Techstrong Gang – April 11, 2025

Hey everybody. We got AI agents everywhere. You're watching Textron Gang.

We'll be back in a minute. Welcome to the latest edition of the Text on Gang. We, once again, have a, a global network of contributors on this show today, starting with me in the west of Ireland, as I am for the last week or so, and might be for the next few episodes.

We'll see how far that goes. Hopefully they will let me back in the country, but who knows these days. Anyway, our guests for today are way out on the West Coast.

Let's get started there. Lisa Martin, how are you? Good to see you again, as always.

Doing well. Good to see you too, Mike. I know we're, we're cutting up against pub time for you.

Yeah, there you go, man. We have our priorities. Come on.

John Schwartz is not in his normal Northern California perch. He is down into Southern California. Do you need a passport to go from northern to southern California?

It's a very different mindset. Well, you having lived, having, you know, having lived in Northern California, that it's basically California is two states. Lisa maybe can attest to this too.

Oh yeah. So Southern California and Northern California are totally different in terms of culture, people, everything, the way we look, the way we talk. So yes, I am in another land right now, but I do have, uh, my real id, which helped expedite things.

I can, I can see an executive order in the future trying to sort that one out and see how it goes. Andy, man, good to see you. I believe you are in the great state of Colorado still, or are you traveler?

Uh, I am absolutely in the great state of co Colorado, the mighty Colorado. Uh, yeah, no, it's great to be here. Thank you, Mike.

It's, it's all we got. Look, I would just like to go to a decent taco in San Francisco. Can we do that?

I don't know. Maybe it's beyond our best. Go to the Mission, Diego.

Yeah, the mission. Go to the mission or, or just San Diego. Go to the mission or, or, or heavens to, you know, if you really can manage it, go to the East Bay.

There's lots of good tacos in the east. Ah, Always top tips here on the gang. There you go.

And finally, stna, how you doing? Good to see you. How is Ohio?

What's the weather? Absolutely, mark, today, it's so cloudy. Uh, it's been raining for the last couple of days, but you're inside not complaining.

Since I left the states to be in London and here in Ireland, I am now on my 14th straight day of sunshine. It is unbelievable here. So, Wow.

That does not happen, Mike. It doesn't, no, it, it does not happen. It is, it is almost like a perfect Irish summer here in April.

So there you have it. Well, let's jump into the news of the week and we'll start with Google Cloud next. It's not like they didn't announce a few billion different things that were kind of mind boggling the track this week.

But, um, the highlight of it all was that they have this a raft of AI agents that they're adding for every given task in the world. And then they created this, uh, agent to agent protocol that will hopefully interconnect all these things, or at least give you some, uh, mechanism for doing that. And they've got like 50 other vendors helping them out with this whole thing.

And then there was all kinds of coding tools that didn't come as much a surprise. But, you know, the only thing that I found a little bit troubling is like, everything being announced is like a preview. And some of it's a public preview and some of it's a private preview.

And it's not clear to me that any of this stuff actually exists yet. But so long now. com.

I think there's a few on tech strong it by now. But what, uh, as someone looking at this from afar, what did you get out of this? Um, yeah, so Google did indeed make a flurry of announcements at Google Cloud next, uh, around ai.

And, uh, they even detailed, uh, how it's working with, uh, uh, you know, over 500 customers in that space and how Google's AI tools are helping customers solve real world problems. 'cause, uh, a lot of the companies are still in the discovery phase, uh, finding proper use cases that can be advanced with ai. So obviously, again, the highlight, uh, was, uh, Ironwood, uh, which is, uh, Google seven generation, TPU, uh, the custom AI shape.

Um, it is say that Ironwood is 3,600 times better performing than the first generation of TPU and 29 times more energy efficient. Um, uh, but other than that, I saw a lot of, uh, announcements around ai. There were enhancements for AI inference, and particularly, uh, one that caught my attention was this, uh, announcement around AI agents that there's this agent to agent framework, uh, which Google announced.

Uh, so it's an open protocol that allows AI agents to communicate to collab, collaborate, and, uh, exchange data across platforms and applications. So, uh, the agent to agent framework has been built, uh, with contributions from over 50 technology partners. Uh, and that includes Atlassian, that includes coha, Lang Chain, Salesforce, sa sa, sap, um, uh, cognizant, uh, KPMG.

And so it, it looks to me like that they're really pushing for AI agents, and there's also a, a platform now for building and deploying AI agents. Uh, so it looks to me like they're definitely pushing more for, uh, AI agents to be integrated into the workflows for, uh, more better automation and, uh, easier use of the tools. Mm-hmm.

John, it's no secret that Google, uh, stubbed its toe early on when it was kind of moving into this AI space. And, um, they do like to remind everybody that they invented the transformer that everybody else then took and made a billion dollars on. But, um, as you look at all this stuff, do you think Google's kind of making up some lost ground here with, or Yeah, you know, you know what, you know what this reminds me of?

It also reminds me of Salesforce. Uh, so you have these two companies that are overcompensating, shall we say. I mean, I looked at just this, the, the, the raft, the, the, the scope of this announcement.

It was overwhelming. And I, I'm glad you mentioned that this idea that some of it is available and some isn't. Some is enclosed beta testing.

And that's, that's something that we're gonna talk about, that I'll mention about Atlassian. And it all kind of, you kind of all put it together and you've in, in less than a year, we've had dozens of companies named any, any major software company or any type of of company with any type of enterprise solution that have announced some, some form of AI agents. Some may be available, some may not be.

We don't know if they're interoperable. Um, we do know that it's a massive market. Uh, I think Futurum just came out with a report that a, a genetic AI is gonna tackle up to $4 trillion worth of human labor globally by 2030, which parallels this idea from Jensen Wang of a multi-trillion dollar economy opportunity with billions of automated digital workers.

So I think about, to me, I think about the CIOs and how they're gonna prioritize this because they are under pressure from the top level to actively ramp up AI adoption and use. And so Google's throwing its considerable weight behind it. And I, and I, I'm not saying this is, it's, it's, it's always good to have options, but I think we've almost kind of overwhelmed and flooded the zone, so to speak, with what IT managers have to cope with and what they're gonna have to piece together.

And it's not gonna happen overnight. I mean, this is going to be slowly rolled out, and there's gonna be a lot of trial and error. So in a sense, when I saw the Google announcement, I was thinking, this is interesting, but it's also probably part of this overwhelming wave of, of tools and options people are gonna have to consider.

Andy, were you shocked at all? Because that sounds like what they were trying to do. Look, I wasn't shocked.

I mean, I, I I, I will tell you I'm not impressed with stalling announcements. It's a blight on our industry generally, this idea of we're gonna have this software available sometime real soon. Now I do not love that.

But look, Google's had a good history of building custom chips, right? The custom arm, 64 based, uh, 10 chip, uh, for their cell phones, for their pixel, um, actually did a really interesting flip on what, uh, cell phone processing was able to do for photography specifically. This, uh, Ironwood probably a logical extension of that.

It's smart for them to move into AI for testing and qa, for example. These are known knowns. So using AI to replace human workers around the complex and high speed and high volume work of testing qa, I really love that.

I think it's great for CTOs that there's gonna be potentially better cloud options that might even save us a couple of bucks on GPUs. Um, 'cause it's so expensive to do, uh, ai and as Sevin says, it's still in the sort of, uh, development and experimental phase, I think for most CIOs. Um, I do worry about agents talking to agents, and I actually feel like that's getting a little bit of ahead of where CIOs really are.

There's trust but verify desire within the CIOs I talk to right now. But I don't think they're ready to let agents go and talk to agents and just get work done independently, like their human teams can do. So I wonder if they're getting too far ahead of the game.

But look, you're absolutely right, John. They've gotta get up there and talk about their multi-million dollar, their billion dollar investments. They've gotta catch up essentially to open AI and others, but they're taking it through a new angle, and I really like where they're going.

Mm-hmm. Lisa, back in the day, we used to have this phrase, it was called vaporware, and people would kind of announced things and then we would label it as that. And it seems to have fallen by the wayside, but sometimes I also feel now that Google makes an announcement, OpenAI makes an announcement, and they're all talking about something that will happen in the future.

And I almost feel like I need a quantum computer now to sort out who's actually doing something in the present in the future. But is this gonna cycle outta control or, 'cause I, as I look at everybody making announcements, I have to wonder if a lot of this is for consumption on Wall Street rather than customers. That's a great point.

It's a marketing challenge for sure. I noticed the same thing that you guys pointed out. A lot of things in preview in beta, some customers have access, other, lots of others don't.

It's a marketing challenge because they have to message this appropriately to their target audiences, the developers, the DevOps teams, for example. But there's, what I also got out of what the announcements were, was co-option and competition. I mean, the intensifying competition with Microsoft AWS and even Nvidia on the TPU side, it's, it's a pivotal time.

On the co-op petition side, they talked about partnership with Nvidia to run Gemini on Nvidia, uh, Blackwell systems. Dell is a hardware partner, so they have, they've done a decent job there in terms of messaging, the partnerships, logging, you talked about how many partners were involved, for example. But it's going to be, I think it's just gonna, it's, it's this constant race we see on the AI side to one up each other on that competition side.

And marketing has to stay right on top of that, but also ensure that the messages are delivered in a, in an appropriate way to the target audiences, and they understand when they're gonna get access to things in preview. That's, I think, a really key challenge that marketing has right now, Kinda like this, like this tight rope act also in a certain sense, because one of the, one of the partners of Google is Atlassian, right? And when I was talking to Atlassian, one of the, one of the, the key products they were talking about was OC search and its ability to basically look through an enterprise and do search, and they juxtaposed what they do versus Google, which they consider more of consumer search.

And I imagine point out that Google's actually looking into, into the use of AI for enterprises as well. So in a sense, they're working together, but they're also in a sense consider themselves Hold, hold that thought 'cause we'll come back to Atlassian in a minute. Yeah.

All right. But It's, I think that's a thing though that doesn't, doesn't just apply to Atlassian, but it applies to a lot of these other companies. I see Salesforce as a partner, SAP ServiceNow, and there is gonna be some friction in, in what particular agents do.

It's gonna be interesting to see how you, the, the, the nuance or how you finesse that between competing and it all comes back even to the Microsoft Open AI relationship, right? It's just this, this, this coopetition as, as Lisa said, and it's, it's, that's gonna be an ongoing evolving story that they're all gonna have to sort out. So along them, walk this through with me.

How much of this effort is to kinda get people to not, I wouldn't call it a hard lock into the platform, but if all my agents are in need to interoperate with each other, am I not gonna be inclined to kinda land on the same type of cloud and will people as they get in more and more in AI start picking between Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and maybe there's like five core platforms just like kind of the cloud, but this is the next wave of that? Um, well, the intention generally is to, uh, keep as many customers as pa possible on the platform. And, uh, this whole rush of AI announcements, whether it's agent tech or uh, product enhancements or whatever it is, they're all geared towards that to cater to the customers wholesomely so that, you know, they don't need to find another platform or go into another vendor or look for options elsewhere.

So yeah, it's, uh, generally the idea is to be the one-stop shop. And so I feel like the this, um, uh, the more AI they add to it, the more tempting it becomes a product or even a platform, right? And So I think just generally, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

So you think about who they're partnering with specifically and who they're threatened by. And so Atlassian versus GitLab for, uh, GitHub for example, is a pretty interesting, uh, head to head. Microsoft and SAP have always been a little bit head to head, same with Oracle.

Uh, so, you know, you think about who they're partnering with and it's actually pretty interesting to consider how they're trying to reshape that competitive landscape this way. So, mm-hmm. Annie, let me ask you something about the actual products that you're seeing.

I mean, status notwithstanding, it seems like Google has a pretty solid plan here. I mean, all these things seem to be where we're headed and, and, and I I couldn't fault them on anything in particular that they were rolling out. It's just a question of timing, right?

Yeah, look, I agree with that. I'd, I'd love to see it all just fully released. Uh, it's always been something I've done as a product leader.

Uh, but if, you know, I, I really like what they're doing because they're going straight for, uh, in a lot of ways my people, right? Ops people, they're going after faster speed, performance, uh, integrations. Um, they're definitely going after the developer and DevOps audience, and that makes sense.

Uh, I will tell you that they're also looking to get those integrations regardless of platform. So I agree they're trying to get people to use the platform and lock into Ironwood as their chip set for their new developments. So, and partnership is gonna be a huge part of that.

But I also think, you know, this is based on my experience running cloud services for large enterprise, the idea that you don't necessarily want to use all one cloud. You don't want that lock in. Uh, and so the idea of making the agent to agent conversation a lot easier means that even if I'm on Azure or AWS, and let's face it, most people are on AWS and Google wants to catch up to that.

And they can have capabilities out of Google that are unique, uh, first and only, you know, the, the, the key competitive areas you want to go to while they're still using core services from AWS. So maybe Amazon becomes the sort of Kubernetes and storage cluster where GCP becomes my new AI cluster. This is a really interesting opportunity for the hybrid cloud.

So yeah, I like where they're going. Like I said, with uh, uh, the IT ops stuff, test and dev for ops to have, uh, maybe a night's sleep 'cause code's not going down. I really like where they're going.

I think CTO should be pretty happy about this as long as they can get access to the software, Right? It was interesting to me that they were using a networking terminology for the agents. So it was kind of a protocol.

And my read on it is that it'll work fine within a particular cloud, but I suspect there's gonna be slightly different implementations on different clouds for the same capabilities. So we're gonna need gateways between the different agent to agent protocols and it will kind of play out in that way. And of course, you know, a specification is one thing, and the way somebody implements it can be radically different.

So, uh, I think there's an opportunity for, I don't know, slog you covered this space, but, you know, are agents becoming networking endpoints essentially? Um, yeah, in a way you can say that. Um, 'cause uh, well we have all seen in the past couple, um, past few months that, uh, agent take AI is, uh, really becoming the big deal.

And, uh, companies are really trying to, uh, infuse it into literally everything. 'cause it makes the job a lot easier for a lot of, uh, the across the team really, um, whether it's networking or development or whatever that may be. So yes, absolutely.

I'd say that, uh, there, there would come a point in time when a AI agents would, uh, be able to substitute for a lot of the things for the, uh, road jobs that we, uh, have been doing, and that that's taking away a lot of the bandwidth from, uh, people, whether it's, uh, developers or, uh, networking people or security people. So we'll see a push, uh, towards that more and more. The other thing that struck me, and Lisa, I'd love your opinion on this, is if you look at what they were describing, they were like trying to unify everything ops, right?

So basically they were saying that this platform will eventually lead to the unification of DevOps, finops, IT ops, and anything involved with ops. Um, I'm not sure that that's gonna play out as they had hoped, because, you know, there's, those are cultural issues as much as they're technical. But, um, is that a reasonable goal or is that something that's a little too pie in the sky?

I think it's a reasonable goal, uh, from the collaboration standpoint alone. You bring up a great point though, that I think it's probably the cultural aspect of it is probably more difficult than the technical aspect of it, because cultures are really hard to change. But I think ultimately what they're getting at, and we'll talk about this in the next block as well, is that collaboration that teams need to have, they need to have that visibility.

They need to stop working in silos and really understand what the others are doing, how they work together. Because at the end of the day, it's all about the customer. And customers want choice.

I think when Andy was talking about, you know, the hybrid multi-cloud, for example, I'm like, yeah, customers, they want choice and they also need these teams to be collaborating at a deep level. And that requires transformation, cultural transformation, which I think is harder, as I said, but it has to go in parallel with the technological, uh, transformation that has to happen to make this work. All right.

Andy, last word on this. What do you say? Is this achievable or at the end of the day, we're all gonna just keep slicing up functions?

'cause Well, Elisa's point, I kind of like my way to think it. Yeah, look, I, I think it's possible, but I don't think it's likely just simply because of what you say, Mike, the humanity of it, the differences from data center to data center team to team function to function. Um, I think it's a really good point that, and Lisa were talking about the idea that you've gotta have these communication and collaboration.

I've done the studies myself, more communication, more collaboration across boundary lines, deliver better results. So obviously, I guess ai, talking to AI can produce better results. But yeah, I would like to, I would love to see AI helping people to communicate better across teams, um, helping to collaborate better across teams.

But I do think the uniqueness of these individual teams in dev, qa, ops, security, I, I'm back to T-shaped people. I want t-shaped ai, I guess. All right, well, I'm gonna move on to our sub next subject here.

But I would just point out one thing about, there's an old maxim that says, good fences make for good neighbors. We'll be back in a minute. Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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And at least my take on it was that they have, like everybody else, a a raft of AI agents, but it wasn't nearly as ambitious as Google, it was more kind of, um, designed to be helpful to people for specific roles. What's your take, John? Yeah, that's, I'm glad you said that.

It, it was, it was more practical. I mean, what they're trying to do, I think is smart, uh, with this morass of AI agents, some of which are available, some many aren't that, so I'm, they, they're thinking from the standpoint of the enterprises, which are searching for ways to organize and act on data across their operations, many of which is Lisa Setter siloed. So Atlassian and made a couple of announcements.

And the, basically the theme is about curated knowledge. Bas basically to inject some sort of context in finding data across enterprises, collating it, and then making sense of it to not only save time, but to improve collaboration, be be be more productive. And so a couple of things that stood out to me at the show were, uh, this idea or concept of Jira Confluence and Loom now are being supercharged with robo agents to form what Atlassian hopes will be the central core of a collaboration stack used for every team.

Um, the robo agents are basically designed to act as these configurable, customizable AI powered virtual teammates that do anything from the, the most minute task to, to semi ambitious tasks. And they are being integrated into Atlassian workflows at Atlassian told me they have about 2000 of these robo search agents within the organization. And, and, and in a sense, almost anyone can help build these things.

And, and I think the reason why they find this so, so successful and appe, uh, appealing to their customers is that it's gonna make it, first of all, first and foremost, easier to find data across an organization. They were telling me that 28% of an employee's time is, is wasted looking for information. Like, for instance, the vacation policy.

How much time do I have left on my thing? And without, without naming any companies, I, I used to work at a company where we had a, uh, 50 apps up on a, on a screen, on a bulletin board, and invariably people didn't know where to find the information, and it could have been in any one of those apps. So that's, that's one takeaway.

The other thing was this idea and, and reinvention, so to speak, of Trello. So now there's gonna be an AI to do list that you can use with Trello. In a sense that's interesting to me because Atlassian, when they bought Trello seven years ago, it, there was a question of how is Trello gonna coexist with Jira?

So in a sense now, the, they're, they're making even more compelling case for individual use of, of Trello. And this new Trello AI to-do list has been downloaded half a million times in 48 hours. So it does have a wide appeal.

Um, so that's kind of where I'm, I'm coming from where I saw at Atlassian, and it was a very practical, it wasn't overly ambitious, it was, um, kind of what they do. It's kind of stay in their lane. They do compete with Okta and some, some other folks.

And what they're trying to do basically is make it so much easier. So we don't spend the same amount of time saying, you know, I think I put something in Slack, or was it email or was it a Word doc or was it in some other shared document? They're just trying to make things simple and that's life really for them.

I kinda like that approach 'cause it almost feels like it enables the end user to embrace this from the bottom up as opposed to maybe a, a set of top down kind of mandates that some CTO is gonna put in place. And you got any thoughts? Bottom up, top down, what's the better way to go?

Yeah, look, I, again, I really like this, you know, iGen AI clearly is the new hotness, especially in the CRM and I TSM space. You know, look at the competitive pressure again on Atlassian, right? Think about ServiceNow's investment in Yokohama talking about, you know, press releases, talk about a billion dollars, uh, reminds me of the billion dollar entry fee to cloud many years ago.

And then there was the acquisition ServiceNow of, um, um, of logic ai, right? For CPQ, uh, this is also an interesting, do you get some of the doc and search vendors, right? So I'm thinking not just Google, but also, uh, maybe elastic.

Um, but I like it because the arc of the of, of innovation tends to be from general purpose to specific purpose. And this is Atlassian sort of speed running that arc, um, where everyone else is going after generic general purpose agent ai. Um, and, you know, Google's announcements very much lean into that.

Atlassian is going for use case specific stuff that's gonna help its people, its personas with their use cases, right? So I really like that, that it makes it functional and useful. Um, you know, I will say that the past experience of Atlassian products, you know, you talked about Trello there, John, um, you know, the integration has not been stellar.

Uh, and now they're talking about putting a shim or a layer on top of this that's AI based to do essentially some cross product integration for them. Now that's an interesting idea and I'd, I'd love to see how that plays out. I'd love to see them spending a little bit more time on, on actually functionally integrating, uh, UI especially.

But the fact that they're going after these use case specific, uh, capabilities with the agent AI across their platform, I really like that CTOs should be pretty happy. Like Selena says, saving time every single day on what people are doing. You know, this, uh, Mike, you, you mentioned that the bottom up approach.

That's, that's interesting that you say that because one of the reasons I'm here is we're doing a bunch of, a bunch of video interviews with folks from Atlassian as well as some of their customers. And when I talked to the Atlassian executives, I asked them about how this is being used and what the reception is among their employees because they mentioned the necessity, not only to train them, but to get them comfortable with using AI agents and not considering them a threat. And they said, because these are simple everyday tasks that eliminates distractions for them.

The employees are, are very happy with what, what they're, what they're being given, and the customers are, are, are giving them the same feedback. So in a sense, it goes the opposite way, right? It's the, you're right, the bottom up approach versus this narrative that we keep coming across where we're hearing about the CEOs dictating and mandating we must in, you know, you must adopt AI as fast as possible across all operations, which is intimidating.

And John, I will just say this is following the path of automation as well. You know, you used to sell automation software and one of the big selling points was, look, have you got enough time in the day to do everything your boss wants you to do? Uh, do you have enough, do you have not enough project work to do?

Would you like a little help on the boring, routine, mundane stuff that is easily accomplished so you can spare time for creativity, innovation, human nature, and it, it's following the same arc. And you're exactly right, John. This gets the people using it to be comfortable with it because honestly it's actually helping them.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. That's the takeaway.

Lisa, does Atlassian have an issue in my mind that goes something like this? And maybe it's just me, but I kind of feel like people know Trello and Jira and the products better than the company. So I mean, the, I thought the message actually was, was well deliberate this time.

We, you know, if we compare it to, to Google Cloud next so much to overwhelming. But, but Atlassian's done a good job here of really being very upbeat about the potential for the products. And they're calling 'em out specifically.

We've got Jira, we've got Loom, we've got Confluence, for example. And people know and are familiar with those. But what they're aiming to do for their personas, and I'm glad that you had the chance, John, to talk to some of their customers.

'cause that's always so valuable is they wanna make workplaces better and they wanna bring in the ro ai agents in particular. That could lead to a point where meetings are much more, um, efficient or don't need to happen. Or I can find things like, for example, when a team starts a meeting with Loom, the AI agent joins, invites is invited, and then seconds after people hang up, it's distilling all the information into a summary action items.

So the teams are well informed of, of what was communicated, who needs to do what. Um, I think they could do a better job of, of kind of upleveling the message to an Atlassian story perspective and show how they're integrating these technologies that they're buying so that the work is really seamless. And they talk about, you know, we want meetings to be much better.

So I think that message could be upleveled, but I think overall, what I got the sense, uh, from this announcement or this event that I read about was they were really upbeat about the potential to make workplaces a lot better. And who doesn't want that do Hi, something that Can I, can I mention Mike something that sure is kind of funny about? So I asked him why I, I said to him, you know, literally every AI announcement from a company now is in Las Vegas.

It's almost become a cliche. They actually were doing their events in Las Vegas until this year and decided to do it in Anaheim. Maybe perhaps they saw the timing and they saw they were gonna go up against Google, but they also, they're trying to break themselves a little bit out of the box.

Um, and and another thing of, when, when Lisa mentions about the marketing of the company, it's funny because when they intro, when they introduced you to their executives, they introduced you to them by their title, but they don't mention the name of the company, which is kind of almost like a culture thing. It's, it's, I I haven't really, I rarely run ru run run across that. So I had to reiterate to each person, it's like, you work for Atlassian.

Is that correct? Because your name is not that the company name is not associated with you. It's here's the robo person, here's the Trello person, here's the Jira person.

Andy is there, are they're Australians? So is this an Australian thing or is it just an Atlassian thing? Uh, look, I'll tell you, Australians don't like to blow our own trumpets too much.

We have a whole thing in Australia. We call it tall poppy syndrome. If you, if the poppy grows too high, you cut off the top, right?

Uh, so there's a, there's a thing in Australia, tall poppy syndrome. So you don't wanna necessarily show off and, and, and, and big mouth yourself. Um, and so I, it is actually maybe a little bit cultural in terms of the Australian aspect to how you promote your business yourself or something like that.

They're proud of their products and they should be, they're great products. Atlassian itself is the larger entity is maybe not as important, uh, to them individually and to their customers. You know, this comes back to the ideas that I was talking about, about integration as well.

And Lisa, I love that you bring this up. Uh, but, you know, getting them all to work together and being part of one platform, you know, what are Trello versus Jira as Confluence, but, you know, these are all sort of separate objects in their minds, clearly. And so maybe we're seeing a little bit of Conway's law here as well, right?

The, the, the external view of products is reflecting the internal organizational structure. Uh, but yeah, I I I think maybe it is a bit of an Australian thing that they don't wanna sort of stick their head above the parapet and, and maybe get it shut off. And I love the fact that they're making a rover available to customers across all plans like standard, medium, enterprise, cloud, wherever.

So this is definitely that, uh, bottom up approach. Um, so yeah, I think that, uh, this will definitely help integrate, uh, agent, uh, agent ai and, uh, in this case vo search or chat or studio, wherever, uh, all into, into the workflow, which is, uh, amazing, instead of just slapping it on as, as an add-on, which often comes as an instruction from, uh, you know, the top level. I do think though, it's becoming apparent that there will be a handful of agents that I engage with that will then hand off tasks to other agents, which Lisa will create something of a branding challenge for vendors who are on the back end of that process.

So, you know, is the front end gonna be owned by a, a small number of agents that are kind of Uber agents and everything else is kind of sitting on the back somewhere? That's a great, that's a conundrum. I think that they don't, that is an unknown right now in terms of how that's gonna be handled.

Who's gonna have naming rights, brand power, that sort of thing. At the end of the day, what they need to be delivering is a solution. So to your point about culture and about, you know, the Trello person, the Jira person, the confluence person, they need to be delivering a solution message to their customers to, to explain all of the things that they're enabling them to do.

And the agents, I think should be, um, horizontal, but not at the forefront from a customer perspective. They shouldn't necessarily need to know whose agent is working with who's, who's handing off. It just needs to work seamlessly for the customer, for cultural transformation within an organization to actually be able to use these tools to collaborate better, to make meetings and workspaces better.

All right, Well folks, we'll see how this all plays out, but you can imagine that almost every week that goes by, somebody's gonna be launching a new AI agent, and it's probably gonna, at some point be a little overwhelming. 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. Hey folks, we're back for the C block and we're gonna change gears a little bit, but it's a topic we've been tracking and now the city of Baltimore is suing DraftKings and, um, one other gambling site.

And the issue is that, uh, city at least alleges that, um, they have tuned their algorithm in a way that encourages people with addictions to gamble more. And we've talked about this in the context of social media platforms that also have gained their algorithms to keep you addicted, but, um, arguably there's no harm in the fact that you just wasted half your day scrolling through various Facebook posts, but gambling might be a different issue here. So, Lisa, is there a nuance here where that we need to kind of think through, you know, these algorithms that we have created that are deliberately addicted?

Yeah, so Baltimore, as you mentioned, is, is suing DraftKings, and FanDuel is the other one for allegedly preying on customers. So a lawsuit was filed just about a week ago by the city of Baltimore alleging that these companies, these sports books are really singling out customers with gambling problems, luring them deeper into debt with deception. So the, the challenge customers have is because every time we sign a legal waiver, right, there's, so, there's, so nobody reads through it.

So customers are signing this when they're shutting up online accounts and individuals can't go after sports books. They can't even join class action lawsuits, but municipalities can, which is how Baltimore is, is able to do this. Um, it's a, the algorithmic tuning though is, that's a, i I didn't even know what the right word is.

It's, it's wrong in my opinion, because they're trying to get folks in the door with the promise of, oh, bonus bats or other promotions designed to get these people who are repeat gamblers who probably have addiction issues, um, to do it. And they're, they're doing things like, oh, here's $150 bonus mat if you're a new customer, but you gotta use it within seven days. So they're really working hard to get these folks in and, and committed.

Um, and so it's unfortunate that what they're doing through these algorithms is they're, they're trying to maximize customer lifetime value at the expense of someone's humanity. So it's, it's, it's, uh, you know, and they're also getting a ton of user data as well out of this. So they're benefiting and these individuals are having problems.

I think that's a cultural societal issue. Yeah, to your point, I think that, uh, all of us know somebody or some family that's been wrecked by some sort of gambling addiction or something that went with that. I don't think we talk about it enough in society, but it's definitely out there.

John, what's your take on this? I mean, I could think of maybe a half a dozen addictions that could be game with algorithms and this is not a good thing. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Gambling, alcohol, drugs, um, what have you. Right. 7 billion.

So it was ratcheting up, but in terms of this gambling issue, it was inevitable. I mean, anyone who watches the sporting events, this is where the major sports leagues are going. They are advertising whole hog and embracing gambling.

They have, they do have a disclaimer if you look at the very bottom of the screen and freeze your television screen and then, and then read it if you have the patience or the eyesight to do so, that warns you of all the, of all the, the, the problems. And there, there's, there's kind of a voiceover, oh, if you have a gambling problem, here's a phone number to call. Um, it's, it's, you know, you hit, you get hit with a fire hose of temptation, and then you have a little, a little eyedropper telling you, well, you know, you have an option if, if this, if this is too tempting for you.

And I think gambling is that the lowest hanging fruits, and it will probably extend from this into other areas. And I'm afraid that it, not just gambling, but social media, we're gonna start seeing probably some monetization. And I don't mean to be cryptic or sinister, but we're gonna see some sort of monetization into, into vices.

I mean, it does, yeah. Work. Yeah.

And where does it stop? Is this, is this the, you know, the opening of floodgates for these algorithms to be able to, to be tuned, to get people to do things, to monetize John, to your point, but where does it stop? Because they, they technologically they can do it right Now, it's interesting though, Andy, you grew up in Australia.

I'm here in Ireland, and it was in England. There's a sports book on every street corner, and you can be on anything at any time. Yeah.

If you wanna see where America's going, have a look at what, where Australia is, where UK is, right. We cleared out our, uh, all the places where bands would play gigs in hotels, in pubs and stuff. Now it's all poker machines and there's advertising on television constantly.

Mobile ads targeting problem gamblers. They're even targeting children in Australia. They've had to introduce legislation so to, to, you know, so that the gambling sites are not deliberately pumping ads at children.

Because if you just use AI and machine learning, you'll understand that children are incredibly sable and your algorithm will continue to churn on kids gambling. You know? So if you wanna know where America's going, you know, look at where Australia is right now.

Um, I think this is gonna be an interesting test. To your point, uh, Lisa around, uh, how enforceable they are. Do people really have the ability to ascent or, or not?

I think it also sort of challenges, John, the idea of, of fiduciary responsibility. Is it DraftKings, uh, fiduciary responsibility to make the most money it can regardless of the impact that it has on society? Maybe it is, I'm not particularly a fan of that aspect of a fiduciary responsibility, but that's what people think.

Um, so I get it. And well, Lisa gambling is so addictive. It is.

I, I studied this in psychology. It's taken me back to my university days. It is the perfect addiction vector.

It is random reward. You think of Pavlov's dogs and all these random rewards, like the, literally the best training mechanism for humans, for mammals generally. And algos have proven to be toxic.

You mentioned social media, John. Um, think about things like Cambridge Analytica, think about the Wall Street flash crash as alternative examples of where algos have gone road. I actually think it's a really fair role of government to test where we want to put our limits, uh, as a society.

Look, there is legislation, and I know I've read the article that, uh, that says that there are some introduction of minimum federal standards. Look, I'd, I'd like it if they were being introduced by people who understood that the internet is not just a series of tubes. I'd love for our legislators to actually get ahead of technology for once.

Um, but maybe this is where we need to be. It, it, it is, it's funny. Like you, you look at all these, these organizations or bodies like the, the major sports leagues were always dead set against gambling.

Oh, it's gonna impinge on the integrity of the league. Or you even add up until the mid nineties you had all this big movement by the senate to, to block online gambling, offshore online gambling. And now it's just being embraced because of the money that can be made in, in the instant, the instant gratification.

It's, it's just this, this whole kind of cultures, uh, flipped, you know, from this is evil to bring it on. Yeah. Pete Rose, look what happen to Pete Rose.

Yeah. And I'll tell you, gambling addiction is not just for the people gambling, uh, the government revenue streams. That's very addictive in Australia.

That's one of the problems. That's good point. Super hard, hard to get rid of gambling because the governments are addicted to the taxation revenue.

It is true. I have a friend of mine who used to live on, um, offshore for six months of the year off of Costa Rica. So he was driving, helping to drive a gambling operation, which, uh, um, he sorely misses these days, to be honest.

Um, thinking about this for a minute, Lisa though, at what point will somebody file a lawsuit that says M-L-B-N-B-A-N-H-L are all complicit in this, then this whole thing will just kind of expand. That's a great point about them being complicit because they are, I, I mentioned Pete Rose a minute ago, and that was a huge debacle and he was prevented from ever getting into the Hall of Fame and he finally admitted it years later. But the, it's also goes to Andy's point, like the governments are addicted to the taxation and the revenue that they're getting.

So are the leagues. I think they absolutely are. I think it'll be interesting to see the impact of the lawsuit filed by the city of Baltimore, because obviously that's a small, that's a municipality against two major sports books.

But, um, I think all of the sports are complicit. And every time I go to Vegas, I forget which one I think it might be, I forget which one. Jamie Fox plugs and you see it everywhere.

Concept Mgm, was it Bets? That's right. MGM, yes.

And so I think that, I think that the leagues are so powerful that, that that addiction to the revenue that they're getting is, I don't see, I don't see them being helpful in preventing this manipulation. I see them being just what you said, complicit and fine with it. I don't think we have a situation where we're gonna ban gambling.

In fact, it'll just go underground anyway. But I think there's a fine line between allowing gambling and then using algorithms to take advantage of people's psychological conditions to, to basically fleece them. Right?

Absolutely. That needs to be controlled. 'cause it's mass manipulation right now, and it's just, it's outta control 'cause it's everywhere.

All right folks. Yeah. Yeah, Go ahead.

Ja. Oh no, I've just, I, you know, I, I was gonna be very sensitive about this, but we have a, a family friend whose son was heavily into gambling. He ended up going to prison on two different occasions.

He was, he, and, and part of it, and I talked to him, I actually asked him about this, that part of it he said was the temptation if it was easier than ever. And, and, and, and, and quicker than ever to do. So, I mean, he didn't blame any particular, uh, social media company or any type of algorithm at this as this point.

But he said, you know what, if they make it easier for me, I'm gonna do it. There you go. Well, folks, I think the most important thing is pay attention to those algorithms.

They're mathematical use cases of manipulation at their core, and they're being applied to you everywhere, not just in gambling. So think twice when you, when you try to figure out who exactly is trying to manipulate you and why. Hey, I want to thank everybody for sharing their insights today.

As always, you guys were awesome. And I want to thank you all for watching the latest episode, the text on tv, and we invite you to stay tuned for all the great lineup, uh, right behind us. We'll see you next time.