Intel’s CES Comeback, California Privacy Push, and Continuous Observability | TSG Ep. 996

Hey, is Intel inside starting to mean Intel Innovates? I don't know. I hope so.

Welcome to Textron Gang. If you haven't caught us since the beginning of the year, we're live now, which means you are live. If you're watching this live comment, whether you're on LinkedIn or X or, or, or a YouTube channel or any of our, uh, Textron channels, if you have a a moment to comment, we'll see it.

We no promise, we'll acknowledge it and talk about it, but we'll try and, uh, we hope you enjoy this live format. It, I think it brings news a little quicker to you and, uh, we we're liking it here. To tell you the truth, let me quickly introduce you to our live gang today, as, as if we used to have Dead Gang.

But no, they were always live. But now we're really live Happy New Year to, uh, first time they've been on this year with us, our gang members, Fred Wilmot and Gina Rosenthal. Fred, Gina, great to see you both.

Hi, too. Good morning. Good morning.

And then joining us. I guess he's still in Vegas. Are you still in Vegas, John?

No, you're Home. No, I escaped. I escaped yesterday.

I am home. Good. I hope you had a good hot shower.

Shower. John was out at CES and some other stuff. John, welcome.

And of course, Mike Vizard. So gang intel innovating Intel Positive news coming out of Intel. It's been a while.

Mike, what do we got? Well, Intel is saying that it accelerated its schedule for producing these so-called 18 a chips, which are less than two nanometer and is basically at the now leaning edge of semiconductor productions. And they're basically saying at CES, they're back.

John, you were there. Um, what are people saying about Intel these days? You know, as the tenor change, because I can remember not too long ago, in 2025, I think we had an episode where basically everybody was saying, you know, we got some serious doubts about Intel.

Yeah, bye. Buy Intel. Yeah, no.

Um, so, you know, when we were talking about Intel last year, we kept talking about Pat Gelsinger and how things weren't working out and how they were in this kind of downward spiral with their manufacturing, and they were falling behind a MD and arm. And much to our surprise, pleasant surprise, Tuesday, they made this announcement that you said, and these are the core Ultra Series three chips. They're gonna be the first products to market using the 18, a manufacturing process.

And it, it was, to me, it was really welcome news. And it, it, you know, it gets lost in all of CES or all the shiny objects like robots, ai, innovation, et cetera, auto autonomous vehicles. And here we had this company, which makes the technology that makes a lot of this possible announcing something in a positive nature, which as you said, it's, it's really welcome news because from Intel, I didn't expect to hear anything from them.

I expected to hear a lot. I expected to see too much of, uh, Jensen Wong, which I did. Um, I expect a lot from Samsung, Lenovo.

There was a time, Mike, and you know this because you've been to all these shows in Vegas where Intel was one of the anchor companies at these shows, and I did not expect to hear anything from them. So to my surprise, they actually did make an announcement. And in a sense, they're trying to reverse this manufacturing setbacks with Panther Lake.

And, um, perhaps it's part of a road to recovery, which is aided in part, ironically by Nvidia and an investment as well as the federal government. But again, it's good to hear from an venerable company that is so important. And I am, I'm not allowed to root or I shouldn't root for companies, but in the case of Intel, I would really like to see them become much more relevant than they have in the last couple of years.

Alan, what's your take here? Is this, you know, significant or will this be filed under the heading of maybe a little, it's too little, too late? Well, look, first of all, let's give them their due, right?

They, they hit this milestone. Congrats to them. Secondly, John, you me mentioned the Pat Gelsinger situation and really the crux of him, of his leaving was this, uh, well, it was several reasons, but one of the big ones was, should Intel pursue a dual strategy of making their own chips, their own design chips, the intel inside the Intel core chips?

Or should they just be a foundry making, you know, chips for hire or foundry for hire kind of thing? Uh, you know, we've, we saw the Nvidia investment and supposedly they'll be able to make maybe some Nvidia chips. I've heard rumors of Apple may use Intel as a foundry to create next Gen M you know, the Apple chips.

Not, not necessarily Intel. They're not going back to Intel chips, but that they can manufacture Apple chips now all good, and I'm happy for them. Couple other things that I think we got at, when we talk about the federal government investment, that was money that came from the CHIPS Act in the previous administration as Biden.

Yeah. As this administration often does relabeled it as if they did something or they really did something That the previous administration, Right? And then they took, they took a 10% equity stick in in the company.

But that being said, my question is, are these chips truly AI chips or we just call everything AI chips today, even though they might be potato chips. Um, right. Is this, is this GPU stuff, is it inference, is it training or is it just an intel chip?

But everything's AI today. Not barbecue, not sour cream and cheddar, but Intel To a certain degree it is. Everything is AI these days.

So, um, we are seeing more workloads start to move beyond GPUs use for ai. So probably everybody's throwing the AI moniker in front of every processor they can find. And you know, they all have varying degrees of ai, so you need to kind of take that with a grain of salt.

But Gina, what's your take here on your perception of Intel these days? Because, you know, the folks on Wall Street this past week are doing a happy dance and the stock is flying high. Well, I have a take for the half question.

So I don't know if my take is right. So I had to look up what 18 A is, and that's what this, the manufacturing process for this chip is. Mm-hmm.

What they call it 18 a and to make it really dumbed down, 'cause I can't remember all the right terms right now. Um, they just made something like they flipped how things work. They made it so the power can be received from anywhere and they made it smaller.

So that, that's part one. And I don't have the terms, obviously I looked it up, but they just have a new manufacturing process and that's what was failing, I think. And that's why they couldn't think bring things to market because it was different.

The way they were trying to do things was different and it took longer than they thought. Um, so now they've announced this new chip that they were supposed to have out by the end of the year. And in things, to me it looks like it's the personal, like the end devices, that it's not, it's the consumer stuff.

It's not anything for the data center. So that's my question number one, am I right about that? But then it looks like this new 18 A that they did, and they're able to smush things a little smaller in the chip.

This is my very technical terminology, um, because they figured out how to do everything a different way. Now it's easier for them to smush it even smaller. So if they're able to get the same performance out of a much smaller chip, that means less power, less space inside a chassis, all the rest of it.

But I think it also means you can now use more chips maybe, or more of that inside of a server to get to the equivalent of what A GPU does. And it's not at the chip size and not just calculating things like A GPU does. And that's my thought process when I read up on 18 a.

So please correct me if I'm wrong. So to answer your question, yeah, the, the first rev of this is for consumer endpoint type devices, and they'll probably use it for servers as you go along. 8 nanometers and everybody else is starting to get to two, but it's not clear yet whether or not the way that they, to use your technical term smush things is gonna lead to more performance than some of the two nanometer stuff that you're seeing coming out of the other rival manufacturers.

I think I saw recently, uh, the TMSC was basically saying that they are on two nanometer and moving into production, but I don't think we've seen the head-to-head comparison of the different architectures yet. But John, what are you hearing? Well, uh, you know, so one thing I want, uh, mention and, and, and it's, uh, this is really important I think with Intel, is it for, for the, uh, those of you who haven't gone to C-E-S-C-E-S to me is kinda like the, the sports equivalent of the Daytona 500.

It's the biggest events for an industry at the beginning of the year, the calendar year. And what's important is you make some sort of statement or some sort of a presence at, at this show. I think increasingly, uh, in, in the, in the case of Intel, they had to do something.

And I, what I want to mention is, you're right, Mike, the, the stock was up six point a half percent on Wednesday, which is really significant for Intel. Um, if any type of movement like that. But also the CEO Bouton was at this, there was at, uh, an event Tuesday night for Lenovo where Lisa Sue Jensen Wong, uh, Yusef Medi from Microsoft, the, the CEO of Qualcomm, they were all at this event.

I mean, it was, it was a kind of an imprint of, uh, industry leaders making, uh, an series of announcement the FIFA president was there. Uh, that's another story. But it, in a sense, it was very, very significant.

And you're right, it starts at the consumer level. They're gonna be rolling out more products, more, uh, different types of devices that are adhere to the chip throughout the second half of the year, this first half and second half of the year. So I, I think that's really significant.

And again, with Intel, you, you have to show that you still have a, a pulse and in tech right now, seriously in tech, you have to also, uh, glob onto ai. Whether it's, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like a, uh, flimsy, flimsy argument. And, um, that's something they did and I will give them credit for.

And I, I did not expect to write a story about Intel in any shape or form this week. Fred, we haven't heard from you, but I wonder, you know, is Intel anywhere on your radar screen? Is it taken up any cognitive thought or are you just kind of like, this is off in the middle of nowhere and it's a secondary issue to you?

Well, I think there's two interesting points that come out about this. First is the first time Intel's hit a milestone that they projected, uh, in quite some time, which is a significant statement when you've, uh, when you've been caught in the gears for a long time, making that kind of statement and following through with this pretty good. I know there's been a number of, uh, folks like Nvidia, but Broadcom have been testing, uh, this, this chip for some time, uh, as early as back as March.

So I think it's a positive result in that regard. Uh, the other thing that I think is really important is made in-house, and that can be understated given the geopolitical situation that we have in the world today. So if we're looking at that, plus we're looking at the, you know, the production, uh, quality of a, of a smaller chip size, um, that has significant opportunity.

And so I think the important part for us here, when we look at this and stack it up and, you know, in reference to, to Alan's on, you know, government investment, um, if we do have a foundry here and we are able to manufacture chips of that scale and that, uh, those dimensions, I think that's a very positive sign of improvement, both for Intel, but also for the chip community in general. Yeah. And I would just mention guys, I don't know, you know, if, how much of you, how many of you follow the stock market?

None of you probably follow the stock market, but you know, the semi market is on fire since the start of the year. It's up. I don't know, is it 20% or some stupid number, right?

The semi market. And, and so that rising tide will buoy intel and then there's good news from Intel on top of it. It's no wonder that it, you know, 'cause they've got a lot of room to come up, right?

They, they were pretty low. So I, I think this, you know, strictly from a equities financial investment perspective really, really bodes well for Intel. And, and John, I'm with you.

Good for them. Can I ask you a question? So if the United States owns 10% of Intel, can any US citizen show up at an Intel shareholder meeting and ask questions?

No. Well, don't, let's not go there. Don't stir it up, please.

Yeah, We've got enough stirring up for on TA in the well No fair. Well At least see Epstein files. I just wanted to jump on top of what Fred said too.

Um, Intel does have, um, confidential compute, so it is a big thing that it's all built in-house. So you, you've got all of this stuff built in that you can make sure that when it gets to the servers, which I'm sure we'll see announcements from all of the big server companies at their, um, conferences in a few months, that they've got a new line of servers coming with the new Intel chips available and, and confidential compute will probably play a big, uh, part of that storyline, I would guess. Yeah, absolutely.

I would just think competition is a good thing here. And so if Intel is doing better and bodes well for all of us, because well, it makes everybody else do better. So, uh, you know, rock up.

Hey, alright. This is a great first segment. You know, as we're doing now here, we're not gonna take a full on break.

We're gonna segue right into our next, uh, segment, which is, uh, a new regulation coming outta California, right? About data brokers and, uh, uh, registry or deletion registry. Uh, Mike, what, what's this one about?

So, California enacted, and I don't know if the rest of the country was paying attention, but basically you can now go into this portal and require data brokers to delete your data. And maybe, you know, this will become a larger trend as we move along here, but I'm not sure everybody appreciates the role of data brokers. And I know when most people hear that term, they're probably start thinking, you know, low lives and used car salesman and all kinds of things, but they're kind of critical to the way this whole world operates.

And Gina, what's your take on what's going on here? Well, data brokers are important. I can explain it from a marketing, um, perspective real quick.

Um, but this is not a new thing from California. California's had a law enacted for a while that their, um, citizens could request that their data be deleted from a data bricker. What data brickers do, if you've ever gone to a website, and this is because of the California law, every day, every website, um, most every website has when you first log in a place where you can set your cookies, yes, I want, yes, you can use anything and track me, no, I only want you to use the most basic things that I can sign up for or don't track me at all.

So when you get a cookie set on your, um, computer, your laptop, your device, your your phone from visiting a website, it's for the marketers. It's for people to figure out, alright, you clicked on a LinkedIn ad that brought you here and then you went here to this page and this page, marketers use it to firm up their funnel. And so the funnel is they drop, um, different types of content along the way, and if you keep consuming the content down the funnel, they're like, this is who we need to go after this person's gonna buy.

Which is why once you visited a website about a perfect certain product, they have your information, so they're gonna retarget you again. And that's where the data brokers come in. They're like, we know these people are looking for new intel chips in their laptop.

So you will get all that information and you can use that when, when I set up Google ads or I set up LinkedIn ads, they'll use a data broker to find the right places to place my ads that I set. And that has all sorts of privacy implications. You don't wanna be followed around.

You don't want people to know what you're looking at and why you're looking at it. You should be able to roam the internet for free, but you're not, we're paying for it in that way. So what California did a while ago is they had a law that said they're citizens, citizens of California.

You, if you're a data broker and, and that you asked to be, and, uh, citizen asked to be their information to be deleted, you have to delete it. And it was complicated for the citizens because there was no centralized way to do this. So marketers don't even see the data brokers.

We just use different ad platforms that connect to the data brokers. So for citizens, they'd have to go to every single place and request their data be deleted. And it was long and arduous.

So California put this law together called the drop law, which is the delete request and opt out. And they've built a portal where all the citizens of California can go and say, I want you, I wanna drop out of all of these different, um, uh, data registries. I don't want anybody reselling and reusing my information.

So the idea is to have this portal where citizens can come and then if that the data brokers continue to use their information, they get fined every single day. And this will start in like September. So is this a good or a bad thing?

I don't know. I don't think the implementation is really great because if you're a California citizen, you have to sign up for the registry. And to do that, you have to give them every single piece of your most informa of your most information, which the data brokers may or may not have.

Um, they do a lot of aggregation, so they may have that, but they're not gonna necessarily have my maiden names, my maiden name, my previous married name, this, that, the other, they're not gonna have all of those things, my address. You can even tell them what your TV ideas, if you're tired of getting direct ads for people, um, specialized ads to you. Um, so you can opt out of all of it, but then all of your information is in one place for me, number one, that's a honeypot that if I wanted everything, including all of your government information, then I could just go there because now you've got citizens doing this.

State of California wants citizens do this because they don't wanna have to pay for all this work for the request to be the data to be deleted for everybody across the nation. Um, so it's kind of a, it's kind of a give and take. And I'm not sure this is the best way.

I think the better way goes back to marketers and how marketers are measuring the impact of, um, their campaigns and how they reach people. So it's not just painting with a wide brush. And I don't think a lot of marketers understand these data brokers and what they do because you don't see it in the tools that marketers use.

Marketers are just trying to re reach all the right people and honestly prove that the money that they're spending is having an impact on the organization. So I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done from a marketing standpoint, and there needs, I think any time you come across one of those places, a website that asks you if you want your data to be used, you say no and you don't give the data brokers any extra ammunition that they're getting from Google or where else, wherever else that it's a sticky topic. I'm, I'm not so sure how I feel about having one registry with all of your government information plus all the information of everybody place you've ever been, um, in one place.

That's a little scary to me. And we have, uh, had some experience with this as of late. So we, you know, what's your take on what's going on here?

So you went there. Okay. Uh, so, so let me, let me, let me put on my tech strong CEO founder hat.

I never took it off, but let me put it on here and, and talk from that point of view. I realize there are some evil people out there who want to get as much information about you as they can and monetize the crap out of it. And that's a terrible thing and we need to do something about it.

But then there are legitimate companies like Textron who, look, I I, you know, I explain what's our business model. Our business model is we produce content that hopefully people like to consume. Whether it's watching this video, reading an article, listening to a webinar, coming to our virtual event, predict 2026 next week, sign up for it.

This is how we do business. We wanna collect your information so we know who you are because then we have companies, legitimate tech tool vendors, whether they be services, software, what have you, who wanna reach that audience. But in order to match up and not waste your time, we wanna make sure you are the right profile for that vendor.

That's how we keep the lights on here. How we feed our families and how we do business. What happens is there are a lot of software at these data brokers are, are part of all of these data collection cookies and, and everything else.

And to the point where, you know, we'll, we'll do a campaign for an IBM and Oracle or some big company, little company, whatever. And we don't know what third party data brokers they're dealing with. Are they reputable?

Are they good? Are they bad? I, I don't know.

But the next thing you know, you get a lawyer's letter that you got data broker software on your backend. I didn't know we have any data broker. Where the hell, what is he talking about?

Well, our analytics program is collecting data and we're not warning people specifically. And then you get states like California that do these regulations, and I'm not against anti-regulation or something, but you know, they want you to enunciate every single one. You can't just do sort of a blanket, Hey, there's, we're collecting data.

Um, and so it's squeezes the little guy because then here's the real parasite in the system, the lawyers, what a surprise. The parasites come out and we, you've got law firms based in West Hollywood, California who specialize in this s**t, in this crap, right? They don't pick on the New York Times or the Washington Post or USA today.

They specifically target small and medium companies. Send a mimeograph, excuse my age, showing a mimeograph letter saying, oh, you have data broker software on your mach on your site, and we're gonna sue you for violating the California CCPP, whatever the hell it's called. Right?

Yeah. Now, b******t. I don't have it.

I wanna fight it. Call the lawyers, let's fight 'em. Okay.

I need $15,000 up front to fight us. 'cause we're gonna have to do some discovery. We're gonna have to file some counter papers.

15 to start. We're probably looking at 30 to 35 pretrial. The parasitic lawyers in West Hollywood, California say, we'll, we'll go away for 10 K, we'll go away for 10 K.

What's an entrepreneur? What's a businessman to do? Fight the good fight, write the checks to tell 'em f you or do you pay the 10 K and crow and say, crawl back under the rocky came out of Yeah.

You know, it's, um, oh, but I, I was gonna mention, you know, I I I, I feel your pain now. And, and, and, and in a weird way, these, these laws and, and, and kudos to California for trying to a address this unregulated data broker industry. But this, you mentioned, I think it's A-C-F-P-A-I wrote about this years ago.

Before that there was another, see, okay, sorry, thanks for it. There, there are like two laws and now we have another attempt. So in a sense, it's kind of, it reminds me of laws are kind of like software.

Sometimes you have to have the, by the third version, you've got, you get the things right. And even maybe this is an imperfect solution. I understand where they're going, but in a sense, this must be maddening.

And I'm taking Alice's point, and this must be maddening. If you're a business trying to cope with this and, um, you know, absent federal law, we're gonna be seeing these piecemeal approach. You gotta deal with GDPR.

I mean, basically longer if you get all these popups when you come to sites now that say, acknowledge this and, and most of us don't even read it. We just say accept all, acknowledge, yeah. And move on.

But you, you have to do that now. And then there's a cottage industry of companies that just specialize in making those popups for you and tracking them, right? So if, if, uh, let me put my uh, CISO hat on for a second shimmy.

And let, let me use an analogy. You know, when you're a kid and you go down to the river and you pick up a rock and you wanna skip a stone, you see every ripple that your rock that you throw generates, what you don't see is the knock on effects of everything that happens beneath the water someplace else. And those ripples can have that effect.

The reason why these privacy laws are becoming so tantamount to consumers is because data brokers don't use just cookies. It's not the direct relationship that I have with this particular website. Every ciso, if they comply with, uh, GDPR also has to note all of their adjacent brokers that they operate with, who is their third parties that they share information with.

Consumers can't control whether those companies keep or delete their information. And it is a, uh, it is a devil's errand to figure out whether or not your information is actually matriculated into a place that you could say, Hey, I'd like you to delete my information. You have to send an email.

It's a, it's a painstaking process. Most people don't do a great job at it, but it's your requirement. And the challenge that we have is data brokers.

And there are, as you said, there are some that are legitimate and some that use more illicit means. But when we talk about enrichment, we've already seen, there have been major, major occurrences of data broker leakages that have far more information than anybody ever authorized. That enrichment process of gathering every notion of your last 10 addresses, right?

And all of your credit scores dating back to college, all of that information is not necessary for you to be able to understand the buying habitudes of a person that is trying to engage. And as a business, all that data is risk. So there's also consequence when we think about that from the perspective of an organization.

Does it, does it get you to, you know, marketing qualified leads may be in some cases, but that hasn't been proven to illustrate the capability of what the actual direct relationship with the consumer is. And so I'm very excited about something like this. California's not the only, uh, state doing something like this.

We, we all know of FedRAMP, right? From a, a, a, a compliance perspective with government regulations about how to operate. Uh, you know, in conjunction with both security and privacy and the other things that go along with it.

State ramps have been taking the show for quite some time. California's one, Texas is another. There are 37 states that have different policies that are starting to become more privacy oriented towards their citizens.

So, you know, it is a, you know, in every, in every environment you're going to have the parasites, right? And Alan, I think you, you've got a great case. You can't, you can't sort of create legislation that allows bullying for organizations trying to comply, right?

Without their knowledge and wherewithal. But at the same time, you know, if you think about it from a consumer's perspective, the critical moments are when I get letters saying that my data's been compromised from somewhere and I never had any interaction with that organization, and I don't have any wherewithal to remove it. So I think it's, uh, while I would say, you know, it's edgy to say every California native or, uh, citizen can go remove all of the context of all of those things, there's still gonna be opportunity for people to both be able to sell to those folks and also to be able to, uh, you know, enrich data around it.

But I think reducing the attack surface here is a huge thing, even though it's going to have some, you know, effect on the marketability of, of those direct customers. If somebody, I, I wanna clarify something, Mike. It wasn't the data that we were collecting.

'cause we're, I mean, our data is really simple stuff. If you don't provide a registration form, we don't know who the heck you are, right? But it was, it was, it was a third party program that was attached to a third party plugin on the site, an analytic site.

And that third party's third party is currently in litigation now because they don't really do data brokering per se. But while that suit is pending, the parasitic law firm is making, Hey, so Mike, go ahead. So we have a lot to talk about and yet, but I would just say one final thing on this whole thing.

Um, I would pay money for an app, not just a portal, but an app that would let me see all this stuff and then I could just manage it myself and, you know, it would be worth something to me to, But let me tell you how convoluted this is. When they, when I found out about this, I had our IT and engineer say, find me this program. I'm not aware.

We had this program run every God done program that's associated, that's being fired off from all these third parties things. And it still didn't show up. It still didn't show up to the point where I asked the, the parasite law firm, show me what you are, where you're saying we're using this 'cause we don't see it.

And they have some specialized software that looks just for these programs like that, that weren't really apparent to us. 'cause it wasn't on our platform, per se. It was a third party.

Third party, but we got a boogie. But as a consumer, somebody could do the same thing as an app service and use that same tech for good. This is why I like what Apple's done on Apple TV where it says, do not track.

Yeah, I, I like that kind of simplicity. Mm-hmm. All right, we gotta move on.

Alright, let's move on. But let's stay in cyber. Okay.

All right. Uh, I'm gonna, So this is my Hogan's hero segment, I think Mike, right? Remember, you know, Sergeant Schultz, it seems the lights, the lights would go across the wire like once every two minutes.

So all of the lebo at New Kirk and knew once the light passed, they had a minute and 30 seconds to cut the barb wire and get out of Stalac 13 to go do their mischief. Every, everybody under 40 just went, what the hell is he talking about? That's okay.

That's okay. I like Hogan's. That was when CVS was the Tiffany network, wasn't it?

Yes. Yes, He was. I was.

And the producer was the guy who wound up producing the Godfather. Hey, that is, uh, the, the star there, Bob, was that Bob Crane? Yes.

Which all, all their misadventure and auto focus Look it up. But let's let, let's move on to the actual topic. So AWS's CISO is saying in the fact that the world has changed and that the volume of attacks and the sophistication of attacks have gotten to the point now where security teams are gonna need to be able to continuously observe just about everything happening in their environment so that they can surface up anomalies and respond faster and maybe automate more processes.

And I think we've been kind of moving down this path, uh, you know, and fits and starts for a few years now. But Fred, has things changed and are we at add some fundamental shift here and where we need to be able to continuously observe all our IT environments, which are really complex, and can we even achieve that goal? I think, uh, it's always interesting to hear, uh, a very, very, very large company CISO sort of make assertions about what's necessary in the market.

And I think yes, uh, continuous monitoring, continuous observability has been a thing. It's been a thing for 10 years. Uh, it is not new.

Uh, I think the challenge now is, while it's a goal or has been a goal historically for good security, uh, it's, I think the statement that, uh, Amy's making here is really about, it's a requirement now. It's not just a sort of theoretical need. Um, but the challenge that we have, and I I think there are some, you know, surveys that would point to something differently.

The challenge that we have is, if we think about what a cyber security team is composed of today, a lot of those organizations either have, you know, data scientists and or data, uh, uh, analysts, uh, AI engineers or guys that are folks that are leaning into AI engineering and so on. You know, the challenge isn't that budgets are growing. Uh, I know there's a survey that says otherwise, but my CSO friends would all tell you that's not the case.

If you said there's a six to seven, 10% growth in the budget, no, the common conversation is, Hey, guess what? Everybody, everybody wanted cybersecurity to be treated like it's a regular business, uh, risk. And so guess what, when it is, you can't complain about it.

And the risk here is that irrespective of what a breach looks like, loss of operational capability, the inability to conduct business as usual is a far grosser, uh, financial burden than a cybersecurity breach. Now, I'm gonna caution them with this. Just one other thing.

If you look at Land Rover's recent occurrence, right? That isn't true. And so as an illustration of that scale of breach has dropped their sales 43%.

We didn't see that after Target. We didn't see that after a, any number of major breaches. And there is a good illustration where there is a negative effect here.

So I I, it made some great points, right? There's complexity, there's evolving threats. AI is being used, uh, by adversaries just like it is, uh, by cybersecurity professionals.

And there is this intent to shift to proactive security, um, without sounding like the industry jargon and buzzwords of what the marketing capabilities of all of the technologies we're building today are, there is an absolute need for this. But the challenge is when we say air quotes, keeping pace with AI powered threats, AWS sees this every day. Does the every man see this every day?

No, not yet. It's coming. But is 2026 gonna be that, that time in that place where we consider that that's actually going to be, be the, the, the biggest challenge that we have.

And what I would offer here is simply this, the amount of agency that we decide we're going to give to ag agentic behaviors is a real risk factor every company's got to establish. And so whether we're talking about cyber budgets for buying technologies or hiring people, there's a lot of amazing security people on the street today that don't, that are unemployed, uh, courtesy of some of the changes that we've seen in both the ability for AI to take some roles, but also in the tightening of the belt around cybersecurity, allow the business consequences I was talking about earlier. The real question is what is the amount of agency that we're going to enable technology to have?

If you wanna be proactive, you're going to have to take on more risk and give more agency. And I think that's a strong point that she's made, that that is a requirement for us to consider, consider and conceptually something that everybody's gotta wrestle with. Now, the practicality of that is where I challenge maybe the statistics on this, because I don't see that availability in the budgetary process for folks for 2026, maybe for 2027.

But, you know, the defenders are far behind adversaries in this particular capacity from a budget. Um, crime, crime pace, Alan Fred, that was one of the most eloquent, thoughtful, and comprehensive answers I've ever seen given on Textron Gang. Thank you for that.

Wow. I I have a little bit of a simpler observation on this one. You know, the old saying, why do dogs lick their private parts?

'cause they can, and if we can do continuous observability, we will. It's just the nature of the beast, right? This, this is, I I don't know if it'll necessarily make us any more secure, mind you, right?

Because just because she can doesn't mean you should, but that is, you know, well, I would argue shimmy for you. I would argue though that, you know, this is not easy, right? You're talking about massive amounts of telemetry data that you're anomaly gonna collect and then try to analyze and then figure out what to keep and throw away.

Well, No. So we have the power, we have the technology, Right? It's expensive.

So what's your thought on the feasibility of this economically? Well, see, I go to a different place in my head because I, I, I'm not sure how expensive it will be. It depends on what products people are trying to sell.

And I think that I, I totally agree with everything that Fred said, but this has been things that the security teams have been working and expanding their, um, relationships internally, like with the data protection teams. This is all, all of a sudden this is all tied together. Great.

If you have observability, then what's next? What, what do you do if you observe something? How do you tell the right people to get involved?

How do you ensure that your data's protected? So I think, um, there's been a lot of work internally on teams trying to, to unify some of the more boring parts of it, like data protection with observability and what's going on and how do we protect the data. I think the biggest thing to me is, um, even though she's the CSO of A AWS, when she gets out and speaks on behalf of AWS, what is she gonna, why is she say laying the groundwork for, and what are they building that they're gonna try to start selling people?

And maybe it will be something great, but will it be something just, um, that they're making external for people that, um, consume AWS infrastructure to use in their own environments? Are they working with other people? This just sounds from a product marketing view, like a setup to another announcement or a sell, like softening the market for that.

All of it's important, but it has been important for a really long time. It's great. AWS is calling it out.

So what are they gonna provide for us to help help organizations achieve it? So here's the part about this whole thing that I find somewhat ironic, and maybe Alan has some thoughts about it, but, you know, over in the land of DevOps, we've been banging the drum about observability for years now, and we are collecting massive amounts of telemetry data, much of which is the same data the security people are looking for. So can we not just aggregate these two functions and, you know, is the future of DevSecOps gonna be unified observability for the DevOps and the security folks?

Al So I, I, I think you're right there, Mike. It is a lot of overlap, but this is the Splunk conundrum, right? I remember going, I don't know, to some security show in 27 2 0 0 7 2 0 0 8, whatever, Fred, I probably hung, hung out with you there.

Yep, yep. And you know, Splunk had those, those just plain black t-shirts that had cool, like they had cool sayings on them, and it, Splunk was great. It was like the ultimate arm rubber, your glue.

It, it collected everything. And we were in love with the idea of being able to collect everything. And so a lot of us started collecting everything and then we had to pay for everything, Right?

And we said, wait a second, wait a second. I don't wanna collect everything anymore. I can't afford to collect everything.

It's the same thing here, right? If there's not a payoff for it, if there's not a good justification, an ROI, as we say, just 'cause you can doesn't mean you should. We're not dogs.

Well, and there's been a major trend for the last, I don't even know, five, seven years of getting out of the business of collecting everything. 'cause just like you said, shimmy, now it's a conversation about value pricing. You can't have an unanticipated budget increase as a ciso, it's impossibility.

Mm-hmm. So how do we make better, uh, uh, and more informed decisions with less hay and the requirements are those, right? And so when we think about the complexity of what that means, as more and more data types come online and more and more capabilities for asking questions of that data, that's all great.

Observability doesn't make you proactive. So we need to start to talk about, again, where that agency and that risk quotients going to be. So you can make more informed decisions, but you might not be making them, right.

It might be supervised, right? If you're doing it right, you might have the wherewithal to say that my organization can basically say, I have a supervised agency, or full agency, or prescribed agency around this. So how much of the human in the loop, right?

In simple terms, are we willing to bear the cost and the risk therein to understand how proactive we can become? Humans don't operate at machine speed. We know that all threats are not equal.

We know that too. So where do we go from here? That's why he was a Seeso, Mike.

He, he knows this stuff. Alright. Hey guys, we're we're over time.

I apologize. But you know, the thing about doing these live is we really don't have the, the, uh, luxury of stopping and editing and making it shorter tomorrow. What you sees, what you get and you just saw it.

Welcome to another edition, or I hope you've enjoyed another edition of Text on Gang, Fred, Gina, John, Mike, thanks for joining. Thank you for watching. Hey, keep watching.

We're gonna keep doing this live for a while, I think. And as we figure it out, we've got a lot more text on TV coming at you today though, so stay tuned for that. Until then, though, this is Alan Shimel.

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