I Didn't Know My Bot Was Doing That | Newsday with 229Project

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I Didn't Know My Bot Was Doing That

[00:00:00] Drex: to necessarily do that with a proxy. I mean, they may today, I'm not sure. But then we sort of… that joke eroded into, I brought my 9 kids to work with me today, and I gave them all laptops, they're sitting in the back of the room. I gave them all my username and password, and they're all interns now, they're just working on all kinds of stuff.

[00:00:11] Drex: Which is kind of what we've done with agents. It's a little scary, and a little, you know, we might need to take a beat.

[00:00:24] Bill: Alright, it is…

[00:00:27] Bill: the 229 Principal's Office. That's what we're gonna now call this podcast, and I love how we do this to the production team, like, we just rename the podcast, they have to do all new branding, all new stuff, because we just said that it is, the 229 Principal's Office.

[00:00:44] Drex: called to the principal's office.

[00:00:45] Bill: Call to the principal, and from time to time, we will call people into the principal's office, we'll have conversations with them. It'll be great. We still will talk about the news and things that are going on, but it does give us a little, room. The last couple of weeks, we've talked about some of the AI things we're doing internally.

[00:01:00] Drex: Yeah.

[00:01:01] Bill: And we'll do some of that. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the election and what it means for cybersecurity, what it means for health systems, what it might mean for budgets.

[00:01:16] Bill: You know what's interesting is I should, I should connect my computer to a, power source, because that's important. Today, we are joined by Drex DeFord, who has already been talking, right there.

[00:01:30] Bill: What is it?

[00:01:32] Drex: You would not believe the stuff that goes on backstage here. Before we actually get started. There's a lot of it's complicated technology work. Lori, yes, a lot of really complicated technology stuff happening here.

[00:01:44] Lori: Yes, the power source is very important.

[00:01:47] Bill: And Lori, Boisjoli is, with us as well, so two principals are here. Sarah Richardson is still, trolloping across Italy? Is she in Italy?

[00:01:59] Drex: I don't think trolloping is a… is a thing.

[00:02:02] Drex: Trapsy.

[00:02:03] Bill: Crapsy! That's what it was. I just… I pictured her with, like, a little basket across the mountains and the flowers and stuff.

[00:02:10] Drex: Yes.

[00:02:10] Bill: I just… I didn't know what that word was.

[00:02:13] Lori: Dinging from the hillsides.

[00:02:15] Bill: And we're from the hillsides, yes, having a good time.

[00:02:17] Drex: She's not in Switzerland, come on.

[00:02:20] Bill: I guess we will find out whether she listens to the show or not when she's not actually on it, and…

[00:02:27] Bill: We'll get some comments. I will say this, she's been very active on, on texts.

[00:02:33] Bill: Like, we'll send a text, and she responds, like, almost immediately. It's like…

[00:02:39] Drex: I think it's one of those things where it's, like, bedtime there, when we're talking about stuff, or…

[00:02:44] Drex: Something. It's the… the time zones have her in a position where she's probably on her phone anyway.

[00:02:50] Bill: What, what was your role as a CIO with regard to the… to work at home and your phone and stuff? Did you have a delineation? Did you have a, you know, I didn't carry… Lori, what was… what was… was your thing?

[00:03:05] Lori: I probably preached something very different than I did myself.

[00:03:11] Lori: You know, so it was, you are going away, you're on vacation, leave it behind, we've got you. Did I always do that myself? No. Probably one advantage of

[00:03:25] Lori: how I spend a lot of vacations might be, on my bicycle in remote places, and that does afford

[00:03:34] Lori: the disconnect.

[00:03:35] Bill: Yeah.

[00:03:36] Drex: Yeah, I was more… I was more of a,

[00:03:38] Drex: like, I had my phone with me all the time. I just… that was just… if you're gonna get paid this much, that just means that you're connected all the time. For my team, I told them, like, we had a keyword in the subject line.

[00:03:51] Drex: And basically, it was like, just because I send something at 2 o'clock in the morning doesn't mean I need an answer from you at 2 o'clock in the morning. If I say urgent, or whatever the keyword was.

[00:04:03] Drex: Then I need a response right away. Otherwise, it'll wait until tomorrow, don't worry about it, so…

[00:04:10] Bill: Yeah, HRQ… well, look, my thing is, I… all my email signatures have my mobile phone on it, so for the most part, for my entire life, I just… I work, so if you can get ahold of me, you can get ahold of me.

[00:04:24] Bill: I will rarely answer my phone after hours unless you're somebody I want to talk to, but for the most part, you can get ahold of me, you can text me. But I did get in trouble from HR at one point for sending emails on the weekend to my team, and I'm like, well, they don't have to respond, and they're like, yeah, and we don't want you sending emails on the weekend to your team. I'm like.

[00:04:44] Bill: So I had to get a tool that essentially

[00:04:48] Bill: scheduled all the emails to go out on Mondays instead of going out over the weekends.

[00:04:54] Lori: That's the beauty of delay.

[00:05:25] Bill: I don't know how CIOs stay in front of all this stuff. There's so much going on.

[00:05:29] Bill: In fact, that's one of the topics we can… we can, talk about, the number of open CIO positions and what's, going on with those CIO positions is that it appears

[00:05:42] Bill: it appears this CIO… yeah, and these go in cycles, as you know, we've talked about this before, but a lot of CDIOs

[00:05:51] Bill: have come to the fore, and we're seeing AI officers

[00:05:55] Bill: And, that isn't necessarily just the CIO just stepping into those roles anymore. We're seeing people go outside the industry.

[00:06:04] Drex: It's a… it's a… there's an odd…

[00:06:06] Drex: I think with a lot of these roles now, CDIO, CIDO, chief, AI officer.

[00:06:16] Drex: they're not all well-defined, so somebody who carries that title at one organization isn't necessarily doing the same kind of work as somebody who's carrying that title at another organization, and that's, I think, kind of part of the problem with the openings that we have right now, trying to find the right person who is the right fit.

[00:06:35] Drex: I know the recruiters, I'm sure, have their hands full. That would be a good conversation, too. How do you not…

[00:06:44] Drex: stereotype CIOs who are potentially leaving jobs as a particular… this person can only do this kind of thing? Or do they do that? And do they do that more now than ever? Makes me wonder.

[00:06:59] Bill: Yeah.

[00:06:59] Lori: It makes me think about, as somebody potentially, you know, going into a new role at an organization, how important clarity

[00:07:09] Lori: on… Who has what responsibilities become, because those could look…

[00:07:15] Lori: different, depending on the departure that happened, depending on what the organization is strategically trying to do, but the clarity is going to be really important so that, oh no, that's not mine, that's yours, or yes, and so many times you're going to be in it together, but, you know, I feel like…

[00:07:34] Lori: Things fail when you don't have that clarity.

[00:07:39] Drex: It's always one of those things that we coach all the time, too, right? You and I have kind of talked about this,

[00:07:46] Drex: you know, you… when you do an interview, it's as important as anything else that you're interviewing the organization. They're not just interviewing you. I mean, don't go into these roles as these…

[00:07:57] Drex: openings is like, I'm desperate, and I need this job. It's… the fit's really important, and I've made this mistake, where you kind of go in and maybe don't ask all the

[00:08:09] Drex: I don't know that everybody knows what all the right questions are, but spend more time kind of digging in to the organization, almost to the point sometimes of making them feel uncomfortable that you're asking so many questions.

[00:08:21] Drex: Cuz… Sometimes the shiny paint job they're showing you is not the actual…

[00:08:27] Drex: Under-the-hood look of the organization that you're getting into.

[00:08:32] Bill: Yeah, no, I absolutely saw the job interview as me interviewing them, probably to my detriment, because I didn't necessarily portray that I wanted the job in some cases, because I determined pretty early on that I didn't want the job.

[00:08:46] Bill: Because, you know, you just have a couple conversations with people, you're like, yeah, you don't want me in that role.

[00:08:51] Drex: But…

[00:08:51] Bill: the… I'll tell you, the AI officer is interesting to me, going external. I can see that. There's an awful lot of CIOs I have conversations with that really do not have any,

[00:09:03] Bill: You know, background experience.

[00:09:07] Bill: in running an AI project, let alone, really understanding the data structures and the semantic layer and all this… all the things that go into getting your data right and whatnot. So I understand why they're going external for that. CDIO, that's just another consonant. I… I don't see… digital is…

[00:09:27] Bill: the CIO role has been digital.

[00:09:29] Bill: forever, so I understand why CIOs are stepping into that role, and I also understand why they're looking external.

[00:10:16] Bill: We're gonna talk about the election. We don't talk about politics much on this, on this show, because it's not a political show, but we will talk about it with regard to healthcare. This, this election was about a handful of things. I mean, I think we can all agree, the war, affordability.

[00:10:33] Bill: And probably not specifically, but, a subtext here was, AI data centers, right?

[00:10:45] Drex: and corruption accountability. I would say that is another big chunk of how and why people voted.

[00:10:52] Bill: Yeah, again, this isn't a political,

[00:10:55] Drex: I understand, I'm just covering all the bases here.

[00:10:58] Bill: Yeah, because you and I are gonna get in an argument here, and I don't really…

[00:11:02] Drex: Very possibly.

[00:11:03] Bill: But this is what the principal's office is about. This is, you know, we have these conversations.

[00:11:09] Bill: the, so the midterms were about, essentially, affordability, and when we look at that, part of that is healthcare, and the cost of healthcare, and all the things that are going on. And, you know, as we look at this.

[00:11:23] Bill: The, One Big Beautiful Bill Act is, in motion. In fact, a lot of the stuff's gonna be, taking effect before this

[00:11:34] Bill: Before this set of senators even sits down.

[00:11:37] Bill: And so, I guess the first thing we have to figure out is, is any of this really going to impact our financial outlook as a CIO next year?

[00:11:46] Bill: And… I'm not sure I would plan for any difference from a financial standpoint.

[00:11:53] Bill: at least next year. Now, it could trickle maybe 28, maybe, you know, and then we have Pick.

[00:11:59] Bill: we'll start talking about the presidential election, like, next week, I think.

[00:12:03] Bill: So, I mean, seriously, that cycle will start earlier and earlier, and I think it's already started. But for the most part, I'm not sure it's going to impact our budgets next year. Do you think it'll impact our budgets?

[00:12:16] Lori: I think it depends. I mean, it's a hard question, because every fiscal year is different for each organization.

[00:12:23] Lori: So, last place I was at, it was 10-1. We had to submit it to the state, early summer. We had to build our budget for 28 by April or May of, you know, 27. So, how much insight we'll have into what 28 looks like?

[00:12:40] Lori: Probably not a lot, but other organizations that run maybe more true calendar year, that kind of thing, you know, could be in a better position, depending on that timeline.

[00:12:53] Bill: Yeah, you make a good point. Most health systems have moved off of the calendar year just because

[00:12:57] Bill: It's, it's just easier to do it sometime.

[00:13:00] Bill: Outside of the calendar year. Drex?

[00:13:02] Drex: Yeah, I've just… yeah, I think most not-for-profits are probably on the federal fiscal year calendar that ends

[00:13:08] Drex: September 30th. But, yeah, I think CFOs, by their nature, are super skeptical and very risk-averse, and they are going to continue

[00:13:20] Drex: We said something like this in our staff meeting this morning. They will… they will proceed until apprehended. They will continue on this path of…

[00:13:29] Drex: cuts, and no spending, and you really have to have a good business plan for anything you're bringing to the table, and until somebody shines a bright light and says, there's more money coming, I don't see them coming off of that. Now.

[00:13:45] Drex: It's really interesting, you know, not to, again, to get too much into politics, but it's going to be really interesting to see over the next couple of months what really happens as the new House and Senate starts to migrate into place, and a lot more of those conversations are Republicans

[00:14:03] Drex: going to continue to back Trump? Are they going to try to distance themselves from Trump? That may create a situation where we start to see the opportunity for Trump to veto some bills.

[00:14:15] Drex: That then are overridden by the House and the Senate. If that turns out to be the case, and we see a couple of those, I think that'll change attitudes

[00:14:24] Drex: next year might make things a little more predictable, but I think it's still gonna be a dogfight, because you are coming up on 28, and the Republicans are going to have to make themselves somehow look different from the Democrats.

[00:14:36] Drex: And vice versa.

[00:14:38] Bill: Yeah, no, I think they do look different than the Democrats. I just don't, you know, I think what you're implying is that they want to look similar to the Democrats to win votes, and I don't think that's how Republicans get elected in some of those states, so we'll see what happens. The, you know, the other thing this puts on the table, but it won't really

[00:14:56] Bill: I don't think it'll matter until we have a different president.

[00:15:00] Bill: is there was a significant movement in conversation in Medicare for All.

[00:15:07] Bill: And so that's going to be a conversation. But I'm not sure that's a conversation we want to have here. I do want to have the conversation around

[00:15:14] Bill: Data centers. Does the data center conversation impact

[00:15:20] Bill: CIOs and how they think at all. I mean, is this really going to impact a hospital? Do we… are we thinking about data centers that way, or are data centers small enough, or are providers…

[00:15:34] Bill: already established enough that we're not worried about the fact that, you know, Microsoft's not going to be able to build a data center, and Amazon's not going to be able to build a data center, and whoever else.

[00:15:45] Bill: You know, whoever else we're utilizing might not be able to keep up with capacity.

[00:15:51] Drex: Yeah, it's definitely demand versus capacity. I mean, I think that's part of the…

[00:15:56] Drex: part of the issue. So, the things that we want to do with AI and the other things that we want to do moving out of our local data centers and more into the cloud, and do more things in the cloud, more as-a-service stuff.

[00:16:06] Drex: might cost more money, because there will not be as many data centers, or as much compute capacity, as there would be otherwise. Now, I think this also drives a lot of conversations. You know, the three of us, the four of us talk all the time about

[00:16:22] Drex: Scarcity being the mother of invention. And so, if you can't build more data centers, there's gotta be another plan. What's that look like? And, somebody's gonna come up with that plan and make a bunch of money.

[00:16:34] Bill: I agree. Do you pull back on your AI plans at all? Are you worried about…

[00:16:38] Bill: You worried about your AI plans? I mean, everybody and their brother's throwing AI at you.

[00:16:43] Lori: Probably from a short-term perspective, there's not… I mean, it might be cost increase, but probably not a huge impact, but if you think out further, I think, you know, as there's more and more and more opportunity, and more demand gets created, there probably is a more direct impact.

[00:17:02] Bill: Yeah. I think it's, I agree with everything you guys have said so far. I think, for the most part, I think what we're going to be looking at is, we're going to go into next year, and the financials are going to look the same. I think, I think…

[00:17:16] Bill: that, there will be some surprises with regard to, concessions on the One Big Beautiful Bill, especially around Medicaid. I think that it will…

[00:17:27] Bill: the Democrats will push it, and I think the Republicans, including the President, will, will acquiesce on affordability. So we'll see how that plays out, but again, it won't… it won't be…

[00:17:39] Bill: January 1st, it'll be whenever it… whenever it, you know, comes to a head. Let's see… CVS Health, hey, this was a… this was a pretty big one, I'm curious what you guys… Yeah.

[00:17:50] Bill: you know, CVS Health splitting everything up again. You know, they bought all this stuff, now they're splitting it up. Aetna, Caremark, CVS Specialty, Oak Street Health, and Signify Health stay under the CVS Health name.

[00:18:04] Bill: And, with David Joyner, about 9,000 pharmacies, mail pharmacy, MinuteClinic, and Health100 technology business becomes CVS Pharmacy under, Prem Shah.

[00:18:16] Bill: Separation is expected for the first half of 2028.

[00:18:20] Bill: What do you think's driving this? And, you know, what does this… what does this do?

[00:18:32] Lori: I honestly don't… I mean, like, you can speculate on some of the motives, but I don't know if they've really, and maybe I missed it, that they've come out and actually said, sort of, the true why behind the separation?

[00:18:45] Bill: Whoa.

[00:18:46] Drex: I'll give you the speculation. So my speculation is…

[00:18:50] Drex: They realize they've built what starts to feel significantly like a monopoly.

[00:18:56] Drex: The insurance company, the… the healthcare provider, the… the pharmacy benefit manager, the pharmaceutical company, like, they have the entire self-licking ice cream cone.

[00:19:12] Drex: completed, right? And they see the tea leaves

[00:19:17] Drex: As the election comes, as the wave is coming, they've already been through the grill many times in the…

[00:19:25] Drex: in the House and the Senate and subcommittees over the last year,

[00:19:31] Drex: They're trying to figure out how to not be designated, probably, as some kind of a monopoly, so they're gonna break themselves up. We'll see how that really looks and feels, but that's what I'm thinking, is that they're just trying to get ahead of what they think is probably some kind of governmental oversight that they don't want.

[00:19:49] Bill: Yeah, I agree. There's, there's,

[00:19:53] Bill: there's a populist approach to addressing the cost of healthcare, and the populist approach is, you know, let's go after monopolies, at least the ones we don't like. And so, they will start going after the ones that they don't like. The reality is, almost every major hospital is a monopoly.

[00:20:12] Bill: Or an oligopoly of some kind, right? So, we had… we had 38% market share in Southern California.

[00:20:19] Bill: Well, I mean, in what other area do you not consider that monopolistic pressure on the pricing of.

[00:20:26] Bill: And every health system that has acquired something over the last…

[00:20:30] Bill: three decades has been doing it to increase their monopolistic pressure on the thing. So, healthcare systems are monopolies, PBMs.

[00:20:38] Bill: pharmacies, you know, just the whole thing is set up on monopolies, and so they will start where they start. But the reality is, you know, one of the things the big, beautiful bill did was reduce the amount of money going to health systems.

[00:20:52] Bill: And, there's no appetite for that. And, I don't know how you reduce the cost of healthcare if you don't reduce the spend of health systems.

[00:21:01] Bill: like… like, if we spent uncontrollably, and people are like, well, you know, you need to bring down your… the cost of your goods, it's like, we would have to reduce our costs as a company in order to reduce the amount that we're charging for our goods. But it's part of a larger system that's…

[00:21:18] Bill: Just kind of messy. This is why Medicare for All just is, from a simplicity standpoint, it's a simple term, and people can get their arms around it. They're like, oh yeah, just one payer, boy, that'll make things a lot better. It'll just be simpler, easier. But, but again, just hard to understand and hard to…

[00:21:38] Bill: Easy to… easy to comprehend, hard to implement, unless you have $50 trillion, 50 to 100 trillion sitting around.

[00:21:46] Bill: Let's see, what else? Hey, Drex, a lot going on on the security front.

[00:21:50] Bill: So, CrowdStrike, buying, Fiddler AI, Dreadnode for about, half a billion. You have,

[00:22:00] Bill: AI red teaming plus AI kill switch, closed expected Q4 2027 Citrix, added AI agent oversight to secure spaces, secure access,

[00:22:14] Bill: So, this whole agent area seems to be a significant focus and an area for acquisition for these players.

[00:22:22] Drex: Yeah, I think it's the next wave as…

[00:22:24] Drex: Health systems, all organizations kind of look at what's happening with cybersecurity and where they are concerned about the potential for things to go wrong.

[00:22:34] Drex: From a cybersecurity perspective, a lot of the focus right now is on agents, and agents that are being built and fielded, and shadow AI, and all the work that

[00:22:44] Drex: everyone seems to be doing right now. Everybody's running really hard toward the light, and there's some version of this that needs to be… we need to take a breath. We're… we're having that conversation, actually, even inside the company right now, looking at our agents and the way that our agents work.

[00:23:01] Drex: What applications they work with, how they should be,

[00:23:06] Drex: defined from an identity perspective. We're having all those same… I mean, over the weekend, you and I were trading, messages about this, or all four of us were, I guess, trading messages about, how to do this.

[00:23:18] Drex: And as a result, I wound up spinning up a bot named Polly. She's an AI policy bot, and she went out and stripped-mined the internet.

[00:23:28] Drex: And found, found some stuff for us, and so it'll be the basis of some of our continuing conversation around what should we be doing when it comes to AI agents.

[00:23:38] Bill: Yeah, it's,

[00:23:41] Bill: It's, it's… so the conversations we're having are really interesting to me, because we have, we have, given people Agentic AI. So, essentially, we've given them GrokBot, they're standing up these bots, they're doing all sorts of things to it. I was just at lunch with Jairus.

[00:23:57] Bill: And, somebody asked him for something, and he asked the spot to, go into our system, take a picture, you know, the picture of the table and all the people who are going to be at the table, and, you know.

[00:24:11] Bill: draft an email so he could look at it. And he went in, and it took the snapshot of the picture so you could see everybody who's coming to the event, and it did everything that he asked them to do. And I thought, this is a good opportunity, let me… so,

[00:24:26] Bill: You logged into your email with your account, yes. Alright, so you gave it your credentials for your email. We've almost all gotten past that, like, that's just stable stakes, like, yeah, your agent's gonna get access to your email. Okay. Well, in the Google world, that access to the email also gives them… unless you set up.

[00:24:44] Drex: All your Google Drive and everything else, yeah.

[00:24:47] Bill: Yeah, it gives you… unless, again, you go back in, and you rethink, and you set up all the granular controls to get the least privilege across the board, which before, when we were talking about humans.

[00:25:01] Bill: we didn't really do that. Now that we're talking about agents, it's like…

[00:25:06] Bill: I don't know how… well, you guys are both about my age, so, do you remember when Google came out with a device you could put on your LAN? Like, they sent you a device, and you put it on your LAN, and then it went out to, like, all your servers and all your stuff, and created, like, a Google search for everything that's on your network? Do you remember that device?

[00:25:26] Drex: Yeah, yeah.

[00:25:26] Bill: We… I remember putting that on a network. Somebody said, oh, we're gonna have Google search for our network, and I thought, yeah, this is pretty cool. So I set it up, did all this stuff, did a bunch of testing. You can't possibly do enough testing.

[00:25:39] Drex: Of this now.

[00:25:40] Bill: Because the first thing they search for is salaries.

[00:25:43] Drex: Yeah, how much does Bill make?

[00:25:44] Bill: And sure enough, they went searching, they found…

[00:25:47] Drex: Jesus.

[00:25:47] Bill: salaries, it's like, it's like, hey, why do they have access to salaries? I'm like.

[00:25:51] Drex: Turn it off, turn it off. I'm like…

[00:25:53] Bill: They've always had access to salaries, you just didn't know they had access to salaries.

[00:25:58] Drex: Yeah.

[00:25:59] Drex: It's, we were joking around, earlier in the week, I'm trying to remember, maybe it was last week in Newsday, and we were talking about how

[00:26:09] Drex: So, when we all had assistants, our assistants could get access to our email, but they had their own account, we'd just given them sort of, like, a proxy access to our accounts to do emails and things like that.

[00:26:21] Bill: Who's…

[00:26:21] Drex: We also did… but we also did really bad things, like, say… and so, I'm gonna give you my username and password to my Alaska Airlines account, because I want you to make flights for me. Because Alaska Airlines doesn't have a way

[00:26:34] Drex: to necessarily do that with a proxy. I mean, they may today, I'm not sure. But then we sort of… that joke eroded into, I brought my 9 kids to work with me today, and I gave them all laptops, they're sitting in the back of the room. I gave them all my username and password, and they're all interns now, they're just working on all kinds of stuff.

[00:26:53] Drex: Which is kind of what we've done with agents. It's a little scary, and a little, you know, we might need to take a beat.

[00:27:02] Bill: If we had a polygraph and asked every CIO how they worked with their admin, I doubt… my gut tells me we would find some horrific stories.

[00:27:12] Drex: For sure.

[00:27:13] Bill: Oh, yeah, yeah, no, they log into my email with my… with my user ID, with my password, and whatever.

[00:27:18] Drex: into my Expensify, they do our supply, whatever supply stuff. They're doing a whole bunch of things. My bank account, yes, for sure.

[00:27:28] Bill: Lori, did you have an admin?

[00:27:30] Lori: I had an admin.

[00:27:31] Bill: And… and… how did you set it up?

[00:27:33] Drex: Who doesn't want to.

[00:27:34] Lori: I think if I was tied to a polygraph, I might do okay.

[00:27:39] Lori: But I think that's probably because in the world today, you really, you know, like, we used a system to book flights, we used, like, all those things were sort of in there. But I do think this whole conversation does go back to what we were talking about earlier, budget-wise.

[00:27:55] Lori: You know, because I do have the…

[00:27:59] Lori: CIOs planned in the budget for additional cost to sort… whatever those extra costs may be that, any third party's gonna sort of charge for the agent watching. And then even what we just talked about right here, sort of what might be necessary to refactor

[00:28:18] Lori: You know, the right protections.

[00:28:21] Lori: 4.

[00:28:22] Lori: Any Agentic.

[00:28:23] Bill: the… you're gonna find that there's a Drex Mafia.

[00:28:26] Bill: a Drex DeFord mafia. They, they follow him, and then they bang on you when you say, you know, silly things, like, use agents for this and that. And my response to Drex and his mafia is always the same thing, which is, like, convenience trumps

[00:28:41] Bill: just about everything, like, in the world. And so, unless we're gonna give people an alternative that actually works.

[00:28:48] Drex: Yeah.

[00:28:49] Bill: then, you know, our job isn't done until we've done that. And we shouldn't be surprised when they go, oh, yeah, yeah, I gave my admin those credentials, because, you know, quite frankly, you guys didn't give me a way for her to blah blah blah, or him to, you know, get into this stuff, therefore I did this.

[00:29:07] Drex: That's why policy is just kind of, like, the most immature model of… Any of this cybersecurity stuff.

[00:29:14] Drex: Don't do this. Well, you know, awesome. I mean, in most places, that's kind of an invitation to debate. It's not actually a policy, right? Because I'm still going to do what I think is the best thing I need to do to get the job done.

[00:29:29] Drex: Which might not adhere to policy. So you've got to figure out how you're gonna…

[00:29:33] Bill: So, we are going to…

[00:29:36] Bill: I like the direction we're going, so we've been trading some emails back and forth, and this is the… this is where the principal's office takes a little detour from Newsday, and why we're renaming it and doing it a little different, because we're going to talk about some of these things and some of the things we're setting up.

[00:29:52] Bill: you know, we start… just the basic architecture, and we're only working with one app right now. Like, we're looking at our main app, which is… to think of it as our CRM. Now, it also has some ERP…

[00:30:03] Bill: characteristics and whatnot, but for the most part, let's just call it a CRM at this point. The, we…

[00:30:10] Bill: We are looking at it, and we're saying, look, today.

[00:30:14] Bill: These people, these people, our staff, our friends, our colleagues.

[00:30:19] Bill: have, essentially just logged in to the CRM from GrokBot with their credentials. And so when Jairus says, hey, do this, it goes in as Jairus, does that work, gives them the email, sends it out.

[00:30:35] Bill: And we all agree, everyone 100% agree, this is wrong, can't do it this way, and so we want to, you know, we want to eat our own dog food here and figure it out. What we're looking at now is to, essentially, policy. Policy's easy, right?

[00:30:52] Bill: Do not give the agent your credentials. Is that our policy? I mean, in a very short form, that's our policy.

[00:31:00] Drex: Sure. I mean, I think that's a great place to start, but then you start to figure out… I know that you're looking at GrokBot underlying universal policies about what agents can and can't do. That takes what you want and actually makes it a thing that now can or can't be done.

[00:31:19] Bill: So you move from policy to controls. So how are we going to control this? And when I think about controls, what… again, we have to give them alternatives. We want to maintain… I want Jairus to be able to do that at lunch.

[00:31:32] Bill: Right? That's a very real use case, and we want him to do that. And so I started thinking about it, it's like, alright, so the agents need a way to securely

[00:31:43] Bill: access, the system, the CRM.

[00:31:47] Bill: And so they're gonna do two things. They're gonna ask questions of the CR, they're gonna query it, and they're gonna write to it.

[00:31:54] Bill: And the thing is, when I look at that, I'm like, those are different characteristics. Like, very different characteristics. Like, to a certain extent, the reading from it, the querying from it, we have a database that has granular controls, row-level security, and all that stuff.

[00:32:11] Bill: And it was really well thought through, and we can do that. Now, we have to think through it for agents.

[00:32:17] Bill: But we can do that. Alright, so we think there's gonna be a gateway for reads. Like, this is what you can read, this is what you can pull out.

[00:32:25] Bill: But when I think about that, Jairus does lose the ability to say, hey, go ahead and take a picture of that screen, because now we're not dealing with it from a browser, we're actually looking at the data from a

[00:32:37] Bill: from the data. I mean, we're just going to the root of the data. So anyway, I'm not worried about that specific use case, because he can still get a list of everybody who's coming.

[00:32:47] Bill: to the event, and it really has the same… the same overall, outcome. So, we're thinking of a… a query gateway, and we're thinking about a write gateway. The write gateway is where I'm still fuzzy as all get out, like…

[00:33:01] Bill: Yes, we can have the controls.

[00:33:05] Bill: But… Anytime it does a right, it's gonna need to be able to be, rolled back.

[00:33:12] Bill: Okay.

[00:33:13] Drex: M?

[00:33:14] Bill: And we're also going to want to know the agent's logic for the right.

[00:33:19] Bill: like, Drex told me to write this because of Y, or we did this research and we did this. I'm gonna need some audit trail and some transparency that's gonna say, this field was changed because this bot did this work, and here's why it did it.

[00:33:37] Drex: Are you gonna ask… will we ask the same question of the humans when they write Kilos?

[00:33:46] Bill: No.

[00:33:47] Drex: they have to provide the same justification? I mean, this is the, like, okay, we… okay, we gotta think through this.

[00:33:54] Lori: No way, it really is change control.

[00:33:55] Drex: It is true.

[00:33:56] Lori: Sounds good.

[00:33:58] Bill: Yeah, I mean, this is the double standard that we live with, right? This is, you know…

[00:34:02] Drex: And that's okay, like, I think it's okay to have… electronically in our CRM

[00:34:11] Drex: You know, the humans that can do things, and we'll hold them accountable, because they're humans, and the robots who are going to do things, but they need to justify why they're doing it, and we will hold them accountable, but it's a very… it's a different kind of hold-them-accountable standard, right?

[00:34:29] Bill: Yeah, it's interesting, because I feel like I can call Lori up and say, Lori, because we do track that, right? So, we know that Lori made the change in the CRM, she updated it and that kind of stuff, so I can call Lori and say, hey, Lori, you updated this person's title, why'd you do that? Oh, I had a phone conversation with…

[00:34:48] Bill: You know, this person, and they said this person got promoted, or they just got hired, or whatever it is.

[00:34:53] Bill: So, I can actually call and figure that out.

[00:34:56] Bill: And up until, you know, up until this conversation, that felt like all I really needed. I didn't need Lori to give me the, you know, hey, change this person's title, and oh, by the way, oh, Lori, before we make this change, please tell us why we're making this change.

[00:35:13] Bill: My gut tells me, though.

[00:35:16] Bill: We're going from a point where 90% of the… 90… 100% of the work used to be done in a… in a… in the application interface by humans.

[00:35:27] Bill: I think that's gonna shift almost entirely.

[00:35:30] Drex: It's shifted a lot for me today. The way that I use our CRM is largely through the bots today. I ask about dates, I ask for sign-up links, I talk to the bot mostly, or the bots, depending on what I'm doing, mostly.

[00:35:50] Drex: to get to the things I want to get to. All of my bots have very strict never write to the CRM, so if I decide to write something to the CRM, this is kind of my role, right? I compel myself to open up the application and go make the change, but…

[00:36:07] Drex: That's not the most convenient thing in the world, it's just that

[00:36:12] Drex: for us today, that bot is logging in as me and doing something, and I think it's the right thing, but I also am concerned about wrecking the database by doing some… it thinks I want something that… that's not what I meant.

[00:36:26] Drex: So…

[00:36:28] Drex: When we get down to the point where we can have… we have individual identities, the bots have individual identities, and we can then tell specifically who did what and why.

[00:36:39] Drex: And, and we've got a rollback plan.

[00:36:41] Drex: For all those changes, that makes way more sense to me. This is… for everybody who's listening, this is the sausage that's being made. We are having a lot of these conversations right now about how and why and where does this work, or not.

[00:36:58] Drex: And we have other staff that have really leaned into this, and have a lot more of these sort of capabilities already built into their work with their bots. So those are the people who are gonna, like, have to, like, figure out how do we unwind them, or make sure we don't destroy their productivity.

[00:37:12] Bill: But… so, I made a choice. I… I… this was… I made… this was a conscious choice to get people excited about it and worry about pulling stuff back from.

[00:37:23] Drex: Yeah.

[00:37:23] Bill: And it's a choice, like, you could… you could wait until everything's perfect, and then give it to people, and then you're not… you don't run the risk of pulling things back from them. We may end up pulling some capabilities back from people.

[00:37:35] Bill: But, you know, Drexley, I sent you some of this stuff, I think, on Friday, just to you, I think, and I said, you know, hey, here's some things to consider. I took all the screenshots from the administration interface from GrokBot, and it's pretty powerful. Like, I could say, don't allow it to…

[00:37:55] Bill: do anything on the local machine. Like, it can only work off of its virtual machine. Right. Which means it's, like, not going to look at the hard drive. It's not going to be able to run any repos that you put on your hard drive.

[00:38:08] Bill: you have to put all of those on your virtual machine. It will not look at your Google Chrome.

[00:38:17] Bill: For example. So, like, we can set that at the… at the center, and there's a… there's a couple of really cool

[00:38:24] Bill: features, which I thought, man, that's really well thought out.

[00:38:28] Bill: And then the other thing, just to throw this in there.

[00:38:31] Bill: we could set up a team bot, so there's team bots, and one of our groups of people set up a team bot, and I thought, well, this is really interesting, I'm gonna have to really understand this. And one of the things, as I was looking at it, I'm like, we could make it so that every bot has to write through a team bot that's called the data steward.

[00:38:49] Bill: And no bot can write directly to Helos. Only the data steward bot can write to Helos, and we can define at the administrator level what that bot can do, what it can see, how it writes.

[00:39:02] Bill: questions it asks the person, if there's data missing, or something missing, or a reason missing, it can, like, go back and prompt them and say, Drex, why, you know, why are you deleting Bill from this? And you go, well, I'm deleting Bill for this reason. It's like, well, Bill's still the founder and CEO, we're not going to delete him, is that okay? Kind of thing. I don't expect you're going to delete me, but the,

[00:39:25] Bill: But that team bot concept

[00:39:28] Bill: is… is interesting to me, too, because we could still… we could funnel everything through that team bot to do a certain activity.

[00:39:37] Drex: Lori, there's a… there's a…

[00:39:38] Drex: deduplication of effort here, too, right? Because there's probably… you have a bot, Bill, to do something that is probably also… I have a bot to do the same thing, and Bill has a bot, and, you know, 19 of us have the same bot. Like, having a team bot.

[00:39:53] Drex: Makes more sense to me.

[00:39:55] Lori: Well, it does, and you can control it better, too, right? So, you know, so whatever changes you want to make, whether it's to give it more broad permission or narrow that permission, you know, if you don't have to do it in 12 different.

[00:40:09] Drex: Universal standards, yeah, yeah.

[00:40:12] Lori: I mean, that's the same world of, you know, anything we've been doing in IT, right? The less duplication, the easier the maintenance, the better control, and I think it, you know, is the same situation here. And I do think the audit piece of it will certainly be

[00:40:28] Lori: very important. You know, if you think about Any kind of…

[00:40:32] Lori: Questions you may want to ask.

[00:40:36] Lori: Being able to answer those will be…

[00:40:38] Drex: Are you saying we're gonna need an auditor bot, too, and that'll be the…

[00:40:43] Lori: I think we should always pretend, that we could be audited at any point. You know, obviously our world here at 229 Project is a little bit different than a CIO healthcare audit.

[00:40:55] Lori: But it's gonna be… I think that's gonna be a question they're really gonna start asking. What is being changed via any kind of AI capabilities, and how do you track it? Show me who has access to it, show me what's changed, show me…

[00:41:14] Lori: I think that's… if it's not here already, it's coming.

[00:41:17] Bill: 100%.

[00:41:17] Drex: And the one thing that for sure is not going to work anymore, because we see it over and over now, is the, I didn't know that my bot was doing that excuse. That just doesn't fly, don't expect that that's ever going to fly if you're at a health system now.

[00:41:34] Bill: Yeah, and I'm starting to see some of these health systems report out, like, hey, some of our information through research was given to

[00:41:44] Bill: It was given to AI agents that were not covered, not.

[00:41:48] Bill: AI agents, and they have to disclose that. That is a… that is a breach.

[00:41:53] Bill: And so they're disclosing that information, and I'm… I'm impressed that they're doing it, but there's… the other side of me is, how do they know?

[00:42:01] Bill: like, how do they… how are they tracking all the information that's going in? Unless they set up the right tools.

[00:42:08] Bill: because some of these are 6 months ago, and I'm like, if they… they must have the right tools to know what data went from here to here, and yeah, I'm curious how they… how they caught that.

[00:42:21] Drex: Auditor bots.

[00:42:24] Bill: Well, we… we have… we have a good, at least 3 or… a team of 3 or 4, security bots that are looking at our, code quality and those kinds of things. I think it would be great to have a pen test bot, I think it would be great to have… I mean, I don't… I don't see the limits to this thing, like…

[00:42:44] Bill: I don't know, I guess the limit is the cost of tokens.

[00:42:50] Drex: Yep, and that's a… that's a business case, you know, around, what do you…

[00:42:56] Drex: What would you do otherwise? You know, would you hire a consulting firm? Would you put somebody on retainer?

[00:43:03] Drex: Would you buy software, and then you have to hire somebody to run it?

[00:43:07] Drex: Like, it's a… It's a business case conversation.

[00:43:11] Bill: Yeah, it is a business case, and I find our… our conversations are getting more and more interesting from that perspective. The first was the CRM, you know, we wrote the code, and we put it… put it in place, and there's nothing on the market like it. Like, it is custom.

[00:43:26] Bill: Fit to us perfectly.

[00:43:28] Drex: Totally.

[00:43:29] Bill: Lori, you're new to it. I mean, you just… you look at it, and you're like, yeah, this is designed for the 229 project. And it has no…

[00:43:36] Bill: it has no, excessive features, because it's only the features that we're going to use. As opposed to if you bought Salesforce, you'd be like, hey, you know, we could do this, and we could do this, and we could do this, and we're never going to do those things.

[00:43:50] Bill: Plus you have to hire a team of, you know, 25 people if it's Salesforce to…

[00:43:55] Bill: Get it… get it all implemented.

[00:43:58] Bill: And I'm still a huge proponent. I believe that we will have more CIO developers starting next year, and I think that number will just continue to increase over the next two to three years.

[00:44:09] Bill: We will see. Well, that conversation was more fun for me than the political conversation.

[00:44:15] Bill: Maybe that's why we don't talk about politics. I don't enjoy talking about politics.

[00:44:19] Drex: Yeah, no, that was good.

[00:44:22] Bill: Yeah, so we, you know, as a team, we will continue to meet. The principals have agreed to build out this architecture,

[00:44:31] Bill: And, implement it, and then when you guys come to the, summits, roundtables, and, city tour dinners.

[00:44:39] Bill: We will tell you what we're learning and what we're figuring out, and we will try to make it as relevant to healthcare as we possibly can, which I think it's… I think it's all relevant to healthcare at this point, so…

[00:44:52] Bill: Alright, anything else we need to… need to do before Sarah gets back?

[00:44:57] Drex: No, you know… There's some practical joke, I just haven't figured it out yet.

[00:45:03] Bill: We're still trying to figure it out. Lori, always great to have you here. I love the yellow hat in the background.

[00:45:10] Lori: There's a black one there, too.

[00:45:12] Bill: A yellow and a black one. You didn't get the pink one, huh?

[00:45:15] Lori: I did not. I don't think it was, like, there, and I said, oh, I'll just take this one.

[00:45:19] Drex: They're very popular. No doubt it wasn't there. Somebody probably had… had, bought it and took off with it.

[00:45:26] Bill: Well, that will be a conversation, I don't know, maybe for next week's show, we'll start to talk about, what the…

[00:45:34] Bill: what the, chairs get for next year, and what we're gonna do around Alex's lemonade stand, so…

[00:45:40] Bill: Should be, should be interesting. Next year, we might be able to hit…

[00:45:45] Bill: A million dollars raised for…

[00:45:48] Bill: pediatric cancer cures and families battling pediatric cancer, so that will be, that'll be a fun.

[00:45:56] Bill: goal to go after…

[00:45:57] Drex: We're in the window. I mean, it's a stretch next year, but we can do it. I'm positive.

[00:46:02] Bill: I think so, too, and Drex is coming up with hiking boots.

[00:46:07] Drex: Sarah's got some ideas about some things, too, that are pretty cool, so…

[00:46:11] Bill: Yeah, looking forward to hearing.

[00:46:12] Drex: Learn about those.

[00:46:13] Bill: We'll wait till she gets back, and we'll have that conversation. Alright, hey, thanks everybody, thanks everybody who's listening. That's all for now.