“If you do a penetration test to an organization and you get blocked, this is where you stop the test, right?” says Sharon Nimirovski who founded White-Hat Ltd., a leading Israeli cybersecurity firm recently acquired by EPAM. “But in real life, the attacker doesn’t do that.” In our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation Nimirovski tells Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, that nefarious actors keep looking for other ways inside. “They don’t leave. They’re moving to, maybe, spear phishing. They’re moving maybe to infected URLs, maybe infected Android apps.” How do Nimirovksi and his team meet this barrage of digital assaults? Behind the scenes they repel attackers by building “a database of all the attack techniques and the vectors they use.” His team brings this offensive armada to clients, to test for their systemic weaknesses, and when they find them they create a “vaccine” against the vulnerabilities (“That vaccine is only a behavioral rule that we embed into the client’s given technologies”). A fascinating conversion straight from the front lines of offensive security. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 26: Bringing the Offensive Angle with Sharon Nimirovski and Sam Rehman

Imagine you’re a CEO. You settle into your office in the morning and open your laptop… and there's no way to communicate with clients. “No phones. No emails. Nothing,” says Ofer Levinger, Senior Director of Business Unit Operations at EPAM, on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.*

Levinger tells Adam Bishop, our Director of Information Security (and his podcast partner-in-crime): “It’s very hard for you in that particular moment to work [with] a cool mind, open the well-prepared incident response book, and play by it.”

Bishop notes that the idea of incident response has been around for decades but “things aren’t really improving.” Looking at the headlines about massive data breaches, “It almost feels like things are getting worse.” 

Levinger, who has been the CEO of White Hat, the Israeli cybersecurity firm, since 2019, says most companies look at incident response as a “CISO problem, not an organizational problem. ‘It’s not a *business* problem.’”

This, they say, needs to change.

Listen as our conversationalists get into the intricacies of incident response: the communications challenges, the new ways hackers are getting in (“living off the land” attacks, for instance), zero trust, and more. 

It’s a highly charged topic, one that creates a lot of stress for organizations. Bishop says that just having good cybersecurity hygiene is not enough to allow companies to sleep soundly nowadays. 

Levinger says that it’s necessary to move beyond the reactive posture, which is an ongoing active process. And he adds: “If you have a CISO that sleeps good at night, you have a problem.”

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 28: Incident Response with Ofer Levinger and Adam Bishop

*Data and dairy.* You might not link these two words together—unless you’re Sidhant Jena, Co-Founder and Director of FaunaTech. In this conversation with our Duncan Freake, Jena explains his mission to bring “precision farming” to small farmers all over India (“probably the largest dairy producer in the world”) and, perhaps eventually, the globe. Jena is obsessed with solving the last-mile problems of dairy farmers, and he’s using the smartphone as a diagnostic tool to measure the quality of milk and health of the cows that deliver it. Freake says: “Last-mile measurement enables last-mile interventions,” and Jena compares what he’s doing to our recent experiences with COVID testing: “You need to do testing, and testing leads to tracing, and tracing leads to isolation.” Listen and learn about dairy data aggregation and sharing, the nuances of milk pricing, collaborating with government regulators, EHRs for farms, the quantified cow, and more. Intrigued? Pull up a stool and hit the play button.

Host: Kenji Ross 
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 68: Data and Dairy with Sidhant Jena of FaunaTech

People don’t normally visit our Boston studio with a rack of superhero outfits. But this is exactly what happened on a recent Thursday afternoon: Sergei Nossoff, CEO of Teslasuit, and Andrei Pyko, who runs the company’s research team, dropped by to demo their sleek black haptic feedback garments. After permitting a few lucky people to suit up, get calibrated, and venture into VR land, they conducted a spirited conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer. 

The trio talked about how the suit was originally conceived of as a video game accessory (Nossoff said that his CTO originally sought to “create a suit that would provide extra sensations during gaming”) but it’s currently used for (1) XR training and motion capture;  and (2) medical and healthcare applications.

The task of the technology, said Pyko, is to get people deeply involved and forget that they’re zipped into a suit or a VR environment. “There are a lot of emotions just wearing the suit,” he said and added that donning the suit can prompt people to ask, “Am I a superhero?” 

Zooming out, Shekhter noted that EPAM’s investment in Teslasuit, like our other recent investments, focuses on "identifying unique, technologically driven propositions that present an opportunity for EPAM to accelerate the company either through our own product development expertise or to act as a channel or as an integrator for a large number of our portfolio customers across multiple verticals.” 

The portfolio of this conversation included such topics as Teslasuit’s current business model (B2G and B2B enterprise training services), their partnership with the Hospital for Special Surgery (Nossoff said the aim of the HSS partnership is to “create a product to allow patients to be treated remotely as well as be diagnosed remotely”), and how PII data and privacy factors in here (“So far, we do not have medical certification but we are working towards it,” said Pyko). 

Where might Teslasuit be walking in the near future? 

“In the longer term, we can really use this technology for the consumer market,” said Nossoff.  He’s not necessarily thinking about video games, but fitness and wellbeing and yoga. 

Shekhter joked about Teslasuit working with Louis Vuitton on yoga clothing, and Nossoff talked about pajamas for older people to take biometric parameters to prevent heart attacks during sleep and industrial PPE use. 

All agreed that deep tech smart wearables have a future. And it might be a luxurious future at that. 

“I wasn’t actually kidding about Louis Vuitton yoga wear,” said Shekhter. “We work with a lot of retailers who’d absolutely love to brand your black superhero suits.”  


Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 69: Talking Teslasuit with Sergei Nossoff and Andrei Pyko

Let’s talk experience! In business today, we speak endlessly about digital experience, customer experience, employee experience, patient experience, provider experience, and so on. But one of the newest forms of experience to walk on the scene is still somewhat obscure: developer experience. With an increased focus on digital business, it’s really important for organizations to think about the professional and personal well-being of the people developing software for them. 

The latest episode of Silo Busting double-clicks on this highly relevant topic. Listen up, and you’ll get the full download from Pavel Azaletskiy, EPAM’s Director of Technology Consulting and Head of Engineering Excellence Consulting in North America. He’s in conversation with Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM.

Loughlin says: “Developer experience is about keeping developers happy and successful in their jobs” and that it involves various components: tools, culture, belief in job, and organizational vision.

Azaletskiy concurs and notes that developer experience isn’t just for companies exclusively focused on tech. “Every company right now is a technology company,” he adds. “Without efficient delivery and good developer experience it’s very hard to compete.”

This plugged-in conversation examines he cultural aspects of DevX, the interesting idea of citizen development, the essential elements that developers seek in a job, the relevant benchmarks companies should consider, and more.  Experience it for yourself! 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 32: We're Talking Developer Experience with Sandra Loughlin & Pavel Azaletskiy

To make the most of data, you need to understand that it requires more than an obvious linear process, with discrete handoffs and dashboards and such. It’s about properly viewing data in its living ecosystem, about seeing data as a *loop. * 

The data loop, in fact, is the central focus of our most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, mixes it up with Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions. Also looped in: Dmitry Grinberg, Managing Principal of Technology Solutions at EPAM, who lobs some great questions at these two data-driven men.  

Reardon says that Liberty Mutual uses the data loop as a framework that “helps us shape our priorities and technical approaches, ensuring that we can realize incremental value and make it real along the way.” He then walks us through the key elements of the loop: unlocking data, making it accessible, providing “good, modern, self-service tooling whenever wherever possible,” and finally operationalizing all the insights the process produces.

One of the great advantages, Tsitlik notes, of the data loop is that it focuses the business conversation: Once an organization starts talking about data loops, they stop talking about *data projects.* It’s a mindset that looks at the situation “holistically… as a continuous process,” one that involves “ingesting more data” and “providing more access to various customer users.”

When they discuss how Liberty Mutual operationalized machine learning, Reardon says: “The more that we can build our models and our capabilities with a simple API approach, the more we can easily integrate those insights into different parts of our environment.” 

Reardon emphasizes building simple models and deploying and iterating quickly. Everyone agrees that culture change is important and can be challenging. 

He says: “You can easily understate or even miss, you know, the cultural aspect that's required to head down this path, and we spent a lot of time in our business group educating our leaders first.”

But right now it’s time for *your* education. Enjoy the conversation. 

Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 70: John Reardon of Liberty Mutual Insurance

The search is on! All over the internet, in conference rooms, on ill-lit Zoom calls, anxious executives are straining to understand the still-obscure concept of Web3. The term dares you to define it and to explain why organizations should care—and that’s what we're here for, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting.* 

Our experts, Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Érica Moreti, Head of Strategy & Innovation and Physical Experience for EMEA for EPAM Continuum, answer some essential questions from Producer Ken Gordon about the technical and business implications of Web3. 

They begin by building off of Gavin Wood’s famed definitional haiku: “Less trust, more truth.” Pitkevich talks about Web3 as a place “where the infrastructure and the data are owned by the creators of this infrastructure.” Moreti sees it as a “decentralized ecosystem based on the blockchain” in which platforms and apps aren’t “owned by a central gatekeeper anymore but rather by the users themselves, who would earn their ownership stake by helping develop and maintain those services.”

They dig into those often-tossed-around terms *centralization* and *decentralization.* Pitkevich says that our internet is current running on a “centralized concept, where the majority of the users are coming to one server, one database.” As for decentralization, Moreti talks about a system that’s “distributed in the homogenous way to a connected network of people and devices.”

Together, they address the confusion people have between Web3 and the metaverse. “When we're speaking about multiverse, we are speaking about a huge interactive presentation layer of internet,” says Pitkevitch, adding: “When we speak about Web3, we are speaking to the complete internet infrastructure,” in which all the layers—presentation layer, middleware, the back end—are, you guessed it, *decentralized.*

It’s a good, useful dialogue. Their conversation addresses the essential context around Web3: the economic implications and business opportunities, the challenges of digital identity, and the power of communities. 

If you need an introduction to Web3, you must listen to these two. 

Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 33: Defining Web3 with Sasha Pitkevitch and Érica Moreti

In 2022, Technology evolves fast—faster than the technologists who use it. In order for organizations to put this tech to work for them, they need to have a good understanding of the talent ecosystem, and how to work within it.

As Eli Feldman, EPAM’s CTO of Advanced Technology, says, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting:* “Business capabilities are evolving faster than ever and therefore the technology capabilities that support the business capabilities must keep up.”

Feldman’s interlocutor is Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, who makes the important point that companies don’t just need to keep their training their employees on new skills, they need to do so longitudinally. When it comes to the issue of developing capabilities, Loughlin says, it needs to “span entire career changes, especially as automation has changed the roles that people have” and raises the questions of “whether those roles even exist” in the future.

Back and forth, Loughlin and Feldman go, talking about the importance of training people in a way that makes sense for their business (“Getting the right content to the right people at the right time, right way,” says Loughlin) and applying it to their daily work, aligning skills strategy and capability strategy, the capability academy model, mentorship, EPAM’s learning infrastructure, our approach to assessments (Feldman says EPAM focuses “extensively on making sure that assessment is in reality all about guiding the individual toward their next milestone in their career”), and more.

Eavesdrop on Feldman and Loughlin and you’ll soon understand much about creating a healthy talent ecosystem here. Lucky for you, the learning process is as simple as hitting the “play” button.  

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 34: Tackling the Talent Ecosystem with Sandra Loughlin and Eli Feldman

It’s 2022: Are you ready to jump on a plane? Are your customers? What might it take to make all of us comfortable with the idea of traveling, once again, across the globe? We’ve been thinking about such questions because we’ve been prompted by the insights from *Consumers Unmasked: Stage 2,* part of our longitudinal, international research initiative. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* Jasmin Guthmann, Senior Director of Global Partner Marketing at Contentstack and Daniel Smythe, Vice President of Retail & Hospitality Consulting for EPAM Continuum, sojourn deep into the topic of contemporary travel. Guthmann herself admits that it’s a tense moment for travel: “I've just come off my first long haul flight myself and the level of anxiety added is incredible.” To offset this, she says, the travel industry must provide “as much certainty as possible.” 

But the travel challenges aren’t just about pandemic fear and uncertainty; they also include economics. Learning that 44% of *Consumers Unmasked* respondents said they couldn't afford a vacation, Guthmann said: “That's pretty dire,” adding: “I don't think discounts will be the way to go” and that young travel customers “need highly attractive offers,” personalized and customized offers, at “the right price for what [they] want.” 

Together, Guthmann and Smythe talk intelligently about taking customer experience seriously, the personalization tech can play, staycations and remote work, the importance of privacy for today’s travelers, and  travel must do to attain, especially for young customers, “that more playful vibe again.”

Host: Macy Donaway
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 78: Consumers Unmasked Travel Insights with Jasmin Guthmann and Daniel Smythe

Passwords are a hassle. But what would it take to live a secure online life without them? 

This is what Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Shaked Vax, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Anonybit, talk about in our latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation. 

Listen as they jam on the topic of zero trust and identity as it relates to relevant and tricky ideas such as passwordless technology and biometrics. 

There are some issues, says Vax, explaining that relying on the biometrics enrolled on one’s smartphone “creates a bit of a false sense of security, in my opinion.” Those biometrics, he says, are “not validated against who they belong to.” Because one can store other fingerprints—those of, say, one’s kids—on a smartphone, this creates “a gap there between the account holder and the biometric on the phone.”

There are flaws, Vax says, when the system is not fully connected to a centralized authentication and relies too heavily on phone biometrics.

“You truly want to identify and bind that to the end user,” says Rehman, meaning a very specific person and “not just somebody who can unlock the phone.”

The big question for Vax is: “How do you do a multi-factor authentication that addresses this gap, this vulnerability around the new phone or the account recovery?”

Some fascinating talk here about decentralized data storage and protection, the user experience of passwordless, and the importance of having multiple modalities for different populations.

You’ll want to listen—and you’ll be glad that no password is required. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 39: Zero Trust and Identity with Shaked Vax and Sam Rehman

Home, they used to say, is where the heart is. Now it’s also where people do an enormous amount of shopping. We learned all about this in the most recent installment of our *Consumers Unmasked* report, and our experts—Jen Jones, the Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools, and Mario Crippa, Head of the Physical Experience Practice EMEA at EPAM Continuum—employ these insights to fuel an animated conversation with *Resonance Test* producer Ken Gordon.

The group talks about a number of relevant issues including how small local retailers are transitioning in the post-pandemic world. “Many local retailers built strong relationships with their customers and their communities throughout the pandemic,” says Jones adding that they must be sure to “build on that and extend that relationship into our post-pandemic world” because “We all know that consumers have very short memories.” 

This is seconded by Crippa, who says that after the pandemic, “We all need a little a little bit of human touch, some human contact,” and that small local business are well-positioned to reach out. They definitely have the ability “to come up with better propositions or sharper positions,” to “show off their values, what they believe in.”

As an example, Jones talks about a local restaurant that sold curbside family pickup meals during the pandemic: ”They've sort of shifted that to a pick-up-on-your-way-home-from-work [offering] and have a nicely prepared meal with instructions.”

Jones and Crippa think through the falling value of being able to physically view products. 

Crippa says “the entire way to create desire has changed,” with the advent of product drops and the continuous digital campaigns consumers encounter. “People just click ‘buy.’ They feel like they're missing out, so they buy. They buy immediately.”

Jones suggests that smart online retailers employ a combination of  “emerging technologies, which are continuing to improve and evolve, plus great customer service” and that together this “can basically eliminate the need to see something in person.”

The conversation also looks at how Amazon—“one of the very few companies that is basically a bank of consumers desires,” Crippa says—has been approaching home shopping (“They're testing, testing, testing to see what sticks and then rolling it out to a bigger market,” says Jones). 

They even touch on gaming. Says Jones: “people are leaving their houses again doing other things like concerts and travel; that would take you away from being at home gaming.”

So many insights, at no cost to you! Bring them into your home. Just hit “play.”

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 84: Consumers Unmasked Home Insights with Jen Jones and Mario Crippa

It’s time for your authentication journey! Mandeep Khera, the Chief Marketing Officer at SecureAuth, is our guide in this #SecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* And Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, is of course on hand to pepper Khera with questions about the fascinating concept of passwordless.

Khera begins with a little history—we move from plain text passwords to hashing to one-time passwords to multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and behavioral—and then concludes: “But guess what, passwords are still around and it doesn't make any sense.”

The role of passwordless, Khera says, is to “clear all the friction for users and provide a lot more security.”

It isn’t, of course, that simple. “A lot of people are claiming [that they are using] passwordless, but it's not quite there yet,” says Khera.  

The reason—the real reason—we need to evolve to a real passwordless system, Khera says, is that roughly 80% of today’s cyberattacks happen because of credentials.

Together Khera and Rehman talk about identifying ourselves via our phones and physicality and the annoying friction created by passwords (“Let's just get rid of all the passwords. Let's get rid of all the friction. We just have everything we need”).

The pair zero in on the idea that behavioral monitoring and analytics might provide an answer. “I kind of know what you like to talk about,” says Rehman. “If all the sudden you start talking to me about, you know, Amber Heard… I’d be like: Is this Mandeep?”

It’s a fantastic conversation about how our computing future might operate. To hear it, you need only intone the famed cinematic shibboleth *Klaatu barada nikto.* 
 
Just kidding. You need only click Play. Happy listening!

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 53: Mandeep Khera and Sam Rehman Go Passwordless

The era of generative AI needs humans… not just the data sets they create. Now and going forward, companies will need to depend on perceptive, intelligent, creative humans who can evaluate and, when necessary, stand up to the black box output AI throws at them. What kind of traits do such people embody? Where might we find them? What might they teach the rest of us? That’s what this episode of *Silo Busting* is all about. Tariq King, our VP and Head of Product-Service Systems, and Ira Livshits, Senior Data Scientist at EPAM, meet the test-based questions of Producer Ken Gordon with knowledge and aplomb. 

King, who spent much of his career hiring testers, says he looks for “the way that someone actually approaches solving problems and thinking perhaps in a different way or from a different perspective.”

Livshits notes that with testing in generative AI, “sometimes there is no right or wrong” and that a tester will “have to act or decide based on his or her understanding of the field and maybe intuition.” In short, she says, testing has become much less of a black-and-white job.

Together King and Livshits create a model conversation. They talk about how explainability fits in here, why musicians and liberal arts people make for good testers, the importance of being able to relate findings to a given audience (“[if] I have a PhD focused on machine learning, probably I can understand certain things in a different way than someone who may not have that degree,” says King), and how generative AI is bringing the role of testing closer to the fore.

Go on, give it a test-listen.

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 62 Human Testing and Generative AI with Tariq King and Ira Livshits

The cloud creates “cloud cowboys,” says Yinon Costica, VP of Product and Co-Founder of Wiz. 

This creates, as you might imagine, security issues. 

“Cloud allows people to really own their stuff end-to-end. They can basically create whatever they want,” says Costica. But he says that security professionals need to ensure that the cowboys can “govern their environments in a way that is secured while they continue to build.”

These issues set the theme for this #CyberesecurityByDesign conversation between Costica, Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation.

Rehman notes that the frequency of change in cloud is “great for software engineering,” but adds: “It also makes it very, very difficult for you to actually find your baseline, your footing,” regarding security.

One of the most useful things we learn in this episode is how cloud might help spread the responsibility for security. In the past, security was solely the problem of the security team but with cloud and its self-serve nature, Costica says: “Security now should be democratized to those who are actually managing the environments, running the resources, have the right context.”

As a group, the guys talk about the differences between on-prem and cloud security, the role of visibility plays in cloud, the pragmatism cloud brings to security, and more.

Understanding the manifold nature of cloud is critical, and it will require a lot more education than many organizations realize. Says Rehman: “If you don't have a good understanding of what your cloud looks like, which is majority of people out there, then you still have a huge problem.”

Be part of the solution: Listen.


Host: Kenji Ross
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 61: A Clear View of Cloud Security with Yinon Costica, Sam Rehman, and Aviv Srour

Responsible AI isn’t about laying down the law. Creating responsible AI systems and policies is necessarily an iterative, longitudinal endeavor. Doing it right requires constant conversation among people with diverse kinds of expertise, experience, and attitudes. Which is exactly what today’s episode of *The Resonance Test* embodies. We bring to the virtual table David Goodis, Partner at INQ Law, and Martin Lopatka, Managing Principal of AI Consulting at EPAM, and ask them to lay down their cards. Turns out, they are holding insights as sharp as diamonds. 

This well-balanced pair begins by talking about definitions. Goodis mentions the recent Canadian draft legislation to regulate AI, which asks “What is harm?” because, he says, “What we're trying to do is minimize harm or avoid harm.” The legislation casts harm as physical or psychological harm, damage to a person's property (“Suppose that could include intellectual property,” Goodis says), and any economic loss to a person. 

This leads Lopatka to wonder whether there should be “a differentiation in the way that we legislate fully autonomous systems that are just part of automated pipelines.” What happens, he wonders, when there is an inherently symbiotic system between AI and humans, where “the design is intended to augment human reasoning or activities in any way”?

Goodis is comforted when a human is looped in and isn’t merely saying: “Hey, AI system, go ahead and make that decision about David, can he get the bank loan, yes or no?”

This nudges Lopatka to respond: “The inverse is, I would say, true for myself. I feel like putting a human in the loop can often be a way to shunt off responsibility for inherent choices that are made in the way that AI systems are designed.” He wonders if more scrutiny is needed in designing the systems that present results to human decision-makers.

We also need to examine how those systems operate, says Goodis, pointing out that while an AI system might not be “really making the decision,” it might be “*steering* that decision or influencing that decision in a way that maybe we're not comfortable with.”

This episode will prepare you to think about informed consent (“It's impossible to expect that people have actually even read, let alone *comprehended,* the terms of services that they are supposedly accepting,” says Lopatka), the role of corporate oversight, the need to educate users about risk, and the shared obligation involved in building responsible AI.  

One fascinating exchange centered on the topic of autonomy, toward which Lopatka suggests that a user might have mixed feelings. “Maybe I will object to one use [of personal data] but not another and subscribe to the value proposition that by allowing an organization to process my data in a particular way, there is an upside for me in terms of things like personalized services or efficiency gains for myself. But I may have a conscientious objection to [other] things.”

To which Goodis reasonably asks: “I like your idea, but how do you implement that?”

There is no final answer, obviously, but at one point, Goodis suggests a reasonable starting point: “Maybe it is a combination of consent versus ensuring organizations act in an ethical manner.”
This is a conversation for everyone to hear. So listen, and join Goodis and Lopatka in this important dialogue. 

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 90: Responsible AI with David Goodis and Martin Lopatka

“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

The Resonance Test 92: Lessons from a Maverick with Uma Gopinath and Macy Donaway

“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

The Resonance Test 94: Angela Stockman on GenAI in Education

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

Silo Busting 69: Neatsun Ziv and Sam Rehman on the Balanced Approach to Risk Management

“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

The Resonance Test 95: Technology, Trust & the Customer Experience with Eric Sobie & Chris Tapley

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

Silo Busting 70: Lessons for the Modern CISO with Tim Ramsay and Sam Rehman

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



The Resonance Test 96: Building an Aquatic Corporate Community with Antonio Silva & Kate Pretkel

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



Silo Busting 71: IR Now with Tab Bradshaw and Sam Rehman

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.

The Resonance Test 97: The Power of Partnership with Colleen Kapase and Elaina Shekhter

AI is not as new as we think, says Gary Rivlin, author of *AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence.* 

As our non-artificial guest on *The Resonance Test,* Rivlin tells host Barry Briggs that back in the 1950s, it was thought that AI was always right around the corner. There would be a gathering of technologists who said: “Give us 10 years and we'll have this thing largely solved.” Which meant, says Rivlin: “AI was ‘a decade away’ for about 70 years.”

Rivlin notes that recommendation engines and Google Translate have been operating for a while. “Google Translate has been around since 2015. That's AI, but no one really thinks of it as AI.”  However, when ChatGPT strutted onto the scene, it was something else. Rivlin says: “We were talking to it. Suddenly: AI that you could converse with. It's a whole different beast.”
The builders of that beast are his topic in *AI Valley.* 

Rivlin, who was a reporter for *WIRED* in the dot-com days, returns to his old beat to document the onset of the recent, fast-blooming AI spring. He and Briggs, a former CTO at Microsoft IT, bring years of history into the conversation to offer an assessment at this moment of peak AI in Silicon Valley. 

They talk, for instance, of Reid Hoffman. Briggs says, “He’s the exception to the rule of nice guys finish last.” Rivlin zings back, calling Hoffman: “A billionaire you can root for” and adding “this lonely kid who wanted friends created LinkedIn, which connects the world.”

Together they remember the dot-com days of irrational exuberance, getting-rich-by-selling-dog-food-online. “The problem was we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term,” says Rivlin, adding we’re seeing a similar sort of thinking with AI today.  

The pair reflect on how people used to joke about autocomplete. “I should have started thinking, ‘this could turn into sentences, this could turn into paragraphs, this could turn into dialogue,’” says Briggs.

Rivlin notes that agents aren’t “trustworthy” yet. He says that if an agent is going to “make material decisions, it really needs to be trustworthy.” In two, five, 10 years from now, “AI agents are going to be central to the work life of many, maybe perhaps most of us.”

We trust that you’ll be informed and entertained by this episode. Click on!

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon



The Resonance Test 98: Gary Rivlin, Author of “AI Valley”

“In French, we say when it’s raining at a wedding, it will be a beautiful marriage leading to a happy life,” says Syz Bank COO, Boris Chave. Reflecting on an announcement made on stage in 2023 alongside EPAM’s now-CEO Balazs Fejes during an afternoon storm in Geneva, Chave adds: “I think this rainy event was the beginning of a successful project and a happy partnership between Syz and EPAM.”  

Swiss banks have a well-known reputation for being protective of customer data, and Syz Bank is no exception. For years, the bank relied on on-prem servers and top-shelf security solutions to protect its customer data. However, the cost of those solutions was rising sharply, which led Chave to wonder if there existed a better solution. “The challenge with our setup was that even though we had these best-in-breed technology solutions, the ongoing investments we needed to make to protect our data just weren’t sustainable. I had to ask myself, should we continue down this path with its huge impact on P&L? Not to mention I wasn’t comfortable with the complexity of our systems.” 

Fast forward to June of 2025, and EPAM has just finished helping Syz Bank migrate all its IT infrastructure to cloud-based systems, no small feat. As Fejes points out, “You got new notebooks, new applications, you migrated everything to the cloud. You basically built, de facto, a brand-new bank.” As Chave notes, not only did EPAM help Syz Bank navigate the cloud migration, but we did so with minimal impact on operations. “So many aspects of this project have been a huge success. We delivered on time and on budget without any outages for customers or employees.”

The move to the cloud came at a rather fortuitous time. Fejes says: “When you and I met on that stage in 2023, nobody was really talking about AI yet. But now you’re probably finding yourself in a very privileged situation because some of your competitors might still need to work on what I would call the foundational elements of their infrastructure, whereas you’re in a situation where you can take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud.” Says Chave: “The foundation we have now will give us access to some of the best AI technology without having to make huge investments in infrastructure just to deliver something. We can try out new tools and pivot quickly.”

Beyond enabling new and surprising technologies, the move to the cloud also had another major impact on Syz Bank: a reduction in complexity. What was previously 140 applications working together to protect the bank’s data has been reduced to seven on the cloud system. “So many people are underestimating the impact of complexity in terms of environment stability and cost. Program simplification is probably one of the best ways to achieve cost-efficient operations,” says Fejes.

It might seem counterintuitive that such a complex transformation could result in such simplicity, but that’s exactly how this project played out. Now, with the stage set, let’s raise the curtain on this episode.  

Host: Michael Nicholls  
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas 
Producer: Scott MacAllister 
Executive Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 99: Balazs Fejes and Boris Chave on Syz Bank's Digital Transformation

When it comes to the topic of drug discovery and development, scientists are busy furrowing their lab-goggled brows trying to understand what’s real and what’s hype when it comes to the power and potential of AI. 

This *Resonance Test* conversation perfectly dramatizes the situation. In this episode, Emma Eng, VP of Global Data & AI, Development at Novo Nordisk, and scientist and strategist Chris Waller provide a candid view of drug development in the AI era.   

“We're standing on a revolution,” says Eng, reminding us that “we've done it so many other times” with the birth of the computer and the birth of the internet. It’s prudent, she cautions, not to rush to judgement guided by either zealots or skeptics.

Waller says, of the articles about AI and leadership in *Harvard Business Review,* one could do “a search and replace ‘AI’ with any other technological change that's happened in the last 30 years. It's the same kind of trend and processes and characteristics that you need in your leadership to implement the technology appropriately to get the outcomes that you're looking for.”  

Which means, for pharma, much uncertainty and much experimentation. 

“I think experimentation is good,” says Eng, who then adds that we need to always keep track of what is it that we're experimenting on. She says that the word “experimentation” can “sound very fluid” but in fact, “It's a very structured process. You set up some very clear objectives and you either prove or don't prove those objectives.”

Waller references the various revolutions (throughput screening, combinational chemistry, data, and analytics revolutions) that pharma has seen and says: “We've all held out hope for each and every one of these revolutions that the drug discovery process is going to be shrunk by 50% and cost half as much. And every time we turn around, it's still 12 to 15 years, $1.5 to $2 billion.”

Will AI make the big difference, finally?

“Maybe we need to be revolutionized as an industry,” she says. “It can be hard to make much of a difference as long as there are few big players.” Just a few big players, she says, is “the nature of pharma.”

Of course, our scientists are measured in their assessments about industry change. After all, as Waller says, the systems involved—the human body, the regulatory environment, the commercial ecosystems—are all “super-complicated.”

Eng notes that an important side-effect around the AI hype is corporate interest in data. “Now it's much easier to put that topic on the table saying, ‘If you want to do AI, you need to take care of your data and you need to treat it like an asset.’”

Listen on as they test topics such as regional and regulatory challenges in AI adoption, change management, and future tech and long-term impact (watch out for quantum, everyone!). 
In the end, Eng returns to the idea of revolutions. “You think you want so much change in the beginning which you don't get because it takes time,” says Eng. This makes us underestimate what will happen later. Having such a farseeing mindset is significant, she says, because “these technology shifts will have a large impact on the long term.”

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 100: Emma Eng of Novo Nordisk

If someone told you that his company was all about “people analytics,” would you understand what that meant? How about if he added: “Sort of like *Moneyball* for business”? Bet that would make things crystal clear--at least for the multitude of baseball and/or Brad Pitt and/or Michael Lewis fans out there! That is, in fact, how Humanyze’s CEO, Ben Waber, described his firm to Continuum SVP Kevin Young, in the most recent installment of *The Resonance Test.* In a sprightly digital dialogue, the two talk through such topics as: the use of data in the modern work environment, how privacy functions in Humanyze’s work, and why the U.S. should look into adopting EU privacy standards. If you want to a glimpse into the future of the work place, you should pay attention to this podcast, and note when Waber says:

•	“You don't care what Bob’s doing at 2:30 on Tuesday. No one cares. What you care about is: ‘What’s our most productive team do differently that everybody else? How much does management talk to the sales team?’ Those really big questions. That’s what we care about.” 

•	“Humans, by our very nature, we’re not recording devices. We’re also incredibly inaccurate when I even ask you questions about these things. *Who’d you talk to yesterday?* Only about 30% accurate.”

•	“Essentially our customers use our technology to inject *real* intelligence into all their different people decisions.”

•	“We give people consent forms, that show them the actual database tables we collect. That’s a legal contract between us and our users. That’s important especially in the U.S., to give people legal guarantees around what their rights are with the data.”

•	“Because our technology enables you to literally, at a millisecond level, understand what’s going on, you can act that much more quickly.”

•	“Just figuring out where somebody is at any given time is not that hard. And you can see how that can be abused—which is why having regulations out in front of that is really critical.”

•	“Our average opt-in rate is over 93%, so we’ve gotten quite good at rolling this out. But... you have to take your time, and you have to be *transparent* about what you’re doing with this data.”


Host: Pete Chapin
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 22: Ben Waber of Humanyze

Sunandini Chopra spends her days working for IBM Watson Health (genomics and oncology). Her free time, however, belongs to AI for the Rest of Us, “a platform that facilitates discussion, problem identification and problem solving to create a positive impact on public health by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence.” Platform? It’s a community. A discussion group. A gaggle of brainy AI brainstormers. We know because we hosted one of their events, at which Toby Bottorf, VP of Service & Experience Design, gave a sterling talk on AI and human augmentation in healthcare. Chopra visited *The Resonance Test* to report to Bottorf on chatbots, the power of Alexa (“Linked with your phone, with your television, with the speaker in your house, it can take you through the whole route of a digital visual experience, a texting experience, and an audio experience,”) the predictive similarities between meteorology and healthcare, the direction healthcare is heading (“There’re two futures: one that’s the future for cutting-edge technology and one the future for all the other people in the world to get access to basic care,”) and the adorable nature of RD-D2. *Beep Boop.*

The Resonance Test 33: Sunandini Chopra of AI for the Rest of Us

Want to get schooled on innovation and higher education? Talk with Andy Boynton. Boynton is the John and Linda Powers Family Dean at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. He’s also a long-term friend of ours (we helped [BC redesign their core curriculum). As we’ve been lately thinking about the higher-ed experience, we decided to invite him onto *The Resonance Test.* In this informal-and-informed conversation, our Toby Bottorf, who knows a thing or two about college administrators, chatted with Boynton about the fundamental nature of design thinking, in and out of the classroom. Boynton talked about ideas and competitive advantage and the importance of the “connective tissue” of innovation. He spoke of time (“Spending time up front makes it faster in the long run. And by the way, it’s gonna bring success faster”) and cost (“Throwing a lot of products and services out and seeing which ones stick sounds very expensive to me”). As for BC’s own innovations, he says things have been “incredibly collaborative all summer across the university” and that they’ve prepared for this by, um, working with us. “You don’t flip a switch and say, ‘OK, let’s innovate together, let’s collaborate. You gotta have the right culture in place.” 

Host: Kyle Wing
Editor: Kip Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 51: Andy Boynton, Dean of the Boston College Carroll School of Management

The cloud is an opaque space. Few people know how to migrate safely upwards. Fortunately, in the first of our #CybersecurityByDesign episodes of *Silo Busting,* we talk with an expert who skillfully navigates the cloud: Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. Rehman breaks through the nimbus surrounding the topic and explains to producer Ken Gordon the special nature of cloud security, the importance of data strategy, the smart way to fly through multiple clouds, the cloud’s agile dynamism and elasticity, and the cloud-based fear many people feel (and how to disarm it). Truth is, the cloud is complicated and organizations need to cultivate a more realistic understanding here. Says Rehman: “A lot of people move to the cloud not thinking about ‘What exactly is the boundary? What exactly is the protection?’” Pay attention, and you’ll be soon floating such essential questions yourself.  

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kip Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

Silo Busting 9: Securing the Cloud with Sam Rehman

Peter Senge—the renowned architect of systems thinking and author of the 1990 classic, *The Fifth Discipline*—doesn’t love the word “system.” “I always try to kind of demystify the word ‘system,’ because that's a bit of a problem we've always had,” he says on the most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* “System is an off-putting word.” This is, in fact, one of many surprises nestled in his lively conversation with Rick Curtis, Senior Director of EPAM Continuum, and Paul McCormick, a Principal Consultant at EPAM. Senge’s holistic and humanistic worldview plays nicely off of Curtis-and-McCormick’s pleasantly British style of inquiry. He speaks in mini-lectures about systems thinking (of course), adaptivity, innovation, competition, collaboration, and data in a slightly hoarse but consistently positive voice. Senge is both informative—he teaches us that Latin root for the word “compete” means “striving or seeking together”—and a skilled, off-the-cuff aphorist. Press play and hear him say (among other things):

“Deep change never starts with a majority. Revolutions always start with small numbers. The real changes always start on the periphery of the mainstream.”

“Even direct competitors have to work together to create healthy market conditions, which in turn can allow them to compete.”

“What we often call human nature, I would call habit—collective habits of thinking and acting. And that's culture.”

“You can throw away the word ‘system’ entirely and just talk about [how] we live in webs of interdependence, where my wellbeing depends a lot on yours, and we're continually influencing each other.”

“The basic element is awakening people's intuitive understanding that we always live in an interdependent interconnected reality.”

“Competition and collaboration are natural sisters. They go together. And that's true in business just as well.”

Host: Kyle Wing
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon

The Resonance Test 56: Peter Senge, Author of "The Fifth Discipline"

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