 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit 2019. Brought to you by PagerDuty. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at PagerDuty Summit. The fourth year of the show, third year of theCUBE being here. I think they finally outgrown the West in St. Francis. We got to have a bigger venue, but we're really excited to have our next guest doing super, super important work. We learned about this company a couple weeks back at AWS Imagine non-profit, the Polaris company, and we're happy to have Nancy McGuire-Chey. She's the COO of Polaris. Nancy, great to see you. Jeff, it's fantastic to be here. Thanks so much for having me, and it's great to be back at the PagerDuty Summit a second year in a row. Oh, so you were here last year. I was here last year. So do you agree? Up on the big stage. Is it outgrown the venue or are we ready to move to a larger venue? I think possibly a larger venue next year. All right. They're doing incredible work. So really fortunate to interview Brad a couple weeks ago. So for people that didn't see that, don't know Polaris, give us kind of the overview about what you guys are up to, what's your mission. Sure, absolutely. So Polaris is an organization dedicated to ending human trafficking and restoring freedom to survivors. So for those that may not know what we're talking about when we talk about human trafficking is three main categories. Anybody who's forced to work against their will by means of force, fraud, or coercion. Any adult in the commercial sex trade by means of force, fraud, or coercion. And any minor, anyone 17 or younger in the commercial sex trade. And the way we think about this issue is in two halves that are complementary. One is on the response side. We've got 25 million people around the world who fit that definition that I just described. And so it's about individual case management and helping to get them out of those situations. The way Polaris works on the response side of the issue is by operating the US National Human Trafficking Hotline. This is the nerve center for the anti-trafficking movement in the United States where we work 24 seven to connect victims and survivors to the services they need to get help, stay safe, and begin to rebuild their lives. So that's half of the story. The other half of the story is we recognize that the response side, while absolutely invaluable doesn't get at solutions to the problem. So we work on longer term solutions to the issue of human trafficking. And the way we do that is through data and technology. So we've amassed one of the largest datasets on human trafficking in the US and we've mined that data for insight about how trafficking works. So we've learned there are 25 distinct types in the US alone. We've then dug deeper to understand what are the legitimate businesses and industries that traffickers are using for their crimes? And those include social media, hotels, motels, transportation, financial services among others. And then we take those insights, we work with private sector companies, the public sector and law enforcement to get to upstream strategies to prevent and disrupt this issue at scale. So fortunately we don't have three days to dig through that good list, but let's unpack some of it, because it's super, super important. On the data side, because we're here at PGD. So what are the types of data that you guys are looking at to build these models? It was fascinating Brad's conversation about the multiple kind of business models that you guys have defined was enlightening for sure. So what types of data are you looking at? Where are you getting the data? What are you doing with the data? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to know is that this is a clandestine issue and for so long the field has been data poor and it's been really hard to unpack what we mean by sex trafficking and labor trafficking to wrap our arms around the problem. And so we've had these really significant breakthroughs just in the last few years by understanding that there are these 25 types and that was through mining over 35,000 cases that we worked on on the national hotline over the years. And then our second major research initiative was to augment that with surveys and focus groups with survivors. So those with lived experience have now informed the data set and some examples of what we've learned. How are traffickers using hotels and motels for their operations? How do they use credit cards? How do they use buses and planes and trains and rideshares? And how are victims recruited on social media and conversely, how can they reach out for help including through our hotline? And so we're starting to really get granular about the nature of this problem and then where are those key intersection points? Where do we have leverage? And a big part of the answer is the private sector. Right, right. So the intersection from the clandestine and the dark and secret to the public as you said were things like credit cards or they need to get on planes or they need hotels. It's a pretty interesting way to address the problem because there are these little points where they pop up into the light. Absolutely. So when you're doing that and you're building the longer term strategy, one is to get the people out of there but are you trying to change the business models? I mean, what are some of these kind of longer term resolutions that you're starting to think about? So right now the equation that traffickers perceive because this is a financial crime, right? It's not just a human rights abuse. The equation they perceive is that this is high profit, low risk. We flip that equation, for instance, when financial institutions are tuned into, have built in red flag indicators for all the different types of trafficking that they might see. So it makes it simply too difficult or too risky for traffickers to bank and move their money. So that's one example. Another is in the realm of social media. So we've understood how traffickers are exploiting victims on social media. It can look like anything from grooming and recruitment in sex trafficking to fake job ads on social media as well. So as we can help to inform social media companies, again, working in tandem with victims and survivors to put those lived experiences into and leverage those insights into solutions, we can make change that equation for traffickers so it is simply too difficult and too risky to recruit online and push them to sort of more old school systems of recruitment. Those are the sorts of upstream things that we believe are really going to change the game. Right, so it's recruiting. It's taking their money away. It's making it expensive for them to operate a lot of those types of kind of phasing. Exactly, and the real focus is on these six systems and industries that we've identified. And tech is really a crucial, obviously, social media companies, hotels, motels, transportation. And for instance, one of our partners is Delta Airlines. And so they have been, I think, one of the exemplars in really looking at this issue holistically and being all in from the CEO on down and leveraging. And again, why we think the private sector is so crucial is they've got the resources, the customer base, the engaged employees. They've got the brand. And so, for instance, what Delta does is they've trained all 60 plus thousand employees on how to spot and detect human trafficking and what to do. They've engaged their customer base through PSAs and people can donate miles including that end up helping victims and survivors on our hotline to get flights to get out of their situations and resources to support the hotline to scale. And so it really takes that, we think the private sector is a huge piece of the puzzle and sort of bringing it back to the tech industry. The tech industry is uniquely positioned, again, with the tools, the resources, the know-how to actually supercharge this movement because it's going to be data and technology that's going to get us to scale. Yeah, the Delta story is amazing for people that haven't seen it. The CEO got completely behind this. They trained the entire company and all their passengers to look for these anomalies and what came out some of the conversations in Seattle is it's really not that hard because you've got your business travelers and you got your families and you got these things that don't really fit and that's, I don't know what percentage of the total flights, but it's a lot. So these things, if you're paying attention, should be a lot easier to identify. So, PagerDuty specifically, what are you guys doing with PagerDuty? You're here, you said it's your second year. Polaris and the broader anti-trafficking movement is engaged in a digital transformation. And so for us, that's on the response side, both on our hotline and on our data side so we can supercharge that learning and insight development. PagerDuty is central to our ability to increase our efficiency on the hotline. It's a, the hotline itself is composed of a number of different technologies. We cannot have any of those technologies go down because minutes and seconds matter on a crisis hotline. So PagerDuty helps us be as efficient as we can be in escalating urgent issues so they can immediately begin being worked on by our technical team. We don't lose those seconds and minutes and hours as in sort of the old school model. So it's part of our broader strategy and we've already been able to identify significant efficiency gains as a result. When it's a response situation someone's got the number, they've got an opportunity to try to get out. What's the total time usually between they picking up the phone and you giving them some action which I don't know what the action is, run away or somebody's coming to get you? You know what, it really depends on the situation. Of course, if we're talking about a minor or a situation with imminent harm, we can be talking about something, you know, an extraction or somebody getting to help within a matter of minutes. In other instances, safety planning at the victim and survivor's wishes takes place over a period of calls, over a period of contact. Sometimes it can take months or years to work up the courage to get to that point. So we do have ongoing communications with victims and survivors over time to support them to leave when they're ready. Right, well Nancy, it's such important work. Not necessarily the most positive thing but I'm sure there's a lot of great positive stories when you're helping these people get out of these crazy situations. Well, absolutely and I think, you know, there is so much reason to be optimistic. This is a really unique moment in time and it's part of why I joined Polaris and joined this anti-trafficking movement is we're seeing unprecedented engagement from the private sector that I mentioned, I think is absolutely critical to solving this issue and we've had real breakthroughs with the data so that we can get so much more granular in understanding how it works. So there's, now really is the time. I mean, as Jennifer said, she's talking about digital transformation this morning, being a team sport. We think the anti-trafficking movement needs to be a team sport and we want to draw that circle much bigger as to who's in that movement and we invite private sector technology companies and all of you out there to join us. Good, well hopefully we're helping get the word out and again, you know, thank you for what you're doing. It's super important and it's much more pervasive and broad than I had ever imagined perhaps in these conversations. So thanks a lot. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. All right. She's Nancy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.