The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

In this engaging discussion, Gary Rivlin, author of *AI Valley* and former WIRED reporter, teams up with Barry Briggs, ex-CTO at Microsoft IT. They explore the fascinating history of AI, noting its promise that's lingered since the 1950s. Rivlin highlights the transformative shift with ChatGPT, contrasting it with earlier tools like Google Translate. The conversation delves into figures like Reid Hoffman, celebrated for his success, and discusses AI's role in companionship and emotional intelligence, painting a hopeful picture of AI's future in our lives.

In the age of AI, there’s no going it alone. Partnership is now an absolute necessity. This conversation between Colleen Kapase, VP of Channels and Partner Programs at Google Cloud, and Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, demonstrates the value of partnership done right. Their back-and-forth embodies the enduring partnership, and unshakable trust, that Goole Cloud and EPAM have built over the years. Kapase notes that the conversations she's had with partners were often about modernizing cloud infrastructure rather than more nuanced AI discussions. No more! “It's moved beyond a CIO conversation to a product conversation, to a CMO conversation.” Google and their partners are asking: “What are you doing to leverage AI to advance our products or offerings or processes and customer experience?” This kind of working is, Kapase says, an opportunity to “grow, grow, grow, grow” that can deeply impact their partners’ customer experience and product development. Shekhter says that lately there has been much restructuring of the partner ecosystem and then asks bluntly: What is partnership *for?* “Just delighting the customer,” says Kapase. “I don't know if it gets any more complicated than that.” Complicating things somewhat, Shekhter wonders if her interlocutor has advice on how partnership can be customer-centric in AI-native transformation work. “It can sound basic, but communication is *so* important,” says Kapase. “It is really the basis of any great partnership… Strong communication just can make you better together.” Better together, indeed. So, for those who are in or want to join the Google Cloud crowd, or care about partnerships more generally, listen up! Much here to learn about partner-driven delivery and adoption, the role of Agentspace and AI innovation, the importance of optimism, and more.

Today’s incident response ain’t your grandfather’s IR. But the psychology surrounding it hasn’t changed an iota. This is precisely what Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Tab Bradshaw, Chief Operating Officer at Redpoint Cybersecurity, are talking about on this #SecurityByDesign conversation. “It really comes down to the preparation piece,” says Bradshaw. It’s about being well prepared and asking: “How often do you prepare in your organization, at a technical level, at an executive level, to handle some sort of incident?” Rehman agrees and says that he has clients wondering, “OK, so when am I done?” The perception is that being IR-ready is enough, he says. “That's not the case. It's a muscle. It's emotion. It's how you work. It's how you react to it.” There are benefits to knowing the proper way to react. “A well-handled breach really builds credibility,” says Bradshaw, adding that the word “reasonable” is omnipresent in IR documentation. He says: “Reasonableness is not just about having a mitigation strategy.” It’s also about, say, practicing tabletop exercises. Regularly. So that when you’re asked about doing regular tabletop sessions, the answer is, as Bradshaw puts it: “Yes, we did it every quarter for the past five years. We feel like we're in a pretty good spot that if something happens, might not be perfect, but we think we have good preparation, consistent preparation, consistent practice, to your point, to respond to the incident when it does occur.” Rehman says that security people are “used to having that sudden sense of violent impulse and urgency coming to us,” but what about the business leaders and everyone else in the organization? He asks Bradshaw about IR communication: “How do you guide the team through it, especially when everybody's thinking about, ‘Oh, am I gonna be on the news?’” Of the thousands of breaches Bradshaw and his team have responded to, for “a third, maybe half” of them, there is “some internal chaos at the client—and it's not because anybody's doing a bad thing.” “It really comes down to what I call C-squared,” says Bradshaw, which is shorthand for “communication and coordination. Someone has to be the quarterback.” Bradshaw says the chaos is about “a lack of preparation and testing.” A tabletop exercise needs to be a live fire exercise: “Doing it once a year is not good.” Too many organizations treat IR as a checklist, which is a mistake. He says: “It's a living, cross-functional discipline that evolves with the threat landscape externally, obviously, and also internally as people move.” And so? Get moving. Hit play and get ready. Host: Lisa Kocian Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

What does the phrase “aquatic corporate community” mean to you? A school of fish in business suits holding an underwater meeting around a table of coral? Well, for our guests on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test,* it’s all about plunging into a strategic social responsibility program called “Let’s Swim Together.” Antonio Silva, President of European Aquatics, and Kate Pretkel, EPAM’s VP and Head of Sustainability Programs, have pooled their knowledge to answer questions from Balázs Magyar, Senior Director of Account Management at EPAM. Swimming is not just sports skill, says Silva, “It's a life skill.” He rightly points out that the pool is a place that can be used by everyone: babies, children, and adults. And, as Magyar notes, it promotes discipline, responsibility, social connections, and physical- and mental health. “Let’s Swim Together,” is starting with a pilot program for EPAM Hungary but the program will expand to other companies, other countries. Silva adds that with this initiative, we can reach “the specific goals of a company” and “so-called environmental, social and governance goals.” This is good news for Pretkel, who speaks ESG fluently. She says that EPAM has a long tradition of helping employees “to make a good impact on the communities that we live and work in,” adding that “It's not *just* about people working for a specific company, but also their friends, their families, their kids and their communities.” The challenge, with all these groups, is getting people to take the first step toward the water. “We are looking at the whole employee experience,” says Pretkel. The trick is making it easier for our employees to join. To do so, they are incorporated into the “overall experience that we are creating for them.” She says it’s all about “building these habits and also in some cases engaging the team so they can help each other to make this first step.” In short, Silva and Pretkel are excited about building what Antonio calls, yes, “the aquatic corporate community.” He concludes: “It's about reaching some social goals that [the participants] could not reach if they were not involved in such an activity.” Host: Macy Donaway Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

How are CISOs holding up in the era of AI? According to Tim Ramsay, Managing Director of Mandiant Client Advisory (now part of Google Cloud), and our guest on *Silo Busting*: “You have a number of parts of the organization that may be embracing AI without any involvement from central IT, and more importantly… without security.” Not an easy situation for a CISO. But not to worry, Ramsay and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s CISO and SVP, have seen this kind of thing before. In the pre-AI age, there were other technology inflection points, such as virtualization and the cloud, and our conversationalists learned that dealing with them involved clear communication and trust. Today’s CISOs “don't want to kill the business or stop the business,” says Ramsay. “They want to enable the business. But that kind of presupposes they know what the business is trying to do.” What’s necessary, he says, is for business leaders “to have some level of trust that the security people are actually going to bring something productive to the conversation and not just rule from a position of fear, uncertainty and doubt.” CISOs must teach their colleagues that secure business is, as Ramsay notes, a team sport and that organizations must know their data assets. Security people must also be clear about risk. “We need to be real about what type of threats we actually are engaging,” says Ramsay. The lessons of DeepSeek emerge during the episode. Ramsay says he thought there’d be “some voice in the room who would have said, ‘Guys, are we ready? Are we ready for global type of exposure here?’” Getting ready, in fact, means that security must be included from the beginning, both Ramsay and Rehman agree. Rehman adds: “To secure something as an aftermath is a million times more difficult than if you have security in mind when you’re actually going through that innovation process.” Rehman asks how CISOs can build the necessary trust. “Meetings are always good, but relationships are where it gets real,” replies Ramsay. “Conversations that CISOs are having alongside other C-levels are going to be much more effective” than meetings that can sometimes feel adversarial. Build strong enough relationships and sometimes business leaders will deliver the security message themselves. “It takes a secure CISO to let others carry the message sometimes,” says Ramsay. “It takes the pressure off the CISO to be always the bearer of threats and news of risk.” Says Rehman: “So much of security requires... letting go of that insecurity.” Host and Producer: Ken Gordon Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

“If you want to know the future, look at the past.” While no one in their right mind would claim Einstein was giving any thought whatsoever to the future of the financial services industry, history would have once again proven him right if he had. Once upon a time, one’s choice of bank was based on how well that particular institution had won over your trust. That meant building relationships with the customers and the community at large. While it’s hard to envision any other reality, it’s only been a couple of decades where convenience and the digital experience became such dominating factors. But as banks increasingly leverage emerging technology to race toward automation and digital optimization, the notion of trust and relationship building has all but faded into the rearview. Or has it? “Yes, you need to have an amazing digital experience. It needs to be convenient, easy and it needs to flow… But you also need to be able to get ahold of a banker just as quickly. You need that opportunity to have someone jump into that digital experience as you’re a part of it–if you have a challenge, or a question or an alternative need. For our industry, that’s what everyone is trying to solve.” This is the mantra of Eric Sobie, SVP, Head of Consumer Sales and Strategy at Heartland Financial USA, Inc. It’s his belief that in order for the financial services industry to move forward, it needs to find a way to bridge the gap between the personalized experiences of the past with the efficiency and digital innovation of today. And as Chris Tapley, VP of Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, points out, it’s a notion with strong precedent behind it. “It’s interesting because what bank customers told us is that they have very disparate use cases for in-person versus digital interactions with their banks. They want to move money digitally; they want to check balances digitally; but when they need advice, or when they need a problem solved, they… want some kind of in-person interaction. Being able to converge that digital and human experience will be critical.” As the two discuss, it's this convergence where the emergent technologies of AI and generative AI will play an important role. While they might make it possible to further automate, optimize and streamline customer interactions – for example, recommending a specific product for a customer based on the available data – is this what consumers really want? As Sobie makes note, the alternative is to leverage these technologies to gain a more thorough understanding of the customer, and to upskill bankers to better build relationships with their customers based on this insight. “I think banks, rightfully so, are a little nervous about AI, because we are a business built upon trust; we want nothing to invalidate that trust. Let’s not use AI to create an opportunity to drive [a product] recommendation. But can we get predictive analytics? Can we understand where the customer is on their road map… and can we get a whole view of who that customer is from the data?” That’s how banks can bridge the gap between today’s digital environment and the personalized experiences of the past. Now, it’s time to dive into the full *Resonance Test* conversation. Enjoy your stay. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Scott MacAllister Executive Producer: Ken Gordon

What should we be focusing on? It’s an essential question for all of us… but for those in the cybersecurity game, it’s critical. Focusing on the wrong things here can be *costly.* Or so says Neatsun Ziv, Co-Founder and CEO of OX Security, in this *#CybersecurityByDesign* conversation with Sam Rehman, EPAM’s CISO and SVP. Ziv says that, when it comes to fixing code, “95% of the things” that organizations work on have “zero risk impact,” adding: “That is an insane amount of money that the organization should have spent creating a bigger gap between them and the competitors.” Managing risk is indeed a major challenge for contemporary organizations. “There's no such thing as one single application anymore,” says Rehman, who wonders: “How do you manage the inherent risk from all these components?” Ziv says the answer is about getting clients to focus on what’s critical to them. There’s a need to distinguish between vulnerability, theoretical risk and actual practical risk. What is a practical risk? It means getting clients to recognize, as an organization: “This is what I'm concerned about.” “I always tell people the risk is managed,” adds Rehman, who says that approach is underpinned by asking questions such as “What's your security posture?” and assessing a client’s risk tolerance. “You need to be smart about the investment,” says Ziv. He notes that this is where experienced leaders become practical. He gets them to answer questions like: What's exposed? What's internal? What do you want to replace first? How do we do it? Ultimately, he says, it’s getting clients to be mature enough to say that they’d focus on the “5% [of efforts] that would actually make a difference in the first year or the second year.” The trick is taking a balanced approach, and the guys bring the idea of balance into the realms of supply chain and open source. We leave you with a warning: Listening might have a serious impact on your own security posture. Click play now! Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“Can we use generative AI in a way that teaches us something that we might not have known otherwise, and in that learning… create something that actually has the potential to increase agency for all inside of the system?” Good question, Angela Stockman! It is, in fact, one of many good questions that Stockman, the author of *The Writer’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation,* raises as our guest on *The Resonance Test.* In this episode, Stockman joins Kristin Heist, Senior Director of Innovation Consulting at EPAM Continuum, and our Brian Imholte to dig deep into Gen AI and education. Part of that digging involves the art of *asking questions.* Heist says that while building a tutor with input from educators, teachers have been “pushing us to design tools that follow the principles of Socratic method” and not just giving the answers to students. Stockman agrees saying that teachers don’t want to see “learners leaning on AI tools just to generate answers or to produce work in ways that you know undermine their opportunity to sharpen their own saw.” The hope is that students will become keen enough to create whole new ways of doing things—and that teachers will, too. Part of teachers’ craft, says Heist, is “learning what works for their students, learning what their students understand, learning who their students are.” But the reality is that teachers are extremely time-constrained. And this makes personalization a challenge. Stockman says that for teachers “who are working with sometimes over one hundred students in a single day,” personalization is “kind of unrealistic”—but a GenAI tutor can truly help. The real focus is where GenAI tools can, as Heist says, “elevate the teacher's craft,” as opposed to replacing what they're currently doing. And let’s not forget data! Stockman says that AI is “helping us scoop the data out of their lived learning experiences. We don't have to bring learning to a halt in order to assess what's going on and it can help us with the interpretation of massive amounts of qualitative data.” If you have questions about GenAI and EDU, and you know you do, listen up. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

We’re talking about the lab of the future! Better than that… we’re *building* it. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* two of the builders are giving us a tour of sorts! Listen as Sridhar Iyengar, Founder, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and Chairman of Elemental Machines, and Chris Waller, EPAM’s VP and Chief Scientist, chew the scientific fat about creating a collaborative model cell and gene therapy laboratory. Waller says the lab of the future seeks to “reinvent the way we look at equipment and utilize equipment in a laboratory setting that's used to manufacture cells” by making it, as we say, real. “We’re building out that facility at the EPAM Continuum office in Boston and partnering with folks like Elemental Machines” to enable “the transformation that we're looking for in these laboratory settings.” Creating such a next-gen lab is a very complicated task, says Iyengar. “Unlike many other disciplines that are primarily software driven or even mechanically driven, the life sciences have a much greater degree of variability.” To minimize this variability, they’re putting an Amazon Go level of scrutiny on lab processes. AI, Iyengar says, “can spot patterns across an enormous number of variables and dimensions, much more than any human being can do… To do that you need lots of data, so you can cancel out the noise and you can find the signal in the noise.” The key step here, he adds, is to collect “as many dimensions of data as possible and make it computationally available.” At present, says Waller, the EPAM Continuum facility enables us to give the future a test run. The lab “allows us to bring our clients, our members of the [Pistoia] Alliance [and] our technology partners together in a safe space to work collectively to derisk the introduction of new technologies into these laboratory settings and show us the future.” Iyengar adds that when he walks people through the lab, “You see their eyes light up and say, ‘Ohh, I get it; that means we can do XYZ!’” Listen to these two and you’ll soon be having your own XYZ thoughts. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“One of the most essential parts of bringing innovation to market is often the most rarely noted,” says host Macy Donaway on the latest Resonance Test podcast. “And it’s those dedicated client leads and sponsors who have political capital built that they can spend to then overcome hurdles.” We call such people mavericks, and Uma Gopinath, the CIO of Porter Airlines and our podcast guest, perfectly embodies that term. Gopinath has been a highly successful change-maker in numerous companies and industries (she was the CIO of Metrolinx, the Director of Technology and Innovation at Lush, and the AVP of Intelligent Automation at Canadian Tire Corporation). Along the way, she has learned how to thrive in the heavily male-dominated technology industry and shares some of her wisdom in this conversation. Giving back, in fact, is central to her work. “As a person of privilege, you need to share that privilege with others,” she says, noting that when at Metrolinx, she noticed the diversity of her teams was “in the low teens when we started,” and by the time she exited “We were close to 30-35% in diversity.” She says that change happens “by intention.” And notes that when a woman didn’t win a particular role, she would ask her colleagues why and was often told, “But she’s the second best.” To this, Gopinath argued that perhaps she was “second best because she's never been given the opportunity to be the first best.” Fixing systemic bias, she notes: “Calls for courage, calls for some unpopular statements sometimes.” Courage is a central part of Gopinath’s general ethos, and it takes the shape of a willingness to be curious, to experiment (and experiment at scale: “your denominator has to be big for you to get those useful, successful experiments,” she says). Gopinath talks up the importance of focusing on the customer. Continuously. Gopinath notes that many organizations brew up a business case and do a project, “but then nobody goes back to effectively evaluate” the outcomes originally projected. Consequently, she says, “We hear lots of stories about how IT projects don’t deliver.” She adds that sometimes it’s “a small feedback loop that's required” and that doing “a little more to get to that bigger benefit” is something businesses need to do better. Gopinath ends with some memorable maverick-level inspiration for future leaders: “Enjoy what you're doing. If you’re not having fun, then go be successful somewhere else.” Now go have fun and listen to the episode! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon