 story, or we're just out ahead over our skis on that? I think that's more of a 20, 28, 20 30 type story, um, really That far out.

Yeah. I I think it's gonna take quite a bit of, of development because essentially, if you think about it this way, what was the, the capability that made LLMs work, essentially it was that they were able to study the relationship between words to such an extent that maybe there's emergent behavior in terms of, uh, quote understanding of, of concepts, of written concepts. But if you look at the generative video, uh, that everyone was going nuts about in 2024, let's terrible, uh, there's no concept of real world physics, et cetera.

It looks beautiful, but the problem is, it, it, it lacks any kind of coherent, um, framework that that matches the real world. What, uh, Nvidia, what what Jensen was talking about on stage at CES, what it made a lot of sense that we need to build a, a model of the real world. We need to build a digital twin of physics in order to have things like physical concepts, gravity, inertia, uh, permanence of, um, dimensions and, and, and things like that.

All of those things need to be developed in, in a new way so that we can then develop systems that can simulate activities in that real world, and then we can apply them to the real world. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money, it's a lot of investment. I, um, suspect that Nvidia is signaling that they stand ready to help fund the development of that and help support the development of that through their hardware and software efforts.

But that's something I think that we're gonna see, uh, the next generation of, of AI giants working on basically building a, uh, a virtual world that is comprehensible to a different kind of AI model, as you said, like a physical AI model. So that they can then, uh, do things, avoid doing things like the, um, the bicycle that morphs from, from front to back to back to front, or the, uh, you know, the, the, the people that, um, have grow magical extra arms or something while they're, while they're walking through space, so that AI will kind of know that that's not possible in the physical world. And only then will we be able to take AI and apply it to physical machines in the real world and have it successfully navigate those machines.

And if, if this sounds like, uh, bad news for, um, autonomous driving and applications like that, I think it is, I think that it's gonna be a while before we are able to have AI acting in, in real space. Absolutely. Steven, I want to turn around a little bit here, or not turn around, but pivot a little bit.

Um, well turn around is sort of pivot, but we could talk about that in another show. Uh, you know, AI was certainly a bright spot in the tech horizon for 2024, but a lot of our colleagues, people, you and I both know, good people were laid off in 2024. We saw companies being sold for way, way below, you know, market cap, uh, capitalizations of monies they had raised.

We, you know, we, we saw consolidation, you know, not, not the general oh, UPIA, you know, kinda liquidity event, but hey, we had to do something. Um, when we look at the story of 2025, do we, do we get back to a more normal or is this the new normal? Are are happy days here again?

What, what's your outlook on the tech industry for 2025? Steven? I, I think the tech industry has been dramatically disrupted.

Um, the pandemic certainly had a huge, um, impact on the tech industry, mainly in terms of the sort of energy and vibrance of conventional, uh, data center IT companies. Uh, I think a lot of them really found themselves, uh, you know, parked on the side of the road while smaller, more nimble, cloud focused, cloud first companies, remote first companies, uh, leaped ahead of them. At the same time.

We, we've talked about how AI has disrupted the, the market. Every company is turning toward ai. It's, it's really funny for me to talk to companies that I've known for a decade in networking or storage or security and having them say, no, no, no, we're an AI company now we're a hundred percent in on ai.

Some of them, um, have, and even, you know, Rene, their products or, or completely changed their focus to be absolutely, we're an AI company. That's it, that's our bet, because that's where the money is. Who can blame them?

I do think that, uh, everything has changed and it's not going to get back to normal, especially for those companies that really were asleep at the wheel for the last couple of years. Um, if, if you were, uh, willing to go out there and invest and try to build, uh, sales and build market, uh, you could absolutely succeed as a conventional enterprise IT company. But some of them absolutely didn't.

I think some of them really, they had no product announcements. They had no, uh, marketing exercises. They had no, uh, public presence in the last couple of years.

Uh, those companies I don't think are ever gonna find their footing again because Amazon and Google and others are just waiting eagerly to eat their lunch. So we are in a really strange position now where companies have laid off people. In fact, some companies have laid off some very good people, either because the company itself is suffering because it can't seem to find its footing in the market, or because there's been a big acquisition as of course, the case with, uh, VMware by Broadcom, or because they simply got left behind as, uh, all the attention and energy and investment dollars turned to ai.

But I think that there's a bright spot, which is, uh, we are still seeing companies that having success, companies selling products into the market, uh, the ones who remained focused, the ones who, who saw a market for their products. Um, you know, for example, in the edge space, there's a lot of companies that are growing rapidly and, and selling a lot. Um, there's even hardware companies.

Uh, you know, one of the most exciting companies we saw this year, oxide computer, uh, a big old fashioned hardware company. I love it. It's so much fun to see it.

Why are they successful and others aren't? Well, for, for, for one, they're a startup. And, uh, a few sales can make a big difference to a startup, but also because they are energetic and they're committed to the market and they see a need and they're trying to build a product that meets that need.

You know, the old fashioned stuff that people used to do before they were just chasing, uh, VC dollars. So I think that there is the opportunity for startups, for established companies, even some of the biggest companies to be successful in 2025 and beyond. But, uh, frankly, if you've been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years, you're not gonna wake up and find a good situation now.

So some of the sleeping giants, well, it's gonna be sad to see them go, but I think we're going to. Excellent. Steven, you mentioned a few times companies that you had seen this past year, and, and for many of them, that means they presented at one of your Tech Field day conferences, and you did, I forget how many, it was a couple of dozen tech field day, certainly in in 2024.

I'm gonna ask you now a little self-serving, but what do you see specifically for Tech Field Day in 2025? Give us a preview. Well, we're trying to do some different things with Field Day.

First off, uh, we're trying to work with this, uh, tech Strong group. If you've heard of them, uh, you know, they, they vaguely, they, uh, do a great job. Essentially, Textron is bringing a lot of the things that we've never been able to do with Field Day, uh, in terms of, of, of audience, in terms of demand gen, in terms of connecting the, uh, very, uh, high level, um, uh, or top of the funnel kind of, uh, activities that we do with Field Day, with the rest of the funnel, with the rest of the sales funnel.

And that, frankly, is, is just great for everybody involved because it means that the presentations that are from that happen at Field Day can then be connected in with, uh, you know, to, to help interested people learn more and connect with these, uh, with these companies. Another thing topically that we're doing is we're, um, looking at new spaces. Uh, you know, it rather than, you know, doing another com, another event focused on storage arrays or network switches or whatever, uh, we are going to be looking at new topic.

So for example, we have a proposal out for another data field day. We have a proposal out for a, uh, CRM field day. We have a proposal out for other topics that you might not have thought you'd see at, uh, tech Field Day events.

Um, but that's because frankly, there's a lot of really exciting technology. There's a lot of companies we haven't spoken with yet, and we're, um, interested in and now able, thanks to the help from the future, uh, team to address these spaces. So I'm pretty excited about where we're going in, in 2025.

Uh, we're doing a lot of different things. Uh, I, I love it when I get to go to a Field Day event, even behind the scenes, you know, I'm standing, uh, you know, behind the table instead of sitting at the table, but I'm able to learn something new. Um, I really enjoyed, uh, going to App Dev Field Day and seeing how modern applications are developed.

I really enjoyed going to a, my, a mainframe focused field day event and, and learning how things are doing, uh, you know, in that mainframe world. And, um, I'm really looking forward to being the one to, to stand there and learn about, uh, you know, process automation or CRM or AI or security. So that's really what's driving me in, uh, 2025, uh, with Field Day.

We're also doing a lot more stuff, uh, behind the scenes. So, uh, you know, I'm, I'm gonna be, uh, participating more in, in, in the Textron, um, uh, media activities. Uh, we are participating more in podcasts and so on, essentially to help spread the word about these things that we're learning.

So it's not enough for me to learn it. I wanna be able to help share what I'm learning in real time with the rest of the world. And, uh, Textron gives me that ability.

So it's, uh, it's a really great partnership. And same here. We're, we're excited with that.

So Steven, you know, my, my friend Brad Fels told me that 99% of what we do in tech is evolutionary, not revolutionary. And even with some of these fantasm kind of things we're talking about with AI and agentic AI and, and, and the physical ai, and, you know, we've spoken on text and gang about quantum coming down the pike and quantum computing and all of this. A lot of it is very evolutionary, right?

The, the whole idea of AI taking off seems sort of revolutionary. But when we look over the arc of the next, of the last two, three years going into the next two, three years, we, we see this evolution taking place. But if I had to ask you, Steven, what's the moonshot?

What's a potential moonshot in 2025 from a tech point of view? What, what might be, and, and granted they're long shots, by the very definition, they're moonshots. But if you had to, if you were a betting man, what, what are some that may be worthwhile throwing a couple dollars on?

I dunno about, I'm not gonna give you any advice to throw any dollars at anything. Um, okay. I, I'm famous for making poor decisions there, but, um, I'll say, uh, there are some really cool transformative things happening in this space.

Now. We're still waiting for quantum. Could quantum happen in 2025?

The answer is yes, will it? Probably not. We're waiting for a breakthrough there, and I think that that could be something that could surprise us.

Uh, another area that I am pretty excited about is the potential for, um, alternative energy sources. Um, I think that despite what it sounds like from Washington and from, um, Canada and Europe and, and the rest of the world, uh, I think the horse, as I've said many times from Textron Group, the horse is out of the barn as, as, as far as solar. And solar is increasing in, um, value per dollar to such an extent that we could see as soon as the end of 2025, uh, solar being suddenly transformative and, uh, massive investments going into farms and fields of solar to power data centers and things like that.

I could also see other alternative energy investment, uh, taking hold. Um, for example, you know, small nuclear reactors. SMR doesn't exist, it's just a concept.

But if some of these things can take hold, and they've, uh, attracted the attention of some serious investors and some serious companies, I could see a small modular nuclear reactor being rolled out by the end of the year and having that kick off a, uh, power revolution like we've never seen before. And if we just look at the technology in front of us, um, there's some really neat things and, and neat possibilities that could happen when we combine, um, IOT devices. Uh, when we have, um, low powered chips from arm, uh, maybe risk five, uh, maybe there'll be a rate breakthrough on a, on a risk five processor, uh, you know, maybe the Raspberry Pi Foundation, um, e even smaller than that.

If we look at, um, microcontrollers and what's happening in the ESP 32 market with, uh, MQTT and things like that, if you don't know what these things are, just Google them. They're very cool. And all of these things could kind of come together to transform everyday life for people.

Um, maybe the matter protocol takes off in, uh, home iot, maybe not, uh, um, maybe, you know, uh, we start seeing, uh, low powered, uh, thread routers in everybody's houses and in every, every appliance, uh, things like that can really be transformative and can kick off new industries as well. So we'll see what happens with all of this. And then one more thing on the energy side.

I am, I'm kicking myself for not mentioning it, battery technology. We are on the cusp of some really big breakthroughs in terms of making, uh, rechargeable battery systems that don't use, um, difficult rare earth that are solid state. Um, there are a lot of patents, there's a lot of companies working on it.

There's a lot of investment happening in that space. And I could absolutely see sometime in 2025 having a solid state, um, maybe an iron based battery or a sodium based battery. Absolutely, uh, seizing the, the news at a very low cost, um, very, you know, high safety, uh, low environmental impact, and that would really transform a lot of the stuff that I've talked about and a lot of the stuff that we look at every single day.

So, uh, there's a lot of exciting tech out there. You sound bullish on 2025, Steven. I am, I'm, you know, you, it's easy to, to be disappointed in, uh, in what's going on in the world right now.

But there's a lot of cool stuff and there's a lot of people working on neat things. And, uh, I'm excited to see where we go this year. Fantastic.

Hey, I want to thank you for coming on here and sharing with our audience here at Predict 2025, your outlook. You did not disappoint you. You gave, you gave people something to hang their hats on here, and I appreciate it, and I'm personally looking forward to working with you in 2025 and doing some great things.

Thank you very much for coming on here. Thank you for watching. Uh, by the way, if you're interested, you should go check out Tech Field Day.

Uh, they, they do do a lot of very cool, uh, events and, uh, if you want to get involved, it's, you can go on their website and check it out. Um, but for now, that's it. Steven, thank you for joining us.

We've got a full day of Predict 2025 here, including the announcement of the DevOps Dozen award winners. So stay tuned for that. Or for now, this is Alan Shemel, enjoy the rest of Predict 2025.

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong AI video series. I'm your host, Mike bor. Today we're with Andrew Wells, who's chief data and AI officer for N TT Data.

And we're talking about a report that they did that kind of shows that business people are, and tech leaders too, are a little uncertain about the future and the absence of AI regulations, and that's affecting their investment strategies. Andrew, you're welcome to the show. Great to be here, Mike.

And, uh, very interesting what our survey found. Yeah, I mean, well walk us through the high points, but you know, today we live in an era where everybody's running around saying, you know, we don't need regulations. And yet here we have business and IT leaders saying that in the absence of them, they're uncertain of essentially of how to proceed.

How do we, this is a bit of a quandary as far as I can tell. Yeah. You know, there's a dichotomy that exists with leaders that are wanting to drive a strong innovation agenda, but also wanna do it in a responsible manner.

And that tug of war, you know, exists, you know, and that gap between those two are, it's probably wider than it's ever been. The technology sit changing so fast, and you have this, you know, energy that's pushing you to wanna innovate and make sure that you continue your leadership position, or this is an opportunity to create a MOOC for your business, um, uh, by, uh, leveraging the technology change and doing a business process different. Uh, but, you know, you gotta do it in a responsible way as well.

And it's that chasm, it's that, uh, it's that, uh, gap in between those two that I think a lot of the leaders are struggling with. What is it that you guys are recommending folks do to navigate that? I mean, do I just kind of follow the, uh, most stringent rules I can find on the assumption that everything else will be fine somewhere else?

Or do I have different strategies for different geographies based on the regulations of the day? Yeah, boy, I think it's very bespoke and probably one of the reasons why regulations are challenging in this space, because it really depends on the type of company you are. You know, if you're, um, manufacturing heavy or you've got a heavy workforce, safety's a big issue.

And, um, you've gotta really be fairly pedantic and, um, you know, concerned about the approach you take with the level of automation you drive with Gen AI and Genix to make sure people are kept safe, but you still need to lean in the change and solve for while, how can this drive a better customer experience? And how could I leverage this technology to do things, um, maybe faster or less costly or drive product? What most people are finding is it's driving productivity into the system to allow people to do more or do things faster.

Do I kinda, as a business leader, am I worried about having to roll something back because I, from, once I roll it out, and then I'm worried about some regulation that might show up six months from now, and I don't have a lot of clarity into it. So does that make me a little more hesitant to invest in ai? Yeah, what we're finding is there's a lot of proof of concepts, but maybe one in 10, uh, are getting scaled into a production.

So, and that's for a variety of reasons. Some of them, it's, the technology's just not there yet, and there's not the efficacy around, um, the business case for rolling it out. But in some cases its impact.

It's what we are unsure of the impact to our workforce or our customers, uh, to be able to roll this out. So we are going to, um, we're gonna wait and gauge it a little bit more, maybe continue to evolve it, but not scale it yet. Am I anxious because I'm worried that somebody else may not wait, and then I'm gonna have a competitive disadvantage.

Because a lot of the times, uh, you know, you hear the phrase fomo if you're missing out. Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely think there's a lot of that.

I think maybe people are waiting for other people to move first before they roll something out or scale, although we're, we're not experiencing as much of that. But I do think, uh, people are racing to drive the innovation, um, but they're also trying to gauge, well, how do I best drive the innovation responsibly? And there's, you know, we sort of think about it in four dimensions.

One is leadership, and it needs to come from the top that as you innovate, you need to do it in a responsible manner. And that we need to, um, carry both, uh, the ethics and the, um, the policies of our market and our organization into the work we do. I think second for us is, you know, designed by responsibility in the things that you design and things that you develop.

Make sure that responsible responsibility is inherent in those designs. Third for us would be governance. You know, make sure you have multi-level governance in place.

So if there are things that are being designed or, um, that you release, you can walk in the back fairly quickly. And then last is probably workforce readiness. How are you upskilling your workforce to really take advantage of these tools and understand how to use them in the right way?

It seems like to me too, we haven't quite fully solved this whole hallucination issue. And, um, the models themselves are probabilistic, and that's a long fancy way of saying that they don't quite do the same thing the same way every time. Yeah.

Have a lot of business processes that are deterministic where they have to be done the same way every time, so mm-hmm. Is that a source of my, um, anxiety, because I'm not entirely sure what the outcome of these things is gonna be, even if it isn't malicious, it's gonna be different. Yeah, that's definitely a concern.

You know, especially when you think about genix and actions the models may take, um, as well as just analytics, you know, if you're looking to look at numbers that, um, you wanna make sure that the numbers it provides are accurate, it's, it's great. Right now for creativity, it's great. Now, right now for writing, um, we do find a lot of efficacy in it around some of the analytics, but you need to, there's, there's methods and approaches for making sure that you can get tighter, um, answers back from your models, either through leveraging some rag techniques or through, uh, developing smaller models or training models, um, on your specific data sets.

So it knows that, um, you know, it's got a tighter universe in terms of the answers it wants to provide, but it's, it's a challenge. And you've gotta make sure that either if it's something that involves a, an important and impactful decision that a human's in the loop, uh, and or that you are looking at, well, what, what are the implications of this? And then how am I managing risk around it?

So you put in plenty of safeguards, but it, it is a concern in the industry of where the models are now. The models are getting better though, and there are techniques you can, uh, deploy for driving accuracy. Is there anything in the report that kind of surprised you that you didn't think you'd see there?

Yeah, you know, I think the biggest one was the gap, uh, that we saw between, um, the two in terms of innovation and, uh, responsibility, uh, the, the, the tug of war of as well between executive leadership and then people that are implementing, uh, the technology sort of was another surprise. Executives are considerably more bullish on the technology than, um, maybe the people on the ground that are having to sort of stumble their way through it, because the technology is still very nascent. I think we find that most technology leaders or most leaders in organizations see the promise of the technology and what it could do to, uh, a particular process or a particular business, either, you know, creating a competitive differentiation for it, or driving revenue or saving cost.

But the people that are on the ground having to implement it are having to solve for, you know, a lot of the, um, uh, nascent stage of it. And there's a lot of bubble gum and, you know, uh, duct tape being used to sort of piece things together, as, you know, uh, people put together the solutions. But just like any big wave in technology at the very beginning, it is, it's a little messy as, uh, the market innovates, but eventually it tightens up and, um, you know, you get solutions that are more scalable and, um, uh, drive a, uh, broader range of capabilities.

If I do start implementing all these AI capabilities and agents, it's not clear to me how much transparency do I have to provide to my partners and customers, uh, about those agents because they are, um, shall we say, potentially inconsistent at the very least. So, do I need to disclose every time I'm using these AI agents, or how will that play out? I do think there's going, especially around a decision that impacts something related to a customer, I think you're gonna find yourself needing to disclose the decision process and the our techniques that you can use to determine, you know what, maybe it's the weightings inside of a model, or maybe it's the reasoning behind the decision that you will, you know, I'm sure regulation's gonna come out and say, you eventually need to disclose those.

So you need to build those into, into your solutions today to understand, based off of the decision at this time, what did the model look like? Or what were the weights that were used or tell, have the model tell you, well, why, what was the reasoning path behind it? So you can record those and make sure that you are, you know, being fair.

And, um, you know, as you think about risk management, risk mitigation, you can look back and see, okay, well, what was the model deciding? And then catch, even if it's in arrears where there may have been an issue, Ultimately, what are the business leaders supposed to do? I mean, am I quite literally gonna write my congressman and tell 'em to get their act together on regulations or, um, how will they make their voices heard?

Gosh, I'd be surprised if anyone raises their hand and says, regulate me. But I do think that, um, you know, if what we advise our clients to do is just make sure it's a principle responsible led approach, and that they are looking at how these decisions impact both their employees and their customers, and that they're putting in governance to that decision making process. So one, they can feel good that they're being responsible, and two, they can catch anything that is going on that may be because of a model hallucinating, or, you know, the fact that these technologies are new.

Do you think that the employees that work on these projects will be the source of that kind of observation and information? And maybe they, we all need to do a better job of listening to the folks in the front lines because, and sometimes, you know, there's several layers removed from execution and the managers who sign this thing. So, um, will we need to have a a a tighter loop of process re-engineering, I guess, between the employees at the front end and the execs at the back end?

Yeah, it's gonna get really interesting, especially as, you know, gen AI starts to do a lot of the automation tasks. You know, when it can, when you can tell Gen AI to go write a script for you and it does it, then how do you test it for its, um, you know, it being the script drives a responsible action. So, you know, my, my guess would be, and this is a guess, is that as these models get better at doing development, there's going to be models that are specifically created and reporting that specifically created to tease out, well, where could some issues lie or where do the issues lie?

So there will be safety checks that get put in place to make sure that, you know, the code that's written isn't nefarious or doesn't drive a bad action. But that's, it's a great challenge, and it's gonna be one of those that I think the market's gonna solve for. Well, I did scratch my head about that very thought.

'cause in theory, I could use AI models to track the governance and the safety of the other AI models, but then how do I track the safety of this AI models that I put in place to make sure the other ones are safe? Follow me? Yeah.

That's sort of what Anthropics doing. I mean, anthropics niche in the marketplace is we're responsible ai and we're teaching our model to be more ethical than other models. And it's a really interesting niche that they're, they're heading down.

So I do think it will exist. I do think that, that it has a place in the marketplace. It has a space in the marketplace, and someone's gonna close it all.

Right? Yeah. You could get in an infinite loop of is my AI corrupting my AI to get the AI to do something nefarious.

And, and if we got to that point and We, we'll have different sets of problems, then yeah. Yeah. Hey, folks, you heard in here.

Here's a thought. If it feels bad, it probably is. So you should take another look at it before you go and implement this thing and have a conversation about it.

Andrew, thanks for being on the share. Thanks, spike. All right.

And thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Techron AI video series. You can find this episode and others on our website. We invite you to check them all out.

Until then, we'll see you next time. I am Tiffany Bova, chief of strategy and research at the Futurum Group. With 2025 upon us, I'm reminded of one fundamental truth disruption weights for no one organization and leaders who can anticipate, adapt, and act quickly will thrive.

At the Futurum Group, we are focused on helping you decode the complexity of today's digital first world, so you can stay ahead of the curve. This year's predictions dive deep into the trends, reshaping industries from AI's pervasive influence across enterprise applications to seismic shifts in hardware, cloud, and customer experience. Our team of analysts, some of the brightest minds in research and strategy, have dissected the forces driving change, and outlined actionable insights for what's next.

Whether it's the rise of ag, agentic, AI disrupting software consumption, cloud marketplaces revolutionizing go-to-market strategies, or the accelerating impact of a IPCs on productivity, the message is clear. We are entering a new era where business agility, intelligence, and innovation are the ultimate differentiators. The insights shared in our prediction series are not just about spotting trends, but about preparing for transformation As customer expectations soar and the competition intensifies.

Companies that embrace change as an opportunity rather than a challenge, will set the pace for the next decade. I invite you to explore our predictions, listen to our analysts, share their insights, and download the report so you can reflect on how your organization can harness these shifts to drive growth, improve outcomes, and elevate experiences for customers and employees alike. Don't forget to download our Futurum 2025 prediction ebook, and we look forward to meeting the future head on together.

Hi, I'm Keith Kirkpatrick, research director, enterprise Applications for the Future Government Group. Today I'd like to talk to you about the market and offer a bold prediction that I have for 2025. Now, there's a lot going on in the enterprise application market.

Generative AI is predicted to deliver exponential productivity, efficiency, and accuracy, and in large measure has dominated nearly every buying conversation. Now, gene AI technology is being delivered either as an add-on feature at an additional cost, or as a fully integrated or embedded capability directly into business applications such as C-R-M-E-R, PCDB, and countless other line of business applications, though without a discreet additional charge on top of the base license. Now, how generative AI is actually being delivered to customers, it's largely dependent upon the individual vendor's technology stack and footprint.

Some vendors such as Oracle or Zoho, while they own the entire technology stack, including the data centers in compute, that will power AI model training, tuning, and inference test, all the way to the end user facing applications. Now, other vendors, they only own the application itself and they have to procure or cobble together compute resources, AI model, training and development, and other ancillary services to actually deliver real value to organizations. This latter group, there are significant concerns around balancing these costs and hard for delivering AI, while actually ensuring that they can deliver new innovations on a continuous basis, not just on a quarterly cadence, but on a continual basis to satisfy their customer's thirst for quickly utilizing new innovations.

Like prediction for 2025 is that we're gonna witness the in production and growing usage of new packaging and pricing models in terms of how software is actually delivered to the market. This will largely be based around the growing utilization of generative AI, copilots, or assistance AI agents and embedded AI technology. Now, if you'd like to learn more, please be sure to download our ebook future and research 2025 key issues and predictions.

Thanks, and we'll steer you throughout the year. Hello, I'm Krista Case Research director on the team here at the Futurum Group, and I'm here today to walk you through three of the key trends that we're going to be watching in the cybersecurity space. The first topic is the fact that AI is accelerating the race between attackers and defenders.

The second topic is the fact that attack surfaces are sprawling, and this is really creating the perfect storm. Number three is the fact that data protection is evolving into cyber resiliency. So let's look at the first topic.

AI is accelerating this race between attackers and defenders. The meteoric rise of deep seek so far this year in 2025 has really shown a limelight on the fact that attackers are not only using AI to kind of up their game, create more innovative and more efficient, you know, attack techniques, but at the same time, they're also targeting large language models and things of that nature to be able to do things like capture user, um, personal identifiable information and other things. The other flip side of this coin is how we're seeing enterprises use AI from a defensive perspective to try to, as much as they can, keep a step ahead of how attackers are evolving.

Their techniques speak a lot with practitioners, and they're really looking to their vendors to be able to make capabilities like detection of anomalous activity and to be able to identify, you know, potential breaches sooner, and also to be able to respond to them more quickly. So again, it's certainly something that just as attackers are not sleeping on, the opportunity for AI defenders certainly are not as well. The second topic, sprawling attack surfaces an explosion in the number of SaaS applications in use by the given enterprise.

For example, we have the rise of remote work and the myriad of devices that enterprises are accessing corporate data from. We have a growing number of iot devices and growing OT environments, for example, we also have supply chains that have become more sprawling than ever before. So as attackers have become more innovative in their approaches, the potential attack surface is also much more difficult for security practitioners to be able to get visibility into an established control.

Over our third topic, data protection evolving into cyber resiliency. This topic is very closely interweaved with our first two topics because it is naturally the data at the end of the day that attackers are targeting as it becomes more difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of attackers and prevent them from getting in. The precedence is placed on recovering data as quickly as possible and getting these critical business services back up and running.

So for data protection companies, what this means is it means baking in capabilities like that anomalous detection that we talked about of potentially nefarious activity, and then to be able to potentially take action like creating a snapshot as soon as that activity is detected and automatically uncovering the best recovery point. There's also a growing correlation between data protection vendors and incident response that we've seen both through partnerships and acquisition activity. So the takeaway from these three key trends is really that there's new technology requirements that really have been emerging over the last 18 to 24 months.

Buyers are evaluating all of the vendors that they're working with across the cybersecurity space, and they're really looking for ways to address these new threats, shore up their security posture and any potential goals, and to be able to mitigate any business impact if they are breached. So with that, I wanna thank you for joining me. Please make sure to also check out the video from Fernando Montenegro, our VP in this space, who's gonna be covering some other trends, um, that we're gonna be watching in cybersecurity this year.

And make sure to check out our ebook, um, for a discussion of all of the trends and topics across, um, the technology space that we're watching. Thank you so much again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. The six five is back, and we are back from Davos, Switzerland.

This is our first podcast that we're doing here. It's great to be back, Dan. And boy, we talked a lot of AI when we were out there.

Uh, a lot of the discussions right, were were the, the, the the one two punch, and that was, okay, we wanna bring this AI in, but we wanna make sure it's resilient. We wanna make sure it's safe. And that even carries through, uh, with client computing.

Yeah, it absolutely does. And you know, companies right now, they're trying to find the efficiencies. They're trying to find the productivity, they're trying to find the reliability, they're trying to find the security, you know, they're really tying threads together.

Pat, I talk a lot about ai, ROI and that being a big part of the year, but look, the blocking and tackling the core ability for your workforce to be productive is massive, and taking it out to the edge, bringing it on device pat, uh, do not be mistaken. Everyone. Client is a big thing.

It's important and it's really where a lot of the work gets done. Yeah, it, it, it's amazing. Uh, things like resiliency and and security, uh, get a lot of lip service sometimes when it comes to the forefront is when there are our outages, but there are technologies to limit your risks in, increase your resiliency, and I can't imagine a better person to have this conversation with than Veen from Intel.

Veen, great to see you. Great to be back. No, it's great to have you on the show.

I mean, as Pat and I were kind of saying in the preamble, I mean, there's not a topic right now that's more front and center than ai, but of course it just that, it's like that requires so many different partitions, right? Of what AI is and where it takes place and how it works. And, you know, something we got to spend some time about when we were actually with you in Santa Clara doing a series of six, five videos about AIP PCs, which we spent a lot of time talking about the management, I remember that was around the time that there was that massive outage with CrowdStrike and there was, you know, some significant, uh, determinations of kind of how to blame, how to fault, how to fix, what to do and go forward.

We had some great conversations. And so, you know, I want to, you know, pivot Pat if you both are okay. And talk a little bit about vPro with you.

Talk a little bit about this topic because frankly it's refreshing to talk a little bit about more, more about something other than just ai, but like, you know, the refresh for instance is a hot topic. The A IPC is driving part of it. Um, you know, how do you see the ability for organizations to kind of balance the, the forging ahead with the most advanced AI enabled tools, but also ensuring that some of those core manageability and functionality tools are still being put into place to optimize performance?

Yeah, absolutely. So similar to, uh, when we talked last time, you know, when you think about AI coming into the, uh, enterprise, there's things like content creation and productivity, but really we're, we're focused on what it means for it as well, right? Um, and for it, you can kind of split it in a few different ways.

One is around intelligence on the PC delivering this predictive proactive style PC where it's not it reacting to issues, but rather being more proactive and, and, uh, highlighting what is going on on the PC and taking action to remediate it. And we've seen progress even since last time we talked. Um, you know, we've been working with, uh, Lakeside who is in the digital employee experience space, and you know, they, they just, uh, announced at CS with us around optimizing for that AI PC hardware that we're delivering into the market.

And so what customers are gonna be able to see is AI and intelligence on the PC driven in a efficient way that gives employees a better experience and then delivers cost savings for it. And that's in the, I would say, more insight space, but as we'll, we'll probably talk a little bit more about today when we think about like remediation, you know, that's like the meat and potatoes of what you need to be able to deliver, uh, in your enterprise. And so that's, that's the, the, the heart of vPro, if you will, in that vPro manageability space where you can get your devices back up and running in a matter of minutes.

And so when we think about the outage from, uh, from a few months ago, you know, many, many customers of vPro were able to get back up and running in a matter of minutes, uh, because they could reach those devices regardless of where they are in the world. And OS was down, get it patched back up and running, you know, so it's pretty amazing. So let's do a double, let's do a drill down, uh, on that.

You know, we pointed out, you know, you had Delta big disruptions. American seemed to recover a lot faster, uh, as in like, not weeks, but um, hours. And you know, I do my best research, uh, on social media platforms, that's a joke.

Uh, but my snarky comment that I had wi immediately within minutes of seeing this is, okay, it's either old PCs, uh, or old or new PCs that, that they didn't turn on, uh, certain features or they bought brands of PCs that didn't have features where you could do a fast rollback, right? Or if you put, you know, something got corrupted in the bios, you could update that. But, but I'm curious, let's get a little bit more specific.

How exactly does vPro uh, assist? And, and I feel I I know that you've made it easier, uh, as well because there's a lot of organizations who buy it, uh, and some, some don't turn it on. That's right.

Yeah. So with vPro, um, and baked into the hardware, we give customers the ability to, to reach that device regardless of the OS state. So that means, you know, say you can't boot into Windows, what are you gonna do?

Right? Um, and you're either gonna go hunt that device down and manually go in and, and take action. That's not efficient, right?

Um, and largely, uh, a lot of folks, uh, dealing with the outage from a few months ago had to do that, and it's incredibly painful. Uh, but with vPro, what you end up doing is using, you know, the software either directly from Intel or from, um, your UEM provider, getting direct access to vPro on your own terms, right? You, you go in and activate it and you, you control that flow.

Uh, but what it gives you the ability to do is do remote KVM, um, at a hardware level so you can frankly go into bios if you wanted, um, or recovery mode, uh, remotely. So, um, in that outage scenario where you couldn't boot into the os, uh, folks were going into recovery mode remotely, um, because that device is in constant connection with, uh, um, with the software. So it was fantastic to see those, uh, customers who have vPro and have turned on the management capability, get right in there, get those devices back up and running, um, and like we said in a matter of minutes, uh, versus sending somebody out there touching every single device in your fleet trying to get it back up and running, We're gonna, we're gonna drill on that in a minute.

Naveen, pat, I, I could think about when you were asking the question, talking about the airlines, was you and I standing in line in Zurich when we were leaving Davos and we were trying to, you know, head home and watching this, them trying to turn these terminals on and check people in, and it was like eight people in two hours to check in. I mean, it was just incredible and all, you know, you think about, you know, sometimes how, uh, much this equipment ages out and how poorly it's managed at times. And then, you know, the risk, and it's just, to me, I mean, I think we were trying to do the, the math nove, but I mean, it, it had to be a eight to nine figure difference between American and Delta, both near and long term.

Because the thing is, is like you can kind of equate the loss of having the, the time you were down and the refunds you had to give. What you can't, uh, immediately equate is the actual cost of customer that just absolutely was fed up with the situation, uh, employees that took abuse that decide to leave and not come back. And all of this could have been fixed with a simple manageability tool, which, you know, just absolutely blows my mind.

So, you know, that's one use case, but there's obviously a lot of less severe use cases where just having vPro can deal with basic things like intrusion, detections and risk managements, and of course optimization of, of the user. It can drive ROI it can drive cost savings. You know, you've been looking at this more holistically.

What do you see typically when it comes to the value that this tool implementation can create? Yeah, typically what we see, um, is around a two XROI, uh, on, on their investment, which is fantastic, right? I mean, because you're gonna buy, uh, a PC for your employees anyways, right?

So the incremental adder, uh, you know, buying a a, a vPro system, you're gonna recoup. Um, and, and that incremental investment, like I said, you see a two extra turn on it, not just because, you know, it essentially protects you out of a global outage like we've been talking about. But on your day-to-day, um, you know, uh, environment, you have employees that run into issues, corruption that may not be triggered by a global outage, you still need to be able to step in and remediate those PCs.

And the alternative is productivity loss or setting a device back in, or, you know, um, you're going into a IT shop to try to fix it, give 'em a loaner device. None of that is frankly a good employee experience, let alone the cost of trying to ship a device back in and, and get a new device back out. Um, and so we give, uh, our customers ability to really just get in there, remediate as fast as possible, and get employees back up and running.

Uh, it's interesting, we talk about, you know, that global outage, we've seen, uh, estimates of, you know, $5 billion plus, uh, uh, you know, in terms of business loss. Those are direct business losses, let alone productivity loss and things like that. So when you think about making, um, the choice around what, what PCs you're issuing, uh, it's that holistic picture, the day-to-day, you know, how do you get people back up and running, and then the, the assurance that you can deal with a significant outage, um, and get your business back up and running.

So that's, that's, uh, what we end up, um, discussing a lot with our customers. Um, and, and that's where they see the value. So we talked a lot about, uh, airlines and maybe, uh, I forced that in, uh, with the Davos conversation here, but, um, and all the trains, planes and automobiles, uh, we were having, but I, I would suppose that the applicability of vPro is not just for aviation, it, it's for other industries.

Maybe, uh, any place that you see an industrial pc, uh, is a, uh, used by, uh, back office, uh, back office workers, seems like there would be some applicability. Uh, do you have a lot of customers in other industries? Yeah, I mean, we see it all across the board, but I'll give you a specific example.

You know, um, back to that outage I had, um, hospital networks give me a call during that outage. Like Naveen, I have to send a IT person into an operating room to get a a PC back. I mean, they've got the, the small form factor PCs plugged into a screen, right?

Um, they're, they were having to send it folks into operating rooms to get those back up and running. So I mean, you never want that to happen, right? Not when I'm getting surgery done, that's for sure.

For my family members. Exactly. So my point there is, uh, you see a lot of this, it's not just employees that are dealing with, um, with some of these pains.

It's, it's across the board. I mean, there's PCs in every nook and cranny of a, of a, um, company. And so you gotta ensure that you can reach those devices, um, and remediate whatever issue might happen.

And again, it, it doesn't have to be a global outage, right? If that operating room, uh, PC goes down, do you still wanna send an IT person out there to go fix it or, uh, remediate it remotely? Um, and so it, the applicability is across the board, but, you know, just to highlight on a, a, a real world example, um, in the, in the hospital network, So Naveen, you know, our team is, uh, collectively working on some research that's trying to do a little bit more hypothetical evaluation of what's going on here, customer use cases, um, as well as kind of real, the real consequences, everything we've already talked about throughout this conversation.

Um, you know, you've, you've been involved and been interacting throughout this process. Curious, kind of what are some of the insights that, that you found most interesting and what are some of the implications that you're really focused on in terms of how this can help communicate better going forward to get more people to, to work with Intel and with vPro? Yeah, the one thing that we've heard loud and clear is the simplicity of what customers are asking for.

You know, you rewind, um, you know, let's say five years ago to get this remediation capability. Um, it was frankly a, a a difficult process for it, right? Setting up servers and, uh, installing, uh, software in order to gain access to the out of band capability today, right?

We've, we've invested so much in modernizing vPro and making it, uh, cloud connected that, uh, you know, we've, we've looked to make it as simple as possible. Um, and one of the things that we just announced, uh, a couple weeks ago is, um, called vPro Fleet Services. com, log in and, uh, activate vPro manageability, and then, uh, gain access to their power control and remote KVM directly from, uh, that console.

So we, we try to make it as simple as possible. My, my challenge to the team was I wanna see my 8-year-old be able to pull up the site and, uh, and be able to activate vPro and then click the button to get, um, remote KBM. And we've done that.

Uh, and so we've really been investing in making sure that, uh, vPro is simple to deploy, simple to use, uh, so that everybody is taking advantage of the manageability capability. So you're gonna see a lot more, uh, from us in this space to ensure that it's dead simple to use. Um, 'cause, um, you know, our customers say they, they're, they need the out-of-band capability.

They just need a simple way to get access to it. Well, Naveen, I, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time and going through all this with us. We see this as a very important trend.

We know that the inflection around the next generation of ai, PCs and copilot PCs as going to bring a wave of enthusiasm as software continues to proliferate. Um, we want thinner, we want lighter, we want faster, and of course we want more manageable. Um, and I think sometimes that that last part maybe gets missed.

And hopefully everybody that's out there listening to us right now and, and, and joining in this conversation, reading Patrick and my commentary, reading the collective commentaries from our firms, um, really understands this. And the fact is that there's 7, 8, 9 figure risks that go with large fleets and deployments, because really keeping systems up and running is a much bigger deal than just access to your pc. So Naveen, let's do this again sometime soon.

Thanks so much for joining the six five. Uh, it was great to see you. Yeah, great to see you guys again.

And thank you everybody for tuning into this episode of the six five, this special webcast brought to you in partnership with Intel. We appreciate everybody tuning in, being part of our community. Subscribe, join us for all of the great content here on the six five.

We gotta say goodbye for now. But we'll see you all really soon. Bye-bye.