Comms at work (AI + product PR @Cisco) | Momms at home (SF). Don't tempt me with a good sunrise, a community bench or a free little library. Podcast junkie.
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2008
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Susan O'Brien retweeted
These experiments are super important to sponsor. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t but it’s definitely worth the pursuit.
The thing that we have done here is thought of this 2 to 3 person team team as someone that catalyzes the movement and gets the core team to own the final product. What this does is gets everyone to see the benefit of a different way of working. This is also important to have more memory-safe language code migrations that by definition reduce vulns.
Lots of benefits to this approach. The key is to make sure that we are constantly pushing ourselves to think of new ways to accomplish much more than wasn’t possible in the past.
The thing that is not obvious here is that every engineer at Cisco will benefit from this experiment and when they are part of this modernization in areas of their code, it gives them an accelerant to build what they couldn’t in the past with the speed they wanted to move at.
There is a world that is not discussed as much which is that the future could be infinitely more secure, more innovative and filled with a lot more possibilities than we’ve been able to imagine due to previous constraints.
What’s changed in the last 3 months?
In my conversation with Fortune 500 CIO clients, am hearing that they are willing to go 💯 percent AI First and native (versus tweaking around the AI Progressive edges).
They are done with legacy and tech debt, unless AI can completely revamp. No way they can unleash the AI value, without rewriting the core systems.
This comes as no surprise from @jpatel41 and @Cisco
went out with a girlfriend who is very much not in the tech scene / ai bubble last night and she surprised me by telling me she's a huge Instinct user and that she IMMEDIATELY gave it her credit card details but has yet to connect her gmail or gcal.
.... what???
"Your credit card?!?! You can dispute charges -- you can even have your Instinct dispute the charges FOR you. Of course i gave it credit card access. Now... bank logins? thats a totally different story."
Susan O'Brien retweeted
Well said Jeetu! Experiments like this take courage and willingness to trial and error, but it’s so important at this moment!
I took the bait and tried Gemini in my Waymo (why? Exactly).
We’ve got some work to do Google. I was driving through the Haight Ashbury intersection and asked what was special about where we were. It said we were driving in the Castro and we were close to Coit Tower and Pier 39 🤔🤔🤔
Susan O'Brien retweeted
An AI agent's actions may look harmless individually. The real risk emerges when they're connected.
Introducing Project Quarry: @Cisco's new open source detection language designed to identify threats across multi-step agent behavior.
See how it works: blogs.cisco.com/ai/project-q…
Susan O'Brien retweeted
Introducing Cisco Model Foundry.
Now partners can access, deploy, and fine-tune @Cisco's purpose-built AI models for their customers, all within Cisco Cloud Control.
Built on decades of networking, security, and operations expertise.
Learn more from @DJSampath: blogs.cisco.com/ai/cisco-mod…
oh wow. Didn’t see this coming from Block in particular
Meet Dessa, our speech model trained from scratch on human conversation.
Hear it for yourself: block.xyz/dessa
Susan O'Brien retweeted
Great work by the @TalosSecurity team getting this out quickly! If anything in your business runs on PHP, this is critical info and requires every company to move quickly. The old habit of baking patches into the next general purpose release isn't going to survive the AI era.
Two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in PHP core could have implications across its wider ecosystem. Talos has published a blog to explain what we know so far, and details the Snort coverage available, including rules in the Community Ruleset blog.talosintelligence.com/t…
woooooffff.
Newsletters are dead --> form fills are dead --> websites are dead...
What will a 'lead' even look like in the future? Are agents going to (let alone want to) signal interest? Doubtful. How do you MEDPICC an agent?
Pretty mind-boggling to think through the impacts to traditional marketing / sales
a big take I've been noodling on and I’m ready to call:
the newsletter is dead
@every's core business is a newsletter with 120k+ subscribers so I don't say this lightly.
persistent agents mean i dont look at my inbox
with dots (GrokBots, Muse, etc) I almost never look at my inbox. if I do it's for a specific thing I need to reply to.
i think in a year I'll be doing all of my email this way - fully filtered by my dot / something like it.
this is not new: it's a continuation of the trend of having a “newsletter” folder in Gmail, but 10x more filtered.
what it means
It doesn’t mean people won't read newsletters, but it does mean that getting a person’s email is no longer the guarantee that you have a relationship with them that it used to.
luckily, with persistent agents (and AI coding more generally) there is an entirely new playing field to build relationships with readers. instead of fighting to get an email address, publishers and creators will need to make sure we're installed in our reader's agent harness of choice, so that they get directly notified when we do something new.
we're already starting to experiment with this @every with our MCP and the frontier alerts we send users of our slack agent (every.to/agent)
it's also more affordable than ever for publishers and creators to build their own platform ecosystem: you can have your own website, app etc. and you can use AI to publish 100x more high-quality stuff to your community—so we may see a world where many creators themselves are running their own little empires that have their own apps, feeds etc.
to be clear: It'll take a while before this actually happens, but the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over.
here's a set of predictions I made 3 years ago about AI and media that panned out pretty well: every.to/chain-of-thought/we…
Susan O'Brien retweeted
Scaling AI infrastructure requires massive bandwidth and power efficiency. Today, @Cisco and @nvidia announced design plans for USFP, the industry’s first 400G-per-lane pluggable form factor delivering 6.4T capacity and 1.3x greater efficiency. Let's go! cs.co/6004BH8wyi
💯 💯 💯
Saturdays are for deep thought, exec reflection mode after busy week
Saturday posts from CEOs no coincidence, this is an important one from @satyanadella
Susan O'Brien retweeted
We don't trust airplanes either. We engineer them so we don't have to.
Treating models as insider risks is what *unlocks* speed, not what slows it down.
Containment is the thing that lets you deploy boldly.
The history is clear: aviation, electricity, the internet, every one of them got safer through deployment plus engineering, never through restraint.
The trust infrastructure for the agent economy includes identity for agents, policy layers, audit and more and everything is a greenfield.
The upside of agents acting in the world dwarfs the risk. We need to engineer the trust infrastructure for agents faster.
Hey AI and product comms / PR leaders—I know you’re in here. 👀👀
I’m looking for one of you.
I’m hiring for a head of PR for Cisco’s AI Software & Platform team.
I’m *hoping* you and your AI agent(s) 😜 are based in SF🤞or Bay Area but at the end of the day if you’re the right fit that’s what matters.
Is this you or do you know someone who’s great? My DMs are open.
Here’s the JD: careers.cisco.com/global/en/…
As if I didn't already love @notjustanychang enough. Ofc she loves punk rock, free diving w whales, and ya know... powerlifting.
"Chang now ranks sixth in her U.S. weight class in powerlifting and believes she could reach No. 1 if she didn’t have such a demanding career."
... sorry not sorry Amy? Love working with you! Also dogmom extraordinaire could this pic be any cuter?
Amy Chang leads our AI Threat Intelligence and Security Research team, and her job is to find ways an AI system can be made to do what it's not supposed to. A line leaders should take from her story: “The human can’t just become a rubber stamp… You still have to have your critical thinking cap on; you still have to have ownership.” Great profile from the @Cisco Story Lab team!
Literally just finished my last audio book last night and look what shows up on my doorstep this morning!
Feels like AI surely must have been involved in that perfect timing, no? What kind of black magic are you working @kevinroose 😂
