Techstrong Gang – January 15, 2025

You are watching Text on Gag. Hey everyone, happy Wednesday. I'm Alan Shimmel.

Welcome to Tech Stru Gang. So, what the heck were we doing in that opening? Well, if you couldn't tell, he was See no evil.

I was speak no evil. And he was here. No evil.

And that pretty much sums up what we want to do here on Textron Gang. We're gonna try to keep evil out of it, though. Evil has a way of seeping into our conversation sometimes.

Um, we've got a great gang and some great stuff to talk about today. Let me introduce you first of all. Well, let's do the remote for first, for folks first, had a little tongue twister there.

First of all, joining us from somewhere at sea. He's on his boat as usual, and, uh, the Mariner, not the Submariner, but the Mariner and cybersecurity expert, Chris Blas. Hey, Chris.

Hey, Alan. Good to see you folks. Yes, I'm anchored off a little island, uh, somewhere around Vero Beach.

Very cool. Very cool. I hope it's not too cold that you need to scarf or is that more of a, a Look, It's, I'm, I'm Coldblooded person, Don my wife Donna is on board with me.

You know, we've been married for years. For you, Chris. Yeah, so she's, she's basically in shorts and a t-shirt and I'm bundled up with mittens.

That's just the way it is. Yep. Excellent.

Well, thanks for being here. It's great to have you on joining us, I guess, home in San Angelo, Texas, where she's just come off yesterday's, uh, predict 2025 panel that she hosted live. And you could check, check that out, and you could catch it.

Well not live anymore. It can only be live once. com as well.

It's a whole bunch of other great content. It's our special content editor at large. Amanda Ra Ani.

Hey, Amanda, how are you? Great. Happy to be here as always.

Happy to have you on. Alrighty. And then I'm really happy to be joined here in our Boca Ratone Studios.

The Prodigal Sons have returned, uh, to my left. That might be your right. Our Chief Content officer visiting us from New York.

Mike Ard. Hey, Mike. Great to have you here.

The great state of Florida Was kind enough to issue me a passport so I could be Here only on, only for a short period that six o'clock You're back out. Didn't stop you at the border. Yeah, that's good.

That's good. Well, he wasn't spouting woke stuff, I guess, but, um, I, I noticed you're wearing some text stroke swag. Yeah.

Um, this came for the holidays, so I got this little Textron group vest thing here. So, you know, I, I'm still waiting on my gang colors, but I'll wear these in The meantime. Well, those are our gang colors.

Well, I'm white. Well, actually a lot of our gang members will be supporting these. I think we had them sent, but mm-hmm.

Um, anyway, thanks for being here. Mike joining us from Colorado is a little less high here. I can tell his eyes are very sharp.

Still high a little bit. He's still high about too. Yeah, he future, uh, VP Analyst and our friend Mitch Ashley Mitchell.

It's great to have you here in person, man. It's great to do it in the studio. We always have fun when we get together, so.

Absolutely. So I feel like we're men in Black, at least Par partially this We do. Yeah.

We are sort of men in black today, back in Black. Um, I should mention, I'm actually, I did mention that Predict 2025 was yesterday and it was a, uh, one of the best, I think the best predict we've had. It was very good.

An amazing sessions, amazing speakers. Of course, a lot of them had to do with ai, surprise, surprise. But a lot of it had to do with the Gen AI and different aspects of ai.

And we had speakers from AWS, some of the other big hyperscalers. We had a three or four folks from Futurum. Uh, we had my friend Carolyn Wong and Jennifer Gio, and a lot of, you know, friends Mitchell from our cyber war, uh, cyber Days.

Mm-hmm. And so it was all good to have them. Uh, it was great.

Including, as I mentioned, Amanda's panel with our friend Hope Lynch gang members, hope Lynch and Guy Courier. I guess that was the Textron Gang. There you go.

Panel for, uh, predict. And oh, one of the highlights though, for Predict every year is we announced that DevOps Dozen awards. And, uh, this was the 10th year for DevOps dozen awards.

We had eight community categories and 14 tools and service categories. And I'll tell you, it was, we had over 8,000 votes cast for the DevOps dozen awards this year. Um, judges were Hope Lynch and Mitchell and myself.

And for the most part, we went along with what the audience voted for, though we did. There were some companies shall remain nameless who tried to gain the system. No, yeah.

In this day and age, gaming the system. Voting, yeah. After all.

Well, people don't vote, but these people voted over and over and over again. Were they in Chicago? No, those are dead people who vote in Chicago.

People who vote multiple times are usually right here in Florida. Um, anyway, but we did discount those votes, so it was a fair, free and fair election. We had no riots or anything.

It went well. Um, I'm really happy to congratulate all of the DevOps dozen award winners you can get. com.

com. So congratulations to our award winners. Uh, worthy, worthy, worthy Award winners.

Well, We're gonna jump into this in the A blocker. I thought that was the A block. Well, we would normally do a little introduction there, but up to you.

Go around. Okay. Well, that was our A block.

Um, that was the DevOps dozen award guys. What do you guys think? You, you saw the winners.

You, you, Mitchell would, Amanda and Mike, you've been doing this with us for years now. Thoughts, I Felt that this was kind of the winners of the old guard, right? A lot of the vendors who won have been in the category for a long time.

So is there something indicative of that where maybe we're seeing fewer startups win? Or what's your sense of where are we in this market? I, I think it depends on the category, right?

When you look at, like, for instance, best DevOps end-to-end, uh, product. Yeah. That is, that doesn't change.

I mean, the, the nominees are always the nominees. You got GitLab in there and CloudBees and Jfr, you know, uh, end-to-end DevOps platforms, GitHub. There's just not that many harness.

So you know that that's who it is. But remember also that in those categories, look, we don't nominate the finalists. It's self nominated and open to people and then it's who votes for them.

So is there a lot of change in DevOps? But I also like to look at some of the new categories. 'cause we do add new categories every year.

So this year we had several AI categories. We had a platform engineering category, and of course, what I always call the rookie of the year, the best new DevOps tool. Mm-hmm.

So, you know, there were, if you look some, some new names and new faces and in, in there. But the fact of the matter is, in DevOps companies like Jfr and CloudBees and GitLab and Harness, there's a reason why they're leading. They're leading the space.

I Think it's a sign of the maturity of the market. Yeah. It is.

A little more Companies have filled out and added more to their product set of things that they're offering. Mm-hmm. Um, it's also just the maturity of DevOps.

Yeah. Um, we're gonna be coming out with a, uh, new data set for future intelligence around DevOps and, and AI and development and things like that. And tech strong research.

Yep. It's gonna come out, I don't know the date yet, but we're working on it as we, 56% of the people have not 50, 66% used Crest toothpaste. Okay.

No. That it's a different survey. Different Survey.

I'm glad to hear that, that Even our text drawing research from last year, you know, Showed that, uh, more people were putting themselves in kind of a, a later stage of maturity of adoption, standardizing in DevOps and even, uh, mastery level. So, you know, we've been doing this for a while, so I'm not surprised to see some of the same players continuing to do that Sure. As well as new players too.

Absolutely. And I Imagine that some companies, especially the more experienced companies who have been a part of this contest for several years, are pretty good at their marketing and, and promotion tactics as well. Yeah.

No, there is that. Look, companies that promote that they're finalists and seek votes, get votes. People that don't, don't.

Um, I, I'll tell you though, another theme that I saw this year, that there was a category best use of AI in a DevOps product. We had a, we, we returned nomination fees 'cause we had too many companies that were submitting every company is putting it AI into their, uh, product. Right?

So that, that's a new theme too that I don't think, you know, we saw last year, certainly not the year before that for sure. So I think that was big. Look, you know, it's DevOps and I think the DevOps doesn't reflects the DevOps market.

I always like the categories involving, you know, who we recognize is kind of leading evangelists for DevOps. So, you know who came, well this year we had two different evangelist categories. One was best community evangelists.

So this is not a vendor. And we, we had two great finalists and the winner was from the Georgia, not Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia, former Soviet Republic, Georgia DevOps community. His name is Georgie.

Uh, Kelli, I believe is his last name. And he won his best community evangelists. He did a really nice, he does a really great job.

Right? And and more power to him. And there was another person from India that they was in.

The finalist there too was also great and worthy. And then we had the corporate evangelists, right? And look, Derell has had a tough year, right?

A lot of our friends in Dere don't have their jobs anymore. People were cutting back on Dere, going back to sales. But there was several.

And, and in that category it was actually all new names. Hmm. All new folks.

Uh, the winner was from BMC, who, you know, you wanna talk mainframes, you want to say they're old guard, but they're out there banging the bushes and collecting votes I might add every year in and year out. So more power to them as well. Anything else?

It's tough this year. No good stuff. com.

dot com. You can go there. com with the help of our cracker jack editor, edit Amanda.

So you could check in out there, or you could watch it on Predict 25. All the sessions are still up there. And, and nominations for 2026 Open will open in August.

Please don't start writing me now, but they open in August. All right, let's take a break and then we're going to come back and find out what's the hottest new podcast on the waves. And I do mean the waves, uh, stay tuned.

We're gonna tell you about it. You're watching Text on Day. Modernize your business to fuel innovation and elevate customer experiences with the builder community.

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Hey everyone, we're back here. So, as I mentioned, what's the hottest new podcast? While at least on, on tv, you know, our friend Chris Blaske has been building up some content and talking about and threatening us on doing a podcast for a long time.

And, uh, in between keeping his boats afloat, traveling back and forth to Canada, advising people on critical infrastructure and cybersecurity, Chris has found the time to finally launch the inevitability curve. And when I say it's the best podcast on the waves, I literally do mean the waves. He records a lot of the sessions right on his boat with guests from around the world of cyber.

And not only cyber, a bunch of stuff, but Chris, give us the scoop about the inevitability curve. So in the early 1990s, I think it was 91, 92, um, I was, uh, living in Canada again, working a little computer company and they had an internet connection, right? You using that connection, right?

And a dial up, uh, thing. And it dawned on me that everyone on earth was gonna get on the internet. And so a little six person company, and this is where the into security, um, uh, shortly thereafter.

And, and the, the two, the two bosses, the two owners about our ages, right? You know, said, kid, you don't understand the internet's for education and military. It's, you know, it's never gonna be a thing.

And I argued this for a couple weeks and I finally went in, uh, to John Al also, John, if you're out there on this whiteboard and said, let's just assume for a second that I'm right. That in some useful period of time, 10, 20, 30 years, the entire u you know, PO global population gets on the internet. in the upper left hand, upper right hand, part of his whiteboard.

And in the lower left has said, we're here. If I'm right, there is already a line that connects us to that future and multiple lines. But you know, you know, the sales of whatever, right?

Things will change along a given pattern if in fact that futurist is correct. And I've found myself coming back to this over and over and over in my career and realize it really is, before all this, this is always the way I've looked at things. It always kind of surprised me that, that we get so wrapped up in the moment.

We can't say the moment is here because we have just gone through all these things. And given that we have gone through all these things to get to this spot, the only possible futures are along some range of tr trajectories that you can look at, right? So in this series, first one was up, uh, got up last week, they come out every Wednesday, Heather McMann, you know, amazing background.

Just like so many of our peers. It was like, how did you get exactly there? Just, just that by itself.

But having gone through all the phase that, that she's coming in her career, we talk about marine systems and cybersecurity and, and cyber systems and automation, you know, it, it's, that gives you a lot of insight into where we're going, right? So I'm looking forward to doing more of these. We have the, the weekly series, and we're putting together a set of round, uh, round tables.

The first one, um, end of this quarter, early Q2. We'll have a couple of sponsors. We'll sit down, we'll do the same sort of thing, you know, in a, in a larger group, uh, context, you know, with ai, where have we been?

How do we get to where we are right now? What useful information about our future can we find inside? That is, I find, you know, with all, all the things I've done in my career, mostly it's this, it's talking to folks like you where we all have a pretty good understanding of what we're doing and just ferreting out how the heck we got to this.

And then looking forward a little bit and saying, all right, given that we're probably do about to do that. So, Very Cool. Not that I'm obsessed or anything, but that's, it's a thing.

Now, No one ever accused you of being obsessive, have they? I, I, God, I hope so. As, as you look back over time, how much of the innovations that we have tracked, it wasn't really a technical issue as much as it just was a cultural issue.

And it just took a while for the adoption curve to work its way through Almost all of it. Mm-hmm. Right?

I don't want to get all Isaac Hasim off, you know, psycho history, you know, foundation series on us. You know, we are, you know, arguably, you know, free-willed entities and we, you know, creatures, we, we do things because we want to, however, right? When we're doing things, it's usually because we've wanted to for a long time.

And now's the time, you know, where my, you know, the network address translation, my early claim to fame. And I, I always think, you know, aside from, you know, my own back padding, I find it fascinating. You know, the 1992, I think it was, we had started building the border wire firewall server.

And I talked to some, you know, old Bart, you know, like our age. He's like, kid, you don't understand. There's not enough IP addresses.

You internet won't work. And within 15 minutes, um, with two colleagues, Andrew Flint and Amaya El Gundi, we invented network address translation. Totally unaware that there was a raging debate among the IETF about network address translation.

And two other people were inventing it in parallel at the same time. You know, could that have been done earlier? Sure.

But it wasn't nap time yet. It reminds me, there was a TV series with, I think it was James Burke connections, where he walked through history and said, you know, this caused, this, led to this that led to gunpowder. Well, there's the butterfly effect Yeah.

Too, right? It is sort of your inevitability curve of things happen for a reason because of a lot of things that led to that, enabled that to happen. So I'm thinking, do we start calling Chris Dr.

Harry Selden? I don't know, but I, I think that if I knew where the exact points were on the curve, I'd probably be working on Wall Street making a lot more money than I am right now. 7 gigawatts.

You could go back in time and do that there, MC fly. Well, I, I think it's one of, one of the things I'm looking forward, you know, I'm enjoying actually in, in this whole conversation is defining what I mean by this, because it's not, you know, the future is not fixed. However, it's, it is, it's less about the things that will happen as, as more about the things that are not gonna happen, right?

Not now, not yet. You know, we can't make that kind of curve in that period of, of time. So it's more about Bounding responsibility.

Well, this's a quantum aspect to it, right? Like, you know, the fact that, you know, it's there by, by the very fact of knowing that's gonna happen, you're changing it, right? And, and so it exists in different states and Multiverses and all of that craziness that we could get into, even though, uh, Jensen Wong says quantum computing is 10 to 15.

Yeah. And all these quantum stocks took ahead as a result. But there, but there is a, a quantum aspect to it.

Um, but let me bring us back to the real world here of relativity and all that good stuff, Chris. The inevitability curve is gonna be right here on Techstrong tv on our network, as well as on your favorite podcast, uh, platform, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or ads, any of the other places that you listen to podcasts, uh, as part of text on tv, it'll be on the YouTube, the text on tv, YouTube channel. It'll be available on all of our websites as well as LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, x whatever you want to call it.

If you're still on there. Um, talk about some of the guests you've got coming on here. Oh, this is, you know, you mentioned Harry Selden.

You know, I, I tend to think of Dirk Gently, you know, the Douglas Adams character. Mm-hmm. Uh, everything, the holistic de detective.

And, you know, you and I talked about that, about this, you know, over the years. It's amazing the people we know, the networks we make. And, you know, Mickey, Mickey Finner in deity.

You know, Mickey is just an amazing, uh, uh, person. You know, she's also been, uh, she'll be in the early episodes that are already recorded. Phil Engler at the Healthcare isac.

Phil and I have been leading a, uh, assisted working group on ISACs as SBO M distributors. And I'm sorry, there's so many acronyms in that I can define them all. Hopefully, uh, people can pick up most of 'em.

And discussing with him, he is working at the healthcare isac, how do we get threat intelligence out to medical device manufacturers and so on and so forth, right? You know, so, you know, everything from the, uh, uh, talking to people, Fred Cohen, right? People who have been in the, in the industry.

Fred coined the term computer virus at his PhD thesis, so he's that guy, right? You know, these are all the people that we, that, that we've grown up with and lived in our, in our careers with. And, and young and old.

I I love the fact that people are coming into the industry and, you know, it, it's, it's, it's easy to get a little pompous. It's like, I've got 30 years, I have 25 years. It's like, look, there are people with three years and seven years of experience in security doing amazing things right now.

Right? And quite often the things that us, you know, people with too much experience are Missings, you know what? It, it goes back to something you said a little earlier, earlier.

It's like, we didn't ever want to be those old farts who say, Hey kid, I don't know what you're talking about. You don't know what you're talking about. Because there's always some smart kid out there who's gonna do network address translation or whatever the next thing is, And, and they're fresh new perspective to it.

Yep. So, right. Well, it Is, I'll I'll throw one, right?

C-I-A-C-I-H drives me mad. Confidentiality, integrity and availability are not the only three protection objectives, Pillars of security. Mm-hmm.

That's an artifact of the times to our point. You know, I, I can tell you exactly how that happened. Fred Cohen and Stephen Northcott and the, and the creation of Sands and so forth, bake that in.

There are more than three possible objectives to security. So to your point, Amanda, yeah. Freshman wise, coming to this and not just, not just rote.

How, how often are you doing new episodes, Chris? Every week, every Wednesday, there'll be a, there'll be the interview episodes out, the round tables will be at least quarterly. I think it's a reasonable goal to put those together and get that done.

The quarterlies are sort of live audience round tables, Right? Yeah. Get a couple of those would be sponsored, you know, so we'll have some, let's Talk sponsors.

What kind of sponsors you're looking for for this marketing folks out there pay attention, Right? You know, so, so this, you know, I, look, I spend a lot of marketing money, you know, again, I am vice president of strategy at sbe, and I, you know, do a lot of these roles. I've been in a vendor almost my entire career.

So there's thought leadership type of stuff, which has a, a less hard value. But, you know, if you're interested in, uh, um, promoting your image of, of understanding where you're going, that's, that's a good thing. And if you're targeting, uh, these, these audiences, you know, this is, this is Techron.

We speak to a technical ar uh, audience. And, uh, uh, obviously I focus a lot on, on cybersecurity. So cybersecurity vendors are, are interesting folks, but I've always thought it's more than that.

One of the things I love about supply chain right now is though, though it's security, people talking about supply chain, it's really all about logistics and efficiency and so forth. So, Very cool technical Vendors. And we're happy to try to make you look good if you deserve it.

Excellent. All right. The inevitability Curve comes out every Wednesday.

Check it out here on TechOne tv, or as I said, wherever you listen to podcasts, it'll, you'll be able to find it. Chris. Good luck with it.

We'll, of course we'll be doing everything we can to help, but I'm sure it's gonna be a fantastic discussions there and good stuff. Let's take a break here on TechOne Gang. We're gonna come back to our C block.

I think Amanda's gonna kick that one about AI spending projections too early to say it's a failure. Or I don't think we that, I think it's an inevitability curve issue. Okay.

That crazy iron there. I was. Nice.

Mike, you should work in marketing. He's sharp. Sharp.

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And yeah, going into that whole conversation about inevitability. We all think AI is coming, but boy, there's a huge debate about the when and the where because, uh, a lot of folks from Wall Street are getting a little antsy about how come we're not seeing a huge amount of revenue flowing through these AI products just yet. And we saw UBS now has a survey out where they asked 125 senior IT execs, and they were saying that their spending would drive to the back half of this year, maybe in into 2026.

'cause their businesses just weren't aligned around how to use AI just yet. We also have, uh, stories on text drawing, ai. Uh, there's a FreshWorks report that says a lot of this stuff right now is just being driven from the bottom up.

And part of the problem is there isn't enough leadership up top that's kind saying where we should be driving this conversation. And then NTT has the same thing going on in their survey, and I know you talked to them recently. Um, the, everybody seems to be pointing to the same issue, which is, it's just taking longer to execute on this than people imagined.

But Amanda, I know you've been covering this whole AI space, for instance, the early days. What's your take on, where are we and what's going on here? Well, we know every company, practically every person is eyes on AI and try and integrate AI in some way.

But the problem is, um, and you can see this on a lot of our articles, is, um, the value is not coming through as expected. Um, and so they're having to cut back on their spending because it's not, it's not, um, giving them what they anticipated. So, um, while this is an issue, of course, everybody has to move forward with AI adoption.

So what is necessary is good communication and, um, understanding the outcome and having a good plan of action. 2 points you're trying to solve and go forward with that first. Um, and I think that we're seeing in, um, a few different articles and interviews, that's the way to go.

Me. There's overinflated Expectations on ai. I'm shocked.

Hype cycle, shocking hype cycle gambling going on. You know, I, I have a different, I have a different take on this. I'm surprised that's me.

It happens, it's inevitable. Um, but that, that being said here, here's my take. And I'll be honest with you, it's not my take.

I think my friend John Willis told me about it. I, there's a reason why we're seeing it from the bottom up because the smaller companies lower down less money at stake. They're more nimble, they're quicker to adopt, they're quicker to experiment, they're quicker to try.

When you get to the companies that USB is rep ing or you know, these large enterprises, the inertia built into driving those ships is it's the reason why the Titanic sank. Mm-hmm. Right?

They can't get out of the way of the iceberg. And so we haven't been in this AI cycle long enough for the enterprises to change the direction of their ship to overcome that inertia. And that's why we say, oh yeah, we're gonna see it in the second half of 2025 'cause it's gonna take at least that long for these B myths to, you know, look at their budgeting cycles.

A lot of them are on, uh, fiscal, not calendar years. It starts February one, June one, you know, and you can't do a lot of these AI projects if it hasn't really been budgeted. You only rob Peter to pay Paul so much.

And so it's gonna be the second half of the year, at least until you start seeing budgets at these large companies incorporate some of these AI uh, projects. Them being said, though, it's, it's rocket. I mean, To that point, and, and I, this, I've lived this, right?

As, as part of running IT organizations is something new comes along, you wanna start to adopt it and you're not in the cycle, especially in a very large enterprise, right? They're, they're budgeting for 2, 3, 5 years out for projects that are multi-year projects. So what you do in the short term is you kind of Rob, Peter, Peter, PayPal, you say, where can I, let's pull back on spending here.

I'll put a little bit of it on I AI when I really would like to do more, but it's gonna be maybe a year, maybe two years before I really kind of are investing the levels that I think I should be investing, especially in a big enterprise. So in the near term, I think people are still in the experimentation phase, learning what they can do, especially with generative ai. They've got pilot projects.

We're hear about a lot of projects sort of stuck in, stuck in that pilot base, not sure how to get it into production. Kinda getting that over the hump. We'll start to see more value.

But I think the bottom up is spot on. And, you know, John's experience there, uh, is very much true that because we don't see the larger investment by IT budgets. People buy their own copilot license or license to whatever tool that they like to use.

But I, I don't think there's any doubt that it's a big market. It's just not gonna happen. As fast as we'd love to get an ROI on it, If I was gonna read anything into it, I, I, I, you know, and, and don't read too much into my statements, but it, it seems like the kind of overcorrection you get when it is a real trend, right?

We started the show with, with DevOps, right? You know, 10 and more years ago. Is it really going, you know, would, would 2025 in DevOps be at the maturity level that, that all you guys were talking about at the beginning?

Nobody knew. Um, but the answer is yes. 'cause this time, that time, you know, it really was time to do the thing.

And I think ai, we're at this, you know, early stage the first couple years, 1, 2, 3 years. And like you say, Mitch, you know, people are going, I'm actually gonna start using that. Whereas in the big corporations, there's, there's healthy functions that try to damp that down.

When the enthusiastic, you know, group comes up and says, we need big budget next year. It's like, eh, the low the second year, um, maybe it goes too high. So I think we're in that overcorrect too much stage of a real trend.

I don't, I don't, haven't seen any signs of this, this uh, uh, version of what we call AI not being frankly as exciting as it looks. I think that you have to keep in mind the fact that I would argue half of it spending is now driven by a line of business units somewhere, and it's not always in the IT budget. So a lot of those folks might be driving this conversation forward in a way that doesn't necessarily always include the IT folks until they get some level of scale going and then they dump it back on the CIO and say, you know, Hey, look what we did and, And their funding, their funding projects based on outcome based ROI, what what they need delivered, not just we need to invest in a technology versus B.

Mm-hmm. I, I think also, you know, one of the big things that predict Yesterday was that 2025 we'll see a big move from let's say gen AI to agentic ai. And I think agen ai, believe it or not, is not as radical maybe as generative.

A a generative AI had a lot of parla trick faz magical property to it, right? Let me show you what it could do. You know, and you didn't have to be a techie to say, holy macro, that's cool as crap.

AG agentic AI though is where work gets done. And I think as in 2025 we start adopting and developing more agentic AI use cases, we're going to see more real, you know, rubber meets the road. Meat and potatoes kinda work being done via ai.

Yeah, I agree with that. 'cause a lot of this, you know, stuff where we were handing people like a, a library of prompts that they should use for different use cases, they kind of looked at that and shrugged and said, I really don't know how to operationalize that inside of my job. But if I have an agent that I can just say, you know, go do this, that's a different experience.

Well, You Know, yeah, and that was kind of my point is companies, um, need to step back What's a real solution? They, you know, a real problem that they need to solve, focus on one or two real problems they need to solve, get the budget for that and move forward. Yeah.

I think there's A real emphasis on mean, Mike, my theme for 2025 is AI And production. You, let's get this, let's get it in there. And actually what can do for us, right?

It's time and get out. I mean I did see an interview with Zuckerberg, mark Zuckerberg from Meta of course, who talked about in 2025, they think they're gonna replace a lot of mid-level developer engineers with, with AI stuff, Be the office saying the same thing. Is it?

Yeah. So may maybe, I guess we'll have to wait and see how that comes out. What's the prediction there?

I don't think that's gonna be true, But you heard it here first. I doubt heck would predict happens. Stroke, chaos.

I doubt it. We'll see, we'll see. Anyway, I think that's gonna wrap us for Techstrong Gang today.

We are, we're busy here in Tech, strong land in Boca doing our all hands kind of meetings and planning and scheming and thinking about what's inevitable for 2025. And, uh, we'll, we'll go with that. Chris, I've, I wanted to catch up with you too.

It may wait till later this week 'cause I got these guys here. But, um, if you haven't, if you missed Predict 2025 yesterday, it's still up there. Go register and go check out all the sessions.

They're all there, including the sponsors and they have a bunch of great content on their hubs as well. So Predict 2025 churn, uh, predictions for 2025. Oh yeah.

And if you register, everybody gets the few churn and prediction 2025 ebook. We'll be emailing that out. Um, it's been a great week so far.

We've got a full tech, strong TV lineup on for today as well. And, uh, we'll be back tomorrow with even more as usual from the gang. But for now, this is Alan Shimel.

On behalf of Mike, Mitch, Amanda and Chris, thank you. We're out.