Techstrong Gang – December 13, 2024

Hey, everyone, look up. That could be a Chinese drone watching you. You are watching Text and gang.

Hi everyone. Happy Friday. It's Alan Shimmel for Textron Gang.

Wow. We've got a full house of gang members today and some great, uh, content to, uh, including two field reports. One from over in Europe at Blackout Europe with with Mitch, and one from an AI summit report that, uh, Mike Ard that attended down up in New York this week.

So, you know, Textron Gang still remains on the road. It feels like we've been on the road forever. Um, before we jump into it though, let's introduce you to our gang members today.

As I mentioned, joining us from from London, where he is been attending Black Hat Europe. This week is a future DP research. Mitch Ashley.

Hey, Mitch. How are you? Cheerio.

Cheerio. That's the best I could do in terms of an accent. Okay.

You know, Hey, you go with what you got. Go with what you got. Welcome from Rainy, cloudy, dark London.

London. Well, it's supposed to be rainy in London. It is true to form.

Good Welcome. Glad you can join us, Mitchell. Thanks much.

And then, as I mentioned, joining us from, uh, well, he was recently at the AI Summit up in New York. Not as quite a, a commute for him as it was from Mitch is our Chief Content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike.

How are you? I'm well. Hey, I made it from my house to Javits in under 40 minutes, so I was not too bad.

That's not bad at all. You. Yeah, not, not during rush hour, I take it.

Oh, definitely. Rush hour, seven o'clock in the morning. Really?

Through the Lincoln Tunnel? No, Lincoln Tunnel. Just I'm North, so I'm up in Westchester.

Oh, you came over the gw. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the Javit Center's right by the Lincoln Tunnel. One of my favorite places to hang out. Right around that Javit Center, though, they've, it's actually really nice by Hudson Yards and everything else, but, all right.

I, I digress. Let's jump back from New York out to California where we understand from our California contingent. They've gotten some, some rain.

Uh, yes. A lot. Yeah.

Well, I guess we'll defer to royalty and go with John Schwartz first. Oh gosh. Hey, uh, hey.

Hi everybody. Hey, you want to feel older? Um, I got, uh, an invite from Microsoft yesterday for their 50th anniversary.

They turned 50 years old on April 4th next year. Yeah. They're gonna be doing, I guess, parties around the country.

But doesn't that make you feel old? That's right. No, it's not.

That's, that's not right. Oh, maybe it's 1975. I got the same Invite.

Mike got the same. Yeah, Yeah. 1975.

That, that's about right. Yeah. The Apple's gonna turn 50 in 2026.

I believe they were founded in 1976. Yeah. Well, so, uh, you know, down here in Boker is where they obviously used to do the IBM pc and they actually have the room where Bill Gates signed the, uh, DOS licensing agreement with IBM.

Yeah. And if you wanna do like a press conference, if you're a, so it's now called the Brick. The old IBM facility is the Boca Raton Innovation Campus.

And, um, if you're a tenant there and you have a press conference, you could actually do it in the room where Bill Gates signed that DOS agreement. Um, so yeah, I guess right down here in Boca Raton, the center of the tech Universe. Why do you do it down there, by the way?

Well, yeah, that's Interesting. So there was a guy, and I forget his name, there's a middle school named a technology middle school named after AM down here. I think it was Don Estro.

Don Estro. That's the right Don Estro Middle School. Don Estro kind of headed up the IBM pc, uh, division.

Mm-hmm. And they were down here. They, for whatever reason, they were down here and they, they did a lot of the, you know, all of the work for it was down here.

And they, I mean, Boca Raton is what it is because of IBMI mean, we, they built better schools here than they did in the rest of the surrounding areas of Florida, because IBM put money into it and demanded it. And that set off that whole chain. Now, when IBM pulled out of here in the late eighties, you know, and they got outta the IBM pc, I guess business, uh, the town went into a depression for many years, you know, economically and became known more for just pump and dump stock people.

But, um, such, such his life in Florida. Anyway, let me, let me take off my Boca Ratone historian hat and move over to Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa.

How are you? Hopefully a little warmer Today. Warmer today.

Definitely got my cozy sweater on today. Enjoying the rain. 'cause I didn't have to drive anywhere yesterday, so that was good.

But, um, looking forward to this exciting conversation that, particularly the drones 'cause it, I was just in New New York City and big news story over there, uh, among several was the drones over New Jersey the size of SUVs. Yeah, the sizes. Wow.

Yes. I don't think people realize that. We'll come back to it.

Well, jumping now though, from California to Texas. If, if I, and she's all decorated for Christmas. Very cool.

Very nice. Hook them horns, huh? Yes.

Hook them horns. Hook 'em horns. So I've got tickets to the Orange Bowl, which is the national semi-final game this year.

So I'm hoping Nice. Can it could be, it could Be Texas, could be Georgia. We'll see.

Broke my heart. Yeah. It was A tough game over time to Georgia, but I don't think it anyone can say we don't belong in the S-E-C-I-I.

Oh, no one, no one ever said that said that. Oh, no one ever said that. Oklahoma maybe, but yeah.

The only people who said that Oklahoma doesn't ska. Right. And where are they right now?

Watching. Okay. But I digress again, and, and I'm, it's not aloha.

It's a ho lot, a ho lot ward. Yes, it's Dan. Yes.

Good morning. It's good to see you, Anne. Haven't seen you in a while.

It's good. I, we've been missing. I've been on the road.

Um, oh, yes. Anyway, I think that's all of us. Right?

So let's, let's jump into our first story here, Mitch. You've been at Black Hat Europe, you know, traditionally black hat Europe is not quite the size of, uh, black hat us. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, things have been changing on that front, especially as, you know, more regulation and more action, quite frankly, coming up outta the EU there. So give us a report. How's it been?

What, what's news there? Well, in some way it is, first of all, it's very vibrant community over here. It's much smaller.

But, um, the, the show floor, the, the, uh, booth are very crowded. A lot of people here. It's a two day event, plus the training, you know, pre-day.

So it's, it's not, uh, quite as many days. It's not, you know, coupled with any hackathons or anything. It, um, the, here's, here's the vibe.

The whole, not the whole conference, but it's almost been taken over by prompt hacking for Gen ai. There's a ton of sessions about that, about how to take over, um, LLMs, you know, gen AI type applications, data poisoning, how they introduce that. So there's a number of, uh, talks about that.

Another interesting session is, um, there, there's one group was talking about some things they found in the Apple M chip at a hardware level, uh, uh, vulnerability that they were pursuing. And they, there was a talk about that. Um, a lot of discussions about how AI is helping hack hackers personalizing phishing attacks.

And we're really just at the beginning of that. I think, uh, they're really thinking that's gonna be a major issue in 2025. We'll hear a lot more about it 'cause it'll be happening as well.

So it's, you know, there, there's AI here. There's also, you know, what, what kind of good things are gonna be happening with ai? How's it gonna help us with, with, uh, security?

And of course, data's a very, I'm sorry, security's a very data intensive business. So there's lots of discussion about ML and, uh, generative AI as well. So it's, it's a, it's a fun conference.

The keynote was actually done by Frederick Duse from who was the, uh, geopolitical, uh, professor at University of Paris eight. Which is kind of an interesting timing because, you know, uh, ER's government got their vote to no confidence, but they've, at the same time, they've got this 1 billion euro cybercrime bill, uh, coming up that they're trying to, to, uh, get passed for the healthcare system. So that, uh, that was part of the keynote.

I didn't get to catch it, but it would've been in, you know, it's one of those kind of rug pull out from, from under you type speeches when you're here, uh, representing a big effort. And suddenly your government's, you know, gotta vote in no confidence. So it's kinda interesting doing this the, the European way.

But, uh, there aren't many product announcements here, primarily because, you know, it's Not a bad thing. Yeah. It, it's, it, it has a more of a vibe, kind like the old black.

I I was just gonna say that, Mitch, it sounds more like the black hats you and I used to do, it's still secure exactly where the, the exhibits and the, and the vendors really were on the back burner compared to the research and, you know, some of the vulnerabilities and stuff that were Disclosed. Very much so. One, one big change is the show floor is at least half people in sort of the AppSec, uh, after supply chain, not just traditional security.

I don't know if it's taken over, but, you know, three years ago that wouldn't have been true there. There'll be some, but not like there is here. 0 and lots of things, you're kind of coming to fruition pushing SBOs to the front of the stack or top of the stack and how we're, how organizations have to get going on that.

And, uh, not, not sitting back because the, uh, EU also had a, uh, change in the product liability for software and for internet services that you can be sued for that. So if you ship vulnerable software, you potentially can be, be liable for that. We've talked about that on some, some other, uh, tech strong events, but Got it.

Very cool. Very cool. Um, overall worthwhile trip.

'cause I know it's, oh yeah. For you from Colorado, it's a, it's a bit of a trip. Yeah.

I just gotta, you know, click my heels and poof, I was in London, so Is it, is it me? But every time we figure out something that is gonna be more secure, whether it's the a MD thing, and I think there was a lot of conversation this week about MFA because Microsoft had a flawed imple implementation. And, uh, people may not understand how to actually do that correctly.

But I feel like every time we say we got something that's gonna make things more secure, it's about nine months later before some researcher decides, oh yeah, by the way, here's some way around that thing. Oh, yeah. Always.

You know, there's something in Windows, there's a whole talk about hidden transformers in, in some window features and, and ways to thwart around kind of the, the best security feature or best fit security feature. Um, I, I think one of the other general sense senses, Mike, to your point is it's not getting better. Security's not getting better.

We're we, we, it is, if anything, you know, the mountain of data that we're collecting and processing is just growing. We can't hire enough people. You can't scale people to, to meet the problem.

We can't hire people to meet the problem. So it's, it's, I would say that's depressing, but it's kinda like, okay, when, when are we gonna see the hockey stick start to bend? Because right now it's, you know, it's flatlining growing fast just to the right, not up to improvement.

You know, it's computers. I mean, were you expecting stuff not to have bugs or, you know, vulnerabilities? They're not gonna go away.

And, and we test more of them. We find more of them. Overall, I think we're better at it than we were, let's say 10, 5, 5, 10 years ago.

But, you know, like take this apple, uh, M chip say, is anyone surprised? I mean, if you, it security and technology, th this is the nature of the beast There very much so is I think, you know, the, there's a lot of, uh, dare I call optimism about the regulatory regulations that are starting to come into effect. And there's things that have aren't hitting yet.

Um, I think that's probably too much hope being put on that. Um, people aren't over exuberant about AI solving all our problems for us quite yet. But maybe it's just 'cause security people are more skeptical than, you know, the, your typical punch.

Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure I wholeheartedly agree with you, Alan, on that security point, because I would say like four years ago we decided that, oh yeah, now we're gonna focus on security and take it seriously. Maybe four or five. And everything that happened before that, we said, oh, well, you know, that was 'cause we weren't thinking about security.

Wait, who, who said that? I'm saying this from the chip vendors to Microsoft, to every vendor out there started Computing, what year was that, Mitch? 2005.

Yeah. We, we, we, yeah, we are gonna be, we are gonna focus on security and make it happen. In So far, Mike, this is a migratory pattern.

They say this every three years, you know what I mean? I know. So, So it's just disappointing is what I'm saying.

And things, you know, don't feel that, but, but That's, but that's the life of a security person. It is disappointing. No one listens to us.

We, we see the same things go over and over again. Everyone says how important it is, but then they get T-Rex arms that don't reach their pockets. This has been good.

I'm in security 30 years, nothing's changed. Mm-hmm. Speaking Of that, Alan, you know, I was meeting with a vendor today, um, who was kind of coming out of the early friendly customers working with their product and going to market.

And this is his fourth company doing the same thing. It's all around, you know, analysis of vlog data security data and how now how do we solve the volume of, of all that to, uh, look, you know, look for signal versus noise. So in an entrepreneurial sense, the, I guess the problems have going away.

You can just keep creating companies to solve the same problem with just with new technology. Well, look, take logs for instance. Mitch, how many reincarnations of basically log analysis have we seen?

It was sim, there's CAP, there's this straight up log analysis. There's, you know, the whole Splunk sort of, I mean at, at its heart, what was Splunk security looking at logs Log in. That's where we, sorry.

First saw Splunk, was that, was that a black half? Yeah, We, we back nice black shirts with cool sayings on it. But you know, and, and here we still are.

Now we have AI that looks at logs so we don't have to look at the logs ourselves. And we call it observ, a new attack vector. And we, and we call it observability.

Yeah. And now we, we have one more thing to secure that people are mm-hmm. Acting Indian.

So, but you know, stuff goes round and round and it comes back around and every three, four years. Yeah. We're gonna get serious about security.

Microsoft just said it again this month. It, it's like Haley's comet. Well, Haley's comment's 500 years.

It's a little bit more frequent than Hailey's comment. That's What your gestation cycle Before. Yeah.

But alright, So, so every time somebody has a security announcement about how they're more focused about it, I'm just gonna channel Bullwinkle and say this time for sure. That's right. Little buddy.

We rock. Oh geez. That was Rocky.

We got Boris and Natasha say they're bad men. They're bad men. Come we go now.

Catch squirrel. Um, you squirrel. Let's go get squirrel.

Boris and Natasha. They were quite the characters. Anyway, Mitch, I'm glad you got to go there though.

And thanks for the report on, uh, black Hat London. Let's take a, a quick break and look up in the sky. It's a bird.

It's a plane. It's an SUV. No, it could just be a Chinese drone.

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Visit the builder community hub to learn more. All right guys, we're back with a much anticipated conversation about drones. And there's two storylines going on and we're not sure they're related, but one is the, the Chinese national was arrested at SFO, uh, allegedly he had some footage from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

And this is not the first time this has happened. There's been, um, Chinese folks arrested and sent to jail for taking photos of, uh, shipyards where the US naval fleet is in Virginia. And this seems to be maybe part of this low tech spying trend that maybe started with those balloons last year or the year before that.

But also in New New Jersey, everybody is flipping out because there are reports of these drones flying around in the evening. And, uh, they are rather large and the local police department has, uh, attempted to put their own drones up to catch these drones to no avail. So it suggests that they're fairly sophisticated.

And meanwhile the United States government and the Army saying they don't know anything about this stuff. So who they may be, um, for purposes of national security, maybe not saying what they do or do not know, but, um, starting to feel a little lit like Oron Wells and more of the worlds in New Jersey all over. Yeah.

You stole my line. Dammit. I was gonna say that.

1939 New Jersey. So, you know, Lisa, you were out here in New York, but you know what? Yeah.

What's your sense of what's going on? It's crazy because, um, I live, you know, not too far from Vanderbilt's Space force space and obviously the issues there and that drone was flying for nearly an hour capturing images of all lot of SpaceX proprietary information. But in New Jersey, it's a huge story.

One of the huge stories going on. And, and I was just in Manhattan. And, but the crazy thing is a lot of this is being slotted by the public.

And these, these drones are massive. Their reports are they the size of SUVs? It's happening every night.

So much footage from the public. The FBI is investigating, the Pentagon is weighing in. But what's interesting is they say right now there's no evidence that, that they're coming from a foreign adversary.

Um, or Mike, to your point, maybe they're withholding information for on purpose, but they don't know the source of the journals. They don't know where they're coming from and they don't know where they're going. A lot of the public, at least in, in New York City, is of the mindset of they the, the authorities to just shoot them down.

So it's, it's a really interesting kind of scary, um, proposition because there's so little that we know and, and, uh, the authorities are, are not being Able to be proactive. They're being reactive. Mm-hmm.

The authorities are saying we can't shoot them down 'cause we need to take them down safely. But they're not describing how it is that we're supposed to do that. But Exactly.

Didn't the ne wasn't there a New Jersey State senator who called for a limited state of emergency during the last Yes. The sighting of all these mysterious drones According to a, b, C news? Yes.

There was, there is a New Jersey State senator calling for this. Um, I mean this Yeah, part of this just sounds too national inquire ish for me. But, you know, are they UFOs from aliens?

I I, could you imagine the Chinese flying an SUV? Oh, there's one Mitchell. They're Over London.

I I'm not scared of a one-off. I I think the drone swarms are maybe more my nightmare scenario where they're just like multiple ones collaborating. Um, you know, and just like an army of them.

But that to me is a little more terrifying. But I mean, it's not like, I would not be scared if it was over my house, you know, A SUV size. Yeah, I would imagine.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm a, I'm a little more scared of the, you know, 10 guys in trucks with guns hanging out in the field waiting to shoot down drones that that's gonna end badly.

Drone tipping. Oh, just remember if it flies, it might be a spy. Mm-hmm.

Can they just get another drone and then have it go over it with net? Or do you know, like where, where like they have, they've trained American Eagles to take drones out of the sky. Like where's the, where are those attack birds?

Where's the rail gun? Doesn't Vandenberg space have like a rail gun to shoot the damn thing down? Yeah.

And There's all sorts of advanced drone technology to take it down right. By sound or other, other means. It doesn't have to necessarily be violent.

I I think that those technologies only exist in the Air Force base and I think the Army bases here in New Jersey probably have 'em, but, um, I'm not sure. Like Newark Airport has them or anybody else. So maybe, you know, they has, it will come to that.

Right. We're gonna have to like start giving people anti drone technology to keep their prying eyes out of the sky. Yeah.

So, so the FAA has authority over drones in this, in airspace, is that correct? They do, yes. So in a sense, do they have some sort of air defense for drones?

I don't know this, um, I Don't know if they have air defense, but you know what, I remember when I bought my Joan, uh, you had to fill out a thing for the faa. Mm-hmm. And then they'll, they'll give you specific no fly areas and stuff where you're not allowed.

So now, you know, register have only outlaws have guns. So if, If Right. These people are, well, it's so up to no good.

You think they care about the law? No, no. Um, what is the, the requirements to be at least 13 and a US citizen or legal permanent residence, something like that.

I mean, that's not gonna stop whoever wants to do what they want to do, but yeah, it's just, uh, go get, At what point are we gonna be embarrassed when it turns out to be a couple of 13 year olds hanging out in the garage? Well, The, it could the one thing be these aren't consumer drones though. We know that when the Pentagon has confirmed that, that are not consumer, they're Not side, no.

It could be someone working on a Jetson flying car. I wanted my fly. I thought we'd have flying cars by 2025.

It could be Commercial interest. They wanna, they wanna compete with SpaceX. I mean, could Be that too.

I mean, could who know? I mean, look, in New Jersey, there was a time where Thomas Edison had his lab there, right, Mike, that is true. And, and, uh, didn't lucky Lin Lucky Lindy take off from New Jersey somewhere?

He did. He did. He did.

Um, what do you think that, you suppose that there's a sense of paranoia though, in terms of our feelings about China and spying since there's so many instances. So therefore we, we kind of triangulate this into this kind of mysterious conspiracy of being spied upon or being endangered by an inanimate object? Absolutely.

I, I think the more I read something that tells me to think something, the less I wanna think it, the more I'm questioning why am I thinking it? And who, who benefits from us being scared of China? That's the question.

I always, you know, who, who benefits if this is actually true? Um, so I I try to approach it with that skepticism, but we just don't know. And the speculation is sometimes worse than what the reality is.

I think it's just Boys with to, I think that's what most, I think it's be real, A SpaceX competitor. Honestly, I think we gotta watch, there's a lot of paranoia. These John Industrial complex.

No, No, no. But there, but there is A, oh geez, wow. Nice point.

There is a point here about red baiting and the red scare. You know, this, this is right out's what? Cold War handbook of the fifties.

Mm-hmm. And sixties mm-hmm. 1939.

And where the worlds right. Same, same scenario, same political heightened anxiety. If, You know, they would never pick New Jersey 'cause the pollution would certainly kill them there as happened in the original.

Um, anyway, you know, I think it'll remain a mystery. Stay tuned. We'll have a reality show on this, uh, you know, in the future.

But for now, it's gonna have to watch out there. But do be careful that a drone doesn't land on you. Hey, Drone Drone Wars is coming to a show near You.

Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Let's take a break here on Text and Gang and we're gonna come back and we're gonna get an update from Mike from his recent Trip to the AI Summit.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, we're back and we're talking about this AI summit that occurred in New York City this week over the Javit Center.

And, um, it was billed as a conference to kind of cut through the hype and say, who's actually using AI for what? And two trends became apparent early on. One is most of the successful use cases are, um, automating existing processes.

There's very few actual brand new AI applications that are driving some totally new use case. And then the second thing was the folks who are ahead are the folks who had the best data management practices in place already. So in a lot of instances, uh, they're no doubt they're smart, but they also got lucky because they happened to have their data house in order and they were able to take advantage of this.

Um, for instance, AstraZeneca was there and they were talking about how, you know, they need to come up with, uh, another 30 patents that they can then build drugs out of in the next 10 years and they want to drive $80 billion worth of revenue. And so they were making heavy use of AI within their operations to accelerate everything from pure research to clinical trials. And they were showing exactly how they went about doing that.

And that was pretty awesome. And you saw a lot of the financial services sector folks there, but everybody else seems to be struggling with the data management side of this equation and getting, figuring out how to actually manage this whole thing. It was interesting, Airbnb was there with Stripe talking about how they're actually making available an open source platform to go tackle that issue that they created for that very purpose.

And they said that it cuts down the amount of time it takes to build AI models by two thirds because the data is now managed almost like a service. Um, and then there were other folks that were just talking about, you know, possibilities and things that were interesting. Um, a small startup there called Riva was taking pictures of people's faces and determining, uh, basically I called it a dermatologist in a box, but instead of giving you a prescription, they would make the perfect compound for your skin tone that would then, uh, be part of your health skin regimen.

And then NASA was there and they were just talking about what they were doing with simulations and they were taking the data from a gaming engine that they created or running around the, the moon as part of the training for this Artemis program. And they were feeding that into AI models and that was how they were gonna go and kind of get their data for the next mission. And then they had some other interesting ideas.

It's still early, but they wanna build, uh, you know, what they call the A doc in a box. And basically it would be a chat GPT doctor that would be in your computer systems, uh, in the spaceship. And if you got a rash or something, you would consult that.

And Alan, before you go there, it is not the emergency medical holographic unit from Star Trek, but it's a step in that direction. So, you know, it's a, it's a thought process. And so it was a great show in the sense that it talked about what was real.

And then there were some interesting ideas about, you know, things that could be done in the future. And um, you know, I was only there for the day, but I enjoyed that. And then finally, um, shout out to Etsy, but for all you folks who are Christmas shopping out there, Etsy's using AI to help you figure out what gifts to buy people based on what you previously bought them.

And then there's service map, some suggestions to go with that. And I know Amazon's all over that, but the Etsy approach was a little more sociable, shall we say? So anyway.

Oh, and they do it and they do it well, I bought a lot of gifts on Etsy this year. Did You? They got you.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, my husband will buy whatever he wants whenever he wants.

It's so, he's very hard to shop for. And it was like, okay, so I know how that is, knows exist. I'm One Of those.

Hey Mike, He's a gadget guy. Question for you. Sorry, again, question for you.

There's a lot of discussion here and there about AI being in kind of the prototype proof of concept stage and having trouble getting into production. Was that much of a conversation there about how do you push those experiments and things like that? That was The system integrators were hot and heavy on that particular subject and they were like saying we gotta move these things into the next wave.

Um, I think when you look at the people who have stuff in production that's meaningful, it, it has a profound impact, but they're a small number. And I go back to the fact that, you know, they just happen to have their data house in order and now they're able to move forward. Uh, everybody else has all these kind of pilots in the stage, but when they wanna move, uh, they don't have the data to drive it and they don't have the processes.

And it's, it's all the, the little it gotchas that are holding people up. There's nobody standing around going, I don't think I believe in this AI stuff. I think, well, you know, given the nature of the conference.

But everybody there seemed to be having struggling with something, whether it was skills or the infrastructure or the cost of things became an issue too. So it wasn't, and I don't think anybody was walking away going, AI is a slam dunk and it's gonna take them a little while to kind of like really drive this. So people are believers, but they've become more realistic about what it's gonna take to make it happen.

There's also a cost shock factor. Many people are building 'em and they start to, you know, pilot it or whatever, and they get the, they get the bill for the GPO usage that ran for a weekend and like, well we gotta do this more efficiently. I think maybe they're retrenching to say, how do we do this in a cost effective way too.

Yeah, and I think part of that is also the infrastructure scam, right? They charge you for the token on the inbound and that's the input. And then they charge you for the token on the outbound, and that's the output.

So every AI action has two transactions to it. So yeah, that adds up quickly. Kinda interesting how the venue in the AI show in New York is much more practical and grounded in terms of the experience and what they're sharing versus say, a show in Las Vegas or California, which was, you know, soaked in hype.

Because a lot of the things you mentioned, Mike, or what we come across, right? When we look for examples of how people are using ai, AI within companies is very limited and it's based on those who are best at data management and that the little things that, that are hiccups that, that kind of get in the way. But um, it was just interesting to see a different kind of point of view, actually more real point of view than what I'm accustomed to seeing out here or in Vegas.

I think that's some of the DNA leftover fingerprints from, uh, interop days. Remember Alan at the J at center? That was the standard.

Go to interop, hit the, hit the hit the, the show floor there. Yeah, It was, that was a good one. Well, You know, I will give a shout out to New York.

There's not a lot of tolerance for the over the hype conversation. Yeah, right. You get, I mean, to be fair to these folks around the conference, people walking around were senior folks and vice presidents and above and there was like 4,000 people at this event, but they weren't the kind of folks that were gonna be easily wowed by, you know, a little smoke and mirror.

'cause you could tell they they've been around the block more than once. I'll, I'll give you a real life example. Last night I, I went shopping to get my younger son a pair of shoes on Akai.

And I, I've got the shoes he wanted and I, you know, it was because it was the Shopify, it automatically sucked my information in. And I hit buy and done. And then I realized I was having them sent to my house rather than my son is in Texas in Abilene.

And I, 'cause it never even gave me the o you know, it just said boom, boom, boom, done. Um, so I saw I gotta change this and I went to the help and it said, use our AI assisted chat to solve your problem. So I went on the AI assisted chat and I said, I need to change the address of a delivery of an order.

Here's the order number. And it was very polite, a very polite AI responded to me and said, Alan, no problem. We have this order number.

Yes, we see it is, uh, going to your address and it put my address down. And it said, what can you know is, is this correct? Yes.

What do you want to do? I want to get this forwarded to a different address or just return this, cancel this order, I'll make a new order. Whatever.

You know, I, I gave it lots of options and, and basically all it could tell me was, thank you for contacting us. We're gonna have someone contact you. Thank you for contact.

You know, it did absolutely nothing. It was just, it was just a front, hi, how are you? But couldn't do anything on the backend.

And then of course today I got a, an email message that my order has already been processed and is on its way to me here at my house, which now I have to cancel it and reorder it to, to do the Abilene one. So you know that John is, I think a lot, even Mike with what you see, you know, they, they tout these AI enabled, uh, programs and and so forth, but they really, uh, in my mind, an AI program should have been able to just change the address, the mailing address. That's not a hard thing.

I'm Sure there are ones out there that can the what you just encount with something that's just disconnected from an actual business process. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Anyway, shame on you all Laki, um, Your bot. Oh, I really do always tell you what's in the help documentation.

That's been like, That's about, that's all it does. Yeah. And you know, this is our AI chat.

Well I don't, it's not, I, not the non-AI gimme the dumb chat, you know, and let's see what that could do for me. Um, anyway, well, I like fun with it like three. I like to fun with it.

Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger. Tell them I love them. I like to ask them how their day is.

I like to just mess With em. Well I do that to Alexa. I like him idea.

I Alexa's always very nice to me. Have fun with it. Yeah.

My, my get weird with it. My father-in-law does that to anybody who cold calls em. He has a long chat with them.

Ask him all kinds of stuff. Just keeps him on the phone. 'cause he is like, he's retired.

I'm happy to waste their time. Is it really your father-in-law or is it an ai? His agent.

Oh wow. Alright. I taught him how to do that with ai.

He might be very excited. Yeah, Imagine that. I think that's gonna wrap up today's text on gang.

What a great week it's been. It's a great Friday. We've got a lot of text on TV coming at you immediately following.

Then take this long weekend off because guess what? Next week is the week before Christmas, believe it or not. Crazy.

Uh, from all of us here at Text and Gang, have a great weekend. If hopefully you'll watch this before Christmas. But if not, you know, season's greetings as they say.

Merry Christmas, happy New Year. But we'll, we'll be saying that all next week. For now though, on behalf of Mike and Mitch and John and Ann, and of course Lisa, this is Alan Shimel, we're out.

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 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.

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Mark your calendars January 9th, 8:45 AM Eastern. Be there or you'll miss the biggest scoop on the future of tech. See you at Predict 2025.

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