AI Roundtable: 12 Takeaways, Opportunities, Dangers
Generative AI can be a big sales accelerator.
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Glide Apps Brett Haralson said when it comes to AI, many businesses are struggling with understanding it.
“AI is a buzzword like the internet was back in the 90s, and I don't think they really understand what it is, how to interface with it and how they can transform their process,” he said. “We all know it's ChatGPT. It’s extracting data, text from images, data formatting, being able to take things and make it appear a certain way, generating HTML, data analysis and ideation. This can increase the time and speed, and reduce time for businesses, which equals money or less employees.”
Coro’s Hilary Gada said her company’s platform is AI based, so with the SME marketplace,”part of what we offer is, since they typically aren't experts, the AI will do that and trace their business and follow what they're doing, and make the trends for them, and then follow the security appropriately based on what they're doing.”
“So that's been amazing and it's taking the fear of AI out from that marketplace,” she said. “The challenge I see is finding the right tools for the right fit, for the right reason. So it's that sorting through all of it to get to the one thing that's really impactful. Once you find it, it's like gold.”
AKATI Sekurity’s Krishna Rajagopal said his company made the decision to include an element of AI in every product for its clients. If a product doesn’t include AI, it’s not going to be future-proof and then “you're going to be stuck with things that are outdated or archaic.”
“And then the platform that we use internally for our own solution also has AI and we see it as a huge productivity booster and morale booster … because now my security operations center (SOC) analysts are not doing mundane tasks anymore,” he said. “They're doing more things that matter. And I think that's a major win for us. The only thing that we probably have to worry about is privacy. I think everyone has to decide on that on their own, not just dump source code onto something that's public. But if it's a private AI instance, perfect. I think the main challenge as a service provider or an individual is privacy.”
Bergamo Marketing Group’s Allison Bergamo said we’re now in phase two of AI.
“According to McKinsey's report on the state of AI in 2023, almost a quarter of C-suite executives in a survey are saying they're personally using generative AI tools for work,” she said. “And to me, that signals that they're like OK, 11 months ago I was hearing about generative AI from my marketing team because we always go for the shiny objects. Now they're personally trying it out to see how do we take AI or generative AI from an experiment to a business growth accelerator. For companies to be able to get all their data from their different sources, unify it, and then be able to leverage it into more personalized or hyper-personalized customer experiences, I think that's where you'll see a lot of focus in this space of AI.”
Haralson said generative AI caught the attention of the mass public.
“It's really interesting to me to see people create custom software that allows you to ask a question, tap into some of these generative AI components, come up with five really cool topics, click one and then now it writes in whatever you want to build the flow,” he said. “I don't think anybody really knows where AI is going to go. I don't think we at Glide know where it's going to go, but we're giving that power to our users and MSPs. And it's really interesting seeing what they're creating and how they're using it. And I'm really excited to see where it goes.”
The generative AI adoption rate is “incredible” and people are putting it into practical use, Gadda said.
“We have a very young sales team within Coro … and I find it to be an amazing accelerator for speed to sale for people that are still learning,” she said. “To be able to get that email, the open rates and the data on all of those things is significant and impressive. And we see that in what we're getting in appointments and doors open, and all of the things that go along with it. So from that perspective, I see a lot of positivity. And how we use it with security, I think that's been quite amazing as well. Everybody's got some regulation that you have to find, so to be able to get those things and pull them through with AI has been amazing as well. It's a great learning tool.”
Rajagopal said end consumers are predominantly focused on generative AI, whereas enterprises and service providers are using mainly machine learning (ML) models and large language models (LLMs).
“But I think in the next couple of years we're going to see a convergence,” he said. “So a lot of the commercial end user products are going to start tapping into LLMs and ML models, and then enable generative AI back to them using the data that they have with privacy checked. But for now there's a clear disparity there.”
Today's buyers are digital natives and AI can help sales teams better meet their needs, Bergamo said.
“Because of the pandemic, everyone sheltered in place and started educating themselves on their own, and digital natives do not want to interact with salespeople at all,” she said. “However, they often immerse themselves in so much data that they can't determine what is valuable, what is correct and what is insightful, and that ends up resulting in a confused buyer, and a confused buyer is an inactive buyer. The good thing about LLMs is they're very good at making analogies. They're very good at comparing concepts. So, for example, a salesperson or a marketing person can say to Claude or another AI tool can you provide me with three simple examples to explain cybersecurity mesh architecture. Then you can get in front of the customer or prospect and say I know you have some questions about cybersecurity mesh architecture, it's very complex, but here we've drilled it down to what's important and valuable to you.”
Haralson said in business, time is money, and AI can quickly remove monotonous and mundane processes that otherwise take forever. For example, a service provider built an inventory management tool for a wine distributor.
“They could take a picture of the wine and it would use AI to look up the make, the year, the region, and auto populate all the things that normally you have to type out to add it to the inventory,” he said. “So using AI, but having a human check, and that's what it was built for. The fields were all populated and editable where all they had to do is just scroll, correct, submit and now it's added. Just that simple thing alone changes the process of a very boring task.”
Gadda said AI presents an opportunity to grow, not shrink or shed workers, because it’s increasing efficiency.
“So now where you had one group, you can now add another,” she said. “This group is still doing what they’re doing, they're just having an assistant, and now you can grow your business and you can go in another direction that you were wanting to. You might be able to open that other location. So I look at it as a growth accelerator versus let's save money. I think in our industry, that's what we lead with, how can we grow.”
It’s doing more with less on a personal level, not an organizational level, Rajagopal said.
“It's not like we have 10 people and now we're going to shrink it down to five,” he said. “I don't think that's going to happen, but it's more like what kind of output can I get from the same 10 people? I may be able to get much more by using generative AI because now they're all doing more meaningful tasks. They've eliminated all that repetitive work and pushed it down to generative AI. It allows people to grow. It’s pretty much like what happened when the calculator first came out. There was a rumor that all accountants were out of a job, but that never happened. It just made the accountants smarter to do more and faster.”
Cybercriminals have been using AI for years, and they are crafting very sophisticated, more intense and more frequent cyberattacks, Bergamo said.
“And they are using generative AI to do everything, creating phishing emails, smishing or vishing,” she said. “It used to be if you paid attention, you could see a phishing email. The grammar wasn't right. There were some misspellings. If you hovered over the email address, you could see it's not coming from a domain that I recognize. Now, cybercriminals have addressed all of that with AI tools. I think it's having conversations with your customers and your partners, and your vendors to educate them on the cyber risks and encouraging them to really pay attention to who has access to their data, how they're using it within these tools and what are the risks.”
Gadda said AI comes in all flavors and sizes, and everything's an endpoint.
“When you go to the gym, everything you touch in a gym now is an endpoint, that's all AI,” she said. “They're bringing all of that information back in and I think education, education, education will continue to be just paramount to taking the scare out of it, but also people understanding.”
Rajagopal said cybercriminals using AI is “something we will never be able to stop, just like you could use a knife to stab someone or you could use it in the kitchen.”
“But the question is, how do you know what it’s being used for?,” he said. “That's where being vigilant comes in, reducing your attack surface and making sure that you educate your users to ensure that they understand that everything that they touch -- they no longer just have one computer, they have multiple computers, their watch, their car, their fridge, their phone, their tablet -- all of those are endpoints and all of those can be breached as well.”
Gadda said AI comes in all flavors and sizes, and everything's an endpoint.
“When you go to the gym, everything you touch in a gym now is an endpoint, that's all AI,” she said. “They're bringing all of that information back in and I think education, education, education will continue to be just paramount to taking the scare out of it, but also people understanding.”
Rajagopal said cybercriminals using AI is “something we will never be able to stop, just like you could use a knife to stab someone or you could use it in the kitchen.”
“But the question is, how do you know what it’s being used for?,” he said. “That's where being vigilant comes in, reducing your attack surface and making sure that you educate your users to ensure that they understand that everything that they touch -- they no longer just have one computer, they have multiple computers, their watch, their car, their fridge, their phone, their tablet -- all of those are endpoints and all of those can be breached as well.”
A recent Channel Futures Leadership Summit artificial intelligence (AI) roundtable addressed the benefits and dangers of the technological advancement.
Among the key points was AI is a tool, not an easy button, so humans will always need to be in the loop.
Panelists addressed the good of AI, such as how organizations can increase efficiency, and the bad, such as malicious hackers making use of it to craft and launch more effective cyberattacks.
Roundtable participants included:
Allison Bergamo, CEO, AI speaker and advisor at Bergamo Marketing Group.
Brett Haralson, head of experts at Glide Apps, a no-code app builder.
Hilary Gadda, Coro’s head of national partner management.
Krishna Rajagopal, CEO of AKATI Sekurity.
We asked participants when it comes to AI, what’s not being talked about enough.
“What's that one thing that I can do today to monetize and help my customers?” Gadda said.
Haralson said it’s that one piece in the software that “unlocks a whole new beast” in an AI stack.
“I think it's just the one thing that we may not know or have thought about how we're going to connect it, but when it does, it changes the game,” he said.
Bergamo said while AI can do “all sorts of great things,” humans need to always be involved.
“They need to understand what the customers are thinking, feeling and doing … and don't let a chatbot do that for you,” she said. “Also, we are at the very baseline of capabilities with AI. Don't use AI to emulate the old ways of solving problems. Look at AI as ways to open up new opportunities, new revenue streams and tackle new challenges. Don't use an AI tool like you would a Google to do research. There's so much more that these tools can do.”
Rajagopal said AI is going to be utilized a lot in robotics.
“We're seeing that happening side by side,” he said. “We're going to have all these AI-powered robots all over the place.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more comments from the AI roundtable.
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