Smart Talks with IBMIn this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Jason Kelley, GM, Strategic Partners and Ecosystems at IBM, and Kristy Friedrichs, SVP and Chief Partnership Officer at Palo Alto Networks. They discuss the challenges and opportunities that the rapid development of AI brings to the cybersecurity space. Jason and Kristy also underscore how implementing a zero trust strategy can help enterprises enhance cyber resiliency and simplify operations. Together, IBM and Palo Alto Networks are delivering fully integrated, open, end-to-end security solutions to enterprises.
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Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Pushkin Industries, iHeart Radio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glapwell. This season, we're diving back into the world of artificial intelligence, but with a focus on the powerful concept of open its possibilities, implications, and misconceptions. We'll look at openness from a variety of angles and explore how the concept is already reshaping industries, ways of doing business and our very notion of what's possible. On today's episode, I'm joined by Jason Kelly, the global Managing Partner for IBM Strategic Partners and Ecosystems, and by Christy Fredericks, the Senior Vice president and Chief Partnership Officer at Palo Alto Networks. We discussed how their partnership in the cybersecurity space helps strengthen enterprises by focusing on seamless cybersecurity solutions tailored to meet the evolving threat landscape. By leveraging AI and automation, this collaboration aims to modernize security programs, improve response times, and produce risks. Jason and Christie both bring a tremendous amount of experience and expertise to the subject I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Jason Christy, Welcome to Smart Talks with IBM. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
We are here to discuss cybersecurity and the partnership between IBM and Palo Alto Networks. But before we get there, I wanted you guys to tell me a little bit about yourself. Jason's start with you. I see on your resume west Point, which makes we think there's some interesting things going on. How did you get to west Point?
West Point? West Point was the decision. First, it was it was affordable back in the day. But I had a sense of service. My father was a World War Two vet, so I grew up on the weekends watching World War two video. You know he's army as well. Yeah, and so I thought, oh, that'd be exciting, and I thought I do some type of service. Went there and now I have the biggest family, extended family I could ever have.
So it was very exciting.
Played football lucked out, meaning I wasn't recruited.
I walked on and that kept.
Me there because it gave me something and out left with all the other pressures defensive back, I was I was great at knocking the ball down, not the best at catching it.
Yeah, and then you were a ranger.
I was.
I was privileged to be a US Army airborne ranger station, but did most of my time in northern Italy. We're part of the it's eighty second airbarnship post. Oh yeah, people say seriously, like, you know, you were, you were, you were drinking wine and having bred, you know, but it was.
We're part of a NATO force there at the time. Yeah, so exciting.
How did you get from there to IBM?
A long path.
As I came out of the military, I started manufacturing retail housing and did a quick stint, took a leave of absence from industry, and did a stint of yet again public service in the state of Tennessee with economic development, and got a whiff of how fun it could be to do things around data and media. Started a small media firm what we would now call a digital firm, sold it and said I wanted to go do it again somewhere, but I wanted to go to a big company. And the family at IBM brought me in and yet to let me go.
That was how many years ago, two decades oh wow, Yeah.
So I know I look amazingly young on but yes, you must have.
And IBM was my fifth career and and and I've enjoyed a since. And that's what I what I do.
They build teams, grow new parts of the company and get to work with some of the most brilliant people on the face of the planet, as well as partners like Christy that just keep it exciting.
Christy, you're I was delighted to learn that you are Canadian.
Yes from here?
Yeah.
But you so you were a consultant for a long time at Bane.
Yes. Yeah. I joined Bain Consulting intending to spend a couple of years there learn the ropes and then go get my first real job. But the value personally to my growth and development, and then that we were able to bring our clients. I ended up there for sixteen years, and then post Bain went on to another my first product company, a new relic, and then it's come full circle at Powlta Networks. But at Bain it was all about bringing expertise across different industries to help our clients improve whatever they needed to improve and bringing that expertise to bear. And then you have the product lens and you think, Okay, we're going to build the absolute best product to help our customers do what they need to get done. And then I joined pal Alto about six seven months ago in a partnership's role and I'm delighted to be able to work with amazing consulting companies like IBM where we bring both to bear.
How long have IBM and Paulo Alto Network's been partners?
So we've been We've been working together for quite quite a long time, but we made it official, meaning we got married as strategic partners last year.
Oh I see. So what is it that each of you bring to the table? What's each side special?
So it's great that you asked that because about a decade ago, are now CEO Arvin Christ says, you know, it wouldn't be great if we just had this one focus with this what does IBM do? And you have this whole list, and he says, let's make it simple. We are a multi cloud, hybrid cloud a company. And so when you say that, it sounds very simple, but then.
People, what the hell is that? What your hybrid cloud?
Well, both of those two things have a lot of data involved and a lot of those mean that that data is going to sit in multiple places and distributed environments. Well, if you're able to tie those things together with multiple partners, you also have to make sure that it's secure because in the direction that we're going, where data is now being consumed in many different places and it is the fuel behind AI as we know, then you say, ah, well, who does that well and who does it in a way that's getting rid of seams, the seams that could be across multiple products, multiple product SATs even And that's where Powell comes in.
I think the conventional wisdom and cybersecurity was always you need all the new tools, right, you need it every threat. It's like, whack them all. Every threat that pops up, you get the tool that's purpose built for that specific thing. Well, fast forward to you know, the RSA conference this year, there were four thousand vendors on the floor. You look at an average company, there's hundreds of cybersecurity tools. It introduces a level of complexity that is really hard to manage you as a user. Query and application, right, that query can go through a bunch of different pings from one cloud to the next. It goes into and out of assaas application. It maybe running along a network. You may be accessing it from your phone, which is an unmanaged device. It's got to go in and out. And if you say, okay, I've got to secure that phone, I've got to secure the network, I've got it. And then all of a sudden you've got sort of firewalls, software and hardwelfiles popping up everywhere. You've got cloud security, and it's you've probably heard of this concept of zero trust, which is every time you have to check and say are you allowed in here? Are you allowed in here? The number of places that can fall down it just becomes overwhelming. So you end up with either alerts firing, you know, every two seconds that you have to then go invest again, most of which are false positives or you miss something right. And so that was the conventionalism was we've got to buy all these tools, and now you've got overwhelmed CIOs and CSOs with hundreds of tools, and Palo Alto strategy has been, look, we're going to create a platform where everything can be stitched together, everything can speak the same language, and we can sort of manage throughout the architecture and watch, you know, this call as as it's passing through all these different checkpoints, and we can do it in a way that you still have the confidence that it's best to breed right, so you're not making any trade offs. But it's not so simple just to get from the spaghetti to the seamless architecture. You need, oftentimes to re engineer your business processes. You have to re architect your digital environment. And so that's where we partner with a company like IBM to bring that expertise and say we're going to help you not just deploy the best cybersecurity architecture, but really get your environment ready to have this zero testomer.
As well as all of those players that cross at spaghetti. Because when you start thinking about all the other partners that you work with, if you're you think of an industry perspective, you're going to have an ERP. It could be an Oracle, it could be an SAP. You're not going to have one cloud, as I mentioned, it's gonna be possibly multiple clouds. You'll have some AWS maybe Microsoft Asure and then even even some Google in there, and then your own that you've built in your private over there.
Uh, some an IBM cloud.
You'll have those multiple clouds, and then you also will have you know, fit for purpose. Oh I need a I need a salesforce in there for my customer focusing. I need I'm doing some graphics, so I have Adobe, so I just as I can name name name, all of those then have to be re engineered seriously.
I mean, come on, Malcolm, You're gonna sit there.
You think how long that would take. So if you haven't done that before, you're going to have to go to each one of those individually, or you can work with a company that can tie those things together, because we are also strategic partners with them. So that's where you start to say, Okay, I see how this comes together. You have to make sure that your ecosystem is going to be stronger than your competitor's ecosystem, and you have to be secure in what you're doing because as you add more players or products, you create seams, and you want to make sure there's fewer seams and that there's zero trust across that capability you're building. And that's why the compliment between the two companies.
We'll take a step back from a moment before we sort of launch once get into the specifics of what you guys are doing. I'm curious at this moment in twenty twenty four, how nervous should we be about cybersecurity? So compared it to five years ago or ten years ago, are we Are you less nervous than you were five years ago or more nervous or all of changes going on right now increasing vulnerability or decreasing it.
I would say Chris, also, I think we share the point of views that it's not necessarily being more nervous.
I think you should be more prepared.
Yeah, because the amounts of threat is increasing based on our dependence upon data. And that's that's where I think the attention should be placed. Is that more and more, especially with the importance of AI that you say, okay, then what's under all that?
And it's the data?
As I said, So knowing that you should be more concerned.
Does the advent of AI and it's rapid evolution help defense more or offense more?
I think it's I think it's like any mega trend that we've witnessed both. Right, So you think about AI, it's ninety nine percent great right in terms of what it's going to unlock for productivity, for humanity, But it also makes it a whole lot easier to build ransomware. It's a whole lot easier to take different ways into a system, right. But I think that's true if you think about like the rise of the Internet, right, all of a sudden, everyone was putting their data online and you had to think of new ways to stay ahead and keep that secure. And I don't think AI is any different. You've got companies like Palta, partnerships like Powell and IBM that are constantly scanning the landscape for not only the current threats, but what's next, what's coming around the corner, what's after AI? And so I think taking it seriously and being prepared is probably the right way of looking at it, as opposed to because if you think about it too hard, you'll just want to crawl into a corner and stuff everything under the mattress.
I am the CEO of a regional hospital chain, big distribute healthcare system, so a ton of data. The consequences of being hacked and help for ransom are life and death. Life and death. When you come so you you come down, You sit down with me, and you chat with me. Walk me through the kinds of things you would tell me about what I need to get safer. For example, let's start with one. Is it likely that I'm spending too little or am I spending money in the wrong place?
Great question, It depends how you've broken it out. If you are distributing all of your dollars across a whole bunch of different tools, it's likely you're just spending the wrong money. And in fact, you know, putting it all in one place is a way of potentially saving money but keeping your security actually higher. And I'd love to hear Jason, how you would approach it. How we would approach it, of course, is by saying, you know what, what does your environment look like? You know, do you have the connected medical devices into your EMR? Are your respirators and ventilators all online? Right? And so we would talk about, okay, here's how you get coverage, and how the coverage of both the firewalls as well as the detectors all feedback into your security operation center and you can manage it and and do your learning with AI and keep yourself securing.
So yeah, and I would say Christy and I would go to the same point because if you get under what she was just asking, it is your data on prem and when it's on prem, how active is it across the enterprise? And so that begins the basis for the start. And then often you're going to say, well, we actually take in data from outside and then we also have the circumstances. There's a lot of PII and so that personal is the personal information, right, Yeah, And so now you're saying, okay, now how are we securing that and where are we securing it? And so you have to start really thinking about the different areas within that hospital chain. Are you sharing that amongst your hospitals? And now you start to think of if I'm saying no to a lot of that, it's like, well, then are you as efficient as you want to be? So there is that trade off of you know, am I so tightly walled that I'm not productive? And so that's where we would start to say, what's the outcome that you're trying to get to? All Right, maybe you're good, Maybe you're you're good with your five locations and you don't need to go any further, but maybe you want to expand to fifty and by the way, you're going to go crossport or you're going to be in Toronto and in New York. Okay, well then how do you do that? And so I think that it's very easy to start jumping into any of the typical situations. But the first question that you have to ask you, as the hospital CEOs, what's your objective? What are you what are you trying to do? Because too often what we see is that there's some bright, new, shiny thing that everybody wants to put in play. You know, it's a sandwich looking for lunch and you go, but what is it that you want to do as this Are you doing research? Are your research hospital? Are you more consumer oriented? So those are the questions you start to ask because they start to then tell a story in line with what Christy questions. And I think that that's where the again, the complement is that instead of just saying, oh, well, that's thanks for telling me all this, Malcolm, here's your ten page strategy.
Go find somebody.
We have the benefit in IBM, and is probably why I'm still there is.
You know, we're very unique.
We're the only company on the planet that has a consulting business at scale inside of a technology company, and so we have you know, the left brain, right brain, we're able to do that, and then we're able to say, okay, now which partners are going to be most valuable for our clients.
What's going to work for you?
Isn't going to work for the manufacturer down the road, isn't going to work for the consumer or CpG company across the river. Those things are very specific. The threats and the scenes that I was talking about are very specific. So that's where it becomes very valuable to make sure that I'm not just giving you some strategy that's generic.
But everything as a healthcare CEO, everything I have done, almost everything I've done over the last ten years, hasn't it had the effect of increasing my vulnerability. I want to digitize data within the hospital used to be on pieces of paper. I want doctors to go home and to be able to seamlessly hook into stuff at work because they got to do all their paperwork. I want to make sure the diabetes people are speaking to the organ transplant people. And so isn't that everything I have done to kind of keep up with the revolution in healthcare? Isn't that also making me more and more vulnerable to a bad actor.
It's such a great question because think about the quality of healthcare delivery.
Right.
So now doctors aren't filling out forms, they're spending time with patients, and so the quality of care is improving and the vulnerability is improving, right, And so I think that's where having a strong cybersecurity strategy actually enables all of that. One of our products is our sas product, and we tested it with some business application and oftentimes the wrap is, oh, security is going to slow you down, like you have to add a firewall, you have to checkpoints. Our product actually increases the velocity of your ability to use that application because of the way that it is queried through our system as opposed to just through the regular network. So it doesn't slow it down and in fact, it makes it run more efficiently. That's just one minor example. But back to the healthcare question. I, as a patient want my doctors accessing all the technology and talking to each other and connecting the dots behind the scenes. I also want my data to stay private, and so having both a consulting partner who understands how to ask questions of the environment and of the applications you're using, and who understands the industry inside and out, and a technology partner that builds and stays ahead of all of the different threats come together and advise you. I think is super important. When you bring in a partner like IBM, with a platform like Palalta that covers all the different parts of your environment, you're able to say, look, where where are the vulnerabilities in the system, Where are the different endpoints that we need to have covered, and then just make sure you get that breadth of coverage, and then you're better able to so, yes, you've increased the risk, but then you've mitigated it.
So to give so before I retire my healthcare analogy, because I was thinking about just trying to understand the importance of this idea of having a single platform. So if this mudtal healthcare network is typical, I've acquired a whole series of over the last ten years. I bought a hospital over here, some I got some physicians, things that I snapped up over here about a diagnostics company, and so I have all of these legacy systems and I had, like you said, maybe I got some stuff in the cloud with one company, some stuff with the cloud. And what you're saying is the first step is to kind of rationalize that put it on a single platform, so you understand where your points of weakness are as opposed to being blind to your points of weakness.
There's yes, although anyone who's done any kind of M and A knows that that's a long journey, right. So I think the first step is just understanding where everything is. And then you get on a path and you say, where's the biggest risk. Let's let's neutralize or mitigate that risk one at a time. The thing about open end secure, you know Palo Alto. We keep touting the benefits of the platform. Everything on Palo Alto, your risk is going to be mitigated and you're going to have the full visibility. But you can't get there overnight. And so we've got you know, thousands of integrations with other technology companies, including our partners, to make sure that we can capture and have visibility into those those endpoints in those systems as well. And so I think step one is just figure out where everything is. Just get the scan. So Polta has a couple of products where you can kind of deploy and get a view of your attack surface. I love the analogy. Just like a digital environment is a house, right and so like you have your front lock, of course, because probably they're going to try the front door first. But that's not all you're going to do, right, You're going to make sure the whole you know, the windows are locked and there's an alarm system and all of that. And I think that's how you have to think about it, is just how do we cover the whole service?
So everyone laid, people like me have been bombarded over it seems like over the last year with one thing another about how quickly AI is moving forward and how big of a deal it is suddenly is going to be in the economy. What is the impact of that dramatic change in AI's capabilities on this cybersecurity question? So what does it mean if you're defending somebody that you now have these sophisticated AI tools you just suppose.
I think that AI becomes the force multiplier for cyber To think about cyber Before it was just locking your doors, locking the windows, and if you were really good, you had an alarm system. You know, Now with AI, you can say, well, I can predict what's going to happen, I can see around the corner. I know, I can leave my windows open upstairs, and it's fine and it's okay.
I mean because why because the AI is running a million simulations.
It can And that's exactly it. It becomes the intelligent part of that AI. It's not artificial, it's augmented. So you now have this new capability to see around corners and so you're able to do the jobs of yesterday more effectively.
And the.
Queries that you were doing and that's all you're really doing, now you're doing them, you know, faster, You're able to access even more data and you're able to then make it more secure. So that's why AI becomes a force multiplier.
Yeah, and just talk about the faster part. What does faster mean in practical terms? If you're trying to defend an enterprise against a cyber attack, what does speed matter in that environment?
You're always trying to find a place through I go back to you. We brought up the army. You always how do you break the line? How do you find a penetration point? And when you think about you know, pin testing, penetration testing.
Where are those?
So if you're able to do that faster than the bad guys, and not only faster, but you're picking more probable points.
This is back to the intelligence.
I could waste time doing penetration testing someplace where. That's why I mentioned leave. If they can't get in the second story windows, why are you spending time trying it? So that becomes more effective. So that's when I think of speed. That's what I think of because with not just speed, I think it's also what's effective.
Just to put a put a fine point on it. So I found a way in. Okay, Now what I don't know where the jewelry is, so I have to look around and see if there's any hidden gems and try to find my way. That used to take a week, two weeks, or of seven to fourteen days. Now it's hours right so there in and they can actually expltrate data within less than a day. The metric we use in the security operation center is meantime to detect, so to see anyone's there, meantime to respond and remediate to get them out right. That used to be also you know, seven eight, nine, ten days. Now it needs to be less than an hour. And with our AI based security operations platform, it is. Now you've got one tool that whether it's all peloton networks or whether it's just you know, hoofringing data from other places and you're able to see it all together, so you actually get fewer alerts. So you get from thousands of alerts down to one hundred alerts, right, and you can investigate them and you investigate them using AI too. And AI is today it's today's threat, but it's you know, you think about threat and opportunity to think about what's next. You always have to be kind of evolving and you have to think.
We talk about threat and risk, and you know, we didn't tell you know, what is the cost of cyber some type of penetration. It's typical cost is for four and a half million dollars and that's just in labor and remediation. If you think about reputational risk as well, our Institute for Business Value to the study and found it in twenty twenty three and they were thirty nine banks that we watched that suffered a reputational risk market value of one hundred and thirty billion dollars. And so you start to think, wow, that's just reputational risk. So that's what's at stake here, and it's only that is only going to get bigger.
So one of the piece we haven't talked about about AI that I find super interesting because we've been talking essentially about like the terminator, the robots fighting robots, right, Like whose robots are quicker? Like I'm designing at tax and I'm defending against tax, and I think that's that's super important. But we recently launch and our working at IBM on our AI security product to actually secure the use of AILA because it also opens up another set of threat factors. I'll give you an exampimple. I'm a marketing executive now for your hospital. So I work for you, and you want to announce the launch of a new center, and so I upload all the information about all the patients and our you know how we do things into chat GPT to write the PR for me. Well, I've also just uploaded to chat GPT a whole bunch of secrets, right. So it's it's how employees are using AI, because I think, you know, some companies are sort of building their own language models and their own AI applications that they want to keep secure. Others are just curious about how their employees are using AI applications on the shelf. And so we announced in May a product where you can actually scan and see how AI is being used in your enterprise and within We made the announcement with the GA was last month, but we made the announcement in May, and we had immediately thousands of CIOs signing up because just understanding you know who's using what it's another open question because you know, we talk about AI enhancing productivity and all the benefits it's going to bring, but it brings it brings risks, not just in how it's being used by the threat actors, but also you know what other vulnerabilities That.
Excise is the eye that you does that system tell you what's a problematic use?
It does, so what what it does, and you've got to train it right. But what it does is say this is this is outside of your policy. So CIOs will set policies on here's what is acceptable and not acceptable use. So we'll be able to scan and say these these falling uses are outside of policy, and then it'll punt and say I think this is too restrictive, I think this is too permissive, and then you can sort of update your policies from there. That's just sort of the visibility piece, and then there's the run time piece, which will actually stop you from using it. So you go and say, Okay, here's all my patient's social security numbers. I'm going to upload them to chat GPT to you know, get an understanding of like where they all live. I don't know what why you would possibly do that, but let's say you were, and then you know, it'll note that looks like a social security number. You can't upload that into your prompt, so it.
Will stop before you Yeah, thoughtful voice over your shoulder, just to remind you not to do something silly exactly.
But this is just.
Talk a little bit more about adding AI into this mix. You say it's a force multiplier. It's a really interesting dig into that. What other instances of what that means?
Well?
How does the balance between AI and human expertise work in the kind of next generation of cybersecurity?
I think the.
Common way to look at as it back to the force multipliers, It's not going to be is your AI better? But can you use it better? Can you ask your AI the right questions? Are you well trained? So the competition really becomes your use of AI? And are you pointed it in the right direction? You have fifty people can they do the work of two hundred and fifty, and can they do it in a safe and secure manner, So you're not opening up more risk based on or too much risk is your risk tolerance in order to get the outcome. So that's why I think there's the opportunity. And so you see this truly as a force multiplier because the first thing people go, oh, you're going to get rid of people, Oh, the people portion is still still going to be just as important because they're doing that other piece of work.
One of my favorite statistics is that there are now more bank tellers in the US than there were in nineteen sixty before the ATM was invented. Right, So, but it used to be you would go to your bank because you had to. I remember doing this. You go, you fill out your deposit slip, you hand it to the teller and they give you your cash. And then ATMs are invented, and it's like, oh, no, what's going to happen all these jobs and now there's more, Right, but you're not withdrawing money from a bank teller. You're now doing more sophisticated transactions. And so I think it's similar with AI, Right, Like you want people doing things that only people can do.
The human element remains absolutely central in all of this. How do you make sure that your cybersecurity folks are equipped to handle high value tasks, are ready for the this increasing responsibility.
There's a couple of ways to answer this, but I think the more you're able to automate the routine and the mundane tasks. For example, the bulk of cybersecurity happens in the security operations center. There's analysts who are sitting in that center. If they're spending all day either configuring alerts or responding to alerts, they're not able to do the advanced sort of threat hunting and analysis work. And so I think a big chunk of it is just freeing up their time to be able to do the more advanced strategic work. And a lot of the automation tools based on AI, like our cortex XIM product, is it's designed to free up their time in order to be able.
To do that, And from our perspective, is making sure that it's a requirement to make sure that you have the qualifications because people can easily get used to.
Doing what they've always done.
I know this, and that's what I do you say, well, now, all the threat actors are learning on the fly. They're trying to always outsmart you. So it's in your best interest, our best interest, our client's best and partners best that you are on the front leaning edge of that learning capability.
If you're talking to a client he wants to develop a kind of unified cybersecurity strategy, what's the best single piece of advice you can give them?
You should have a single platform. It's hard not to answer that, but it is true. I mean all joking aside having you know the best of breed solutions that are all talking to each other and able to stitch together and identify threats before human might be able to. That's number one, and number two is making sure you have visibility on all elements so you're able to cover your whole environment and understand how people are accessing it.
I'd say, think like a bad actor.
Yeah, always think outside in because you get comfortable the other way around.
You guys work together with a Push and five company, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about use that as a kind of case study for what this collaboration between the two your two companies looks like. When you work with a cloud.
It really was you know, IBM leading on a digital transformation for this client that wanted to move their applications into the cloud. And so you're asking a lot of questions about how does AI increase the risk and the surface area. Those same questions ten years ago were asked about the cloud, and we're still on the journey where where companies are migrating into the cloud. We're not anywhere near finished that yet. And so there's two pieces to a cloud migration. One is just refactoring for the cloud to make sure the application works effectively in the cloud. And the second is security. And then you built in security by design using poll does prison of cloud products to make sure that not only did you have the visibility so our cloud product you can scan and see where the vulnerabilities are. And then there's also you know cloud firewalls essentially that will keep bad actors out and keep the cloud instance secure.
If we sit down, I don't have this conversation five years from now, which I actually hope we do.
Be fun.
This pretend is twenty twenty nine. Tell me what are you happy about in twenty twenty nine.
I think twenty twenty nine, quantum computing is mainstream. I think quantum computing is now quantum safe, where we're using quantum computing to make sure that those bad actors aren't as bad as they used to be back in twenty twenty four, and we're seeing around the corners and that we're empowering our palo Alto relationship. That in twenty twenty nine is the premiere type of capability that people are looking at when they think of what used to be AI and now is quantum capability.
Yeah, yeah, I think for AI, everyone's just using it as part of their job. The way email was an innovation in the nineties, the way you know cloud was an innovation in the twenty tens, and we thought, how are we going to use this? What impact is it going to have on productivity? All these people who are spending their days typing up memos, like what are they going to do? We're going to be past that fear and we're all going to understand that it is this like truly positive force multiplier. For you know, every employee is able to do their best work and spend their time on the things that only they can do, and then the AI is doing the rest of that for them.
Right, AI, it's fun to enable many things to work together, and it won't be just one language model.
We won't even think about.
It will be the difference between you know, Malcolm having a fax machine, stereo and a telephone and a memo board. Now it's in your pocket and it's all one thing and you don't even call that, you know. I said, walk them into my kids the other day and they're like, what's a walk man? So I do think it will. It'll be part of the past, and it will be the stock of the seamless connection. That is, secure seamless connection, of HR, of finance, of distribution, logistics, of billing, all.
Of those will have a capability to work together. Yeah.
I have to do some social quick fire questions. You guys ready, all right? What's the number one thing that people misunderstand about AI?
The reliance on data? What do you mean by that?
I think that it's just assumed that it's happening and it can just go out and grab data anywhere.
Yeah, you have.
To have good data, reliable data, and access to the data.
I think people are too afraid of it.
Checkbox and image generators are the biggest things in consumer AI right now? What do you think is that next big business application?
Jason, I think it's the tying together of multiple capabilities. I'm hinting towards this earlier is. I think tying together the disparate systems that sit in different parts of the organization, front all this back office, making it one office and tying together those different functions.
That's it.
I mean, it's workflow automation. I think back to your point on the reliance on data seems easy. It's a lot harder than you think because you have to have everything set up and exactly the right way to get all of your systems automated and the sort of the more boring jobs taken care of so that humans could do the strategic ones.
How are you already using AI in your day to day life?
I mean I use it at work all the time, and then I've found right now I go to chat, GPT instead of Google to look things up. I like having a conversation.
We have a wonderful capability in our consulting business called our consulting assistant and consulting advantage is the proper name for it, but I look at it as.
That assistant and it's a force multiplier for me.
So if I need to pull together content proposals with the teams, we go straight to that.
We are one more we Here's so many definitions of open related to technology. How do you define it and how does the concept help you innovate?
By definition? In cybersecurity, you don't want to be too open, right, So I think we enable openness with this concept of zero trust and saying like everyone's invited in as long as you have the right credentials, right. So that's that's one way, and then the other way is just making sure you're connected to all the different systems in order to be able to have that visibility and see what's happening, because if you are blind, that's the minute you have that vulnerability.
And I'd say it's moving quickly with security, it sounds contradictory open.
Oh then it means you're not safe. No, you are safe and you can move faster.
Yeah, thank you so much.
It's fun.
Thanks a lot, Thank you great. We'll see you in five years.
Five years, man, I'll be old in five years. Thank you to Jason Kelly at IBM and Christy Frederick's at Polo Alto networks for that fascinating conversation about the threats and opportunities in cybersecurity today. As Jason and Christie stressed, AI can be a force multiplier for enterprise across industries. When you're working with multiple products and have your data in distributed environments, you need technology that will work across your organization, and with Palo Alto Networks platform, you can enhance cyber resiliency and simplify your operations. Through their collaboration, IBM and Palobalto Networks are charting the future a fully integrated open end to end security solutions. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, Joey Fishground, Amy Gaines McQuaid, and Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Lydia Jane Kott. Our engineers are Sarah Bugaier and Ben Tolliday. Theme song by Gramoscope Special thanks to the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well as the Pushkin Marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm Glapham. This is a paid advertisement from IBM. The conversations on this podcast don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.
