Think AI Podcast - Data Before AI | Ep. 5 with Alex Ryals (MicroAge)

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

What happens when a cybersecurity leader who has sat on every side of the tech table — customer, reseller, distributor, and vendor — decides the future belongs to AI? Alex Ryals, CISO and SVP at MicroAge (celebrating 50 years!), breaks down why most companies are getting AI security dangerously wrong, and what to do before you flip the switch on Copilot or any AI tool.In this episode:00:05 — Intro: Alex's rare career journey across all four sides of the tech channel03:47 — Why Alex traded global scale at TD SYNNEX for a smaller, more impactful role10:53 — As a CISO, how do you balance "move fast" with "stay safe"?14:02 — Shadow AI: the silent risk happening in your company right now18:46 — Building a Copilot sales assistant and using AI avatars on YouTube22:34 — Humanoid robotics, skills marketplaces, and where IT partners fit in25:51 — MicroAge at 50: bankruptcy, reinvention, and lessons for every tech company29:53 — Octum.ai: why data hygiene comes before any AI investment33:30 — First move for leaders who don't know where to start with AIIf you're a business leader sitting on the fence about AI, this episode will either push you off or hand you a map. Like, subscribe, and drop your biggest AI security question in the comments.🔗 Links & Resources[MicroAge YouTube Channel] — Search "MicroAge" on YouTube[Cybersecurity Deciphered] — Alex's personal channel: youtube.com/CybersecurityDecyphered[Think AI Consulting] — thinkaicorp.comDave Goyal - davegoyal.com[Add additional links here]AIGovernance #CybersecurityAI #MicroAge #ThinkAIPodcast #AILeadership

I really enjoy understanding all the technology in the market, but then being able to apply that to solve a real problem. We can be nimble and we're very agile to build on technology solutions for the benefit of our clients. I like to make an impact. Welcome to the Think AI podcast. Each week we talk about the most exciting AI research, tools, case studies and more. I'm your host, Dave Goir, and I've been working behind the scene in data and AI for all. over 30 years, whether you are an AI expert, skeptic, or something in between, this podcast is for you.

Today I have a guest with one of the most unique career path in technology, Alex Rars, is the chief information security officer and SVP of several business units at MicroHage, a company celebrating its 50th anniversary, wow, this year. That puts MicroHage in an elite head. group of 16 technology companies in the world that have been around for half a century, a lot of fair to digest. Alec has worked on every side of the technology table, consulting, distribution, where he has built and run the global cybersecurity business at TDCNX, the vendor side, running global channel at Ping Identity, and now back in the reseller community, leading cybersecurity AI services and half of micro-edge.

Alex, welcome to the show. A lot to take in. How are you? I'm doing great. I really appreciate the invite. I think this will be fun. Okay, let's get started. So I have some questions that I want to go through,

which can get your journey and your growth so far. So Alex, take us through your journey. You have set on every side of the tech table, customer, reseller, distributor, vendor. How did you, that shape, and how do you see the industry today? Well, I think it gives me a pretty well-rounded perspective on the channel in particular. You know, the channel, of course, being all the infrastructure set up to support customers from selling the technology, supporting the technology, making the technology,

distributing that technology. I feel very fortunate to have been at all four sides of the channel. You know, sometimes I think about was the order, the right order. You know, I think I was customer first, then reseller, then distributor, then vendor, then back to reseller. And I sometimes wonder if the order was the most optimal. The truth is, I'm glad I did customer first because it gave me a real appreciation for their needs, which I think served me well as a reseller and a vendor. But the truth is, I get bored pretty quick.

And so a customer, you're dealing with one set of technologies and one set of problems. And I thrive better when I get to play with all the toys in the toy box. So going to the distributor side is really fun because I think in my cybersecurity business globally, I had about 250 security vendors and about 20,000 we sellers and service providers that bought through TDSinex for security. And so I got to play with all. the toys and get to know all the vendors in the community. So that was a lot of fun. But at the end of the day, when I left Ping most recently, I was trying to decide, I've done all four, where do I want to go next? I could choose any of them. And I really chose the reseller side because to me,

solving the business problem for the client is the most fun part. As a distributor, my customers, the partners. As a partner, my client is really the clients. And so I think that's the most fun and personally for me. That's pretty amazing. And like I said before, it's a lot to take in. I truly appreciate all you did to the community and the growth and sharing your journey here. Also, I can relate to what you were saying. I also get bored pretty quickly.

I build nine businesses. Five of them fail miserably. But that arc taught me things that business school could never do. I did go to a business school on international business. It didn't help me as much as the failure in the business with a new lens. And yeah, this is an amazing journey you have. So I want to expand on what you just said. So you're in a very large global security operation at TD CynX.

Now, you are at MicroH running the solution practices as Microsoft cybersecurity, AI services, IT, and business optimization. And I think you briefly touched upon it, but I want to expand on it. What made you choose smaller and broader over bigger and specialized? Yeah, it's a great question. I actually enjoyed both. I like to make an impact. So what was fun about TD Synx and Ping Identity for that matter is I got to touch so many different

companies and partners, resellers, build programs. I built the first and only cyber range. at TD CynX at Tech Data before that actually. It's in Phoenix, Arizona. And it's a program that touched so many resellers and customers. You got to come there and learn cybersecurity skills and improve the way they do business. So I really enjoy that part. But the truth is, when you're impacting everybody and setting standards for the market,

building programs that impact everybody, that's fun. But you never get to really see the impact of it down at the customer level. And so by moving to a reseller like Microwage and a service provider, it lets me get closer to the end customer. And truthfully, what's really neat is if you've worked in distribution, distribution has hundreds of programs designed to help service providers and resellers do what they do better, sell more service to client. But most partners don't fully understand all the programs. So one of the great things about going to distribution and then moving to the reseller community is I know all those programs that TD Synex has to offer. And I can leverage them on our behalf to create better services for our clients. There's financial programs that distribution offers.

There's technology programs. Like they have a destination AI program at TV Cynics right now that's really good that helps partners figure out how to best leverage AI as you build solutions to sell to clients. I built a similar program in my security business years ago called security practice builder. In fact, MicroAge was one of my partners that I personally came out and taught them how to build a security business. Seven years ago, which is kind of funny because now I've come back to run their security business. But now I know all the programs to leverage, which makes me more effective at a, what you mentioned is a smaller company.

It certainly is smaller. but to me, it lets me be more impactful for clients and really solve business problems. Makes sense. And like you said, a smaller is only a perspective, right? We are coming from some place and coming to some place. Like compared to microage, we are pretty small. But at the same time, we have been growing as the top 5,000 company in U.S. for INC. 5,000 awarding for last three years. So we feel pretty proud.

But again, compared to everything else, is pretty small. and small is not bad, like you're saying. Small is probably giving you more opportunities and avenues to try things on your own. And I want to expand on that too. I know from my side what appeals me, but what appeals you more wearing many heads as we were talking about it? What appeals to be more about what? I'm sorry? Yeah, so you wear many hats and what appeals you more like being, being, you know, customer, being consumer, being so many hats on security.

officer, AI, IT, things like that. Why you like that a lot more than me? I mean, you did mention you get bored, but what is inside it is what I'm trying to get to. Yeah. No, good question. You know, I'm a technologist at the end of the day. I've been a software developer half my life. I build and sell technology in many companies. To me, I want it. I like the reseller side, but we can be nimble and we're very agile to build on technology solutions for the benefit of our clients. So when a customer comes to us in a banking industry and they have a unique requirement to design and build something that solves a problem, I love that I'm not at a vendor where I can only throw one solution at the problem. As a reseller and a service provider, I get to pull from

all the different solutions in the market and design something custom for my clients, specialized for them. This solves the problem. For me, as a technologist, I really enjoy understanding all the technology in the market, but then being able to apply that to solve a real problem. And now, of course, with AI on the loose, we've got so much more new tech at our fingertips that's going to be fascinating over the next few years as we figure out how that evolves. So at the moment, I do have a lot of hats at Microage with Microsoft business and cybersecurity and AI and services and IT and CSO. There's a lot going on, but I love to have my fingers in a lot of different pies, plus I have

some really great VP leadership. It works for me that manages those businesses on a day-to-day. Does it just a fantastic job. Well, that's amazing. And I kind of made a similar choice as well. I could have stayed in corporate consulting or just corporate work, worked a lot in health care. But I wanted to build something. I want to own something.

I wanted to satisfy customers and I see the same zeal in you even more than what I could ever do. And you have touched every part of the business, which is phenomenal. I want to move towards AI, our show is AI. We talk about AI. We talk to three different groups, AI curious, AI enthusiast, and AI skeptic. You work in a security world and it's fascinating that you are embracing AI. I have lots of friends in healthcare and they are a little bit reliant. reluctant on going to AI. Now, everything brings risk, everything brings value. How do you balance your

risk is the key. But what's your take on it? Like, AI is moving really fast, but security teams are often the ones pumping the brakes. As a CISO, how do you balance? Let's move or say, let's be safe. Well, that's a great question. And I think that there's a difference between CISOs of publicly traded companies or of regulated companies and then me over microage. So if I were in a regulated or publicly traded company, I would have less flexibility to move as quickly as we do at microage because I need to take some extra precautions, right? But at micro wage, we're privately held by private equity. And so that gives us a little bit of flexibility, I would say, to be nimble, which is fun. So on one hand, I am maniacal about our security internally.

We are SOC 2 compliant. We are NIST cybersecurity framework compliant. I am CMMC level one for working in the federal government. I'm about to get our CMMC level 2. So we have a whole set of, I think there's up to 140 security controls we've implemented here at Microage. So I have a lot of policy. I have a lot of governance. I have a lot of tooling.

Part of the good thing about being a resale. is for my more relevant security manufacturers we work with, I get not for resale licenses, right? And that allows me to play with some technology internally a little cheaper than maybe if I were a client. So that is a benefit of being a reseller. We base a lot of our internal security technology on SOFOS. Sofos is one of our biggest and best security partners.

So I'm able to leverage their identity threat detection response and their SOC services and their endpoint security and their encryption technology and their network monitoring tools. So I get to play with a lot of things at a reasonable price level that lets us do a lot of security internally. And when it comes to AI, I really think that it's important, number one, that you get your data under control before you start playing too much with AI internally and that you think about what AI security needs to look like for you. So for us, we are in the middle of deploying purview right now so we can classify and label our data. so that we can limit what co-pilot has access to or a Microsoft shop. And then I also recently deployed an AI security technology from a company called Oroscape

that monitors all the prompts that go out from our employees. It monitors the various LLMs, public and private, that our associates are using. And it has the ability to also be part of that software development process for building agent technology. So it's important to have that capability, which is new for a lot of clients. We don't have many clients that are doing that yet. They're just starting to. So I adopted it quickly so we would understand it so that we can help our clients. We're all about moving fast, but safely.

Yeah, no, that's beautiful. And I also want to know for other companies so that they understand this coming from a CISO. Where do companies you think get the balance wrong? And the balance is, let's move. quickly or let's be safe. Yeah, I think when it comes to AI specifically, I'll give you an example. We do have a lot of clients who are starting to, they are not preventing their employees from using various public LLMs.

Therefore, their software development teams using Claude code and uploading sometimes proprietary code into Claude. Instead of IT coming over the top first and saying, here's an AI security policy, we're going to allow you to use these tools, but only under these requirements. Like, if clog code is the right answer, you need to be purchasing a subscription so that you can have some secure enclaves for your code as it get uploaded and scanned and not using, allowing people to use public subscriptions of, or personal subscriptions of clog code or chat GPT or perplex. or anything else. So I think it's important that companies have a policy, think through it, and be clear with the employees.

Otherwise, they're going to go use this stuff. Every customer I have right now, it has employees using AI. We call it Shadow AI. It's happening all the time, which is a good thing as long as it's done within guardrails and limits it.

So there are some LLMs and AI agent technologies that are high risk, but can you even add? identify those high-risk technologies so that you can tell your employees not to use those. You know, I've deployed a technology internally that lets me identify high-risk AI technologies that our employees you're using. And I can even prompt messages in front of them that say, are you sure you want to do that? Let's not use that tool.

But you've got to be thinking about those things. I think CSOs need to take this seriously and be very proactive in this because it's happening faster than any other technology adoption I've ever seen. No, that's that you touched upon a great point. And one of the thing I've also preached is governance, right? Policy, guardrails, governance, responsible AI, whatever you want to call it. It's been categorized AI ops now. But governance, an accelerator or a blocker?

I think you did answer, but I want to highlight it for others. Is it really a, because people think governance can block me and then I can't do much. But is it really an accelerator or a blocker? I think governance is an accelerator because if you don't have some governance, A, you don't have a mechanism to tell people how they should and shouldn't behave. B, you don't have a mechanism to know if they are behaving or not behaving. And C, you don't have the ability to determine other other tooling you need to buy in order to make your environment more safe. So governance is imperative, I think, in our current culture, not just in AI security, but also in, identity and many other areas of security.

No, I agree. In fact, I had a great conversation just the other day this week with a guest who said governance isn't a blocker. It's an accelerator. When you have the right guardrails, and I'm just quoting them, people actually move faster because they are not afraid. And, you know, we also work with companies where data scattered across six and seven system with no governance. So it's not just AI, right? If you started building your own reports in PowerBi as an example or any other reporting tool. And it's not governed. You can free to manipulate your calculations, you know, come up with your own conclusions and present it to your management team. But that also needs to be governed, similar to AI. AI is just a foundation or a platform,

but the rules of the game still, it's the same, right? Have the guardrails, have the governance, have the corporate white policy in place. So I totally agree with you on that. You know, I was talking to a client the other day and they pointed something out really interesting. if you don't have governance in place and your employees don't really know what the guardrails are, they'll do things in secret. So these software developers will use AI without telling you to get their job done more efficiently and to learn things. But then they're violating policy that they don't even know they're violating sometimes. And so governance is a great way, to your point, to be very clear on here's the guardrails,

here's how we work. And it lets people move faster because they don't. have to do things in secret anymore. Now your whole software development team can be working in unison to accomplish things faster using the guardrails you set up. And if you don't do that, there's going to be a lot of shadow AI and a lot of people doing things, building projects. They don't tell you about. They could be helpful with the business. You just don't even know they're happening. Very true. Very true. So I want to move towards the real execution of AI, since that's one of the big thing

you are also managing a lot with the security, governance, and other areas. You build a sales assistant agent using copilot that consumes your company's knowledge base like a wreck, I would say. And then one of the funny thing that I also see, you use AI avatars on your YouTube channel.

And for someone who comes from cybersecurity, who are surprisingly hands-on with AI, what flip for you? You know, I don't know that I'd call it a flip, You know, as I mentioned, I'm a technologist from through and through. I've programmed in 27 languages in the past. I've done a lot of technology implementations of different stuff. I just love tech.

And so AI is the newest tech, so I want to know all about it, right? And wearing my CISO hat, I would say that hackers are already using AI to great effect against us faster and more effectively. Like there are now bots that write a phishing email. emails that are very compelling, more compelling than a human written. There are now many more hackers out there, script kitties, if you will, that are writing bad malware sometimes, but they're using AI now to write a little bit better code. Unfortunately, they're not coders, and so they don't know how to review the code written by AI to fix its problems because it is not perfect yet. And so a lot of the malware we're seeing show up in the market has a lot of

issues with it because it's being written by people who aren't coders now. But the truth is, if the hackers are going to use AI against us, we have to know and understand AI to use it in a defensive posture. And so for that reason, I spend a lot of time learning about all aspects of it. Prompt engineering. And you mentioned I'm doing some AI avatars on my YouTube channel. I certainly do that. Here at the house, I bought a raspberry pie with 16 gigs of memory and I'm loading different AI models onto it and plating with it. So I think it's important that all of us in IT-related roles know everything we can know about it because we're on the very verge of where AI is going.

You know, very shortly we're going to start seeing it show up inside of robotics, which are going to be another very much industry transformation for the market. And so I certainly don't want to be behind the curve trying to understand what an LLM is when that happens. Yeah, no, that's very true. true. And I'll share a story about it, but I want to go back to where you have your AI avatar. So you have a show called Cybersecurity Deciphered on YouTube, I believe. And this is where we saw your AI avatar. And it looked cool. My 16-year-old son thought it's really cool

and hip. So that's kudos to you that he in his age is liking it. And he's into, just since I'm talking about him, he's into. robotics and I take him to Caltech Pasadena here in Southern California and just the other day, last Saturday, I believe, we went to humanite and we saw what magical things are already happening in what you just mentioned, right? Robotics, mechatronics, humanites. And it's unbelievable what the potential is out there. So if you're not embracing this, we're going to leave behind way back that is very difficult to catch. And the people who know AI is the One, because AI is not the technology, right?

It's really the electricity, the platform, which will take this generation further. That's what I truly believe. And I see that. If these manufacturers like Tesla and Boston Dynamics and if these robotics manufacturers play their cards right, they will create an ecosystem instead of just creating robots, right? So in the same way we have computers and then people build applications for them, I think there's a real opportunity for there to be humanoid robotics that have general purpose AI in them. But imagine different skills.

And I think Claude is, Anthropic is implementing this concept right now before our eyes outside of robotics. They've got skills, right? And now you've got a flawed code, which is a software developer. And you have a legal skill for Claude that is unbelievable. And it's basically a paralegal. And they're adding more skills over time. I think there's going to be an opportunity in robotics for there to be a marketplace of skills for your robot that you can upload, just trains your robot on certain types of things that may not come out of the box intentionally so that there can be a marketplace for skills. And so the question is, where do we as service providers, resellers, ISVs, where do we play in that marketplace model that might,

evolve over the next couple of years. So there'll be the people who make the hardware of robotics, the people who make the general purpose AI that's inside the robotics and then the skills that have to be developed. And then there's an opportunity for all the maintenance of the physical hardware in the same way we used to roll trucks to work on service storage and networking. There's going to have to be a whole distribution network to distribute robotics, repair robotics. There's a lot of really cool opportunity coming, I think, over the next five years here in our market. Yeah, it's an ecosystem. And what excites me on robotics, I'm a disabled entrepreneur. I wear pretty archaic legacy braces. And that's one of the key reasons I moved to United States,

where I wanted to see a lot of growth. Now, there are bionic legs, people who do not have the legs, but people who have this muscle atrophy and have weakness in the muscles, there's not much is happening. And I'm constantly engaged in finding solutions. by myself or if some other company is doing it. And I see that as the future, you know, future for cancer care, future for synthetic data. A lot of avenues on AI if you keep a positive approach on it can be done. And you highlighted a lot of them. I want to move to a different topic here.

Micro Edge at 50. I'm 54. So only I was actually not even, yeah, I was born like four years old, right? So microage is 50 years old this year, one of the only 16 tech companies. Wow, when I read that through, it just takes a lot of time to sink it. And it hit globally alongside with Apple and Meta, who are like probably a little bit old. Well, meta is not as old, but most of the companies are. What has allowed Micro Age to survive and adapt where so many others haven't?

Yes. I would say reinvention is the key, right? We have reinvented ourselves multiple times through the years. If you don't reinvent on a regular basis, then you will become irrelevant at some point in time, right? And so for us specifically, we've had two completely different ages of our company. So the first 25 years, we actually became a global six and a half billion dollar distributor. We competed with Arrow and some of the early distributors in the market up until the late 90s. And we were a little bit of a reseller. But we had storefronts.

We had stores all over the world that you could go buy computers from. We sold one of the first Apple computers in a retail store. Steve Jobs came and negotiated a deal with us back when he was just starting Apple, and we sold the first few Apple computers out of our retail stores. And that was a great time. We had distribution centers all over the world where we stocked computers and would shipped them out for IBM and Compaq and a lot of different companies. And as tends to happen, like the market changes.

And in the late 90s, the market change for us. And companies who were selling through distribution on the way to resellers on the way to customers decided overnight to stop selling through distribution. And that represented billions of dollars in revenue for us. And so we ended up going bankrupt in the late 90s over changes in the market as the market just evolved. And the needs of the big vendors changed. They changed their distribution strategies. And we got caught in the middle of that. And so I think it was 99-ish, we weren't bankrupt.

And then we rebooted in 2001 as the new version of Micro Age as a reseller originally. And then we've now, we're 25 years into part two of the story. And since then, of course, they've grown into a service provider as well as a reseller. What makes us a little unique in the market besides our longevity is we sell so. much of IT from endpoint devices. We saw an awful lot of laptops and keyboards and mice and printers and all the endpoint things. But we also sell all the data center stuff, server storage networking software. We have practices in Microsoft and AI and cybersecurity. We have a big services organization. So we're kind of all things IT to our clients. And they love that because they can

form a partnership with us and they know that we're not going anywhere. We've been around a long time. Our reps tend to stick around for 15 plus years. So we don't change reps with our clients very often, which is something our clients enjoy. So it's been a lot of fun, but we've reinvented multiple times. We used to sell a lot more server, and eventually we decided to pivot to pivot to networking.

And over time, we decided to pivot more toward virtualizations. We took advantage of that. When cloud came around, we built a whole cloud practice and invested heavily in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 to invests, in cloud. We do at AWS. Now the AI is here. We have invested heavily in, in AI. We have a whole

AI practice we call Octum and a whole team of people who help our clients in that space. So, you know, my advice for resellers and partners like us, and I know many of them from my distribution days, is always be reinventing, always be thinking about what needs to change, what's new, where's the market going, how can you better leverage what's happening, what's happening in the market to provide solutions for your clients. And that's been our secret sales. And it's apparently worked for 50 years. So we're excited to keep on trucking. That's a great journey. And you just talked about Octum and you launched Octum.AI and a full data intelligence and AI practice. Now for a company known for infrastructure and cybersecurity,

that's a big bet, isn't it? And what were your clients telling you that made you take it or do it. You know what? I think what really triggered us to create Octum is data, more so than AI. The truth is AI is going to be as effective for you as the data you feed it. And so I know internally for us, I had a real concern that we had the wrong permissions set on all of our data and our files. And And if the, oh, just 15, 20 years of bad hygiene, people sharing files they shouldn't have or not removing permissions and someone changes a role. And so it turns out our clients have the same fear. And so we were having daily conversations with clients who were nervous about investing in

AI because they were unsure of their data hygiene. And so we started forming partnerships with some larger data providers like Veronis and Sierra and NetRicks. and some of them, certainly Microsoft, and started looking at how do we help them first get their data in order so that we can turn on copilot, if you're a Microsoft shop or Jim and I for Google, and not be as worried about copilot finding information you don't want it to find. The truth is your employees had access to this data all along.

They just probably didn't know about it, but copilot brings that to light. So it started with data, and then our clients are now really wanting to explore AI. They want to do it safely. And so we've built partly an AI practice to help people ideate AI. I think one of the most popular services we're offering right now is what we call an ideation workshop. We cater to SMB and mid-market more than super large enterprise. And so a lot of these mid-market companies are starting to want to leverage AI for optimization

of their business, but they have no idea where to start. So we go in and we'll have these workshops on site and help them figure out where's one place, you could automate one process and use automation to do it. And maybe automation doesn't necessarily mean AI. That could be Microsoft Power Automate or Power Platform or some other technology. But these ideation workshops help people get their hands around. What does it mean for me? And where can I start?

And it's been very effective. Great. And we are seeing the exact same thing. I think AI client come to us saying we want AI. and when we dig in, the real problem is their data scattered across eight systems with no single source of truth. And then the AI conversation starts with the data conversation. And guess what? What happens is you start looking into data.

And I had a saying from my past, from Ralph Pimble days, garbage in garbage out, right? And then we started showing we need to clean this. We need to organize that. We need to build a data platform. And that's kind of an eye-opener. So we started doing this AI value workshop, which is similar to what you just mentioned. I highly recommend leaders doing so. And on that note, I want to hear from you for leaders listening right now,

who are somewhere between I know I need to do something with AI, or I have no idea where to start. What's the first move you would recommend? I would say the first move is, pull out YouTube, and you need to be watching YouTube videos every night learning about it. Everything I know about AI pretty much came from YouTube. There is so much great tutorial content out there to explain to you. What's the difference in perplexity and co-pilot and Gemini?

And what's the difference in a large language model and a small language model? How would I take data in my own company and make it accessible through a large language model? What is rag development? What is an MCP server? you need to speak the language is the very first step. And so YouTube, it's free. Just go learn. After that, I would say before you implement something like Jim and I or co-pilot, think about your data.

Look at how you're going to discover your data, classify your data, and label it, and then understand permissioning of your files in your environment before you really invest too much in AI. And then lastly, I would say, if you're doing software development, it's okay to use something like Cobb code to write code, but you must still have humans to review the code. We are not yet self-sufficient and AI generated code. So there's nothing wrong with using it as a tool. Make sure your developers are looking at the code, validating it, and also inject some AI security into your software development lifecycle process. There's some great new startups out there. I was just to RSA last week.

There's a whole category of AI security coming up right now that is AI red team bots that will hack your code as you develop it and launch prompts against your agents your building to try to hack them in the same way a threat actor will later. But you want to do that during the software development process so that by the time you launch your agent or your process in a production, it's a little more hardened. And so investing in technology like that as you're playing with AI is a really good, good approach. That's beautifully said. And AI is just an employee. ClaudecoteCode is just an employee. And it's only limited to whatever has been researched today. And then there are badappers, like you said, who can do security injections through skills,

which is downloaded from third party or something like that. And that needs to be cautionally checked, monitored, measured, tested by humans. If not, we can get into something really terrible. With that, you talked about a lot of these different things. One thing I want to ask, I think I did ask you in the initial meeting as well. What's your superpower? So I would say I have two superpowers. One is I'm an aviator. I love aviation, and I know a ton about aviation. I have an airplane. I fly every weekend. That's one superpower. and it keeps me out of IT for a little bit on the weekends so I can put my brain power somewhere else. The mother superpower is probably what we talked about in the beginning of the call,

which is that I've worked at both a customer or reseller, a distributor, and a vendor, which gives me a very unique perspective on the channel, on the needs of each of those constituents. And as I build and design solutions, I'm able to think about them from the perspective of all the people who would be involved in them. And that's been a real superpower for me in my career, and I'm very grateful. Yeah, I love both of those. Those are 100% a superpower,

especially the complete picture of buying cycle from every angle is incredibly rare. People are generally, you know, biased on one side or the other. They are either geek or they are only thinking about solution, not the challenges, but you are well-rounded. And I really appreciate connecting with you on this channel. Let's mention the channel that you have

so that I don't butcher through my own accent what you're running and how people can find you. So you can find Micro Age on YouTube. I'll just search for MicroAge. We have a great channel there with a lot of great content. And then I have a personal channel called Cybersecurity Deciphered, D-E-C-Y, P-H-E-R-E-D. And I post regular content I do videos

called Cyberbytes. They're 10 minutes. I educate on lots of different cybersecurity topics just to help everyone learn, which is what I'm always trying to do myself. So as I learn things, I like to share what I'm learning with others. Great. So Alex, it's great connecting with you, more power to you, and we'll see you out there on YouTube and other channels, creating more great and amazing stuff. Thank you. Thanks for the invite day. I really appreciate it. listening to Think Yeah a podcast with Dave. Take one idea from this episode and turn it into action.