 Podcast Studio, Presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey everybody, welcome, welcome, welcome to our podcast series, Data Movers. I'm your host, Jamie Scott-Okitaya, CEO and founder of JSA, along with my fabulous co-host, none other than top V2B social media influencer, Mr. Evan Christel. Hey Evan. Hey Jamie, good to see you again as always and really exciting episode today at Data Movers where we sit down with the who's who of the data center and telco world, supporting the network and telecom requirements of this modern world. But first Jamie, let's talk about a topic that we don't hear in the news much, AI, GenAI in particular, it really needs a little more attention from us. But you know, I was thinking the other day, you know, there's this job apocalypse worry about AI. And you know, I don't have strong views either way about whether at the macro level, AI will destroy more jobs than it creates or vice versa. But what about our space, media and social and PR, what do you think the short medium term effect on jobs will be? Well short medium term, I think it is an incredible tool that does provide a competitive edge. We here at JSA, we use AI to ensure that our research is crawling across every part of the globe in every language. We use it, you know, we'll make our own outline and then we're like, what else are we missing? Let's let's let's chat, let's go to open AI and see what chat GPT can add to it. So it's part of our foundational research, but then we use our own creative writers in house to make sure that the copy is indeed human. And as it comes from a relevant interactive creative place, you know, Google will actually scan. And if your website is written solely through chat GPT, for example, it'll rank you less for a person. So there is still currently some safeguards in there to protect against just total AI written language being, but it is out there and it can be misleading, can be based on old information. It also can be really difficult in terms of keeping corporate secrets safe, like never ever just put in a press release that you're about to release on chat GPT, like that would be horrible, horrible. So we hear at JSA, we work really hard to, yes, use it as a tool, but make sure that human safeguards are in place. Could you imagine if you told, you know, AI, hey, solve for, you know, starvation for humans and then it could turn around without any of safeguards in place and kill a billion people. So that's what I'm talking about. You need to make sure that their safeguards are as human intervention that we're protecting ourselves short-term, long-term, no matter how great our intentions might be. Yeah, and I think that that's the concern. Long-term is the effect on humanity and humans, but I think you're right, short-term, medium-term, it's a tremendous tool. I think the losers will be people, firms like ours who don't leverage AI tools and best practices and tips and tricks that AI can offer. Even for shows like this, we're creating video content which AI can help turn into short-form clips and audio content from the video content and the written word through transcribing and turning it into short-form blogs and so many other possibilities that if you're not using AI tools and beefing up your knowledge, you're gonna lose out personally and professionally to someone who's much more adept with these tools. So I think that's the risk for most people versus AI just stealing their jobs. So, but we have a cool guest, someone who knows a lot about AI and big data and compute someone from Intel, very senior leader. Oh, you're just stealing my vendor here. Let us get right to it. Let us introduce Mr. Steve Oren, federal CTO of Intel and there at Intel he orchestrates and executes customer engagements in the federal space overseeing the development of federal solution architectures to address challenges in government enterprises, national security and other federal areas of focus. So excited, Steve, a key advisor and subject matter expert in the emerging technology space, of course, providing guidance to the public sector, the fence, intelligence communities and he's here with us today. Yay. Glad to be here, Jamie. Thank you. Well, Steve, very excited to have you here. Very excited to see what Intel is up to, you know, with its renewed strategy and focus, so much excitement happening within Intel these days. But before that, maybe introduce yourself and your role little bit about your personal career path at Intel. Sure. So again, thank you for having me today. As you mentioned, I'm the federal CTO and in that role, it's my job to help the federal government adopt and plan for the coming technologies across the spectrum from small form factor or internet of things to high performance computing and everything in between AI, cybersecurity, help them adopt and deploy and manage these things at scale. The other half of my role at Intel is in translating government requirements back into Intel speak, if you will, so that our business units can better develop future products to meet the current and future needs of the public sector. I've been in this role for just over 10 years prior to that around security pathfinding for Intel. My background is in cybersecurity, having done multiple startups throughout the 90s and 2000s and a variety of areas of cybersecurity and data protection. And so I've really worked my whole career trying to make the world a better place from a security perspective. And now with the federal government in a much larger scope and scale, but really at the end of the day, it's how do we help organizations whether it be commercial or public sector entities protect themselves, adopt the next generation of technologies. And like Jimmy was talking about a moment ago with the right safeguards so that they can get the most return on their investment and the best services for who their customers or constituents are. Yeah, and that's a brilliant lead-in to the conversation we were just having AI. What new cybersecurity threats have been introduced with this evolution of AI and how can government agencies in particular secure against this complete AI life cycle? So that's a really good question. And to come at it, we have to remember that the threat adversary from organized crime to nation state actors look at AI the same way that every organization does. It's a powerful tool. And they're absolutely adopting that tool to advance their goals. We've seen it applied across a multiple of domains. Some examples are automating the malware development life cycle, testing various different potential vulnerabilities in an automated fashion, crafting malware much quicker to be able to go and deploy it. We've seen some very innovative approaches and I know it's weird to use that term but they are being very innovative in the threat adversary world. There were a couple of months ago there was a great example of an attack where they used a deep fake video along with a chatbot to trick a financial person at a company to transfer money. And so they had a deep fake of the video of the CFO as well as an interactive chatbot that was leveraging that AI to basically trick an individual to transfer money out of the company. And let's face it, most individuals believe that they're talking to the CFO when they see a video image and they're seeing a chat on the team's call. And so things along those lines are exactly what they're doing. Another example that many of us may be seeing in our everyday lives is the phishing scams in many cases are getting much better. And a lot of that is because it's not written by someone who doesn't have English as their primary language and are trying to craft an email. They have the AI do it. And so the AI can craft a very personal email trying to get you to click that link or download that file or perform that function. And so we're seeing AI applied across the board by the threat adversaries. And again, it's a tool that they're absolutely taking advantage of. They don't have the same rules and regulations around safeguards and ethical use that organizations and federal government have. And so they have no problem taking advantage of the latest technology if it advances their goals. Wow, that's a lot to unpack there. And so timely a topic in light of RSA conference coming up next month. So tell us more, give us a peek behind the curtain. How is AI innovation, you know, driving change in the infrastructure we're seeing within the agencies and what's happening, you know, behind the scenes to really prepare for this huge wave. So let's look at it from two angles, Evan. I think a lot of people focus on what I call the sexy part of AI. Let's go track ships in the Atlantic. Let's go do really cool object recognition and interactive chap and all these, I mean, and they're amazing things where we can actually affect the day-to-day missions whether it be precision medicine. There's a lot of value there. And that's where a lot of the focus is. I call it the shiny object part of AI. Let's see how we use chat to BT to do this. Let's see how we do generative AI to do that. And those are all important. But one of the areas that I find, you know, it's less sexy, but actually it's where you're gonna get the bigger ROI, you know, the return on investment, you're gonna reduce your time to market, you're gonna get the biggest value is where you apply AI to your legacy processes, to the core business operations like supply chain management and logistics, ERP, enterprise resource planning, finance, HR, taking AI and being able to automate some of those manual human in the loop kind of processes to speed them up. Or in the case of cyber workforce, being able to apply the AI to be able to deal with the 80% of the sort of the day-to-day firefighting and let your cyber talent focus on the 20% hard stuff. And so a lot of the benefit where organizations, both commercial and public sector are seeing some of the biggest returns on their adoption or their projects around AI is when they look at focusing it on those sort of core business applications, enterprise systems and automate and make them more efficient, reduce, you know, find redundancies or inefficiencies in the system. There's been some great examples in the public sector where the very first public ones was the Air Force that took, used an AI machine learning models and applied it to their contracts database with an idea looking for redundancies or contract terms that were not aligned. So you had like 20 contracts and they all had different terms and conditions and how to ratify that so that they weren't managing all this, you know, diversity and complexity in their contracts. And so they really did get a huge benefit by just training on their existing contracts database and having the AI be able to identify those, like I said, redundancies, finding places where they had the same thing being built with different contractors with different terms. And that again creates costs, creates time issues. And so those kinds of projects are actually some of the really cool ones I think because that's the one that's gonna transform and give you the big bang for your buck. And ultimately that will also make life better for when you do those cool projects you'll already have adopted the data pipelines and the governance protocols that are necessary to effectively scale a lot of these mission oriented AI solutions. And talking scaling, we need a creative, innovative workforce coming up soon to really take over these types of projects and to help us protect against cybersecurity. So what recommendations do you have for future generations of tech innovators to really break into this field? So Jamie, I think there are a couple of things I like to say when I'm mentoring the people in my organization or providing guidance to others, when it comes to cybersecurity, a couple of things really come to bear. I mean, obviously there's a lot to keep track of and the industry is constantly changing. My best advice is play with breaking things. Get your hands on things and try it whether it be generative AI, go play with open AI, try to generate a deep fake and then try to see if you can build an algorithm to detect the deep fake. Actually get your hands dirty is really one of the best ways to learn a new technology or a new approach. And then the other is run with your idea. If you have a cool idea of how to solve a problem, fix a vulnerability or understand a different cybersecurity way of doing things, go with it. Don't just leave it in your back of your head. Oh, that's a cool idea. I'll deal with this some other day. Present it to management, do a startup, actually get out there and try it. And you'll find that the really successful tech entrepreneurs and innovators, they had their hand out. They were in the garage. They were playing around with hacking things and then they tried it. They went out. They validated with the market. They went out and tried it. And inside organizations, you see a lot of programs that are doing what they call entrepreneurship inside and being able to help foster that innovation. And those opportunities are probably both the big large corporates as well as small businesses looking for ways to out innovate their competition. So definitely play with breaking things and go with it. Take it to market, try it, present it to management, show what you can do. And that really is some of the ways that we see a lot of the younger generation out innovating some of the folks that are sort of, like you said earlier, stuck in their old ways. Steve, the reason why I'm smiling so much is that you reminded me of a story. My stepfather emigrated from Italy when he was 25 and he went on without a degree to head up IT and operations for a factory in Rhode Island. And I used to say to him, well, how do you figure out all this technical stuff? And he said, well, the machines I don't understand, I take them apart and put them back together again. And I was like, oh, that makes sense. And that was his approach and certainly an approach that would sustain well into the future. So great answer. Thank you. Oh, that's such a fun story. We're gonna get into our rapid fire section where we try to stump you. No, just kidding. We're gonna have some fun back and forth. One thing I get asked a lot for best practices are tips and tricks for securing my own identity, personal identity at home. Do you have any top tips for folks who may not be that technical but are looking to secure themselves against this wave of fraud and malware and other things that are coming at us? So I thought about this and I have three and there are no particular order. There's one that's an easy button. That is turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere you can for both your accounts as well as for the password reset. Make sure you've turned it on. Most organizations have this feature and the tools like the little apps you have in your phone are all free to download. Definitely turn that on because that just raises the bar from a lot of the attacks. Even if you accidentally click on the link, it's gonna ask you for multi-factor and that again will help protect you even from the accidental breach. Two is a less obvious one and that is as you're browsing, separate your activities. Don't browse your email while you're banking or doing other important sensitive transactions because a lot of attacks actually take advantage of the fact that you're logged into one account and then if you get hit over here in your email by clicking a link, it instantly has access to everything you're currently logged into. So log off of everything or shut the browser down, restart it and then go surf the internet or read your email or go to your social media. Just separating those key things. When you do sensitive things, just do that and then close them will actually save you from a lot of those kind of fraud and credential stealing attacks. And the last one is one that I've started thinking about a lot of people, I mean, it takes a little effort but in the age of ransomware is have versions of your most important data backed up offline, it can be a USB stick but the most important stuff, the stuff you can't live those pictures, the Excel spreadsheet of what's your financial situation and all that important data, have it on a USB stick that's not connected to the system that you have offline so that if something goes wrong, you can recover the most important information and start with a new computer plug in the USB and then you can get back your data. And so it's something now in the age of ransomware just having those most important things stored offline and as well as online, in a drive or someplace so that you have easy access to recover because that's going to happen and it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. That's such great advice. Yeah, I'm gonna take number three up right away something I don't do. Another one I would just add while we're on the subject is call your phone company or mobile phone company and have them add extra security to your account and tell them no changes allowed unless I'm in person at the branch. It's amazing how straightforward it is actually to steal your phone identity which is used of course for two-factor authentication and you can add, they'll add an extra password on there. So great tips and tricks. What would say you Jamie? Do you have two factor on all your accounts? Yeah, I try that one but I'm also very guilty of Google sign-in for everything so I'm on the worst. But security threats aside because that topic scares me and I'm really terrible. Steve, what consumer technology are you most excited about and why? Give me something positive. It's a really good question and I think there's a lot of cool technology out there that's some great augmented reality but when I think about the thing that actually I find most fascinating and useful in my everyday life is and most of the collaboration systems have it now is AI transcription. It has actually been a game changer internally and for me if I'm on a call and it's recording, creating the transcript it doesn't just give me the notes which is okay but actually these tools nowadays are actually putting it into tracking task items. Like if I say I'm gonna do something it's gonna put that in there and put it in bold. It's gonna actually keep track of the things we all committed to and then email them out to us so that we know what we said in that meeting. Some of the more advanced ones actually are integrated into your office probably whether it be Microsoft or Google so that when you say I wanna get something done by a certain data will create a reminder. I mean that kind of interaction with something that I don't have to sit there and take notes while I'm talking has been absolutely amazing. Oh that's such a good one and even this video podcast will be transcribed and there are tools that can turn it into a really nice blog for those of us who hate writing or actually will write for us so that's a good one. Speaking of innovation any tech innovators in history that you admire living or dead? So there are a lot of modern innovators that I looked up to and I continue to do so people from the early internet days like Vint and Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest on the cryptography side and Bruce Schneier was one of my early mentors but if you look at the history I think one that doesn't often get the notice but I really love it for how she came about it is Hedy Lamar. For those who don't know Hedy Lamar great actor from the early days of cinema but what you don't maybe know is that she's the inventor of spread spectrum frequency hopping. I mean game changing technology wasn't, the timing wasn't great and since the Navy wasn't ready for what she had come up with but later on she was inducted into the innovators hall of fame because she came up with a way of eliminating jamming of RF signals by frequency hopping. Her patent is the first in that domain and we're talking about someone who was an actress and singer and musician and what really exciting about it is how she came about that innovation. She heard about from her husband who had been working at the Navy about a problem and she looked at it from a perspective of a musician about how notes and how you'll line notes together and how you can jump from different octaves and she had this idea of how to apply that to radio frequency communication. So I look at her as a great example of someone who fought outside of her domain and actually innovated across a domain that she wasn't well known for. Yes, she's a great example. Funny enough, her great niece, Lea Lamar is a 20-something actor model in LA. What do you think all these innovators both present and past have in common? Is there some common DNA that they share? So I think, and it goes to the Hedy Lamar example, it's about outside-the-box thinking and really coming at it from a diversity of ideas and viewpoints and that is, I think, really the hallmarks of those great innovators is that they don't stay in that silo or in that lane that they've been predescribed to be in and they use their experiences in other domains and other technologies or other areas and bring a fresh view to a problem which often is how you get those technology innovations. And so I think that that is one of the key things. If you look at what some of those early innovators, how they came up with their cool idea, it wasn't because they were studying that problem over and over and over again or they learned something in school, it's because they experienced something outside of that domain that influenced them. And so that diversity of thought and outside-the-box thinking, I think is a common thread of some of the greatest innovators of our time. Wonderful thought and it's so great to see so much innovation coming out of Intel. We have a long history there. Well, I don't know if it must be a museum or something of Intel innovation somewhere, but I'll have to research that one day. In California headquarters. Okay, well, road trip. Well, thanks for joining, Steve. Really informative and interesting quick chat and catch up. I picked up some tips and tricks as well. So that was fantastic and can't wait to meet in person at one of the many events out and about in the security space. Thank you, Evan, and thank you, Jamie. But yeah, check us out on all the social channels, including Threats, that's my latest one that I'm excited about. And LinkedIn and Twitter, of course, and we have amazing guests coming up. Look forward to our next chat.