Techstrong TV – May 23, 2025

Are you ready for a Johnny Ive AI device? You're watching Text on Gang. Hey, everyone.

Happy Friday to you. You know, I'm a glass half full kinda guy, so I'm optimistic today after a devastating loss the other night. I'm hoping my Knicks bounce back and beat the Pacers tonight at the Garden, even the series.

But let me tell you what's got me even more excited. You know, many people think that Steve Jobs was the front man, but the real little elf in the back who is designing all those cool Apple products, when Apple made cool products, was Johnny Ive, and, you know, the good folks at AI just bought the rest of the company that they didn't already own of, of Johnny's company, uh, to create AI empowered devices. And I can't wait to see, uh, some of the cool stuff Johnny Ivan, his design team are gonna come up with.

We'll get more into it in a second. Welcome to our Friday edition. We've got some really cool people to talk about it with.

Let me introduce you to them. This is really an east coast, west coast kind of day. We're gonna fly over the rest of the country, um, sitting, you know, the czar of the valley, purveying over all that.

He's can see, kinda like Simba, it's all yours. The circle of life. He's our, he's our, uh, Silicon Valley editor, John Swartz.

Hey, John. How you doing? I'm good.

So, speaking of Johnny, ive, last night's, we, we taped this on Thursday morning, last night, Wednesday nights I went to an event in Pacific Heights, which is where he lives. And there is a, uh, startup that did a, an event at a, at an open house, at a mansion is for sale. He was invited to the party.

I don't know if he ever showed up. I, I left bef if, if he did show up, but I don't think he would've, he's probably drunk right somewhere right now, after celebrating that, that, that I would, I would be Six and a half billion. That's, and, and we'll get into it, but it's really only a little piece.

He's still, he's still gonna have his own company and people, but we'll, we'll get into it. John, good to have you here. I love Pacific Heights.

I stayed there during RSA. I remember that. It's incredible.

Beautiful. Good stuff. Beautiful area.

I used still living in an apartment building in Pacific Heights. I stayed in an old Victorian mansion there with, well, piece of a mansion. It was two floors, four bedrooms, three baths.

It was, it was nice. This, this was five stories. Yeah.

Incredible. Nice. Well, let's move on from our royalty to the Duchess of Silicon Valley.

She's, I love that marketing the Duchess, that's always a good name. One and only Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa, how are you, Alan?

I'm doing great. Great to see you and Mike and John. Now I know since my Warriors are out of the playoffs, I don't know John, how you feel, because Alan and Mike, you're big Knicks fans.

I'm gonna put all my energy into rooting for the Knicks. All right. We, we need the help.

We need the help. Too bad you couldn't help us the other night, you know, just hit a foul shot would help. But anyway, thanks for being here, Lisa, fresh off your Boomie mc gig.

That looked like a lot of fun. I saw robots. Yes.

I got to interact with robot on stage, and it actually worked beautifully. It was, it was a blast. Great time there, great, great energy, great customers, partners, great boomie folks.

It was just wonderful. Good stuff. And I, well, by the time you see this, he'll hopefully be home and bought from Boston, unless they've kept him hostage there.

Now, who knows. Uh, he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you?

I'm all right. I'm up here in Boston where they throw tea in the ha and we don't need no stinking royalty. Yeah, yeah.

But they don't have a basketball team in the playoffs anymore. Just say it. And, and while I was up here, I went to a Met Red Sox game, and, you know, it's, it's a rare moment, but I got to cheer.

Let's go Mets. So you probably won't hear that very often. So you are one of those guys who would cheer for the Mets over the Red Sox.

Oh, most definitely. See, I, I, I look for a zero zero tie. I don't want to see any of those teams win.

But anyway, Hey, let's move it in. So, so look, six and a half billion. All equity, all equity, no cash exchanged hands here.

So I don't know how drunk Johnny got though. Look, Johnny Ives isn't hurting for money, but Mike, what, what do we got here? Well, it's pretty amazing.

Uh, it seems to be another one of these situations in the valley where somebody's ascribing value based on, I don't know what the math is here, but, uh, sounds kind of fictional to me, but great for them. I'm happy that it makes sense to some venture capitalist somewhere, but the rest of the world is scratching their head going, well, what the heck could you possibly come up with that I'm not already gonna get from Apple, Samsung, and a dozen other consumer electronics companies. John, any idea what's going on here?

Well, they, this idea, according to a video that Sam Altman and Johnny I've made, is that they are going to create this family of AI products. Now, whether that are, these are glasses, jewelry, uh, smart home devices, we don't know, maybe gadgets of some sort, but they're gonna be available next year, or the first ones gonna be available next year. Um, it it, it's interesting because this, this deal is, while surprising, it really isn't surprising because these two companies, um, have been working together.

Io, which is a startup from Johnny, and then Altman's open ai. They've been talking for a couple of years, and, and, and in fact, I've mentioned in a profile in the New York Times that he was working with them, and that there had been reports and the information, Bloomberg and others, that there might be a deal, if not at least, of, at the very least, a partnership. So, as you mentioned, like yeah, there's, there are a couple of, there are a number of companies.

There's, there's Meta, there's Google, there's Samsung, there's Apple, which we shouldn't dis discount at all. They're all gonna be buying into this area. This area has actually not had a lot of success.

I mean, we've had a couple of well-known failures that I pointed out and, and, and, and made light of, um, and said they just weren't the right products for the right time. You know, my takeaway from this isn't as much about the products, but at the Lost opportunity at Apple. And it, to me, it's like a story about Apple in a certain way and what happened with Tim Cook.

So if you go back in time, Johnny left in 2019, he was there almost 30 years at Apple, and he left after years of frustration from structural changes and this kind of change in culture from the company being a design heavy company to being utilitarian, utilitarian, I can't pronounce that word. But in any event, he, he moves on. Apple continues to struggle to innovate, I think in the last few years.

Uh, cook is still there. I, there, I, I was talking to some people last night about this, who know the players, and there are beginning to be murmurs of how long is Cook going to be running Apple. I mean, maybe it's time to make a transition eventually into someone who's more of an innovation person.

And that, that all, it all hinges on how Apple does an app with Apple intelligence. And we're gonna see, we're gonna know within the next year or two. But I think that's something that Bears looking at in the long term versus this kind of short term win for open ai.

Lisa, we talked about this in the past, but you know, devices are already kind of creepy. They're already listening in and kind of tracking our behavior, and now they're gonna have artificial intelligence. And I can only imagine how much more creepy things might be.

I mean, am I gonna have to build some, you know, area of my house that is completely soundproof so I can have a private conversation with somebody? Or what, That's not a bad idea. Actually wish this, the code of silence, the or, or the kind of shame, I wish this wall was soundproof.

You know what, what's interesting about it? First of all, that video was a little bit mysterious. Now, they were having coffees, but there was wine behind them in that bar that they were in.

Anyway, just saying. But what was interesting to me was that Sam Altman said that we have this opportunity to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer. So, kind of a vague but bold statement there.

But I think from a Silicon Valley perspective, AI is getting creepier. I actually talked about it on the radio this morning. I had a message to graduates about why not to be concerned and why you should partner with ai.

But I think what this means for Silicon Valley is AI leadership. I think this acquisition would solidify open AI as a leader in consumer AI in that space. It's gonna put pressure on competitors like Google and Meta and Apple, because they need to accelerate.

John, you talked about Apple I worldwide developer conferences coming up and what, less than a month. And so hopefully we'll hear some more innovation from Apple with respect to Apple Intelligence. But I think, I think the AI leadership, um, for open AI is, could get much stronger.

I also think that this partnership between IO and Open AI could lead to sort of mysterious right now, but really revolutionary AI products that apparently they say will change the way people interact with technology. So, like I said, it's a little bit mysterious, but I think there could be some new market opportunities as well. Like John, you mentioned potentially, you know, things coming into market next year, maybe smart hub gadgets, creating new opportunities that could disrupt traditional industries.

So I think it's an interesting, uh, acquisition, a little bit mysterious, and they were just covering it about a half an hour ago on my local NBC station. And, uh, it's definitely one that's peaking a lot of interest in the Valley and beyond. Alan NK Gadget.

Boy, you're usually at the front of the line for any of these new Innovations. I was, but you didn't call on me. I raised my hand.

I was trying to, I was trying to follow the rules. So let me, let, let me give you Shimmy's take on this one. So first of all, you know, there's an old saying in baseball and football, a team takes on the character of its coach.

When your coach is Tim Cook, you have a rather utilitarian team. So it's no surprise that Apple's product line kind of mirrors Tim's personality and, and his who he is now. So I'm, I'm not surprised by that.

On the other hand, I think you guys are just barking up only one tree and missing the forest. Johnny Eyes didn't just make consumer products at Apple. He didn't make just, I don't wanna say the word, it's live.

It'll pop up here. He didn't want to just say Siri. Johnny, Johnny really was responsible.

Steve, look, Steve Jobs had the final sign off and everything, but Johnny was responsible for the look and feel of that Macintosh, that silver laptop with the white apple on it that lit up, that you knew you had an apple, it made you feel just a little special. You could put the sticker over it and all kinds of things happened. That's Johnny Ives the look and feel of macros, why it looks so much more elegant than Windows did.

That's Johnny Ives, that, you know, this is a master of design, A master What fonts, Steve, Steve Jobs was known to be fanatical about what fonts they're used more than, right? Remember, I mean, apple had their fonts. That's Johnny Ives.

So when you got a Johnny Ives, that's why I think the buzz is, that's why they paid six point a half billion dollars. It's not to make creepy ai. Well, it was, I mean, he, he designed iPhone, of course.

Uh, even the Apple Park, apple Park was his last project. Yeah. Which they didn't go forward with.

But you know, when Sam Altman talks about redesigning a computer, are we gonna have some guy running down the thing, throwing a hammer into the, into the screen where, where Trump's talking or something? You know, not a bad idea. But anyway, uh, this is this.

I think what they're betting here is trying to catch lightning in the bottle again, which is have Johnny Ives and team come up with AI devices that are truly extraordinary revolutionary, the very opposite of utilitarian. I'm not looking for Apple's not gonna come out with anything exciting. You think they are?

No. But Johnny Ives can. And I think that's what Samal Altman has betting six and a half billion.

One other quick thing though, from a deal perspective, OpenAI already owned, I believe like 23% of io. So they just bought the other 75% in Essence. And, but they didn't really buy Johnny, Johnny and his team still have this other company that sounds pretty Silicon Valley.

He new agey to me, but that's him. And, you know, and, and so he's still going to be doing his things outside of this IO deal. But me, for one, I'm excited as heck to see what comes he builds out of this.

Yeah, I, I, I, so, so it's called, yeah, love the Collective is called Love from, you know, the interesting thing too, is a bunch of the Apple key designers who we worked with, with him. And so, and this is the thing that I keep running across, and this is what I, why I'm convinced that Cook is in a transition period. I don't mean to like just blow smoke, but I've run into five or six people who have moved on to completely different companies doing incredible interesting things.

You didn't do him an Apple. There's an argument to be made that Tim Cook was the right person at the right time for the right job. There.

You had job, he left. There had to be a transition. Johnny, Ivan, those people moved out.

They're a different company than they were, But that was 14 years ago. Jobs died. I mean, they, they, they, they passed on the torch because jobs was, was, And, and look, if you are a Apple shareholder, you're not crying in your beer over, over how your stocks done this last 14 years.

Tim, Tim, he's the right guy for that job. But maybe Apple is no longer the company that makes exciting revolutionary products. Maybe they make evolution.

I mean, there, there's an argument that says the iPhone has been evolutionary since the iPhone three. There's been nothing. I just got my wife a 16 pro, she replaced, I think it was a 13.

And she doesn't know the difference. It's, it's just minor iterations every year. And they, and, and they play this smoke and mirrors game, absolutely press, They included it, but Johnny Ives.

But here we, you got a blank piece of paper here for this maestro to, to, to design on, right? I'm who know, I don't know if we under even know, we we're assuming consumer devices we're assuming creepy ai. Who knows?

Is it, is it a robot? Is it a humanoid robot? Is it some other pet?

Is it some something we haven't thought about? He's not a me too kind of guy, so I don't expect Me too. I think it'll be, it's gonna be a mix of things.

It'll be robots and all kinds of things embedded into appliances that are, I don't think it's gonna be any one thing. It's more about the experience that will happen across multiple. It's gonna be a look and feel of these products that you are going to know, just like you knew it was an Apple product, even the Newton And the, and the way they interact.

Now, here's the part I am a little bit concerned about as we get into this brave new world is, you know, theoretically agents will talk to each other. But I got a sneaking suspicion that, you know, apple AI is gonna talk better to Apple AI than it does Samsung ai or, and vice versa, right? They're Gonna embrace and extend the AI agent interface, Maybe the walled garden AI approach.

Yeah. Yeah. So there might be all these walled gardens that start to emerge around all this AI stuff that, you know, I don't want to have that conversation over and over again.

Every time there's an innovation, I just want stuff to work together. So then go to Google. There are plenty of Apple fanboy out here.

We're gonna be fine with it. I I'm telling you right now, you're not gonna change that. Well then, then, then I will just stay with my Google phone and my Google earbuds and all my other Google gadgets.

'cause at least I feel like, so You not, you're not gonna have the cool stuff. And maybe, maybe Johnny Ives open AI will be more open. I don't know.

May I don't know, maybe. But you know, you are telling me that some boomer's gonna build something really cool for the 20-year-old 20-year-old set. I don't know.

Maybe there's a kid out there who's got a better idea and a better Field. The greatest generation, my friend. Well, not us.

It was, it was our parents. All right, on that note, let's take a break. We're watching Tech Drug Bank.

We're gonna come back and talk. What, you know, SAP joins the agent, craze the race. Ready, set, go.

You're, you're watching the Gang. Hey folks, we're back in. Yes, if you watched any episode this week, you know that there was more shows this week than I can remember at any given time.

And SAP had their own little event called SAP Sapphire, which they were all down in, uh, I think it was Orlando. Um, and one of the things they were talking about is agents on steroids. And it was a network of agents who are gonna be what they described as omnipresent.

And the idea here is that these agents are continuously on continuously monitoring every activity and then suggesting in combination with each other helpful things to be done. And in an SAP's mind, this is how they're gonna automate entire end-to-end processes. So Alan, what's your take on this?

You know, it's not much different than what Microsoft was describing, but very, you know, ERP kinda CRM specific, You know, it's Triple Crown season, right? Uh, the Preakness, I forgot who won the Preakness. It's a one word name.

Not justify journalism. Of course you would know that one. John, uh, yeah, journalism won the Preakness came in second in the Derby.

I feel like I'm watching a horse race here. And really, SAP went out of the gate at a long shot of about 45 to one. You wanna talk about the ultimate Me too?

I, you know, I look, let, let's be fair. SAP doesn't make their bones on leading the pack. SAP makes their bones on.

They've already got a huge install base who use these er to use their ERP tools. There's a lot of inertia steering that ship. They don't need to be the first to market.

They just need to be decent. They need to be, they, they need, they can't be last as they turn for home on that last turn, right? They can't be less.

But if they're in the middle of the pack, their customers are gonna be happy because it's too much of a hassle to tear that out and go try to use one of these cutting edge ones that try to, you know, win the race necessarily. So when you look at what they've had, what they've announced here, it's a solid set of what, what is becoming run of the mill AI agents that, that do task in their ERP world. But here's all sounds great, but here's where I think we've gotta be cautious.

Everything we've heard this week, and I mean, everything we've heard this week, not from just SAP, but from Microsoft and, and, and Dell and, and all of these other places that we've reported from this week, these are all on the com. None of this is necessarily real right now, right? It's all what's coming, maybe it's in beta or pieces of it have rolled out, but this is all, you know, typical Silicon Valley tech industry, you know, selling the dream, brother selling the dream.

And what's gonna happen is at some point, we're gonna separate winners and losers based upon who converted their dream to reality. Now, you can make fun of SAP as I did, right? As the 45 to one shot, but the dream they sell isn't farfetched.

It's it's middling of the road. And, and they will, there's little doubt in my mind they'll deliver. They'll go, it may not be the coolest, greatest, sharpest, sexiest thing out there, but it'll, it'll work for them.

It may not be the first, it won't be the last, but it'll work. And that's SAP right there. And there's two things about this that are unclear.

One is, AI is expensive. So now I'm gonna have, you know, yeah. And these are systems and records.

So, you know, it might still be cheaper to actually have a human go enter a piece of data than use the ai, because the AI is gonna run up a bunch of tokens, and those tokens will quickly add up. I mean, a simple process is like 40 or 50 token alone. I, I get it.

But, but here's the bet that's being made here by all these companies as well, right? Like, we like a sort of a Moore's law kind of equation that, you know, as the time rate goes forward, left to right, the cost of AI computing comes down, Right? But it ain't happening in this year or next.

So that's all it Says. Well, a lot of these agents may not be out here this year and maybe next year. But a, you know, if we're not gonna fundamentally change the co cost of ai, all of this stuff that we've been talking about for the last six months is, is crack that we're smoking, right?

And let's get off the crack. We we're all bet that, you know, what made deep seek the story, it was because they could do it cheaper. But that's the way transistors give way to, to circuits and electronics get shrink, shrinking.

And, you know, Moore's Lord, in terms of computing, this is, this is, this is what we do. This is, we, you know, I think that bet is kind of already baked into our system. I I think everybody's trying to figure out if this is a 2026 phenomenon or a 2027 and beyond phenomenon.

That's all we're trying. I think everybody agrees it's gonna happen. Not everybody seems to know for sure the when of it.

No. But, but here's my, again, this shimmy's take on these things. Not just this, but with every technical innovation that I've come in, it gets announced in my own hype cycle.

It gets announced out here. The hype gets crazy up here. It starts getting real.

And there's always gonna be pundits who said, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet not. And then at some point all of a sudden someone says, Hey, wait a second, it's real. I don't know when that point's gonna be, because I think that's different for different people, right?

My Silicon Valley friends tend to get a lot more excited faster than maybe the, the cynical New Yorkers, right? And you may say it's real a lot before Mike's gonna say it's real. I'm, I'm from Florida, we're plastic, you know?

And So when I used to work at Forbes years and years ago, I, I, I would, we've fall into this. We had a, we had a Silicon Valley bureau and we would get excited and hyped by things. And then the guys back in New York would say, would always like throw water on it.

And we were, and it was always like in between and shall in in the, the, the mid mid point was, right? I mean, and I, and I think this kind of interesting thing about SAPI, like SAPI respect them, but I think you're absolutely right, Alan. They're, they, they're not trying to win any argument.

They're not trying to blow us over. They're just trying to be good enough. And I don't mean that as a put no, and that's, that's reputation and it works.

So, um, kudos to them for picking their lane. Lemme Lemme let me paint an SAP nightmare scenario for you. So imagine a world where there are these agents, but they're not SAP agents, but they're able to invoke SAP services on the backend.

So they could be agents from, I don't know, Microsoft Apple pick them. And then everything that SAP does is a backend service that comes essentially a headless service. And there is no SAP brand in front of you anymore.

It's just something that's being invoked in the backend. And, uh, then the, you know, that becomes a set of commodity processes on the backend. And Lisa, you know, as a marketer, can you feel the pit in your stomach start to get queasy?

If you're thinking about, you know, the SAP brand, You know, I, I just, I'm not sure there's a pit in my stomach. In fact, I don't think there is. I think what they did well with the announcements was, was the messaging.

They're aiming to automate tasks and improve efficiency using AI agents. That's what they wanna deliver for their bread and butter customers, of which there are so many. They talked about the Juul AI agents really being designed to understand the context of tasks and, and, and provide that personalized support that we all want.

I don't think they're concerned about their brand being absconded or, or blurred away. I think what they wanna do is, is really provide this framework for orchestrating these agents so that there's integration with other frameworks and end, end-to-end process automation. And I think at the end of the day, what they want to do is delight their customers and make that those tasks automated, contextualized and personalized.

And that's kind of what they said in what they were announcing this week. So I don't think they're concerned about the lines being blurred as much as they are delighting their existing customer base. I, you know, and Mike, in terms of non SAP agents working with SAP, I think that's gonna be a conscious decision.

SAP makes, because they could spin it as them being, you know, the platform that the whole ecosystem works for. Or they could decide they're not gonna, they're going to, they're gonna take an Apple approach, if you will, and say, well, it works, you know, a little bit with Microsoft, but it works best with our own agents. Or, or they might go the other way and say, our agent's gonna be, you know, the superior agent and my agent can kick your agent's ass and therefore it will do what I tell it.

Will we, can we play that song Secret Agent man? Secret agent Man, it's going to, it's, look, this whole agent thing is gonna play out. It's gonna be very, I, I had this, the conversation with Mihir, um, I forgot mi last name, the Automation Anywhere.

CEO, SLA Su Shukla Shukla, Mihir Shukla. He's the CEO 20 year CEO at Automation Anywhere. It's not whose agent you use.

'cause we're all going to use agents from everywhere. It's whose agent Orchestrator you use that they give a hell about. And I think that is this Mihir Iss no dummy, right?

And, and I think he's dead on. And I think that's where the smart money is, is making their bets ServiceNow, making their bet on it. Salesforce Benioff making their bet on it.

Mihir making his bet on it. Um, that's, that's the key. We're we're going to use, you know, agents from everywhere and anywhere.

Some will be ephemeral, some will be persistent, some will be good, some will be bad, some might be really elegant. Design by Johnny is, I'm kidding, but who, who do we use to orchestrate? How do we manage this army of agents doing our buy bidding?

Those will be the big winners in this, in this thing. All right? So it's gonna be like Batman.

You're gonna get the agent you need not deserve. And see how it goes. No, Bateman Bateman, Right?

Love those commercials. Alright. Alright.

We've taken it, we've taken it to the umpteenth. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drug tv. We'll be back in a minute.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, back, we're back with the last show of the week. Boy, it was, I gotta tell you, I'm tired.

But Dell World Technologies was out there and they were talking up their new server platforms and partnerships with a MD and how they're gonna be able to use AI accelerators from Nvidia and a MD and Intel. And they also previewed some new systems where they're gonna combine what they're calling HCI and traditional three tier systems if there's one integrated system. And we talked about something similar to that a week or so ago as well.

But, um, Lisa, you know, one thing you gotta say about Dell and all these guys for all the chat about software, maybe it's the hardware guys that they're gonna make all the money Very well could be. Yep. This week was Dell Technologies world.

I wasn't there this week. I had a lot of friends who were so, I saw tons of coverage, lots of selfies with Michael Dell. He's always so good about that.

But they announced this range of infrastructure innovations that are designed to support AI workloads. They talked about, uh, talked about validated designs for ai. They talked about AI ready servers.

So there's your point there, Mike, about the hardware guys, because Dell has introduced AI ready servers. They say, Hey, these are optimized for performance, uh, for efficiency to support demanding AI workloads. They also talked about some new storage and networking solutions all designed to support its AI workloads.

But I think why this matters for customers is what Dell is trying to say is that, Hey guys, we're gonna simplify AI adoption for you. Every company. We talked about this, um, uh, Alan R-S-A-C-A couple weeks ago.

Every company has to have an AI story. Well, it's challenging. It's, it's, it's, it's very complex, especially when you bring in the cyber resilience, uh, sphere if you will.

But I think what Dell is trying to do here is, is simplify the adoption for customers of AI by providing these solutions that are, they're pre-configured, they're pre-tested, they're also trying to improve performance so that customers can run AI workloads more effectively, simplification, more effective, more efficient. And also what they're saying is that, hey, customers, if you leverage our AI ready infrastructure, you're gonna gain a competitive advantage because you're gonna be able to deploy AI solutions faster and more efficiently than your competitors. So that, that was kind of, I think thematically what I got out of what they're announcing really efficiency, um, performance, make AI adoption easier in this complex landscape.

There's a tension in all of this conversation too, and I'd love to, you know, get Alan's opinion on it. 'cause I think we've seen this before, but you know, a lot of the AI platforms that are in use today are do it yourself kind of things that people stitch together and integrate it. And they're hard to support, but they were typically created by infrastructure people that were attached specifically to a data science team.

And now, you know, as we see more of the inference start to be running and, uh, software artifacts themselves are getting built into DevOps workflows, there's an argument to be said that it's time to just build standardized platforms that you get from a Dell or an HPE or somebody else in much the way you buy any other server. So are we, are we on the cusp of that? Al Are we on the cusp of it?

It goes back to the AI agent thing, right? So lemme back up, yes, we're on the cusp of it, but when do we actually get there? John May think we get there a lot sooner than you may think we get there, right?

Because there's an argument to be made. What we've got now is, or what's coming down the pike right now, is there, it it's, you know, it may not be all the way there that we, we, we, you know, it's not achieving the full promise, but we're already starting to see this stuff get real to a certain extent, right? And now where we talked about SAP being a, uh, not a laggard, but you know, the second half of the mainstream, let's call it kind of company, that's, that's their market.

Not, not the early adopters and not the first half of the mainstream. Dell is, is very much also a company that doesn't like to jump into a market unless that market is substantial. And unless Dell feels good that they can capture a substantial share of that substantial market emphasis on substantial.

So when you see a company like Dell coming out with this, they've already validated in their minds that this is a, a substantial market, not 10 years from now. Now it's a substantial market now. So we're on the cusp and they're making their play to capture their fair share of that market, which in Michael Dell's mind is always an outsized share of that pie, right?

It's a big piece of double piece of pie. And so, I, I think there's your answer. If Dell's saying it, they're doing it, it's real.

They don't, Dell doesn't usually they're not, they're not Apple though. Apple's never a first to market company either, right? Dell's not a first to market company.

So this, we're we're past the cusp. Yeah. I mean, to your point, de Dell always waits to, you know, when there's enough critical mass of customers to buy something that in, in numbers that can be measured in millions and billions, that's when they start worrying about it.

Yep. And only when they have a plan to be a substantial player in it, they never want to be a fringe player And they leverage their ecosystem. Well, to your point, Alan, they don't wanna be a fringe player, but they also leverage that ecosystem.

Well, and some of the things they announced, I thought, Hey, I could see new partnerships here, new collaborations and the AI ecosystem, which would further solidify them as one of the go-to platforms. You know, think you'd take away for in, in a sense like where Mike was, this is, I, I think I, I think Mike would agree, this is probably as many announcements and in many, uh, big companies competing against each other in the same space that I've seen in one week, maybe in decades. And I, and I think that the takeaways we have the leaders making their, their moves, but we also, as you said, Alan, SAP and Dell and what, to me, what's always interesting, and I keep asking the companies themselves that are gonna make these decisions, and they're all kind of in a, in a kind of a, a holding pattern, like a plane flying over a city waiting to land.

They just, they're just waiting for this stuff to come out. And again, just to synthesize what you've all said Al already, we don't know what the timing is gonna be, but it's definitely gonna happen. 5, you know, the, the, the latest announcement that they make, well, we'll, we'll have more details later.

That's what the holding pattern is, is about. And they're also waiting for what Apple has to say. So it's all kind of just this, this huge rush.

And then awaits Talent's also betting on the CIO and most of those CIOs are kind of anxiously looking across the room there at these AI budgets that are starting to increase within their organization and sucking up more of the dollars. And they want control of those budgets because they're gonna be large scale projects. And you can then roll up all kinds of interesting upgrades alongside that AI project.

Much like a bill going through Congress. And they wanna be able to go back to the CFO and say, yeah, we have an AI motion. It's big, but it includes all these pieces and standardized stuff that we can manage.

And they're used to making that kind of case versus, I don't know if, um, you know, a lot of the I internal IT organizations that I know, I don't think they can build custom systems, never mess maintain them. I think they've lost that skill over the years And for good reason. I mean, it's just, I mean, who, who wants to build custom system one-offs anymore, right?

I I just, you know, uh, I think back to when I was in the, at inter reliant, we were in the data center business and all the different servers and machines and you know, we bought 30 companies in 36 months. Most of them were, were hosting companies. And you know, it, the, the disparity between the machines you would see from company to company.

You know, some people had white box PCs that they kind of went out and got the motherboards themselves and built sitting in, in Baker Baker's racks, right? Other people really had like Rackable, rackmounted servers, you know, then Cobalt came out with this little one U blue server that had red lights that blinked. I remember asking Pat Conte there, head of sales, pat, what are the red lights?

Blinking symbolize? He said, nothing, but they're cool as s**t, aren't they? And I said, yeah, they are.

And everybody started and, and we were able to sell those 99 bucks a month dedicated server, sold them like hotcakes, right? This is, you know, you know, we're talking about, by the way, we were Dell host. I did that deal.

Interline, the company I helped put together was, was Dell host. And we were an OEM relationship. Dell invested in us.

And that was another sweet deal, right? For Dell. We used to have to buy the server, they would sell it, they would sell it for 40% more than we could sell it for.

'cause our salespeople stunk compared to Dell. We'd have to buy the server from them. So we pay them for it.

Then Dell would collect the money from the end user every month for hosting and give us a piece of that for the, what we did. So they made money on the, in the out and the in between. And we were sitting there having to keep the customer happy.

But it brought a lot of business into us. 'cause you know, it allowed us to be Dell host. And This is, this is the magic of a thing called the channel, right?

And Dell is a master channel. So that, So good for them, you know, and next generation servers and yeah. You know, I I, so those are the, probably the least, you know, I I I, I was reading the coverage, like you were, at least we had a lot of Futurum folks there.

Um, okay, there's a new power edge. Wow. You know, um, honest.

But, but, but compute and storage get the scale independently, but you buy them together in a bundle and consensually manage them. Does that not get your heart going? Yeah, just a little bit.

Just a little bit. But there are people who geek out on that, right? And, and so more power to 'em.

Anyway, let's call a wrap on this week's Textron Gang, the week of AI agentic AI conferences. We shall it shall be heads forth, be known as, um, have a great weekend. Hey, just a heads up, you know, for those in the US you know this, but for around the world this weekend is what we call Memorial Day weekend, where we honor our fallen soldiers over the years on Monday.

So we will not be doing a show on Monday. We'll, we'll be returning on Tuesday. And, um, enjoy the long weekend.

If you are lucky enough to have the long weekend, uh, we have a, as usual, a full text from tv, uh, uh, schedule right behind today's show so you can watch it the rest of today. And again, quick reminder, we are on our OTT channel. Go check us out on Roku, Amazon, apple tv, iOS or Android.

Mike, John, Lisa, thank you very much. Thank you for watching. This is Alan Hummel, we're out.

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. Let me introduce you to our next guest in this segment.

His name is Mark Haney. Mark is the chief technology Officer for embi. And let's welcome him in.

Hey Mark, how are you? Hey, Alan, I'm doing great today. Thanks for having me on.

Pleasure to see you. Pleasure to see you as well. So, mark, I, I mentioned you were the CTO over at Embi, but you know, the, some CTOs are VP of engineering types, some are out in the field, some are, you know, front face fronts for their organization in terms of dealing with people like us here at techstrong.

Some are all three and more. Tell us, mark, what kind of CTO are you and how'd you get here? Yeah, I appreciate the question.

I, you know, when I think about myself, I'm really kind of the process and structure. CTO. I'm not joining companies to rewrite their key algorithms and restructure all of the applications.

That's the chief architect's job. But I can hang in those discussions. My kind of focus in life is really around mobilizing engineering teams, getting their productivity up and running a disciplined process from end to end that can produce results.

Uh, I've been in enterprise software pretty much my whole career. Uh, I've been a programmer at nearly every job I've held, although they don't let me code as much these days, more the leadership side. Uh, but yes, I've been coming up in enterprise Software.

What if you had to, you could That's Right. I could get in there. That's right.

You could Still roll up your sleeves and do it the head bang with the best of them, but That's exactly right. That's exactly right. But yes, uh, computer science background, but now firmly in leadership around process and execution.

I get you. I I think we like to think we can, I don't know what the reality is, but, um, I, I hear you. I hear you.

Mark. Let's talk a little bit about sebi. Give us the sebi story.

Right. I'm so excited to join sebi. I'm about 90 days in as the Chief Technology Officer here.

And it's really my bread and butter, it's software development tools. Uh, we are an end-to-end platform for software quality and testing. And so think about really popular tools like TestRail, uh, and X-ray within the Atlassian ecosystem, tracking all your test cases, your test plans, and how you execute quality on your products.

But we thought it was really important at semi to form that end-to-end process, not just how you test, but also integrating things like automation into the product suite. So we have a Ranorex product that does automated testing that feeds right into those testing tools. And most importantly, I think it gets into our topic today is incorporating security and compliance matters directly into the development pipeline.

So we have two products today that focus on both code obfuscation as well as security vulnerability scanning. And you can integrate that right into your end-to-end testing suite. And that's what we're all about here at embi, is we know that, you know, people are struggling to get high quality, predictable results.

We want to provide the suite that can help you get there. I love it. I love it.

Um, you know, mark, so testing, a lot of people had a lot of misconceptions about software testing. There were a lot of folks who used to think that people who did software testing were sort of junior developers, failed developers, people what could arise. They didn't give credit to what I call the testing professional people who's devoted their lives to testing.

That's right, right, right. Making sure you had good coverage. That's right.

Right. And then, you know, with the advent of DevOps, we started seeing the automated testing, continuous testing, right? And it kind of changed the whole testing game.

There was a segment that said, let's shift testing left and let's make developers do testing. Not that they can't or they couldn't, but that it took away from that professional cadre of professional testers who quite frankly did it better than developers could. That's right.

And so I think we've seen that pendulum swing back and say, Hey, testing belongs with testers. We can automate, we can do it continuously, but it's not really the developer who should test, right? Yes.

It, it's also there's a separation of duties there. That makes sense. That's right.

Um, but then we, you know, obviously you've seen a whole new thing come in, mark, and that's the advent of ai, Right? Right. And, and all of a sudden we're using AI to figure out what, like we are with AI doing code, we're having AI write test and, and you know, do test coverage.

Huge, huge sea change, right? Sebi does, you know, I've learned in my 30 plus years in technology, you either embrace change or you get wiped over by change. That's right.

Talk to us about how EM'S embraced this change, mark. Well, I think it starts with your opening point, right? Which is the fact that yes, um, testing isn't just for some junior person that couldn't be a developer one day.

It's matured and become much more complex and rich in terms of the areas that it touches. And that is where an end-to-end suite like 70 really focuses. You can't just say, well, my developers will write automation, and you can't just say, I'll have some human testers go and click buttons and test.

You actually need a little bit of both and everything in between. Um, and so yes, maybe your developers are writing unit level tests, and hopefully if those fail, it's creating tickets in your system on an automated basis. Um, but you also probably have UI automation, you have API automation, then you actually have the human element where you go and say, in certain areas of this product, we're actually gonna go and put the human touch.

So I think the process maturity of quality assurance for products has improved greatly and now incorporates all of those nuances from that end-to-end approach. And I think that really sets the stage for talking about, you know, the new rush into adopting ai. Um, everywhere I have turned Alan, I have seen teams saying, we need an AI strategy.

Do something. AI is happening, right? It's a big buzzword in the market, whether you're capturing value yet or just want to participate a bit, there's a huge emphasis in adopting AI into that end-to-end process.

And so, you know, as we move into that world, the biggest piece of advice I have for everyone is make sure you have your process sound before you rush into an AI future. If your process doesn't work today not using ai, and you have gaps in coverage, you can't see your governance processes, you don't know where things are gonna fall, those same problems are gonna be amplified when you start to put AI agents into the development cycle itself. So that's kind of my biggest kind of advice for people.

Focus on your process today before layering AI in, because it'll have major implications. I don't know if that's helpful to kind of get our conversation started today. Yeah, no, I think it's a great segue.

Mark. You know, recently the administration came out with ano, uh, yet another executive order, um, this one around AI though, right? And, uh, i, I think the technical number for the executive order is executive order 1, 4, 1 7, 9, right?

Sounds like something outta monsters you. But, um, mark, talk to us about this executive order, what it means and what we should be doing. It effectively just lowers the barriers to adopting ai.

There used to be a lot more hoops and, and, and kind of rules to go through before you can use those tools. Now that's really been removed. And so now we can start kind of adopting them at a much faster pace.

So all of those boardroom discussions and leadership team meetings where we say, we've got to have an AI strategy, we need to go faster on ai, this, you know, change in the regulations is only going to enable those to actually happen. And so, you know, as I think about that and my previous comment, you know, that process maturity really needs to be in place before you rush down this path. You know, I think there's kind of three big areas that I get worried about when people pile into ai.

You know, the first is really the compliance and legal space. Uh, you know, I'm not sure if you kind of saw, uh, but there have been instances where, um, actual source code has been kind of put into an AI engine, and then other folks can actually see portions of that by just talking with the ai. You know, it's concerns like that, that you have to kind of think about upfront in terms of your process.

You know, what agents are we gonna use? How secure are they? How do we protect some of the proprietary information or customer data from leaking or going into that kind of AI approach, you know?

So that's the first thing I would think about. You know, the second thing I would think about is really security. Um, we've seen actually instances of ais leaking secrets from those source codes, or even possibly if they're not instrumented the right way, you know, suggesting insecure coding practices as you adopt an AI tool to help you with that coding and those tasks.

Uh, and the third thing I worry about is really infrastructure. And so how are you gonna run that ai uh, those AI agents, how are you gonna go govern what they are? How are you gonna make sure that you don't spend a million dollars overnight because people just start lighting it up left and right.

So you have to have some monitoring on your infrastructure to make sure that it's healthy and sound, uh, and also that it's managed and controlled. So those are kind of three areas I worry about with this order now, we are gonna see a huge increase in velocity and movement to adopting AI into the dev pipeline. And so having some of those three topics covered in your end-to-end process, I think is really important.

So it's gotta be a thoughtful approach and not just a gold rush. I I, I agree with you. And look, I don't think you we're going to get much argument.

There is a bit of a gold rush going on right now. Yeah, That's Right. You know, just this week there seems to be conferences everywhere.

Mm-hmm. And every report I'm getting from our tech strong and fu people on location is agent ai this AI that AI everywhere. That's right.

And, you know, mark, a lesson I learned in business is in most gold rushes, you know, who makes the most money? There's a lucky few hit gold strike gold, but it's the people selling the picks and shovels, right? That's right.

That's really success or failure. They still sell their picks and shovels, whether you find gold or not, they made their money. That's right.

That's right. Um, so I think it's important that we remember in this rush, right, that we, you, you, you gotta, you've gotta kind of keep your, your cadence, you've gotta keep your head about you, your wits, about you gotta do things that's right in the right way. So I, I love this, um, specifically with sebi and, and their platform.

Now, how are you guys incorporating that? Let's talk about that a little bit more, right? Where does rubber meet the road there for you?

Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, obviously at a foundational level, SEBI provides that suite of products that helps you run your testing and quality assurance process. And as I look at the AI movement, I mean, there is going to be an absolute explosion of velocity within dev teams as they adopt these tools.

And what that means for us is actually in the quality assurance world, making sure we test more deeply, more broadly and more frequently than ever. It doesn't mean the opposite. Maybe we're using AI tools to assist us, and we can talk about that in a moment.

But, you know, it actually means that you need a robust process to coverage this, even if a lot of it's automation and very scalable, you need to make sure that as change comes through that's generated by an agent, that you can test it, you can understand where it came from, who did that commit, um, you know, have it accounted for. You know, and, and I think it starts really for most companies, they've gotta look at their risk tolerance, right? And so, for example, are you a healthcare company making a medical device or are you a video game company making something for fun?

Those are gonna be different risk profiles, and you can use platforms like Embi to kind of dial in, uh, you know, your process to the right degree of scrutiny. Um, but I've read a number of articles in recent, uh, days and weeks. I mean, I think something like, uh, I saw an article from Stack Overflow in, in 24 of their developer survey, said 76% of developers are already using AI or adopting it in the near term.

I mean, it is happening everywhere. Um, and to think that it's just gonna solve all the problems without us maybe managing those changes, scrutinizing them and following them along is, is, you know, it's a fool's errand. So, um, you know, that's where, where I say define your risk level, define a process that's mature and get end-to-end tooling to help you support that process.

So that's kind of the foundation of what we do. Of course, at sebi, we also have our own AI strategy. We'd be foolish to not kind of look at the power that this can bring to our customers and our internal staff.

We're proceeding with a very thoughtful, uh, I wouldn't call it cautious, but I would say, you know, um, measured approach, uh, to adopting AI in particular. We've got a couple of offerings that we'll be announcing in the next month that will help our customers form up their test plans in a new way, and also generate test cases to test changes in their code base in a new way. So we've got a big announcement coming in the next month that I'll, I'll save some of that thunder for there.

But, uh, you know, we're excited to offer some AI tools to our customers, but again, it's the foundational process for me that's most important, which is what we've been doing for, for years. Love it. Mark, thank you for coming on here.

Good luck in this new role with sebi. Sounds like you've already gotten yourself an invitation for next month's announcement, so, uh, we'll, we'll see. There we go.

Where we are there. Absolutely, man. Until then though, keep doing what you're doing and thanks for coming on Techstrong tv.

Alright, Alan, thanks for Mark. We didn't mention Cbis. URL, what is it?

com. com. Uh, check it out.

And we'd love to kind of work with all the engineering teams out there driving great value. And thanks Alan for your thoughts and your leadership in the industry. Thank you, mark.

It's a pleasure to have you on. Mark Haney, chief CTO, sebi, here on text drum tv. We're gonna take a break, we'll be right back.

Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Anja Bart, who's principal developer advocate for Amazon Web Services, and we're gonna be talking about all the amazing things happening around Amazon queue developer generative ai. And in case you haven't heard, there's also this thing called vibe coding.

Hey Anja, welcome to show. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. You know, in the last 30 days alone, I think I have seen four or five announcements, new capabilities added to Amazon queue developer.

It's not clear to me that everybody understands exactly what that is. So why don't we level set for a minute and say to folks, what is this thing? It's an AI agent framework, but it does what?

So Amazon Q developer is our AI assistant that helps you across your software development lifecycle. And it's built upon agents. So agents that help you to either transform code, modernize code, but also doing a lot of other exciting things.

And one of the exciting things we just recently, a couple of weeks ago introduced is Amazon Q developer in the CLI. So there's a lot of excitement I can see from the developers out there, including myself working with ACL I. What it does is it brings this agent experience that many of you probably experience working in your ides, where you have those coding assistant into the CLI.

So now what it unlocks is you have access to all of the CLIs installed. In my case, I do a lot development with AWS of course. So I can use the QCLI now to just, you know, type in natural language and help me list my files in a specific S3 bucket.

Or even ask, Hey, can you check the docs? How do I implement a, B, C? And the tool does it for me.

So super exciting to see those capabilities emerging. One of the things that has come up when I started talking to people about this is that while they're happy to use these tools within their IE, one of the things they like about the CLI, it's a little more extensible in their minds. And they started using the AI agents for things that went beyond just writing COVID.

They were using it for almost other parts of the software development lifecycle and engineering. So how extensible is it now that we have the CLI and it almost feels like we're moving into the realm of DevOps with some of this stuff. Absolutely.

So one of the last additions, um, that Q developer CLI got is support for MCP. So the proposed model context protocol by Tropic there has been a huge excitement in the community about it and, uh, a great deal of adoption. So with that MCP support, you can now connect to specific MCP servers.

For example, what our teams did, our documentation team, they wrapped the public APIs, created an MCP server, which is available on the GitHub repo as well that we provide. And you can use that for example, with QSI and then just using natural language, say, Hey, could you check the docs? Look something up for me.

And that's just one example, right? With MCP, you can connect the CLI now to all of the servers you want to include for your development workflow. I also noticed too that there's now integration with natural GitLab, but GitHub as well, I think.

And um, that also kind of makes the whole platform a lot more extensible in ways that people hadn't early imagined. But, um, how will software engineering evolve in your mind as we kind of have these capabilities? I think there's a lot of change happening.

How we build, right? We still need all of our technical knowledge, we all need all of you developers out there. But what I see is changing is a lot of the things that, for example, took me a long time, like looking up specific commands I'm not just using every day, right?

Like sometimes you push a gi, um, requests and and then something just goes wrong and then need to kind of reverse what you pushed. And then looking up those specific commands. Like if you live in that world every day, obviously you have that, but sometimes you just, you know, find yourself Googling for a specific command or if you're a Python developer, right?

Maybe you have to write something in another language for like a specific project and you're not that familiar with Rust or Java or something. So now you can use the AI assistant to really help you what I would call kind of, you know, the learning zone as well in the software development life cycle. So you can quickly do tasks, either look up some stuff which is more like, you know, helping you a task you can definitely do by yourself, but it would just take a little bit long to to optimize and augment and, and be more efficient.

But also tapping into this, this learning zone where you can also use the tool as you're writing and developing code to just, Hey, help me like convert this snippet here I have in Python, how would you write this in in rust, et cetera. And obviously with the GitHub integration, it's also a lot of those things, right? Where you can, these days, for example, with the, uh, queue developer integration, just label an issue and then chat with the agent and help you like solve that issue, right?

And queue developer can automatically implement your feature. It can generate bug fixes for you, run code reviews. And I think that is kind of the new way that developers will, will start to work, embracing the tools and then helping you just do your job much more efficient and you can focus on the parts that you actually enjoy solving the problems.

Do you think as a result more developers will embrace a wider range of programming languages? I think most people maybe know one, maybe two, and they have one that they favor. But um, you know, in a lot of instances we wind up writing code and old versions of Java.

Do you think as we kinda move into this brave new world, it'll be easier to stay current on a particular platform or maybe even switch between programming languages? I think at the core of a developer, there is the curiosity, right? We are, we're always getting excited about new technologies and, and new languages and new protocols that are coming out.

And I think that especially the speed of innovation that's happening right now in the AI space, it's, it's so much news and, and protocols and, and things coming out that it's sometimes hard to stay up to date, right? Even for the most curious minds. So I do think really that, you know, the AI tooling and all of this really helps us to kind of embrace that a little bit more.

Like one example also is kind of, you know, the emergence of vibe coding recently where people just, you know, um, in a kind of a different way approach the thing and say, Hey, let me see how far is I can take this, right? And just use the natural language, use coding assistance and then develop something. Build something.

So that could be like you're tapping into something new, right? Like I started many decades ago with, you know, creating my own websites. I haven't really been a front-end developer, so I, I'm, I'm not up to date on how you would build, you know, modern front ends these days.

But that's, for example, would be a good use case for me. Just, you know, use web coding over we can maybe and and develop like an updated website. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity in kind of helping in a fun way sometimes, and also in a very practical way in your jobs to leverage AI and help you learn to kind of synthesize information and news that are happening and kind of yes, elevate your skills and just embrace new technologies.

And, you know, at the core of it still has have fun at this as a, as a developer, You mentioned vibe coding and we've been kinda using low code and no code tools to get at citizen developers for a long time now. And vibe coding seems like the next logical extension of that. But I'm also starting to wonder just what is a developer these days?

'cause it seems like there's gonna be a broad range of types of skills and more people will be able to develop. So, um, how do you view the developer community evolving? I think it is really democratizing who can be a builder, which I'm excited about.

Not everyone might have access, you know, to traditional software engineering education. And to see that you can use those tools in natural language to build something is super exciting. So I do think the community of builders will grow, grow, and it's already growing, which is, it's great to see.

At the same time, the technical developer community can also grow with the tooling. So I do think we should all be like embracing that and welcoming to the new builders in the community and then together figure out, you know, the best ways obviously to, to work with a new tooling. And also, you know, security is an important part to be able to put guardrails in place as we're developing with ai.

It also seems like it might be easier to collaborate between, uh, developers who may be quote unquote vibe coding and professional developers in the of AI agents because we'll have a more common framework for understanding what's happening. And maybe we don't have to explain as much of the technical underpinnings. There's definitely a big opportunity for us to collaborate and, and we already see this in the community.

Um, at AWS we have a lot of, you know, user group events happening where I, I get to join not once in a while. We have meetups that we're hosting. We have the, the community itself running a a ton of events and we already see like there there is kind of this, you know, collaboration between people and more people coming to those events as well and, and kind of are excited about the technology.

So this is an amazing thing to see that's happening I think already, and definitely I think over the next years as well. So what is your best advice to developers about how to get started with all this? Because on some level I think they're all intrigued, but they're also maybe a little overwhelmed and sometimes maybe a little fearful.

I would just recommend to, to be fearless and, and try out the tools depending on what you're doing, whether you're a Java developer, whether you're a Python developer, whether you are working on front end. There's so much choice right now in the market with, with tooling, with capabilities. And I think just looking at what your day-to-day looks like, embrace some of the tools and, you know, be curious and see how it can help you do your job better and maybe help, you know, offload some of the tasks you'd rather like outsource to an AI and really get your core time focusing on, on, on either what, what will you enjoy doing, um, solving problems or other things.

And I mean, historically, a lot of software engineers, especially kind of, if you're going into the kind of the principle roles, a lot of that work is already kind of directing strategies and, and and reviewing rather than, you know, actual writing. So I think for all of us as a, as a developer community out there, it's about helping to shape the future and seeing where we can really drive those values. And especially working, you know, with, with the startups in this space, we already see a lot of great impact that it's having where, you know, startups, for example, we're working with one Namu Q developer helped to reduce development time by 30% and now, you know, you can use that time to, to really invest in other things coming up, you know, spinning up additional projects or et cetera.

So that's kind of where I see it going and, and I'm super excited for everyone to just, you know, come together and help evolve the space and, and find the great use cases as well. You think ultimately there'll be less friction in the development process? And I asked this question because, you know, I've talked to more than a few people where they have an idea, but then they think about what it would take to set up the development environment to go execute that idea, and they decide that they're just gonna go do something else.

So, um, can we get to the point where, you know, all the stuff that gets in the way of between the idea and the code of just getting it out of the way, I see a lot of opportunity in that space for quick prototyping, right? And, and it's kind of like partially in the vibe coding area as well, where we see, um, I think there, there, there was a podcast recently from Y Combinator that also tapped into this and saying they see a lot of uptake where, you know, startups start to use vibe coding just to get some initial MVP products out. So in general, I think across vibe coding and what I would say the AI assisted coding, which is like, you know, you are very technical, but you using the IT tooling to assist you opportunity to just bring ideas to life much faster, try out to things much faster, like you can experiment quicker and then really kind of iterate faster to, to find a product, to find, you know, build out the application, see which path is kind of, you wanna take it.

So absolutely, I think it helps us to, to build faster, ideate faster. I was having a conversation with somebody and they were trying to figure out how to manage all the different AI agents that there might be out there. They're gonna need to be connected and orchestrated and just come quite, couldn't come to the conclusions to whether or not are there gonna be, you know, two dozen specialist agents that I'm interacting with, or will there be kinda like a master butler agent that goes, tell all all the other agents what to do.

We see a lot of excitement and already like emerging this multi-agent world. And what you wanna do is, rather than compressing all of the capabilities in, in one big single agent, you wanna have those specialized agents, right, that have access to specialized knowledge domains. Again, like security safeguarding, guard railing is all very important.

So you probably wanna have like a specialized agent that is, might, might have access to a specific domain, let's say your internal development best practices. You might have another agent that is trained with its knowledge on the security best practices, and then it's about how to orchestrate that, right? To your point, I do think we see this multi-agent and we already seeded, um, even more expanding over the future.

And then there's a lot of like excitement in the community as well right now about protocols, open standards emerging around how we can communicate between agents. So I can see over the next month and years a lot of like development in that area and then figuring out how we can more broadly build this world of multi-agent. There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about the degree to which AI and agents might replace developers.

Is that feasible or is it just changing the role in the experience? But there will always be a need for somebody who's the developer. Yes.

And we've seen this over, over the course of like technology innovations happening, there are skills that are more likely an AI will perform, but there's definitely a huge opportunity like to shift what you're working on and shift the skills. So I see a very definite need for technical software engineering resources, people that have that deep technical knowledge. There might be a shift and we see that, right?

Like, which tasks am I really doing and I'm, I already shift, but there's definitely the need for the technical people that, you know, are able to build the more complex system architectures to review and then also set the direction. So while there is a shift, I think in, in the individual tasks, like with all technology evolution that we've seen in the past, it'll create exciting new types of jobs, which I'm very confident about. Like we, we already see the first glimpse of that happening and also like just what I'm as a individual working on my tasks and, and, and skill shift a little.

So that's why it's so important for us all to, to really embrace and, and be curious and try to, to build up that skillset, how to work with ai, right? Like what's the best way of phrasing my natural language inputs to get to the results I'm looking for. So there's so much I think, for all of us to, to learn and kind of grow with the technology.

And I think those are the important skills to have as a, as a developer in the future. Last question. There's been a lot of folks saying that we may actually build more software in the next two years than we built in the last decade.

Is that hyperbole or do you think that that might actually happen? I think there's a lot of potential for, for new use cases, which, which will ultimately end up in new applications and especially in the ent AI world. Imagine like, you know, like agents communicating with each other.

And there's so much opportunity, I think in this space to figure out like as you're building products, as a company, as a startup, as an individual developer, like how to participate in this new future where, you know, ag agentic AI is, is making a lot of like, you know, the reasoning, the planning and helping not just to interact maybe with your customer base, which we see right now, like a lot of like customer support use cases, but I think there will be a complete new wave of, of applications and we see like early glimpses of that. Um, for example, we're working with Ana ai, they're building agents and using agen AI to automate an entire research lifecycle. So this has been a discussion in the industry as well.

Can AI help us to, to drive research and innovation? So really kind of from generating new ideas to then also like running experiments and, and creating research reports. So I think there's, there's this whole world in front of us and I'm as excited, I think as everyone else to see what those new use cases, um, might be.

Alright folks. And you heard in here, hey, the job of a developer is definitely gonna change and evolve, but you could argue it's probably never been a better time to be a developer. Hey Anja, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Mike. All right, and back to you guys in the studio. Hey everyone.

We're live here at RSA. This is Alan Schell. It's my first interview for RSA 2025.

I've been busy over, I don't know if you could see it out the bat, but Moscone South's just over there. We're in Moscone West and I've been over in south all day. I haven't had a chance to be here.

Lisa Martin's done a great job. I hope you're following along. What a be best way to kick off my RSA coverage though, then with this guy right here.

If you don't know him, shame on you, but no, if you don't know him, he's the CEO of Futurum group. He's my good friend, Daniel Newman. Daniel, welcome to RSA Coverage man.

You are my first interview. Yeah. And welcome, uh, yourself.

I mean, we're at the desk together. Yeah, our first one since we got happily married. Uh, That's right.

And that was in Boca was the last time we did that. That Was in Boca. And, uh, our first r RSS a together though as Yes, this one big happy family this first time you've been here.

So, and this is a good RSA, they're expecting somewhere between 40 and 45,000 people. Um, you know, we, we do this event every year over in, uh, with, in conjunction with them. This is a 10th year doing it.

And we had, well, at two o'clock we had about 850 people there, but they'll, um, we'll probably finish with a thousand. It was an amazing day of AI cyber at depth. Yeah, it's been a good one so far.

Uh, I came in on Sunday. I know the event technically is not even really, So tonight started The expo floor, but, uh, been doing some stuff around the perimeter. I had a great sit down with, um, Palo Alto Network, CEON Aurora.

They, they bought a company since last night, A AI company announced, Uh, and, and launched a new platform. So talk a little bit about that. Uh, yep.

Spent some time with, uh, Cisco's chief product Officer GT Patel today. I love, Love G Two. Uh, had him, uh, for, yeah, G two's great.

Yeah, great. Sit down. I went over and visited the Veeam house.

Um, just, I was just sitting with Google Cloud for a while. Really. Course Google is, uh, making big moves.

Um, you know, we'll see if billions And billions, 30 something billion, uh, doing gotta get the wiz deal done. Yeah. You know, I'm the, the environment still a little questionable.

So I, I heard the wiz deal is not getting done now till 2026. Um, I haven't heard anything official, and even if I had, I wouldn't say it here. Okay.

But, um, let's say from the onset of that announcement, I'm just, there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty still. And Google, of course, yeah. Is in the middle of a lot more regulatory scrutiny.

Chrome, the two cases advertising business, they're just going through a lot right now. And so, while personally I don't actually believe this transaction is particularly problematic, um, I think when you're a company that's kind of facing this many investigations, both here domestically and around the world, trying to get something through you, you know how hard it is to get these deals done. You need a lot of regulatory bodies to approve them There.

There's also a PR aspect to it. And like you said, while this particular deal I don't think represents any sort of monopolistic behavior or anything because of the atmosphere that Google find finds themselves in, it's going to get so much more scrutiny than it deserves, quite frankly. You know, I'm not a handicapper, but I, you know, the odds of this thing getting done are just not as good as they you would think that it should be.

Yeah. So Lemme tell you something that is very interesting in those conversations that I had though so far this industry has long been very fragmented. There's so many different types and pieces of security.

Yeah. You come here and it's not a few dozen power players. It is hundreds, thousands of companies.

There's new companies, tons of venture money going into this space. You know, we're securing this application, this device, this edge, this data, but there is this really big sort of movement by these larger companies to try to do a platformization. Yeah.

Um, I heard it from Nikesh, I heard it from G two. This kind of, the industry needs centralization and that AI is a bit of a forcing function Maybe. But so here, as someone who's been in security 30 years, the move to a platform, you know, it's little fish get eaten by the medium fish, big fish eat the medium fish.

One of the issues in security is innovation at the Cisco level or even the Palo Alto level kind of stops. They, they count on acquisition for innovation. And uh, what you used to hear was products become features, right?

So you would have a small company that made a product and then that became a feature in a larger product set. Well, the other shoe of dropping on that is products move into platforms. Yep.

And then the nice thing about platform is you don't have to own every product that fits into that platform. You could partner and have an ecosystem, if you will. I think that's been the holy grail that companies like alo, Cisco and before them, McAfee, Symantec, they all chased that holy grail.

Very few companies achieve that platform status, which is weird. 'cause you would think, what's the big deal about being a platform? Right?

But why is it so hard? But very few companies get there, Daniel. Well, it's a massive deal.

And what's a little different in terms of a forcing function, one ai. Mm-hmm. So AI is creating so much velocity, so much pace that companies have to be able to address that.

And stitching together dozens or hundreds of different security solutions is a challenge, especially given the amount of budget that is security, which is generally single digit percentage of an overall IT budget at Best. While concurrently tending to be not the strongest part of expertise within any, any IT team. And so the idea, again, it's a good idea, not necessarily saying it will work, but that you could sort of have that one universal platform.

By the way, we started there a little bit with cloud, right? It was you're gonna use one cloud, right? And that one cloud will solve all your compute, storage, networking needs.

And it's like, well, you need one cloud, but you also need a bunch of your own infrastructure still for this reason. And then it was how many years later that all those big clouds said, well now you need more than one cloud. And by the way, it's a telco cloud and there's an edge.

But I think the idea that getting underneath all of the security needs and having sort of a more prominent partner becomes relevant, but it also materially changes the makeup of the industry. If that was to really take place, Yes, it would. You know, the single biggest question I hear from my friends in security, especially those who can't make it out to San Francisco here at RSA, where's the innovation?

Where is the innovation in security? We're doing the same things we were doing. Where's the innovation?

And unfortunately, the innovation is generally not in Palo Alto or Cisco. I don't mean to pick on them. They're two great security companies.

The innovation, I always say, if you go down to the expo floor here at five 30, it's kind of like the Star Wars galaxy in the center of the galaxy. There's a big black hole that's sucking in light. Yeah.

That's where these big companies have 40 by 40 booth and 80 by 80 booths. It's when you get to the outer rim, you see innovation, those 10 by 10 booths where security people are innovating, coming up with the next generation, especially with ai, ag, AI stuff. And I see it in two ways with ai.

One is AI is a sword, one is AI as a shield or it, you know, using a shield for ai. I don't think, I think the whole system is geared, and I'm not saying it's cracked, but the whole system is geared to keep that innovation engine humming. 100%.

These big companies will make a number of purchases of these smaller companies. That was the protect ai. Absolutely.

It's just that there are thousands of smaller startups either being seated in Series A's and B's, um, that may not see that exit, but we do need in any industry, and that's the same thing in ai. There's lots of companies trying to innovate there, but we are seeing a very exciting convergence. Yeah.

Security doesn't sit on the island anymore. It used to be like IT security, security, security have, and now these two things are very much interdependent. Yep.

And that security platforms plus data plus infrastructure aren't sitting that far away from the type of compute applications and resources and agents. Absolutely. Let me bring up something else here.

I'd like to get your thoughts. Hey, if you need a nap. No, I'm good.

Tissues. Okay. Um, but, Uh, we're all a little sick.

Yeah. Well, it's going around Here, but thank gosh, from where you sit watching us right now, uh, We're, they can't catch, we're not contagious it from here. So I don't know if you had a chance to go over to the, uh, what they call the innovation sandbox here.

No, not yet. So, 20th year at RSA, they picked 10 companies every year to compete in the innovation sandbox. A who's who of winners over 20 years.

Lots of IPOs, lots of big exits. This year they're doing something a little different. Every one of the 10 finalists is getting $5 million in venture money from Crosspoint Partners, which is the company that now owns RSA conference.

Oh, wow. Interesting. What's your opinion about, so RSA conference is a conference.

Should they be investing in companies? Are we gonna mess up? Are we going to kill the, the gravy train?

This whole system of innovation? Like, you know, there's a, a lot of people here are saying RSA is a conference, not an investor. They're changing their business model.

It's now RSAC conference, C for community. Well, I think that's very limiting. It's a very small mindset.

Look, the RSA conference community, whether it is or isn't community. Right. We're, we're, we're debating that is a ecosystem and it's a, it's a bringing together of many people and ideas.

Transparency here is that RSA happens to be owned by a company that is invested in other businesses. They're using an event that they've built that brings the best together into one place to try to seed. I mean, they could do it more stealthily and have their, I I would rather them not.

Yeah. I'm saying. So now they're, it's with a level of transparency.

It's out in the open. I mean, these companies that are entering it are choosing, they understand that the consequence of being good could be taking an investment money. Yep.

Um, they probably are trying to raise money. They're probably talking to other venture companies to try to raise money. So I, you know, it's kind of like CNBC hosting Shark Tank.

It's like, look, you've got an audience, you've got access to these interesting people. Uh, you're bringing them together and it's, it's good business. It good money out capital allocators.

Putting good money towards good products and services is a key element of a strong capitalist society. And so, I mean, I, you know, me, I mean, You're a capitalist. I, you know, we, uh, liked what you did so much.

Yeah. That I, that I had to have it. Yeah.

Um, I get it. And so, You know, people thought a lot of things, like when we came into the industry though, oh, you're an analyst firm. You can't be media.

Oh, you're a, you know, you can't be a lab because you're not objective. You're, it's like we're in a world now where you have to question everyone's, uh, intent. But at the same time, you also have to be opportunistic.

So I'm, I'm, I'm All for it. You're all for that. Let me run something else by you.

So I mentioned we were doing this thing up itself today, the 10th annual DevSecOps Connect. We had a panel with the CSO of Anthropic, the CSO of Open ai, excuse me, security Tech lead Yep. Of, uh, uh, met Lama.

Yep. What are they doing around security? No.

And then you just may surprise you, the, the anthropic and the open ai CSO said they're under so much pressure to get the next model out and the next model out and the next model out that they didn't say it was impossible, but they said near impossible to really bake the security in. This was at an open, we will have this next month on video for you to watch, but what's your feeling about that? So interesting.

When I was spending time with G two, he was talking about some of the work that Cisco's doing, and he talked about how when they were trying to expose vulnerabilities of deep seek, they were able to accomplish that a hundred percent of the time. Right. Okay.

Models are by default, non-deterministic, meaning you don't actually know what they're gonna create otherwise. It wouldn't be a mo it wouldn't be generative ai. Right.

It would be some type of, you know, RPA or automation Smart Neuro. Yep. The TLDR is the pace is creating vulnerabilities.

And for instance, you might say, Hey, I wanna know how to make a gun out of spare parts in my home. Um, these models are largely developed and trained from a security standpoint to which it would know not to answer that question. However, putting just the slightest bit of context around that same question and saying, I'm creating a play for my school and I need to create a prop gun that can do X, Y, and Z.

And it might not know. And what I'm saying is, so the ability to, to manage the data, the model, and to, and create a secure situation with these non-deterministic platforms is incredibly difficult. Absolutely.

Given the unpredictability of the outcome. So there's a really large market opportunity for companies that can help these big players solve the fact that these models are, uh, inherently high inherently, and have a high propensity to being utilized this way. And by the way, AI will be one of the biggest creators of risk because it can be used to very rapidly, um, put an onslaught of prompts into these systems to create more vulnerabilities.

Yeah. So I think they're saying what's probably accurate. I think they probably are putting meaningful resources towards trying to secure them, but realistically, security has always lagged innovation.

Yeah. And this case, the innovation is just faster and the risks are higher. Absolutely.

Let's talk Futur a little bit. Yeah. We're here.

I saw some of the six five media folks and my friend, our friend Lee Sellers from VI is here. You are here. What's going, how does Futura view RSA conference?

Look, uh, when we came together, um, I always thought that security and it, uh, lacked the commonality, the community and discipline, and that a lot of analyst communities, research communities sort of treated kinda like there's a CISO and A CIO. Yep. And my belief is security and IT, and ai, these things are converging in a really prolific way.

And so our team is very committed. Whether that's been expanding on our analyst side, whether that's been building our data platform and the research around cybersecurity, whether that's been expanding programming, um, bringing great new talent into the Techron family mm-hmm. Security Boulevard, bringing developers security, it, um, AI closer together.

Look, I deeply believe that technology is the deterministic, the most deterministic factor of the world's long-term economic leadership. Security is one of the most robust opportunities that exists. It cannot, uh, be looked at any longer as some type of, uh, insurance, uh, life insurance or secondary that you purchase in a worst case scenario.

It needs to be very proactive. It needs to be very upfront to everything you do. And so, deep down, um, I couldn't be more bullish about this category.

No. And so personally, while I haven't spent as much time in this space as I maybe in other parts of the tech stack, um, seeing this, seeing the community, uh, I couldn't be more proud of the company that we've created and the depth that we're, uh, able to cover this space. And, uh, I'm just, I'm just really glad we're here and I think you guys are doing a great job.

And, uh, well, I can't stay longer. Um, No, I see what you're getting. Yeah.

I, I can't stay long Another time, But, uh, I am really looking forward to coming back and, and RSA, but also just continuing to, you know, take a more and more active role in this community because I think security is one of the fronts that's just under covered, underused with so much upside opportunity and necessity. Alan, 40,000 plus people here would say absolutely. 100%.

Absolutely. Daniel Newman. Hey dude, it's a pleasure having you here.

Thanks for having me. com. We didn't talk about the intelligence portal.

I'm gonna talk about it this week. Check it out. But we're live at, excuse me, my voice is going, we're live at RSA.

We'll be back actually visit for day one, right? Well, day zero. We'll be back tomorrow for day one.

Until then, enjoy. Bye-Bye. Bye.

It is the Tech Field Day podcast with Catchpoint. We are going to be looking for the unknown and unknowns. Have you got links to external websites that maybe your Vibe coders have linked to?

Or maybe one of your developers found a really useful tool that links to some other website. Maybe it's a service that's running on a cloud provider like AWS. If you don't know it's there, it might cause you pain later.

Stay tuned for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT technical experts to discuss a single idea around key concepts in the industry. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often recorded in association with one of our events.

Tech Field Day is part of the Futurum Group, and this podcast is also published on our sister company Site Techstrong tv. On this episode presented by Catchpoint, we'll be discussing how your internet application is full of unknown unknowns. Before we get started, let's meet who's on the panel today.

Hi everybody. My name's John Meyer, chief content creator at Meyer Media. And, uh, my name is Eric Wright.

I'm the co-founder of GTM Delta and also the head podcaster at the Disco Posse Podcast. And joining us from Catchpoint, fresh off their presentation at Cloud Field Day 22 is Eddie Dody. Welcome.

Thank you gentlemen. So, hi everyone. My name is Mary, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Catch one, and coming to you live from New York.

Excellent. Well, we're spreading all around the place. Uh, we came up with this unknown unknowns because we were discussing a little beforehand, as, as you often do, uh, how incredibly interdependent we end up with within internet based applications, because everything, every kind of service you can imagine is available over the internet.

We end up building our applications to use bits of this and bits of that. And we may not even realize in the same way that on premises, we used to occasionally end up with a developer machine, which was running some vital service in our production application. Now, our internet applications can be dependent on all kinds of things, all over the internet and medi.

This leads to people experiencing outages when they really don't think they should be experiencing outages. I like what you just said. They're experiencing outages where they should not be experiencing outages.

Um, so when you think about it today in 2025, an average web, an average website or web application has about two to 300 calls to, to objects that are, that make their webpage, right? So that can be ads, that can be CDNs, it can be tracking pixels, capture services, payment gateways, you name it. But on average, it's two to 300 requests that needs to happen in milliseconds for you to have a good user experience.

That's true for mobile apps as well. Out of those two to 300 requests that needs to happen and fire up immediately, you're probably talking to about 50 to 60 different host names that are hosted by different organizations, whether it's cloud services like Amazon, Google, et cetera, or your own data centers. And those calls also rely on a DNS lookup that is hosted by either ultra DNS and NS one dime Oracle, or your own DNS services and all of that rely on a spaghetti of networks, uh, of ISPs.

And all of this stuff needs to happen in real time. I mean, when you think about it, it's like a human body, right? My head is thinking, it's talking, telling my toe to move, and I'm not even thinking about it, right?

All of this needs to happen in milliseconds. The problem is, uh, you, the company, for example, have great service, uh, great services. You bought the best servers, you have the best third party, uh, hosting.

You have the best CDN, you have the best of everything. You have the best SREs, you have the best engineers, you top-notch. But there is a third party pixel that is called by some unknown other pixel that is called by another unknown pixel that comes out of nowhere that is hosted in Cambodia or Vietnam.

Uh, and that thing is unre unreachable, and that is going to bring your house down, literally a house of card. So, uh, so this is why I like the unknown unknown, uh, famously introduced by Rumsfeld during the Gulf War, for those that remember, but in many times, we're dealing with an unknown unknown. So what, what is the unknown unknown in the observability monitoring space is you don't know you have a problem and you, and worse, you don't know how to deal with it.

So again, you don't know you have a problem. So then you're get to rely on down detector or our own version or, or something like that. Or maybe even worse, you CEO coming down, it's like, Hey, what's up with, with this?

Uh, I'm in a meeting and I couldn't close this deal because our website was done, or our web application was done. So first you don't know you have a problem. So you're relying on Twitter down, sorry, X down detector, uh, an angry C level person that is telling you what you should have known in the first place, which is you're, you're dumb.

Then you look at your playbooks and it's like, you've never seen this error. So you, you don't know how to act with it. And that is doing what?

That is going to prolong the time it takes you to respond and get back in online. So that's the unknown unknown we are dealing with. And, and believe it or not, it happens a lot more and we're not seeing that problem go away just because, hey, let's add the child GPT, uh, piece on our website, right?

I mean, what can go wrong? It's ai, it's it's self, self working, right? Or self debugging itself.

Well, if open AI has a problem, you, your website is going to have a problem, and then you're going to have angry customers. So, uh, so we're constantly adding stuff to our websites and our web applications because we want to reacher things. We want to reacher applications, we want to reacher visualizations, we want to richer experiences.

Well, what, when we want that, we want complex and we, we add complexity, and the complexity just keeps feeding this unknown unknown little monster of ours. One of the things that I hear a lot of times medi is, uh, you know, a PM is obviously like better telemetry, better instrumentation. We've got lots of people trying to solve the instrumentation challenge.

So I'd love to let people know and like, think of like, what, where does a PM end off and IPM come in? What is the interconnectedness of those things? So where are you winning by a PM and where does IPM really, you know, come in where a PM can't?

Sure. Um, so it's not one versus the other that I don't think that's the best way to look at it. So for the viewers and listeners, so I'm not, I'm not advocating one or the other.

I think it's usually it's a stereo vision. So you need both. So it's A plus B.

And here is, uh, here is why. So again, going back to the example we talked about you, the company A has the best engineers, the best servers, the best, best, best. And you go and buy yourself the best a PM tool out there.

Dynatrace, Datadog, you name it, they're all amazing tools out there. That's great. So your house is protected, right?

You, you, you have all the telemetry about that window in the north, that the door on the right, the roof, the water leakage, you have everything great, you're safe. Except that, except that you invite two, 300 people every day to your house, and then not going to necessarily put Dynatrace or Datadog or whatever you pick you, they're not going to put your smoke detector in their house. And so that's why it's important to have that, that end user view.

Uh, that is, uh, the monitor, the monitors, basically, we, we are above all that stuff where looking at it from a satellite view. So, uh, again, you can put your, your smoke detector in your house. I can look at it from a, uh, from space, and I can zoom in.

I can say, yes, your house is on fire because, uh, that third party that you, uh, uh, that you've let in is having a problem. And you, you don't know because you're not going to put an a PM tool agent on that third party vendor that you use. So I, the other thing is where a PM is very good at understanding your infrastructure, your systems, your application, your code, your, your relationship between that piece of code and the database lookup and whatnot, it's not very good at telling you.

Well, you know, in Boston, on at and t right now, there is a BGP issue that is preventing all the users from getting to you. And you, if you just rely on a PM, somebody's going to call you and say, Hey, people in Boston are having a problem. And you're going to go and blame the, you're going to blame the developer.

You're going to blame the database guy. You're going to maybe look and see, was there a change? Did we make a rollout yesterday that broke something?

So you're going to go and spin your, your wheels in trying to maybe try to see if the problem is in your house versus the problem being, again, a third party. And again, the unknown unknown. So you don't know you have a problem and you don't know how to deal with it, right?

And that's again, where we come in. So it's not one versus the other. It is just one covers the inside of, of your house, and the other one looks at it from a different perspective.

And just make sure that even if, by the way, most of those a PM vendors that are great, uh, they're all hosted on the cloud, right? So by the way, if AWS goes down, you're completely blind because all of them are hosted on AWS We're not, we're not hosted on any cloud vendor on purpose. And I, it cost me a lot of money to not be hosted on AWS or one of those vendors.

But we're on purpose because ultimately our job is to watch over those things. Medi, I love how you use the analogy of a house, and I wanna walk through that analogy just a little bit more here. I have a house, right?

And if I invite somebody in my house, I know where they're at. I know they're coming into my house, and I can validate that, hey, listen, they're into it. But here's the other thing that happens is that what if that person invites another person into a house and another person in a house?

I can't monitor them. I don't know. I didn't know that they actually invited him into a house.

And if something goes down, something happens, I have no way of tracking it. Now I translate that to your traditional, your IT infrastructure, uh, building an application where I am the, you know, IT manager, and I know that they built this application and the database guy connected to this. Now that guy left.

And, uh, I didn't know that he connected it to, you know, say Facebook met to pull in some data and APIs behind the scene. Now I have tribal knowledge. And now they're pulling in that.

And when that goes down, we're running around with our heads cut off trying to figure out what, why, why am I pulling meta information? Why is that, wait, why did I build my application around it that is totally unknown that I didn't know my application was tied to this backend pulling this data that now critically handles it off to my customers. You know, those are some of the things that are totally unknown to an organization or an application until something goes wrong.

And, and the other thing, John, what what we see a lot is, well, it's not my problem. I didn't build it, so why should I like, Hey, that wasn't my problem. Don't yell at me, but I'll go fix it for you.

Correct? And, and that is, you see, in the unknown unknown equation, the biggest factor in my opinion is the, I don't care and it's not my fault. And, or, you know what, Hey, we, we, we bought an a PM tool or we bought this other tool or whatever.

So I'm covered. And, and, uh, and so I think we have to rethink a little bit, right? When, when, when you buy a, when you buy a, a, a an, an alarm system for your home, you want to protect your family.

You want to protect your valuables, you want to make sure that if there is smoke, you can catch it before it goes everywhere. You want to catch carbon monoxide, you want to catch water leaks, and it all needs to work in tandem to protect you. There is no, well, I don't care.

Well, I didn't do the plumbing, or, Hey mom, dad, I'm, uh, you know, I, I just did my bedroom. I'm not going to care about flushing the toilet. It, it is just like, it, it's, it's almost like a sense of responsibility that companies need to, or the, the people that work in companies need to take on and say, we are all ultimately responsible for the assets that actually pay our paychecks, and we have to think about it holistically.

And therefore I need to put in place the right monitoring system so I can catch things as quickly as possible. Because the sooner you can catch something, the faster and cheaper it is to fix. Always.

There's, there's that crucial thing of, of it. It doesn't matter how the business you are in fails, you are gonna be affected by it failing. And so that it's, it's not, you know, I've done my bit that's, that's, uh, part of dealing with this, the solution isn't enough.

And sooner or later you've gotta make sure that the business is able to continue to operate. You've gotta have that system level thinking of, I'm contributing to this, but uh, the story is not complete if I just do my part of it. And having that awareness that we may be unaware that there may be dependencies, and particularly there may be dependencies on third parties who have their own dependencies on other third parties that we are totally unaware of.

Um, that collection And Scary Here, here is, here is the biggest first party, the biggest third party is your cloud provider. I mean, you, when you think about it, we have, we have decided to put all of our eggs in Amazon or GCP or Azure. You don't know how those guys run their stuff.

You don't, you we're taking it face value that, I mean, thank God they are right, but they also buy third party stuff. They also, you know, sometimes are not their data centers. The electricity is not from them.

The water supplies from the city, the generator, the diesel comes from, I mean, Amazon does not have petroleum yet, right? So, so it is just like, this is how people need to think about this to do risk, risk mitigation and understand what can go wrong versus this mentality that we've had since the cloud happens, which is like, oh, it's easy. Push a button and poof.

And it is easy. You can just consume a service. But what happens when the service isn't working?

I mean, one of the, the elements in this is a lot of this dependency on third party is if you code your application for all of the loose coupling and, uh, being able to cope with delays along the way, then you minimize the impact on the end user application. It's just that doing that is a lot of hard work for developers. And developers are usually incented to go and get new features out, not to spend all of their time ensuring the, the highest uptime.

And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of developers who do an awesome job of that, but often the business driver is, we need to get this new feature out. We need to get it out as rapidly as possible. And that's the sort of thing that leads to that scenario.

Yeah, And you're so spot on, and we do a terrible job at explaining to the business that the number one feature, feature nu Uno is performance. That is the most important feature in my opinion. I mean, there was this venture capitalist guy, Fred Wilson, you can Google him.

He said that it was brilliant. He said that in 2008, 2009, the, the most important feature is performance. And that hasn't changed today.

It, it doesn't, that's why we keep buying new iPhones or new and why, because the processor is more performing because we want speed. We are so driven by this damn speed and reliability. One of the things medi that I think more and more of us are seeing is the abstraction away from, like, the whole idea is like, can I get ideas to production?

Whether it's no code, low code, we're seeing things like Versal and we're seeing vibe coding. And what you, we end up with these is a lot of, you know, less bespoke solutions, but they're also incredibly opaque. Uh, so how, how are you seeing the rise of paths actually getting great success in my view?

Like, you've seeing Heroku coming back to the fore again, where you're seeing a lot of that happening, but then what's the impact on application builders and, you know, where do you see your, your role in, in helping people to really get the most outta those platforms? I, I, so yes, there is a rise of all these applications, all these platforms. Uh, I think we're going to see even more of that.

I mean, when you think that chat GPT can start generating code and prototype for you and stuff like that, I mean, it's, it's, it's unbelievable the, the, the world we're, we're going to live in, right? Where it's just like the ideas are going to just like, it's explosion of ideas and creativity. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm jealous to some degree, right?

Um, I do think that, uh, this opacity that you mentioned is good for us, uh, because at the end of the day, that doesn't take away the fundamentals of reliability. Again, it's still a computer, right? It's still a network, it's still a service, it's still an infrastructure.

It's still CPUs and memories and things like that. And that stuff still breaks and will keep breaking, I think, uh, where we're going to. And you showed that.

You saw that, uh, uh, when we presented, that's why we keep investing on this internet stack map, being able to visualize and understand the dependencies. Uh, that's why we keep investing in some of our AI capabilities to be able to detect and connect the dots. Because what this, what this is going to do is just like more opacity, more complexity, and then understanding what happened is, is going to be more crucial.

That unknown, unknown is still there, bigger, worse. We just need to shrink the amount of time to detect and, and, and help customers. But yeah, I don't see any change.

I just think that things are going to get worse from a complexity perspective. Medi, are we our own saboteurs when it comes to the unknown? When you're implementing things and you're trying to be efficient, you're trying to get the most out of it in the performance.

And we go and attach to a website or a database that's public out there just because we wanna provide something to our customer, but ultimately not realizing that we don't know as much about them as we should. Yes. And I will add, I think we need to live around that, so we shouldn't stop that because I think that's stopping progress to some degree.

That's stopping creativity that, listen, I love the risk taking that people take. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. Right?

Uh, I think risk taking is important. I think risk taking with some mitigation is even better, right? So I think I, I don't think we should say that disconnect from the internet, you know, that's the safest thing.

Let's unplug and, uh, you know, we can all sleep well at night, all that stuff. Uh, but I think we need to put the boundaries and the systems and procedures to detect and, and do all that stuff. Uh, and, and even if you wanted to, uh, to certify third parties, this then becomes, again, problematic process.

Red tape, and people go around red tape anyway, so it'll be a cut and mouse game. So I think what we should, I would rather do is like, hey, put in place the system to detect the smoke, uh, as quickly as possible. Uh, I know sometimes it's more expensive, but I think the, uh, the red tape and the risk, the risk aversion is I think very bad from a business perspective.

Your competitors might say, you know what? Let John be risk averse. We we're going to go and do other things and kick his behind by coming to market with something better.

I think, uh, as we're coming to the end of this podcast, and, and as, as always, when we gather together, it's such an interesting group of people. We could go for hours at this, and I, for one, could probably do with a drink. Um, I think also one of the things I, I really pull out of this is that there is no nirvana state.

Nothing is going to become perfect. And so, getting the ability to see the imperfect, to understand the imperfect understanding that there is a tension between business requirements at different phases, and, and this conflict is natural and norm, not something to be avoided, uh, is, is an important aspect of not just this conversation, but any conversation where we're talking about innovation and building things. Since we are running out of time, it would be great if, uh, listeners out there would like to catch up with people some more and carry on the conversations.

Uh, where can we carry the conversations on with you all? com. Also follow it at Meyer Media and hit me up on all the channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, or sorry, X I'll never get used to any of that.

But anyway, you can follow us at John Meyer And, uh, I'm Disco Posse and all social media. com and find out what I do. org.

One of my favorite tools that I promote to everybody thank you is Catchpoint gives back to, you know, in frees to the community. It's incredible help for me as a developer to learn. And, uh, but anyways, that was my last, uh, shout out.

But, uh, with that, over to you. Thank you so much, Eric. org.

com. We have a great blog. You should, uh, read it on LinkedIn, X, et cetera.

So thank you so much. com website. You can find me also writing various places my own, um, writings.

Typically at the moment. co nz, uh, or NZ for those of you in America. And, uh, you'll also find me on some of the other fu um, properties, uh, writing content out there as well.

So, thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast application so you don't miss an episode. Do consider giving us a nice rating and of a review.

Let other people find this, this, uh, great content as well. com/podcast or review. Uh, review us on Techstrong tv.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel, and welcome to another Shimmy says, you know, I think when we look back, this will be the week of Agen AI conferences. We had so many people both here on our tech drunk team, as well as on the Greater Futurum team, really spread out all over the place, whether it was Dell Tech World or Red Hat Open Summit, or the Microsoft Build Conference, SAP Sapphire and more, you know, listening in reporting from getting briefed at speaking at all of these conferences and all these conferences.

You know, I felt like I was watching the Kentucky Derby, and we had 12 horses coming around that final bend, because they all very much, at some level looked the same. All of these companies were talking about their agentic AI plans and how their agents are gonna make our life better, you know? And quite frankly, it's not just from this week.

It was the same story last week and the week before, and the week before that. It just seems the race is on to get agents out there doing your work or doing tasks for you. And, and then there's a race within a race, which is to be the orchestrator of those agents, right?

We've seen that from ServiceNow and, and Salesforce and, and, uh, automation Anywhere and IBM, right? Everybody wants to be the manager of all these agents that all these companies are talking about. And it raises some really big issues.

I realize. I work in the tech industry and we live in a bit of a bubble, and we're always, you know, we, we pride ourselves in being in the 15% of early adopters looking for that next new thing. And by all, you know, stretches of the imagination, agen AI is that next new thing.

But is it really, are we, are we putting too many eggs in our basket? Are we, are we overhyping here with making it impossible for, for this to, to do everything we think it's gonna be? You know, when you look at adoption curves of, of things over the years in technology, it's very hard to put your finger on the point and say, this is when it became real.

This is when things really started working. And very rarely is that point at the point we are now, right? Because the point we are right now really screams to me of, of just hype, right?

No one wants to be left out of this, right? A company like SAP, they're a great company, they're an ERP company. People don't look to SAP to be cutting edge.

People don't look to SAP to pioneer the newest thing. SAP adopts things when their customers are ready to use them. Same thing with Dell.

Dell doesn't pioneer new markets. Dell doesn't get into a market until it's big enough to be something that'll move the needle. And until they think that they can command enough of a market share in that nascent market to really move the needle at Dell, which is measured in the tens and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars at this point.

So, when I see companies like Dell and SAP talking about their agent, AI and, uh, ambitions and product launches, to me this is, this is, we've moved beyond the cutting edge stuff that I expect from the hyperscalers, that I expect from Google and Meta, and, you know, companies like that, Adobe, or even Microsoft, when Dell and SAP are doing it, it, it's starting to feel like it's real. But yet as I sit here, is it really real? Where do these AI agents really work?

And I'll be honest with you, I'm a bit of the loss. Where do they really work? First of all, I still have questions.

What's the difference in some cases between an AI agent and an API call is an API call the, a form of an AI agent? Not really, but you know, I'm, I'm gonna put it out there to you, Shimmy's asking you, what AI agents are you using now that work? If you can let me know, I'd love, I'll talk about it at our next Shimmy says, but I think that's something we need to discuss.

That's it for today. This is Shimmy. I'm out.

Have a great holiday weekend for those of us in the us. Bye-bye. Are you ready for a Johnny Ive AI device?

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey, everyone, happy Friday to you. You know, I'm at Glass half full kinda guy, so I'm optimistic today after a devastating loss the other night.

I'm hoping my Knicks bounce back and beat the Pacers tonight at the Garden to even the series. But let me tell you what's got me even more excited. You know, many people think that Steve Jobs was the front man, but the real little elf in the back who was designing all those cool Apple products when Apple made cool products, was Johnny Ive, and, you know, the good folks at AI just bought the rest of the company that they didn't already own of, of Johnny's company, uh, to create AI empowered devices.

And I can't wait to see, uh, some of the cool stuff Johnny Ivan, his design team are gonna come up with. We'll get more into it in a second. Welcome to our Friday edition.

We've got some really cool people to talk about it with. Let me introduce you to them. This is really an east coast, west coast kind of day.

We're gonna fly over the rest of the country, um, sitting, you know, the czar of the valley purveying over all that he can see, kinda like Simba, it's all yours, the circle of life. He's our, he's our, uh, Silicon Valley editor, John Swartz. Hey, John.

How you doing? I'm good. So speaking of Johnny, ive, last night, so we, we taped this on Thursday morning, last night, Wednesday nights I went to an event in Pacific Heights, which is where he lives.

And there is a, uh, startup that did a a, an event at a, at an open house, at a mansion is for sale. He was invited to the party. I don't know if he ever showed up.

I, I left bef if, if he did show up, but I don't think he would've, he's probably drunk right? Somewhere right now, after celebrating that, that, that bill, I would, I would be Six and a half billion. That's, and and we'll get into it, but it's really only a little piece.

He's still, he's still gonna have his own company and people, but we'll, we'll get into it. John, good to have you here. I love Pacific Heights.

I stayed there during RSA, I remember that. Yeah, it's incredible. Beautiful.

Good stuff. It Was a beautiful area. I used to live in an apartment building in Pacific Heights.

I stayed in an old Victorian mansion there. Well, piece of a man show. It was two floors, four bedrooms, three baths.

It was, it was nice. This, This was five stories. Yeah.

Incredible. Nice. Well, let's move on From our royalty to the Duchess of Silicon Valley.

She's, I love that marketing the Duchess, that's always a good name. One and only Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa, how are you, Alan?

I'm doing great. Great to see you and Mike and John. Now I know since my Warriors are out of the playoffs, I don't know John, how you feel, because Alan and Mike, you're big Knicks fans.

I'm gonna put all my energy into rooting for the Knicks. All right? We, we need the help.

We need the help. Too bad you couldn't help us the other night, you know, just hit a foul shot with the help. But anyway, thanks for being here, Lisa, fresh off your Boomie mc gig.

That looked like a lot of fun. I saw robots. Yes, I got to interact with robot on stage, and it actually worked beautifully.

It was, it was a blast. Great time there, great, great energy, great customers, partners, great boomie folks. It was just wonderful, Good stuff.

And I, well, by the time you see this, he'll hopefully be home and bought from Boston, unless they've kept him hostage there. Now, who knows? Uh, he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm all right. I'm up here in Boston where they throw tea in the ha and we don't need no stinking royalty.

Yeah, yeah. But they don't have a basketball team in the playoffs anymore. Just say it.

And, and while I was up here, I went to a Mets Red Sox game, and, you know, it's, it's a rare moment, but I got to cheer. Let's go Mets. So you probably won't hear that very often.

So you are one of those guys who would cheer for the Mets over the Red Sox. Oh, most definitely. See, I, I, I look for a zero zero tie.

I don't want to see any of those teams win. But anyway, hey, let's move it in. So, so look, six and a half billion, all equity, all equity, no cash exchanged hands here.

So I don't know how drunk Johnny got though. Look, Johnny Ives isn't hurting for money, but Mike, what, what do we got here? Well, it's pretty amazing.

Uh, it seems to be another one of these situations in the valley where somebody's ascribing value based on, I don't know what the math is here, but, uh, sounds kind of fictional to me, but great for them. I'm happy that it makes sense to some venture capital is somewhere, but the rest of the world is scratching their head going, well, what the heck could you possibly come up with that I'm not already gonna get from Apple, Samsung, and a dozen other consumer electronics companies. John, any idea what's going on here?

Well, they, this idea, according to the video that Sam Altman and Johnny I've made, is that they are going to create this family of AI products. Now, whether that are, these are glasses, jewelry, uh, smart home devices, we don't know, maybe gadgets of some sort, but they're gonna be available next year, or the first one's gonna be available next year. Um, it, it, it's interesting because this, this deal is, while surprising, it really isn't surprising because these two companies, um, have been working together.

Io, which is a startup from Johnny, and then Altman's open ai. They've been talking for a couple of years, and, and, and in fact, I've mentioned in a profile in the New York Times that he was working with them, and that there had been reports and the information, Bloomberg and others, that there might be a deal, if not at least, at the very least, a partnership. So, as you mentioned, like yeah, there's, there are a couple, there are a number of companies.

There's, there's Meta, there's Google, there's Samsung, there's Apple, which we shouldn't dis discount at all. They're all gonna be buying into this area. This area has actually not had a lot of success.

I mean, we've had a couple of well-known failures that I pointed out and, and, and, and made light of, um, and said they just weren't the right products for the right time. You know, that my takeaway from this isn't as much about the products, but at the Lost opportunity at Apple. And it, to me, it's like a story about Apple in a certain way and what happened with Sim Cook.

So if you go back in time, Johnny left in 2019, he was there almost 30 years at Apple, and he left after years of frustration from structural changes and this kind of change in culture from the company being a design heavy company to being utilitarian, utilitarian, I can't pronounce that word. But in any event, he, he moves on. Apple continues to struggle to innovate, I think in the last few years.

Uh, cook is still there. I, there, I, I was talking to some people last night about this, who know the players, and there are beginning to be murmurs of how long is Cook gonna be running Apple. I mean, maybe it's time to make a transition eventually into someone who's more of an innovation person.

And that it all, it all hinges on how Apple does in app with Apple Intelligence. And we're gonna see, we're gonna know within the next year or two. But I think that's something that Bear's looking at in the long term versus this kind of short term win for open ai.

Lisa, we talked about this in the past, but you know, devices are already kind of creepy. They're already listening in and kind of tracking our behavior, and now they're gonna have artificial intelligence. And I can only imagine how much more creepy things might be.

I mean, am I gonna have to build some, you know, area of my house that is completely soundproof so I can have a private conversation with somebody? Or what, That's not a bad idea. Actually, I Wish the code of silence, The or or the kind of shame, I wish this wall was sound, you know, what, what's interesting about it?

And first of all, that video was a little bit mysterious. Now, they were having coffees, but there was wine behind them in that bar, but they were in anyway, just saying. But what was interesting to me was that Sam Altman said that we have this opportunity to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.

So, kind of a vague but bold statement there. But I think from a Silicon Valley perspective, AI is getting creepier. I actually talked about it on the radio this morning.

I had a message to graduates about why not to be concerned and why you should partner with ai. But I think what this means for Silicon Valley is AI leadership. I think this acquisition would solidify open AI as a leader in consumer AI in that space.

It's gonna put pressure on competitors like Google and Meta and Apple, because they need to accelerate. John, you talked about Apple I worldwide developer conferences coming up in what, less than a month. And so hopefully we'll hear some more innovation from Apple with respect to Apple Intelligence.

But I think, I think the AI leadership, um, for OpenAI is, could get much stronger. I also think that this partnership between IO and OpenAI could lead to sort of mysterious right now, but really revolutionary AI products that apparently they say will change the way people interact with technology. So, like I said, it's a little bit mysterious, but I think there could be some new market opportunities as well.

Like John, you mentioned potentially, you know, things coming into market next year, maybe smart hub gadgets, creating new opportunities that could disrupt traditional industries. So I think it's an interesting, uh, acquisition, a little bit mysterious, and they were just covering it about a half an hour ago on my local NBC station. And, uh, it's definitely one that's peaking a lot of interest in the Valley and beyond.

Alan NK Gadget. Boy, you're usually at the front of the line for any of these new Innovations. I was, but you didn't call on me.

I raised my hand. I was trying to, I was trying to follow the rules. So let me, let, let me give you Shimmy's take on this one.

So, first of all, you know, there's an old saying in baseball and football, a team takes on the character of its coach. When your coach is Tim Cook, you have a rather utilitarian team. So it's no surprise that Apple's product blind kind of mirrors Tim's personality and, and his who he is now.

So I'm, I'm not surprised by that. On the other hand, I think you guys are just barking up only one tree and missing the forest. Johnny Eyes didn't just make consumer products at Apple.

He didn't make just, I don't wanna say the word, it's live. It'll pop up here. He didn't want to just say Siri.

Johnny, Johnny really was responsible. Steve, look, Steve Jobs had the final sign off and everything, but Johnny was responsible for the look and feel of that Macintosh, that silver laptop with the white apple on it, that lit up, that you knew you had an apple, it made you feel just a little special, could put the sticker over it, and all kinds of things happened. That's Johnny Ives the look and feel of Mac Os.

Why it looks so much more elegant than Windows did. That's Johnny Ives, that, you know, this is a master of design, A master What fonts, Steve, Steve Jobs was known to be fanatical about what fonts they're used more than, right? Remember, I mean, apple had their fonts.

That's Johnny Ives. So when you got a Johnny Ives, that's why I think the buzzes, that's why they paid six and a half billion dollars. It's not to make creepy ai.

Well, it was, I mean, he, he designed iPhone, of course. Uh, even the Apple Park, apple Park was his last project. Yeah.

Which they didn't go forward with. But you know, when Sam Altman talks about redesigning a computer, are we gonna have some guy running down the thing, throwing a hammer into the, into the screen where, where Trump's talking or something? You know, not a bad idea.

But anyway, uh, this is this. I think what the Ab Bean here is trying to catch lightning in the bottle again, which is have Johnny Ives and team come up with AI devices that are truly extraordinary revolutionary, the very opposite of utilitarian. I'm not looking for Apple's not gonna come out with anything exciting.

You think they are? No. But Johnny Ives can.

And I think that's what Samal Altman has betting six and a half billion. One other quick thing though, from a deal perspective, open AI already owned, I believe like 23% of io. So they just bought the other 75% in Essence.

And, but they didn't really buy Johnny, Johnny and his team still have this other company that sounds pretty Silicon Valley. He new agey to me, but that's him. And, you know, and so he's still gonna to be doing his things outside of this IO deal.

But me, for one, I'm excited as heck to see what comes, he builds out of this. Yeah, I I, I try. So, so it's called, yeah, the collective is called Love from, you know, the interesting thing too, is a bunch of the Apple key designers who we worked with, with him.

And so, and this is the thing that I keep running across, and this is what I, why I'm convinced that Cook is in a transition period. I don't mean to like just blow smoke, but I've run into five or six people who have moved on to completely different companies doing incredibly interesting things. Didn't do him an Apple.

There's an argument to be made that Tim Cook was the right person at the right time for the right job. There. You had job, he left.

There had to be a transition. Johnny, Ivan, those people moved out. They're a different company than they were, But that was 14 years ago.

Jobs died. I mean, they, they, they, they passed on the torch because jobs was, And, and look, if you are a Apple shareholder, you're not crying in your beer. Over, over Harry Stocks done this last 14 years.

Tim, Tim, he's the right guy for that job. But maybe Apple is no longer the company that makes exciting revolutionary products. Maybe they make evolution.

There's an argument that says the iPhone has been evolutionary since the iPhone three. There's been nothing. I just got my wife a 16 pro, she replaced, I think it was a 13.

And she doesn't know the difference. It's, it's just minor iterations every year. And they, and, and they play this smoke and mirrors game, absolutely press, But Johnny Ives.

But here we, you got a blank piece of paper here for this maestro to, to, to design on, right? I'm who know, I don't know if we under even know we're assuming consumer devices. We're assuming creepy ai.

Who know? Is it, is it a robot? Is it a humanoid robot?

Is it some other pet? Is it some something we haven't thought about? He's not a me too kind of guy, so I don't expect Me too.

I think it'll be, it's gonna be a mix of things. It'll be robots and all kinds of things embedded into appliances that are, I don't think it's gonna be any one thing. It's more about the experience that will happen across multiple.

It's gonna be a look and feel of these products that you're going to know, just like you knew it was an Apple product, even the Newton And the, and the way they interact. Now, here's the part I am a little bit concerned about as we get into this brave new world, is, you know, theoretically agents will talk to each other. But I got a sneaking suspicion that, you know, apple AI is gonna talk better to Apple AI than it does Samsung ai or, and vice versa, right?

They're gonna wall. So embrace and extend the AI agent Interface. Maybe the walled garden AI approach.

Yeah. Yeah. So there might be all these walled gardens that start to emerge around all this AI stuff that, you know, I don't want to have that conversation over and over again.

Every time there's an innovation, I just want stuff to work together. So then go to Google. There are plenty of Apple fan boys out here.

We're gonna be fine with it. I, I'm telling you right now, you're not gonna change that. Well, then, then, then I will just stay with my Google phone and my Google earbuds and all my other Google gadgets.

'cause at least I feel like they, So you're not, you're not gonna have the cool stuff. And maybe, maybe Johnny Ives open AI will be more open. I don't know.

May I don't know, maybe. But you know, you are telling me that some boomer's gonna build something really cool for the 20-year-old 20-year-old set. I don't know.

Maybe there's a kid out there who's got a better idea and a better field For the greatest generation, my friend. Well, not us, it was, it was our parents. All right, on that note, let's take a break.

We were watching Text Drunk. Bang. We're gonna come back and talk.

What, you know, SAP joins the agent, craze the race. Ready, set, go. You, you're watching the Gang.

Hey folks, we're back in. Yes, if you watched any episode this week, you know that there was more shows this week than I can remember at any given time. And SAP had their own little event called SAP Sapphire, which they were all down in, uh, I think it was Orlando.

Um, and one of the things they were talking about is agents on steroids. And it was a network of agents who are gonna be what they described as omnipresent. And the idea here is that these agents are continuously on continuously monitoring every activity and then suggesting in combination with each other helpful things to be done.

And in an SAP's mind, this is how they're gonna automate entire end-to-end processes. So Alan, what's your take on this? You know, it's not much different than what Microsoft was describing, but very, you know, ERP kinda CRM specific, You know, it's Triple Crown season, right?

Uh, the Preakness, I forgot who won the Preakness. It's a one word name. Not justify journalism.

Of course you would know that one. John, uh, yeah, journalism won the Preakness came in second in the Derby. I feel like I'm watching a horse race here.

And really, SAP went out of the gate at a long shot of about 45 to one. You wanna talk about the ultimate me too. I, you know, and look, let, let's be fair.

SAP doesn't make their bones on leading the pack. SAP makes their bones on. They've already got a huge install base who use these er to use their ERP tools.

There's a lot of inertia steering that ship. They don't need to be the first to market. They just need to be decent.

They need to be, they, they need, they can't be last as they turn for home on that last turn, right? They can't be last. But if they're in the middle of the pack, their customers are gonna be happy because it's too much of a hassle to tear that out and go try to use one of these cutting edge runs that try to, you know, win the race necessarily.

So when you look at what they've had, what they've announced here, it's a solid set of what, what is becoming run of the mill AI agents that, that do task in their ERP world. But here's all sounds great, but here's where I think we've gotta be cautious. Everything we've heard this week, and I mean, everything we've heard this week, not from just SAP, but from Microsoft and, and, and Dell and, and all of these other places that we've reported from this week, these are all on the come, none of this is necessarily real right now, right?

It's all what's coming, maybe it's in beta or pieces of it have rolled out, but this is all, you know, typical Silicon Valley tech industry, you know, selling the dream, brother selling the dream. And what's gonna happen is at some point, we're gonna separate winners and losers based upon who converted their dream to reality. Now, you can make fun of SAP as I did, right?

As the 45 to one shot, but the dream they sell isn't farfetched. It's it's middling of the road. And, and they will, there's little doubt in my mind they'll deliver.

They'll go, it may not be the coolest, greatest, sharpest, sexiest thing out there, but it'll, it'll work for them. It may not be the first, it won't be the last, but it'll work. And that's SAP right there.

And there's two things about this that are unclear. One is, AI is expensive. So now I'm gonna have, you know, yeah.

And these are systems of record. So, you know, it might still be cheaper to actually have a human go enter a piece of data than use the ai, because the AI is gonna run up a bunch of tokens, and those tokens will quickly add up. I mean, a simple process is like 40 or 50 token alone.

I, I get it. But, but here's the bet that's being made here by all these companies as well, right? Like, we, like a, a sort of a Moore's law kind of equation that, you know, as the time rate goes forward, left to right, the cost of AI computing comes down, Right?

But it ain't happening this year or next. So that's all. Well, a lot of these agents may not be out here this year and maybe next year.

But a, you know, if, if we're not gonna fundamentally change the co cost of ai, all of this stuff that we've been talking about for the last six months is, is crack that we're smoking, right? And let's get off the crack. We we're all bet that, you know, what made deep seek the story, it was because they could do it cheaper.

But that's the way transistors give way to, to circuits and electronics get shrinked shrinking. And, you know, Moore's lords in terms of computing. This is, this is, this is what we do.

This is, we, you know, I think that bed is kind of already baked into our system. I I think everybody's trying to figure out if this is a 2026 phenomenon or a 2027 and beyond phenomenon. That's all we're trying.

I think everybody agrees it's gonna happen. Not everybody seems to know for sure the when of it. No.

But, but here's my, again, this shimmy's take on these things. Not just this, but with every technical innovation that I've come in, it gets announced in my own hype cycle. It gets announced out here.

The hype gets crazy up here. It starts getting real. And there's always gonna be pundits who said, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet not.

And then at some point all of a sudden someone says, Hey, wait a second, it's real. I don't know when that point's going to be, because I think that's different for different people, right? My Silicon Valley friends tend to get a lot more excited faster than maybe the, the cynical New Yorkers, right?

And you may say it's real a lot before Mike's gonna say it's real. I'm, I'm from Florida, we're plastic, you know? And So when I used to work at Forbes years and years ago, I, I, I would, we would fall into this.

We had a, we had a Silicon Valley bureau and we would get excited and hyped by things. And then the guys back in New York would say, would always like, throw water on it. And we were, and it was always like between and shall in, in the, the mid mid point was, right?

I mean, and I, and I think this kind of interesting thing about SAPI, like SAPI respect them, but I think you're absolutely right, Alan. They're, they, they're not trying to win any argument. They're not trying to blow us over.

They're just trying to be good enough. And I don't mean that as a put down. Oh, that, and that's, that's reputation and it works.

So, um, kudos to them for picking their land. Lemme lemme, lemme paint an SAP nightmare scenario for you. So imagine a world where there are these agents, but they're not SAP agents, but they're able to invoke SAP services on the backend.

So they could be agents from, I don't know, Microsoft Apple pick them. And then everything that SAP does is a backend service that comes essentially a headless service. And there is no SAP brand in front of you anymore.

It's just something that's being invoked in the backend. And, uh, then the, you know, that becomes a set of commodity processes on the backend. And Lisa, you know, as a marketer, can you feel the pit in your stomach start to get queasy?

If you're thinking about, you know, the SAP brand, You know, I, I just, I'm not sure there's a pit in my stomach. In fact, I don't think there is. I think what they did well with the announcements was, was the messaging.

They're aiming to automate tasks and improve efficiency using AI agents. That's what they wanna deliver for their bread and butter customers, of which there are so many. They talked about the Juul AI agents really being designed to understand the context of tasks and, and, and provide that personalized support that we all want.

I don't think they're concerned about their brand being absconded or, or blurred away. I think what they wanna do is, is really provide this framework for orchestrating these agents so that there's integration with other frameworks and end-to-end process automation. And I think at the end of the day, what they want to do is delight their customers and make that those tasks automated, contextualized and personalized.

And that's kind of what they said in what they were announcing this week. So I don't think they're concerned about the lines being blurred as much as they are delighting their existing customer base. I, you know, and Mike, in terms of non SAP agents working with SAP, I think that's gonna be a conscious decision.

SAP makes, because they could spin it as them being, you know, the platform that the whole ecosystem works for. Or they could decide they're not gonna, they're going to, they're gonna take an Apple approach, if you will, and say, well, it works, you know, a little bit with Microsoft, but it works best with our own agents. Or, or they might go the other way and say, our agent's gonna be, you know, the superior agent and my agent can kick your agent's ass and therefore it will do what I tell it.

Will we, can we play that song Secret Agent man? Secret Agent Man, it's gonna, it's, look, this whole agent thing's gonna play out. It's gonna be very, I I had this conversation with Mihir, um, I forgot Mihir ISS last name, the Automation Anywhere.

CEO sla, Shukla Shukla, Mihir Shukla. He's the CEO 20 year CEO at Automation Anywhere. I, it's not who's agent you use.

'cause we're all going to use agents from everywhere. It's whose Agent Orchestrator you use that they give a hell about. And I think that is this Mihir Iss no dummy, right?

And, and I think he's dead on. And I think that's really the smart money is, is making their bets ServiceNow, making their bet on it. Salesforce Benioff making their bet on it.

Mihir making his bet on it. Um, that's, that's the key. We're we're going to use, you know, agents from everywhere and anywhere.

Some will be ephemeral, some will be persistent, some will be good, some will be bad, some might be really elegant, designed by Johnny is, I'm kidding, but who, who do we use to orchestrate? How do we manage this army of agents doing our buy bidding? Those will be the big winners in this, in this thing.

All right? So it's gonna be like Batman. You're gonna get the agent you need not deserve.

And see how it goes. Like no bait man. Bateman Bateman, Right?

Love those commercials. Alright. Yeah, that's Alright.

We've taken it, we've taken it to the umpteenth. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drug tv. We'll be back in a minute.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, back, we're back with the last show of the week. Boy, it was, I gotta tell you, I'm tired.

But Dell World Technologies was out there and they were talking up their new server platforms and partnerships with a MD and how they're gonna be able to use AI accelerators from Nvidia and a MD and Intel, and also previewed some new systems where they're gonna combine what they're calling HCI and traditional three tier systems if there's one integrated system. And we talked about something similar to that a week or so ago as well. But, um, Lisa, you know, one thing you gotta say about Dell and all these guys for all the chat about software, maybe it's the hardware guys that are gonna make all the money Very well could be.

Yep. This week was Dell Technologies world. I wasn't there this week.

I had a lot of friends who were so I saw tons of coverage, lots of selfies with Michael Dell. He's always so good about that. But they announced this range of infrastructure innovations that are designed to support AI workloads.

They talked about, uh, validated designs for ai. They talked about AI ready servers. So there's your point there, Mike, about the hardware guys, because Dell has introduced AI ready servers.

They say, Hey, these are optimized for performance, uh, for efficiency to support demanding AI workloads. They also talked about some new storage and networking solutions all designed to support AI workloads. But I think why this matters for customers is what Dell is trying to say is that, Hey guys, we're gonna simplify AI adoption for you.

Every company. We talked about this, um, uh, Alan or SACA couple weeks ago. Every company has to have an AI story.

Well, it's challenging. It's, it's, it's, it's very complex, especially when you bring in the cyber resilience, uh, sphere if you will. But I think what Dell is trying to do here is, is simplify the adoption for customers of AI by providing these solutions that are, they're pre-configured, they're pre-tested, they're also trying to improve performance so that customers can run AI workloads more effectively, simplification, more effective, more efficient.

And also what they're saying is that, hey, customers, if you leverage our AI ready infrastructure, you're gonna gain a competitive advantage because you're gonna be able to deploy AI solutions faster and more efficiently than your competitors. So that, that was kind of, I think thematically what I got out of what they're announcing really efficiency, um, performance, make AI adoption easier in this complex landscape. There's a tension in all of this conversation too, and I'd love to, you know, I'll get Alan's opinion on it 'cause I think we've seen this before, but you know, a lot of the AI platforms that are in use today are do it yourself kind of things that people stitch together and integrate it.

And they're hard to support, but they were typically created by infrastructure people that were attached specifically to a data science team. And now, you know, as we see more of the inference start to be running and the software artifacts themselves are getting built into DevOps workflows, there's an argument to be said that it's time to just build standardized platforms that you get from a Dell or an HPE or somebody else in much the way you buy any other servers. So are we, are we on the cusp of that, Alan?

Are we on the cusp of it? This goes back to the AI agent thing, right? So lemme back up, yes, we're on the cusp of it, but when do we actually get there?

John May think we get there a lot sooner than you may think we get there, right? Because there's an argument to be made. What we've got now is, or what's coming down the pike right now, is there, it it's, you know, it may not be all the way there that we, we, we, you know, it's not achieving the full promise, but we're already starting to see this stuff get real to a certain extent, right?

And now where we talked about SAP being a, uh, not a laggard, but you know, the second half of the mainstream, let's call it kind of company, that's, that's their market. Not, not the early adopters and not the first half of the mainstream. Dell is, is very much also a company that doesn't like to jump into a market unless that market is substantial and unless Dell feels good that they can capture a substantial share of that substantial market emphasis on substantial.

So when you see a company like Dell coming out with this, they've already validated in their minds that this is a, a substantial market, not 10 years from now. Yeah. It's a substantial market now.

So we're on the cusp and they're making their play to capture their fair share of that market, which in Michael Dell's mind is always an outsized share of that pie, right? It's a big piece, a double piece of pie. And so I, I think there's your answer.

If Dell's saying it, they're doing it, it's real. They don't, Dell doesn't usually they're not, they're not Apple though. Apple's never a first to market company either, right?

Dell's not a first to market company. So this, we're we're past the cusp. Yeah.

I mean, to your point, Dell, Dell always waits to, you know, when there's enough critical mass of customers to buy something that in, in numbers that can be measured in billions and billions, that's when they start worrying about it. Yep. And only when they have a plan to be a substantial player in it, they never want to be a fringe player And they leverage their ecosystem.

Well, to your point, Alan, they don't wanna be a fringe player, but they also leverage that ecosystem. Well, and some of the things they announced, I thought, hey, I could see new partnerships here, new collaborations and the AI ecosystem, which would further solidify them as one of the go-to platforms. You know, the good takeaway for in, in a sense like where Mike was, this is, I, I think I, I think Mike would agree, this is probably as many announcements and in many, uh, big companies competing against each other in the same space that I've seen in one week, maybe in decades.

And I, and I think that the takeaways we have the leaders making their, their moves, but we also, as you said, Alan, SAP and Dell and what, to me, what's always interesting, and I keep asking the companies themselves that are gonna make these decisions, and they're all kind of in a, in a kind of a, a holding pattern, like a plane flying over a city waiting to land. They just, they're just waiting for this stuff to come out. And again, just to synthesize what you've all said Al already, we don't know what the timing is gonna be, but it's definitely gonna happen.

5, you know, the, the, the latest announcement that they make, well, we'll, we'll have more details later. That's what the holding pattern is, is about. And they're also waiting for what Apple has to say.

So it's all kind of just this, this huge rush. And then awaits Talent's also betting on the cio. And most of those CIOs are kind of anxiously looking across the room there at these AI budgets that are starting to increase within their organization and sucking up more of the dollars.

And they want control of those budgets because they're gonna be large scale projects. And you can then roll up all kinds of interesting upgrades alongside that AI project. Much like a bill going through Congress.

And they wanna be able to go back to the CFO and say, yeah, we have an AI motion. It's big, but it includes all these pieces and standardized stuff that we can manage. And they're used to making that kind of case versus, I don't know if, um, you know, a lot of the I internal IT organizations that I know, I don't think they can build custom systems, never mess maintain them.

I think they've lost that skill over the years And for good reason. I mean, it's just, I mean, who, who wants to build custom system one-offs anymore, right? I I just, you know, uh, I think back to when I was in the, at inter reliant, we were in the data center business and all the different servers and machines and you know, we bought 30 companies in 36 months.

Most of them were, were hosting companies. And you know, the, the, the disparity between the machines you would see from company to company. You know, some people had white box PCs that they kind of went out and got the motherboards themselves and built sitting in, in Baker Baker's racks, right?

Other people really had like Rackable, rackmounted servers, you know, then Cobalt came out with this little one U blue server that had red lights that blinked. I remember asking Pat Conte there had of sales, pat, what are the red lights? Blinking symbolize?

He said Nothing but their, they're cool as s**t, aren't they? And I said, yeah, they are. And everybody started and, and we were able to sell those 99 bucks a month dedicated server, sold them like hotcakes, right?

This is, you know, you know, we're talking about, by the way, we were Dell host. I did that deal. Interline at the company I helped put together was was Dell host.

And we were an OEM relationship. Dell invested in us. And that was another sweet deal, right?

For Dell. We used to have to buy the server, they would sell it, they would sell it for 40% more than we could sell it for. 'cause our salespeople stunk compared to Dell.

We'd have to buy the server from them. So we pay them for it. Then Dell would collect the money from the end user every month for hosting and give us a piece of that for the, what we did.

So they made money on the, in the out and the in between. And we were sitting there having to keep the customer happy. But it brought a lot of business into us.

'cause you know, it allowed us to be Dell host. And This is, this is the magic of a thing called the channel, right? And Dell is a master channel.

So that, So good for them, you know, and next generation servers and yeah. You know, I I, so those are the probably the least, you know, IIII was reading the coverage, like you were, at least we had a lot of Futurum folks there. Um, okay, there's a new power edge.

Wow. You know, um, honest. But, but, but compute and storage get the scale independently, but you buy them together in a bundle and consensually manage them.

Does that not get your heart going? Yeah, just a little bit. Just a little bit.

But there are people who geek out on that, right? And, and so more power to 'em. Anyway, let's call a rap on this week's Textron gang, the weak of ai, agentic AI conferences.

We shall it shall be Heads forth, be known as, uh, have a great weekend. Hey, just a heads up, you know, for those in the US you know this, but for around the world this weekend is what we call Memorial Day weekend, where we are our fallen soldiers over the years on Monday. So we will not be doing a show on Monday.

We'll, we'll be returning on Tuesday. And, um, enjoy the long weekend. If you are lucky enough to have the long weekend, uh, we have a as usual, a full text on tv, uh, uh, schedule right behind today's show so you can watch it the rest of today.

And again, quick reminder, we are on our OTT channel. Go check us out on Roku, Amazon, apple tv, iOS or Android. Mike, John, Lisa, thank you very much.

Thank you for watching this. Alan Hummel, we're out. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv.

Let me introduce you to our next guest in this segment. His name is Mark Haney. Mark is the chief technology Officer for embi.

And let's welcome him in. Hey Mark, how are you? Hey, Alan, I'm doing great today.

Thanks for having me on. Pleasure to see you. Pleasure to see you as well.

So, mark, I, I mentioned you were the CTO over at Embi, but you know, the, some CTOs are VP of engineering types, some are out in the field, some are, you know, front face fronts for their organization in terms of dealing with people like us here at Techstrong, some are all three and more. Tell us, mark, what kind of CTO are you and how'd you get here? Yeah, I appreciate the question.

I, you know, when I think about myself, I'm really kind of the process and structure. CTO. I'm not joining companies to rewrite their key algorithms and restructure all of the applications.

That's the chief architect's job. But I can hang in those discussions. My kind of focus in life is really around mobilizing engineering teams, getting their productivity up and running a discipline process from end to end that can produce results.

Uh, I've been in enterprise software pretty much my whole career. Uh, I've been a programmer at nearly every job I've held, although they don't let me code as much these days, more the leadership side. Uh, but yes, uh, I've been coming up in enterprise Software, but if you had to, you could.

That's Right. I could get in there. That's right.

You could still roll up your sleeves and do it the head bang with the best of 'em, but That's exactly right. That's exactly right. But yes, uh, computer science background, but now firmly in leadership around process and execution.

I get you. Uh, I think we like to think we can, I don't know what the reality is, but, um, I, I hear you. I hear you.

Mark. Let's talk a little bit about sebi. Give us the embi story.

Right. I'm so excited to join sebi. I'm about 90 days in as the Chief Technology Officer here, and it's really my bread and butter, it's software development tools.

Uh, we are an end-to-end platform for software quality and testing. And so think about really popular tools like TestRail, uh, and X-Ray within the Atlassian ecosystem, tracking all your test cases, your test plans, and how you execute quality on your products. But we thought it was really important at semi to form that end-to-end process, not just how you test, but also integrating things like automation into the product suite.

So we have a Ranorex product that does automated testing that feeds right into those testing tools. And most importantly, I think it gets into our topic today is incorporating security and compliance matters directly into the development pipeline. So we have two products today that focus on both code obfuscation as well as security vulnerability scanning.

And you can integrate that right into your end-to-end testing suite. And that's what we're all about here at symbi, is we know that, you know, people are struggling to get high quality, predictable results. We wanna provide the suite that can help you get there.

I love it. I love it. Um, you know, mark, so testing, a lot of people had a lot of misconceptions about software testing.

There were a lot of folks who used to think that people who did software testing were sort of junior developers, failed developers, people what could arise. They didn't give credit to what I call the testing professional people who's devoted their lives to testing. That's right, right, right.

Making sure you had good coverage. That's right. Right.

And then, you know, with the advent of DevOps, we started seeing the automated testing, continuous testing, right? And it kind of changed the whole testing game. There was a segment that said, let's shift testing left and let's make developers do testing.

Not that they can't or they couldn't, but that it took away from that professional cadre of professional testers who quite frankly did it better than developers could. That's right. And so I think we've seen that pendulum swing back and say, Hey, testing belongs with testers.

We can automate, we can do it continuously, but it's not really the developer who should test, right? Yes. It it's also, also there's a separation of duties there.

That makes sense. That's right. Um, but then we, you know, obviously you've seen a whole new thing come in, mark, and that's the advent of ai, Right?

Right. And, and all of a sudden we're using AI to figure out what, like we are with AI doing code, we're having AI Right. Test and, and you know, do test coverage.

Huge, huge c change, right? Embi does, you know, I've learned in my 30 plus years in technology, you either embrace change or you get wiped over by change. That's right.

Talk to us about how SBIs embraced this change, mark. Well, I think it starts with your opening point, right? Which is the fact that yes, um, testing isn't just for some junior person that couldn't be a developer one day.

It's matured and become much more complex and rich in terms of the areas that it touches. And that is where an end-to-end suite, like somebody really focuses. You can't just say, well, my developers will write automation.

And you can't just say, I'll have some human testers go and click buttons and tests. You actually need a little bit of both and everything in between. Um, and so yes, maybe your developers are writing unit level tests.

And hopefully if those fail, it's creating tickets in your system on an automated basis. Um, but you also probably have UI automation, you have API automation, then you actually have the human element where you go and say, in certain areas of this product, we're actually gonna go and put the human touch. So I think the process maturity of quality assurance for products has improved greatly and now incorporates all of those nuances from that end-to-end approach.

And I think that really sets the stage for talking about, you know, the new rush into adopting ai. Um, everywhere I have turned Alan, I have seen teams saying, we need an AI strategy. Do something.

AI is happening, right? It's a big buzzword in the market, whether you're capturing value yet or just want to participate a bit, there's a huge emphasis in adopting AI into that end-to-end process. And so, you know, as we move into that world, the biggest piece of advice I have for everyone is make sure you have your process sound before you rush into an AI future.

If your process doesn't work today not using ai, and you have gaps in coverage, you can't see your governance processes, you don't know where things are gonna fall, those same problems are gonna be amplified when you start to put AI agents into the development cycle itself. So that's kind of my biggest kind of advice for people. Focus on your process today before layering AI in, because it'll have major implications.

I don't know if that's helpful to kind of get our conversation started today. Yeah, no, I think it's a great segue. Mark.

You know, recently the administration came out with ano, uh, yet another executive order, um, this one around AI though, right? And, uh, I, I think the technical number for the executive order is executive order 1, 4, 1 7, 9, right? Sounds like something outta monsters you.

But, um, mark, talk to us about this executive order, what it means and what we should be doing. It, it effectively just lowers the barriers to adopting ai. There used to be a lot more hoops and, and, and kind of rules to go through before you can use those tools.

Now that's really been removed. And so now we can start kind of adopting them at a much faster pace. So all of those boardroom discussions and leadership team meetings where we say, we've got to have an AI strategy, we need to go faster on ai, this, you know, change in the regulations is only going to enable those to actually happen.

And so, you know, as I think about that and my previous comment, you know, that process maturity really needs to be in place before you rush down this path. You know, I think there's kind of three big areas that I get worried about when people pile into ai. You know, the first is really the compliance and legal space.

Uh, you know, I'm not sure if you kind of saw, uh, but there have been instances where, um, actual source code has been kind of put into an AI engine, and then other folks can actually see portions of that by just talking with the ai. You know, it's concerns like that, that you have to kind of think about upfront in terms of your process. You know, what agents are we gonna use?

How secure are they? How do we protect some of the proprietary information or customer data from leaking or going into that kind of AI approach, you know? So that's the first thing I would think about.

You know, the second thing I would think about is really security. Um, we've seen actually instances of AI leaking secrets from those source codes, or even possibly if they're not instrumented the right way, you know, suggesting insecure coding practices as you adopt an AI tool to help you with that coding and those tasks. Uh, and the third thing I worry about is really infrastructure.

And so how are you gonna run that ai uh, those AI agents, how are you gonna go govern what they are? How are you gonna make sure that you don't spend a million dollars overnight because people just start lighting it up left and right. So you have to have some monitoring on your infrastructure to make sure that it's healthy and sound, uh, and also that it's managed and controlled.

So those are kind of three areas I worry about with this order now, we are gonna see a huge increase in velocity and movement to adopting AI into the dev pipeline. And so having some of those three topics covered in your end-to-end process, I think is really important. So it's gotta be a thoughtful approach and not just a gold rush.

I I, I agree with you. And look, I don't think you agree we're going to get much argument. There is a bit of a gold rush going on right now.

Yeah, That's Right. You know, just this week there seems to be conferences everywhere. Mm-hmm.

And every report I'm getting from our tech strong and rum people on location is ag agentic, ai this, AI that AI everywhere. That's right. And you know, Marco lesson I learned in business is in most gold rushes, you know, who makes the most money?

And there's a lucky few hit gold strike gold, but it's the people selling the picks and shovels, right? That's right. That's really success or failure.

They still sell their picks and shovels, whether you find gold or not, they made their money. That's right. That's right.

Um, so I think it's important that we remember in this rush, right, that we, you gotta, you've gotta kind of keep your, your cadence, you've gotta keep your head about you, your wits, about you gotta do things that's right in the right way. So I, I love this, um, specifically with sebi and, and their platform. Now, how are you guys incorporating that?

Let's talk about that a little bit more, right? Yeah. Where does rubber meet the road there for you?

Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, obviously at a foundational level, SEBI provides that suite of products that helps you run your testing and quality assurance process. And as I look at the AI movement, I mean, there is going to be an absolute explosion of velocity within dev teams as they adopt these tools.

And what that means for us is actually in the quality assurance world, making sure we test more deeply, more broadly and more frequently than ever. It doesn't mean the opposite. Maybe we're using AI tools to assist us, and we can talk about that in a moment.

But, you know, it actually means that you need a robust process to coverage this, even if a lot of it's automation and very scalable, you need to make sure that as change comes through that's generated by an agent, that you can test it, you can understand where it came from, who did that commit, um, you know, have it accounted for. You know, and, and I think it starts really for most companies, they've gotta look at their risk tolerance, right? And so, for example, are you a healthcare company making a medical device or are you a video game company making something for fun?

Those are gonna be different risk profiles, and you can use platforms like Embi to kind of dial in, uh, you know, your process to the right degree of scrutiny. Uh, but I've read a number of articles in recent, uh, days and weeks. I mean, I think something like, uh, I saw an article from Stack Overflow in, in 24 of their developer survey, said 76% of developers are already using AI or adopting it in the near term.

I mean, it is happening everywhere. Um, and to think that it's just gonna solve all the problems without us maybe managing those changes, scrutinizing them and following them along is, is, you know, it's a fool's errand. So, um, you know, that's where, where I say define your risk level, define a process that's mature and get end-to-end tooling that help you support that process.

So that's kind of the foundation of what we do. Of course, at Embi, we also have our own AI strategy. We'd be foolish to not kind of look at the power that this can bring to our customers and our internal staff.

We're proceeding with a very thoughtful, uh, I wouldn't call it cautious, but I would say, you know, um, measured approach, uh, to adopting AI in particular. We've got a couple of offerings that we'll be announcing in the next month that will help our customers form up their test plans in a new way, and also generate test cases to test changes in their code base in a new way. So we've got a big announcement coming in the next month that I'll, I'll save some of that thunder for there.

But, uh, you know, we're excited to offer some AI tools to our customers, but again, it's the foundational process for me that's most important, which is what we've been doing for, for years. Love it. Mark, thank you for coming on here.

Good luck in this new role with sebi. Sounds like you've already gotten yourself an invitation for next month's announcement. So, uh, we'll, we'll, there we go.

We'll see where we are there. Absolutely, man. Until then, they'll keep doing what you're doing.

And thanks for coming on Techstrong tv. All right, Alan, thanks for Mark. We didn't mention em's, URL, what is it?

com. Uh, check it out. And we'd love to kind of work with all the engineering teams out there driving great value.

And thanks Alan for your thoughts and your leadership in the industry. Thank you, mark, it's a pleasure to have you on. Mark Haney, chief CTO sebi here on text drum tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back. Hey guys, thanks.

We're here with Anja Bart, who's principal developer advocate for Amazon Web Services. And we're gonna be talking about all the amazing things happening around Amazon queue developer, generative ai. And in case you haven't heard, there's also this thing called vibe coding.

Hey Andre, welcome to show. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. You know, in the last 30 days alone, I think I have seen four or five announcements, new capabilities added to Amazon Queue developer.

It's not clear to me that everybody understands exactly what that is. So why don't we level set for a minute and say to folks, what is this thing? It's an AI agent framework, but it does what?

So Amazon Q developer is our AI assistant that helps you across your software development lifecycle. And it's built upon agents. So agents that help you to either transform code, modernize code, but also doing a lot of other exciting things.

And one of the exciting things we just recently, couple of weeks ago introduced is Amazon Q developer in the CLI. So there's a lot of excitement I can see from the developers out there, including myself working with ACL I. What it does is it brings this agent experience that many of you probably experience working in your ides, where you have those coding assistant into the cli.

So now what it unlocks is you have access to all of the CLIs installed. In my case, I do a lot development with AWS of course. So I can use the QCLI now to just, you know, type in natural language and help me list my files in a specific S3 bucket.

Or even ask, Hey, can you check the docs? How do I implement a, B, C? And the tool does it for me.

So super exciting to see those capabilities emerging. One of the things that has come up when I started talking to people about this is that while they're happy to use these tools within their IDE, one of the things they like about the CLI, it's a little more extensible in their minds. And they started using the AI agents for things that went beyond just writing COVID.

They were using it for almost other parts of the software development lifecycle and engineering. So how extensible is it now that we have the CLI and it almost feels like we're moving into the realm of DevOps with some of this stuff. Absolutely.

So one of the last additions, um, that Q developer CLI got is support for MCP. So the proposed model context protocol by Tropic, there has been a huge excitement in the community about it and, uh, a great deal of adoption. So with that MCP support, you can now connect to specific MCP servers.

For example, what our teams did, our documentation team, they wrapped the public APIs, created an MCP server, which is available on the GitHub repo as well that we provide. And you can use that for example, with QSLI and then just using natural language, say, Hey, could you check the docs? Look something up for me.

And that's just one example, right? With MCP, you can connect the CLI now to all of the servers you want to include for your development workflow. I also noticed too that there's now integration with not just GitLab, but GitHub as well, I think.

And um, that also kind of makes the whole platform a lot more extensible in ways that people hadn't early imagined. But, um, how will software engineering evolve in your mind as we kind of have these capabilities? I think there's a lot of change happening, how we build, right?

We still need all of our technical knowledge, we all need all of you developers out there. But what I see is changing is a lot of the things that, for example, took me a long time, like looking up specific commands. I'm not just using every day, right?

Like sometimes you push a GI, um, request and, and then something just goes wrong and then need to kind of reverse what you pushed. And then looking up those specific commands, like if you live in that world every day, obviously you have that, but sometimes you just, you know, find yourself Googling for a specific command. Or if you're a Python developer, right?

Maybe you have to write something in another language for like a specific project and you're not that familiar with Rust or Java or something. So now you can use the AI assistant to really help you what I would call kind of, you know, the learning zone as well in the software development lifecycle. So you can quickly do tasks, either look up some stuff which is more like, you know, helping you a task you can definitely do by yourself, but it would just take a little bit long to to optimize and augment and, and be more efficient.

But also tapping into this, this learning zone where you can also use the tool as you're writing a developing code to just, Hey, help me like convert this snippet here I have in Python, how would you write this in in rust, et cetera. And obviously with the GitHub integration, it's also a lot of those things, right? Where you can, these days, for example, with the, uh, queue developer integration, just label an issue and then chat with the agent and help you like solve that issue, right?

And queue developer can automatically implement your feature. It can generate bug fixes for you, run code reviews. And I think that is kind of the new way that developers will, will start to work, embracing the tools and then helping you just do your job much more efficient and you can focus on the parts that you actually enjoy solving the problems.

Do you think as a result more developers will embrace a wider range of programming languages? I think most people maybe know one, maybe two, and they have one that they favor. But, um, you know, in a lot of instances we wind up writing code and old versions of Java.

Do you think as we kind move into this brave new world, it'll be easier to stay current on a particular platform or maybe even switch between programming languages? I think at the core of a developer, there is the curiosity, right? We are, we're always getting excited about new technologies and, and new languages and new protocols that are coming out.

And I think that especially the speed of innovation that's happening right now in the AI space, it's, it's so much news and, and protocols and, and things coming out that it's sometimes hard to stay up to date, right? Even for the most curious minds. So I do think really that, you know, the AI tooling and all of this really helps us to kind of embrace that a little bit more.

Like one example also is kind of, you know, the emergence of vibe coding recently where people just, you know, um, in a kind of a different way approach the thing and say, Hey, let me see how far is I can take this, right? And just use the natural language, use coding assistance, and then develop something. Build something.

So that could be like you're tapping into something new, right? Like I started many decades ago with, you know, creating my own websites. I haven't really been a front end developer, so I, I'm, I'm not up to date on how you would build, you know, modern front ends these days.

But that's, for example, would be a good use case for me. Just, you know, use white coding over a weekend maybe and, and develop like an updated website. So I do think there's a lot of opportunity in kind of helping in a fun way sometimes, and also in a very practical way in your jobs to leverage AI and help you learn to kind of synthesize information and use that are happening and kind of yes, elevate your skills and just embrace new technologies.

And, you know, at the core of it still has have fun. It is as a, as a developer, You mentioned vibe coding and we've been kind of using low code and no code tools to get at citizen developers for a long time now. And vibe coding seems like the next logical extension of that.

But I'm also starting to wonder just what is a developer these days? 'cause it seems like there's gonna be a broad range of types of skills and more people will be able to develop. So, um, how do you view the developer community evolving?

I think it is really democratizing who can be a builder, which I'm excited about. Not everyone might have access, you know, to traditional software engineering education. And to see that you can use those tools and natural language to build something is super exciting.

So I do think the community of builders will grow and is already growing, which is, it's great to see. At the same time, the technical developer community can also grow with the tooling. So I do think we should all be like embracing that and welcoming to the new builders in the community.

And then together figure out, you know, the best ways obviously to, to work with a new tooling. And also, you know, security is an important part to be able to put guardrails in place as we're developing with ai. It also seems like it might be easier to collaborate between, uh, developers who may be quote unquote vibe coding and professional developers in the, as of AI agents, because we'll have a more common framework for understanding what's happening.

And maybe we don't have to explain as much of the technical underpinnings. There's definitely a big opportunity for us to collaborate and, and we already see this in the community. Um, at AWS we have a lot of, you know, user group events happening where I, I get to join not once in a while.

We have meetups that we're hosting. We have the, the community itself running a a ton of events and we already see like, there there is kind of this, you know, collaboration between people and more people coming to those events as well and, and kind of are excited about the technology. So this is an amazing thing to see that's happening, I think already, and definitely I think over the next years as well.

So what is your best advice to developers about how to get started with all this? 'cause on some level, I think they're all intrigued, but they're also maybe a little overwhelmed and sometimes maybe a little fearful. I would just recommend to, to be fearless and, and try out the tools depending on what you're doing, whether you're a Java developer, whether you're a Python developer, whether you are working on front end.

There's so much choice right now in the market with, with tooling, with capabilities. And I think just looking at what your day-to-day looks like, embrace some of the tools and, you know, be curious and see how it can help you do your job better and maybe help, you know, offload some of the tasks you'd rather like outsource to an AI and really get your core time focusing on, on, on either what, what will you enjoy doing, um, solving problems or other things. And I mean, historically, a lot of software engineers, especially kind of, if you're going into the kind of the principle roles, a lot of that work is already kind of directing strategies and, and and reviewing rather than, you know, actual writing.

So I think for all of us as a, as a developer community out there, it's about helping to shape the future and seeing where we can really drive those values. And especially working, you know, with, with startups in this space, we already see a lot of great impact that it's having where, you know, startups, for example, we're working with one Namu Q developer helped to reduce development time by 30% and now, you know, you can use that time to, to really invest in other things coming up, you know, spinning up additional projects or et cetera. So that's kind of where I see it going and, and I'm super excited for everyone to just, you know, come together and help evolve the space and, and find the great use cases as well.

You think ultimately there'll be less friction in the development process? And I ask this question because, you know, I've talked to more than a few people where they have an idea, but then they think about what it would take to set up the development environment to go execute that idea, and they decide that they're just gonna go do something else. So, um, can we get to the point where, you know, all the stuff that gets in the way of, between the idea and the code of just getting it out of the way, I see a lot of opportunity in that space for quick prototyping, right?

And, and it's kind of like partially in the vibe coding area as well, where we see, um, I think there, there, there was a podcast recently from Y Combinator that also tapped into this and saying they see a lot of uptake where, you know, startups start to use vibe coding just to get some initial MVP products out. So in general, I think across vibe coding and what I would say the AI assisted coding, which is like, you know, you are very technical, but you're using the AI tooling to assist you opportunity to just bring ideas to life much faster, try out things much faster, like you can experiment quicker and then really kind of iterate faster too to find product, to find, you know, build out the application, see which path is kind of, you wanna take it. So absolutely, I think it helps us to, to build faster, ideate faster.

I was having a conversation with somebody and they were trying to figure out how to manage all the different AI agents that there might be out there. They're gonna need to be connected and orchestrated and just come quite, couldn't come to the conclusions to whether or not are there gonna be, you know, two dozen specialist agents that I'm interacting with, or will there be kinda like a master butler agent that goes, tell all, all the other agents what to do. We see a lot of excitement and already like emerging this multi-agent world.

And what you wanna do is, rather than compressing all of the capabilities in, in one big single agent, you wanna have those specialized agents, right, that have access to specialized knowledge domains. Again, like security safeguarding, guard railing is all very important. So you probably wanna have like a specialized agent that is, might, might have access to a specific domain, let's say your internal development best practices.

You might have another agent that is trained with its knowledge on the security best practices, and then it's about how to orchestrate that, right? To your point, I do think we see this multi-agent and we already seeded, um, even more expanding over the future. And then there's a lot of like excitement in the community as well right now about protocols, open standards emerging around how we can communicate between agents.

So I can see over the next month and years a lot of like development in that area and then figuring out how we can more broadly build this world of multi-agent. There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about the degree to which AI and agents might replace developers. Is that feasible or is it just changing the role and the experience?

But there will always be a need for somebody who's the developer. Yes. And we've seen this over, over the course of like technology innovations happening, there are skills that are more likely and AI will perform, but there's definitely a huge opportunity like to shift what you're working on and shift the skills.

So I see a very definite need for technical software engineering resources, people that have that deep technical knowledge. There might be a shift and we see that, right? Like, which tasks am I really doing and I'm, I already shift, but there's definitely the need for the technical people that, you know, are able to build the more complex system architectures to review and then also set the direction.

So while there is a shift, I think in, in the individual tasks, like with all technology evolution that we've seen in the past, it'll create exciting new types of jobs, which I'm very confident about. Like we, we already see the first glimpse of that happening and also like, just what I'm, as a individual working on my tasks and, and, and skills shift a little. So that's why it's so important for us all to, to really embrace and, and be curious and try to, to build up that skillset, how to work with ai, right?

Like what's the best way of phrasing my natural language inputs to get to the results I'm looking for. So there's so much I think, for all of us to, to learn and kind of grow with the technology. And I think those are the important skills to have as a, as a developer in the future.

Last question. There's been a lot of folks saying that we may actually build more software in the next two years than we built in the last decade. Is that hyperbole or do you think that that might actually happen?

I think there's a lot of potential for, for new use cases, which, which will ultimately end up in your applications and especially in the agent AI world. Imagine like, you know, like agents communicating with each other. And there's so much opportunity, I think in this space to figure out like as you're building products, as a company, as a startup, as an individual developer, like how to participate in this new future where, you know, ag agentic AI is, is making a lot of like, you know, the reasoning, the planning and helping not just to interact maybe with your customer base, which we see right now, like a lot of like customer support use cases, but I think there will be a complete new wave of, of applications and we see like early glimpses of that.

Um, for example, we're working with Ana ai, they're building agents and using agen AI to automate an entire research lifecycle. So this has been a discussion in the industry as well. Can AI help us to, to drive research and innovation?

So really kind of from generating new ideas to then also like running experiments and, and creating research reports. So I think there's, there's this whole world in front of us and I'm as excited, I think as everyone else to see what those new use cases, um, might be. Alright folks, you heard in here, Hey, the job of a developer is definitely gonna change and evolve, but you could argue it's probably never been a better time to be a developer.

Hey Anja, thanks for being on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. All right, and back to you guys in the studio.

Hey everyone. We're live here at RSA. This is Alan Schell.

It's my first interview for RSA 2025. I've been busy over, I don't know if you could see it out the back, but Moscon South is just over there. We're in Moscone West and I've been over in south all day.

I haven't had a chance to be here. Lisa Martin's done a great job. I hope you're following along.

What a be best way to kick off my RSA coverage though, then with this guy right here. If you don't know him, shame on you, but no, if you don't know him, he's the CEO of Futurum group. It's my good friend Daniel Newman.

Daniel, welcome to RSA Coverage man. You are my first interview. Yeah.

And welcome, uh, uh, yourself. I mean, we're at the desk together. Yeah, our first one since we got happily married.

Uh, That's right. And that was in Boca was the last time we did that. That was In Boca.

Yeah. And uh, our first r RSS a together though as Yes, one big happy family. First time we've been here.

So, and this is a good RSA, they're expecting somewhere between 40 and 45,000 people. Um, you know, we, we do this event every year over in, uh, with, in conjunction with them. It's our 10th year doing it.

And we had, well, at two o'clock we had about 850 people there, but they'll, um, we'll probably finish with a thousand. It was an amazing day of AI cyber at depth. Yeah, it's been a good one so far.

Uh, I came in on Sunday. I know the event technically is not even really Night started The expo floor, but, uh, been doing some stuff around the perimeter. I had a great sit down with, um, Palo Alto Network, CEO Nash, Aurora.

They, they bought a company since last night And they, AI company Announced, uh, and, and launched a new platform. So talk a little bit about that. Uh, yep.

Spent some time with, uh, Cisco's chief product Officer, GT Patel, Love G two Today. Uh, I had him, uh, for, yeah, G two's great. Yeah, he's a great sit down.

I went over and visited the Veeam house. Um, just, I was just sitting with Google Cloud for a while. Really.

Course Google is, uh, making big moves. Um, you know, we'll see billions And billions, 30 something billion, uh, doing and gotta get the wiz deal done. Yeah.

You know, um, the, the environment's still a little questionable. So I, I heard the wiz deal is not getting done now till 2026. Um, I haven't heard anything official, and even if I had, I wouldn't say it here.

Okay. But, um, let's say from the onset of that announcement, I'm just, there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty still. And Google, of course, yeah.

Is in the middle of a lot more regulatory scrutiny. Chrome, the two cases advertising business, they're just going through a lot right now. And so, while personally I don't actually believe this transaction is particularly problematic, um, I think when you're a company that's kind of facing this many investigations, both here domestically and around the world, trying to get something through you, you know how hard it is to get these deals done.

You need a lot of regulatory bodies to approve them. There's also a PR aspect to it. And like you said, while this particular deal I don't think represents any sort of monopolistic behavior or anything because of the atmosphere that Google find finds themselves in, it's going to get so much more scrutiny than it deserves, quite frankly.

You know, I'm not a handicapper, but I, you know, the odds of this thing getting done are just not as good as they you would think that it should be. Yeah. So Lemme tell you something that is very interesting in those conversations that I had though so far this industry has long been very fragmented.

There's so many different types and pieces of security. Yeah. You come here and it's not a few dozen power players.

It is hundreds, thousands of companies. There's new companies, tons of venture money going into this space. You know, we're securing this application, this device, this edge, this data, but there is this really big sort of movement by these larger companies to try to do a platformization.

Yeah. Um, I heard it from Nikesh, I heard it from G two. This kind of, the industry needs centralization and that AI is a bit of a forcing function Maybe.

But so here, as someone who's been in security 30 years, the move to a platform, you know, it's little fish get eaten by the medium fish, big fish eat the medium fish. One of the issues in security is innovation at the Cisco level or even the Palo Alto level kind of, they, they count on acquisition for innovation. And the, what you used to hear was products become features, right?

So you would have a small company that made a product and then that became a feature in a larger product set. Well, the other shoe of dropping on that is products move into platforms. Yep.

And then the nice thing about platform is you don't have to own every product that fits into that platform. You could partner and have an ecosystem, if you will. I think that's been the holy grail that companies like Palo, Cisco and before them, McAfee, Symantec, they all chase that Holy grail.

Very few companies achieve that platform status, which is weird. 'cause you would think, what's the big deal about being a platform? Right?

But why is it so hard? But very few companies get there, Daniel. Well, it's a massive deal.

And what's a little different in terms of a forcing function, one ai. Mm-hmm. Right?

So AI is creating so much velocity, so much pace that companies have to be able to address that. And stitching together dozens or hundreds of different security solutions is a challenge, especially given the amount of budget that is security, which is generally single digit percentage of an overall IT budget at best. While concurrently tending to be not the strongest part of expertise within any, any IT team.

And so the idea, again, it's a good idea, not necessarily saying it will work, but that you could sort of have that one universal platform. By the way, we started there a little bit with cloud, right? It was you're gonna use one cloud, right?

And that one cloud will solve all your compute, storage, networking needs. And it's like, well, you need one cloud, but you also need a bunch of your own infrastructure still for this reason. And then it was how many years later that all those big clouds said, well now you need more than one cloud.

And by the way, it's a telco cloud and there's an edge. But I think the idea that getting underneath all of the security needs and having sort of a more prominent partner becomes relevant, but it also materially changes the makeup of the industry. If that was to really take place, Yes, it would.

You know, the single biggest question I hear from my friends in security, especially those who can't make it out to San Francisco here to RSA, where's the innovation? Where is the innovation in security? We're doing the same things we were doing.

Where's the innovation? And unfortunately, the innovation is generally not in Palo Alto, or I don't mean to pick on them. They're two great security companies.

The innovation, I always say, if you go down to the expo floor here at five 30, it's kind of like the Star Wars galaxy in the center of the galaxy. There's a big black hole that's sucking in light. Yeah.

That's where these big companies have 40 by 40 booth and 80 by 80 booths. It's when you get to the outer rim, you see innovation, those 10 by 10 booths where security people are innovating, coming up with the next generation, especially with ai, ag, agentic, AI stuff. And I see it in two ways with ai.

One is AI is a sword, one is AI as a shield or you know, using a shield for ai. I don't think, I think the whole system is geared, and I'm not saying it's cracked, but the whole system is geared to keep that innovation engine humming. 100%.

These big companies will make a number of purchases of these smaller companies. That was the protect ai. Absolutely.

It's just that there are thousands of smaller startups either being seeded in Series A's and B's, um, that may not see that exit, but we do need in any industry, and that's the same thing in ai. There's lots of companies trying to innovate there, but we are seeing a very exciting convergence. Yeah.

Security doesn't sit on the island anymore. It used to be like IT security, security have to, and now these two things are very much interdependent. Yep.

And that security platforms plus data plus infrastructure aren't sitting that far away from the type of compute applications and resources and agents. Absolutely. Let me bring up something else.

I'd like to get your thoughts. Hey, if you need a nap. No, I'm good.

Tissues. Okay. Um, But, uh, we're all a little sick.

Yeah. Well, it's going around Here, but thank gosh, from where you sit watching us right now, uh, We're, they can't, we're not contagious. Catch it from here.

So I don't know if you had a chance to go over to the, uh, what they call the innovation sandbox here. No, not yet. So, 20th year at RSA, they pick 10 companies every year to compete in the innovation sandbox.

A who's who of winners over 20 years. Lots of IPOs, lots of big exits. This year they're doing something a little different.

Every one of the 10 finalists is getting $5 million in venture money from Crosspoint Partners, which is the company that now owns RSA conference. Oh, wow. Interesting.

What's your opinion about, so RSA conference is a conference. Should they be investing in companies? Are we gonna mess up?

Are we going to kill the, the gravy train? This whole system of innovation? Like, you know, there's a, a lot of people here are saying RSA is a conference, not an investor.

They're changing their business model. It's now RSAC conference, C for community. Well, I think that's very limiting.

It's a very small mindset. Look, the RSA conference community, whether it is or isn't community. Right.

We're, we're, we're debating that is a ecosystem and it's a, it's a bringing together of many people and ideas Is transparency here is that RSA happens to be owned by a company that is invested in other businesses. They're using an event that they've built that brings the best together into one place to try to seed. I mean, they could do it more stealthily and have their, I I would rather them not.

Yeah. I'm saying. So now they're, it's with a level of transparency.

It's out in the open. I mean, these companies that are entering it are choosing, they understand that the consequence of being good could be taking an investment money. Yep.

Um, they probably are trying to raise money. They're probably talking to other venture companies to try to raise money. Sure.

So I, you know, it's kind of like CNBC hosting Shark Tank. It's like, look, you've got an audience, you've got access to these interesting people. Uh, you're bringing them together and it's, it's good business.

It good money out capital allocators. Putting good money towards good products and services is a key element of a strong capitalist society. And so, I mean, I, you know, me, I Mean, you're a capitalist.

I, you know, we, uh, liked what you did so much. Yeah. That I, that I had to have it.

Yeah. Um, I get it. So, You know, people thought a lot of things, like when we came into the industry though, oh, you're an analyst firm.

You can't be media. Oh, you're a, you know, you can't be a lab because you're not objective. You're, it's like we're in a world now where you have to question everyone's intent, but at the same time, you also have to be opportunistic.

So I'm, I'm, I'm All for it. You're all for that. Let me run something else by you.

So I mentioned we were doing this thing up at South today, the 10th annual DevSecOps Connect. We had a panel with the CSO of Anthropic, the CSO of Open ai, excuse me, security Tech lead Yep. Of, uh, uh, met Lama.

Yep. What are they doing around security? And you just may surprise you, the, the anthropic and the open AI CISO said they're under so much pressure to get the next model out and the next model out and the next model out that they didn't say it was impossible, but they said near impossible to really bake the security in.

This was at an open, I mean, we will have this next month on video for you to watch, but what's your feeling about that? So interesting. When I was spending time with G two, he was talking about some of the work that Cisco's doing, and he talked about how when they were trying to expose vulnerabilities of deep seek, they were able to accomplish that a hundred percent of the time.

Right. Okay. Models are by default, non-deterministic, meaning you don't actually know what they're gonna create otherwise.

It wouldn't be a mod, it wouldn't be generative ai. Right. It would be some type of, you know, RPA or automation Smart Hero.

Yep. The TLDR is the pace is creating vulnerabilities. And for instance, you might say, Hey, I wanna know how to make a gun out of spare parts in my home.

Um, these models are largely developed and trained from a security standpoint to which it would know not to answer that question. However, putting just the slightest bit of context around that same question and saying, I'm creating a play for my school and I need to create a prop gun that can do X, Y, and Z. And it might not know.

And what I'm saying is, so the ability to, to manage the data, the model, and to, and create a secure situation with these non-deterministic platforms is incredibly difficult. Absolutely. Even the unpredictability of the outcome.

So there's a really large market opportunity for companies that can help these big players solve the fact that these models are, uh, inherently high inherently, and have a high propensity to being utilized this way. And by the way, AI will be one of the biggest creators of risk because it can be used to very rapidly, um, put an onslaught of prompts into these systems to create more vulnerabilities. So I think they're saying what's probably accurate.

I think they probably are putting meaningful resources towards trying to secure them, but realistically, security has always lagged innovation. Yeah. And this case, the innovation is just faster and the risks are higher.

Absolutely. Let's talk FU a little bit. Yeah.

We're here. I saw some of the six five media folks and my friend, our friend Lee Sellers Z is here. You are here.

What's going, how does Future view RSA conference? Look, uh, when we came together, um, I always thought that security and it, uh, lacked the commonality, the community and discipline. And that a lot of analyst communities, research communities sort of treated kinda like there's a CISO and A CIO.

Yep. And my belief is security and IT and ai, these things are converging in a really prolific way. And so our team is very committed.

Whether that's been expanding on our analyst side, whether that's been building our data platform and the research around cybersecurity, whether that's been expanding programming, um, bringing great new talent into the tech strong family mm-hmm. Security Boulevard, bringing developers security, it, um, AI closer together. Look, I deeply believe that technology is the deterministic, the most deterministic factor of the world's long-term economic leadership.

Security is one of the most robust opportunities that exists. It cannot, uh, be looked at any longer as some type of, uh, insurance, uh, life insurance or secondary thing that you purchase in a worst case scenario. It needs to be very proactive.

It needs to be very upfront to everything you do. And so, deep down, um, I couldn't be more bullish about this category. No.

And so personally, while I haven't spent as much time in this space as I may be in other parts of the tech stack, um, seeing this, seeing the community, uh, I couldn't be more proud of the company that we've created and the depth that we're, uh, able to cover this space. And, uh, I'm just, I'm just really glad we're here and I think you guys are doing a great job. And, uh, while I can't stay longer, um, Oh, I see where you're getting here.

I can't stay long Another time, But, uh, I am really looking forward to coming back and, and RSA, but also just continuing to, you know, take a more and more active role in this community because I think security is one of the fronts that's just under covered, underused with so much upside opportunity and necessity. Alan, 40,000 plus people here would say absolutely. 100%.

Absolutely. Daniel Newman, Hey dude, it's a pleasure having you here. Thanks For having me.

com. We didn't talk about the intelligence portal. I'm gonna talk about it this week.

Check it out. But we're live at, excuse me, my voice is going, we're live at RSA. We'll be back actually visit for day one, right?

Well, day zero. We'll be back tomorrow for day one. Until then, enjoy.

Bye-bye. It is the Tech Field Day podcast with Catchpoint. We are going to be looking for the unknown and unknowns.

Have you got links to external websites that maybe your Vibe coders have linked to? Or maybe one of your developers found a really useful tool that links to some other website. Maybe it's a service that's running on a cloud provider like AWS.

If you don't know it's there, it might cause you pain later. Stay tuned for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT technical experts to discuss a single idea around key concepts in the industry.

This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often recorded in association with one of our events. Tech Field Day is part of the Futurum Group, and this podcast is also published on our sister company Site Techstrong tv. On this episode presented by Catchpoint, we'll be discussing how your internet application is full of unknown unknowns.

Before we get started, let's meet who's on the panel today. Hi everybody. My name's John Meyer, chief content creator at Meyer Media.

And, uh, my name is Eric Wright. I'm the co-founder of GTM Delta and also the head podcaster at the Disco Posse podcast. And joining us from Catchpoint, fresh off their presentation at Cloud Field Day 22 is Eddie Dody.

Welcome. Thank you gentlemen. So, hi everyone.

My name is Mary, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Catch one, and coming to you live from New York. Excellent. Well, we're spreading all around the place.

Uh, we came up with this unknown unknowns because we were discussing a little beforehand, as, as you often do, uh, how incredibly interdependent we end up with with internet based applications, because everything, every kind of service you can imagine is available over the internet. We end up building our applications to use bits of this and bits of that. And we may not even realize in the same way that on premises, we used to occasionally end up with a developer machine, which was running some vital service in our production application.

Now, our internet applications can be dependent on all kinds of things, all over the internet and medi. This leads to people experiencing outages when they really don't think they should be experiencing outages. I like what you just said.

They're experiencing outages where they should not be experiencing outages. Um, so when you think about it today in 2025, an average web, an average website or web application has about two to 300 calls to, to objects that are, that make their webpage, right? So that can be ads, that can be CDNs, it can be tracking pixels, capture services, payment gateways, you name it.

But on average, it's two to 300 requests that needs to happen in milliseconds for you to have a good user experience. That's true for mobile apps as well. Out of those two to 300 requests that needs to happen and fire up immediately, you're probably talking to about 50 to 60 different host names that are hosted by different organizations, whether it's cloud services like Amazon, Google, et cetera, or your own data centers.

And those calls also rely on a DNS lookup that is hosted by either ultra DNS and and s one Dime Oracle, or your own DNS services and all of that rely on a spaghetti of networks, uh, of ISPs. And all of this stuff needs to happen in real time. I mean, when you think about it, it's like a human body, right?

My head is thinking, it's talking, telling my toe to move, and I'm not even thinking about it, right? All of this needs to happen in milliseconds. The problem is, uh, you, the company for example, have great service, uh, great services.

You bought the best servers, you have the best third party, uh, hosting. You have the best CDN, you have the best of everything. You have the best SREs, you have the best engineers, you're top-notch.

But there is a third party pixel that is called by some unknown other pixel that is called by another unknown pixel that comes out of nowhere that is hosted in Cambodia or Vietnam. Uh, and that thing is unre unreachable, and that is going to bring your house down, literally a house of card. So, uh, so this is why I like the unknown unknown, uh, famously introduced by Rumsfeld during the Gulf War, for those that remember, but in many times, we're dealing with an unknown unknown.

So what is the unknown unknown in the observability monitoring space is you don't know you have a problem and you, and worse, you don't know how to deal with it. So again, you don't know you have a problem. So then you get to rely on down detector or our own version or, or something like that.

Or maybe even worse, your CEO coming down, it's like, Hey, what's up with, with this, uh, I'm in a meeting and I couldn't close this deal because our website was done, or our web application was done. So first you don't know you have a problem. So you're relying on Twitter down, sorry, X down detector, uh, an angry C level person that is telling you what you should have known in the first place, which is you're, you're dumb.

Then you look at your playbook and it's like, you've never seen this error, so you don't know what to act with it. And that is doing what? That is going to prolong the time it takes you to respond and get back in online.

So that's the unknown unknown we are dealing with. And, and believe it or not, it happens a lot more and we're not seeing that problem go away just because, hey, let's add the chat GPT uh, piece on our website, right? I mean, what can go wrong?

It's ai, it's it's self, self working, right? Or self debugging itself. Well, if you open AI has a problem, you, your website is going to have a problem, and then you're get to have angry customers.

So, uh, so we're constantly adding stuff to our websites and our web applications because we want to reach your things. We want to reach our applications, we want to reach your visualizations, we want to reach your experiences. Well, what, what we want that we want complex.

And we, we add complexity. And the complexity just keeps feeding this unknown unknown little monster of ours. One of the things that I hear a lot of times medi is, uh, you know, a PM is obviously like better telemetry, better instrumentation.

We've got lots of people trying to solve the instrumentation challenge. So I'd love to let people know and like think of like, what, where does a PM end off and IPM come in? Where does the interconnectedness of those things?

So where are you winning by a PM and where does IPM really, you know, come in where a PM can't? Sure. Um, so it's not one versus the other that I don't think that's the best way to look at it.

So for the viewers and listeners, so I'm not, I'm not advocating one or the other. I think it's usually it's a stereo vision. So you need both.

So it's A plus B. And here is, uh, here is why. So again, going back to the example we talked about you, the company A has the best engineers, the best servers, the best, best, best.

And you go and buy yourself the best a PM tool out there, Dynatrace, Datadog, you name it, they're all amazing tools out there. That's great. So your house is protected, right?

You, you, you have all the telemetry about that window in the north, that the door on the right, the roof, the water leakage, you have everything great, you're safe. Except that, except that you invite two, 300 people every day to your house, and they're not going to necessarily put Dynatrace or Datadog or whatever you pick you, they're not going to put your smoke detector in their house. And so that's why it's important to have that, that end user view.

Uh, that is, uh, the monitor, the monitors, basically we, we are above all that stuff. We're looking at it from a satellite view. So, uh, again, you can put your, your smoke detector in your house.

I can look at it from a, uh, from space, and I can zoom in. I can say, yes, your house is on fire because, uh, that third party that you, uh, uh, that you've let in is having a problem. And you, you don't know because you're not going to put an a PM tool agent on that third party vendor that you use.

So, uh, the other thing is where a PM is very good at understanding your infrastructure, your systems, your application, your code, your, your relationship between that piece of code and the database lookup and whatnot. It's not very good at telling you. Well, you know, in Boston, on at and t right now, there is a BGP issue that is preventing all the users from getting to you.

And you, if you just rely on a PM, somebody's going to call you and say, Hey, people in Boston having a problem. And you're going to go and blame the, you're going to blame the developer. You're going to blame the database guy.

You're going to maybe look and see, was there a change? Did we make a rollout yesterday that broke something? So you're going to go and spin your, your wheels in trying to maybe try to see if the problem is in your house versus the problem being, again, a third party.

And again, the unknown unknown. So you don't know you have a problem and you don't know how to deal with it. Right?

And that's again, where we come in. So it's not one versus the other. It is just one covers the inside of, of your house, and the other one looks at it from a different perspective.

And just make sure that even if, by the way, most of those a PM vendors that are great, uh, they're all hosted on the cloud, right? So by the way, if AWS goes down, you're completely blind because all of them are hosted on AWS. We're not, we're not hosted on any cloud vendor on purpose.

And I, it cost me a lot of money to not be hosted on AWS or one of those vendors. But we're on purpose because ultimately our job is to watch over those things. Maddy, I love how you use the analogy of a house, and I wanna walk through that analogy just a little bit more here.

I have a house, right? And if I invite somebody into my house, I know where they're at. I know they're coming into my house, and I can validate that, Hey, listen, they're into it.

But here's the other thing that happens, is that what if that person invites another person into a house and another person in a house? I can't monitor them. I don't know.

I didn't know that they actually invited him into the house. And if something goes down, something happens. I have no way of tracking it.

Now, I translate that to your traditional, your IT infrastructure, uh, building an application where I am the, you know, IT manager, and I know that they built this application and the database guy connected to this. Now that guy left, and, uh, I didn't know that he connected it to, you know, say Facebook meta to pull in some data and APIs behind the scene. Now I have tribal knowledge, and now they're pulling in that.

And when that goes down, we're running around with our heads cut off trying to figure out what, why, why am I pulling meta information? Why is that? Wait, why did I build my application around it?

That is totally unknown, that I didn't know my application was tied to this backend pulling this data that now critically handles it off to my customers. You know, those are some of the things that are totally unknown to an organization or an application until something goes wrong. And, and the other thing, John, what what we see a lot is, well, it's not my problem.

I didn't build it, so why should I like, Hey, that wasn't my problem. Don't yell at me, but I'll go fix it for you. Correct?

And, and that is, you see, in the unknown unknown equation, the biggest factor in my opinion is the, I don't care and it's not my fault. And, or, you know what? Hey, we have, we, we bought an a PM tool, or we bought this other tool or whatever.

So I'm covered. And, and, uh, and so I think we have to rethink a little bit, right? When, when, when you buy a, when you buy a, a, a, an, an alarm system for your home, you want to protect your family.

You want to protect your valuables, you want to make sure that if there is smoke, you can catch it before it goes everywhere. You want to catch carbon monoxide, you want to catch wa water leaks, and it all needs to work in tandem to protect you. There is no, well, I don't care, or I didn't do the plumbing, or, Hey mom, dad, I'm, uh, you know, I, I just did my bedroom.

I'm not going to care about flushing the toilet. It, it is just like, it, it's, it's almost like a sense of responsibility that companies need to, or the, the people that work in companies need to take on and say, we are all ultimately responsible for the assets that actually pay our paychecks, and we have to think about it holistically. And therefore, I need to put in place the right monitoring system so I can catch things as quickly as possible.

Because the sooner you can catch something, the faster and cheaper it is to fix. Always. There's, there's that crucial thing of, of it.

It doesn't matter how the business you are in fails, you are gonna be affected by it failing. And so that it's, it's not, you know, I, I've done my bit that's, that's, uh, part of dealing with this, the solution isn't enough. And sooner or later you gotta make sure that the business is able to continue to operate.

You've gotta have that system level thinking of, I'm contributing to this, but, uh, the story is not complete if I just do my part of it. And having that awareness that we may be unaware that there may be dependencies, and particularly there may be dependencies on third parties who have their own dependencies on other third parties that we are totally unaware of. Um, that collection And Scary Here, here is, here is the biggest first party, the biggest third party is your cloud provider.

I mean, you, when you think about it, we have, we have decided to put all of our eggs in Amazon or GCP or Azure. You don't know how those guys run their stuff. You don't, you we're taking at face value that, I mean, thank God they are, right, but they also buy third party stuff.

They also, you know, sometimes are not their data centers. The electricity is not from them. The water supplies from the city, the generator, the diesel comes from, I mean, Amazon does not have petroleum yet, right?

So, so it is just like, this is how people need to think about this to do risk, risk mitigation and understand what can go wrong versus this mentality that we've had since the cloud happened, which is like, oh, it's easy. I push a button and poof. And it is easy.

You can just consume a service. But what happens when the service isn't working? I mean, one of the, the elements in this is a lot of this dependency on third party is if you code your application for all of the loose coupling and, uh, being able to cope with delays along the way, then you minimize the impact on the end user application.

It's just that doing that is a lot of hard work for developers. And developers are usually incent to go and get new features out, not to spend all of their time ensuring the, the highest uptime. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of developers who do an awesome job of that, but often the business driver is, we need to get this new feature out.

We need to get it out as rapidly as possible. And that's the sort of thing that leads to that scenario. Yeah, And you're so spot on, and we do a terrible job at explaining to the business that the number one feature, feature nu Uno is performance.

That is the most important feature in my opinion. I mean, there was this venture capitalist guy, Fred Wilson, you can Google him. He said that it was brilliant.

He said that in 2008, 2009, the, the most important feature is performance. And that hasn't changed today. It, it doesn't, that's why we keep buying new iPhones or new and why, because the processor is more performing because we want speed.

We are so driven by this damn speed and reliability. One of the things medi that I think more and more of us are seeing is the abstraction away from, like, the whole idea is like, can I get ideas to production? Whether it's no code, low code, we're seeing things like Versal and we're seeing vibe coding.

And what you, we end up with these is a lot of, you know, less bespoke solutions, but they're also incredibly opaque. Uh, so how, how are you seeing the rise of paths actually getting great success in my view? Like, you're seeing Heroku coming back to the for, again, where you're seeing a lot of that happening, but then what's the impact on application builders and, you know, where do you see your, your role in, in helping people to really get the most outta those platforms?

I, I, so yes, there is a rise of all these applications, all these platforms. Uh, I think we're going to see even more of that. I mean, when you think that chat GPT can start generating code and prototype for you and stuff like that, I mean, it's, it's, it's unbelievable the, the, the world we're, we're going to live in, right?

Where it's just like the ideas are going to just like, it's explosion of ideas and creativity. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm jealous to some degree, right? Um, I do think that, uh, the opacity that you mentioned is good for us, uh, because at the end of the day, that doesn't take away the fundamentals of reliability.

Again, it's still a computer, right? It's still a network, it's still a service, it's still an infrastructure. It's still CPUs and memories and things like that.

And that stuff still breaks. And we keep breaking, I think, uh, where we're going to. And you showed that.

You saw that, uh, uh, when we presented, that's why we keep investing on this internet stack map, being able to visualize and understand the dependencies. Uh, that's why we keep investing in some of our AI capabilities to be able to detect and connect the dots. Because what this, what this is going to do is just like more opacity, more complexity, and then understanding what happened is, is going to be more crucial.

That unknown, unknown is still there. Bigger, worse. We just need to shrink the amount of time to detect and, and, and help customers.

But yeah, I don't see any change that just think that things are going to get worse from a complexity perspective. Medi, are we our own saboteurs when it comes to the unknown? When you're implementing things and you're trying to be efficient, you're trying to get the most out of it and the performance, and we go in attached to a website or a database that's public out there, just because we wanna provide something to our customer, but ultimately not realizing that we don't know as much about them as we should.

Yes. And I will add, I think we need to live around that, so we shouldn't stop that because I think that's stopping progress to some degree. That's stopping creativity that, listen, I love the risk taking that people take, otherwise we wouldn't be here, right?

Uh, I think risk taking is important. I think risk taking with some mitigation is even better, right? So I think I, I don't think we should say that disconnect from the internet, you know, that's the safest thing.

Let's unplug and, uh, you know, we can all sleep well at night, all that stuff. Uh, but I think we need to put the boundaries and the systems and procedures to detect and, and do all that stuff. Uh, and, and even if you wanted to, uh, to certify third parties, this then becomes, again, problematic process.

Red tape, and people go around red tape anyway, so it'll be a cat and mouse game. So I think what we should, I would rather do is like, hey, put in place the system to detect the smoke, uh, as quickly as possible. Uh, I know sometimes it's more expensive, but I think the, uh, the red tape and the risk, the risk aversion is I think very bad from a business perspective.

Your competitors might say, you know what? Let John be risk averse. We we're going to go and do other things and kick his behind by coming to market with something better.

I think, uh, as we're coming to the end of this podcast, and, and as, as always, when we gather together, that's such an interesting group of people. We could go for hours at this, and I, for one, could probably do with a drink. Um, I think also one of the things I, I really pull out of this is that there is no nirvana state.

Nothing is going to become perfect. And so getting the ability to see the imperfect, to understand the imperfect understanding that there is a tension between business requirements at different phases, and, and this conflict is natural and norm, not something to be avoided, uh, is, is an important aspect of not just this conversation, but any conversation where we're talking about innovation and building things. Since we are running out of time, it would be great if, uh, listeners out there would like to catch up with people some more and carry on the conversations.

Uh, where can we carry the conversations on with you all? com. Also follow it at Meyer Media and hit me up on all the channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, oh, sorry, X I'll never get used to any of that.

But anyway, you can follow us at John Meyer And, uh, I'm Disco Posse and all social media. com, find out what I do. org.

One of my favorite tools that I promote to everybody. Thank you. As Catchpoint gives back to, you know, in freeways to the community.

It's incredible help for me as a developer to learn. And, uh, but anyways, that was my last, uh, shout out. But, uh, with that, over to you.

Thank you so much, Eric. org. So that's one way of, of getting to understand a little bit your unknowns.

com. We have a great blog. You should, uh, read it on LinkedIn, X, et cetera.

So thank you so much. com website. You can find me also writing various places my own, um, writings.

Typically at the moment. co nz, uh, or NZ for those of you in America. And, uh, you'll also find me on some of the other Futureum properties that are writing content out there as well.

So, thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast application so you don't miss an episode. Do consider giving us a nice rating and of a review.

Let other people find us this, uh, great content as well. com/podcast or review. Uh, view us on Techstrong tv.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel, and welcome to another Shimmy says, you know, I think when we look back, this will be the week of ENT AI conferences. We had so many people both here on our Techstrong team, as well as on the Greater Futurum team, really spread out all over the place, whether it was Dell Tech World or Red Hat Open Summit, or the Microsoft Build Conference, SAP Sapphire and more, you know, listening in reporting from getting briefed at speaking at all of these conferences and all these conferences.

You know, I felt like I was watching the Kentucky Derby, and we had 12 horses coming around that final bend, because they all very much at some level look the same. All of these companies were talking about their agentic AI plans and how their agents are gonna make our life better, you know? And quite frankly, it's not just from this week.

It was the same story last week and the week before, and the week before that. It just seems the race is on to get agents out there doing your work or doing tasks for you. And, and then there's a race within a race, which is to be the orchestrator of those agents, right?

We've seen that from ServiceNow and, and Salesforce and, and, uh, automation Anywhere and IBM, right? Everybody wants to be the manager of all these agents that all these companies are talking about, and it raises some really big issues. I realize.

I work in the tech industry and we live in a bit of a bubble, and we're always, you know, we, we pride ourselves in being in the 15% of early adopters looking for that next new thing. And by all, you know, stretches of the imagination, a agentic AI is that next new thing, but is it really, are we, are we putting too many eggs in our basket? Are we, are we overhyping here with making it impossible for, for this to, to do everything we think it's gonna be?

You know, when you look at adoption curves of, of things over the years in technology, it's very hard to put your finger on the point and say, this is when it became real. This is when things really started working. And very rarely is that point at the point we are now, right?

Because the point we are right now really screams to me of, of just hype, right? No one wants to be left out of this, right? A company like SAP, they're a great company, they're an ERP company.

People don't look to SAP to be cutting edge. People don't look to SAP to pioneer the newest thing. SAP adopts things when their customers are ready to use them.

Same thing with Dell. Dell doesn't pioneer new markets. Dell doesn't get into a market until it's big enough to be something that'll move the needle.

And until they think that they could command enough of a market share in that nascent market to really move the needle at Dell, which is measured in the tens and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars at this point. So, when I see companies like Dell and SAP talking about their agentic, AI and, uh, ambitions and product launches, to me this is, this is, we've moved beyond the cutting edge stuff that I expect from the hyperscalers, that I expect from Google and Meta, and, you know, companies like that, Adobe, or even Microsoft. When Dell and SAP are doing it, it's starting to feel like it's real.

But yet as I sit here, is it really real? Where do these AI agents really work? And I'll be honest with you, I'm a bit at a loss.

Where do they really work? First of all, I still have questions. What's the difference in some cases between an AI agent and an API call is an API called a form of an AI agent?

Not really, but you know, I'm, I'm gonna put it out there to you, Shimmy's asking you, what AI agents are you using now that work? If you can let me know, I'd love, I'll talk about it at our next shimmy says, but I think that's something we need to discuss. That's it for today.

This is Shimmy. I'm out. Have a great holiday weekend for those of us in the us.

Bye-bye. Says.