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Welcome to MISAC Connect Audio, the official podcast of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC). This podcast is your go-to resource for in-depth discussions, expert insights, and community stories that go beyond our MISAC Connect forum.
0:00
Yeah,
0:01
dude, your hair is super long. Yeah, it's, it's very long. I'm trying to catch it. It's not one of those. I'm not cutting it until.dot.or,
0:11
are you just pretty much? I'm trying to see how long it'll get at this point. You know, part of the fun it is, it is fun. And many would probably think I'm going through a midlife crisis or something, but I was like, you know, I'm an old dude now, and I'm like, I still got my hair, and if I still have it, why don't I just grow it out and just see what happens? So exactly, that's part of the fun of this, you know? I was curious, you know, what would happen. So it was about, think, just over two years ago. Now, right before DEF CON, I got a haircut, and then from there on, since I haven't cut it at all, this is 100% natural, I got the fun ringlets and everything else that die for, apparently. But now it's, it's fun. No, that is cool. And because it is natural, you don't have to do anything. It's washing, wear, huh? Wash, put a little bit of leave in conditioner, just so it doesn't frizz as much. But yeah, so you probably didn't think, you thought You thought you were going to talk about AI, but we were talking about hair products and hair I could talk about anything.
1:29
Hey, me sat community. I am here with Ryan Nelson, by the way. I know this is a boomer question, but I've got to give you the hardest question of the day, and that is why the E in Ryan, you know, I asked the same question. So growing up, obviously I only knew R, Y, E, N, my mom wanted me to be special. And if you happen to see my last name, it's also with an E. So normally, Nelson's an N, E, L, S, o, n. So to make my life easier, my mom said, hey, you know what? I'm gonna make his first name in E. Also, little did she know I would be having misspellings of both the first and last for the rest of my life. So at this point, I really don't care, unless it's some legal document anyone can spell anyway, I'll answer. I have every alias under the sun ready to go. Yeah, great time. It's funny. I only bring it up because I have a son. His name is Austin, and at the time, Austin was a popular name, and I was like, You know what? I'm gonna mix it up. I'm not gonna put an i n on there. I'm going with an E n. And then what I've done so I probably did what your parents did, but I set you up for a lifetime of I will never have a personalized license plate that can get at some
2:48
everywhere I go. I can never find one. I have to get it, you know, custom printed, or something else for 10x the price. Yeah, I didn't think about that stuff too far down the line when I was naming my my first son, so he's an Ian as well, and that's that's why I drew attention, nothing more than great on resumes. Yeah, it stands out. And I appreciate the the Ian on the end of Nelson as well. It's good fun. It's good fun. So before we get into it, obviously, we've got you in here because of your AI background and your involvement with the task force, but I think we'd be doing the community a disservice if we didn't learn more about Ryan with an E personally. And so start out by sharing a little bit about your background and career journey, especially your experience working in the government sector. Absolutely. So I am the ripe young age of 32 so I actually don't have a whole lot of professional experience coming out of high school, I actually started college as a sophomore, and I went to a year round college, so I finished by the time I was 20, got my Bachelor's out pretty quick, and started instantly working in academia. So for a while I was just an IT technician, made my way up to an IT director, taught some classes in K 12. Really an amazing experience. Taught me both a lot. I hope I taught the students quite a bit too. But that really shaped me to be the person I wanted to be, someone with a lot of empathy, understanding, someone that is willing to get up in front of others share their experiences just like this and everything else. So after that, I wanted to see if the grass was greener elsewhere. So I decided to kind of tangentially, work with the federal government. So I went to a startup that was working with the Department of Defense. Got to work on some wonderful artificial intelligence projects there. I did have some experience over the years, but mainly it was just like personal projects and things like that.
4:56
So at that startup, you know, I got to both work cybersecurity and a.
5:00
I kind of put together
5:02
and learned a lot in a very short period of time, although the grass definitely wasn't greener there, I actually got the wonderful opportunity here at Mission Viejo shortly after that, and that's where I kind of found my home, where one I can use my skill set, both with cyber security and artificial intelligence for some great use cases, and also being able to give back to the community. In fact, even just last week, I was able to go to one of our community centers and teach a senior class on cyber security basics. And that's something that I love to do, is just give back. It's one of my favorite things. That's something my parents instilled in me from a young age. I've always found it to be important, because, again, without community, what do we have? So it's kind of my background, no, that's awesome and certainly appreciated by me, someone that has a heart for public service, and it's nice that is definitely even though we are an internal service organization, we are the connective tissue to your community. And it always warms my heart when I talk to people in this space who aren't in it just to collect a check or order their pension, which you have a long time look forward
6:18
to. It does take a special individual to do that, and it's always nice to hear someone who who has a heart for that. And so,
6:28
you know, I was going to ask you, What drew you into it, and you answered that. But let's, let's, let's ask this question, what has kept you committed to working in this space,
6:40
something that I've always found absolutely essential is having kind of variability. I don't even know if that's a word, but we're using it here today. You know, having a variable nature to my job. I knew that. You know, I enjoyed technology. I enjoyed security. I love the hacker mindset, you know, tinkering, you name it. And you know, there's many different areas you can go with that. I felt like most of those other areas, I'd be doing the same thing pretty much day in and day out. So one of the most important things for me is I get to do a lot here. Yes, I primarily focus on cybersecurity, but I get other wonderful opportunities either by doing community outreach, helping out the rest of the team with, you know, learning opportunities, engaging with me, sack, which is just a wonderful organization, other groups, I'm on the board of some other, you know, cyber security companies and things like that. And I just like to be really involved. I like having different things to do every day. I love tinkering and just having tons of fun. And that's really what it boils down to, is, I have fun.
7:50
Yeah, no, that's also it's good to hear. And if, if I was your boss or supervisor, those are all music to my ears, because I think, and maybe I subscribe to this because I'm just a nerd, and I eat, drink and sleep technology, and it's not something I do when I check into work and stop doing after I leave. And I think, think,
8:12
I think you need that in this space. I'm not saying all need it, and I do think there's definitely a work life balance. You just got to shut it down. But to hear someone say and share what you have in regard to your your love for what you do, I think it just, it's, it's one of those. It's an old and overused saying
8:32
and almost cliche, but it's, they work if you you know, if you love what you're doing, and you happen to collect a check along the way. That's bonus. You know, it's interesting. We're kind of kindred spirits. My time goes back over 20 years, but I was a network engineer in the in the private sector, and as a network engineer, you know, cyber security is not a new thing. I mean, over 20 years ago, we were doing it as well. And my saying used to be, in order to beat the hacker, you have to be one. And so it is kind of funny that you talk about tinkering. And it is. It was a special part that I really enjoyed about being a network engineer and being, you know, taking on the role or or doing things in the black hat world. So so I totally get it and but we're going to talk a little about AI. I know your role at Mission vao is cyber security, and I know with your AI background,
9:30
it is obviously a bonus to the team there.
9:34
How did you see it intersecting right now where you're at, give
9:39
you a little bit of background on, you know, my AI journey, which I think will be helpful for this answer
9:46
back in college. You know, even before that, ignoring my, you know, my experience AI has been around for a very long time. We've, we've come up with many algorithms over the years that have been able to enable.
10:00
Computers to think, to act on their own, to predict, and all these other crazy concepts at lightning speeds compared to what anyone could do, either by hand or even with their own brain. And that always kind of intrigued me. In college, I had several classes just small little projects, object detection, you name it very early on NLP, which is kind of the precursor to what llms large language models are nowadays, it was all kind of fun, and I knew at some point that either hackers would be using these tools against us, or they'd become so ubiquitous that they'd be a tool to be hacked, and little did we know how quick they would come, how heavy they would hit, and how ubiquitous they'd become, because it's everywhere at this point. I mean, we happen to have many tools here at the city that either we've developed or allow our users to use, like copilot, but we also have other tools that do great reporting, and I personally can see plenty of outside usage of AI. And you know, that's both a concern, but it also just shows how important the tools are to our staff. So at least for me,
11:16
you know, it was great to kind of see AI take off, and I knew, because I had that foundational experience here at the city, I would be able to benefit the city and hopefully Mesac, which is what it kind of turned out to be, by utilizing the skills I learned along the way. Yeah, so let's talk about that, Mesac and the AI task force, so you're serving in a co chair with Raj, and I debated, and even thought we should have him on here as the co chair, but I like to focus on the individuals, and I'll certainly get Raj on a future episode, because he and I have had some great conversations, and I know he has a lot to share as well with that said, walk us through what that role entails right now as the co chair of that AI Task Force, sure. So
12:06
the AI Task Force started as a little mini sub group of the cyber security committee. So there were just, I think, seven of us on it. It was basically Auggie and Raj and then five cybersecurity committee members and we spent approximately six or eight months just kind of monitoring things, seeing how AI was evolving. You know, what were some use cases? Is this thing going to just die out? Was there a quick bubble going to burst, and what it eventually turned into as well. Hey, everyone's asking, Can we join this subgroup? Can we interact? Can we collaborate? You name it. And we spun it out as a full blown Task Force. Auggie was still co chairing with Raj at the time, but our wonderful southern chapter president is Augie, and unfortunately for him, his calendar was just filling up too much, so he had to relinquish that position. And I was more than happy to at least throw my hat in the ring. And seemingly people were very happy to have me co lead with Raj. So it's been a wonderful opportunity so far. I'm very excited to see the directions going to continue. The first phase was just a lot of collaboration. We were all figuring out what AI even is, what is government even going to use it for? I mean, we all know how slow moving government can be, especially you know how long it takes to either incorporate things. But this is one of the few times I feel like it has been able to really drive the ship in many of our agencies to really push forward on some innovative solutions. And I'm really, really fortunate to be able to kind of help co lead that ship in a wonderful agency like me? Sack,
14:02
yeah, you stole a little bit away from a question I had, but I think we can still hit on some of some of it, and that is some of the main objectives out of that task force. And you'd mentioned phase two, and I'm familiar with what's going on there as as a member of one of the subgroups, but just share to those who aren't quite up on what's going on, or maybe they're drive by forum posters or readers, not that we have any more or less listeners on this podcast. But you know, if you could just shine a light, a little bit of light, on what are the objectives of that task force, both phase one and what has been accomplished, what you look forward to in phase two, and also sprinkle in a little bit about who's involved in that task force you know, and share a little bit about
14:50
that group and how that is put together across the different agencies and chapters, absolutely so a teeny bit.
15:00
More about phase one, like I kind of mentioned before, it was really just that explore, exploration time. We were really all kind of learning about what products were out there. We were having many vendors come in present to us about various solutions, various agencies that are members of the task force would talk about what they were doing, what they were implementing, how well it was going, what didn't work out, you name it.
15:26
But as we were progressing, what we were noticing was, were we only benefiting ourselves, or were we benefiting Mesac as a whole? And that was really important, I think, to everyone, was that we wanted to make sure it was beneficial to everyone. So we transitioned from what we called phase one to that phase two, which was now this next evolution of the AI Task Force, where we are prioritizing a series of projects. We're currently focusing on three right now, and those three projects are being led by our members with inevitable deliverables. That way we can present to the task force, show some very important
16:09
outcomes from it, and be able to actually represent what we're doing in the task force for everyone.
16:17
Yeah, what I'm excited about you see these questions pop up in the forum, and that is to be able to deliver what essentially will be a cookbook. You know, with all the recipes for our partner agencies, we're all in the same fox hole together, and we're all at different stages of our maturation journey with the AI, some are even just now saying, oh my gosh, I'm being asked to do this, or I'm the person being asked to do the policy, or what are you guys using? And the exciting thing about this, and I think the discussion was had that this task force may evolve into a committee or be rebranded, because this is something that's going to be, have to be. It's ever evolving thing. Not just, Hey, we're done. We put together an implementation plan, a policy, some good practice, some security items related to it. Call it a day, and let's move on. Even just my journey in my agency, I've adjusted things just even three four weeks ago. It
17:19
is, it's something that I think will continue. I can understand why the Mesac board decided to make it a task force at first. We didn't even know if it was going to just kind of go away instantly. And I personally do believe we're in some form of an AI bubble. But regardless of that bubble bursting or not, AI isn't going anywhere. There may be just a few different companies left in the end, but these are going to be tools that everyone uses. And I think I missed a point that you asked on your prior question there, which was, who's kind of involved we have, well, on the books, we have almost 70 members, active members. We have about 4045, and that kind of really shows the absolute interest in this topic. And I would implore anyone that would love to join, we'd love to have you. You know, we are potentially rivaling the size of the cybersecurity Committee, which has traditionally been the largest one out there. So I would love to state that we beat them, but there's amazing people on there from all walks of life, all experience levels, all different types of positions, individuals like yourself who are curious, willing to learn, have fun with it, share their experiences again, even someone that's been seasoned and in the field for almost 15 years now, with AI, it's just great. I'm learning a ton from you all too.
18:46
Yeah, you know what? Let's, let's just take a moment for a little humble brag on this process. And that is, what milestone or early wins would you like to share, or do you feel that you've had so far? I mean, what would be the thing that you were like, Damn man, we did a great job with that task force, or our agency, Task Force, all right?
19:10
I think with the task force, the key thing for me is truly the collaboration factor.
19:18
You know? I think it is what ultimately, Mesac does incredibly well, which is getting us all in a room without the fear of a vendor being offended or something else. And because AI is so new, so many VCs are pouring tons of money into this, we're all getting hit with probably dozens upon dozens of AI vendors all the time. Yeah, and I think that major win for us is being able to kind of filter out those that are basically all smoke and those that can actually get the job done. And that list we're trying to actually develop right now, we're trying to create a list, a matrix.
20:00
Of ones that we would vendors or solutions that we would recommend, but at the same time, we also have a list of do not use, and I think that's going to be incredibly valuable for our members, because some people, some agencies, have actually, you know, bitten the bullet, spent some money and tried to go down a certain path and have found out that these solutions don't work for them, and maybe they will work for you, but if you know, you know that certain agencies are consistently not happy with its vendor, we now know not to waste our money or time with them.
20:37
Yeah, let's, let's shift a little bit. I'm going to hang the subject matter expert title on you, and that's why I wanted to get you on this episode. And that's AI in the public sector. But we'll shift a little bit from your good work with the task force, from your perspective, what are some of the most promising applications of AI in local government?
20:58
It's a fantastic question someone that's in a medium sized city. I only really have my perspective. Obviously, I get to hear from everyone, but these are, I think, some areas that would benefit us and do benefit us as a whole. So one agenda, writing, I mean just professional writing, right? Technical writing, you name it. I'm fortunate enough to have poured a lot of energy into that, but I know some people pour tons of energy and can't learn it or struggle with it to this day. And you know what? Even with my experience, I struggle with it. What? Sometimes should take me 10 minutes, takes me an hour to write. Sometimes it's just an email, and I struggle so being able to just use a large language model to dump information into, you know, here's my brain dump. You know, please make this coherent, and it spits out something nearly perfect. It just breaks my brain in all the right ways. You know, being able to just be more productive, and that's one thing I do want to quickly highlight, too, at least how our agency is approaching this. We personally don't want to replace anyone that isn't our goals. Humans are so important and beautiful in this world, and we just want to give them additional tools, sometimes AI, sometimes not, to make them more productive. It takes a lot of time to go through video transcripts. We tell our users, shove it into AI, ask it for notes. One way that it has become more streamlined is we just transcribe every meeting and then use AI notes. We tweak them at the end. That enables us to be more present in the meetings. We don't have to constantly be off to the side or taking a note for this action item or adjusting that. So we found that incredibly useful other areas right citizen engagement. We're going to be rolling out a chat bot here for our citizens. I know several other agencies have done the same thing. Our websites are huge. I think a lot of our websites are big beasts. It sometimes can be very difficult to find. You know the exact thing you're looking for, the exact municipal code that applies to me. What permits do I need to pull? Every city is different. Every county is different. And being able to not waste the public's time for an hour or two trying to get the right answers and have them be able to put something in natural language and get quick, immediate results back, is super nice. And I think a third example would be object or video detection. You know, I've heard some great use cases of like pothole detection or being able to notice when things are out of place. There's another agency, I won't name them, but they have a consistent issue where people are going into their fiber vaults and they're lifting the heavy metal
23:46
gates and whatever on top of them, and they have constant imagery data every week in those areas, they're going to use AI object detection to notice if the plates on it are shift or have been moved from a week to week. I think those are great examples, right? We're not wasting a human's time, we're wasting a machine's time. To review,
24:07
yeah, I like that. You know that last example you gave, I see a connected technology, and that launched the drones,
24:15
people pulling the plates. Let's, let's move a little bit to the challenges that cities and agencies face when it comes to responsible adoption of AI.
24:26
Yeah, it's, I think it's a very difficult topic, one I will always start out with, that should be something that you always start out with, no matter what, ignoring the fact that it's AI. Have a business problem first. What is your business problem? And get the appropriate tool for it. Sometimes it will be AI, sometimes it won't, but it is absolutely essential that you have a business problem first and foremost. Unless you know city executives say you need to implement it, then what choice do you have? But
24:55
I think having that business problem and being able to actually.
25:00
Demo products against that problem is perfect. Two is budget. AI is super new. I mean, relatively speaking, none of us probably had budget prepared for this, and a lot of us are locked into sometimes multiple year cycles of predetermined budgets.
25:15
That can be pretty difficult. But what I will personally say is you can get started quite cheap. We rolled out our internal chat bot for about 500 of our users. So we have, I think, 275
25:28
full time, and then several good amount above that for part timers and not everyone uses AI. We knew that, right. Why waste the money on 20, $30 licenses for everyone when we can roll out our own tool, which we did, and it only costs us, genuinely under $10 a month.
25:47
It's something that you can do incredibly affordably. You don't need insane hardware. It is relatively minimal uplift. But again, budgets do cost. If you want something that's integrated with a lot of solutions like copilot or chat GPT, you have to spend some money on it. And third, I think it's really important to consider the security side of things. If you're going to be rolling out your own custom AIS, you have to think about prompt injection or incident response when something goes wrong. You better plan for that too. Again, these aren't necessarily all new problems. Some are like prompt injections or deep fakes, but by and large, data exfiltration, DLP solutions, these all still apply to AI stuff. Those are all things you need to consider. So I would really boil down to make sure you think ahead before you implement don't just implement things hastily.
26:44
Yeah, I, you know, you touched a little bit on this about the workforce, and in particular your workforce, but just overall in workforce development, and obviously we're in the same camp of we're not adopting these solutions to replace people, and never will. Now, I could see jobs changing and evolving to where maybe what used to be done by this person could be done with AI, but it's not intended with any reduction in force in mind. It's really for a lot of it. It's about efficiency and making the best use of time. You know, there's a term that we're trying not to use anymore in our agency, because it's overused and it doesn't really speak to what we're trying to do, and that's do more with less. All of us are doing more with less, but I feel like AI is going to be one of those do less with more, and that will be what helps us or complements us. I saw somebody post on in the forum a while back ago now, but it's always stuck in my head, and that is the best intern ever, and that's how I look at it. You know, you gave an example of some use cases, and, man, you are right. Stuff that I have no assistance. We're in a mid size city that I'm not blessed with admin assistants and management analysts, and so you're looking at the person I am that. And so that's what I where I get value is I have the best intern ever with AI, you know, those things that would take me a whole evening to draft or research, I just have it, Hoover it up and produce the results for me. Now, am I just cut and pasting and moving all of my life? No, you know, these are things that I definitely vet and do my due diligence with it. And I think, I think that's going to be the story that comes out of the task force too, in that there are the guardrails and methodologies and procedures on how to appropriately adopt AI. So anyways, let me, let me, let me move off to
28:48
to another item, and that is the
28:51
conference that's coming up. So I'm super excited about the conference and and the role that the task force will have there is, how does a task force plan to show up there in terms of deliverables or shows or anything that you could talk about?
29:09
Yeah, so the task force is definitely planning on making some presence there. We aren't a full blown committee yet, so we don't have pamphlets and things like that, but what I am definitely planning on bringing you to the table is our wealth of knowledge, our experiences. And I'm, fortunately part of a one of the presentations. I believe it's on Tuesday. I'm with a few others on a panel. We're actually talking about AI incident response, and part of that is going to be the things that we learned and developed in the AI task force. So we have some run books prepared for everyone as some resources. We have scissor on the panel too. So we have a wonderful Don Hester. Please come and see us. See him. We have Heather Rama Murphy. And I am very bad in forgetting the fourth person right now, and I'm going to look it up because I HAVE TO THE.
30:00
Is I'm going to feel so bad. So you're gonna, you're gonna edit this, right?
30:04
Let's see here,
30:07
all raw and unfiltered. Yeah, Ron, filter. I love that. Make me feel great. Oh my goodness. I don't have the details,
30:18
all right, I will figure out. Matt Hart, so yeah, the four of us are going to be on the panel, and we're incredibly excited to have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, some run books, some horror stories, maybe an example or two, live demoed right in front of you all about what we've experienced in the last almost year and a half, but also what you all can do moving forward, and what we're ultimately looking for is just extra hands. We want the extra experience that you all have. Almost certainly, there's more than just the 45 ish people that show up to the task force meetings that are using AI in their agencies. And we would love to hear from you all how we can help you best.
31:08
That's great. Looking forward to that. I think many are going to be going to the conference with
31:14
usually. I mean, that's, that's one and two, and it can flip flop, and that cybersecurity and AI, I mean, that's top of mind for all of us, and continues to be so. So we're gonna kind of wind down here. And I wanted you to be able to put your, you know, pull out your crystal ball. And I think we all like to think of ourselves as people with vision and kind of predict the future. I know I like to, oftentimes, just throwing a dart at the wall, but I've been right on some occasions as well.
31:42
With that said, you know, you spoke a little bit to this, and that is the bubble that we're in. I share that opinion. I think we're going to constrict or conflate pretty quickly here, at some point. Just reminds me of the late night 1999
32:01
early 2000s you know, and that.com bubble, and everybody had to spin up a website, and within weeks, doors were closing.
32:11
But with that said, where do you see AI heading in the next I don't know. Let's go three to five years out in the government sector. That's That's an impressive amount of time for AI by then. Right now we are, if you looked at the news today, actually, one of the companies released a new robot that's claiming to be a household robot actually do chores for you. But in the government sector, I definitely see some disruption. I think a lot of the AI companies right now are focusing on private sector, right why would they focus on the public money is all in the private and they have to make money to continue. I mean, vast majority of AI companies are upside down. They are not making nearly any revenue compared to the cost of running these AI systems. But
33:05
what I can see is,
33:08
you know, the
33:10
easier jobs being automated. You kind of were alluding to that earlier too. You know, maybe some people answering phones, they're better used elsewhere. They have great skill sets, I'm sure that either they already have or can learn, you know, sitting at a desk all day and answering phone calls, heck yeah, might as well let an AI do that. Filter calls for you probably give great answers and, you know, take away 90% of the calls that would end up needing to go to a human I can see full blown agenda is being aied basically, feed in the information. Here's your full agenda. It can see pretty much, you know, Granicus surely will come out with a horrible solution that costs a million dollars and we're all gonna have to use for meetings, but it's half joke. But
33:58
regardless, I think it's gonna take a little bit for AI solutions to really come into the public space, and when they do, I think it'll actually be pretty shattering. I think it will really change a lot, but time will tell.
34:16
Yeah, what advice would you give to other city or agency leaders who are just beginning to explore. Ai,
34:25
keep exploring.
34:27
Yeah, get your hands dirty. Try things. Don't be afraid to try to roll your own play with APIs. Play with rags, right? Play with the connectors. I mean, obviously, do things carefully. You don't want to just give unfettered free access to, you know all of your information, but at the same time, gain experience. Now, because I don't see this going away anytime soon, I really think this is going to become one of the next big things. And.
35:00
And if you don't have experience now,
35:03
you're going to miss out in the future.
35:07
Yeah, so you know, one of the questions I had, and you kind of answered this at the start of our conversation, and that was, I wanted to ask you what you know, most excited you about the work that you do, and you and you shared a lot of that, and Nick came across too.
35:24
Let me just sort of tweak that just a little bit. And maybe,
35:29
you know, you've been doing this for a long time, it's kind of a little bit of a,
35:35
you know, you may be at the point where nothing really excites you or surprises you anymore in AI, let's, let's go to AI and
35:45
and be more specific to that, rather than what you do for your day job and that cyber security and in that space, what, what excites you the most about it?
35:56
Is it that not knowing what's around the corner or or
36:03
are you just done with it? You know, I actually really do like the concept of what is around the corner.
36:10
Just a year ago today, AI has changed so much. Cyber Security has changed so much. Both of the fields have and being able to be in the moment right now is incredibly special. I think that's something that we all maybe take for granted. We are seeing history in the making as maybe cliche was saying as that is, it is crazy, and I'm happy to be here for it. I hope you all are.
36:42
I That's great. So you know, if you just land on one last thing,
36:48
anything else you'd like to share with listeners about the task force or the importance of AI and local government, just some final thoughts, absolutely, as that's been mentioned before, get your hands dirty, have some fun with it. Yeah, it's actually an incredibly cool thing. I have found so many use cases, and you would be surprised how many use cases there are. I would recommend that you try to think out of the box, listen to your users, see what they're using it for, because, you know, I recommended a handful of things when we initially rolled out our solutions, and then the excitedness that came back from HR, from community development, and all these places that I just wasn't thinking about how it's streamlining their business processes is what makes me happy. And I think as IT professionals, we really want our systems to work, things to be secure. Our users systems are functioning at the end of the day, right? We're trying to make them less stressed, that way they can live happier lives. And AI, I think is going to do that for a lot of people. It's going to make them live happier lives because they're not having to do the menial stuff they get to work on more fun and engaging things. I totally agree share those sentiments. I personally
38:10
it's gotten to be, you know, and I'm a tech nerd. I'm in this stuff all the time, but I I see new things every day, even by accident, you know, I was, I use comment for my browser now, and having that agentic built in capability, I by accident,
38:30
saw something occur. And I don't know if I've shared it on this podcast or just through other conversations, but, you know, I home, I have a ubiquity Wi Fi network, and it's, it's not the Linksys router network. It's a little more complicated, and it's a mesh network, and it has a million different configurations you can do, which I probably don't need three APs in my house, maybe even four to do my mesh but I do just because I'm a nerd that way, and there are so many settings and capabilities with ubiquity on the set that up, I was in my portal, and I had opened up a little chat on the side, Hey, what are the optimum settings for this AP model, you know, for this, this, and I just kind of put some parameters in thinking that I would just take what it suggested and go in to the dashboard and make the changes. It promptly went in and just started making the changes for me. I was sitting there watching it, you know, in this agentic mode, I'm going, my gosh, I cannot believe this. It was crazy, and it's been doing work for me ever since.
39:40
It's crazy what they can do, and it's going to be even crazier what they can't do in one year, three years, five years. So yeah, I think don't be afraid, Tinker, play, learn it now, because it's going to be a great skill into the future.
39:56
Yeah, let me leave with this one last question. I.
40:00
Try to make this a an ongoing segment, and I forget with some but it's fun for me. But, and that is, what is your favorite app? What is your go to app right now, when you pull your phone out of your pocket, what is the app that you enjoy the most?
40:16
Hacker News, if you don't know the VC Y Combinator, they have a technology kind of, I guess it would be a social media, because people can post on it and comment. But Hacker News, there's also the Hacker News. It's not that one. It's just Hacker News.
40:35
There are wonderful people that post up to date technology and like, world shattering news and articles, and I mean, all the way down to just individual blogs get posted there. But whenever I go there and I look at, you know, the top 10 articles, nine of them, I want to click on and read all about learn more. And that's what's definitely kept me up on some great news. And you know, it's all tech related, it's all hacker ish related, or things like that. So I definitely find interest in it. Would recommend it to anyone that's a great recommendation, and I appreciate that. And those who are listening, you need to be more like Ryan. Do what Ryan does. I certainly enjoyed our conversations and what you're doing, what you're doing for me. Sec, you bring a wealth of knowledge and skill set, and you do it with a smile on your face. Super, super. Appreciate your efforts with me. Sec,
41:32
not to mention the fantastic podcast voice that you have so you need to be on the radio, son, I appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me on, Allen. It's been a wonderful conversation. Great. Thanks again, and we'll see you at the conference. See you at the conference. Allen,
42:00
you
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