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AI is changing sales. But trust still wins deals.In this episode of Make It Happen Mondays, John Barrows sits down with negotiation expert Tim Castle to break down what it actually takes to negotiate and close deals in today's AI-driven sales environment.They dive into the real difference between influence and manipulation, why belief in what you sell matters more than ever, and how preparation, emotional awareness, and cultural nuance shape successful negotiations. Tim also explains how AI can help sales professionals prepare faster while reminding us that human connection and trust are still the ultimate advantage.If you're serious about improving how you sell, negotiate, and build trust with buyers in the AI era, this episode delivers practical insights you can apply right away.Want to sharpen your sales skills and stay ahead of the curve? Head over to www.jbarrows.com and start building the systems that help you close more deals.What You'll LearnWhy belief in your product mattersInfluence vs manipulation in negotiationsHow top negotiators prepareUsing AI for better sales prepWhy trust still wins in salesTim Castle is a globally recognized negotiation expert ranked among the Top 30 Negotiation Professionals in the World (2025) by Global Gurus. He is an award-winning author of multiple bestsellers, including The Art of Negotiation and The Momentum Sales Model, and the founder of the Negotiation Edge Training Academy. Tim works with ambitious organizations that want to win negotiations with integrity, build influence, and create stronger buyer relationships in an increasingly AI-driven world.Connect with Tim Castle:Website: https://www.timjscastle.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimJSCastleLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timcastle3/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timjscastle/X: https://x.com/TimJSCastleTikTok: tiktok.com/@timjscastleTim's Bestselling Books Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Tim-Castle/author/B07G6LF77C?John Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution—helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmbarrows/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@johnmbarrowsCheck out John's Membership: https://go.jbarrows.com/Join John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter
This episode features Drew Russell, Identity Resilience Platform Owner at Rubrik. Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman explore the intersection of backup, recovery, and identity security. Drew explains how Rubrik evolved from data backup into a cyber resilience platform with identity as a core pillar. Topics include recovering Active Directory, Okta, and Entra ID after ransomware, Rubrik's "bunker in a box" appliance for immutable air-gapped recovery, proactive posture management, CrowdStrike and Defender integrations, and where AI and non-human identities fit into Rubrik's roadmap. The episode wraps with measuring success for a product you hope to never use, and a detour into watch collecting.This episode was made possible by the support of Rubrik. Learn more at rubrik.com/idacConnect with Drew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-russell-3762411b/Learn more about Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/idacConnect with us on LinkedIn:Jim McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmcdonaldpmp/Jeff Steadman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsteadman/Visit the show on the web at idacpodcast.comTIMESTAMPS00:00:00 - Welcome and Introduction00:01:19 - Introducing Drew Russell00:01:36 - How Drew Got Into Identity00:02:43 - What Is Rubrik and What Sets It Apart00:03:38 - From Backup to Cyber Resilience00:05:31 - Where Rubrik Fits in the IAM Landscape00:07:08 - Rubrik's Scale: Clients and Growth00:07:51 - Primary Use Cases: Post-Incident Recovery and AD00:09:09 - Kicking Out Compromised Accounts and ADR00:10:11 - Proactive Threat Detection and Mandiant Integration00:11:28 - Scanning Backups to Find the Clean Recovery Point00:12:14 - The Bunker in a Box Explained00:13:18 - Posture Management and Upstream Tool Integration00:14:19 - AI Agent Swarms and the Future Attack Surface00:15:37 - The Taiwan Bank Case Study: Six Weeks to Rebuild AD00:17:16 - The State of Nevada Incident: $400K and 30 Days00:17:56 - What Recovery Covers: AD, Okta, and Entra ID00:19:26 - Post-Restore Change Management and Whitelisting00:20:08 - How Long Should You Store Backups?00:21:19 - Indexing Identity for Intelligent Recovery Points00:22:29 - Excluding Malicious Actions During Restore00:24:41 - Zero Trust for Rubrik's Own Backups00:26:21 - No Windows, No Virtualization Architecture00:27:49 - Proactive Posture Management00:29:00 - CrowdStrike and Defender Real-Time Integration00:30:48 - Why Tabletop Exercises Often Fall Short00:31:53 - AI Roadmap and Non-Human Identities00:34:22 - The Three Pillars: Data, Identity, and AI00:35:29 - Deployment: SaaS vs. On-Prem00:38:37 - Appliance Sizing and Redundancy00:42:23 - Measuring Success for a Product You Hope to Never Use00:43:46 - The Ludacris Rubrik Commercial00:45:31 - Watch Collecting and the Omega Speedmaster00:53:39 - Drew's Closing WordsKEYWORDSIdentity at the Center, IDAC, Jeff Steadman, Jim McDonald, Rubrik, Drew Russell, identity resilience, cyber resilience, Active Directory recovery, AD backup, Okta recovery, Entra ID recovery, identity backup, ITDR, ISPM, non-human identity, NHI, agentic AI, ransomware recovery, bunker in a box, immutable backup, CrowdStrike integration, Microsoft Defender integration, Mandiant integration, identity disaster recovery, ADR, zero trust, tabletop exercises, posture management, IAM, identity security podcast, cybersecurity podcast
1月下旬にリリースされた、AIエージェントのためのソーシャルネットワーク「Moltbook」は、今日まで私たちが目にしてきた中で最も興味深い、大規模なエージェント型AIの実験として記憶されることになるでしょう。
Today I take you on a journey of trading. Great trades to bad trades. I show you some free tools vs. the tools I use. I even show you a fantastic list I provided in July of 2025 that is now up 20% with 1 stock that is an Alpha Pick that's up 80%. Get my FREE newsletter or sign up for the paid version with benefits like the Office Hours and tracking the portfolios in Savvy Trader https://dailystockpick.substack.com/THESE SALES END SOON: TRENDSPIDER - get any annual plan and I'll send you my 4 hour algorithm. Seeking Alpha's Tool kit *BEST DEAL - SEEKING ALPHA BUNDLE - Save over $150 and get Premium and Alpha Picks together ALPHA PICKS - Want to Beat the S&P? Save $50 Seeking Alpha Premium - FREE 7 DAY TRIAL SEEKING ALPHA PRO - TRY IT FOR A MONTH FOR ONLY $89 EPISODE SUMMARY
Oaktree's Howard Marks lays out how he's thinking about the AI trade and software, detailing how his personal experience with Claude changed his mind. Plus, why he says the worries in private credit are not systemic. Then TD Cowen breaks down Broadcom results and whether the stock has more room to run. And the CEO of Okta on results and why the competition in AI isn't a winner take all equation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!Note: We didn't directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus' and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.Full Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals* 33:23 Industries and Datasets* 35:22 Building the Agent Team* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode* 55:38 Token FOMO Culture* 56:31 Production Function Secrets* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and EngineeringTranscriptAdapting Work for AgentsAaron Levie: Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work.We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you'll see compounding returns. But that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.Aaron Levie: It's a pleasure. Wow. How'd you get upgraded to, uh, to that?swyx: Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.We really do.swyx: Uh, and we're here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.swyx: Uh, yeah. So we've all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it's always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You're, you're super excited about agents.I loveAaron Levie: agents.swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executiveswyx: hire.Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,swyx: hey, that's my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.Why Every Agent Needs a BoxAaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've, we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time.And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that's gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we've been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we're only working on the new active stuff.All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it's gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it's gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're gonna need access to that data as well.And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's gonna be agents that are just.Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you're gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.It's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.We think it's gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody's just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.And it's nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that's theswyx: tagline. Every agentAaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I'm fine with this. And that's the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,swyx: okay, let's do it. Yeah.Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.swyx: Yeah.Agent Governance and IdentityAaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we're gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.That's inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that's needed to make all those agents effective in the enterprise? Make sure that they are well governed. Make sure they're only doing [00:05:00] safe things on your information. Make sure that they're not getting exposed. The data that they shouldn't have access to.There's gonna be just incredibly spectacularly crazy security incidents that will happen with agents because you'll prompt, inject an agent and sort of find your way through the CRM system and pull out data that you shouldn't have access to. Oh, weJeff Huber: have God,Aaron Levie: right? I mean, that's just gonna happen all over the place, right?So, so then the thing is, is how do you make sure you have the right security, the permissions, the access controls, the data governance. Um, we actually don't yet exactly know in many cases how we're gonna regulate some of these agents, right? If you think about an agent in financial services, does it have the exact same financial sort of, uh, requirements that a human did?Or is it, is the risk fully on the human that was interacting or created the agent? All open questions, but no matter what, there's gonna need to be a layer that manages the, the data they have access to, the workflows that they're involved in, pulling up data from multiple systems. This is the new infrastructure opportunity in the era of agents.swyx: You have a piece on agent identities, [00:06:00] which I think was today, um, which I think a lot of breaking news, the security, security people are talking about, right? Like you basically, I, I always think of this as like, well you need the human you and then there you need the agent. YouAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: And uh, well, I don't know if it's that simple, but is box going to have an opinion on that or you're just gonna be like, well we're just the sort of the, the source layer.Yeah. Let's Okta of zero handle that.Aaron Levie: I think we're gonna have an opinion and we will work with generally wherever the contours of the market end up. Um, and the reason that we're gonna have an opinion more than other topics probably is because one of the biggest use cases for why your agent might need it, an identity is for file system access.So thus we have to kind of think about this pretty deeply. And I think, uh, unless you're like in our world thinking about this particular problem all day long, it might be, you know, like, why is this such a big deal? And the reason why it's a really big deal is because sometimes sort of say, well just give the agent an, an account on the system and it just treats, treat it like every other type of user on the system.The [00:07:00] problem is, is that I as Aaron don't really have any responsibility over anybody else's box account in our organization. I can't see the box account of any other employee that I work with. I am not liable for anything that they do. And they have, I have, I have, you know, strict privacy requirements on everything that they're able to, you know, that, that, that they work on.Agents don't have that, you know, don't have those properties. The person who creates the agent probably is gonna, for the foreseeable future, take on a lot of the liability of what that agent does. That agent doesn't deserve any privacy because, because it's, you know, it can't fully be autonomously operated and it doesn't have any legal, you know, kind of, you know, responsibility.So thus you can't just be like, oh, well I'll just create a bunch of accounts and then I'll, I'll kind of work with that agent and I'll talk to it occasionally. Like you need oversight of that. And so then the question is, how do you have a world where the agent, sometimes you have oversight of, but what if that agent goes and works with other people?That person over there is collaborating with the agent on something you shouldn't have [00:08:00] access to what they're doing. So we have all of these new boundaries that we're gonna have to figure out of, of, you know, it's really, really easy. So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with ai, which is the agent just is you.And when you're in quad code and you're in cursor, and you're in Codex, you're just, the agent is you. You're offing into your services. It can do everything you can do. That's the easy mode. The hard mode is agents are kind of running on their own. People check in with them occasionally, they're doing things autonomously.How do you give them access to resources in the enterprise and not dramatically increased the security risk and the risk that you might expose the wrong thing to somebody. These are all the new problems that we have to get solved. I like the identity layer and, and identity vendors as being a solution to that, but we'll, we'll need some opinions as well because so many of the use cases are these collaborative file system use cases, which is how do I give it an agent, a subset of my data?Give it its own workspace as well. ‘cause it's gonna need to store off its own information that would be relevant for it. And how do I have the right oversight into that? [00:09:00]Jeff Huber: One thing, which, um, I think is kind interesting, think about is that you know, how humans work, right? Like I may not also just like give you access to the whole file.I might like sit next to you and like scroll to this like one part of the file and just show you that like one part and like, you know,swyx: partial file access.Jeff Huber: I'm just saying I think like our, like RA does seem to be dead, right? Like you wanna say something is dead uhhuh probably RA is dead. And uh, like the auth story to me seems like incredibly unsolved and unaddressed by like the existing state of like AI vendors.ButAaron Levie: yeah, I think, um, we're, I mean you're taking obviously really to level limit that we probably need to solve for. Yeah. And we built an access control system that was, was kind of like, you know, its own little world for, for a long time. And um, and the idea was this, it's a many to many collaboration system where I can give you any part of the file system.And it's a waterfall model. So if I give you higher up in the, in the, in the system, you get everything below. And that, that kind of created immense flexibility because I can kind of point you to any layer in the, in the tree, but then you're gonna get access to everything kind of below it. And that [00:10:00] mostly is, is working in this, in this world.But you do have to manage this issue, which is how do I create an agent that has access to some of my stuff and somebody else's stuff as well. Mm-hmm. And which parts do I get to look at as the creator of the agent? And, and these are just brand new problems? Yeah. Crazy. And humans, when there was a human there that was really easy to do.Like, like if the three of us were all sharing, there'd be a Venn diagram where we'd have an overlapping set of things we've shared, but then we'd have our own ways that we shared with each other. In an agent world, somebody needs to take responsibility for what that agent has access to and what they're working on.These are like the, some of the most probably, you know, boring problems for 98% of people on, on the internet, but they will be the problems that are the difference between can you actually have autonomous agents in an enterprise contextswyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: That are not leaking your data constantly.swyx: No. Like, I mean, you know, I run a very, very small company for my conference and like we already have data sensitivity issues.Yes. And some of my team members cannot see Yes. Uh, the others and like, I can't imagine what it's like to run a Fortune 500 and like, you have to [00:11:00] worry about this. I'm just kinda curious, like you, you talked to a lot like, like 70, 80% of your cus uh, of the Fortune 500, your customers.Aaron Levie: Yep. 67%. Just so we're being verySEswyx: precise.So Yeah. I'm notAaron Levie: Okay. Okay.swyx: Something I'm rounding up. Yes. Round up. I'm projecting to, forAaron Levie: the government.swyx: I'm projecting to the end of the year.Aaron Levie: Okay.swyx: There you go.Aaron Levie: You do make it sound like, like we, we, well we've gotta be on this. Like we're, we're taking way too long to get to 80%. Well,swyx: no, I mean, so like. How are they approaching it?Right? Because you're, you don't have a, you don't have a final answer yet.Why Coding Agents Took Off FirstAaron Levie: Well, okay, so, so this is actually, this is the stark reality that like, unfortunately is the kinda like pouring the water on the party a little bit.swyx: Yes.Aaron Levie: We all in Silicon Valley are like, have the absolute best conditions possible for AI ever.And I think we all saw the dke, you know, kind of Dario podcast and this idea of AI coding. Why is that taken off? And, and we're not yet fully seeing it everywhere else. Well, look, if you just like enumerated the list of properties that AI coding has and then compared it to other [00:12:00] knowledge work, let's just, let's just go through a few of them.Generally speaking, you bring on a new engineer, they have access to a large swath of the code base. Like, there's like very, like you, just, like new engineer comes on, they can just go and find the, the, the stuff that they, they need to work with. It's a fully text in text out. Medium. It's only, it's just gonna be text at the end of the day.So it's like really great from a, from just a, uh, you know, kinda what the agent can work with. Obviously the models are super trained on that dataset. The labs themselves have a really strong, kind of self-reinforcing positive flywheel of why they need to do, you know, agent coding deeply. So then you get just better tooling, better services.The actual developers of the AI are daily users of the, of the thing that they're we're working on versus like the, you know, probably there's only like seven Claude Cowork legal plugin users at Anthropic any given day, but there's like a couple thousand Claude code and you know, users every single day.So just like, think about which one are they getting more feedback on. All day long. So you just go through this list. You have a, you know, everybody who's a [00:13:00] developer by definition is technical so they can go install the latest thing. We're all generally online, or at least, you know, kinda the weird ones are, and we're all talking to each other, sharing best practices, like that's like already eight differences.Versus the rest of the economy. Every other part of the economy has like, like six to seven headwinds relative to that list. You go into a company, you're a banker in financial services, you have access to like a, a tiny little subset of the total data that's gonna be relevant to do your job. And you're have to start to go and talk to a bunch of people to get the right data to do your job because Sally didn't add you to that deal room, you know, folder.And that that, you know, the information is actually in a completely different organization that you now have to go in and, and sort of run into. And it's like you have this endless list of access controls and security. As, as you talked about, you have a medium, which is not, it's not just text, right? You have, you have a zoom call that, that you're getting all of the requirements from the customer.You have a lot of in-person conversations and you're doing in-person sales and like how do you ever [00:14:00] digitize all of that information? Um, you know, I think a lot of people got upset with this idea that the code base has all the context, um, that I don't know if you follow, you know, did you follow some of that conversation that that went viral?Is like, you know, it's not that simple that, that the code base doesn't have all the knowledge, but like it's a lot, you're a lot better off than you are with other areas of knowledge work. Like you, we like, we like have documentation practices, you write specifications. Those things don't exist for like 80% of work that happens in the enterprise.That's the divide that we have, which is, which is AI coding has, has just fully, you know, where we've reached escape velocity of how powerful this stuff is, and then we're gonna have to find a way to bring that same energy and momentum, but to all these other areas of knowledge work. Where the tools aren't there, the data's not set up to be there.The access controls don't make it that easy. The context engineering is an incredibly hard problem because again, you have access control challenges, you have different data formats. You have end users that are gonna need to kind of be kind of trained through this as opposed to their adopting [00:15:00] these tools in their free time.That's where the Fortune 500 is. And so we, I think, you know, have to be prepared as an industry where we are gonna be on a multi-year march to, to be able to bring agents to the enterprise for these workflows. And I think probably the, the thing that we've learned most in coding that, that the rest of the world is not yet, I think ready for, I mean, we're, they'll, they'll have to be ready for it because it's just gonna inevitably happen is I think in coding.What, what's interesting is if you think about the practice of coding today versus two years ago. It's probably the most changed workflow in maybe the history of time from the amount of time it's changed, right? Yeah. Like, like has any, has any workflow in the entire economy changed that quickly in terms of the amount of change?I just, you know, at least in any knowledge worker workflow, there's like very rarely been an event where one piece of technology and work practice has so fundamentally, you know, changed, changed what you do. Like you don't write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and [00:16:00] does it for you, and you may be at best review it.And even that's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. Mm-hmm. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution.The rest of the economy is gonna have to update its workflows to make agents effective. And to give agents the context that they need and to actually figure out what kind of prompting works and to figure out how do you ensure that the agent has the right access to information to be able to execute on its work.I, you know, this is not the panacea that people were hoping for, of the agent drops in, just automates your life. Like you have to basically re-engineer your workflow to get the most out of agents and, uh, and that, that's just gonna take, you know, multiple years across the economy. Right now it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this.‘cause [00:17:00] you'll see compounding returns, but that's just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.swyx: I love, I love pushing back. I think that. That is what a lot of technology consultants love to hear this sort of thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. First to, to embrace the ai. Yes. To get to the promised land, you must pay me so much money to a hundred percent to adopt the prescribed way of, uh, conforming to the agents.Yes. And I worry that you will be eclipsed by someone else who says, no, come as you are.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And we'll meet you where you are.Aaron Levie: And, and, and and what was the thing that went viral a week ago? OpenAI probably, uh, is hiring F Dees. Yeah. Uh, to go into the enterprise. Yeah. Yeah. And then philanthropic is embedded at Goldman Sachs.Yeah. So if the labs are having to do this, if, if the labs have decided that they need to hire FDE and professional services, then I think that's a pretty clear indication that this, there's no easy mode of workflow transformation. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to your point, I think actually this is a market opportunity for, you know, new professional services and consulting [00:18:00] firms that are like Agent Build and they, and they kind of, you know, go into organizations and they figure out how to re-engineer your workflows to make them more agent ready and get your data into the right format and, you know, reconstruct your business process.So you're, you're not doing most of the work. You're telling agents how to do the work and then you're reviewing it. But I haven't seen the thing that can just drop in and, and kinda let you not go through those changes.swyx: I don't know how that kind of sales pitch goes over. Yeah. You know, you're, you're saying things like, well, in my sort of nice beautiful walled garden, here's, there's, uh, because here's this, here's this beautiful box account that has everything.Yes. And I'm like, well, most, most real life is extremely messy. Sure. And like, poorly named and there duplicate this outdated s**tAaron Levie: a hundred percent. And so No, no, a hundred percent. And so this is actually No. So, so this is, I mean, we agree that, that getting to the beautiful garden is gonna be tough.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: There's also the other end of the spectrum where I, I just like, it's a technical impossibility to solve. The agent is, is truly cannot get enough context to make the right decision in, in the, in the incredibly messy land. Like there's [00:19:00] no a GI that will solve that. So, so we're gonna have to kind of land in somewhere in between, which is like we all collectively get better at.Documentation practices and, and having authoritative relatively up-to-date information and putting it in the right place like agents will, will certainly cause us to be much better organized around how we work with our information, simply because the severity of the agent pulling the wrong data will be too high and the productivity gain of that you'll miss out on by not doing this will be too high as well, that you, that your competition will just do it and they'll just have higher velocity.So, uh, and, and we, we see this a lot firsthand. So we, we build a series of agents internally that they can kind of have access to your full box account and go off and you give it a task and it can go find whatever information you're looking for and work with. And, you know, thank God for the model progress, but like, if, if you gave that task to an agent.Nine months ago, you're just gonna get lots of bogus answers because it's gonna, it's gonna say, Hey, here's, here are fi [00:20:00] five, you know, documents that all kind of smell like the right thing. And I'm gonna, but I, but you're, you're putting me on the clock. ‘cause my assistant prompt says like, you know, be pretty smart, but also try and respond to the user and it's gonna respond.And it's like, ah, it got the wrong document. And then you do that once or twice as a knowledge worker and you're just neverswyx: again,Aaron Levie: never again. You're just like done with the system.swyx: Yeah. It doesn't work.Aaron Levie: It doesn't work. And so, you know, Opus four six and Gemini three one Pro and you know, whatever the latest five 3G BT will be, like, those things are getting better and better and it's using better judgment.And this sort of like the, all of these updates to the agentic tool and search systems are, are, we're seeing, we're seeing very real progress where the agent. Kind of can, can almost smell some things a little bit fishy when it's getting, you know, we, we have this process where we, we have it go fan out, do a bunch of searches, pull up a bunch of data, and then it has to sort of do its own ranking of, you know, what are the right documents that, that it should be working with.And again, like, you know, the intelligence level of a model six months ago, [00:21:00] it'd be just throwing a dart at like, I'm just, I'm gonna grab these seven files and I, I pray, I hope that that's the right answer. And something like an opus first four five, and now four six is like, oh, it's like, no, that one doesn't seem right relative to this question because I'm seeing some signal that is making that, you know, that's contradicting the document where it would normally be in the tree and who should have access.Like it's doing all of that kind of work for you. But like, it still doesn't work if you just have a total wasteland of data. Like, it's just not, it's just not possible. Partly ‘cause a human wouldn't even be able to do it. So basically if a, if a really, really smart human. Could not do that task in five or 10 minutes for a search retrieval type task.Look, you know, your agent's not gonna be able to do it any better. You see this all day long. SoContext Engineering and Search Limitsswyx: this touches on a thing that just passionate about it was just context engineering. I, I'm just gonna let you ramble or riff on, on context engineering. If, if, if there's anything like he, he did really good work on context fraud, which has really taken over as like the term that people use and the referenceAaron Levie: a hundred percent.We, we all we think about is, is the context rob problem. [00:22:00]Jeff Huber: Yeah, there's certainly a lot of like ranking considerations. Gentech surgery think is incredibly promising. Um, yeah, I was trying to generate a question though. I think I have a question right now. Swyx.Aaron Levie: Yeah, no, but like, like I think there was this moment, um, you know, like, I don't know, two years ago before, before we knew like where the, the gotchas were gonna be in ai and I think someone was like, was like, well, infinite context windows will just solve all of these problems and ‘cause you'll just, you'll just give the context window like all the data and.It's just like, okay, I mean, maybe in 2035, like this is a viable solution. First of all, it, it would just, it would just simply cost too much. Like we just can't give the model like the 5,000 documents that might be relevant and it's gonna read them all. And I've seen enough to, to start believing in crazy stuff.So like, I'm willing to just say, sure. Like in, in 10 years from now,swyx: never say, never, never.Aaron Levie: In, in 10 years from now, we'll have infinite context windows at, at a thousandth of the price of today. Like, let's just like believe that that's possible, but Right. We're in reality today. So today we have a context engineering [00:23:00] problem, which is, I got, I got, you know, 200,000 tokens that I can work with, or prob, I don't even know what the latest graph is before, like massive degradation.16. Okay. I have 60,000 tokens that I get to work with where I'm gonna get accurate information. That's not a lot of tokens for a corpus of 10 million documents that a knowledge worker might have across all of the teams and all the projects and all the people they work with. I have, I have 10 million documents.Which, you know, maybe is times five pages per document or something like that. I'm at 50 million pages of information and I have 60,000 tokens. Like, holy s**t. Yeah. This is like, how do I bridge the 50 million pages of information with, you know, the couple hundred that I get to work with in that, in that token window.Yeah. This is like, this is like such an interesting problem and that's why actually so much work is actually like, just like search systems and the databases and that layer has to just get so locked in, but models getting better and importantly [00:24:00] knowing when they've done a search, they found the wrong thing, they go back, they check their work, they, they find a way to balance sort of appeasing the user versus double checking.We have this one, we have this one test case where we ask the agent to go find. 10 pieces of information.swyx: Is this the complex work eval?Aaron Levie: Uh, this is actually not in the eval. This is, this is sort of just like we have a bunch of different, we have a bunch of internal benchmark kind of scenarios. Every time we, we update our agent, we have one, which is, I ask it to find all of our office addresses, and I give it the list of 10 offices that we have.And there's not one document that has this, maybe there should be, that would be a great example of the kind of thing that like maybe over time companies start to, you know, have these sort of like, what are the canonical, you know, kind of key areas of knowledge that we need to have. We don't seem to have this one document that says, here are all of our offices.We have a bunch of documents that have like, here's the New York office and whatever. So you task this agent and you, you get, you say, I need the addresses for these 10 offices. Okay. And by the way, if you do this on any, you know, [00:25:00] public chat model, the same outcome is gonna happen. But for a different kind of query, you give it, you say, I need these 10 addresses.How many times should the agent go and do its search before it decides whether or not, there's just no answer to this question. Often, and especially the, the, let's say lower tier models, it'll come back and it'll give you six of the 10 addresses. And it'll, and I'll just say I couldn't find the otherswyx: four.It, it doesn't know what It doesn't know. ItAaron Levie: doesn't know what It doesn't know. Yeah. So the model is just like, like when should it stop? When should it stop doing? Like should it, should it do that task for literally an hour and just keep cranking through? Maybe I actually made up an office location and it doesn't know that I made it up and I didn't even know that I made it up.Like, should it just keep, re should it read every single file in your entire box account until it, until it should exhaust every single piece of information.swyx: Expensive.Aaron Levie: These are the new problems that we have. So, you know, something like, let's say a new opus model is sort of like, okay, I'm gonna try these types of queries.I didn't get exactly what I wanted. I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna, at [00:26:00] some point I'm gonna stop searching. ‘cause I've determined that that no amount of searching is gonna solve this problem. I'm just not able to do it. And that judgment is like a really new thing that the model needs to be able to have.It's like, when should it give up on a task? ‘cause, ‘cause you just don't, it's a can't find the thing. That's the real world of knowledge, work problems. And this is the stuff that the coding agents don't have to deal with. Because they, it just doesn't like, like you're not usually asking it about, you're, you're always creating net new information coming right outta the model for the most part.Obviously it has to know about your code base and your specs and your documentation, but, but when you deploy an agent on all of your data that now you have all of these new problems that you're dealing withJeff Huber: our, uh, follow follow-up research to context ride is actually on a genetic search. Ah. Um, and we've like right, sort of stress tested like frontier models and their ability to search.Um, and they're not actually that good at searching. Right. Uh, so you're sort of highlighting this like explore, exploit.swyx: You're just say, Debbie, Donna say everything doesn't work. Like,Aaron Levie: well,Jeff Huber: somebody has to be,Aaron Levie: um, can I just throw out one more thing? Yeah. That is different from coding and, and the rest [00:27:00] of the knowledge work that I, I failed to mention.So one other kind of key point is, is that, you know, at the end of the day. Whether you believe we're in a slop apocalypse or, or whatever. At the end of the day, if you, if you build a working product at the end of, if you, if you've built a working solution that is ultimately what the customer is paying for, like whether I have a lot of slop, a little slop or whatever, I'm sure there's lots of code bases we could go into in enterprise software companies where it's like just crazy slop that humans did over a 20 year period, but the end customer just gets this little interface.They can, they can type into it, it does its thing. Knowledge work, uh, doesn't have that property. If I have an AI model, go generate a contract and I generate a contract 20 times and, you know, all 20 times it's just 3% different and like that I, that, that kind of lop introduces all new kinds of risk for my organization that the code version of that LOP didn't, didn't introduce.These are, and so like, so how do you constrain these models to just the part that you want [00:28:00] them to work on and just do the thing that you want them to do? And, and, you know, in engineering, we don't, you can't be disbarred as an engineer, but you could be disbarred as a lawyer. Like you can do the wrong medical thing In healthcare, you, there's no, there's no equivalent to that of engineering.Like, doswyx: you want there to be, because I've considered softwareJeff Huber: engineer. What's that? Civil engineering there is, right? NotAaron Levie: software civil engineer. Sure. Oh yeah, for sure. But like in any of our companies, you like, you know, you'll be forgiven if you took down the site and, and we, we will do a rollback and you'll, you'll be in a meeting, but you have not been disbarred as an engineer.We don't, we don't change your, you know, your computer science, uh, blameJeff Huber: degree, this postmortem.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, so, uh, now maybe we collectively as an industry need to figure out like, what are you liable for? Not legally, but like in a, in a management sense, uh, of these agents. All sorts of interesting problems that, that, that, uh, that have to come out.But in knowledge work, that's the real hostile environments that we're operating in. Hmm.swyx: I do think like, uh, a lot of the last year's, 2025 story was the rise of coding agents and I think [00:29:00] 2026 story is definitely knowledge work agents. Yes. A hundredAaron Levie: percent.swyx: Right. Like that would, and I think open claw core work are just the beginning.Yes. Like it's, the next one's gonna just gonna be absolute craziness.Aaron Levie: It it is. And, and, uh, and it's gonna be, I mean, again, like this is gonna be this, this wave where we, we are gonna try and bring as many of the practices from coding because that, that will clearly be the forefront, which is tell an agent to go do something and has an access to a set of resources.You need to be responsible for reviewing it at the end of the process. That to me is the, is the kind of template that I just think goes across knowledge, work and odd. Cowork is a great example. Open Closet's a great example. You can kind of, sort of see what Codex could become over time. These are some, some really interesting kind of platforms that are emerging.swyx: Okay. Um, I wanted to, we touched on evals a little bit. You had, you had the report that you're gonna go bring up and then I was gonna go into like, uh, boxes, evals, but uh, go ahead. Talk about your genetic search thing.Jeff Huber: Yeah. Mostly I think kinda a few of the insights. It's like number one frontier model is not good at search.Humans have this [00:30:00] natural explore, exploit trade off where we kinda understand like when to stop doing something. Also, humans are pretty good at like forgetting actually, and like pruning their own context, whereas agents are not, and actually an agent in their kind of context history, if they knew something was bad and they even, you could see in the trace the reason you trace, Hey, that probably wasn't a good idea.If it's still in the trace, still in the context, they'll still do it again. Uhhuh. Uh, and so like, I think pruning is also gonna be like, really, it's already becoming a thing, right? But like, letting self prune the con windowsswyx: be a big deal. Yeah. So, so don't leave the mistake. Don't leave the mistake in there.Cut out the mistake but tell it that you made a mistake in the past and so it doesn't repeat it.Jeff Huber: Yeah. But like cut it out so it doesn't get like distracted by it again. ‘cause really, you know, what is so, so it will repeat its mistake just because it's been, it's inswyx: theJeff Huber: context. It'sAaron Levie: in the context so much.That's a few shot example. Even if it, yeah.Jeff Huber: It's like oh thisAaron Levie: is a great thing to go try even ifJeff Huber: it didn't work.Aaron Levie: Yeah,Jeff Huber: exactly.Aaron Levie: SoJeff Huber: there's like a bunch of stuff there. JustAaron Levie: Groundhogs Day inside these models. Yeah. I'm gonna go keep doing the same wrongJeff Huber: thing. Covering sense. I feel like, you know, some creator analogy you're trying like fit a manifold in latent space, which kind is doing break program synthesis, which is kinda one we think about we're doing right.Like, you know, certain [00:31:00] facts might be like sort of overly pitting it. There are certain, you know, sec sectors of latent space and so like plug clean space. Yeah. And, uh, andswyx: so we have a bell, our editor as a bell every time you say that. SoJeff Huber: you have, you have to like remove those, likeswyx: you shoulda a gong like TPN or something.IfJeff Huber: we gong, you either remove those links to like kinda give it the freedom, kind of do what you need to do. So, but yeah. We'll, we'll release more soon. That'sAaron Levie: awesome.Jeff Huber: That'll, that'll be cool.swyx: We're a cerebral podcast that people listen to us and, and sort of think really deep. So yeah, we try to keep it subtle.Okay. We try to keep it.Aaron Levie: Okay, fine.Inside Agent Evalsswyx: Um, you, you guys do, you guys do have EVs, you talked about your, your office thing, but, uh, you've been also promoting APEX agents and complex work. Uh, yeah, whatever you, wherever you wanna take this just Yeah. How youAaron Levie: Apex is, is obviously me, core's, uh, uh, kind of, um, agent eval.We, we supported that by sort of. Opening up some data for them around how we kind of see these, um, data workspaces in, in the, you know, kind of regular economy. So how do lawyers have a workspace? How do investment bankers have a workspace? What kind of data goes into those? And so we, [00:32:00] we partner with them on their, their apex eval.Our own, um, eval is, it's actually relatively straightforward. We have a, a set of, of documents in a, in a range of industries. We give the agent previously did this as a one shot test of just purely the model. And then we just realized we, we need to, based on where everything's going, it's just gotta be more agentic.So now it's a bit more of a test of both our harness and the model. And we have a rubric of a set of things that has to get right and we score it. Um, and you're just seeing, you know, these incredible jumps in almost every single model in its own family of, you know, opus four, um, you know, sonnet four six versus sonnet four five.swyx: Yeah. We have this up on screen.Aaron Levie: Okay, cool. So some, you're seeing it somewhere like. I, I forget the to, it was like 15 point jump, I think on the main, on the overall,swyx: yes.Aaron Levie: And it's just like, you know, these incredible leaps that, that are starting to happen. Um,swyx: and OP doesn't know any, like any, it's completely held out from op.Aaron Levie: This is not in any, there's no public data which has, you know, Ben benefits and this is just a private eval that we [00:33:00] do, and then we just happen to show it to, to the world. Hmm. So you can't, you can't train against it. And I think it's just as representative of. It's obviously reasoning capabilities, what it's doing at, at, you know, kind of test time, compute capabilities, thinking levels, all like the context rot issues.So many interesting, you know, kind of, uh, uh, capabilities that are, that are now improvingswyx: one sector that you have. That's interesting.Industries and Datasetsswyx: Uh, people are roughly familiar with healthcare and legal, but you have public sector in there.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Uh, what's that? Like, what, what, what is that?Aaron Levie: Yeah, and, and we actually test against, I dunno, maybe 10 industries.We, we end up usually just cutting a few that we think have interesting gains. All extras, won a lot of like government type documents. Um,swyx: what is that? What is it? Government type documents?Aaron Levie: Government filings. Like a taxswyx: return, likeAaron Levie: a probably not tax returns. It would be more of what would go the government be using, uh, as data.So, okay. Um, so think about research that, that type of, of, of data sets. And then we have financial services for things like data rooms and what would be in an investment prospectus. Uhhuh,swyx: that one you can dog food.Aaron Levie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. [00:34:00] So, uh, so we, we run the models, um, in now, you know, more of an agent mode, but, but still with, with kinda limited capacity and just try and see like on a, like, for like basis, what are the improvements?And, and again, we just continue to be blown away by. How, how good these models are getting.swyx: Yeah, I mean, I think every serious AI company needs something like that where like, well, this is the work we do. Here's our company eval. Yeah. And if you don't have it, well, you're not a serious AI company.Aaron Levie: There's two dimensions, right?So there's, there's like, how are the models improving? And so which models should you either recommend a customer use, which one should you adopt? But then every single day, we're making changes to our agents. And you need to knowswyx: if you regressed,Aaron Levie: if you know. Yeah. You know, I've been fully convinced that the whole agent observability and eval space is gonna be a massive space.Um, super excited for what Braintrust is doing, excited for, you know, Lang Smith, all the things. And I think what you're going to, I mean, this is like every enter like literally every enterprise right now. It's like the AI companies are the customers of these tools. Every enterprise will have this. Yeah, you'll just [00:35:00] have to have an eval.Of all of your work and like, we'll, you'll have an eval of your RFP generation, you'll have an eval of your sales material creation. You'll have an eval of your, uh, invoice processing. And, and as you, you know, buy or use new agentic systems, you are gonna need to know like, what's the quality of your, of your pipeline.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: Um, so huge, huge market with agent evals.swyx: Yeah.Building the Agent Teamswyx: And, and you know, I'm gonna shout out your, your team a bit, uh, your CTO, Ben, uh, did a great talk with us last year. Awesome. And he's gonna come back again. Oh, cool. For World's Fair.Aaron Levie: Yep.swyx: Just talk about your team, like brag a little bit. I think I, I think people take these eval numbers in pretty charts for granted, but No, there, I mean, there's, there's lots of really smart people at work during all this.Aaron Levie: Biggest shout out, uh, is we have a, we have a couple folks at Dya, uh, Sidarth, uh, that, that kind of run this. They're like a, you know, kind of tag tag team duo on our evals, Ben, our CTO, heavily involved Yasha, head of ai, uh, you know, a bunch of folks. And, um, evals is one part of the story. And then just like the full, you know, kind of AI.An agent team [00:36:00] is, uh, is a, is a pretty, you know, is core to this whole effort. So there's probably, I don't know, like maybe a few dozen people that are like the epicenter. And then you just have like layers and layers of, of kind of concentric circles of okay, then there's a search team that supports them and an infrastructure team that supports them.And it's starting to ripple through the entire company. But there's that kind of core agent team, um, that's a pretty, pretty close, uh, close knit group.swyx: The search team is separate from the infra team.Aaron Levie: I mean, we have like every, every layer of the stack we have to kind of do, except for just pure public cloud.Um, but um, you know, we, we store, I don't even know what our public numbers are in, you know, but like, you can just think about it as like a lot of data is, is stored in box. And so we have, and you have every layer of the, of the stack of, you know, how do you manage the data, the file system, the metadata system, the search system, just all of those components.And then they all are having to understand that now you've got this new customer. Which is the agent, and they've been building for two types of customers in the past. They've been building for users and they've been building for like applications. [00:37:00] And now you've got this new agent user, and it comes in with a difference of it, of property sometimes, like, hey, maybe sometimes we should do embeddings, an embedding based, you know, kind of search versus, you know, your, your typical semantic search.Like, it's just like you have to build the, the capabilities to support all of this. And we're testing stuff, throwing things away, something doesn't work and, and not relevant. It's like just, you know, total chaos. But all of those teams are supporting the agent team that is kind of coming up with its requirements of what, what do we need?swyx: Yeah. No, uh, we just came from, uh, fireside chat where you did, and you, you talked about how you're doing this. It's, it's kind of like an internal startup. Yeah. Within the broader company. The broader company's like 3000 people. Yeah. But you know, there's, there's a, this is a core team of like, well, here's the innovation center.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And like that every company kind of is run this way.Aaron Levie: Yeah. I wanna be sensitive. I don't call it the innovation center. Yeah. Only because I think everybody has to do innovation. Um, there, there's a part of the, the, the company that is, is sort of do or die for the agent wave.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And it only happens to be more of my focus simply because it's existential that [00:38:00] we get it right.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: All of the supporting systems are necessary. All of the surrounding adjacent capabilities are necessary. Like the only reason we get to be a platform where you'd run an agent is because we have a security feature or a compliance feature, or a governance feature that, that some team is working on.But that's not gonna be the make or break of, of whether we get agents right. Like that already exists and we need to keep innovating there. I don't know what the right, exact precise number is, but it's not a thousand people and it's not 10 people. There's a number of people that are like the, the kind of like, you know, startup within the company that are the make or break on everything related to AI agents, you know, leveraging our platform and letting you work with your data.And that's where I spend a lot of my time, and Ben and Yosh and Diego and Teri, you know, these are just, you know, people that, that, you know, kind of across the team. Are working.swyx: Yeah. Amazing.Read Write Agent WorkflowsJeff Huber: How do you, how do you think about, I mean, you talked a lot about like kinda read workflows over your box data. Yep.Right. You know, gen search questions, queries, et cetera. But like, what about like, write or like authoring workflows?Aaron Levie: Yes. I've [00:39:00] already probably revealed too much actually now that I think about it. So, um, I've talked about whatever,Jeff Huber: whatever you can.Aaron Levie: Okay. It's just us. It's just us. Yeah. Okay. Of course, of course.So I, I guess I would just, uh, I'll make it a little bit conceptual, uh, because again, I've already, I've already said things that are not even ga but, but we've, we've kinda like danced around it publicly, so I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Just like, hopefully nobody watches this, um, episode. No.swyx: It's tidbits for the Heidi engaged to go figure out like what exactly, um, you know, is, is your sort of line of thinking.Sure. They can connect the dots.Aaron Levie: Yeah. So, so I would say that, that, uh, we, you know, as a, as a place where you have your enterprise content, there's a use case where I want to, you know, have an agent read that data and answer questions for me. And then there's a use case where I want the agent to create something.And use the file system to create something or store off data that it's working on, or be able to have, you know, various files that it's writing to about the work it's doing. So we do see it as a total read write. The harder problem has so far been the read only because, because again, you have that kind of like 10 [00:40:00] million to one ratio problem, whereas rights are a lot of, that's just gonna come from the model and, and we just like, we'll just put it in the file system and kinda use it.So it's a little bit of a technically easier problem, but the only part that's like, not necessarily technically hard, it is just like it's not yet perfected in the state of the ecosystem is, you know, building a beautiful PowerPoint presentation. It's still a hard problem for these models. Like, like we still, you know, like, like these formats are just, we're not built for.They'reswyx: working on it.Aaron Levie: They're, they're working on it. Everybody's working on it.swyx: Every launch is like, well, we do PowerPoint now.Aaron Levie: We're getting, yeah, getting a lot, getting a lot of better each time. But then you'll do this thing where you'll ask the update one slide and all of a sudden, like the fonts will be just like a little bit different, you know, on two of the slides, or it moved, you know, some shape over to the left a little bit.And again, these are the kind of things that, like in code, obviously you could really care about if you really care about, you know, how beautiful is the code, but at the end, user doesn't notice all those problems and file creation, the end user instantly sees it. You're [00:41:00] like, ah, like paragraph three, like, you literally just changed the font on me.Like it's a totally different font and like midway through the document. Mm-hmm. Those are the kind of things that you run into a lot of in the, in the content creation side. So, mm-hmm. We are gonna have native agents. That do all of those things, they'll be powered by the leading kind of models and labs.But the thing that I think is, is probably gonna be a much bigger idea over time is any agent on any system, again, using Box as a file system for its work, and in that kind of scenario, we don't necessarily care what it's putting in the file system. It could put its memory files, it could put its, you know, specification, you know, documents.It could put, you know, whatever its markdown files are, or it could, you know, generate PDFs. It's just like, it's a workspace that is, is sort of sandboxed off for its work. People can collaborate into it, it can share with other people. And, and so we, we were thinking a lot about what's the right, you know, kind of way to, to deliver that at scale.Docs Graphs and Founder Modeswyx: I wanted to come into sort of the sort of AI transformation or AI sort of, uh, operations things. [00:42:00] Um, one of the tweets that you, that you wanted to talk about, this is just me going through your tweets, by the way. Oh, okay. I mean, like, this is, you readAaron Levie: one by one,swyx: you're the, you're the easiest guest to prep for because you, you already have like, this is the, this is what I'm interested in.I'm like, okay, well, areAaron Levie: we gonna get to like, like February, January or something? Where are we in the, in the timelines? How far back are we going?swyx: Can you, can you describe boxes? A set of skills? Right? Like that, that's like, that's like one of the extremes of like, well if you, you just turn everything into a markdown file.Yeah. Then your agent can run your company. Uh, like you just have to write, find the right sequence of words toAaron Levie: Yes.swyx: To do it.Aaron Levie: Sorry, isthatswyx: the question? So I think the question is like, what if we documented everything? Yes. The way that you exactly said like,Aaron Levie: yes.swyx: Um, let's get all the Fortune five hundreds, uh, prepared for agents.Yes. And like, you know, everything's in golden and, and nicely filed away and everything. Yes. What's missing? Like, what's left, right? LikeAaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: You've, you've run your company for a decade. LikeAaron Levie: Yeah. I think the challenge is that, that that information changes a week later. And because something happened in the market for that [00:43:00] customer, or us as a company that now has to go get updated, and so these systems are living and breathing and they have to experience reality and updates to reality, which right now is probably gonna be humans, you know, kinda giving those, giving them the updates.And, you know, there is this piece about context graphs as as, uh, that kinda went very viral. Yeah. And I, I, I was like a, i, I, I thought it was super provocative. I agreed with many parts of it. I disagree with a few parts around. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as as just if we just had the agent traces, then we can finally do that work because there's just like, there's so much more other stuff that that's happening that, that we haven't been able to capture and digitize.And I think they actually represented that in the piece to be clear. But like there's just a lot of work, you know, that that has to, you just can't have only skills files, you know, for your company because it's just gonna be like, there's gonna be a lot of other stuff that happens. Yeah. Change over time.Yeah. Most companies are practically apprenticeships.swyx: Most companies are practically apprenticeships. LikeJeff Huber: every new employee who joins the team, [00:44:00] like you span one to three months. Like ramping them up.Aaron Levie: Yes. AllJeff Huber: that tat knowledgeAaron Levie: isJeff Huber: not written down.Aaron Levie: Yes.Jeff Huber: But like, it would have to be if you wanted to like give it to an Asian.Right. And so like that seems to me like to beAaron Levie: one is I think you're gonna see again a premium on companies that can document this. Mm-hmm. Much. There'll be a huge premium on that because, because you know, can you shorten that three month ramp cycle to a two week ramp cycle? That's an instant productivity gain.Can you re dramatically reduce rework in the organization because you've documented where all the stuff is and where the answers are. Can you make your average employee as good as your 90th percentile employee because you've captured the knowledge that's sort of in the heads of, of those top employees and make that available.So like you can see some very clear productivity benefits. Mm-hmm. If you had a company culture of making sure you know your information was captured, digitized, put in a format that was agent ready and then made available to agents to work with, and then you just, again, have this reality of like add a 10,000 person [00:45:00] company.Mapping that to the, you know, access structure of the company is just a hard problem. Is like, is like, yeah, well, you just, not every piece of information that's digitized can be shared to everybody. And so now you have to organize that in a way that actually works. There was a pretty good piece, um, this, this, uh, this piece called your company as a file is a file system.I, did you see that one?swyx: Nope.Aaron Levie: Uh, yes. You saw it. Yeah. And, and, uh, I actually be curious your thoughts on it. Um, like, like an interesting kind of like, we, we agree with it because, because that's how we see the world and, uh,swyx: okay. We, we have it up on screen. Oh,Aaron Levie: okay. Yeah. But, but it's all about basically like, you know, we've already, we, we, we already organized in this kind of like, you know, permission structure way.Uh, and, and these are the kind of, you know, natural ways that, that agents can now work with data. So it's kind of like this, this, you know, kind of interesting metaphor, but I do think companies will have to start to think about how they start to digitize more, more of that data. What was your take?Jeff Huber: Yeah, I mean, like the company's probably like an acid compliant file system.Aaron Levie: Uh,Jeff Huber: yeah. Which I'm guessing boxes, right? So, yeah. Yes.swyx: Yeah. [00:46:00]Jeff Huber: Which you have a great piece on, but,swyx: uh, yeah. Well, uh, I, I, my, my, my direction is a little bit like, I wanna rewind a little bit to the graph word you said that there, that's a magic trigger word for us. I always ask what's your take on knowledge graphs?Yeah. Uh, ‘cause every, especially at every data database person, I just wanna see what they think. There's been knowledge graphs, hype cycles, and you've seen it all. So.Aaron Levie: Hmm. I actually am not the expert in knowledge graphs, so, so that you might need toswyx: research, you don't need to be an expert. Yeah. I think it's just like, well, how, how seriously do people take it?Yeah. Like, is is, is there a lot of potential in the, in the HOVI?Aaron Levie: Uh, well, can I, can I, uh, understand first if it's, um, is this a loaded question in the sense of are you super pro, super con, super anti medium? Iswyx: see pro, I see pros and cons. Okay. Uh, but I, I think your opinion should be independent of mine.Aaron Levie: Yeah. No, no, totally. Yeah. I just want to see what I'm stepping into.swyx: No, I know. It's a, and it's a huge trigger word for a lot of people out Yeah. In our audience. And they're, they're trying to figure out why is that? Because whyAaron Levie: is this such aswyx: hot item for them? Because a lot of people get graph religion.And they're like, everything's a graph. Of course you have to represent it as a graph. Well, [00:47:00] how do you solve your knowledge? Um, changing over time? Well, it's a graph.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: And, and I think there, there's that line of work and then there's, there's a lot of people who are like, well, you don't need it. And both are right.Aaron Levie: Yeah. And what do the people who say you don't need it, what are theyswyx: arguing for Mark down files. Oh, sure, sure. Simplicity.Aaron Levie: Yeah.swyx: Versus it's, it's structure versus less structure. Right. That's, that's all what it is. I do.Aaron Levie: I think the tricky thing is, um, is, is again, when this gets met with real humans, they're just going to their computer.They're just working with some people on Slack or teams. They're just sharing some data through a collaborative file system and Google Docs or Box or whatever. I certainly like the vision of most, most knowledge graph, you know, kind of futuristic kind of ways of thinking about it. Uh, it's just like, you know, it's 2026.We haven't seen it yet. Kind of play out as as, I mean, I remember. Do you remember the, um, in like, actually I don't, I don't even know how old you guys are, but I'll for, for to show my age. I remember 17 years ago, everybody thought enterprises would just run on [00:48:00] Wikis. Yeah. And, uh, confluence and, and not even, I mean, confluence actually took off for engineering for sure.Like unquestionably. But like, this was like everything would be in the w. And I think based on our, uh, our, uh, general style of, of, of what we were building, like we were just like, I don't know, people just like wanna workspace. They're gonna collaborate with other people.swyx: Exactly. Yeah. So you were, you were anti-knowledge graph.Aaron Levie: Not anti, not anti. Soswyx: not nonAaron Levie: I'm not, I'm not anti. ‘cause I think, I think your search system, I just think these are two systems that probably, but like, I'm, I'm not in any religious war. I don't want to be in anybody's YouTube comments on this. There's not a fight for me.swyx: We, we love YouTube comments. We're, we're, we're get into comments.Aaron Levie: Okay. Uh, but like, but I, I, it's mostly just a virtue of what we built. Yeah. And we just continued down that path. Yeah.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: And, um, and that, that was what we pursued. But I'm not, this is not a, you know, kind of, this is not a, uh, it'sswyx: not existential for you. Great.Aaron Levie: We're happy to plug into somebody else's graph.We're happy to feed data into it. We're happy for [00:49:00] agents to, to talk to multiple systems. Not, not our fight.swyx: Yeah.Aaron Levie: But I need your answer. Yeah. Graphs or nerd Snipes is very effective nerd.swyx: See this is, this is one, one opinion and then I've,Jeff Huber: and I think that the actual graph structure is emergent in the mind of the agent.Ah, in the same way it is in the mind of the human. And that's a more powerful graph ‘cause it actually involved over time.swyx: So don't tell me how to graph. I'll, I'll figure it out myself. Exactly. Okay. All right. AndJeff Huber: what's yours?swyx: I like the, the Wiki approach. Uh, my, I'm actually
Savita Subramanian of Bank of America lays out a strategy for investors to deal with the current volatility and explains how she is positioning portfolios for the rest of the year. Earnings drive the tape with results from Okta and Broadcom. Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein reacts to Broadcom's numbers and what they signal for AI infrastructure spending. Chris Verrone of Strategas joins to walk through the technical picture and key levels investors should watch next in several important sectors. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Get 90 days of Fellow free at Fellow.ai/coo In this episode, Michael Koenig speaks with Greg Keller, co-founder and CTO of JumpCloud, about identity access management and why it's becoming one of the most important operational systems in the age of AI. Greg explains how traditional identity systems were designed for office-based companies running Microsoft infrastructure and why that model broke as companies moved to SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and remote work. The discussion then turns to the next big shift: the rise of AI agents and synthetic identities inside organizations. As companies deploy more AI tools, the number of machine identities may soon outnumber human employees. Managing what those systems can access will become a critical security and operational challenge. Topics Covered What a CTO actually does Greg explains the different types of CTO roles and how technology leaders help companies anticipate where the market is headed. Identity Access Management explained simply IAM answers three core questions inside every company: Who are you? What can you access? How is that access managed? Why the old IT model broke Traditional identity systems were built for on-premise offices and Microsoft infrastructure. Modern companies now operate across: SaaS applications cloud infrastructure remote work environments multiple operating systems How JumpCloud approaches identity JumpCloud was built to manage identity across devices, applications, and infrastructure regardless of platform. Where Okta fits in the ecosystem Okta helped modernize browser-based authentication through Single Sign-On, while JumpCloud focuses on broader identity infrastructure. AI, Security, and Synthetic Identities Why COOs should push AI adoption Greg argues AI adoption is no longer optional. Companies must encourage teams to improve productivity and efficiency using AI. The rise of synthetic identities AI agents, bots, APIs, and service accounts are becoming new actors inside companies that require identity governance. Bots may soon outnumber employees Organizations will soon manage more machine identities than human ones. AI as a potential insider threat AI systems can become security risks if they are granted excessive permissions or misinterpret policies. The API key governance problem Many AI integrations rely on API keys, which are often poorly managed and can create hidden security risks. Key Takeaway As companies adopt AI, identity access management becomes the control layer that determines what both humans and machines are allowed to do inside the organization. The companies that manage identity well will move faster and operate more securely. Links: Michael on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/michael-koenig514 Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorykeller/ JumpCloud: https://jumpcloud.com/ Between Two COO's: https://betweentwocoos.com Episode Link: https://betweentwocoos.com/ai-agents-identity-access-greg-keller
Jack Hirsch, vice president of product at Okta The rise of AI in the workplace is creating a new kind of risk for organizations: shadow AI. Employees can now spin up AI agents that connect directly to emails, files, and business systems—often without IT oversight. These agents can access sensitive data, and without proper controls, they become prime targets for cyberattacks. In this episode of the podcast, we're joined by Jack Hirsch, vice president of product at Okta, to explore what shadow AI is, why it matters for Canadian organizations, and how IT partners can help their customers manage it. Jack discusses Okta's latest tools, which provide real-time visibility into AI agents and their permissions. These capabilities make it easier for security teams to discover unmanaged agents, understand their access, and quickly bring them under identity-based controls. We also touch on regulatory implications, including Canada's proposed Bill C-8, which heightens expectations around cyber risk accountability, access controls, and transparency. As legislation moves forward, organizations will need to prove they understand not just who has access to sensitive systems—but which AI agents do as well. For MSPs and IT resellers, this emerging landscape represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Jack shares insights into how partners can position themselves as trusted advisors for clients navigating AI risk, turning a potentially complex problem into a service opportunity. Tune in to hear why identity management is becoming central to securing the agentic enterprise—and what your customers will need to stay ahead of shadow AI risks. Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to the ChannelBuzz.ca podcast, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always, your host for the show. Okta has announced a new set of capabilities designed to help organizations uncover and manage a fast-growing risk: shadow AI. As AI tools become easier to use, employees are increasingly creating their own AI agents, connecting them to emails, files, SaaS apps, and internal systems to get work done faster. The problem is that many of these agents are created without security oversight, governance, or clear ownership. Once they’re connected to sensitive systems, they can quietly gain broad access to data, making them attractive targets for attackers and a potential liability for organizations. Okta’s new solution is designed to address that gap. It gives security teams real-time visibility into AI agents across the enterprise, showing which agents exist, what they can access, and what permissions they’ve been granted. Just as importantly, it allows organizations to quickly bring unmanaged or risky agents under identity controls, treating them more like digital employees than anonymous tools. That visibility matters even more in Canada, where proposed legislation like Bill C-8 is raising expectations around cyber risk accountability, access controls, and transparency. As AI becomes embedded into everyday workflows, organizations will be expected to know not just who has access to what sensitive data, but what machines and agents do as well. To unpack what shadow AI really means, why identity has become central to managing AI risk, and what all this creates in terms of opportunity for Canadian IT partners, I’m joined today by Jack Hirsch, Vice President of Product at Okta. Let’s dive in. Robert Dutt: Jack, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Jack Hirsch: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Robert Dutt: It feels like this is a topic that a lot of folks in the channel have been through with different flavors in the past. When you say “shadow X,” it certainly brings up memories of transitions past, but just to level set and set the parameters here, can you give me a quick definition on shadow AI? I almost said shadow IT. Can you give me a quick definition on shadow AI, and why it’s becoming both a security and governance issue? Jack Hirsch: Sure. Well, look, it’s no secret now that AI is changing the shape of how work gets done in the modern era. You have these non-deterministic entities running around, and fundamentally, they’re exciting, they’re interesting on their own, but where they really light up in value, where you start to see efficiency and effectiveness gains from your carbon-based workforces, is when you start connecting them to tools. They need resource access to be truly productive. So AI agents need resource access, and that’s when it can start to get scary, and that’s when shadow AI starts to create a ton of risk for modern organizations. We know that the point of authentication is now much stronger with phishing-resistant auth. However, post-auth security is the primary breach vector for the vast majority of cybersecurity incidents now, meaning the session token’s been cut. There’s access out in the ecosystem, and that’s why shadow AI is terrifying. Unfortunately, the options available to the ecosystem to secure AI and to build it quickly have been not good enough, to put it bluntly. This leaves security leaders with this very, very difficult challenge of moving fast and potentially breaking things and giving away the keys to the kingdom to OpenClaw, or whatever it is that you want to do, or potentially stifling innovation. That’s a really, really difficult spot for security leaders to be in. So yeah, shadow AI is everywhere. The challenges are greater. The stakes have never been higher. Robert Dutt: Yeah, so that’s sort of the problem space. So when employees spin up AI agents and connect them to emails, to files, to internal data, to systems, whatever it may be, I presume most of the problems emerge from unintended consequences, as is so often the case in technology. But what are some of the common ways that sensitive data ends up exposed without anyone really necessarily realizing it, or is that the nature of the problem? Jack Hirsch: Well, look, I think there’s sort of the naive answer, and not to say that it’s easy or trivial. I don’t want to trivialize this, but the naive answer is, “Oh, prompt injection, data leakage, data poisoning. Oh yeah, who knows what the LLM will spit out?” But the actual scarier risk is around inadvertent access and the standing credentials that need to be given to AI agents for them to be productive. If Rob, you and I work at Acme Corp, and we’re working on a project together and we want to spin up an AI agent, whose permissions do we give it? Most of the time now, a security leader is not going to be able to jump in front of every single moving train and slow them. They’ll just say, “Oh yeah, give it a set of static credentials. Give it an API key, but don’t give it Rob’s access. Don’t give it Jack’s access. Give it super user access, and we’ll trust it to do the right thing.” And so you’re giving this untrained, very influenceable, non-deterministic entity the keys to the kingdom. And that’s really the primary risk vector here. And so it’s all an identity and access management problem. Fundamentally, these are identities that need to be discovered. They need to be controlled. They need to be governed. And their access needs to be managed in the same way that their carbon-based peers, us as humans, need to be governed as well. Robert Dutt: So with that framing, it sounds like maybe identity is more important than traditional network or endpoint controls in terms of security in this world, where there are all these agents running around and doing whatever it is, hopefully, we want them to do and potentially what we don’t want them to do. Jack Hirsch: I think this is where the traditional model of endpoint or network or identity-based detection and response falls flat. You can’t keep up with the incredible volume of AI agent activity out in the ecosystem to detect it all. Every single, even approved platforms are now starting to put AI sprinkles throughout their products. And so it’s sort of fighting an uphill battle there. And so the reason this is truly an identity-centric problem is because, again, all those agents need access to resources inside of organizations. And the way that AI grew, and we saw this with how OpenAI and Anthropic and even Google with Gemini, their sort of growth paths were primarily consumer driven. And in a consumer world, it’s really easy. I’m spinning up, I’m literally sitting next to a machine that has a Claude bot spun up in a fully isolated environment, but I’m an individual user in that scenario. And so if I want to give it access, I can just OAuth myself. It’s super easy. And so the authorization mechanism wasn’t really thought about in an enterprise context. And then when you get into an enterprise context, you have individuals that want to do exactly the same thing and access corporate resources. So it really is a new type of identity. We can talk about some of the differences between human and AI agent, but it’s fundamentally an identity and access management problem. These are digital identities, non-human identities that need access to resources within an organization. And you actually see this being recognized by broader standards bodies. So for example, Cross App Access was something that we’ve been working on. It’s a new standard, it’s an extension of the OAuth protocol. And it’s something that we’ve been working on for years, two, three years now at this point. And we reintroduced it to the ecosystem this past summer, summer of 2025. And we introduced it first to ISVs and the people that were sort of around the Okta ecosystem had heard about it before. But then the rest of the ecosystem, the adoption was wild because MCP had become a thing and people were trying to deploy MCP servers and AI agents into their enterprises. And no one, not at the time Anthropic or OpenAI or any of the big model providers, had taken on the challenge of enterprise authorization for AI agents. And so this standard that had been sort of latent and sitting somewhere in an IETF draft for a while got picked up and started gaining a ton of steam. And just in November, right before Anthropic split off MCP and gave it away to the open ecosystem, it got merged into the MCP repo as the new default enterprise authorization mechanism for MCP. And so this isn’t something that’s Okta owned, it’s just a standard that we developed because we are independent. And as such, we are the sort of standard-bearer for the open security ecosystem. We believe that we need to be the rising tide that lifts all ships. And that’s why we develop open standards like Cross App Access. So now, really excited, we’ve taken our own engineers and pushed this authorization code out into the open ecosystem so that many applications start picking up this capability, this new OAuth extension. Robert Dutt: So at a high level, when you talk about the products that you guys are bringing to market, the solutions to address this, at a high level, what kind of new visibility or new insights are you giving organizations that are using these tools that they simply didn’t have before when it comes to discovering AI agents, the privileges they have, and what they’re up to? Jack Hirsch: Yeah. So, I mean, maybe if I can even blow it up further and say, let’s talk about maybe three steps: discovery, then control, and governance. So on the discovery side, there are many ways to discover, let’s date ourselves, shadow IT. There are many ways to discover, right? You can have a browser extension, you can have some sort of endpoint monitoring, you can have network monitoring. You can also check the resources themselves for access. And so we took a, initially, we’re taking a multi-pronged approach to doing the discovery, but we’re doing what we do best, which is integrating into over 8,000 ISVs and checking for resource access. And so who’s accessing these resources? Are they carbon-based? Are they digital-based? And so the first phase of discovery with our ISPM product is being able to see who’s accessing these resources and why. And so that extended very, very nicely to AI agents. And it doesn’t really matter where the AI agents exist, right? It doesn’t matter if they’re part of a larger platform with something like Salesforce and Agentforce, or whether they’re homegrown, built off in some skunkworks team off to the side. Ultimately, when they get access to the resource, we see it. And then you get into the control plane. So that’s just the discovery. Within the control plane, we want to meet our customers where they are. And we know that the vast majority of these things are going to be granted access via static credentials, just the god-mode tokens. And for those, we can harden them. We can effectively bring them under management. We can bring those credentials under management. We can observe them. We can rotate them. We can observe for anomalous behavior, et cetera. And so that’s like what you would consider a traditional PAM use case or maybe a modern IGA use case. But then also with control, we give Cross App Access, which is a new mechanism that extends the amazing innovation that was OAuth and OAuth scopes, basically extending that to say, instead of checking with the end user for access to this resource, we can set policy. Now the IDP can set policy to control access to those resources. And then to close the loop, there’s governance. And so standard governance flow, and actually I don’t even want to say standard governance flow because governance historically has this GRC compliance lens, but it’s very much a security-forward technology here. When you get to the state where you need to govern these identities and their access, we can run access certs in the exact same way based on whether or not they’re human or non-human. And so every one of those agentic identities gets pulled into Okta’s Universal Directory. All of their access is controlled. All of it is governed. We still gather the same risk signal and risk pattern behavior from the Identity Threat Protection product. And that’s, I wish I could say that 10 years ago, we knew we were building an identity security fabric, this new category of product that’s going to cover every identity use case, every resource type, and every user type. However, that was the strategy, not knowing that AI agents were going to be born in the 2020s. And it just makes it so that we are really well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. And it gives us a very novel approach to how we secure AI in a way that, it’s because we have this unified identity security fabric. A basket of tools that don’t talk to each other, if you have a disparate IAM and IGA and PAM set of tools, in theory, you could stitch it all together, but you end up with higher costs and worse security outcomes. And so we actually took a much harder approach to market. And this is many years ago. Again, this predates the rise of AI agents, but we decided that we were not going to take an acquisitive strategy where we just bolt on a bunch of things and call them a “platform” in air quotes. And your order form would look like a drugstore receipt. And so you’re not buying a list of products that happen to be on the same order form because we want to satisfy a CFO. We’re taking an approach that we want to drive end-to-end identity security outcomes for CISOs and IT leaders. So we’re doing the hard work deeply integrating these products across the fabric so that we can truly secure every identity, every use case, and every resource type. Robert Dutt: Close to home here in Canada, we have a proposed Bill C-8 on the table. It’s raising expectations around visibility, around access control, accountability, risk, all of these things. I know there are similar ideas out there in terms of government around the world. How does legislation along these lines change the conversation for IT leaders, especially around the topic of shadow AI? Jack Hirsch: So look, I am such a fan of this type of regulation because it pushes… When we enter highly regulated markets, regardless of where they are, and we can talk about C-8, I think it really does align with our identity security fabric narrative and what we’re angling for. But fundamentally, what we’re talking about is trust. If I’m not mistaken, C-8 talks about resilience and reliability. Okta has industry leading availability and resilience. We proudly espouse our four nines of availability, but in reality, it’s much higher. And we target much higher. With the launch of our cell in Canada, and we can talk about the nature of that launch, but with the launch of our cell in Canada, we not only get multi-region disaster recovery, but we get Enhanced Disaster Recovery, which is a product that I really wanted to call Instant DR, because it’s a DNS flip, but the lawyers didn’t like that. So it’s Enhanced Disaster Recovery. And so when you’re talking about resilience and reliability and running critical infrastructure, fundamentally, identity is critical infrastructure. We support governments, financial services, militaries, supply chain logistics with organizations like FedEx, healthcare. And so maybe bringing it back to C-8, data residency, check, highly invested, especially with de-globalization pressures around the world. Supply chain governance, super, super important for us to maintain our independent posture here and to say, look, it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying from a monolithic platform or an independent provider of identity security. We are invested in making sure that your entire enterprise is secure. And so just the same way FedRAMP was a standard-bearer and STIGs in the US were standard-bearers, or IRAP was pushing us in the right direction in Australia, or ISMAP in Japan, I think C-8 is a very, very welcome change. I think it highlights the need for robust identity security and it should put identity at the foundation of every security leader’s agenda this year. Robert Dutt: Well, these pieces of legislation are still in the process and we can look forward. This is likely to see the light of day in some shape or another, but there’s still that sort of sense of maybe we should wait and see. I guess what I’m getting at is what’s the danger or the risk involved in waiting until regulations are finalized, on the books and in place, before starting to take action? Jack Hirsch: So let’s just say at a personal level, I am not into promoting scare tactics. I know that it is very common in the security space for colors to be red. Our colors are blue. That’s not our vibe at Okta. And so look, every organization has their own risk barometer. What I can say is the vast majority of breaches stem from some form of attack on identity. The vast majority of breaches, the implications of having a data breach, oftentimes they go, I think the average time to detection for a data breach is somewhere just shy of 300 days. And so you’re talking about millions of dollars in damages, huge reputational hit. And there are scenarios, and I will not point to any recent security incidents that might have impacted large swaths of the industry, but not Okta. But I’ll just say the reason is because we believe strongly that having a lower risk profile should be easier, should be more elegant. People come to Okta not because of the, “Oh, you get it all done by the CLI.” Yeah, you can, but it’s elegant. It’s intuitive. It’s easier to use. It de-complexifies the world of identity security. I’m sitting in front of my notepad here to take notes, and one of our product principles is productizing best practices. And so we want to make it easier for organizations to reduce their risk profile and make the end user experience elegant and memorable when it needs to be, and disappear into the background when it shouldn’t be memorable. And so with that, look, I would advise everyone go down the rabbit hole. Just look at recent breaches. Look at how widely pervasive these breaches are. Look how easy it is to go after a phish, to buy a phishing kit on the dark web, and see the types of organizations that get hit by these and it’s everyone. And so whether you’re waiting for legislation to be imposed to drive the standards or you are just looking to have an appropriate barometer of risk for your organization, you shouldn’t have to choose between ease of use and cost and lower risk and greater security. And so I would just say everyone’s going to be on their own journey. I’m not a salesperson. I’m on the product team. But I fundamentally think that identity is one of the pillars of Zero Trust. I believe that it should be. It’s foundational. It is the foundation. If I had nothing else to do, if I were starting my own company today and I wanted to build a security practice for my company to manage our organizational risk, it would start with identity, 110%. Robert Dutt: We’ve taken sort of a general market-wide view of the technology problem and now of the regulatory side of things. This is a podcast for IT solution providers. So sort of going with that “if I were starting a business today” line that you just started there, for MSPs and resellers, where do you see the biggest opportunity to help customers get ahead of shadow AI, both in terms of reducing customer risk and in terms of new services, new types of services that they can bring to market? Jack Hirsch: I’ll take it in two parts. One is just you can’t control what you don’t see. And so for VARs and MSPs and sort of operators in the technology ecosystem, I would say look at Okta’s ISPM product. It is amazing what you learn by wiring it. And it’s not just for Okta as an IDP. It’ll wire into any IDP. It will wire into multiple IDPs. It’ll wire into over 300 SCIM-based apps because it’s wired into the Okta Integration Network, and there’s a large set of SCIM apps that work natively with ISPM. And just see what you can find. I optimized my life, my product world for hugs and high fives. And I’ll never forget, I’m sure this person knows exactly who they are. It was a security leader in Australia, ran out of their office after trying ISPM during a merger and they used it to reduce risk during the merger as they were establishing a trust relationship between their organizations. And it basically made this person look like a superstar in front of their C-suite and board because it was like the entire risk burndown chart for their entire M&A transaction to establish the technical risk barometer. So I would just say ISPM is an incredible starting point. A+, highly recommend. You can’t control what you can’t see. And then I think on the second part, of course ISPM will discover AI as well. And then the second part is just, I wouldn’t lose sight of the experience. And so making sure that you’re creating an elegant experience by your choice of products, not only for the admins that you might work directly with or the leadership that might be engaging with you, but also for the end users. And knowing when tools should be elegant, easy to use, easy to configure, and when they should just sort of fade into the background. That’s ultimately what we work on at Okta. It’s our strong conviction from a product standpoint, that it needs to be an absolutely elegant, unmatched user experience for partners, for admins, for end users, and for customers. Robert Dutt: I think we’ve gone over a lot of the territory that I wanted to go over, but just to kind of bring things home, looking ahead over the balance of 2026 or into the first half of next year, what do you think are going to be the biggest mistakes that organizations might make when it comes to agents and identity? And what can solution providers be doing now to make sure their customers don’t make those mistakes? Jack Hirsch: This is an easy one. I think there’s sort of two categories of mistakes. One is getting worried because everything is moving so fast, getting that sort of analysis paralysis to say, “I’m going to see where it shakes out. How important is this AI thing?” Or even if you’re an AI bull, waiting to see who the winners and losers are before you establish any sort of program around it. That’s, I think, one big category of things not to do. I would say, go after it immediately. The capabilities you need are already out there. They might be newer. They might feel a little bit less familiar. But again, ultimately, these are identities that need access to your corporate resources. So I think that is one big category. The other big category is, I would not look at point solutions for this. Anyone that is saying, “We’re going to secure your AI.” That’s great. But what is an AI? It’s an identity. It can be a resource in some scenarios, right? With agent-to-agent, agents acting as resources, but ultimately they’re just identities. That’s for the identity nerds. Sorry. Just as a caveat for the identity nerds out there like myself. But fundamentally, you need a unified platform that gives you that unified view of core access management, core governance, core privileged access, brings all of those identities, whether it be human or non-human, into a single directory and can discover them, can control them, can govern them. And it shouldn’t matter whether they were built by your users, by third parties, by partners, by your supply chain contractors. That unified identity security fabric will deliver comprehensive security and it should be deeply orchestrated into any technology stack. And those products already exist, and it just so happens that Okta is building a reference implementation. Robert Dutt: Works out well for you then, doesn’t it? Jack Hirsch: It does. Robert Dutt: I appreciate your taking the time, Jack. It’s been an interesting conversation and it’s a fascinating and ever-evolving area. Jack Hirsch: Thank you very much. All right. Thanks, Rob. And thanks everyone. Appreciate the time. There you have it, a look at shadow AI through an identity lens with Jack Hirsch from Okta. I’d like to thank Jack for joining us for the show and thank you for listening today. The podcast will be back in your feed tomorrow as we take a look at the launch of Lexful, an AI-first documentation tool for MSPs that boasts, if you can believe it, a robotic channel chief. We’ll find out all about that tomorrow. You’ll want to be sure to catch that, so please subscribe to or follow the podcast in your podcast app of choice. And if it allows you to do so, please consider leaving a rating or review of the show. Until tomorrow, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.
In this sponsored interview Casey Ellis chats to Harish Peri, SVP and general manager for AI security at Okta, a cloud-based identity and access management company. The pair chat about the fact that AI is forcing enterprises to relearn the basics around identity security, and how Okta for AI Agents can help. Show notes
Send a textAI just found hundreds of high-severity vulnerabilities hiding in open source, and the market flinched. We dig into what Anthropic's Claude Code Security actually means for security teams, why vendors like CrowdStrike and Okta aren't going away, and how the real change lands on roles, workflows, and the skills you need next. From CI/CD integration to vulnerability discovery at scale, we frame where general models augment specialized tools and where human expertise still anchors the stack.We also get tactical with five CISSP-style AI questions designed to sharpen your instincts. You'll learn how adversaries reverse engineer decision boundaries to drive up false negatives, what adversarial examples look like in practice, and why adversarial training matters. We break down indirect prompt injection—how a crafted document can hijack an LLM to exfiltrate session data—and outline guardrails that actually reduce risk. Then we map AI risk using NIST's AI RMF, focusing on the Measure function to evaluate potential harms to protected classes, and we unpack why federated learning still faces privacy leakage through gradient updates without differential privacy and secure aggregation.If you're in a SOC or building AppSec pipelines, this conversation gives you a blueprint to adapt: automate tier one triage, monitor for model drift, add OOD detection, and treat your models like code with tests, reviews, and rollbacks. If you're planning your career, we share concrete pivot paths into detection engineering with ML, AI governance, and assurance. Want more hands-on practice and mentorship to pass the CISSP the first time and future-proof your skills? Subscribe, share this with a teammate, and leave a review with the next AI topic you want us to tackle.Gain exclusive access to 360 FREE CISSP Practice Questions at FreeCISSPQuestions.com and have them delivered directly to your inbox! Don't miss this valuable opportunity to strengthen your CISSP exam preparation and boost your chances of certification success. Join now and start your journey toward CISSP mastery today!
What does it take to get your SaaS offering on multiple cloud providers? Richard chats with Steve Buchanan about his new role at JAMF, which focuses on a mobile device management product for Apple devices. Originally built as a SaaS product on AWS, Steve is helping to build out the JAMF stack on Azure to support a broader range of customers. Steve talks about Kubernetes as the common ground among the major cloud players, but you need to dig into the rest of the tooling to minimize differences across implementations. That means cloud-agnostic tools for deployment, identity, instrumentation, and more! The good news is that there are plenty of tools out there to help you, but it does take time to work out your suite of tools to get consistent results, no matter where the backend resides.LinksJAMFOpenTofuElastic Kubernetes ServiceAzure Kubernetes ServiceGoogle Kubernetes EngineMicrosoft IntuneiOS and IntuneOktaPrometheusGrafanaSteve's Pluralsight ClassesKAgentSOC 2 Type 2Recorded January 8, 2026
株式会社日立ソリューションズは2月16日、Okta, Inc.の「Okta Identity Security Posture Management(Okta ISPM)」を2月17日から提供すると発表した。
Ihr kriegt aktuell 25 € vom Scalable-ETF, wenn ihr ein neues Konto eröffnet und nutzt. Dazu unterstützt ihr auch noch diesen Podcast. Mehr Infos gibt's hier. Oberstes Gericht kippt Trumps Zölle. Er macht mit 15% weiter. NVIDIA will in OpenAI investieren. OpenAI verdreifacht Umsatz, verfehlt Margenziel. Moncler zieht Luxusbranche hoch. Comfort Systems & Corning boomen mit Rechenzentren. Okta, CrowdStrike & Zscaler crashen. Software-Sektor hat den schlechtesten Jahresstart seit der Finanzkrise. Schuld ist KI. Aber sind SAP, Salesforce & Co. wirklich bedroht? Wir schauen auf Burggräben, Bewertungen und wo in der KI-Welt das Geld am Ende landet. Diesen Podcast vom 23.02.2026, 3:00 Uhr stellt dir die Podstars GmbH (Noah Leidinger) zur Verfügung.
Okta Japan株式会社は2月13日、アイデンティティセキュリティポスチャ管理(ISPM)における新機能「Agent Discovery」を発表した。
Okta's Dan Hefley (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-hefley), Senior Product Manager for Device Access, explains how Platform SSO brings enterprise identity to the Mac. From day-zero Setup Assistant enrollment in macOS 26 to device bound SSO using secure enclave keys, Dan covers what IT teams need to know about deploying Platform SSO with Okta and Jamf. Dan shares his perspective as a former MDM admin turned identity product manager, discusses how device bound SSO prevents session hijacking with hardware-backed keys, and explains why the Shared Signals Framework between Okta and Jamf creates layered security. Hosts Josh Thornton and Kat Garbis explore what this means for organizations managing Apple fleets. 1:44 Meet Dan Hefley - Senior Product Manager at Okta 5:00 What Is Okta? Vendor-Neutral Identity Provider Overview 6:23 Why Identity and Device Security Go Hand in Hand 7:21 What Is Platform SSO? Native macOS Framework Defined 8:07 Evolution from Jamf Connect Basic to Platform SSO 9:15 Why Platform SSO Was 9:47 Platform SSO in Setup Assistant 10:08 Day-Zero Enrollment Flow - ABM to Jamf to Okta MFA 11:43 Solving Enrollment Friction with Separated Device and User Registration 12:18 Password Syncing Benefits 16:40 How Device Bound SSO Prevents Session Hijacking 17:53 Identity Threat Protection and Continuous Authentication 18:06 Shared Signals Framework - Okta and Jamf Working Together 20:40 Okta FastPass and Passwordless Authentication on Mac 21:20 Device Bound SSO Completes the Day-Zero Story 22:30 Getting Started - Requirements and Deployment Considerations 26:26 Okta's Platform SSO Roadmap and Future Direction 27:43 Key Takeaway - Identity and Device Teams Belong in the Same Room RESOURCES: - Mac Admins Slack - Platform SSO Channel: https://macadmins.slack.com - IAMSE Blog - Okta Integration Guides: https://iamse.blog - Jamf Learning Hub: https://learn.jamf.com/ - Jamf and Okta integrations: https://www.jamf.com/integrations/okta/ Subscribe for Apple device management and security insights WHO THIS IS FOR: IT administrators and security teams managing Mac fleets in enterprise environments. Relevant if you're evaluating Platform SSO with Okta, migrating from Jamf Connect Basic, or planning identity integration for zero-touch Mac deployment. #Okta #Jamf #macossecurity #AppleSecurity #DeviceBoundSSO #macOS #IdentityManagement #PlatformSSO #ZeroTouchDeployment #JamfAfterDark #EnterpriseSecurity #MacAdmin #TrustedAccess #podcast
Transitioning from CISSP to the ISSAP concentration? The architecture of security isn't just about building walls; it's about the visibility of what's happening within them. In this deep-dive session, we break down the 2026 ISSAP syllabus changes moving from six domains to four and why the exam remains as rigorous as ever.We focus on the backbone of security architecture: Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Audit Strategy. From defining the roles of an AI-driven SOC to implementing "Just-in-Time" (JIT) access and advanced log management with SIM and SOAR, this episode provides the technical roadmap needed to master Domain 1 of the ISSAP.
Rohit Dhawan, group executive director of Artificial Intelligence at Lloyds Banking Group in the UK, wrote: Agentic AI goes beyond GenAI, enabling autonomous action, workflow orchestration, and real‑time decision-making at scale. He goes on to predict that 2026 marks a turning point as agentic AI moves from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment across financial services.In this context, CISOs and CIOs in Asia may want to consider prioritising AI-driven identity governance for autonomous environments, in the process treating agentic AI as first-class identities requiring least-privilege enforcement, continuous behavioural monitoring, lifecycle visibility, and human-in-the-loop controls. Maturing understanding of regulations will drive compliance efforts to mitigate shadow agents, rogue actions, excessive privileges, and accountability gaps in securing enterprise IT infrastructure.In this PodChats for FutureCISO, Matthew Graham, Chief Security Officer for Asia Pacific at Okta, shares his thoughts on emphasising practical, regulation-grounded decision-making on agentic AI adoption.1. How ca n we quickly evaluate if our current identity and access management systems are ready to handle agentic AI as independent actors?2. What key principles from Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI should we adopt first to set safe boundaries for autonomous agents?3. Drawing from our experience with the proliferation of Shadow GenAI, how do we prevent shadow or over-privileged AI agents from gaining too much access and causing unauthorised actions?4. What basic steps ensure every agentic AI has its own clear, trackable identity with proper permissions and audit trails?5. What practical approaches manage the full lifecycle of short-lived agent identities—from creation and delegation to safe removal?6. There is a possibility that many organisations don't have the experience or capability to follow through your recommendations. How do CISOs and CIOs have appropriate governance for their business and workflow?7. How can we add simple behavioural monitoring and emergency stop controls to catch rogue or unexpected agent actions without slowing operations?8. Looking forward, how might new standards and Asia's push for sovereign AI influence our long-term plans to balance safe innovation with compliance?9. Agentic AI is predicted to be the IT project of 2026. For organisations that have decided to deploy agentic AI, any security recommendations to ensure resilience?
Okta Japan株式会社は2月5日、Oktaのアジア太平洋および日本(APJ)地域を統括するシニアバイスプレジデント(SVP)兼ゼネラルマネージャーとして、Dan Mountstephen氏の就任を発表した。Oktaの最高収益責任者(CRO)Jon Addison氏の直属となる。
In this episode, iTnews host Jennifer O'Brien is joined by Stephanie Barnett, Vice President of Presales and Interim GM for Asia Pacific & Japan at Okta. Together they unpack why identity has moved from an authentication project to a board-level business layer, and why “attackers don't break in – they log in”.You will hear how organisations across Australia, New Zealand and the wider APJ region are responding to Essential Eight-driven identity requirements, the rise of non-human identities and AI agents, and the growing challenge of fragmented identity estates. Stephanie also shares what CISOs should be telling their boards in 2026, including practical steps to reduce risk while enabling productivity and secure automation.
Identity controls in the enterprise have only become more complicated over the last few years.Initially, the focus was on IoT devices, which were exploding in the enterprise environment. But recent years have brought an onslaught of AI tools and AI agents, all of which come with security and governance complications.How can business leaders get a grip on the adoption of AI agents, particularly as these tools begin to communicate with one another and with third-party enterprise tools?In this episode, Rory speaks to Shiven Ramji, president, Auth0 at Okta, to discuss the future of identity, security and governance in the face of AI agents.
Send me a text (I will personally respond)Are you a sales or marketing leader at a cybersecurity company trying to accelerate your growth but hitting roadblocks with your ICP, pipeline generation, or scalability? Ever wondered how moving from a big company to a startup changes your playbook, and career mindset? Are you struggling to get your team focused on the right opportunities versus burning out on dead-end deals? This episode holds actionable insights for you.In this conversation we discuss:
In this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's cybersecurity news. They discuss: La France is tres sérieux about ditching US productivity software China's Salt Typhoon was snooping on Downing Street Trump wields the mighty DISCOMBOBULATOR ESET says the Polish power grid wiper was Russia's GRU Sandworm crew US cyber institutions CISA and NIST are struggling Voice phishing for MFA bypass is getting even more polished This episode is sponsored by Sublime Security. Brian Baskin is one of the team behind Sublime's 2026 Email Threat Research report. He joins to talk through what they see of attackers' use of AI, as well as the other trends of the year. This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes France to ditch US platforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom for ‘sovereign platform' amid security concerns | Euronews Suite Numérique plan - Google Search China hacked Downing Street phones for years Cyberattack Targeting Poland's Energy Grid Used a Wiper Trump says U.S. used secret 'discombobulator' on Venezuelan equipment during Maduro raid | PBS News Risky Bulletin: Cyberattack cripples cars across Russia - Risky Business Media Lawmakers probe CISA leader over staffing decisions | CyberScoop Trump's acting cyber chief uploaded sensitive files into a public version of ChatGPT - POLITICO Acting CISA director failed a polygraph. Career staff are now under investigation. - POLITICO NIST is rethinking its role in analyzing software vulnerabilities | Cybersecurity Dive Federal agencies abruptly pull out of RSAC after organizer hires Easterly | Cybersecurity Dive Real-Time phishing kits target Okta, Microsoft, Google Phishing kits adapt to the script of callers On the Coming Industrialisation of Exploit Generation with LLMs – Sean Heelan's Blog GitHub - SeanHeelan/anamnesis-release: Automatic Exploit Generation with LLMs Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health" - Ars Technica Bypassing Windows Administrator Protection - Project Zero Task Failed Successfully - Microsoft's “Immediate” Retirement of MDT - SpecterOps Kubernetes Remote Code Execution Via Nodes/Proxy GET Permission WhatsApp's Latest Privacy Protection: Strict Account Settings - WhatsApp Blog Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: Reports | TechCrunch He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive | WIRED Key findings from the 2026 Sublime Email Threat Research Report
(0:00) Intro(1:36) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel(2:22) Start of interview(3:21) Jennifer's origin story(8:06) Journey to Treasury starting with Sara Lee Corporation, to Cisco and eBay (20-year career in Treasury)(15:05) From Box to CFO roles at Coupons.com and Smartsheet (took it public as CFO)(20:50) Building a Board Career: True Search, Auth0 (acq by Okta), Nerd Wallet, Wyze, Riskified and Klaviyo.(23:40) Private vs. Public Boards(27:47) On founder-led companies(30:01) The Role of Audit Committees(30:50) Navigating AI in the board(36:37) On increased politicization and geopolitics in the boardroom(38:44) CEO-CFO strategy and talking about the hard stuff(40:22) Qualities of a Great Board Member: "The best board members ask the right questions at the right time in the right tone" (from Anita Sands). "They're willing to help in however the company wants them to help."(44:05) Effective Board Meetings(45:59) Books that have greatly influenced her life:Gifts Differing by Isabel Briggs Myers (1980)Discover your Strengths by Donald O. Clifton and Marcus Buckingham (2001)Dare to Lead by Brené Brown (1980)(48:36) Her mentors (50:09) Quotes that she thinks of often or lives her life by "Don't take no for an answer and don't give up" (51:09) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that she loves: Family Search(53:40) The living person she most admires: Taylor SwiftJennifer Ceran is a seasoned finance executive and board member whose career spans treasury leadership, the CFO role, and public and private company board service. Jennifer currently serves on the boards of NerdWallet, Wyze, Riskified, Klaviyo, Flock Safety, and Mesh Payments. You can follow Evan on social media at:X: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
At long last, a TikTok deal. Officials urge lawmakers to keep an eye on the quantum ball. Fortinet confirms active exploitation of a critical authentication bypass flaw. Ireland plans to authorize spyware for law enforcement. Okta warns customers of sophisticated vishing kits. Under Armour investigates data breach claims. CISA adds a Zimbra Collaboration Suite flaw to the known exploited vulnerabilities list. Poor OpSec enables recovery of data stolen by the INC ransomware gang. The DOJ deports a pair of Venezuelans convicted of ATM jackpotting. Our guest is Chris Nyhuis, Founder and CEO of Vigilant, sharing practical steps to protect money, identity, and devices. Curl pulls the plug on bug bounties after drowning in AI slop. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Chris Nyhuis, Founder and CEO of Vigilant, sharing "practical steps consumers can take in 2026 to protect their money, identity, and devices." Selected Reading TikTok Strikes Deal to Create New U.S. Entity and Loosen App's Ties to China (New York Times) US Officials Urge Congress to Reauthorize Key Quantum Law (BankInfo Security) Fortinet confirms critical FortiCloud auth bypass not fully patched (Bleeping Computer) Ireland plans law allowing law enforcement to use spyware (The Record) Okta SSO accounts targeted in vishing-based data theft attacks (Bleeping Computer) Under Armour Investigates Data Breach (Infosecurity Magazine) Organizations Warned of Exploited Zimbra Collaboration Vulnerability (SecurityWeek) INC ransomware opsec fail allowed data recovery for 12 US orgs (Bleeping Computer) 2 Venezuelans Convicted in US for Using Malware to Hack ATMs (SecurityWeek) Curl ending bug bounty program after flood of AI slop reports (Bleeping Computer) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lock down your code and level up your lifestyle in this high-stakes episode of The Dev Life! Brooke & Matt are joined by Alisa Duncan, Senior Developer Advocate at Okta, to demystify the rapidly shifting security landscape of 2026. From protecting your proprietary data in AI prompts to navigating the ethics of AI-generated code, this conversation is a masterclass in staying secure without slowing down. You'll walk away with practical strategies for fostering a security-first culture on your team and, of course, Alisa's personal secrets for maintaining balance and happiness while working at the cutting edge of tech. It's an essential watch for any developer looking to innovate boldly and safely!Connect with Us:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedibravery/https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbchristiansen/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalisaduncan/https://bsky.app/profile/alisaduncan.devhttps://www.pluralsight.com/authors/alisa-duncanFollow us on X:@DevLifePodcastThe DevLIfe Podcast is a part of ng-conf. ng-conf is a multi-day Angular conference focused on delivering the highest quality training in the Angular JavaScript framework. Developers from across the globe converge every year to attend talks and workshops by the Angular team and community experts.JoinAttendXBluesky ReadWatchStock media provided by JUQBOXMUSIC/ Pond5
If AI Agents have capabilities just like humans, should we treat them like humans? If something goes wrong in an agentic workflow, who takes the blame if they're all just nameless, faceless bots? Join us as we talk about it. Do AI Agents need Identities like humans? An Everyday AI Chat with Jordan Wilson and Okta's Eric KelleherNewsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion on LinkedIn: Thoughts on this? Join the convo on LinkedIn and connect with other AI leaders.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:AI Agents in Enterprise: Opportunities and RisksAgentic AI: Human vs. Agent ResponsibilitySecuring AI Agent Identities: Okta's ApproachEvolution of Identity Management for AI AgentsIdentity Governance and Auditability for AgentsAgent Impersonation and Cybersecurity ThreatsRogue AI Agent Behaviors and Case StudiesZero Trust Security: Agentic Age ChallengesOpen Standards: Cross App Access ProtocolBenefits of Identifying AI Agents Like HumansResponsible AI Adoption and Ethical ConcernsPractical Steps to Secure Agentic IdentityTimestamps:00:00 "AI Agents: Power and Pitfalls"05:38 "Automating Identity and Access Governance"06:49 Balancing Innovation and AI Security11:57 "Addressing Rogue AI Threats"17:17 "Securing Real AI Agents"19:56 "Balancing AI Innovation and Security"24:13 "Standards for Identifying Nonhuman Agents"27:24 "AI Agents: 24/7 Security"29:48 Securing and Managing Agent IdentitiesKeywords: AI agents, agentic AI, AI agent identity, securing AI agents, agentic identities, AI identity management, nonhuman identity, machine identity, multi agent orchestration, agent impersonation, agent governance, securing agents, compromised identity, cyber attacks, threat actors, state actors, privileged access management, identity governance, identity directory, auditability, credential vaulting, agent provisioning, agent deprovisioning, automation, zero trust, AI authorization, AI authentication, cross app access, model context protocol, identity security posture management, rogue agent behavior, agent discovery, business logic, anomaly detection, technology guardrails, responsible AI, ethical AI,Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Ready for ROI on GenAI? Go to youreverydayai.com/partner
In this episode of Wharton Tech Toks, Kirk Hachigian (Wharton MBA '27) sits down with Julia Oberrotman (Wharton MBA '16), Senior Director of Corporate Strategy at Okta. Julia breaks down why identity security is about to get exponentially harder—and more critical—as AI agents start moving money, accessing sensitive data, and operating autonomously across systems. The conversation unpacks Okta's $6B Auth0 acquisition and explains how they're racing to secure AI from the moment it's built.Julia pulls back the curtain on what corporate strategy actually looks like at a high-growth company, offering candid advice for those navigating an AI-transformed world.
What does sales leadership actually look like once the AI experimentation phase is over and real results are the only thing that matters? In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I sit down with Jason Ambrose, CEO of the Iconiq backed AI data platform People.ai, to unpack why the era of pilots, proofs of concept, and AI theater is fading fast. Jason brings a grounded view from the front lines of enterprise sales, where leaders are no longer impressed by clever demos. They want measurable outcomes, better forecasts, and fewer hours lost to CRM busywork. This conversation goes straight to the tension many organizations are feeling right now, the gap between AI potential and AI performance. We talk openly about why sales teams are drowning in activity data yet still starved of answers. Emails, meetings, call transcripts, dashboards, and dashboards about dashboards have created fatigue rather than clarity. Jason explains how turning raw activity into crisp, trusted answers changes how sellers operate day to day, pulling them back into customer conversations instead of internal reporting loops. The discussion challenges the long held assumption that better selling comes from more fields, more workflows, and more dashboards, arguing instead that AI should absorb the complexity so humans can focus on judgment, timing, and relationships. The conversation also explores how tools like ChatGPT and Claude are quietly dismantling the walls enterprise software spent years building. Sales leaders increasingly want answers delivered in natural language rather than another system to log into, and Jason shares why this shift is creating tension for legacy platforms built around walled gardens and locked down APIs. We look at what this means for architecture decisions, why openness is becoming a strategic advantage, and how customers are rethinking who they trust to sit at the center of their agentic strategies. Drawing on work with companies such as AMD, Verizon, NVIDIA, and Okta, Jason shares what top performing revenue organizations have in common. Rather than chasing sameness, scripts, and averages, they lean into curiosity, variation, and context. They look for where growth behaves differently by market, segment, or product, and they use AI to surface those differences instead of flattening them away. It is a subtle shift, but one with big implications for how sales teams compete. We also look ahead to 2026 and beyond, including how pricing models may evolve as token consumption becomes a unit of value rather than seats or licenses. Jason explains why this shift could catch enterprises off guard, what governance will matter, and why AI costs may soon feel as visible as cloud spend did a decade ago. The episode closes with a thoughtful challenge to one of the biggest myths in the industry, the belief that selling itself can be fully automated, and why the last mile of persuasion, trust, and judgment remains deeply human. If you are responsible for revenue, sales operations, or AI strategy, this episode offers a clear-eyed look at what changes when AI stops being an experiment and starts being held accountable, so what assumptions about sales and AI are you still holding onto, and are they helping or quietly holding you back? Useful Links Follow Jason Ambrose on LinkedIn Learn more about people.ai Follow on LinkedIn Thanks to our sponsors, Alcor, for supporting the show.
(0:00) Intro(1:45) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel(2:31) Start of interview(3:04) Jeff's origin story. Began career in investment banking at First Boston before transitioning to a 25-year run as CFO across media companies (King World, Nielsen) and tech (DoubleClick, Oracle).(7:16) Transitioning to Bessemer Venture Partners.(8:40) Focusing on his board career and audit committee member. ValueClick, Priceline (Booking Holdings).(11:06) Growth in Public vs. Private Markets(12:49) The State of European Entrepreneurial Ecosystem(13:41) The Role of BVP CFO Council(15:31) Understanding California and Silicon Valley's Unique Culture(18:44) AI's impact on the CFO role(20:54) Dynamics Between CEOs and CFOs(23:12) CFOs in Startups vs. Public Companies "We've observed that about 5% of the headcount of any co' at any size is in the finance dpt.")(25:25) CFOs as Board Members(27:35) Board decisions on CEO hiring and firing. "The CEO's role is to articulate an effective strategy, to hire a great team, and then to execute that strategy well using that great team." "If over five years the CEO has never changed their mind based on board input, you have the wrong board."(30:36) On effective Board Composition(32:41) Navigating Shareholder Activism, including his experience at Twilio(37:35) The Debate: Stay Private or Go Public. "There are three ownership structures: public companies, PE-owned companies (where PE controls CEO), and founder-controlled private companies" "I think you're going to see quite a few companies stay private forever or for decades."(39:30) Preparing for the Future of Venture Capital (41:13) Optimizing Board Meeting Content. "Effective boards: 2/3 of time on未made decisions. Ineffective boards: show and tell." "Best-run companies: CEO encourages board members to meet with executives outside board meetings."(45:50) Books that have greatly influenced his life:The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Shroeder (2008)My Early Life by Winston Churchill (1930) How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (1980)(47:07) His mentors (50:50) Quotes that he thinks of often or lives his life by "You want to live your life to have a seamless web of deserved trust" by Charlie Munger(53:15) An unusual habit or an absurd thing that he loves. Reading adventure stories from G.H. Henty(54:01) The living person he most admires: Warren BuffettJeff Epstein is an operating partner of Bessemer Venture Partners where he leads BVP's CFO Council. He is a former CFO of Oracle and currently serves on the boards of Autodesk, AvePoint, Okta, and Twilio (previously at Kaiser Permanente and Booking Holdings). You can follow Evan on social media at:X: @evanepsteinLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/ Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/__To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/__Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
We rebuild a small office network around Linux, with an Unplugged twist and real-world constraints. Things don't go quite as expected...Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger PictureThe EU economy is imploding, Germany the power manufacturing company is falling apart and now companies are moving to Hungary. Trump built the tariff system to compete the [CB]. Trump has now started the narrative of why the Fed should not be controlling the US economy. DOJ has begun a criminal investigation, soon the Fed will be restructured into the Treasury. The [DS] is panicking, they are losing the chess match and they have no more move except one. Trump has now set the stage and the [DS] will follow the path to their destruction. The money supply is in the process of being shutdown, the [DS] is struggling, the countries they controlled are struggling. Soon Trump will have all the leverage and the enemy will be at it’s weakest point. Game Over. Economy (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); https://twitter.com/WallStreetMav/status/2010625048856424506?s=20 countries. In the year 2023, Germany lost 123,000 manufacturing jobs. The trend has continued in 2024 and 2025. Lousy energy policy has consequences. https://twitter.com/RealPNavarro/status/2010480063091720266?s=20 https://twitter.com/RealPNavarro/status/2010480094662332678?s=20 factory jobs appear. https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/2010701202971935191?s=20 JUST IN: RINO Tillis Threatens to Block Fed Nominations Over Powell Criminal Investigation Federal investigators opened a criminal investigation into Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Powell is under fire for the cost of renovating the Fed's DC headquarters. The cost ballooned from $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion. RINO Senator Thom Tillis is threatening to block any future Fed nominations over the Justice Department's federal criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Source: thegatewaypundit.com FED Chairman Jerome Powell Attempts to Evade Legal Accountability by Hiding Behind His Office Regardless of how you feel about the Federal Reserve Board, I think we would all agree the construct of an autonomous central bank is outside the boundaries of our constitutional framework. Factually, the Sea Island financial group set up the Federal Reserve as a system of control over the U.S. economy that was completely unnecessary. . Last year facing ridiculous cost overruns, congress questioned Powell over the insane spending proposal by Powell for a new office building. Chairman Powell characterized the construction changes that escalated the cost of the project from $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion as ‘minor modifications.' That's $2.5 billions of taxpayer money. .[Transcript] – “Good evening. On Friday, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. That testimony concerned in part a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings. I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure. This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress's oversight role; the Fed through testimony and other public disclosures made every effort to keep Congress informed about the renovation project. Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation. I have served at the Federal Reserve under four administrations, Republicans and Democrats alike. In every case, I have carried out my duties without political fear or favor, focused solely on our mandate of price stability and maximum employment. Public service sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats. I will continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people. Thank you.” Source:theconservativetreehouse.com Powell says criminal investigation by Trump's Justice Department threatens Fed's independence https://twitter.com/unseen1_unseen/status/2010547216906125721?s=20 https://twitter.com/jeffreytucker/status/2010520328389173522?s=20 would love to have been a fly on that wall, just listening in. Jerome caved. Now he is whining like a man-child that his supposed independence is being compromised by a threatened criminal indictment over a profligate building project. Historians will have a hard time making sense of this hilarity, including the faux-serious pose in this histrionic statement of pretend integrity. There is no place in a democracy for a secretive and all-controlling central bank. These conspirators are toast, if not now or tomorrow, then eventually. A peoples’ government needs a peoples’ money that people can own and control, and a banking system that is based on market competition, not a cartel of big shots. Sorry, Jerome, you showed your cards five years ago, revealing exactly who and what you serve, and that is not the American people. These are the end times for the Federal Reserve. https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/2010771831658107044?s=20 https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/2010761420082917557?s=20 Silver and Gold Hit New Highs on Fed Probe and Heightened Geopolitical Tensions Gold and silver prices are climbing in response to concerns around geopolitical issues and policy independence at the Federal Reserve. Source: barrons.com of Dollars! It would be a complete mess, and almost impossible for our Country to pay. Anybody who says that it can be quickly and easily done would be making a false, inaccurate, or totally misunderstood answer to this very large and complex question. It may not be possible but, if it were, it would be Dollars that would be so large that it would take many years to figure out what number we are talking about and even, who, when, and where, to pay. Remember, when America shines brightly, the World shines brightly. In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against the United States of America on this National Security bonanza, WE'RE SCREWED! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP Political/Rights WBD is not just another studio. It is the home of HBO, DC Comics, the Harry Potter films, Game of Thrones, and one of the most important film archives in the world. Netflix itself boasts that the acquisition would combine Warner's “iconic franchises and storied libraries” with the world's largest streaming platform. If Netflix absorbs these assets, it will not just be the biggest streaming service. It will become the most dominant cultural gatekeeper the United States — and much of the world — has ever seen. Yet despite the obvious risks, WBD's leadership is pushing forward even though Paramount Skydance has launched an all-cash tender offer of $30 per share for the entire company — a bid that implies significantly higher value for shareholders than Netflix's offer. At the same time, merging WBD's vast film and television library into Netflix would weaken competition in both streaming and content markets and concentrate cultural power in ways fundamentally at odds with the diversity of voices a free nation needs to survive. On these grounds alone, this merger should be stopped. Handing this machine control over Warner's franchises and future output would allow one company to rewrite characters, retell history, redefine social norms, and control which ideas reach audiences. Majority Of North Carolina Trucking Licenses Issued To Foreigners Are Illegal: Duffy A review of non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses (CDLs) granted in North Carolina found that 54 percent were issued illegally, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said in a statement on Jan. 8. The review was conducted by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and is part of its ongoing nationwide audit of trucking licensing systems, the department said. DOT warned that if North Carolina does not “fix their serious failures” and revoke licenses issued illegally to foreign nationals, the department will withhold almost $50 million in federal funding. Source: zerohedge.com DOT Strips California Of $160 Million Over Foreign Truckers A showdown between the U.S. Department of Transportation and the State of California reached a breaking point on Wednesday after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will withhold approximately $160 million in safety program money from the state. The move follows California's failure to meet a January 5 deadline to cancel more than 17,000 commercial truck driver's licenses that Duffy asserts were unlawfully issued by the state to foreign truckers. The California Department of Motor Vehicles announced in late December that it would delay the cancellation until March 6, but FMCSA did not agree to the extension. The $160 million penalty marks the first year of potential sanctions. Under federal law, if California continues to defy the FMCSA's Final Determination, the amount withheld could double in the second year. Source: zerohedge.com DOGE Yes, Dina Powell McCormick worked in the Trump administration. She served as the United States Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy from 2017 to 2018 . She also held the role of Senior Advisor to the President for Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, and the Empowerment of Women starting in January 2017 . For context, the Truth Social post you linked is Trump congratulating her on her new role as President and Vice Chairman of Meta (announced today, January 12, 2026) 1104 Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: 28003e No.967331 Apr 9 2018 12:09:25 (EST) Anonymous ID: db2d29 No.967224 Apr 9 2018 12:02:45 (EST) >>967123 YOU are being TRACKED. NO FB account required. WTF? Is it embedded in Android OS? This is BIGGER than you think. Agencies attached. Q >>967224 Think ‘Bridge’. GOOG. FB. TWITTER. IG. ‘Central’ algorithm. The stage had to be set. Q Geopolitical U.K Asks Germany and France, EU NATO, to Support Expanded Presence in Greenland President Trump wins again. Seriously folks, you would think that after all this time the Europeans would finally understand how President Trump manipulates the media cycle and gets them to do exactly what he wants – while they and the majority of their constituents think it's exactly the opposite. This stuff is just too funny now. According to European media outlets, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in discussions with Germany and France to send a NATO alliance to Greenland to establish a stronger NATO military footprint. {LINK} The media present this, hilariously, as if European NATO is going to defend Greenland against President Trump and the USA military. {{INSERT SEVERAL LAUGHING EMOJIS HERE}} I mean, think about it rationally. The U.K, France and Germany are unwilling to send troops into Ukraine without the protection of the U.S. military. But somehow, for some reason, the U.K, France and Germany are going to send troops to Greenland to defend against the U.S. military. The narrative sounds silly when put into context, right? So, President Trump starts talking about the U.S. taking aggressive unilateral action to secure Greenland as a strategic national security matter. Suddenly, ‘Voila!' European NATO, under the auspices of defending their Denmark democracy, wakes up and says, ‘No, wait, you can't just take Greenland, that's bad.' Then they assemble urgent talks to send EU NATO military resources to Greenland. Exactly what President Trump has been requesting to formerly deaf ears. See how that works? Source: theconservativetreehouse.com https://twitter.com/thestinkeye/status/2010481974985560110?s=20 notes… JSOC Step 4: seize narrative and news cycles for a week or two while all the large accounts get their marching orders and post the same stuff over and over. The EU threatens to mobilize to “protect Greenland” and quietly discovers they cannot project meaningful power outside their continent without the US. Step 5: DJT walks back the outrageous solution (invasion) to the somewhat radical solution (purchase). The big accounts feel like they matter, the little accounts feel like the have been heard. DJT gets what he wanted all along, and Denmark gets a pile of money to fritter away buying votes with socialist BS. https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2010567080802738660?s=20 https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/2010739799477354900?s=20 systemic instability. https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/2010605925342597449?s=20 Guard Corps (IRGC). https://twitter.com/RapidResponse47/status/2010532329303965733?s=20 Venezuela’s leader was a fugitive from US law enforcement and not a legitimate head of state, according to 60 different countries. He was apprehended, and Venezuela’s remaining leaders were asked to cooperate with US expectations. Greenland is likely to negotiate a compact of free association with the US and receive financial assistance, while maintaining self-governance, in exchange for military protection. Cuba is in rapid decline due to a loss of support from Venezuela (and other factors). China and Russia could offer assistance, but at considerable risk. Trump can wait and watch Cuba self-destruct, then come in and offer assistance to the Cuban people if and when they ask. Iran is in a similar situation to Cuba: a nation in rapid decline, with massive risk for Trump if he intervenes too quickly. The likely play there is to wait for the Ayatollah to flee. There would be no finger-pointing about “regime change” if the Islamic regime collapses on its own. Then, the US could offer assistance as an interim government is established. War/Peace https://twitter.com/WallStreetMav/status/2010435240079319153?s=20 specifically exclude any NATO troops from ever being put into Ukraine. All of these steps are designed to specifically undermine President Trump’s efforts at peace between Ukraine and Russia. The warmongers in Europe are determined to keep the war going as long as possible. They need to distract their voters with enemies so they don’t realize how Europe is collapsing economically and culturally. The European “leaders” desperately need enemies like Trump and Putin in order to point the finger and cast blame while things get worse in their own countries. Blame external forces, not their own policies. North Korean Hackers Using QR Codes to Steal Sensitive Information: FBI North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat group Kimsuky is targeting American entities via a QR code scheme that can compromise sensitive information, the FBI said in a Jan. 8 alert. “As of 2025, Kimsuky actors have targeted think tanks, academic institutions, and both U.S. and foreign government entities with embedded malicious Quick Response (QR) codes in spearphishing campaigns,” the FBI stated. “This type of spearphishing attack is referred to as Quishing.” “Quishing (QR Code Phishing) is a phishing technique in which adversaries embed malicious URLs inside QR codes to force victims to pivot from their corporate endpoint to a mobile device, bypassing traditional email security controls.” In quishing campaigns, threat actors send QR images to targets as email attachments or embedded graphics, which typically evade URL inspection mechanisms. When targets scan the QR code, they are routed via redirectors to webpages that harvest their credentials. Such webpages impersonate Microsoft 365, Okta, or VPN portals. These operations typically end with hackers bypassing multifactor authentication (MFA) and hijacking cloud identities without triggering the usual “MFA failed” alerts. They can then establish persistence in the organizations' networks and use the compromised mailboxes to carry out further hacking operations, the agency warned. The FBI recommended that organizations adopt a multilayered security strategy to tackle the unique risks posed by QR hacking schemes. Source: americafirstreport.com https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/2010464207192371542?s=20 Medical/False Flags Cancer Drugs Drive Nearly One-Fifth Of Pharma Sales The global pharmaceutical industry’s revenue is increasingly concentrated in a handful of high-value drug classes, with oncology, diabetes/obesity treatments and immunology leading the charge. As Statista’s Tristan Gaudiat details below, according to estimates from Statista Market Insights, cancer drugs alone generated over $217 billion last year, making oncology the largest therapeutic segment, driving nearly one-fifth (18 percent) of all pharmaceutical sales. You will find more infographics at Statista Antidiabetic medicines rank second, with estimated sales of over $85 billion in 2025, contributing 7 percent to global market revenues. Source: zerohedge.com then Premiums will FALL, by 50% or more, for most people. I want to go back to the three year window where you can get in there for ObamaCare where you won't pay as much. Don't expand ObamaCare. Congress must make Trump Rules permanent. These were President Trump's 2018 Short Term Plans Rule that President Obama terminated. All Congress has to do is say, ‘Look, the Short Term Plans can last up to 36 months, your Insurer can sell you a Renewal Guarantee so it can last even beyond that period, and you will get lower priced Insurance, better Insurance, Longer Term Insurance and, it doesn't cost Taxpayers a dime or, it won't destabilize ObamaCare.' Much simpler than what President Trump's advisers are selling him, much better to assuage the fears of nervous Democrats, because we had these Rules in place for six years, and ObamaCare did not crater. Subsidies will not solve this problem. Government should be capping what it spends on Healthcare at ZERO. Send them a check. No need for subsidies. Congress has to get out of the way of Private Insurance Companies. Give the money to the Consumers to buy directly from the Health Insurance Companies.” [DS] Agenda https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/2010347486783693056?s=20 https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/status/2010445777676673233?s=20 https://twitter.com/RealAbs1776/status/2010549397969350845?s=20 https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2010554642107675018?s=20 https://twitter.com/DHSgov/status/2010362097562013779?s=20 https://twitter.com/RapidResponse47/status/2010540542220726775?s=20 https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/2010537739767238962?s=20 https://twitter.com/TheStormRedux/status/2010374476819472477?s=20 dozens and dozens of those individuals to justice already. We're gonna keep hundreds of HSI officers there to continue to protect those children. Every day we get another individual that was sexual assault against a child. Sodomy against a child. I can't believe that the mayor and governor can defend allowing those people to go out there and victimize more of our children and grandchildren.” Infuriating. When see you see these dumbass leftists protesting in the streets, just know that they are out there protecting pedophiles. At this point, how can anyone claim that the Democrats are the “good guys”? https://twitter.com/AGPamBondi/status/2010755631972577560?s=20 rammed a Border Patrol vehicle, threatening the lives of federal law enforcement officers. He should NEVER have been in our country to begin with, and we will ensure he NEVER walks free in America again. President Trump's Plan https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2010487811732840449?s=20 A federal grand jury voted to indict the former FBI Director on two felony counts — and then three federal judges unraveled that indictment through conjecture, media narratives, personalized attacks on the United States Attorney, and procedural anomalies that have no precedent in federal criminal practice. https://twitter.com/RealSLokhova/status/2010247488826175976?s=20 https://twitter.com/realJeremyCarl/status/2010710384769151325?s=20 (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");
Tristan talks with Lauren Anderson, Senior Director for Okta's Enterprise Data Platform. Lauren shares how identity sits at the center of two seismic shifts in data—AI agents and the open data lake—and why central governance and a shared semantic layer are critical. Lauren lays out how analytics engineers and data engineers should divide responsibilities as agents begin to write a growing share of analytical queries. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
We make our big Linux predictions for 2026, but first, we score how we did for 2025.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
Alex Salazar is the CEO and Co-Founder of Arcade.dev, working on secure AI agents and real-world automation integrations.Chiara Caratelli is a Data Scientist at Prosus Group, working on AI agents, web automation, and evaluation of robust multimodal models.Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinInGet the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletterMLOps GPU Guide: https://go.mlops.community/gpuguide// AbstractAgents sound smart until millions of users show up. A real talk on tools, UX, and why autonomy is overrated.// BioChiara CaratelliChiara is a Data Scientist at Prosus, where she develops AI-driven solutions with a focus on AI agents, multimodal models, and new user experiences. With a PhD in Computational Science and a background in machine learning engineering and data science, she has worked on deploying AI-powered applications at scale, collaborating with Prosus portfolio companies to drive real-world impact.Beyond her work at Prosus, she enjoys experimenting with generative AI and art. She is also an avid climber and book reader, always eager to explore new ideas and share knowledge with the AI and ML community.Alex SalazarAlex is the CEO and co-founder of Arcade.dev, the unified agent action platform that makes AI agents production-ready. Previously, Salazar co-founded Stormpath, the first authentication API for developers, which was acquired by Okta. At Okta, he led developer products, accounting for 25% of total bookings, and launched a new auth-centric proxy server product that reached $9M in revenue within a year. He also managed Okta's network of over 7,000 auth integrations. Alex holds a computer science degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Stanford University.// Related LinksWebsite: https://www.prosus.com/Website: https://www.arcade.dev/~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Alex on LinkedIn: /alexsalazar/Connect with Chiara on LinkedIn: /chiara-caratelli/Timestamps:[00:00] Intro[00:15] Insights from iFood[06:22] API vs agent intention[09:45] Tool definition clarity[15:37] Preemptive context loading[27:50] Contextualizing agent data[33:27] Prompt bloat in payments[41:33] Agent building evolution[50:09] Agent program scalability[55:29] Why multi-agent is a dead end[56:17] Wrap up
The Great Holiday Homelab Special! Where our community brought their absolute best, from budget busters to beautiful disasters. Plus, a boosties celebration! Grab an eggnog and join us as we attempt to choose this year's winners.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
We cut the streaming cord the Linux way with free, legal internet TV you can curate, DVR, and self-host via Jellyfin or Plex. Then, we talk COSMIC stable with System76's CEO.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
Kent Overstreet joins us for a full update on bcachefs. What's new, what's next, and the surprising upside of getting kicked out of the kernel.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
Chipmaker Marvell is on the rise thanks to strong quarterly earnings and an acquisition announcement, identity-management firm Okta is lower despite beating earnings and revenue projections, reports say the Trump administration will propose weakening fuel efficiency standards, Saudi Arabia's public investment fund will own more than 90% of videogame maker Electronic Arts and the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will resume … more than a decade after the jet disappeared. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Follow Squawk Pod for the best moments, interviews and analysis from our TV show in an audio-first format. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
After facing a rough start to 2025, Macy's (M) muscled an earnings beat thanks to a strong showing from Bloomingdale. That said, Diane King Hall points to tariffs and selective spending from consumers plaguing the company's forward momentum. CrowdStrike (CRWD) showed strength in the cybersecurity sector but shares still slid on the report. Staying in the space, Diane turns to Okta Inc.'s (OKTA) earnings that had a red mark on withheld fiscal 2027 guidance. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
In previewing CrowdStrike (CRWD) and Okta Inc. (OKTA) ahead of their earnings after Tuesday's close, Ahmed Khan shows concerns from 2025's price action compared to 2024 but believes it makes the names more attractive in affordability. He adds that cybersecurity's fragmented market will experience continued consolidation. Ron Westfall notes "mixed" expectations heading into the reports but adds A.I. will serve as a long-term catalyst. He projects CrowdStrike and Okta to benefit from what he projects to be a $95 billion market. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
Ahead of Okta Inc.'s (OKTA) earnings after Tuesday's closing bell, Rick Ducat analyzes the most recent earnings moves and why they can be "confounding" to new traders. He explains how the general cybersecurity trade experienced shakiness in 2025 by comparing Okta to peers like CrowdStrike (CRWD) and Fortinet (FTNT). Rick takes investors through bearish and bullish signals in the charts, along with options activity surrounding the report. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
CrowdStrike (CRWD) and Okta Inc. (OKTA) muscled earnings beats for cybersecurity while Marvell (MRVL) did the same for the A.I. hardware space. All showed different reactions when it came to price action. Marley Kayden, Sam Vadas, and Kevin Green break down the earnings and analyze why each stock was searching for direction after the closing bell. ======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Options involve risks and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading, read the Options Disclosure Document. http://bit.ly/2v9tH6DSubscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
We pull on a few loose threads from recent episodes, and some of them unravel into way more than we expected.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
In this episode of Sales Is King, host Dan Sixsmith sits down with Jon Addison, Chief Revenue Officer at Okta, to unpack how identity is becoming mission-critical in a world of AI agents, distributed work, and rising security expectations. Jon shares how Okta is evolving from product to platform, why identity is central to securing AI, and what it really takes to lead large, global go-to-market organizations today. The conversation ranges from AI ROI and agent security to sales leadership, relationship selling in a post‑pandemic world, and Jon's unconventional path from door‑to‑door sales and technical roles into the CRO seat.Key TopicsOkta's mission and why identity sits at the center of security and AI. The early, messy phase of AI and agents and why standardization and consolidation are coming. How Okta thinks about securing AI agents for 20,000+ customers through policy, platform, and design. Moving from “product company” to “platform company” and what that means for GTM, partners, and customers. Jon's view of the CRO role: being a change agent, driving parallel transformations, and balancing data with instinct. The “Formula to Win” (Focus, Compete, Lead) and the decision to specialize across Okta and Auth0 buying personas. Why enterprise selling is going “back to relationships” in an era of hyper‑informed, AI‑enabled buyers. Skill vs. art in sales: practice, rehearsal, and the X‑factor of human connection and courage. Methodologies, MEDDIC, and how frameworks and creativity can and should coexist. Jon's career path: door‑to‑door sales, technical consulting, product management, Oracle, LinkedIn, and now Okta. How to think about talent, instincts, and building high‑performing, international sales teams. Jon's definition of success: growth, unlocking potential in reps, and meaningful customer outcomes. HighlightsAI and agent deployments are still in early, fragmented stages, and most enterprises are experimenting without yet seeing consistent ROI—creating a big opening for vendors who can standardize and secure these environments. Okta sees AI agents much like cloud apps in the early days: scattered pilots that will eventually need centralized identity, policy, and governance—an area where its platforms are already embedded. The CRO role is fundamentally about being an empowered change agent: driving multiple transformation streams at once, building trust across functions, and having the courage to move fast without creating “one‑way doors.” Specialization across platforms (Okta vs. Auth0) and buying personas is unlocking deeper expertise, better customer conversations, and sharper competitive positioning. Enterprise sellers will increasingly face highly educated buyers who have already self‑researched with AI, which shifts the seller's value from information transfer to relationship, insight, orchestration, and outcome design. World‑class sellers treat sales like a craft: they rehearse, review call recordings, seek coaching, and study both customers and industries the way elite athletes study film. Strong sales cultures blend a clear methodology and shared language with individual creativity, ambition, and “brave” outreach that truly differentiates the experience for customers. Guest Bio – Jon AddisonJon Addison is the Chief Revenue Officer at Okta, where he leads the global field organization and is responsible for driving worldwide growth. He brings over 20 years of sales leadership experience from roles at LinkedIn, Oracle, and other global technology firms, and is focused on building high‑performing teams, scaling platform‑led go‑to‑market motions, and helping customers modernize and secure identity in the age of AI.Connect with Jon and OktaJon on Okta's leadership page: https://www.okta.com/company/leadership/jon-addison/ Okta newsroom and updates: https://www.okta.com/newsroom/ Connect with Dan Sixsmith & Sales Is KingDan Sixsmith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dansixsmith/
Get featured on the show by leaving us a Voice Mail: https://bit.ly/MIPVM AI is transforming identity security and giving cybercriminals superpowers. This episode explores the rise of deepfakes, social engineering, and why traditional MFA and recovery flows fail. Learn how businesses can protect digital trust and secure remote work in an AI-driven world.
Chris cooked up a wild remote-access trick for Jellyfin that skips VPNs entirely. One tiny toggle spins up a secure tunnel on demand. Simple, absurd, and shockingly effective.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
We dig into the biggest Linux hardware news of the year, then fire up our new-to-us 1L PC server.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:
We dive into your configs, the genius moves, the glorious blunders, and everything in between.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks: