AI Agent Frameworks, Kubernetes Security & DevOps 2026

Hey, we're here. Happy Thursday, and welcome to Techstrong, gang. I was so involved in what's going on here.

I got to be honest with you, I'm having a bad day. Actually, I'm not even having a bad day. I'm having an okay day.

My bots and my agents are having a bad day. I wonder if this is going to be a new thing. How are your agents doing today?

They're having a bad day. And it's not just me. I think there might be something going around.

Maybe this is the start of an agent virus, a whole new security frontier. But our agents are not behaving today. What a crazy world we live in.

Welcome to the gang, though, where, hey, we're going to talk about it anyway. It should be a lot of fun. We got some great people to talk with today.

We've got our friend Fred Wilmot out in Seattle still. Fred, welcome. Thank you.

Great to be here. Continuing our West Coast presence. It's two and two today.

I feel like it's the AL/NL division championship or something. Representing the San Francisco Giants, he throws with- The last place. Yeah, the last place San Francisco.

Ah, it's early, John. It's early. John Swartz.

It's over. Hi, everybody. All right.

Hope springs eternal for the Giants. I'm a Giants fan, I'm pessimistic. And then here's a man who never has to worry about his agents not running.

He takes the attitude, it's the old, if you have no expectations, you'll never be disappointed. I have an agent. It's the hermit up in the woods.

I have an agent. His name is Alan. He works hard.

Yeah. A hermit in the woods of Harrison, Mike Broussard. All right.

So Mike, it's an interesting day as it always is around AI. Look, Google's got FOMO of not having an AI browser, and they found out they had an AI browser all along, but- Look ... did they click their heels?

What happened? It is interesting to watch this happen because it's kind of reminiscent of what we saw with Microsoft back in the '90s, but every time we turn around, Google's adding a new feature or extending their existing product to add some new capability, and the latest is this Skills thing that goes into Chrome, and it's basically a set of reusable AI skills that you can invoke through a keystroke or a key, and away you go. Now, folks are starting to say that this is also going to be the foundation for how they're going to deliver capabilities that are similar to what OpenClaw and Perplexity and some of these other things do.

So John, as you look at all this stuff, is this a replay of what we saw in the past and the big guys are just sucking up new features immediately? Yeah, it's interesting you said that because I had a flashback to '96. Yeah, 1996.

I'm thinking about Netscape, and I'm thinking of the threat to Internet Explorer and how Microsoft was scrambling, but then again, Microsoft scrambled after a lot of things. I think about the iPhone, et cetera. I won't go down that road, but I guess in this situation, the browser wars, for Google at least, are now turning into an AI war.

So as you mentioned, this Chrome desktop feature called Skills. The idea, I guess, is to transform these repetitive AI interactions into a one-click shortcut. I guess for now, Chrome is the dominant player in the market, but I think there is a real concern and maybe even a fear, I'll say fear, about OpenAI's Atlas, Perplexity's Comet, Dia from the Browser Company.

And so I guess what Google wants to do is have this customizable command center powered by Gemini AI. So there are several categories that this applies to that they're rolling out initially, productivity and personal wellness. And one of the examples was researchers.

A user wants to research nutrition, so they can create this vegan substitute skill to scan recipe pages for plant-based alternatives. Something like that. And in a sense, to boil it down and to kick it back to everyone, this dominance of Google has been based on speed, but now they're turning to this embedded AI utility to keep users from jumping to AI native browsers.

And I think of this as, you can look at it two ways. Is it innovative, genuinely innovative, or is it a defensive move? It is true, and Fred, I'd love to get your opinion on this because it seems like going back a couple of decades, if Microsoft was going to try to suck up something in a new feature, it took them a good part of a year, and a startup had at least a year to get some headroom and try to get some market share.

Now it feels like in the age of AI, won't these vendors just code something up overnight, shove it in there, and announce it, and away we go, and that new feature capability that somebody's spending six months building will be added to somebody else's software in about, I don't know, a week? You're 100% right on the concern about the sort of velocity and veracity of change there. And I think this also sparks a couple of other interesting conversations to have.

Look, it makes a ton of sense. If I'm Google, it makes 100% of the sense to continue to keep my captive audience and continue to operate in the cases where I maximize my AI influence, and I also continue to keep my market share. But there are some other things that are interesting here to consider.

Skills orientation around here, when we think about things like data exposure or the intent security as opposed to actual security, this is another place for policy implementation and things like this. And it could be as innocuous as, hey, I need oat milk in this recipe as opposed to regular milk, but it can also be a lot of things around the transparency we don't see about user agency hijacking and some other things around the data processing location that become very imperative, right? The sensitive data that we keep in our browsers toda Right?

Are the goldmine for tomorrow, and is that being used sort of weaponized a little bit, right? Those are things we need to pay attention to. So it's an obvious logical progression, but the interesting part about that is what are browsers doing in the future, right, that agents aren't doing today?

How connected are they with Agent Harness? And then how much of what we don't know we're giving away are we giving away? Just more of the same risk with just another step in the pendulum swing.

Hmm. Alan, what's your take on this? Because we've already seen this play out a little bit on our side, right?

We discovered OpenClaw, and then we played with that, and then we went to Perplexity because we thought that was cool. And I'll be honest, if something similar to that shows up in my Google Doc next to my browser, I'm going to be one of the millions of lazy people who are just going to use that no matter how good it is because, well, it's right there in front of me. Yeah.

I think Google's counting on that, right? And look, Microsoft's made a living off of that for 40 years or thereabouts. It's that this is the word processor you use, so you want some help, click on that stupid little paperclip.

And that's what we're doing. And look, the functionality here in terms of Chrome anyway, I think to John's point is, it's not different than Atlas or Comet. I played with both of them.

And by the way, I don't think these are killer apps. As they appear today, these AI browsers, they're not killer apps to me. Will it give Google the ability to suck more of your personal information into its grip and use that to sell you more stuff or to sell your stuff to someone else as Google does?

Yeah. You know, that might actually might be part of the appeal of doing this as well, because I think we did an episode, I wasn't on it, but a couple of days ago about Meta surpassing finally... Well, not finally- Yeah ...

but surpassing Google in terms of digital advertising. And here's a possible avenue or source or treasure trove of information that can be monetized. So for Google, not only is it, you could argue is it's innovative, it's defensive, but I think it's also prudent, and I think it's smart to do this if they want to retake the lead or reestablish themselves in digital advertising as big as they already are.

Yeah, and what happens to the Valley? And I'm asking the question in this context, right? Historically, many of these VCs funded a company that they damn well knew was going to be a feature where they were hoping to get enough headroom going that they would be a pain in the a*s to the point where they would get acquired by somebody who wanted that feature because it might be, well, easier to buy it than to build it.

But it's clearly going to be a lot easier to build it going forward. So what happens to all these little startups that the Valley kind of funded over the last few decades when there is no exit strategy? Yeah, that is a major concern here.

With the IPO market, I think there's a lot of nervous people eyeing what's going to happen with Anthropic and OpenAI. But then again, those are exceptions. So for every one of those companies, those mega companies that are going to go public eventually, there are scores, hundreds of companies that are going to be left out in the desert.

I think they are scrambling, and the exit strategy is to be acquired, but I don't see as many avenues after the series of what Google and some of these other folks are doing to kind of shore up what they already have. It's kind of exhausted the possibilities for these companies. But maybe they line up and make a pitch or some sort of unique call to the larger guys.

I just don't know. I think I'd be very nervous right now, especially given the state of the economy and the state of uncertainty in general. Yeah.

Look, I think it's the same thing, quite frankly, in security. Right? If your business in security was scanning...

I don't know, did you guys see the story about Allbirds, the sneaker company? Yeah. Yeah, we're going to write about that today.

Yeah? I did. Okay.

Allbirds sold the sneaker business and is getting into the AI infrastructure business, starting with a little $50 million raise, plus whatever they got for selling the sneaker business. If your business is security scanning, maybe I'd buy the sneaker business. You know what I mean?

Mm-hmm. If robots will wear sneakers, I'm going to specialize in robotic speakers for robots, orthotics for robots, all that walking. But this is what is facing our whole food chain here, right?

And I think it's what Slippery Sam was talking about with this AI New Deal, in that you have the potential for six or seven companies, I'll be generous, say a dozen companies, to own everything. Mm-hmm. Because whatever you make, they can make, and they have bigger distributions and bigger channels and bigger mouths and more resources.

And so they may let you get to a certain size, which is the way the Valley always worked. They let you get to a certain size, and then you came to that fork in the road. Can you say F you and go IPO?

Right. Did you have those kind of cajones? Or did you just get bought and take the money and run after a short stay at the acquiring company?

Now, the acquiring company says, "Well, what? Am I going to give this schnook a couple of billion dollars or whatever it is? I'll just do this myself.

" Mm-hmm. And it's a sea change. Yeah, it's a really interesting point that Mike brought up, and I think it's something that's probably reverberating throughout not just here, but any tech hub.

The whole thesis There are a lot of scared people, a lot of people- Not to mention, what do you need a VC for if you got two guys, a garage, and an AI? We're back to that. Mm-hmm.

That's another good story. Yeah, the future of VCs. Yeah.

So are we seeing the hollowing out of Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto there, John? What do you think? Yeah, as Alan said, didn't "The New York Times" just do a story about two guys who had a billion-dollar valuation of a company they created, only two employees?

No, I wrote an article about the death of VCs, too. Yeah. I had something cute about it.

I don't remember. Yeah, they're almost kind of becoming extinct like a lot of... " And just going back to Albert's, which will now be called NewBird AI, they're going to go from woolen sneakers to AI infrastructure.

They're going to go from sneakers to chips, and they're going to start with $50 million, which sounds like a penny to me in terms of... And you're going to see a lot of desperate moves. Well, I think the $50 million was just an opening bid.

Let's say it's not enough. Mike John, can you look out the window there? I wanted to see if there was any parades of people mourning the VCs.

They're celebrating right now. But wait, I'm going to take this a step further. So Fred- ...

there was a time when if you wanted to be in this business, you needed to be maybe ideally in Northern California or somewhere where there was some concentration of IT folks and money. And is that going to dissipate, and now is it going to be a lot easier to be anywhere? And I know you're thinking about moving, but are we about to become maybe much more location independent when it comes to building innovative things?

I certainly hope so. I think the benefit of having capitalism is the opportunity for a free and open market. And if you look at sort of a stranglehold for where the primary wealth contributors and the dry powder available in the venture capital market, it's not in every place USA, right?

It's pretty rooted in about five places. Mm-hmm. And innovation's happening everywhere.

It's one of the great and beautiful things about this AI revolution in that sense, is it's democratizing innovation in a way that hasn't been done before, or at least not in a good 25 years. So I love that idea, and what it's also going to force, right, as you alluded to, is states and governments have to figure out how to enable business in order to operate, survive, succeed, and allow people to want to build those businesses there, right? Mm-hmm.

And those are critical moments that I think herein till now, we haven't had to really look at the shake of the tree to see what falls out, and now we do, which is, I think, terrific. But there's more. So we've already seen this trend a little bit, and I think maybe we're going to see a lot more of it, that the startup doesn't get acquired.

The big company just comes and hires the people who works there- Yes ... and then everybody's kind of just auditioning for their next job by building something innovative. Mike, you think that the Scale AI executive team went to Meta, right?

I was thinking about that when you were talking earlier. They're going to pick off the talent, perhaps. And we're seeing more- Well, it's the acquihire business, right?

The acquihire, exactly. I tell you, you know who else is doing this? OpenAI, right?

Yeah. I wrote this article also this week, "OpenAI, OpenClaw, Open Source, Open Core," right? They also just bought the Python people, Astro?

Astro. Open source Python players. I think OpenAI is going to wind up being an open core model business.

They're hiring the founders of these open source models. They're keeping the model open, it'll still be open, but they'll have a freemium play around it, and I think that's the model Sam's going for over there. Mm-hmm.

I think that the world is never going to be the same, and I think that changed right before our eyes without anybody actually noticing. Well, starting with the funeral procession for all of the VCs. Mm-hmm.

I can only imagine. I can only imagine the grieving. Well, I think the price of real estate in the Valley's coming down.

That's good news. Real estate in the Valley. So here's the bottom line, though.

If you are looking to raise money, you do still get 20, 25% premium if you're in the Valley compared to Miami or something. All right. Hey, we're out of time on this one, though, Mike.

We got to hop. We got to hop. Didn't Rip Van Winkle live up by you or something?

The Headless Horseman? He sure did, over in Sleepy Hollow. Yeah.

Yeah. So we got a Headless Horseman story today. What's this one?

Yeah, well, you got to give it to Marc Benioff and Salesforce, boy, because they basically launched this thing this week, and they were talking about their agentic AI strategy and continuing to extend it. And they actually embraced the whole idea that they were going to become a headless platform. Saying to folks that we are going to become the backbone of all these AI agents that people will build and deploy.

And if you've been following this story, there's been this conversation about SaaSocablitz, or something. Anyways, I'll figure that one out in a minute. SaaSocalypse?

Oh, the apocalypse? SaaSocalypse. Yeah.

It's hard to pronounce. SaaSocalypse. There you go.

Thank you. " Now, I don't know, Fred, what's your take on all of this? Because it's not clear to me that there's money to be made being on the back end of these things or-- And because ultimately, the system of collaboration is in the AI agents, and if I'm just the back end and I'm a system of record, is that a sustainable strategy when there's 100,000 systems of record?

I don't know. Fred, what's your take? What's going on here?

Well, I think that's an interesting question. I would look at this as more like seeing an Oracle move. Mm.

And from a platform perspective here, Salesforce has long had a marketplace, and Salesforce has a lot more data than just sort of like your CRME stuff now, and it's integrated in multi-factor authentication. It's part of the broker system for payment processing. It's all of these things.

It is a magnificently large ecosystem today. And so what they're turning on is the capability for you to now use AI in a headless way to build your applications in the same way you would think about AWS Marketplace. So I have a good buddy that actually just told me yesterday he's built something here.

And the wherewithal to get to all of the customer base of Salesforce and their ability using AI, and some of the things we'll touch on in John's next piece here is, how are you getting recommendations to buy certain things and what the vehicles look like? So all of that is what they're doing. I think the healthy dose of skepticism lies in, last time I checked, Oracle was not the most secure.

Last time I checked, Microsoft was not the most secure. Why? Because they have everything, and when you have everything, then you pay the same level of diligence through this process.

So I think the question that I have isn't whether or not what takes weeks turns into hours. It's whether or not you can do securely with my most critical data that you possess, something that I can build in a way that allows me to not fully compromise both my data, my infrastructure, my entitlements and authorization for how I do that and make that available for folks that are not in by core or by trade developers to do such a thing. I don't know.

John, you've been following Salesforce for a long time. What's your take on what's going on over there? Oh, God.

I got to watch my mouth here. So first off, I think this is something I've been thinking about for a while, not just with Salesforce, because I don't really want to... I will pick on them, but I'm going to lump them in with a bunch of other tech companies, and the list runs long.

They, in a sense, I think have learned something from the Trump administration, and I'm not getting political, I'm just noting a marketing strategy. So what the administration does, and it's very good, is it floods us with news. It floods the zone with news.

And I think that's what a lot of tech companies are doing in terms of AI. They don't want to be ignored. Now, the worst thing you could ever do to Marc Benioff is not pay attention to him.

That's what he thrives on. He thrives on attention. T.

Barnum of sorts. He worked at Apple for a short period of time, then he worked at Oracle, and he was Larry's guy. So he needs to be the focus of attention.

So in a sense, they are doing a bit of reinvention, but I also think what they're doing is they are trying to reinvent themselves or trying to change the narrative or reset the narrative by hitting us over the head with constant news about what they're doing. And this kind of reminds me of their anti-no software campaign where they went after Microsoft. And in a sense, what they're trying to do now is justify who they are.

Maybe they want to be more than a company that provides AI tools. Maybe they want to be the platform where the tools are built, connected, and managed. I don't know.

They're betting the next CRM interface isn't a dashboard, maybe it's API consumed by autonomous agents. What I'm trying to say is they're kind of flailing to try to find a narrative and kind of get some stickiness because believe me, and I think Mike will agree with me from first-person experience, they are reaching out every week with a major AI announcement that we get that sometimes is kind of middling, I'll be honest. And I think this is extending from the top because they don't want to be left behind.

In a sense, there's a perception that they are struggling to remain as relevant as they were maybe five years ago. And those dashboards you mentioned are going to be generated on demand by my AI agent eventually, right? So I'm not going to set up some sort of elaborate UI to- Wait a second.

Timeout. I thought when you said headless, I was excited. Because if I don't ever have to see a goddamn Salesforce dashboard again- Oh, man ...

my life would be better. Honestly, how many of you out here have seen enough Salesforce da... Let me see the other view of this dashboard.

Okay, I saw it from the underneath, from under. I saw it from top. Well, maybe- I mean, I would vote for headless.

Maybe you don't have to pay a million dollars of Salesforce consultants now, right? Yeah. They'll be headless too, and jobless.

Right. But that's really the problem here is, it is. This is more Benioff circus.

Pay no attention to the man behind that black curtain. Let me sell you something. If they really wanted to just be the orchestrator of agents, which is, I think without them saying, one of the roles they want to play here-That's something you could do headlessly, perhaps.

But that's not how Salesforce works, right? We see it over and over again. "Oh, you bought this?

Oh, you needed the other package for that to really work. Oh, you wanted that functionality? " Right?

If that's what they're selling here, dude, I'll use Clore and whatever Sam and those boys are cooking up and leave me out of this one. Sure. And more dashboards.

" Yeah. So I don't know what the statute of limitations is on these type of things, but I will disclose that years and years ago, maybe like 20 years ago, I was working at USA Today, and Salesforce was used by our sales team. They hated it.

They'd do anything not to use it. And the experiences that you're kind of outlining, some of the scenarios, this is just giving me a flashback to those weird times and we were locked into a deal with them. But anyway, any event.

To be somewhat contrarian to that, John- All right ... CRMs, in general, are not fun. They're not- Yeah, that's true ...

they're not designed to be fun, right? It's not entertainment. " But instead, right, it's a regular part of the rigor for everything that you do, from customer reach-out to sales and all the things that we either love or don't love, whatever your predilection is.

But there's an interesting cross-section here. All of the agent to agent conversations and the cross-application work, today, there doesn't exist something that is what we would call an agent control standard, right? Well, some of us are actually working on a thing that does that from a standards perspective.

But what I mean to say is, just as the same as we talked about MCPs, just as the same as we're thinking about these browser wars and the constraints therein, that should probably become part of the rigor there. When we start looking at applications that reach into the pockets of our most sensitive information, and we couple that with the agent that has the access to the now boundaried or siloed super internal secret sauce, right? Where does the agent-to-agent security come to play?

How do I know? How do we think through that? And of course, an organization like Salesforce wants to maximize both the data they have, the interactions they create, and the ability to leverage them across one another.

But where, right in here, does the value of each of those things become detrimental to the user versus beneficial to the host? And I think that's the question. And am I only going to need one of those?

" And that's all well and fine, but how many of those do I really need? We've been talking about that for a long time, right? But you know what?

I remember a similar, maybe not on this scale, but a similar argument was who was going to be the orchestrator of all those Docker containers we're using. And early on, who would've bet on some Borg project out of Google becoming the 800-pound gorilla? It's an open source project.

No one makes no money on it. Marc Benioff ain't doing that. But nevertheless, here we are with Kubernetes.

Ah, wouldn't you think that maybe we'll see an open source orchestrator that manages all these AI agents, similar to what Kubernetes did for containers and- Oh, that's open AI's play with this OpenClaw bite. Mm-hmm. Well, I think that's the fight, though, because what open source has been to date may not be what open source is in the future anymore.

Mm-hmm. And that's the big question, right? We've talked about sort of like the Linux Foundation and where great projects go to possibly not survive, or not thrive, or insert your thing here.

If all of the acquisition strategy of an Amazon, historically, "Hey, that didn't work out the way that was in open source. " Okay, if that same functionality happens here and the co-opetition goes away, then does open source have as much of a play here in the future if the moat disappears? And the challenge being that you have to be invested and involved with the pantheon of folks that have access to everything.

My question is, does open source still survive? Well, and in an age where why am I going to go deal with the licensing and the politics of open source where I could just say, "AI, make me something that has that kind of functionality"? We don't need licenses.

Licenses? We don't need no stinking licenses. We don't need no stinking licenses.

We don't need no stinking badges or licenses, apparently. I wonder if somewhere Dr. Richard Stallman is dancing round and round.

Mm-hmm. Oh, wow. There we go.

All right, hey, on that note, we're going to move into topic number three. Here we go. And to me, this was kind of a no-brainer, right?

Well, it's happening, I think, at least from my perspective, maybe a little faster than I thought, but I might be the only one. But anyway, G2 has a report out talking where they interviewed or did a survey with more than 1,000 B2B buyers, and well over half, I think 53%, were already using AI tools, and specifically the deep research purchasing tools that the AI companies have created, such as OpenAI, to go research software purchases. And the idea here is that this is a way to surface more information faster, and I think it said something to the effect of three-quarters wound up buying something that they had never heard of before they started that search.

And so the days of I'm going to go and start my purchasing research on a Google search engine query seem to be coming to an end, and it's all fundamentally changing. Alan, is this the new world we're going to live in? I think it's the same as the old world.

Mm-hmm. You're going to do research to find out, make an informed buying decision as best you can. I was a big fan when I was younger of consumer reports.

I believed in them, right? If you wanted to buy a washing machine or a refrigerator or some sort of appliance like that, a car, they had good stuff and they were unbiased. You know what I hated about Consumer Reports was every time I wanted to buy a car, the issue from Consumer Reports was like nine months old.

And every time I wanted to buy a refrigerator- Always the other day. Well, but that's the problem when you're not in an internet age and you're relying on print, right? Mm-hmm.

And so when Google first came out with this kind of functionality, it was great, right? We all looked for reviews on Google and so forth. What the problem was, it got polluted like Times Square on a late Saturday night, or worse than Times Square, 8th Avenue on a Saturday night with street walkers and everything else.

How do you know about what's happening on 8th Avenue late at night? Hey, I like to go walk the beats, innocently. Talk to people.

Yeah, you talk to people. I talk to people. But seriously, the whole Google ...

Does anyone trust Google Search between what's sponsored, nine out of 10 may be right in AI, and everything else that goes on with the SEO game? I stopped paying attention to what Google recommended to me a long time ago. So now we've got this new lily-white, virginal AI to tell us what we should buy.

How long until that becomes soiled and dirty? Mm-hmm. Right?

OpenAI is already selling ads. Well, let me give you another data point that you might find interesting. So Gartner has been telling its CMO clients- Oh, yeah.

Publicize it I know. But they're telling their CMO clients to shift their budget into "earned media" because the earned media is what the AI browsers are going to be pulling up from- Mm. Mm ...

rather than their own custom content that they were creating. And it's like what they're advising is a fundamental shift from what they've been saying for the past decade or so, but John, I know this isn't going to make you happy- Not good for us ... but there's going to be lots more people than ever banging on your door.

You know what was interesting in this survey was, what was it? Like a third discovered vendors they'd never heard of. So if you're a startup or a niche player, and what we've been kind of referring to those companies that are kind of too small, they're not the big players, the AI chatbots actually kind of creates an equalization or they're the great equalizer to kind of give them more of a voice, or not a voice, but at least some exposure.

An equalizer- I thought that'd be encouraging ... a swing at the plate. Mm-hmm.

But here's the thing, because we're in a funny no man's land right now with that, with this, whatever you call it, GEO or AEO, the SEO version for the LLMs, in that there really aren't-- It's much more art than science, right? SEO became a science eventually. This AEO, GEO is truly an art.

No one's quite sure how to game it quite yet, but they will. They will. If I don't understand how it works in the first place, it's very hard to game something, and that's kind of the trouble with a lot of this AI stuff.

Nobody seems to know how it works. Yeah, but when the guys who-- Frank Pantangeli from the... You know, Tom, the little guys, the emperors took everything, right?

And that's what's going to happen here. You got Google, who owns the AI. You don't think they know how it works?

I know they do. Microsoft, Apple, these people didn't get to where they are by not knowing how it works. The whole system's rigged.

Well, I think there's a couple of other, I mean, there's a couple of points about what you said, Jimmy, that yes, there is probably a nuclear winter in the future, but it's not tomorrow. Mm-hmm. The ideology behind what I think people struggle with is twofold.

The first of which is, hey, it's great. When the internet came out, there was this notion of search engine optimization. I would probably click on the first one or two or three prioritized results because it might have been best for my search.

You didn't really understand me. You don't know how or why I think the things that I do, but now users and customers have built up a little bit more callous skin around what happens when they go ask questions in a browser to look for resultsBut even still, even with the advent of gaming, SEO, and the movement into, "Hey, I don't necessarily understand this problem, but I'm asking for a solution," what we might've said is, "Hey, I have a problem. " Now what we say is, "If I've got to go evaluate a set of technologies, I have to go understand the problem.

I got to read up on that, then I got to go look at who are the potential vendors that are characterized that would compete against this, that have similar features. And then hang on, let me make a spreadsheet. " And that's hours of demos and hours of proof of concepts that typically fail, and it never gets me to that point of truth.

So in essence, what we're enabling people to do right now is say, "Look, go build me a matrix. Let me start there and save a bunch of time. What are the features I actually care about?

I don't actually know because I'm not familiar enough with this problem. " And when somebody builds a data structure, what do we always say? Right?

It's one, to influence and two, to data-driven outcomes. And so if we go and you believe that the data that you've gotten is data-driven and the outcome is legitimate, then absolutely, why wouldn't you believe this spreadsheet that was provided to me by Claude that tells me exactly what I should like to prioritize and the coverage model for this? And is that spreadsheet from Claude going to be any more reliable or useful than the mythical quadrant I used to get from Gartner, which was always out of date anyway?

Well, the question is, is who's paying for what? So if I'm not paying Claude for that answer, I guarantee you it's cheaper. Mm-hmm.

So I- Hey, can I mention going back to Consumer Reports, their reports or their conclusions were always so old or dated, it seems. That's because they did a thorough testing of everything they looked at, right? You could trust them because they put these things through the paces and through labs.

Anyway, and now these days, we want an instant answer. Right. Quick answer.

Because Consumer Reports is up here in New York, not too far from Sleepy Hollow, where we started, and they would be driving cars all over New York State for months at a time. Yes. Yeah, deep data, right?

I mean, they were thorough. But you know something? God, they were thorough.

Listening to Fred and what he was describing the process of going through this, gee, sounds like something like G2 could help with. Hey, wait a second, Mike. Who did this survey?

You don't think they would let a company do that, would they? So they're making a claim that this peer review research approach that they do will surface more information more reliably to the AI. That's yet to be proven.

I've not seen any actual evidence of that, but that's what they're claiming. Well, I got to make a full disclosure. We have our new buyer intent webinars learning events here that theoretically show buying intent, and one of the sources of that data is G2.

And we've looked at it. There might be something to it. I don't know if anything's the be all and end all, but it is something we've looked at here at Techstrong and offering to our clients as well.

I think the issue of the day is, as we've just shown in previous segments, software world is changing dynamically almost by the day. So whatever you're going to base your decision on, it's got to be timely, and it's got to be current, and it's got to be the most relevant thing. So whether it's something that was created after two years' worth of research and was out of date the minute it's published, or if it's peer-reviewed data but nobody's said anything to update it in the last three months- Mm-hmm ...

then it's all going to be somewhat suspect, right? Yeah. Here's the other thing I see cutting across all three of these.

Our habits and how we interact with our machine software are changing as a result of this. What we trust, how we did things, it's all changing really rapidly. Yeah.

And there are plenty of companies throwing their hats in the ring to help us manage new habits and new trusts and new ways of doing it. And it makes the world go round. Right?

We're about out of time, though. Fred, John, Mike, thank you. But I think that's going to wrap.

I'm now going to a script written by AI, just so you know here. But that's going to wrap things up for today's Techstrong gang. Big thank you to our gang members and, of course, thanks to all of you watching and listening out there in TV land.

If you like what you saw today, make sure you subscribe to the Techstrong TV YouTube channel, or check us out on the Techstrong app on iPad and iPhone and all the Apple devices and everywhere else. Or catch all our programming on Techstrong TV. We're live every weekday at noon Eastern Time, and you can watch Techstrong TV before and after, as well as on our Techstrong network.

So for everyone here, I think I'm still Alan Schimmel, or I'm some AI clone of Alan Schimmel. Thanks for being part of the gang. We'll see you tomorrow.

Last time I'm reading that. Take care, everyone. We got a great show coming up tomorrow.

I got Shimmy Says at 2:30. So we're going to talk a little bit about space and this Artemis and Apollo and the right stuff. So stay tuned.

Until tomorrow, I'm out.