Techstrong Gang – February 14, 2025

Hey, everyone. Happy Valentine's Day. You know what they say in the cyber world, sometimes Cupid could shoot that arrow in a bad spot.

Be careful you're watching Textron Gang. Hello everyone. Happy Friday, Valentine's Day, day of for lovers and love.

And so we're gonna be spreading some love here on Text Gang today. Um, we've got Lisa Martin in her, in her Valentine's Red outfit. What more can we ask?

Uh, got a lot to go on with her. There's a lot of news going on out there, and we we're doing our best to keep aware, aware of it. But remember, Textron Gang's, only one piece of the text Drunk Puzzle.

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Anyway, let's, let's, uh, let's jump into our, uh, gang for today's show. We've got a full house of really smart people who are eager to jump into things. We'll start out out west.

Well, we gotta go to the royalty first. Keeping his eye on Silicon Valley. He's our editor at Lodge there.

John Schwartz. Hey John, how are you? Hi.

Hey, how's it going, gang? It's a dark and stormy morning in Silicon Valley and it's very windy, too. Glad to be here, though.

Well, do you guys need the rain? And sometimes there's a saying about that, something about, well, it's a little early for April showers and May Flowers, but there's another one. You've gotta go through the storm before you just, I don't know.

I tried. Let's move on. I mentioned earlier she's, she's the lady in red today for Valentine's Day.

She's our resident expert on marketing and hosts. She'll also be hosting with us at the RSA conference later this year. Check it out there.

It's one And only Lisa Martin. Hey Lisa, how are you? Hey, Alan.

I'm great. Happy Valentine's Day everyone. Happy Valentine's Day to you, Lisa.

Um, just going along the bottom of my screen as it turn as it plays out, we're next gonna move not to Houston, but to Austin, Texas. We have a problem. Houston.

Um, he is the fut of analyst as well as CTO co-founder over at Visible Impact, a fut of company, our friend, guy Courier. Hey, guy, how are you? Uh, great and it's great to be here.

It's great to have you on as always, always great to have you on. And then moving up from Texas High atop the Rocky Mountains where he is, I was gonna say, has his Rocky Mountain High, but he doesn't look high. It's early in the morning.

Uh, he's fu vp DevOps security expert, and my friend Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitch. How are you?

You're on mute. Thank you. I'm cold.

It's zero degrees here in Colorado. Dang. But, uh, good, good to be here, you know, warming up in front of the fireplace, the microphone, the computer, you know, got, got the computer fan running on high.

Warm up my hands. We'll be, We'll be good. Very cool.

All right. And then moving over from Colorado all the way east to upstate New York where like Rip Van Winkle once fell asleep even or near there anyway. Yeah, he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Mike wasn't. So we, Um, we, we discussed that on a previous show whether Harrison had anything to do with two presidents. Turns out the answer is either one, and was founded long before either one of those presidents was born and, uh, involved a fellow named Harrison, who apparently, uh, in the, in a shady deal, grab some land from the town of Rye and start up the town of Harrison.

And here we are. But it goes back to the pre-revolutionary debts. So, but British, not Dutch, British.

Oh, absolutely. Hmm. I always like cry, but you know, for most of, uh, me and my friends on Long Island, there was only one thing we knew about Ryan that was Play Lamp.

Yeah. That was, you know, that was the place to go when you, I was about eight or nine years old. It was a bit of a schlep for us.

Now, now, Mike wasn't Most of Long Island and New York, a shady real estate deal at its score. That Was just that, that was when you were, that was when you remember the fresh air from, from Long Island. Right.

Do you remember those? Will you take me there? Yes.

That, that's been, that's been knocked out with the DEI stuff. Hmm. All gone done.

Oh, Okay. Zing. Let's jump right into it.

Um, so Mike, you know, yesterday things got a little hot and bothered on here as we talked about what I am now calling AI imperialism. And I'm gonna be talking, I talked about it yesterday on our, on my Shimmy says LinkedIn live show. Uh, you know, everybody's eager to plant their flag and claim their territory.

And, you know, uh, vice President Vance made it clear that it's America alone, though. He called it America first. The EU responded, they're doing their thing.

The UK is momentarily putting out their thing. Of course, China's doing their thing. Everyone's gonna do their thing.

We'll have a Dutch East India company again and everything. But part and parcel was a follow up to ei AI regulation of which the EU was the, the flags there. There.

You wanna set this up? Yeah. I'm gonna let John kinda set us up, but it seems like the EU has stepped back a little bit and what's going on here?

Yeah. Um, you know what, what we mentioned JD Vance. And so he made his big address at the AI Summit in Paris.

And he, I'll quote him, said, I'm here to talk about AI opportunities. The AI future is not going to be won by hand wringing about safety. Well, evidently he's onto something because the European Union Wednesday abruptly dropped three draft rules on tech regulation, including AI liability.

Um, they also were, were looking at, uh, regulating patents that that went by the wayside. Online tracking technologies modeled after GP GDPR that's gone. Um, in a sense, they backtracked.

And actually to make things even more interesting, they laid out several plans as part of a 2025 program. And if you look at the plans, they all in one way or another, accelerate AI development through something called an innovation act. A cloud and AI development Act, AI continent Action Plan, apply AI strategy in a sense, they are backing away from regulation.

And, uh, in a sense, there are also two major projects going on. There's the one from France that's about $112 billion, and then there's yet yet another EU plan to stake their claim. So in a sense, we talked about the Robert Barons and Land Barons land rush, it's going on there as well as it is going on here.

No, there's a worldwide It's a brave world. Yeah. It's going on Every, It's a new world.

It's a new world, right. So everyone's got their taking their flag and, and that, I think this is continu do a continuation of what we talked about yesterday. It's, it's, it's a free for all.

And, um, it's a little bit disconcerting. I mean, to say the least. Well, I think we we're, we're experiencing not just a retreat from regulation.

What we're doing is coming out of turn four, everybody's got pedal to the metal and the throttle of ai. And it is a balls to the wall race to the finish. That, that, that, you know, no holds barred right in wwf, whatever your analogy is.

I mean, that's what we're in. This is a, I don't care how many people or nations I step over, we will be at the winner at the finish. And everybody else is thinking, oh my God, what do we have to do?

Let's shed all this stuff that was, you know, turning apple away from bringing Apple intelligence to the eu. We're not gonna do that anymore. So it it's a different world.

They're gonna Bring it to Chi. Yeah. They're gonna bring it to China, right?

Mm-hmm. You know, but I was gonna say one thing, uh, the what the only company that anyone seems to be eager to regulate or to ban in any form is deep seek that's taking place in the US and in Europe. So, um, it it's almost like a geo, geo-political situation as Well.

It's absolutely gly, make no mistake, this is geopolitical and I would say more than the robber barons. This is more akin to when Columbus discovered, or Columbus came to the new world and the European powers that bee all rushed to plant their flags, stake their claim and send some of the second and third sons over to, to 'cause possessions. Nine tenths.

You know, I think it's more akin to dropping napalm, uh, you know, and everybody else while you Go for, well, they, they may be trying to do that too, but, you know, if, if you get a chance, watch my shimmy says from yesterday on this, because the real question for me is what's really the prizes here? What are the pr you know, in the new world rush, it was land, timber, gold, and a fountain of Youth. What are the prizes in this ai uh, Super intelligence That, that's the big one.

That's the big one. Anyway, I, I discussed it there. It, it's an interesting thing.

And John, I I wanna just get something straight though. The AI regulation that was already passed, has that now also been rolled back or it was this new Ai No, it's, it's still, it's still in effect. The EU AI acted, it's still in effect, but they were gonna go above and beyond it and build off of it.

And in a sense it was, it was working. But I wonder if the calculus is Look Trump's in office. Uh, we, they are unleashing this.

We, they, Stargate got their attention and really, I think scared them. The other, the other thing is a lot, a lot of these things that they dropped by the wayside had been kind of discussed for a couple of years. So they were considering them and now they, they've been kind of tabled, basically that's what they did say about the liability act.

It's been tabled, which means basically it's probably not gonna see the light of day until something significant happens. Well, until they feel like they have a consensus to approve it. I, I think the real issue is, is that they realize the, the individual nation states, were not gonna approve it.

And I think there was tremendous pressure being brought to bear in terms of money by, by big tech. Right. In conjunction probably with these Demonstrations.

Well, that, that was, that's a huge part of it is the lobbying effort by big tech. Right? Big tech has become as effective in, in terms of lobbying, not just in the US but worldwide.

And that was one of the, the reasons why these European draft plans were put on hold or if not ditched. Well, I think we're gonna see a, a retrenching also of the punitive damage or the fines and penalties from the EUAI act. They're gonna enforce that because they're very draconian.

I think they're Gonna back Do you think they'll let people bribe foreign fish? I I you mean let Well, they won't prosecutor. It might happen.

It's okay now It's, I thought it was already okay. As of what day was That? No, but not in the eu.

They still have morals. Um, they think they but In the us No, no. Yeah, they, they, I think what Mitch is referring to, uh, and maybe you as well, Alan, is on, uh, uh, the Attorney general of the United States, Pam Bond's, uh, uh, uh, declaration, I suppose within the Justice Department that no foreign agent, you know, so-called Fara foreign agent, uh, lobbyists, illegal foreign agent lobbyists, whatever are gonna be cases It's okay to bribe foreign officials.

That's what it comes down to. Or to be for US officials to be brid By be a wave of populism soon. And it's gonna play out like this.

And populism is what we're currently dealing with, and this is how we got here. But it's hard to control populism. And you're gonna see yet another populist emerge turn AI into some sort of political campaign and say, yeah, you know, guys, the reason we're all suffering is because the existing leaders sold their souls out to these big tech guys and all these other folks.

And then they're gonna leave, walk with Their heads, a Populist voting campaign against Macron and France probably. And then we'll start it out there, and then we'll go to all these other countries. And it's just gonna be way back to wave in this stuff because we didn't take a minute to think about how to apply it in a way that people will understand.

So I think the seeds of chaos have been sewn here. Let That mean French rub all over you let that meat cake, Right? And it also, this in a, in a sense encourages, we talked about this, um, yesterday about selling security as an asset or as a feature of ai, that this is just unbridled.

You, you come up with the fastest, biggest, uh, model as, as soon as possible security be damn risk be down its full throttle ahead. Well, that, that, that, and I think this plays into It. So that's a question I have.

Where are the hundred scholars and experts and leaders who said that we have to put the brakes on be, and, and mind you, whose name was whose? John Hancock was the big one on that, on that a hundred scholars. Right?

Our boy Eloc doesn't stop him from bidding a hundred billion for ai. What? To slow the breaks down on that too.

You know, you, you spelled that with a capital HA capital h Well, you, you saw the judge pretty much tossed, uh, Elon a dig where he said, basically, let me get this straight. You wanna buy a company that you're complaining about is not for the public good, so you can make money on it. And he was just basically, you know, saying you're Kind of, he's he's argued, yeah, he's argued both sides about open eye, a ai ai, it's so hypocritical.

That whole, that whole Thing. Yeah. No, well, El Elon does whatever's best for Elon.

We know that every he wants, so why wouldn't you put him in charge of a trillion dollar government? But on top of that though, what about the other 99 people who signed those letters? I don't hear any of them speaking out.

You would think there's A lot of people now there are a lot of people who are not speaking out on a lot of different issues, right? I mean, we can go beyond tech. We, we won't, but this, there's just this era of silence.

And that's something that I'm glad you addressed yesterday, Alan. The, the, the idea of speaking up and making your stand and kind of being, being, uh, not afraid to speak up. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why, um, when we first saw Vance's comments we're thinking how brazen, but in a sense, he probably knew what was going on, obviously knew what was going on behind the scenes, and, um, we was speaking to the room and they're all falling in line.

It's the strategy. It's very conscious effort. I don't think it's by accident.

It's very intentional. Yeah. Well, We're, We're in, I think Mike is right though.

I think we're in a kind of a stunned moment before there is a, a, a, a a reaction and it's roughly a popularly led reaction. I mean, I think about, for example, so, so, you know, we, we talk a, we talk a lot about, at least privately, we talk a lot about, um, how, uh, AI actually stinks at what it does to a certain degree. Um, and you need human intervention and supervision and all that sort of stuff.

But we, we tend to be talking about more complex tasks like, like, like generating code, generating images, generating language and stuff like that. But these same tools, including generative ai when applied to a lot simpler tasks, can do them well enough. And the simpler tasks are being filled right now with human beings, with simpler jobs necessary and essential jobs.

But if it's come, you know, when, when this really starts to hit the fan, so to speak, is when those people are losing their jobs. We, we, we, I think I tend to say, don't worry, it's not so much you're losing your job. It's not so much about productivity, but I think my mind tends to be on this knowledge worker stuff when truck drivers are losing their jobs.

'cause AI is driving the trucks now when farmers, uh, or field workers are losing their jobs 'cause robots can do that and all that sort of stuff, that's the sort of thing that's probably coming sooner than artificial general intelligence. But that creates that kind of a popular movement and, And, and, and popular backlash. But, but that needs to be Addressed guide.

We saw this with the advent of the modern factory and, and assembly lines and all of that stuff, you know, and, and the, the response to it was the rise of the American labor movement, right? You didn't have a strong labor movement prior to that. Um, and, and that really gave rise.

And, and a lot of people will tell you that's what powered the, the mid 20th century American dominance was the rise of the middle class empowered by that labor movement. And maybe something like that happens, who knows, You're already hearing from folks about it's getting harder and harder to break into a, a field up on entry level jobs because a lot of those things are being automated. And so there isn't these functions for people to go spend a year to get trained on something that may have to be addressed at in college education programs or something.

But that's, that's far as moving. That's a great point. When you think about people with entry level jobs, right?

Which may include low level tasks, and that's where this is kind of moving in terms of AI agents. So it's gonna be much more difficult, isn't it, created this incredible ripple effect across not just the, um, economy, but the education system. So everything, I think there's another big impact of this, and that is a move to what essentially becomes AI nationalism.

Where every country, if it's a, if it's an all out race to ai, um, AI isn't something you can, you know, put a border around. It's in, it's gonna be, and is in everybody's products and services and technologies. So us companies operating in European companies are gonna be penalized or shut out or tariffed or whatever, and probably vice versa.

Um, because they wanna favor their own national AI strategy. So I think you, Yeah, that message loud And clear headed down a path of very nationalistic behavior by countries and ai, definitely Macron writing Lines, that's Macron that Macro Did when he announced this plan's. He said, this is our version of Stargate.

So, but that, so right there, that's a cornerstone of Trump's whole economic plan with tariffs, is that our market represents the biggest prize on the board. And if you wanna play in our market, you're gonna have to make it here or sell it here, or pay the piper or bend your knee. What he's missing is, our market is a market of 330 million odd people about the same size as the EU market.

The market over in China has a billion and a half people. The market in India probably has 1,000,000,006. If we're gonna say we just wanna play in our, we're gonna protect our market.

Don't think that these other people are gonna let you play in their markets and their market long term may wind up being a bigger price market, but the deglobalization of markets is what it's, Yeah. So Yeah, that message was loud and clear. The, the lack of collaboration and the competition.

The only thing I would add to that though, is if you're sitting in China, in, or India, you're asking yourself that a lot of the jobs that you have over there are more entry level type things or tasks that can be automated by ai. So are you in a bigger, dangerous situation where suddenly half the population is outta work? Yeah.

The, the, the, the difference between this and industrialization, Alan, is, um, what industrialization did was it changed the economies out of a craft mode and into a mass production mode. And, um, productivity goes up. And the same workers now are largely sort of being retrained at what you might call a higher level, higher order AI replacement doesn't really work that way.

And the people go get out of work and they're, I wouldn't say permanently out of work, but, you know, a large portion of them are. But, but there was that period in industrial early on in industrialization guy. There was that period too.

And I, I'll tell you something, you know, Mike mentioned it, what you got here. You've got waves of populism, nationalism, a new style, industrialization. You know what this is?

This is the world pre-World War. I multipolar many powers, everybody doing their thing. Highly nationalistic, relatively new companies.

At the time, Germany was a relatively new country. Italy was a relatively new country. A lot of, a lot of the Vic, you know, British Empire was stirring for independence.

It took one bullet into Arch, arch Duke, Ferdinand, wasn't it? Mike Archduke Ferdinand. And that, and that set the tinderbox of fire and how many millions of people died.

And I'm not saying that's gonna happen here, but you know, it's eerily similar in, in the, the brew that's brewing. Yep. Anyway, let's take a break on text drawing gang and come back, put our smiling faces on it is Valentine's Day.

You know what? SAP, that cutting edge tech leader, it's coming out with some AI agents. I can't wait to hear all about it.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Welcome back. And as Alan alluded, SAP is well closing the gap a little bit between all these emerging AI technologies and where it is, um, this week talked about how they're rolling out not just AI agents across all their applications, but giving people tools to build their own AI agents.

And then they align themselves with Databricks to provide the data sources for training various LLMs that you might use to build those AI agents. Guy, I know you've been following SAP for a long time, and it seems like they're never, ever quite at the cutting edge, but they seem to be following faster these days. What's your take?

Well, they are following faster. They used to be a lot slower. They, they, I don't think they exactly have a follow fast strategy.

I, I I think of them in the enterprise application space as somewhat similar to Apple in the consumer, uh, uh, device space. John, you and I have talked about this on accepted Apple claims innovation when they really aren't innovating, they're just doing things really well and better, um, so to speak. Uh, SAP, um, is thoughtful and careful.

I mean, one of the most thoughtful and careful companies kind of ever, it took them at 10 years, uh, of development before they, uh, debuted Hana, for example. They're in memory database, um, as an ultimate replacement for all the third party databases that they were using. Um, so they are doing what a lot of enterprise application vendors have been doing for a while, which is incorporating ai.

I mean, they already had a quasi AI agent, this, uh, JUUL agent, this help agent, which was pretty revolutionary for SAP. Um, I wouldn't say SAP is, you know, quite CLI oriented, uh, as it used to be. But still there's, there's, there's a lot about SAP use, um, and management and operations that is very CLI, like really an understanding of the SAP stack and architecture and, um, just implementing or in, you know, instantiating a, a workflow or a processes in SAP feels a whole lot like going back to this eighties or nineties client server era.

Um, so, uh, they have sped up. Um, certainly I think that, um, the overall implement implementation of the HANA cloud now, the SAP cloud, um, over the space of the last 10 years has made them overall a lot more agile. Uh, and, um, they just haven't lost their, let's say, quality roots.

So I don't think being late in the game here, which they definitely are in this incorporation of AI agents, um, is a bad thing. Especially because I think they're doing a really smart thing with the data Databricks partnership. Um, and this sort of corollary launch, um, that they've done, uh, of this new, uh, business Data cloud, listen, they've tilted it, that windmill for a while.

Um, data hub, which I think still exists with sort of a previous version of it. These ways to aggregate, collect, um, organize, uh, a data foundation for use by the SAP enterprise, um, applications. They've been doing that for a while.

This is the latest one. But it being cloud-based, third party cloud-based. 'cause I think it's just AWS to begin with.

So the land there and then expand from there and doing it in partnership with Databricks. That's a really smart strategy because as we have said here, um, and some of us have been yammering about for quite a long time, one of the most important success factors, um, in uh, any AI implementation is sound quality, well-organized and clean data. The cleaner it can be, the better, uh, uh, TA organized it can be.

The better your vectorization will be, the better the tokenization in the AI application and so on. It's like a, a, a value chain. And frequently, um, the approach seems to be more just throw a whole lot of data at the training or tuning model.

SAP is doing a lot better and they are also, um, not trying to do it all themselves. Um, when they talk about, um, the, the training or tuning of their own LLMs within the interface within juul, they're doing all the classic things, helping with co-development, helping with the SQL query development, um, helping with operations with all these AI agents. But they are training using this, uh, this data cloud, um, that they've created and now have made available to the public.

And so the overall user experience should, should, should, should be a lot better in a lot of ways and a little bit less, uh, do it yourself. So Mitch, let me ask you something. I feel like when I look at this SAP thing, this old conversation about Bill versus buy is coming back around.

And, and the nice thing I guess from a certain perspective is, well, if SAP is gonna give me AI agents, I don't have to build those myself, but then I, they're clearly saying I should build some AI agents 'cause they're giving me some tools. So when would I build my own AI agents and versus when would I buy them and am I gonna buy more than I built? Well, s Hippie is a history of partnering with the right key technology companies.

You have a big partnership with SUSE for Lennox. There's a special edition, uh, specifically for running SAP at a very high level, high performance, high failover, et cetera. This is similar to that.

And then with, with, uh, SAP partner with Databricks to essentially help them get their data house in order as well as not saying it was, but take it to that level. You need to, to to, uh, to do AI and LLMs and without SAP having to go build all of this themselves. Plus I'd haven't done the analysis, but I gotta believe there's a big overlap in customers between the two, between Databricks and and SAP.

So that mood make it a natural affinity for them to work with. I'd be surprised that that wasn't the case. It's not you can go to market with this joint solution that both of your customers work, you know, in a majority of cases.

I got another example, uh, of that, uh, collaboration and partnership Mitch that, uh, I think is is is equally I illustrative, which is Oracle used to be, you had to have Oracle database to run. SAP Hana was sort of a play to get out of that particular partnership since there was so much competition. But the partnership remains.

And there are lots of, lots of SAP stacks running right now using Oracle database. Databricks itself, um, is, uh, somewhat competitive with a whole lot of what SAP has done over the last five, 10 years. Um, but this is, like you say, a recognition of of excellence, um, and an incorporation of excellence for better customer and user and operator experiences for SAP.

So that's another example of that smart strategy. Today's technology makes for strange bedfellows. It does.

And who else is gonna partner with Databricks to do the same thing SAP did? I wouldn't be surprised if we see other, some other companies pop up. That's a good point.

Yeah, I think the collaboration, uh, angle here was what struck me, um, as SAP continuing to partner. Well, Mitch, you bring up a great point. There's probably a tremendous amount of overlap with joint customers and at the end of the day, it's how can we help our customers build and leverage AI agents to make their businesses run faster, better, and more successfully?

So I think, I think they had done a good job here, which really putting the customer value and the customer outcomes and laser focus, I'd love to dig in more and see and understand more of what the, the go to market strategy is going to be with the two companies. But I think ultimately there's gonna be value delivered to the customers and there's a lot of, uh, revenue opportunities for both companies as a result, most likely. Here's the part I'm dubious about, and I, and I extend this to Microsoft and Salesforce and all the people who are building AI agents, are they gonna price those agents in a way that is more expensive than for me to build my own AI agent that may be tuned to my specific processes versus, um, you know, it's not clear to me what models these guys are using to price these AI agents.

'cause I've heard everything from we're gonna base it on consumption of some sort of AI resource to we're gonna treat it like it's a virtual employee that you get to hire for a certain amount of time. And I think the pricing of all this stuff is still unproven what the right model is. And if I don't know what I'm paying for, what am I supposed to do?

That's, That's a great point. I think it's one, I think maybe it's early stages and we need to really figure that out. But the ultimately is what's the value for the customer?

Um, and that's something that we'll have to be seeing here to determine what does dictate pricing. You know, I, I think there's a bigger issue around agentic ai, which is, I think we've made an assumption that this is the next great thing on the way to the next great thing. And is it really, is it really what people are clamoring for, right?

Have we have they digested just using generative AI and they're now saying, okay, I want that next step. I want an agent doing this stuff for me, or maybe I want to skip the whole generator of AI thing and go right to agents or, you know, are, are people are people's or is people's ability, the singular ability to is, is people's ability to kind of internalize this stuff and synthesize it slower than that. And we all, at least to your point, we're way too early with maybe some of these agent AI things.

The same thing for Salesforce. And In that yeah, you know, it if, yeah, it feels like we're getting ahead of ourselves with AgTech AI especially, right? I mean, they're, they're, they're anointing this as the buzz word of the year.

They're, they're the leading, they're trying to convince us. But as Mike mentioned, in terms of pricing, we don't know in terms of adoption, it's very hard to get any of these companies to pin them down, to give you real examples, including internally. So yeah, I, it you wonder if it's gonna, this generation is skipped to the next great thing.

I mean, even NVIDIA's talking about physical a I mean, they're just jumping from one era to another will almost willy-nilly. Uh, I will point out something else that's, uh, totally unclear. It's how are we going to orchestrate all these AI agents?

SAP kinda waved its hands and pointed at a knowledge graph, but I was like, okay, that's not an orchestration layer engine, and how am I gonna manage 42 different agents across an end-to-end process to execute something. Everybody's just kind of going, yeah, sure, we will figure that out someday, but I'm not seeing the tool to do that anywhere. I think Google has one Thing also.

All these things, all these things come together because SAP's pricing model, at least for, for cloud is a consumption based model. So they give you the, a agent AI for free. But can you just imagine the potential for bloat and, and unmanaged scale from an agent doing, you know, what it thinks it's, thinks it's supposed to do.

If It's a usage consumption model, you might make a lot of money at it. A p might make a lot of money at it. Yeah.

Hopefully you're making it by using it, right? Right. I mean, go for it.

To guy's point, you would need a cap on the AI agent that said, you know, if you didn't complete this task within 15 minutes, stop. Right. But, but that should be fairly easy, easy enough to do.

Mm-hmm. If you do, I asked how Alan, how long did it take for finops to, to, to, to come up, you know, uh, the, the, the story of cloud being cheaper than on-prem lasted way longer than the reality of it before Started. Well, a lot of that was because the cloud providers kinda made their bill so damn difficult to figure out.

You didn't know what you were spending. Um, anyway, all right. I it look sap P'S not alone here.

As we said, they're, they may not be leaving the pack, but they're not far behind. Right. As, as we come into the, the home stretch, if you will, we'll see how A plays out.

We're gonna take a break here on Textron gang. We're going to come back and like the song says, love hurts. 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. Hello everybody.

And we're back. And it feels like an annual event now. And it's not just Valentine's Day, but it's all the cybersecurity attacks that are aimed at folks who are trying to enjoy a nice holiday.

And Lisa, I feel like this is yet another example of why we can't have nice things. Um, what what is it, um, that's going on here and what are they trying to take advantage of? 'cause it almost seems like they're after people who are perhaps some of the most, uh, needy in our society.

And they're being exploited. They are being exploited. There's two great song references, um, love Hurts.

And then you just made a reference to a Taylor Swift song. This is Where We Can't Have Nice Things. I think that was about Kanye, but what we're seeing romance scams just skyrocket.

Some of the, some of the statistics are shocking. Compare Tech did a study looking at 2024, nearly 60,000 people in the US for scam that of almost $700 million. That's hugely up from, uh, the year before most targeted in the us.

Um, McAfee also is looking at this growing sort of AI deception in online dating. People are using AI and the weeks leading up to Valentine's Day to create fake profiles and personas, but it's allowing them to do so in a much more sophisticated and faster fashion. It's, this is no longer the, the letter from the Nigerian prince with all these misspellings where you can clearly state it.

It's, it's becoming so sophisticated and so convincing that a lot of folks that are susceptible are falling for it. So people have to be extremely vigilant, whether it's online dating or it's even an offer from a, from a retailer. Retailers need to be also proactive and determining and looking are are, are websites being, um, uh, copied with a slight domain name change so that they can alert customers of what they should believe and what they shouldn't believe.

But I think it just goes to show that the cyber criminals are gonna be using the advanced technologies for the, the nefarious act, which they're doing. And the more I think people in the generations that are online, I think we have, that's probably why we're seeing these numbers go up. I mean, the 2024 to 25, um, jump was dramatic in terms of the people that are falling for this.

I can't think of a better, uh, technology to emotionally manipulate people in ai. I'm thinking about these AI generated pro uh, profiles, chatbots, deep fake videos. I mean, we already have people falling in love with chatbots.

In a weird way. The Washington Post has written about this. You just see this as an evolution of a way to, to take advantage of somebody, somebody who's needy as, as Mike had mentioned.

Yes. Um, it, it's, it, it just, I I can see just major damage, especially, um, um, God all ages, you know, it's just, this is something that is territory we haven't really entered before. Mitch, you bring up Tinder in the chat here, and that's one of the apps that's most commonly duplicated.

So people are falling for, unfortunately falling for more of this. But the challenge is that it, it, there's so many convincing elements that people just kind of don't think about. You just have to be eyes wide open with whatever you're transacting.

If it's online dating, if it's an offer from an an e-commerce retailer, um, we have to be really careful. But I, I would definitely pause Tinder today, 10 years ago, uh, we, we, when I was, uh, not working in, but as sort of associated with a, a security product marketing team, um, we were talking about the human factor and security and I, I'm sure that was already a thing. And it's still a thing, the human factor in security that was talking about enterprise security, but that you can do what you can do with tools and all this other sort of stuff.

But, you know, Leon Panetta can't help clicking on the link to go and, uh, you know, see like, uh, what, what this new, uh, speaking opportunity is for him or what have you. This is the same thing on such a huge scale though. It's one thing if you're going to, you know, like institute, like say, oh, okay, our CISO says we need to address the human factor and security.

We're gonna have these three compliance courses like blah, blah, blah, that, that does some mitigating. But what do you do for the population at large? What was the loss like $700 million?

Uh, uh, or something like the, the from, you know, scams last year of 60,000 people in the us. Like that's a huge scale. I dunno what you do about it.

I think part of the problem here is, the other side of it, Lisa, is that most people are ignoring anything to do with Valentine's Day online because they're like, well, it's probably a scam. And so we're having the opposite effect here where, um, the impact of these things is not just the individuals who are impacted by whatever scam, but people in general are less line to deal with anything online related to Valentine's Day. I'm not sure we're there yet.

I think we may be headed that way. I think there's a lot of susceptible people. Yeah.

And, and let's be clear, it's not just Valentine's Day. You know, I, I got scams, uh, text message today purporting to be Dropbox to download some tax forms from something. Uh, every holiday has its share of, of the bottom line is this, it goes to what Mike says, why we can't have nice things, you know, talking about, we're not talking about yay.

'cause we don't talk about him. But that being said, you know, the bad guys never miss an opportunity to take an opportunity. And, and that's what this is.

It's an opportunity. People are out there, they know there's, you know, some event that they can kind of play off. In this case it's, it's Valentine's Day and they're doing it.

And with, with ai, they do it better than they did before. Let me ask Mike a question. Um, the, and I'm sure you'll answer instead Alan, the, the, the, you know, what, what ha what has helped or what has kept credit card fraud as low as it is.

And I'm not saying, you know, like you can, we can throw up billions of dollars lost kind of thing, but it's essentially pretty low given the volume of transactions around the world. Well, US law, and I think it's it's pretty international right now, is that the credit card companies themselves are responsible for fraud. If you, if you report fraud, uh, or fraudulent access of your credit card account, you don't actually pay anything the credit card company pays.

Is there any kind of corollary here? I can't think of it, but is there any i that sort of regulation and law is out of vogue, but setting that aside, like Mike, is there anything that can be done in a centralized manner to, Well, most of these Valentine's Day transactions are already involving credit cards. Cards.

No, you're already, it, it's already in play. Guy that's 700 million. Who do you think paid that?

Real people? It's, it's probably credit cards. Unless you, you know, I pose some Russian war bride and I talk you into transferring money out of your bank account to me.

Or Bitcoin Or Bitcoin or Ven that happen. That's Too, that's not covered. But you know, and the bottom line is, you know what?

Kudos to the credit card companies. We've all been there. Right?

You got a suspicious transmission transaction. They, you gotta verify or they denied it. They, they've developed algorithms that are pretty damn good.

Mm-hmm. Because they have to, because they have to. It's kind of what I'm saying.

They have to because they're held responsible story. They, They do here too. I think The medium is texting, you know, we can capture some of this with phishing on emails, et cetera.

I think that the wide open universe is texting. That's the way much of this is gonna happen. Mm Mm Yep.

It's a shame. Anyway, So I should not, I still believe asking, but you're saying I should not answer the person who just text me, I don't remember. No, No.

She, they really like it. He misses me and wants to get together again. Yeah, They, no, they really, that one's good.

They saw, they saw your profile and they really wanna meet you guy. They thumb warm walks on the pier and raining rain. Yeah, That's what I'm gonna propose.

Late, Late nights watching Textron gang. Yeah, exactly. Up on the how Romantic the fish that'll get, Obviously they know how to does it every time.

Push button. Alright. Every time.

Hey, we gotta, we gotta wrap up here, man. What a great Friday. A great way to end the week on text on gang.

We've got a full text drunk TV lineup following the rest of today. We'll be back Monday. I know it's a holiday for Mo, a lot of us in the US but we'll be doing a strong gang Monday.

And um, have a great weekend and a happy, happy Valentine's Day to everyone out there. Enjoy it. Bye-bye everyone.