Techstrong Gang – April 1, 2024

Hello everybody, and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong Gang. It's Monday, April 1st, April Fool's Day. So we got lots of fun things to talk about, but maybe no jokes involved.

We're gonna be talking about all these AI alliances and acquisitions that are out there, followed by a conversation about what's real about platform engineering. And finally, Bonnie's gonna lead a little chat here about, well, do we need sustainability c-level executives? Because there's a bit of a debate.

Absolutely. All right, folks, we'll be back in a minute. All right, folks, let's jump into this.

I think almost every day now, there's a new alliance or an acquisition in this AI space, and I'm gonna ask Mark to sort it out for us. But last week we had, you know, Microsoft and Adobe stand up and say once again that they love each other. So that's nice.

And then we had an acquisition, and it seems like this is gonna be happening almost every week now. So Mark, what should we make of all this activity? Well, I mean, the first thing is the, the Adobe, uh, Microsoft thing, I think it's a combination of things, is one, they were in talks for an inordinate amount of time trying to do the Figma acquisition, to give them some, some capabilities in the graphical space that was, uh, quashed by the regulators.

So, um, there's a hole in their product line that they're probably filling with, uh, Adobe's generative AI products. Um, I've been looking at it a little bit. I think they're really good with their firefly, um, generative AI products in their suite, and it probably will give it a little lift along with their workflows and some of their other, um, activities.

But I think that's, you know, that's not the real big news. I think the real big news from Microsoft right now is this odd acquihire of the inflection AI staff and a licensing deal. So, inflection AI was a huge, you know, two years ago, three years ago, it was the, uh, co-founders of, uh, um, DeepMind, their CEO, um, CEO Mustafa, um, was, you know, one of the hottest guys in Silicon Valley.

And, uh, um, it looks like inflection is probably not doing as well as they were. They raised a lot of money and probably weren't seeing the revenue, and they were a little early to market. So Microsoft acquired their staff, but they didn't acquire the company.

They licensed the technology from the company. And there's a lot of speculation on what that means is, you know, as we've seen in the open AI debacle in the fall, you know, Satya and the, the Microsoft team were, you know, keen to acquire the open AI talent at pretty much any cost. And now we see them bring in the inflection AI folks, but the oddity is that they didn't acquire the company.

And, you know, it possibly could be because of, you know, they didn't want any antitrust scrutiny. It could be because that was the fastest way to, um, you know, to get them on board. It's, it's hard to say for, for sure, but what it, it is interesting is the takeaway from all of this is, you know, there's an unquenchable thirst for generative AI in these enterprise companies and the talent around them.

So, uh, I think what you will also see that Microsoft is hedging their bets against being dependent, too dependent on open ai, even though they are a 49% owner of the company. So that's, that's the long and the short of it. Mitch, does any of this go, Mitch, go ahead.

It also brought, um, I believe that they were gonna move their pi pi AI onto Azure services. So it brings another service to the Microsoft ecosystem. Um, I, I, I suspect we're gonna see a lot of kind of variations of all these types of acquisitions.

It's early and it's almost kind of a land grab of starting up companies and getting acquired before they're fully mature. Um, and you can even, you can look, even look at OpenAI and it's history, you know, it's, it's an of, kind of an odd progression of investment and transition of the kinds of companies. So I would be surprised if we see a lot of different variations of just some kind of odd, different interesting acquisitions in the next two years.

So let me follow up on that. When you mentioned, does that make you as an IT person hesitant to engage with a lot of these startups? 'cause if I look back in the history of DevOps over the course of a maybe several years, we've seen, you know, big companies acquiring small companies, but at least they had some footprint.

It feels like this is all happening at Lightspeed here. So if I'm a an IT leader, would I be hesitant and say, you know what, I'll just sit back and wait to see how all this plays out. It, it makes a big difference in the size of the company that you're leading it in.

If you're a larger company in enterprise per se, you're prob you, you're gonna see these as interesting things you want to keep up on at what's happening. You're gonna realize most startups early, you know, for the first two to three years probably aren't able to handle enterprise requirements, the scalability of what you have in a large finance organization or manufacturing or something like that. So you, you're gonna, you're gonna pay attention to it, but you're really gonna look at your main suppliers to acquire these people and bring it into the fold of the technologies that you're using if you're looking for more of an innovative edge.

Um, and I think that applies across the board of, we wanna put something into our product, or maybe we wanna do some experimentation just to kinda understand how we're gonna use ai, then I think you're gonna look for par for these companies to partner with and use their technology. But I don't think anybody's gonna make the big bet on any of one of them, maybe other than open AI at the moment. Um, and then of course the, the, the Googles and Microsoft's of the world and AWS but there's, there's so much going on and I don't think you're gonna put all your money on, uh, uh, one or two small companies unless you're another small company and that's the bet you're making.

Yeah, I was gonna say, for small companies, I think this, uh, Adobe Microsoft 365 partnership is useful because, uh, in smaller companies you have people that are doing the content creation as well as, um, operations all at the same time. And in the research they found that 43% of people that are doing marketing don't like having to switch between platforms as they go. And it kind of reminds me of when I'm creating something on Canva, for example, that is now AI has been added to that platform.

So you have that ability to not have to switch off to another platform. So I think that, especially let's say for small to medium sized businesses where people are doing multitasks in their, in their work, I think that it's gonna become more popular and more efficient just for people that are wearing lots of hats. So Mark, you have lots of startup experience.

So how did you engage with folks on the enterprise side as a smaller company when you were working there? Because, you know, to Bonnie's point, most of the companies out there that use this stuff are looking for the easy button and the simplest path to it. And a lot of times that's just through the existing platforms they have.

Yeah, I think the, the key and this is, um, was always when you went into a big enterprise, whether it was a, an international bank or you know, a telecom provider, we, we did it with partnerships with trusted providers. So, um, I think, uh, to Mitch's earlier point on like investing it, what we can't do is grab every new shiny object. 'cause it's a, it's just a recipe to accumulate technical debt.

But when it comes to something like open ai, I look at, you know, the partner partnership with Microsoft is we can trust Microsoft's ability based on their track record to deliver enterprise it. So if I, if I'm want that sort of bright shiny object, which is the, the, um, GPT-4 model, probably consuming it through Microsoft Azure is gonna give you not only the, the new technology, but actually the, you know, support and all those things that Mitch mentioned about, you know, small companies do not have the ability to provide the same level of support integration and backstopping that these large companies do. Mm-Hmm.

Well, let me ask you this then. Do you think that a different kind of ecosystem's gonna evolve or is this just gonna follow the same lines we have around the cloud today where I've got a Microsoft here and AWS over here and Google and maybe IBM hanging on the edge somewhere? Or is there gonna be a different kinda ecosystem as a result of all these AI innovations?

Well, I think there is gonna be the same sort of model of an ecosystem, but the thing is, with this land grab, the, the folks that are, a lot of these companies will get assimilated into the, the borgs of, you know, Microsoft and Google and AWS, but, you know, just the e the unit economics of, you know, getting to their customers that much quicker. We'll probably take some of the high flyers or even the ones that are failing, like inflection off the table. And then there'll, there'll be another crop of probably hyper fast growth companies that have better operational, um, uh, costs than before.

'cause they're not only developing ai, but they're using AI to reduce their, you know, development costs, their time to market, their customer support, their automation and sales, all those things. I think the, the ecosystem is gonna be less capital intensive. Um, if you're really, you know, shrewd about the way you bring your product to market, even though the market force that's going against you is this unbelievably large influx of capital into these companies that they just won't need, need and maybe pressured to take in the event of, uh, getting the funding, the minimum amount of funding they need.

You know, Mike, I think there's also, we're, we're in this weird phenomenon. I, I agree with, with, uh, mark on sort of, yeah, we'll go through the similar kind of machinations evolution in the market. We're in this, we're in this world where everybody's adding the same functionality to their product and chatbots and assistance and all of that, maybe to do relatively different things, but they're, most of 'em are based on generalized models.

And think about, Bonnie, to your point about wanting to switch modes between, you know, I like the product that I'm working on. Well, every product has a chat bot, or I probably don't use most of those. Every product has an AI bot.

Am I gonna learn each AI bot and what they're good at and how to kind of blend them into my workflow? Heck no, I'm not gonna do that. So I think a lot of the early chat bot is an experiment and, and in some ways to get an extra revenue stream to add AI to your email client or whatever it might be.

But ultimately, I think a lot of that's gonna fall to the Wade side. Um, and we're gonna rely, we are just gonna develop, it's kind of like the browser days, the search engine days, right? I had my favorite search engine web crawler before Google kind of came over and took over.

We're gonna go through some of those kind of evolutions, and I think the phase we're in now is not gonna be what it looks like in even two years from now. I think so too, especially with, um, people on the creative side, because if, if they're leaning too much into the ai, then they might lose their brand, their, their look, their original identity. And, um, that's gonna be a balance that's gonna have to play out as well.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old, but I quickly went from being totally amazed to Yeah, whatever. It's another one of these things and feels like it's been like, you know, maybe six months. Just Mike, it's just Mike.

Um, mark, we have a conference coming up with you and I I, and I know we're gonna be talking about some awesome innovations, but what do you expect to see happening in the, in the near future that's gonna wow me again? Because, you know, I've already gotten past the, you know, wow, it's cool, this thing can actually type ahead. Yeah, I think that that really what we're gonna see is we're gonna get, still be inundated with these, you know, fantastical, spectacular demos of AI robots and all these other things.

But, you know, I, I think about things like, uh, um, in the financial world, we never, we started seeing like high frequency trading and things like that, that had huge economic impact, but it wasn't sexy. There's no, nobody wanted to go tour a data center. We might have read The Flash Boys or something, which was talking about that kind of trends.

I think what we're gonna see is, um, behind the scenes companies that were not sexy, not tech leaders are gonna adopt this, you know, the, the financial industry, the insurance industry, the medical industry. I know Bonnie's, um, uh, very passionate about climate. And I, I've seen like, one of the great things is, is a weatherman generative AI from Google that actually is predicting the weather at a higher degree of accuracy.

I've seen that Too. These Are the things, you know, that I think are gonna make us, you know, they're just sort of gonna creep in and have big impacts, but they're not gonna be spectacular. They're not gonna be a robot or a self-driving car, but they're going to, they're gonna make real dollar changes in our economies.

And those things are sort of gonna show up in, you know, company's annual and quarterly reports when all of a sudden you see these surprises from companies that we don't consider AI companies taking this tool and applying it to large markets. So that's, that's my, my sort of take on it all. Uhhuh, Those would be the AI things To last too.

I wanted to get your take though. We've been trying to predict this weather thing for like, you know, several hundred years. Yes.

So you, you, you think we're there? Yeah, I, I think for sure I was forecasting the weather for, I won't say several hundred years, maybe two decades. And, um, yeah, the science has gotten much better.

The AI machine learning has gotten better, and the data gathering is getting better because a lot of the data for, especially for climate, is becoming more public and easier to access. The more data you have, the more you can build, um, a stronger model that has more accuracy. So we're seeing AI weather, I'm seeing it everywhere.

Uh, coming up with, like you mentioned, like, let's say you're booking a flight and you wanna know, looking ahead for the weather, it, they are getting more accurate. But just as a side note, as a meteorologist, once you get a couple days out, you know, then you lose a little bit of the accuracy. That was just an extra bonus bit of information.

There You go. Mark, with our conference coming up is when and where can people join? Yeah.

So the conference is, um, May 21st. It's around the clocks. So no matter where you are in the world, you can, uh, um, tune in on the, the first cycle or the second cycle.

Um, you can go to the artificially intelligent enterprise online, or you can go to Techstrong and there's links to the Techstrong events there. Uh, we have, we've been adding speakers. I'm very excited.

We have folks from AWS joining us. We have folks that are coming out of Commerce, a large, uh, the head of AI from a large bank. Um, he just, um, left that job so he could focus a hundred percent on ai, but he has all this great experience and analysts and practitioners.

So, uh, tune in. We're, we're looking forward to having a, a big tent of enterprise DevOps, uh, business folks and developer content. No matter what your poison, you can take it.

All right, folks, we're looking forward to seeing you all there because we're all gonna be there. So we'll be back in a minute. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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com, home of security bloggers network. All right, folks, we're back and we're gonna shift gears a little bit and talk about platform engineering. And there's a new survey out from the folks at Puppet, which is now Puppet by Perforce, but they've been doing this DevOps survey for a while and they found out that 43% of folks surveyed have been doing managing platforms per se, in a DevOps context for the last one to three years.

And I'm bringing this up 'cause there's a lot of buzz around the term platform engineering and well, I get a little skeptical every time I hear a new buzzword, but that's just me. But Mitch, I'd love to get your take on this. I mean, one of the knocks on DevOps has always been, it's hard to do it at scale, and yet it feels to me we have been doing it at scale and the survey seems to suggest that.

So is platform engineering in your mind a thing, or is it just kind of like the natural evolution of DevOps? Well, I think it's, we've been doing a lot of the things that we call platform engineering now, but I think there's another focus, and that is with DevOps, we've expanded our view to the kind entire SDLC and, and the pipelines and all things that are involved in automating a lot of good things. Um, meanwhile, the environments that developers are working in are not getting simpler.

They're getting more complex, multiple cloud providers, new servers. I'm building serverless, I'm building cloud native, I'm building this or that. Um, and, and while developers can, can do some things on their own at scale, that's pretty difficult.

You, I'm actually working on a, uh, study right now around how much time developers actually spend writing code. And it's anywhere from, you know, 12 to 14% to 50% of their time. The rest of it's doing server and, uh, maintenance and non kind of value adding types of activities.

The what, what platform engineering, it's interesting about it to me, and we did some research in the fourth quarter of last year. It, it's, it's being adopted because it has multiple facets, kind of like DevOps. And one of the facets is developer productivity, internal developer portals, standardizing environments, um, for, uh, development test and production, which taking that off the, the developers, uh, kind of shoulders if you will, takes some of that toll out of their job.

Um, and, and so I think that that being one of the things that, that's important about it and that standardization, I think is why it's getting a lot of attention. 'cause there's real value add. You can see the benefits of that, not just to the developers, but reducing complexity and errors and problems in your environment.

All right, mark, what's your sense of this thing? 0? Yeah, I think the problem is that, you know, platform engineering came from like practices at Google in the early two thousands.

And so Google was building these hyperscale systems. Amazon did the same thing. And, you know, they were starting from scratch.

Now we have all these in like industries where they have a legacy, they have technical debt, they have, you know, organizational units that weren't set up for this. But then you read the latest, you know, IT survey from, you know, puppet or whoever, and you talk about these terms and then people wanna relabel. Same with DevOps.

There's been a problem with DevOps washing for so long because everybody wants to be part of these new movements, but their technical and organizational debt does not allow them to fully adopt it. So, I mean, you know, the platform engineering from Google was this idea that you had this five nine availability and it was made possible 'cause everything was in the cloud and everything was on newer hardware. And they had, you know, they were minting money every day from their search business.

So they could do that. But if you're a, you know, mid-level IT department and a, you know, manufacturing company with 5,000 people, you may not have you, you may have so many things that do not allow you to practice this philosophy or these methodologies. So I think it's just a matter of, it is a real thing, but you are saddled with technical debt and organizational debt that you just can't pay off.

Here's the part that kind of makes me scratch my head. So development is not a science, it's not sitting in the factory. It's not like I'm gonna, just because you offloaded all these tasks for me that suddenly I'm gonna have more inspiration to write awesome code.

You can maybe give me more time to think about that and maybe I'll get some inspiration. But I don't think that there's a direct correlation between the fact that we're doing platform engineering and developer productivity is gonna get suddenly better. And I think maybe some of the promises that we're trying to make around ROI for this thing are a little, uh, shall we say fanciful.

But Mitch, what do you say? Well, there was a, um, kinda nexus of two points converging, if you remember it. Uh, Cobe KA couple years ago.

I remember in Valencia, a big thing was developer productivity because fi the finance as of of our economies were, were dropping and organizations were looking ways to save money and get more for less. And platform engineering was kind of on the rise in terms of popularity and adopting it. So one of the things that became about was developer productivity, and that's where these, uh, essentially it's about de developer self-service, right?

How can I go and get the environment that I want? It's pre, pre-provisioned or scripted or whatever, and I don't have to fill out a ticket and I can get the resources that I need. So that's the focus on the internal developer portal, but also standardizing on some of those environments.

And I think that's part of why it, it kind of took a big jump in everybody's perspective. 'cause all of a sudden everybody went, well, how am I gonna improve developer productivity? My boss said that's important.

Now I need one of those. How do we do that? And platform engineer was kind of sitting there ready to, to step in and at least partially fulfill it.

It it's hard to measure developer productivity, period. So, you know, adding platform engineering I don't think is gonna be any, any source of a magic bullet. But if it makes developers happy, maybe that is a more measurable PKI, if you will, and essentially makes their jobs easier, more livable, don't have to talk to somebody else to get my work done.

At least for that part, that's part of it. So Does that help them optimize their resources in terms of, um, using less resources and platform engineering? I wasn't sure.

So I'm really asking the panel. I think it creates more time for gaming. That's what I think.

But what do I know, mark? Yeah, I think that the problem that we have is just the, the delineation. So, and the definition.

So when it comes to platform engineering, we, we should think about it as the tools that enable developers and not so much the measurement of developer productivity. I think by dividing that line that says we're the automation of the provisioning and the management of the infrastructure. We do continuous integration and continuous deployment of the infrastructure as well as the code that the developer does.

We have observability and monitoring of these systems, and then we do things to make these systems, you know, more productive. So let's just say adding a server mesh to something like Kubernetes, those sort of enabling technologies is where, uh, platform engineering is. And then when you get to the DevOps part, you, you may be looking at systems that are actually, um, you know, more along the communication between the platform engineers and the developers as well as sort of these, um, philosophies of frequent updates.

So I, I think the problem is that the Venn diagram has some overlap. And so when you start talking platform engineering versus DevOps, the, the conversation gets cloudy really quick. I think if you look at where platform engineering sits in the organization, and there is no standard, we have data that says it's kind of all over, but the number one place was infrastructure.

Okay? So that tells you probably what those folks are doing, the kind of work that they're doing. Other places are kind of part of a DevOps team, um, uh, part of the center of an ex excellent or cloud engineering type organization.

So that's your answer right there. Just kinda step back and say, not what's the definition, what, what is it we need to get done? And that's where it'll live.

To Mark's point and something that has always left me scratch in my head, so I'll go visit some, you know, large company and they will tout, you know, we have hundreds of developers, in some case thousands of developers. And I scratch my head and I always go, well, okay, so they're all writing code, but how much of the code that all those developers writing actually makes it into the final production environment and the bill process. And I can't help but wonder if the whole thing is just fundamentally inefficient and, you know, do we need to rethink this whole thing, mark?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the reason that Amazon got so far, so fast is sort of, uh, Jeff Bezos's idea of the two pizza team. And you know, the, uh, um, um, the more you add developers to an organization, the more inefficient it gets because of the communication overhead. So, you know, what happens is you start a project and it starts to creep, it gets some modicum of success.

You add another developer and you add another developer and before you have it, Mike ards walking through a sea of developers wondering what the heck are all these guys doing? And gals. And so I think that that, you know, um, a lot of these organizations are very hierarchical and very, you know, level have levels upon levels that are expiring to be the same kind of web scale companies that are so somewhat flat like in AWS or Netflix or a Facebook or a Google.

And to our earlier point, you know, it's organizational debt as much as technical. Mitch, do you think people are getting outta bed in the morning and going, I'm gonna go get me some of that platform engineering, or is it more likely that, you know, they're struggling through the process of managing DevOps at scale and they are coming up with mechanisms and best practices to do that, and then somebody turns around and says, by golly, that's platform engineering. And they go, well, that's nice, but really kind of secondary to my mission.

But I think it happens in, in two levels. One at the higher level, I used to call it the airplane magazine phenomena. I read about it on the plane and I went back to my IT organizations.

We need us one of those, whatever those is, whatever a platform engineering is, I wrote That article, It usually rewrote it and change the title, right? Um, I think the other is there, there's very much a groundswell kind of a bottom up around things like SRE and platform engineering. I don't think it's all leadership saying we need, we need this one of them.

Um, and, and it's, and it, what it does is it elevates in, at least in terms of visibility, what some of those roles are that were kind of tucked back into the infrastructure group that nobody knew about, um, or Csad Martin work that happened on the development team or the managing the build servers, all of that kind of thing. So I, I think it's the, the positive thing about this is I think it, it raises the importance of what some of that work actually is. It isn't all just drudge and toil.

It's really important and it connects it to who uses it. So it isn't just about building infrastructure, it's for what is it for development environments? Is it for testing?

Is it production? Uh, if we wanna measure improvements, let's measure, you know, uh, pulling back the proliferation of tools and platforms and things that makes us inefficient rather than developer productivity. But to the point earlier about, you know, all the developers, in my personal opinion, I don't think many organizations go out and say, I need to hire a thousand more people to take on that technical debt.

We've got bs. They don't do that. They say, I need a thousand developers to go build new things and create what the business is asking me to do, or to get things done faster.

So the example of AWS and Netflix part of reason, and Google is for the rapid growth in developers is the autonomy of those teams. When you, when you can go build a team to go build something and you don't have to coordinate it across a vast enterprise architecture of everything, that's a lot easier to go far, go fast and go in many, many directions at once. But it's also leads to things like, hmm, in our cloud service we have, you know, probably 5,000 services when maybe 2000 will, will, will service just fine.

So there's a consequence of doing that as well. All right. Mark last thought on this, will AI make this better or worse?

I think it'll make it better. Well, I know it'll make it better. Um, I think that it's, you know, started out with a lot of automation and things like that, that the AI will create some better automations, um, hopefully freeing up more time for the, the, you know, platform engineers to actually improve the platform and not just run it.

Um, but, you know, I also think that the, the big thing is there's a human element that needs to be addressed as much as a technological element. And I think we touched on that numerous times here. I mean, at the end of the day, I think the thing that drives platform engineering and a lot of these organizations other than Mitch's astute observation of the Airplane magazine, airplane magazine, um, is really, you know, if you're a, if you're an engineer working in infrastructure, you always wanna make sure that you look like you're current for your resume.

And, you know, if your resume says Linux system administrator and doesn't say, you know, platform engineer, you might be worried about your future. So this, it happened in the Microsoft Novell days, it happened in the cloud, in the VMware days, and it's gonna continue to happen in the AI days. All right?

I think it might get worse before it gets better. And the worst part is that there's more of these AI machines creating more code than ever. And not all that code is equally good.

So I think AI will force the platform engineering conversation 'cause we gotta revisit the workflows if there's massive amounts of code being created. But that's just me and we'll be back in a minute. Hi everyone.

Welcome back to the Techstrong Gang. We are talking now about Chief Sustainability officers, CSO. Would you believe back in 2021, there was a survey that found more chief sustainability officers were created at companies, um, five times as much in just the past five years.

So this is a booming title that's, uh, happening across many different corporations. I believe the first one was 20 years ago at, at DuPont in Delaware. So it's fairly recent title, but is a title that is growing.

So people might be wondering, well, what does this person do is the Chief Sustainability Officer. So they're, they're managing the ESG goals for the individual companies. Um, and they're also bringing in new technology for each company to be more sustainable and more, um, carbon efficient, let's say in their processes.

Of course. Um, one of the topics is, well, what is the, uh, potential, uh, cons of this? I mean, is this adding another title that we don't necessarily need?

This title reports typically to the CEO? Does it make things more complicated? Uh, I'd love to get everybody's thoughts on that, but it is a, is a popular new title that's only growing in, in companies across the, the country and the world.

Let's open it up, Mike. Well, I think it's, it's, on the one hand, it's sad, right? The fact that we gotta go out and appoint somebody to drive these processes, um, we should be better than that.

But, um, if you look in the history of organizations, right? We create a chief title for just about every little thing we ever wanted to do. So I got chief data officers and Chief Digital Officers, and pretty soon we're gonna have, you know, chief bathroom officers if we can't figure out how to share these things appropriately.

But I, I feel like it's just the nature of the beast. But over time, I don't think the title itself is quote unquote sustainable because eventually all this stuff winds up becoming part of a larger process once we get it down. And I'm not sure similarly that, you know, we're gonna be running around saying, you know, we have so many chiefs and frankly there's too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny, the, the CSOs often, sometimes there's conflicts, let's say between the business and operations because it may cost money at first to, to make things a little bit more carbon efficient. Um, Mitch, is is that something that you might suspect where there could be some friction in those departments? Yeah, I, yeah, I think it's, I think this is partly a phenomena of who's responsible for, fill in the blank, where do you go to?

Because when you make it part of, you know, this industry vertical or the manufacturing groups, you know, yes, you, you shall do that too. And yeah, they'll do it kind of sorta, right? I mean, they've got other big massive main missions to accomplish.

And what it does is give someone who is needs to work cross-functionally with the organization about what some of those goals were gonna set for the company. I think in the case of, and, and that also helps with the friction that you're talking about, Bonnie. 'cause that friction rolls down in there.

Like, you want me to do that too? How am I gonna get all that done? And well, what, what, why are we doing this?

I don't even understand it. Whether, you know, they may believe or not believe into su in sustainability. I think some of these roles, like sustainability has an external element, right?

And not just a, I have one of them too, right? There is that, but there's also, how are you marketing? How are you communicating?

What's the communication strategy for where we're going and what we're gonna do to make us more sustainable? And how does that help you in the market, you know, with your customers, with your suppliers, with your investors, things like that. So that's part of why some of these roles, I don't think the chief data officer gets created for that reason, right?

The chief data officer gets created 'cause we've got a mess and nobody knows who, who to go to to help try to at least fix part of it or move it along the way. So, uh, also I think we've changed the purpose of a C roll. C roll was kind of where everything eventually rolled up to those few app dozen and dozen folks in a c title.

And now it's kind of more of a functional, there are those, you know, the normal C function, chief revenue officer, whatever it is. But then there's also ones that have an area in a subject matter that's cross-functional. That's my view.

That makes sense. And, and one of the, the aspects of the role is to drive innovation, look for carbon solutions and Mark, that's where AI is coming in. So I think that there's gonna be a lot of leaning into AI of what can we do, um, what, what new technologies do we have to reduce our emissions and to promote our ESG initiative with our own shareholders and with our customers.

Yeah. So I think sustainability is, is super important. But I tend to agree with Mitch is there, it's the construct for getting there is not to create a chief anything.

A chief AI officer, a chief sustainability officer, if you like, I think Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet said it best is you show me the incentive, you show me the outcome. And if the incentive is for the organization to be more incent scented to be sustainable, you're gonna have that outcome if you put someone in charge of it. I feel like a lot of it, and it doesn't even limit it to sustainability, it limits to anything where there's a chief ex officer is they become a scapegoat.

And I think a lot of times these companies use it as virtue signaling for whatever initiative, which is sad because all of these initiatives are super important and they should affect the bottom line and the environment in the case of sustainability and you know, our world in general. So, um, AI will help in these significantly. I think one of the best, um, uses that, that ai, and you mentioned it earlier, is just with all this more this weather data available, we are gonna know what the impacts of companies are based on this feedback loop from this weather data and is it really warming or cooling the planet and why?

And so AI will do a big, um, big service there, but regardless of a chief sustainability officer or not, Here's the part that troubles me, right? None of these sustainability officers own the lever that's gonna affect the outcome, right? It's gonna be the CIO is the one that's gotta go and reduce emissions from the data center.

The person who runs the trucking company or whatever it is, has to go and figure out how to make those things more efficient. So ultimately all they can really wind up doing is sending a memo that says, um, you know, tell me what you're doing. And then I'll aggregate those memos so that when we have the next shareholder meeting and some 20-year-old person in the back of the room is screaming angrily about what are you doing about to save the climate?

I can point to my chief sustainability officer and then I got a bunch of reports in the memos and you know, I look good. Yeah, Right. I mean, that's a lot, a lot of it is looking good.

Like you were saying, mark, it's like having that, um, if you go to any company's website that now is popping up very early on, this is our pledge. This is what we are gonna do by 2030. Um, so this chief sustainability officer is the person overseeing that, but you're right, when it first comes up, where are they gonna look?

They're gonna look to the IT department, okay, you guys are the culprits, so we've gotta cut you down, we've gotta change this, we've gotta change that. And then it's the CIO as Mike mentioned, that has to say, okay, how do we do this? You know, how we we're gonna, we gotta implement this now.

So it's coming from, from the top down. But, but also as you mentioned, think of all the young people that are at these companies that are pushing for this and, and the chief sustainability officer is, is a good, um, I hate to say, but green light, that the, the corporation is recognizing the importance of it, uh, that they created this position. And I've seen chief sustainability officers just pop up at every different company.

It doesn't surprise me when I was reading the statistics and they're not just somebody that was working in another department and got promoted. The ones that we've seen in the past five years, over 90% of those have been external hires. So companies are taking these positions seriously and they're recruiting for them.

Um, and we're seeing that growth of chief sustainability officers and I see them speaking all the time internationally at the biggest conferences. Um, you know, they're in demand in, in terms of what their opinions are and their outlooks and, and their plans to, um, make everything more carbon efficient going forward. I would like to defend my IT brethren here for one second because it's not always their fault and it's not all bad.

I remember having this conversation with somebody and he is like, when's the last time you used a printer? You don't use printers anymore because we have PDFs and we've created all this stuff. So we saved more trees than anybody, but we don't get any credit for that.

That's a good point. You do if you claim. But anyway, that's a whole nother topic, um, which I've done before.

I did exactly that. Like, we're going paperless and that's my initiative anyway. Um, I think there's another, a unique, another unique aspect about sustainability officers and that is there's a connection to science outside of the organization and policy outside of the organization.

You don't have that with the chief digital strategy officer or Chief e experience officer, or yes, there are other, you know, groups doing those things. Uh, you know, other companies that are doing that work. Here, here, there's so much.

It, it's, we're talking about how do we tackle great big, massive problem and what can we do? What are we doing to contribute to it the problem? What can we do to contribute to the solution as an organization?

And we don't have a lot of chances to make big bets. You know, we can't just go throw a bunch of money at this and, and claim that we're doing great things to help sustainability. We have to have measurable results or at least some way to, to measure the outcome of investing that money.

And I think that's one of the reasons, to your point, hadn't really thought about it this way, Bonnie, but, you know, bringing in outside people, you wanna bring a specialist, somebody who knows about climate change and knows what the science and what's happening in research and in policy and how to, how others are working to, to apply that inside the organization. Yeah, policy is key. So that may, that may make this a more legitimate c kind of role that is sustainable, unintended.

That Makes so much sense, Mitch, because if, even, even just look in the recent weeks we had the SEC finalizing, um, rules that they're gonna be having for climate regulations. It's very important, um, in the EU that we have these regulations. So as these become more and more abundant, people are going to wonder, okay, specifically what do we need to do?

When do we need to do it? What is scope one, scope two, scope three emissions. And that is where the chief sustainability officer comes in to kind of translate everything to the team and say, this is, this is how we're gonna do it.

So there is that big plan that Mike mentioned affects so many people, but it is coming from external sources as well. Mitch, what's your best advice to IT folks who a lot of them wanna, you know, be part of this, right? They, they care especially, you know, more of our friends in Europe than the US probably, but, um, what should they be doing other than the fact that, you know, somebody sent them a memo, but is there something that we should be, um, putting into our monitoring observability?

What's, what's your thought? I, I think the unique opportunity here, to your point about the 20-year-old in the back of the room, right? The people that you're bringing into the organization, people that you already have in the organization, this is a cause that a lot of people care about.

You know, maybe not everybody, maybe some people, you know, very much so, and maybe kind of casually on the other end. I think when you have a cause meaning you, you have something that people have passionate about, independent of what we're doing and what are, especially if they're asking what are we doing about this? Um, as an IT organization, you can say, what do we want to do about sustainability?

We have a chief sustainability officer, they have some goals, or maybe we, maybe we don't. Um, but if this is something we really care about and want to get behind, then what should we do? Where do we think, let's look at where there's areas where we think we might be inefficient or, or contributing to the problem.

And what are things that we could potentially do? Not everything requires budget. That's usually the first answer is, well, we need budget to do blah.

Well, and a lot of it is just practices, right? It's changing the way we supply paper to our printers and toner. It's, it's the way we buy equipment and, and, uh, de-provision.

It, it's the services and the financial management of it that we over-provision and use. Maybe we should go to serverless instead of traditional server based applications to try to save more resources in the cloud. People will then sign onto that and they'll get behind it.

Not everybody, but a lot of folks will. I think that's something you can do as a organization, somewhat of a groundswell. And if I'm a chief sustainability officer, even if it's not exactly the what, you know, I would ask them to do, I would say, great, the one thing I can't build bring in is passion.

If you've got passion about it, let's, let's help align to get even greater goals done. That would be what I would do. Yeah, that makes sense.

And I think, um, you mentioned, you know, how do we do it? Okay, use less paper, but also, you know, the life cycle of the products. That could be something where we look around and say, well, what are we not using anymore?

Let's get rid of it in a, in a sustainable way. That could be one, one thing that folks can be looking at. Um, so I think there's a lot of aspects to it.

The chief sustainability executive, that's something that going forward, as I mentioned with all the goals that we have for 2030 and 2024, we're just gonna see this role expand in the future. Mark, you know, this one is Mike Mark, you know this one, one more. Go ahead.

Sorry. One more thing I wanted to add is the other organization that, that has a big impact on this is product product management. And that is, um, I'm an advisor to a company called Sustainable Mines, founded by a friend of ours, uh, Terry Swack.

And that's all about bringing data, surfacing data to what are the economic impacts of materials and processes and supply chains of how we at the, from the design stage, how we design and create products that we're, we're building, whether they're digital in the, in the world or they're physical products. And a lot of product management organizations are now looking to that maybe because they've got sustainability goals to say, well, okay, how do we do this more effectively? Maybe outsourcing it to this, uh, portion of the world and using this kind of a chemical isn't the right thing to do anymore, and there's a more, someone has figured out a better way and maybe even a cheaper way to do that.

So that's one other area I think has a lot of opportunity to contribute to this. Sorry, Mike for interrupting you, I just No, no worries. But wanted to get, I wanted to get Mark's.

Uh, last thought here on one key thing. There's a lot of folks who were saying, you know, all these data centers that we're building for running AI as not solving the problem, it's part of the problem. So, you know, how do we make AI more efficient?

Well, I think there's a, there's a number of ways you do that, but, um, and you know, I think the technology will eventually get more and more efficient. Hopefully the, the key is we've gotta outpace the technology has to outpace our demand. And that's the same for, you know, AI as it is for air travel.

I mean, that's, and you know, fossil fuel vehicles and all those other things. But, uh, you know, right now, just because those numbers are so gobsmacking, when you see how much con power consumption is there and how fragile, you know, parts of our power grid are that supply them. But in the long term, it'll be, you know, we'll either, you know, catch up, get ahead, or we will have another episode of the text, strong gang naval gazing about how to figure this out.

I mean, it's a hard problem and I don't know that we have a near term solution. Well, it's a good thing there's so many chief sustainability officers out there to put their heads together, come up with some ideas, Bringing that back home. Yeah.

All right, folks, I think we're gonna close it out here. But I just don't think that there's a lot of oil executives that are overly concerned about suddenly us figuring out some other way to do this. So I think we gotta find some way to be more efficient because we're using more fossil fuels than ever according to every study I've seen.

So we'll see where we go. Please stay tuned for the rest of the episodes that are about to follow and stay tuned. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building.

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