You cannot outsource your judgment to an AI vendor

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Well, I started my career about 30 years back in the software space as a software engineer, as most of us do, right out of college, right? And I worked in the corporate world for about 20 plus years. And in the process, I actually got to climb up the corporate ladder, do you know bigger and better things and learned quite a lot from my corporate background. But I always had this itch. That I wanted to do something for myself. I actually wanted to run a company on my own, start something like from the scratch. but I never did it because it was pretty daunting as you like, you know, you have to leave everything on the table and go to a zero. So it took me like 20 plus years to you know, get that courage to leave everything and then start. So this was in 2015, end of 2014. I was in a very large company. and I thought this is my time. I had done a lot of things for different corp, you know, different very large fortune one fortune one through ten companies. And this is my time. I want to try something different and if it doesn't work out then I always had the opportunity to go back and do what I was doing. and I left in 2014. I was working for Google at that time because that was the merger between you know Motorola Mobility and Google. I left them and I started this company called Delivery Circle in the logistics space. I did not have a whole lot of background in the logistics space prior to that. In fact, I didn't work in a logistics company either. but I had this idea that actually ended up developing a product. For that idea. And I launched here in the state of Delaware with just about like, you know, 20 plus zip codes. I grew that company year over year. you know, we grew substantially in the first four years of the company, and we also raised, you know, multiple rounds of funding through the course and expanded the company from just like you know one state here to 20 plus states. I was, you know. working as the chair and the CEO in the company at the time. and then in 2024, you know I came to a point where the company was doing well. The company actually was working sort of not as an owner-operator model with an external CEO as well. And I ended up selling my stake to a public company. And that was to me To me, a great exit where, you know, you build something from the scratch, we see it grow, and then you have this opportunity to exit and, you know, pass the reins on to another company to run it. so that's a little, you know, summary of my background and my career.

Interesting, right? So if you if you had asked me this question about four years back, there was very little to talk about AI because you know it was just coming up, most people didn't even actually use it in their you know day-to-day work, that type of a thing. it's it it's a good and a bad thing, right? There's a lot of things that we can do with AI today, but then also it opens up a a lot of opportunities to make sure that we are doing it right. So when I sold my stake and I actually exited the company in full, I was looking to do more consulting work in the you know in the space of security, because I'm also a certified cyber CISO. So I thought I would just do you know work only in the security space. and that kind of morphed into security and AI together because I think a lot of companies now, big and small, Are using a lot of AI tools, are bringing in a lot of you know AI vendors to solve their or implement their AI solutions. And that actually led me to believe that this should not be done in a silo because it's always tough when you try to do something and then you kind of retrofit security on the back end, right? So that's the purpose of this tech view. I actually work only with mid and small size companies. companies with less than 500 employees mostly. And they don't have a whole lot of security team, a big security team or a you know, big know-how of how to use the s you know the the tools or put the tools in place. So we developed a product called Secure and Scale. And that secure and scale actually is truly for its name, right? It's it actually is exactly what it is. You first Take a honest inventory of what is there in the company, take a true assessment, you secure everything that you have, and then use automation, you know, AI-based automations to scale it. Because every company wants to scale. This is not one of those things that we say scale is an option. So you secure and then you scale. You don't do the other way around because when you start doing the other way around, that's when things start falling out of place. you know. falling off, right? And you want to make sure that there is no overlap of tools. there is this strong ROI for every dollar that you spend on you know security that allows you to then scale. and this was not something that I went in knowing what was the exact prescription and a fit. In fact I don't even know that today, right? Because every company is different. But we kind of sort of have an idea on how things work. and when we go into a company, we look at what they have, and we also see from the standpoint of, you know, there is always resistance, right? There's always pushback saying, hey, don't touch this application because this has been there for many years, we have added more tools to it, and then the same story on this side. But when we start looking at every dollar that is spent, and when we start putting down on a paper the overlap of things that are happening in an organization and how by just the virtue of having overlaps and multiple tools, how does it translate to not having enough security in place? Then the savings aren't you know theoretical. It's basically the resistance drops, people understand, they can see exactly what's going on, and then we go and we you know help them in terms of both getting a stronger ROI for their spend on technology as well as securing it, you know, structurally for scaling their operations.

Interesting. So last two weeks back, I had posted a article on LinkedIn, and this was something that I shared, you know, citing the MIT research that suggested the small business AI adoption has remained flat, and over half the CEOs are you know recording no measurable ROIs. Now, this was exactly what was in the research, and I kind of shared it on LinkedIn, and then sure enough. I had several entrepreneurs actually from my network that reached out privately to me to say that that's actually not true. We are using a lot of AI and we are seeing benefits with it because everything that is actually monotonous and have a place to be automated, we are automating it. So really small businesses are benefiting from AI, but yet you have called that out in the article from the article that it doesn't. And they have a point. Because it is true that small and medium-sized businesses are using AI, they are benefiting from it as well. I think there's a lot of commotion and mixed messaging out in the space. I I agree to that as well. So when you start using these tools that kind of exponentially take you from point A to B, security becomes an important component in it. Not because you want it, not because you like it, but because that's a nuisance to be taken care of, right? And we have seen this with a lot of other you know, large frontier models that are saying that their systems can actually hack other systems. you know, sometimes without their knowledge, they they are talking about it after the fact. So when you know the risk and when you know this much consequence a smaller business can have if they don't Put security hat on, that then is a challenge because that you know you have to address it whether you like it or not. I think it's easier and better to kind of address a problem when you know that there is a problem instead of hoping that it never becomes a problem, right? and that has that is something that I've always loved doing because sometimes people develop solutions and try to find a problem for it. And I'm here, you know, shouting from the rooftop that there is a problem because you know cybersecurity is not something that you should look at it after the fact. So might as well be ahead of the curve and then you can keep your costs low, but yet you can have a good guardrail, a framework for what you're doing.

Yeah, there's a service called Digi Rescue. it's digital rescue, short form for digital rescue. It's called Digi Rescue. I have partnerships with few firms you know in different countries that actually as an extended team on that service as as well. And what we do in that is most of the times, right, when we go into companies or when I actually work with small Owner operator companies. I keep saying seeing the same pattern, like implementations are stored, budgets are burnt, cost overruns, not enough understanding on what the process is, not enough understanding on why we bought something we bought, what benefits are we getting from that. And the projects just don't go the way the owners or the founders or the CEOs think that they should. So what DG Rescue basically does is exactly that. So when I go into a company and I say, okay, you have set aside half a million dollars to do XYZ, I triage that, I look at what that actually half a million dollar spend should look like. Like if you said this is what I wanted to build, I had set aside half a million dollars, but I've already burnt two hundred thousand dollars and this thing is not going to be delivered in Five months. Then I look at it, I triage it, and then with our partners that we have in tech you, we will stabilize what's already there. So we are not going to just throw things away. Anything that can be rescued, we will rescue, we will put it in, put it onto the platform, we'll stabilize it, we'll rebuild the things that are needed to be rebuilt with a very strong framework and very strong timeline. And then we hand it back over to the client. We actually don't get paid. One of the things we promise is that don't pay us until we deliver it. Because I am confident that when I and this is by my this is because of all the number of years I've spent, you know, working in the corporate world as well as building my own company, right? I when I see a project and when I see how much money has been spent and what has been delivered, there's a strong case to be made. That these are things that we have worked on, these are things that have happened. So let's keep that. Let's stabilize things that are not, you know, can't see the light of the day, rebuild some of those things and then get the product back in the hands of the owners that have spent the money. So that's a DG Rescue service that we have in addition to secure and scale.

So in my experience, I've seen, you know, and I've always believed this. The ideas, the concepts, they are pretty cheap. Execution is the most expensive piece of the whole thing, right? So what I think what ends up happening is, The people at the senior level know that there are issues or they want to take on certain automation work. They go, they buy certain tools. There's not enough probably communication across the organization of what that mission should be. And then the tools are already put in place or bought, and then the execution starts. There are It's a combination of factors. This is one of them that I'm describing. The other piece is AI is a new thing, right? So a lot of people are actually executing and learning all at the same time. And so there is issues with that. There are consequences of learning and executing all at the same time as well. And the third piece is sometimes people don't understand the ROI of what is being invested and what actually. You're getting in return. So, say for example, if you're using any of these frontier models, and you know, I'm not advocating for open source, but I'm also advocating for open source for smaller companies, and the reason for that is sometimes people understand okay, if I just take this tool for $30 a month, then I'm good. I can always go back and automate all these other things in my company. That's not true because the moment you start developing Applications on those tools and start using the tokens, your bill suddenly goes from like $50 a month to $500 a month. And there your budget you're already overrunning the budget quite a bit, right? In addition to anything that slips in an IT project. So I have seen that there are actually multiple factors of why things could have gone wrong. And I'm not disputing that research because I've also spoken to smaller companies that have been frustrated. By what was committed to them or told to them that they would get if they used something or a certain tool and they didn't get it, and then it added a lot more complexity to the issue. Like the one thing I always say when people talk about using AI tools, right? you can't outsource the judgment to a company that's selling you the tool. That should if your objective is to just offload your operations to a tool or a vendor that you're buying the tool from, that never works, right? and never let one vendor's roadmap become your whole security policy. because that's like almost having no kill switch at all. And that should always be in client's own hands, not you know, in some you know, vendor's hands. But that Doesn't get done in most places. I have walked into organizations where they said, I don't know how these all these things work, but you can talk to XYZ from this other company. And I'm thinking, this is really bad because you're just you've just outsourced your pain to a vendor that if the vendor actually goes down or doesn't is not your vendor anymore, the pain will come back more forcefully to you. You should at least Know what you're doing and how you're solving for that problem instead of just outsourcing your problem to somebody.

Sure. So the audience, right? I mean, my focus is on you know, small and mid-sized businesses because genuinely I am very interested in those businesses. And after I became an entrepreneur myself, I can actually relate to some of those challenges, right? So I understand them a lot more and a lot better now. and I would never have been able to do that had I not started my own company. So having said that. I genuinely want small businesses to understand that AI is for a benefit. I mean, it's not something that they should shy away from. they should use it to the full potential to get them to like, you know, scale, to grow their business. But at the same time, I think you know they have to address security day one and ensure that. Anything that they overlook on security should not have you know consequences on their business. And to look the easiest way to look at security is proportional security, which I which I always say it's not the size of your company. And the reason I say that is you can have a 30-member healthcare company that has a lot of data on their clients versus a hundred-member company that's selling t-shirts. with no PI information on their systems. So you can't say my size of the company is only 30 or 100, and so I will worry or not worry about security. It's what kind of data do you have on your clients? And if that data is a sensitive data, then you have to get in front of it and you know make sure that you have addressed anything that could become a problem in the future. And I do consult with a lot of companies for virtually at no cost. I mean, I look at their security in place. Secure and scale is a completely free product. So we assess companies' needs and we look at what structure they have, what security they have for you know, for no cost to them. and then we also give them a 30 day plan to fix something on their own. if they want to and if they want us to fix, that's the only time that we charge them for it. So having said that, they can find me on LinkedIn. they can write to me directly, Vijaya at techvieo dot com. And you know, I think LinkedIn is the best way because I do get a lot of people who reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Yes, that's true. Thank you. Thank you for having me.