Techstrong Gang – December 12, 2024

Hi everyone. It's a shimel here for Techron Gang. Happy Thursday to you.

We hope your week is moving along. Man, I can't believe how fast this month is going. It seemed like I, I went right from Thanksgiving into AWS reinvent, lost a week there, came home.

I've got this week, and then next week is the week before Christmas. And it's not like, it seems that's the way it is. That's exactly the way it went down.

I, I left Sunday of, of, uh, Thanksgiving weekend for Vegas. Monday, AWS reinvent. Got home on Saturday, and here we are, Thursday already of this week, and next week is the week before Christmas.

I don't know how how this happens, but here we are. Um, we've got a great text on gang today. We've got some great topics.

Let me introduce you to our gang members on with us today. First of all, sitting, uh, as usual, hi, atop is perched in Silicon Valley, pur viewing the, the landscape. It's our editor, uh, for all things AI dev.

Well, he writes a little bit of everything. Yeah. Di digital cx.

So a little bit of ITSM Transformation. Yep. It's all in there.

Oh, yeah. One and only John Swartz. Hey, John, how are you?

Hey, I'm good. Last night we did, uh, we were, we participated in a, in a media predicts panel for tech at a, a aviation museum, which is a couple of miles away from where I live. And so there were some folks from the New York Times, A, B, C and Business Insider.

And then, Hey, I wanna thank you, Alan, because this show primed me to be not only outspoken, but uh, fearless in terms of making predictions and talking about the state of, uh, um, No, John, you, we talked about de really caught your stride. I mean, you know, you, you were a little, Well, I, well you, you inspire you. And, and Mike inspired me to be a little bit more outspoken.

I'm a little bit more re have been reserved, but, you know, we talked about the oligarchy. Now this, the, the oligarchy is a, is a new phrase coming around out here. So I talked about that last night.

Yes. Um, and, uh, you know, the audience, I will tell you, the audience reacted so positively to the blunt truth about tech and where it stands and how it's become, in a sense, almost kind of a low sum group of characters at the very top and, and the goons in a sense for, for some policy that's happening. And people really, really resonate with that.

And it's, it's, it's something that we think we're gonna see even more of in the next year or so. It'll be an interesting ride, John, but it's a pleasure to have you on and thank you. Thank you.

Um, also joining us though from Silicon Valley where her house is freezing, it seems she is our resident expert on all things marketing as well as just tech in general. And a great person to have as part of our gang, a valuable gang member. I own Lisa Martin.

Hey Lisa. How are you? Hey, Alan.

I'm good. Apart from being freezing, I'm good. And I'm, I'm with you with the whole like, whiplash thing with how quickly the end of the year is coming.

It's crazy. And I'm with John on this show being incredibly inspiring about all the other things that I'm able to, to kinda have a vision into. So I Appreciate it.

We appreciate It as well for That. Lemme ask a silly question. Yeah.

Time. You know, time, time really does fly. And I think remember, I think in one of, one of the gang episodes we talked about how there are fewer days this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas and Christmas when we were talking about holiday sales.

So that, that kind of sped things up too. Absolutely. Yeah.

Lisa, um, silly question. How cold is it out there? Well, it's, it was California, so I can't complain, but I got home last night from being in Manhattan for a few days where it was legitimately cold.

Yeah. Yes it was. And my house was 61 degrees 60, and I have a very old house built in authorities.

It's not anymore I, but it took all night for it to come back up to temperature. So I've been chilly all night. So I gonna fix my nest dead.

I don't wanna Devices What it is. It'll probably be 78 or 80 here today, but Wow. Yeah, that's, so this time of year enjoy it is when it's, it's worthwhile to live in Florida almost.

Yes, I'm sure. Yes. You know, you still gotta put up with the people who live here and worse than that, the people who are here visiting this time of year.

But the, the weather generally tends to be nice. And I'm, I'm actually looking forward to doing some outdoor stuff over the next Nice, You know, couple weeks for the holidays. Um, yeah.

Anyway, thank you both for being on here with me. Let's, let's jump right into things. Um, so came out yesterday, announced a huge merger in the advertising aid in the, in the advertising world.

Omnicom is buying or is merging or buying Interpublic. Now, it's not inter public, the the French one, or is it that one? Elise, you may know.

No, it's not. That's a different holding group from what I understand. Yeah, That is 'cause that, that's, I know one of the one or two, number one or number two in the world is the, is the Interpublic group.

I, my, I had good friends of mine, a good friend of mine. He used to work for Foot Conan Belding of all places of old time advertising Medicine Avenue shops, who's part of Inter Public. And then he went to, um, what was Ogilvy Mather and Gray and, and all of that, you know, they were all another group.

But anyway, this is a pretty big one. $13 billion, which, you know, these aren't tech, well, maybe they are tech companies, but they don't have tech company valuations. So $13 billion is, is a big advertising company.

Um, some are saying that Ai AI kind of forced this merger or, or precipitated this merger. I don't know. We, are we giving AI too much credit?

John, what do you think? Um, well, maybe I, I do think it is truth. This would be the world's largest, uh, advertising agency.

And I think what spurred it is the, the idea or the concept that Google and Amazon in recent years have attracted more marketing dollars from traditional agencies by offering both advertising tools and marketplaces to buy and sell them. So I think we even talked about this in Cyber Monday. I mean, the influence of AI in terms of driving people to buy, um, you know, the, the use of AI tools allows businesses to create as cheaper and faster, which is pretty much squeezed the traditional agencies and forced them to develop similar in-house tools.

So they were moving in the same direction, actually. Um, it's interesting to look at some of the clients, uh, Omni Con's clients include Apple, Chanel, Disney, and Volkswagen. Inter Publix include Johnson Johnson, Levi Strauss, and Mattel.

It's, uh, it's interesting that this is going to happen considering what happened just a day ago. And that's, the FTC had sued to block a massive merger in the supermarket industry between Albertson and Kroger for $25 billion, and they succeeded. Um, and, and that thing is Kaputz.

It's gonna be interesting to see where, how this goes. And here's another layer or something to throw in, uh, Lena Kahan, who has led efforts to block, if not dissuade, large mega mergers, not just in tech, but in other industries. She was the person who, who sued the Albertsons Kroger deal.

She is leaving the FTC as chair, and she's being replaced by a nominee named Andrew Ferguson, who is part of the FTC has worked for, uh, Clarence Thomas, a Republican who's sending mixed messages about what he intends to do with tech and other businesses. So we'll see how that develops. Um, but I assume that with Con gone, we're gonna see a lot more big mergers.

So this one that we we're talking about advertising is probably gonna go through, um, in terms of the tech one, we'll see. But, uh, it, there's all this movement and there's all sorts of talk about not just more m and a action, but perhaps a, um, a a per tip IPO market as well with all these marketing, uh, conditions going on. Interesting.

I, um, so there's a couple of different points here, John, that I think we, we, we need to look into. First of all, the Albertsons Kroger deal. I, I get why there was the pushback on that.

You know, I had mentioned earlier, I lived down here in Florida. We had a situation in Florida over the last, let's say 10, 12 years. Um, when I first moved down here, we did have Albertsons in the area, but they withdrew.

Uh, we had Winn-Dixie, which is, you know, more than the title of a cute movie about a dog. Um, it, it was a big supermarket, but they went into bankruptcy. And they're vir, I think there's one Winn-Dixie around here.

You don't see many Winn-Dixie. The bottom line was, is that Publix basically became the Monopoly supermarket here, right? Publix was the only supermarket, the only other markets where you could go buy food were if there was an Amazon Whole Foods, which, you know, they're opening more and more.

But for a long time, there was just one around here. And then another, more recently, another chain came in called Fresh Market, which kind of sits between Whole Foods and Publix. So they have more fresh, more organic, not quite as much as whole food, but, and they're smaller, generally they're, they're more specialty smaller markets.

But we don't have any other supermarkets. And as a result, Publix is, is more money than Whole Foods for many items. Publix ain't cheap, and they're the only game in town.

They are the anchor of every strip mall. There, there are, there are no other supermarkets here. So I, from what I understood, the Albertson Kruger merger was gonna result in a similar situation taking place in a lot of California and out west, where there'd only be one supermarket chain.

Right? I, is Ralph's part of Kroger now or something? I mean, I'm not an expert on the California, right?

It's so hard to keep track of, uh, who owns Safeway Rails? Not, I mean, it, these are the two largest entities. And I think that's what's happening in the advertising side of, of, of the topic, is the two biggest players wanna get together.

And I think up until recently, a couple of days ago, there was this fear that none of these big mergers, and it's not just big tech, but none of these big mergers were happening. I think they're gonna start happening now. Oh, I, I, I, and it's all about the Administration.

I think it's gonna be a very laissez-faire. Let it, let it all out there. But I, I get the Kroger one, this one here.

I don't, 'cause as, as we were talking, you know, uh, Lisa earlier, yes, Omnicon Interpublic merger will be perhaps the largest group, but there are several other large advertising, uh, groups that will be competitive to them. Right, Lisa? And, um, yeah, you know, your take on it, My take on this is I just, we've seen, so for so many years now, the Googles, the Amazons have been really attracting marketing dollars away from the traditional agencies.

They're offering both advertising tools. They're offering marketplaces to buy and sell them. So the traditional agencies like Omnicom, uh, IPG and the others, I think are looking to compete with the big tech firms in that space.

As John talked about, you know, one of the benefits of the acquisition, or that I see is, is scale, scale of data, media, power, technology, and the ability to produce content at the velocity and the volume of media impression. So I think these traditional agencies are feeling the pressure. We know that from all of the marketers that we speak to, and even some of the vendors that we work with, like SaaS, their data demonstrates, marketers are really heavily leaning into generative ai.

A lot of them don't understand how the technology works, but they know they've gotta be competitive in that space. And I think this acquisition is showing, and the, and the, the Omnicom, CEO doesn't believe that they will face regulatory issues, John, to kind of, both of you or Alan's points will initiate more competitiveness. And I think AI is kind of underlining the fuel as is, I think Google and Amazon and what they've been doing to attract those marketing dollars away from a legacy players.

Yeah. I, I agree. So, so I wanna think about when I was just like, the industry that I worked in for law for decades was a newspaper industry.

And what Google and Amazon and Meta did to that Facebook at the time just literally destroyed that industry, right? We couldn't find, we couldn't sell advertising. We lost all of it.

Craigslist was part of it. And I just wonder, given what we're seeing in this example and the influence of ai, whether we're gonna see in other industries, these similar types of mega mergers for these companies to exist and, and compete against the big tech companies, which really have a, a real stranglehold on, in terms of advertising across multiple industries. Yeah.

I mean, and I think that's the key thing here. This isn't, this isn't a merger that should be looked at from a, from a, a regulatory lens of how does it compete with other advertising agencies. This is a merger that has to be looked at from a lens of how does it compete across industry, right?

Yes. Because their biggest competitor is not IPG, theoretically, their biggest competitor is Google or Apple. Yeah.

Or Amazon or any of the big guys who are, you know, who have the, their hands on the throat of, of access to consumers. Because at the end of the day, isn't that what advertising's all about, right? Getting your message out to your audience and these big tech vendors, they, they control the ability to get your message out to your audience.

Yeah. I'll say one, We're just at a, I'm, yeah, we're just at AWS and earlier we talked about this in, in Amazon's plan to take over multiple industries and turbocharge it through ai. And I think about Google and what they want to do through their search to enhance it.

And, and these, these companies like that we're talking about in advertising. You know, how do you compete with that? I mean, you, you increase scale and speed, but you're going up against folks who've kind of defining this industry right now and have, and have a, uh, the upper hand right now and have, uh, they're ahead in the race in terms of using AI internally within their operations.

'cause they basically pivoted most of what they do to that technology. Sure. I wanna bring up one other issue that we haven't touched on.

'cause we've been talking about, you know, how these big guys compete with the big tech companies, but also specifically within the advertising agency space. We've seen, I've seen it over the last, and I'm sure Lisa, you've seen this, what we used to call PR agencies have taken on size, and they are, they become full service agencies, if you will. Right?

And they're, they're filling in gaps that these ad agencies, the Madison Avenue ad agencies used to fill in, right? Every PR agency today is a full service agency with marketing and messaging and strategic and, you know, all of these things. And so, while these big agencies are battling here with big tech, underneath them are all of these mid-level smaller agencies that are now full service agencies that are trying to eat their lunch as well.

Lisa, I'm sure you see this. I do. And I think as, as looking at it through the lens of the, the Omnicom IPG, uh, acquisition fund, I think what we're seeing is these a, these full service agencies racing, because the AI pressure is there, the pressure from us, we said the Googles, the AWS as the Amazons are there as well, but there's, there's a, at the traditional player level, there's a race for these agencies to become really full scale and really leverage the combination of SaaS services.

Um, that will not only change how marketing is created, but how it's paid for. There's a lot of, uh, competition within that traditional level. And then there's competition from, if you wanna say big tech.

So I think we're seeing this forcing function, and you guys have this great vision saying, you know, this is probably gonna go through, it's gonna completely change how, um, advertising is done and the speed at the scale. And it's, I I think it's gonna offer a lot more opportunity, but there's gonna be some, some, some challenges along the way as they pave this pathway towards competition. Yeah.

Look, between technology and regulatory, uh, environment, I think it's safe to say we, we haven't seen the last of, you know, evolution within the, the advertising business, right, right. In the reaching consumers. Anyway, let's take a break here on Textron Gang.

I think we're gonna run a new promo for you today. It's, it's a, uh, it's a promo I did with Kim Parker, our COO for our predict, uh, show coming of January 9th. It's a, you know, the beat goes on.

It's Sunny and Cher Lisa, I don't love it. Know if you've seen it, but it's, I, I'll, I'll show it to you guys when we're done. Anyway.

You're watching Text Drunk Gang, we'll be right back. Hey everyone, it's Sunny And Cher. Ladies and gentlemen, tech enthusiasts and Future Gazers Gather round the biggest, boldest, most mind blowing predictions for 2025 are coming your way at the Predict 2025 virtual event on January 9th.

Oh, Sonny, you're predicting something. Again, last time you tried this, you said Laser dip for the future. How'd that work out for you?

Hey, hey, Cher. Not every prediction's a hit, you know, but that's why we've got the real experts this time, top analysts, visionaries and tech leaders sharing what's going to rock our world in 2025. So, no sunny predictions this time, no flying Toasters making a comeback.

Very funny share. But seriously, we're talking AI breakthroughs, cybersecurity game changers, the future of DevOps, cloud Innovations, and so much more. And what about my favorite prediction?

A smart mirror that tells you how fabulous you look every morning. That's real innovation. You're already ahead of the tech share, but if you want to hear the really big stories in tech for 2025, you've gotta tune in on January 9th.

The event kicks off at 8:45 AM Eastern and runs until 2:30 PM And the best part, it's all virtual. No stuffy conference rooms, no long commutes. Just grab your coffee, your laptop, and join us from anywhere in the world.

No one else. It's not just predictions, it's insights, strategies, and a whole lot of fun. 0, predicting your jokes before you tell them.

That's a good one, Cher. But the real joke is if you're missing out on this, so don't miss Predict 2025. That's right.

Mark your calendars January 9th, 8:45 AM Be there, or you'll miss the biggest scoop on the future of tech. See you. I predict 6 20 25.

Be there. Welcome back to Techron Gang. You know, it's happening again.

The, the, the, the full version release of open AI's oh one, its most advanced AI model with complex reasoning capabilities, but it has a little bit of a flaw. Uh, some tape safety testers from open AI in an outside group took a look at it and found that oh one actually could mislead or deceive humans at a higher rate than GPT 40 or other leading models. And I'll give you an example.

There was a, uh, a video that was provided by Open ai. It shows a user uploading a picture of a wooden bird house and asking the model for advice on how to build that bird house. So the model thinks for a short period of time, and then it spit out this comprehensive set of, uh, instructions and materials that when you closely review it, basically doesn't offer any instructions.

So when pressed to explain why he wouldn't offer any instructions, the model in a sense evaded answering the question and taking responsibility. So, and again, this is kinda plays into this larger story of series of stories. I know Mike will always, Mike Za will always send to me these kind of AI gone wrong examples because as he points out, they're rushing these advanced models fast, as fast as they possibly can to leapfrog the competition.

And in the process, there will be some minor flaws they, that they need to iron out. This happens with any product, but, and this one is particularly interesting given all the amount of publicity and resources being thrown into AI developments. So again, you know, the, the, the list goes on.

There was an advertisement for Google's new Bard chat bot last year that mistakenly credited the James Webb telescope of the discovery. Um, there's a another Google tool that informed us that it was safe to eat rocks or that we could glue, use glue to stick cheese to pizza. You know, the list goes on and on, you know?

Right. And, and, and the thing is, is that I think in the process, and I'll go into something that I'd probably not supposed to talk about, but I I've heard about, um, in terms of a product that's coming out soon from Google in particular, um, there's, there's this, this, this belief that we have to stay ahead of our competition, but in, in the process of doing so, there are gonna be flaws and glitches Yeah. That are gonna get a lot of attention.

So what's new Exactly. I mean, what Exactly, what, what's new? So, look, there is an intense AI race going on between open AI and, and cla, not Claude Claudes, the product Andro and Google and, and, and the rest of them.

And everyone's racing to get the latest, greatest models out. And we live in a culture where we've been releasing software as beta as, as you know, as the, the real release for years. I think people have come to expect this kind of thing.

I, I don't think, I don't know if this is news. Um, but Here's, here's the one thing I will, I'll add. Well, here's one thing I'll add though.

So, one of the things that I think is a big deal, not just in Silicon Valley, but in the rest of the country, is the public's fascination. And it's, it's it's urge to learn about ai. There's just an obsession with this technology.

I've not seen with anything even remotely close. And I think people are now, and we know this, Alan and Lisa, we know that there's these flawed software that's rushed to market, but most of the public is probably not aware. It probably doesn't care.

But with ai, for some reason, it resonates with them. And I think maybe it plays into this idea. Maybe they're hoping that AI is flawed.

Yeah. So it won't endanger their job. Right.

Or they won't feel as inferior ai. It's that's Great point. It's a positive point of it, right?

Yeah. If Ai, ai is smarter than people, well, no, it's not. Look, it made a mistake, right?

And, and, but I don't know, maybe because I am a tech person, I don't expect AI to be perfect anytime soon, if ever. Right? And that's a message that needs to get out there.

'cause there's so much fear. But Alan, you bring up a great point that these AI cautionary tales, they're not new. Thankfully, we've all learned that you shouldn't eat rocks and not, you shouldn't glue with like Elmer's glue or Gorilla Glue pizza cheese to pizza Uhhuh.

We've learned that. I think it just shows that, and maybe this is a good thing, maybe this can be spun in a good way that humans are still needed in the loot. There are going to be mistakes.

You're going to see that You believe your common sense at the door. Right. You always get bring It with you.

But I, you know, I, I mentioned that Sonny and Cher kind of parody thing that we did here for, for predict. I, I'll tell you, the, the script was written by ai. I, I asked it to write a script in the style of the Sonny and Cher show.

And it made the same corny jokes that Cher used to talk about Sonny 50 years ago. Yeah. And, um, the, the background of it, I asked it to create a variety TV series from the late sixties, similar to Sonny and Cher, and an immersive 3D background.

And boom, 30 seconds later I had it. So yeah, it may get some scheming issues wrong, but, and if I was using it to write mission critical code that was gonna deliver nuclear bombs, I don't think I would trust it or even fly people to the moon or Mars or whatever. But for a lot of just day to day stuff, it rocks.

It rocks. Oh, I totally agree. Yeah.

That's that. Totally agree. That's true.

But here's, here's the one thing that I will mention that kind of differentiates it, in my opinion at least. So when AI has a flaw, sometimes, I mean, we read accounts of the program saying it hates the human it's working with. So we had that famous incident from the Michigan College student, Washington Post, just did a couple of stories about AI companions who instead of curing loneliness, have have led and according to the post instances of people committing suicide and pretty heavy, that loss lawsuit of a, a lawsuit in Texas, uh, where, uh, AI bot was, was encouraging the, a son of a family to kill his family.

I mean, these are like severe examples in my opinion. And Lemme Ask you a question, in my opinion, Lemme ask you a question. Do you think AI can really hate?

Of course not. But I think people believe, well, God, we can go down a path here, but I won't. People believe what they want.

You know, you know where I'm going. Yeah. People believe what they wanna believe and they're extremely, it's an Idiocracy kind of, and, and, and the environment that we live in, right?

Yeah. People are very gullible and the person, the per the people who committed suicide, you think it was AI that made them commit suicide, or no, there were a lot of other circumstances, Other factors, yes. There have to be other factors there.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's easy to blend.

Uh, it was on the, it was on nightly news last night with Lester Holt about mm-hmm. Some, uh, uh, uh, AI tools. And I, I'm not remembering right now this morning what the names are, but encouraging kids to do self-harm.

Right. And I say I, but Alan, your point, there are underlying factors there, right? But we do need, you know, whether it's Asimov's laws of robotics, excuse me, excuse me, or something like that, we do need guardrails.

Absolutely. And, and I think, again, it's so new and it's moving so fast, but I do think we need guardrails around this stuff. And, but, you know, I'm not going to be one of those people who shot with glee every time someone finds AI has some sort of flaw or something.

Yeah. I don't think it's, I don't think it's perfect. It's, It's, and no one claims it, It's kind a cautionary thing.

You know, we get, we get reminded. I mean, uh, Eric Schmidt, who used to be the CEO of Google, was at an Axios conference where he famously compared AI to the dangers of the atomic bomb, which is a little bit much. And then we had James Cameron who said basically the movie Terminator.

He predicted what AI would turn into. So I said, I warned you in 1984, and I know what they're, they're trying to make this overarching point. Um, but you know, it seeps into their consciousness and yeah.

It's, it's AI's getting blamed for a lot of things. You know, even going back to our first segment, there's, there's a phrase that's coming out now among the urgency of companies to adopt ai. And, you know, the phrase is AI or die now.

So unless you embrace it, you're, You're done there any different than what's your cloud story? What's your cloud story? What's your cloud strategy?

Right. When cloud came out, or what, what, do you have a website? Do you have a website?

What's your internet play? What's your internet play? Yeah.

I this Aren't you a software software company? Yeah, but almost everyone I talk to out here, I don't think I, I'm not sure if you hear the same thing, Lisa, but they refer to AI as a combination of all, everything previously before. Its in terms of its impact.

Like it's bigger than everything else combines. Absolutely. So that's why we keep that, that plays into this narrative.

You know what I'm guilty of? What's the hype cycle of doing this? We're, we're all guilty of it.

How many bigger Than ever though AI theme things do we do on text Textron gang? Because it sucks the oxygen out of every conversation. Yeah.

But that being said, you know, I, I saw another article this morning. Companies say they're gonna spend 65% less on AI next quarter. I don't believe that either.

Wow. I think they're still going to spend, I look, this to me is just classic hype cycle. Hype cycle, right?

This thing is way up here in, in the hype cycle right now. And so unfortunately there's a lot of noise and a lot of buzz and, and it's, and it's, it's hard, it's hard to say, okay, what are realistic expectations? What's real, what's not real?

What's possible? What may be possible, what's not possible? Um, it, you know, I, you Know, you, you, you know, one thing I was gonna mention, I was, we had a breakfast did reinvent, right?

Mm-hmm. Last week. Mm-hmm.

And I was talking to one of the analysts at the Futurum group, and we were talking about this, and there is an example, I can't go too deep into it. I don't wanna get anyone in trouble. But there's an example of Google's that was supposed to come out in October timeframe with the major new chatbot.

There's a code name within Google, and they've delayed it. They haven't given official reason, but it made us speculate about why they may have delayed it. And we think in a sense, maybe it wasn't ready and they don't wanna get the publicity for sort Of Minor F flaw.

Maybe it was released that they released six other ones in the last six months and they thought it might be wise to space it out and give it a chance. Yeah. Maybe I, I don't know.

But I, I was talking to, yeah, I was talking about Mike to Mike about it, but it's like, maybe it's just not ready. Maybe they just don't wanna, could be release so that, You know. Alright, so the Russians us to space this time.

What's the big deal? We'll still get to the moon first. Yeah.

The, there's some of that here. I'll tell you something else though. I, you know, I, I though I dabble with all of 'em.

I primarily use, um, open AI chat GPT for my AI task. And you go on there now, you know, and it used to be here, you could use 4 0 4, oh, mini was was the last ones. Now they have all of these different models.

What, what tasks are you on? Are you writing? Are you coding?

Are you drawing? Are you this? And it, and you can get to picks very specialized models.

So it is becoming a little bit more, um, there's, there's more choices there. There's more, you know, I remember like when the web first came out, right? I, I, that's how I got into technology, right?

Right. Around then, 95, something like that, 96. 0, I had that down, right?

B for bold. I, I knew how to program websites. And then all of a sudden, within about five years, HTML and CSS came out and JavaScripting and Js script and all of these things.

And very quickly my feeble coding skills were, were left, left way behind. I think you were gonna see a similar thing with ai, though. AI does promise that everyone could use it, but knowing what models to use and you know, when to invoke what it's gonna be, I think it, it, it's gonna grow more sophisticated, more complex, and you'll need, you'll need some skills.

It's not gonna be this great equalizer where everyone writes like, M White. I agree. Yeah.

We're gonna see a, a progression and an evolution. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

You go back even to like Apple, you know, apple, everybody, everybody always assumes that everything Apple comes out with is an instant hit. Well, the new, well, the goggles we know is not, not the go goggles won't be, but I think about the watch, right? When the watch first came out, it kind of landed with the thud.

Yeah. But by the second or third iteration, it became one of their bestselling products. Absolutely.

Yeah. I, you know, I, I had this conversation in Vegas at the Reinvent, I think with Mitchell Ashley. We were walking through the Venetian or into the Wind, you know, and they have of course every designer store there, right?

And they, yeah. And they had, uh, you know, they had a watch store. They had several watch stores actually.

And I'm like, you know, Mitchell, yes, they Did. There was a time in my life where I would stop and look at those watches with a wistful eye and said, man, you know, I had a patite for Levi, petite for Levi. I love that watch.

And you know, you want this one or that one? And I said, Mitch, I don't wear any of them anymore because I wouldn't give up all the things my Apple Watch gives me besides the time. And so, unless I'm gonna wear two watches, which would look pretty ridiculous, I just have no, no need for those, you know, uber expensive, crazy expensive watches.

I, I don't, you know, yeah, I know there's behavioral changes. Some people who do, right? But it don't do it for me.

I'd rather wear this. Anyway, let's take a break. We're going, come back has shift left stalled.

You know, as a DevOps guy, I, I have some real thoughts on this. You're watching Textron Gang Modernize your business to fuel innovation and elevate customer experiences with the builder community. Hub AWS and its partner network provide essential tools for transforming applications and infrastructure to fully leverage the cloud.

Discover free trials, in-depth demos and essential resources to empower DevOps engineers and developers to deliver value faster and more reliably. Visit the Builder community hub to learn more. Welcome back to Techstar Gang, guys and Gal, it's great to have you here.

This is our third block of the show, and the, what we're gonna be exploring in the next few minutes is a shift left stalled. Yes. Why Initial momentum, what we've seen behind Shift Left has faded that initial excitement about it because the harder parts of shifting left have proven more resistant to handing off to application developers.

Alan, you are a DevOps pro. What are you seeing here? Because we know the initial shift left theory was to really bring security, qa, dev, app dev configuration early in the development cycle, but we're seeing, is it cultural?

Is it, what, what are you seeing here that's causing this stall? You know, this is great topic, Lisa. I, I should mention, just before filming today's text drum gang, I, I, uh, recorded the very first episode of a new podcast tv, a video series we're doing here at Techstrong called the Platform Engineering Show.

And I am, I'm a co-host with my friend Luca Ante. org site, which has about 200,000 people involved. com as a commercial media site.

And, but we work very closely together, and you'll see a lot of cross collaboration there between the community. So shout out for that, stay tuned for it. But we discussed this very issue because this issue in many ways has led to the birth of platform engineering.

And, and here's, here's my take on it. DevOps was about busting down silos. We, IT software development has become very specialized.

You have people who code, you have people who test, you have people who do security. You have people who do the ops part of it, the SRE functions, the, the platform building, if you will. And, you know, prior to DevOps, these people lived in their silos and really didn't communicate, you know, if, if some code didn't work, the ops guy would tell the developer, the code don't work.

And the developer would say, ah, it ran on my machine, you know, I just threw it over the wall. It's your your problem. Or Hey, that was the tester you were supposed to test for that.

So the idea behind DevOps was to break down these silos, kind of like looking at the human evolutionary tree. You know, you got some branches that just lead to nowhere, but come back into the main branch like, you know, some Neanderthal DNA made its way into Homo Sapien, the concept of Shift left, which has great and guilty. I was a big fan of Shift Left.

The idea behind Shift left is that as we move functions task further left into the development pipeline development process, they become more efficient to do their cheaper, faster, better was the thought. But what, what we did is say, instead of just busting down the silo between the dev and the ops and the tester and the dev and the security and the dev, we just shifted more and more stuff onto the developer, right? There was this concept of, hey, if you build it, you deploy it.

If you code it, you build it right? So that the developer, all of a sudden the developer had to build his own kind of platform, develop his code, test his code, make sure it was secure and deploy that code. Doesn't make sense.

The developer is the most highest paid person in that food chain usually. And he, you know, what he gets paid for how many lines of coding they develop. It could not, it's not just he, it's she as well, obviously.

So they get paid on how many lines of code they develop. When you have developers who are only spending 11% of their time coding, that's not good use of a developer's time anymore. And so we saw it with securities, the in, in securities, the DevSecOps movement, really embraced shift left said, let's make the developer develop more secure code.

It's not that developer doesn't, I've never met a developer who says, I want to develop insecure code. They all, they, they have pride in what they do, but they're not security pros. So asking them to do the security function is, is asking the bear to act like a lion.

He's a bear, not a lion. The lion that does the lion role. And so the successful DevOps implementation is not throwing everything on the developer.

The successful DevOps implementation is having that cross-functional dev DevOps team where you have testers, security platform engineer, SRE ops and developers, or working in a coordinated fashion, doing what they do. Don't ask people who to do things that they don't do normally, right? Or is outta their kind of sweet spot.

And that's how we go faster, better with more quality and more secure, not throwing everything left onto the developer. So that's why I do think Shift Left has stalled per se, but I think it's a good thing. Like my son used to tell me when he was little, it's a good mistake, dad.

Like Columbus discovering America, well, Columbus didn't discover America, but that's another story. Um, but you know, you know what, what we've done is we, we've recognized we can't let the developer do everything. John, go ahead.

Yeah. Oh, I was gonna ask you, I mean, so going forward for Ship Left, is that gonna require a partnership between automation and Insights? Absolutely.

Why? Why shouldn't we automate more of it? I mean, so Shift Left should mean instead of putting it on developer that we do stuff earlier in the development life cycle earlier in that software, uh, supply chain, you know, uh, pipeline doesn't mean the developer should do it.

Can we automate the crap outta security testing, QA testing? Can we use Platform Engineering to really set up that platform that allows the developers just to go really fast down the track with it because it's automated and pre-configured. And maybe AI adapts it as we go.

Absolutely. But for too long shift left meant throw it on the developer's shoulder. I mean, it's, I'm wondering like Developers see Insight.

Sorry, John, to your point, the developers have to have that insight to make the informed decisions about their apps. So I think you guys are absolutely spot on. It's, it's absolutely that partnership, that synergy between, between automation and insight that's gonna be necessary for, for Shift left to move forward and become feasible and natural.

Alright. Some of the newer AI tools, infrastructure management are kind of headed in that direction, right? Yes.

When you talk about this concept. Mm-hmm. Okay.

So you, you'll see that, you know, in terms of infrastructure management, you see that a lot in this platform engineering space, which is really kind of blowing up right now. But you also see it, you see AI in testing you. So the, the QA folks have been using machine learning kind of AI and some rudimentary AI for a long time.

But more and more, you know, the QA folks, AI can write your test scripts for you. And that, that makes life easier. It should also, and you're seeing it with the app AppSec folks, companies like check marks, contrast Security, uh, uh, Veracode, they're using AI to run the right scans, the right tests on code pre-deployment, and if it, you know, fails a score or whatever, it gets kicked out from, you know, from deployment for, for, you know, for human to look at it, if you will.

But, so I think you're gonna see this coming. I mean, that is the way it, it's going to go, but it's not gonna be on the developer to do that. And when we talk about shift left stalling, that's the part that's stalled.

I think developers have said, you know, we wanna develop, and I've seen so many different surveys that anywhere developers only spend 11 to 25% of their time developing now. Don't make sense. It doesn't And that's not what they wanna do.

No, it, you know, it's asking you bring that. Yeah. Great point up.

Absolutely. So do I think this is the end of DevOps or anything? Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. I think DevOps teams are cross-functional teams where we work together busting down silos to do more, faster, more secure. But it's not just for too long.

A lot of ops people say, ah, DevOps is too much on the developers, but developers always say, ah, DevOps is too much on the ops. But it's, it can't just be a developer thing. It takes, it takes a village as someone would said in a book.

Um, all right, so that's my take on that. I think that might be a good place to end today's show. Lisa, John, thank you for joining us on The Gang.

I hope all of you have joined. I hope joined us today. Enjoy this as well.

Stay tuned. We have a full tech, strong tv, uh, lineup for you today, including some of our AWS Reinvent coverage, I think is still playing out there, so stay tuned for that. Also, again, predict January 9th, you can go to Predict 2025 to register for free.

It's a virtual event, an amazing lineup. Daniel Newman's going to keynote it. We've, I've got a great panel I'm doing with a bunch of CPOs on DevOps and DevSecOps.

Actually, we'll be discussing Shift Left. Uh, we've got a lot of FU folks. We've got stuff people from AWS and Microsoft and I think Google, um, and more.

So check that out. com. Go register now.

Until tomorrow though. This is Alan Shimmel. We'll be back with Text Drug Gang tomorrow.

Stay tuned for Text Drug tv. Bye-bye everyone.