Ep.134 AI at the Helm Transforming SOC Operations with Chris Ichelson
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh LaPresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. As you can see here, we’re in the studio. We’ve got a special guest, Chris Ichelson, CEO at 360 SOC. Today we’re talking about AI at the helm and transforming SOC operations. Chris, welcome on, man. Yeah,
thank you, Josh. Appreciate it.
Dude, we got a lot of stuff to cover, and we would not be doing the world a good service if we didn’t talk about AI. So thankfully for everybody, this is about a meaningful episode on AI. So before we get into this and talk SOC and all this good stuff that you’re doing at 360,
just tell us about your story. How did you get into this field? Where did the career start? Windy path? Any cool juicy nuggets in there would be helpful.
Cool. Well, just to reiterate, I’m Chris Ichelson. I’m the CEO of 360 SOC. So my journey here at started nine years ago, kind of in an adverse way to probably the traditional cybersecurity startup. I actually started as a partner. I was a Telerus agent partner. My ultimate goal was to build an agency, build a practice, you know, build that annuity based income for myself, my family. And inevitably what it turned into was something that I never thought would happen. You know, I was out there prospecting. I was selling faxing as a service as a Telerus partner. You know, doing what you should be doing out there, making cold calls, making building relationships. And inevitably somebody asked me a question and they asked me a question of what DLP was and if I had a solution for it. And inevitably at the time, this is going back to 2015, I didn’t really know what DLP was, let alone, you know, I had no idea what the opportunity looked like. And that gentleman, Mr. Dave Williams at Ocean First Bank in New York, he said it pretty clearly that I had missed the largest sale of my life. And I pretty much said that would never happen again. And, you know, you fast forward nine years later, you know, we’ve built 360 SOC into an award winning MDR and SOC as a service provider. You know, and I think that, you know, we’ve brought that mentality as that we had during the agent side of the house, which was, you know, be for the customers, deliver for the customers and continually nurture those customers so that those relationships become extremely sticky.
And I think that’s really what we’ve done. And I think having near zero churn at our organization has helped kind of define that path too for our customers. But yeah, that’s me in a hole, you know, and kind of where I came from.
So walk us through, right? You’ve shifted, you’ve built up this company.
You mentioned obviously, you know, SOC and MDR, but elaborate on us a little bit here. What are all the things? Give us a little bit of a commercial for 360 and kind of how you’re going to market.
Yeah, so 360 SOC being an award winning cybersecurity company focusing on the Security Operations Center, managed detection and response, extended detection and response as a service and inevitably branching into those other services that a cybersecurity company should bring to the table. One being able to, you know, bridge professional services and consulting, you know, through the life cycle of the account, but also being able to build a portfolio that both we can leverage for our customers, but also our partners get a leverage. And inevitably inside that portfolio, it gives us the opportunity to be able to basically bridge in any technology, fill those gaps for customers and also do it in a non-traditional OPEX model where traditionally they would be buying those services, CAPEX.
And maybe to highlight a little bit, I think one of the secret sauce components here is that you give people and you give partners a lot of different wedges, right? So maybe people might hear, “Oh, okay, two things. I heard MDR and I hear SOC. That’s all he’s got.” But in the reality, you’ve got through that plethora of options based on what the customer’s needs are, you’ve got multiple OEMs in there, right? All the names that people have probably heard of, all the things that customers need. I think the beauty of what you’ve done is you can take that, you can manage it, you can deploy it.
We’re going to get into this, but you’re really helping people fill where the gaps are, right?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we built a platform that’s fully open. That open platform enables customers, whether they own the technology or whether they need to get it from us, to be able to bring those all into some centralized, painted glass. I like to bring up painted glass because in security, we’ve all been fighting this. SIM was supposed to be that. And SIM ended up not being it because there’s limitations to the integrations, right? That’s where SOAR came into play. And I think what we’ve done is we’ve taken the power of SOAR, the power of SIM, and we built a platform that will augment in any of those tech plus the additional tech. Now giving customers that central painted glass. I hear a lot of people like partner’s reference, all these different tools and portals, somehow you got to get it down to one, right? And I think that’s what we’re doing well. And then on top of it, if customers don’t have the technology, we have the ability to bridge in anything they want. Some customer might love CrowdStrike where the next customer loves Send in a one. Having both options plus another 10 or 11 options in that space gives them the opportunity to be able to bridge it in. And that’s across the board, whether it’s endpoint, firewalls, DLP, MFA, compliance, having options where customers get a pick, we get it then go back and do what we do great. You know, kind of leveraging that old school agent model from when we were an agent, being able to understand that brokering OEMs gets the end user customer the best deal. And if we can get them all to give us the same price, then the customer gets to pick what the best product for them is. And I think we’re doing a good job of that. And then having an open platform is a game changer because we’re not saying no, it’s cool, bring your tech. And if you don’t like that tech, when you’re done with it, we don’t want you to double pay, then we can take a look at evaluating and replacing it.
Right. So good, good stuff. Okay. Before we jump into this, this AI and SOC track, we go a little bit deeper into that. One final thing, lessons learned as you look back over the last 510 15 years, maybe something you learned the hard way, somebody had a great mentor, what do you got?
I would say that number one is listen to as much noise as you possibly can. Good, bad, you know, and I think in the early days, I looked at anyone trying to say anything as maybe they’re trying to point me in the right, right or wrong direction.
And I think that’s been one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from mentor wise, is that you’re trying to get a better customer. And I think that’s been one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from mentor wise. I just always remember sitting down at lunch with two agents, and they happen to be from an agency out of Northern California. And one of them came from masergy, or they both actually did. But the one gentleman in that scenario, when I had a conversation with them immediately, I went and I said, I need to be like that if I want to succeed, and I want to build this model, you know, all the rest of the dominoes that fall in line there building the service practice side of it. It without that, I still think we would have been successful as an organization that just compounded it, right? That just made it better. But yeah, being able to sit there, that gentleman’s name was Andrew Whitaker from fluent. And you know, when I sat across from Andrew, I was like, wow, this guy gets it. He’s extremely smart. And I and people believe what he’s, you know, preaching to them or delivering to them. And, and that was really the early on. Then you take it a little bit further, I think flying up here to Telaris to the HQ, I think, is the best way to get there.ise, getting to sit with Adam and Patrick inevitably Richard in the end, doing whiteboards up here when I first discovered security. I mean, we have some of those legacy pictures from being in the old conference room where we were drawn on those boards, right? Show them the whiteboards I did add a customer, after, you know, I presented a week before something like that. And I think that was probably one of the most valuable pieces, too, because, you know, it was everybody was looking at this with, you know, eyes wide open. But at the same time, like, well, are we jumping into like these announcements, you know, that’s a this Optiv, this Deloitte space that potentially might not make sense for the agent partner, let alone the providers. You fast forward nine years and
who would have thought? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a game changer. Definitely, definitely figured it out. Good.
All right.
Let’s go, let’s talk SOC operations. So we see AI productizing all over, you know, but security’s had these elements of AI and ML in some extent into things like anomaly detection and stuff like that.
Take from your perspective for a second, somebody that’s out there productizing, selling SOC services, how do you see that productizing? And I’ll call out one little thing, maybe use it as a nugget. When you came in and you did training for our team, you showed us some amazing tools, things like stairwell, right? Things that we’d never thought to correlate. So walk us through how you guys are kind of productizing and you see it productizing AI base.
So number one thing with the AI component for us is I think the most valuable piece of AI today. Those AI value changes because it’s going to be more developed. The use cases will be more readily available. If you notice, I think chat GPT just actually came out with an offensive million dollars for offensive submissions to be able to use the chat GPT API inside the SOC, right? And these are the things we’ve been doing, right? We saw an opportunity with AI to rehumanize everything. I want to make the data readable for you, but I also want to make it readable for a partner, an office manager, a CEO, somebody who has nothing to do with IT or security should be able to read the AI rewritten response and be able to determine what’s going on. And I think that’s really the power of the AI. And that’s kind of how we’re using it today. Tomorrow, in the future, I truly think that AI will do a significant amount of damage to the lower hanging fruit jobs. The entry level positions, AI does it faster, it does it more accurate. So then I think you’ll have a shift in where the human actually gets involved. I think the human will be AI first, but the human will inevitably be an auditor, kind of like what we’ve done with automation over the years and getting people to adapt to it. We’ve always audited the automation every single day. So you still get that touch and feel of a live human every day. So you never feel like something just went ahead and made a decision for you that nobody looked at. But in the future, there’s a lot of power, there’s a lot of data, and inevitably you’re going to have to find a balance there. And I think that’s where AI comes in play, at least for me and then on that roadmap. You talk to the next company, it’s going to be radically different.
They want to create a widget and a pony out of it.
Yeah, a pony, a beautiful pony by AI, built by AI.
Okay, so let’s talk about when you’re out there with customers.
Part of this is helping partners gleam in on what you’re seeing and hearing from the customers, what are their complaints? So maybe walk me through some key problems, perspectives of the customers that you’re hearing in this related to security and related to SOC that helps you guys shine.
You know, I actually just came up with this analogy right now. It’s kind of like customers going to buy SOC services is like a customer going to buy a boat that’s never bought a boat before. They buy cars all the time, right? But they never bought a boat. They don’t know anything about a boat, right? But they know that their family wants the boat, right? And I think that’s inevitably what SOC is kind of with the end user customers today. You know, you have customers that are churning from like an Arctic Wolf or Eastentire or another brand and inevitably they know what they want, right? I want better service or I want to know Jim when he calls because before it was not Jim, it’s a random person every time. They know exactly what they want. It’s probably like 10 to 15%. The rest of the audience, they don’t know. They’re like that guy going to buy the boat. You know, I really want a boat. I don’t know how big a boat I want. I don’t know how many people I’m going to have on my boat and I don’t know what color boat and I surely have no idea what I’m going to name my boat, right? But a boat would be nice. And I think that’s where the space is today. You know, so education is key with the customers, but if you’re over educating the customer, you’re actually losing the value. And the value you bring to the table because they don’t understand. So you have to keep it in real simple terms for them. And I think that’s where if I was a partner, I’m going out to sell security. That’s where I think the opportunity is really large. I don’t have to know anything about security. All I have to know is ask a couple questions. Those questions can be as simple as how do you do it today?
How long do you need to store this data? Do you have any, you know, requirements around it? And if you don’t do something today, what’s the impact to your business? None of that requires you to be technical, right? Oh, yeah, we want, you know, we know we need this. We need to do this because it drops our insurance coverage. It gives us a better rate or it gives us more coverage. Or it could be something where like we’re going to launch here coming up where we’ll have a warranty for our service as well. I think up to $500,000.
And it could be something simple as customers just want another little piece of mind. You know, so you might see that too. But you know, complaints out there in the field, I would say the biggest complaint I hear from customers is that they don’t know what people are talking about when they go to buy security. It’s really they they’re not as educated as we would expect them to be educated. The IT department has changed a lot in the last couple of years, especially since COVID. I mean, it’s way spread out. You have devices everywhere, you know, and I would say, you know, when you start talking about devices, that’s another thing that’s a big complaint on my side is you talk to every single customer. Nobody knows what’s in their environment. Well, I mean, you start to compound not knowing what’s in your environment by having lack of controls. You’re going to you’re going to inevitably have some risks there. Well, that could potentially kick you in the face, right? And it’s not good. So I think education, I think keeping it simple, going back to what we all learned when we were selling, you know, if we came from telecom or you came from, you know, backup or recovery or if you came from cloud, you know, every job role you had in the beginning and all the way through coaching people, you always said the kiss factor. I think it is so important in security to have the kiss factor. And I think that will open the opportunities. I think it builds the trust with the customers. They know you know, smart people, you know, bringing those people.
Yeah. And I am going to come back to the boat thing of a fun fact for you guys on that. But as you go back to this, as you think about the people that we’re talking to is related to SOC and AI and things like that, I just have to imagine, based on the conversations that we have, that this is the majority.
Most people are just trying to do this and manage this themselves. And so they may think of this idea of an outsource SOC as like, oh, that’s only something that huge companies need, right? And the reality is, no, I think we’ve proven that any size of company needs that. It’s a matter of equipment, you know, it’s a matter of devices on the network. It’s a matter of sensitivity of data. Your point, storage requirements, it’s all of those things. I don’t think it’s really a customer size requirement anymore, right?
I don’t believe it to be a customer size. Our smallest customer in the SOC is somewhere around 15 employees. Our largest has, I think, almost 85,000 now. So like, it’s all over the board. The one commonality of these, all these organizations that I find, is that revenue is tied to their cybersecurity program. The guy that’s 15 employees, he has a platform, he sells it to Wells Fargo. Whereas the, you know, organization that’s pushing 85,000 employees, they’re a large healthcare system on the East Coast, right? Both have a tie to that revenue. If they don’t do it, this guy who’s 15 employees loses his Wells Fargo contract. And the guy that’s, you know, massive, he becomes maybe not insurable or his rate becomes so astronomical, right? And you know, I also think that the use cases do shift there a little bit. This guy is solving an immediate need. This guy’s probably doing more augmenting. You know, he’s actually looking at human power that he’s probably not needing to hire versus this guy is doing it for, you know, because of the compliance. But the commonality is they both have that requirement.
Yeah, I think people, I want people to remember that. Like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter regardless of size. It’s good.
But to bring the boat thing home, because I would say I can relate with this boat guy. If you’re buying a boat, you got to do your homework. Because I don’t, you know, I could turn a 10 millimeter wrench back in the day, many jobs ago, just like anybody, I saw a big shiny, 24 foot, cutty cab boat, new stereo, had a great opportunity to pick it up. One small little blip in it was like, but it doesn’t go in reverse. And I was like, no big deal. Don’t have a truck. Don’t have a place to store it. But man, I want a boat. This seems amazing. Great life choice at the time. In fact, had it for a year, worked on it, fixed it, never could quite get it to go the way that it needed to go, ended up selling it, didn’t lose, made money, but turns out boats are a lot of work. So just like anything in technology, do your homework, or you’re going to end up with a 24 foot boat that you can’t move and take out that you have to sell, and then move on and invest that somewhere else.
A water lounge.
Yes.
Bail out another thousand, as they say.
Okay, let’s come back here. Let’s talk about case study and example. So give us an example, a customer that you walked into, tech stack before, business problem before, and then really how did that environment look after SOC and after all these things? And how did it help?
So I mean, it really obviously goes back to your question on size. Some customers will have a plethora of technology and some obviously have very little technology. I always like to use the use cases around the ones that come with, they have lots of portals they’ve got, all these different technologies. And inevitably they’re struggling with one, to manage those technologies internally, and in two, they have the compliance requirements that’s now requiring them to have things like SOC. So I always go back to this institution customer, a financial services customer that I worked with early on that I think they’re like a three or four billion dollar institution. And for them, it was never a problem getting technology. It was finding a way for them to get the technology in sequence and inevitably get it upstream to where somebody could then manage it. For us, we came in there and one thing is we were able to bridge the engineering as a service gap for them. We could augment some services to then give them the peace of mind. And then on top of that, the regulatory bodies came down and said that, you need to have SOC monitoring or you need to have log monitoring at the time or you need to manage it yourself.
That’s really even in the beginning of how we started. Customers coming to us and saying, look, we have this technology, we understand you can manage it, can you manage it and then can you centralize it for us? And I think that’s really the power there and I think we’ll continue to try to find those customers that do have a little bit uniqueness to their environment. I’ve never been very great with I just want to check a box.
Because when somebody says I just want to check a box or I need to check this box, I’m thinking about response then. So you mean to tell me if you’re just here to check this box, you probably don’t care if I escalate anything to you. And if I escalate it to you and you’re just here to check a box, you probably will never respond. Right? That’s always the scariest customer, the guy that has stuff going on, but he doesn’t respond. And I think the customers that have, they’ve invested in SOC, meaning like you start going way up market, right? Where you’re starting to run into customers that have SOC today. And I think that’s where our largest customer comes from in that use case. It was being able to go in there and say, look, we understand that you’ve built this. You’re on Splunk. You’ve invested the last seven years in building this out. You have a team, right? But the next level of what you’re trying to accomplish is going to be a big forklift. And that always was that conversation about bringing in that automation layer, right? Bringing in centralized pane of glass. And for us then would be bringing in the 360 SOC platform. And that’s where we then get, you know, in there being a big organization, that means that their network team manages their firewalls or security team only does certain aspects. You know, they have all this other element or complexity to how they do business. And I’d say for that big customer, you know, really the use case around them was being able to give them the central pane of glass so that the network team could be in the same platform, security teams in the same platform. And inevitably now they’re starting to decrease resources because they don’t need so much in between. Right? And so that’s being solved by, you know, leveraging the power of platform or automation or some elements of playbooks.
You know, that’s the same customer always using my demo examples that, you know, every time they get a CrowdStrike alert, they like an email to be sent out to their end user that basically says, hey, be careful what you’re clicking on, what you’re downloading. You know, you set off an alert. Here’s why you need to be a little bit more careful, but don’t send that more than once a day. That might irritate our user, right? You know, so things like that. And I think, you know, all of the best use cases that I can drum up always have something custom to them that we’re doing, whether it was, you know, bridging in a tech or whether it was some special integration that they couldn’t find anywhere else. Something like a Kato, right? That starts to a lot of people struggle to integrate with. And I think that’s also something that if I was a partner, I’d want to keep my ears and eyes open for because customers tell you everything, you know, and if you’re paying attention to what they’re saying and not trying to sell to them and you’re actually listening, they will tell you something in their environment that they can’t integrate with. And most of the customers that we brought to the table, that’s a lot of the use case. You know, I went and I tried Arctic Wolf. Well, they won’t integrate with this vendor. They want me to use this vendor. Okay. I just don’t have time to, you know, rip and replace 3000 endpoints. You know, I need something else. And I think, you know, that also becomes a good use case then for us to love it.
All right. Let’s talk.
There’s a barrage of marketing, right? I mean, it’s figure out what spam and what’s not spam. Some people like to pay attention to Wall Street Journal. Some people like to read Twitter feeds of what’s coming next. Some people are, you know, getting buried in subreddits. It’s wherever you get your information is what you’re getting information. So with the barrage of marketing that’s coming out there, you know, for the partners and everybody’s trying to pay attention to it. How would you advise them soak up this don’t soak up that and really how do they pay attention to what’s different?
I mean,
that’s a tough one because marketing has done a hell of a number on the cybersecurity space. It is made it extremely complex for one, you know, XDR, EDR, MDR, what’s the difference? One guy says he does this. The next guy’s sock is MDR and you know, all of a sudden if the partner’s that confused, I mean, we can only assume the customer’s that confused. And I think that marketing that’s that was their goal.
Create chaos so that people don’t really understand it so that as it moves quickly, we can eat pivot and address it. It has to be that way because or I shouldn’t say it has to be that way. It seems that way. It’s just not a universal standard.
Right. USB is a universal standard. Marketing creates opportunity, right? Or alleged opportunity in components like that, I guess.
Yeah, but like, you know, you’ve got one guy calls his antivirus, the next guy’s EDR and the next guy from that’s XDR. Yeah. Well, you know, if you ask my definition of XDR, it’s going to be totally different than the next guy’s version. But yet now they’re all starting to push towards my version of XDR because you start seeing them, you know, adding Sam or adding these third party or being more of an open platform.
You know, it’s a very noisy, you know, and I would say for if I was a partner, I would probably go find all the book for dummies that I could find on each one because it does a pretty good job, whether it’s XDRs for dummies or whether it’s EDR, antivirus. And you can actually find them online. The full download, I think it’s about 400 pages.
And that full dump of it actually, I think, is probably a very good way to go try to fish through, you know, what is this stuff really doing? And how much of it was driven by marketing just to be able to make their pink pony now be a purple pony. Right. And I think that’s that’s a lot of my biggest frustration to being on the selling side is, you know, you have a customer saying, well, you know, I need MDR. Okay. Well, is that MDR where you need SIM or is it MDR where you just want somebody to manage your end point? Oh, no, no, I need my log. I need firewall logs. Okay. All right. So that’s more SOC in today’s world, right? This is how complex it gets. But yet you go to, I think, 80 article, if they still call it MDR, whereas we actually branch our programs in MDR and SOC, okay. And then XDR in between where MDR is the end point solution. XDR is goes against Huntress, right? We’re going to add it. We’re going to add a host based agent there. We’re going to add extended, extended detection and extended remediation. We’re going to backhaul it to a data lake and we’ll give you SIM-like. Whereas then SOC as a service is, it’s the whole inch a lot. You get SIM, you get, you know, NDR, UEBA, EDR agents, stairwell, you know, our XDR as a service does include stairwell too, you know, and to address stairwell. You know, this is where I think that if I was also a partner, another thing I would be focused on is trying to understand what security technologies do. Okay. So what do they do? I’m not talking about like antivirus does this. I’m saying what do they actually do when it comes to detection? Because if you look at CrowdStrike or you look at Sentinel-1 or Microsoft Defender, where you look at your firewall, you look at all these technologies you put, they’re only 80% good. Okay. So that’s where 20% of what’s crossing your environment is unknown. You know, it either hasn’t been seen, you know, it’s, it’s an unknown file or hash, or it’s just passed through because there’s nothing that seems malicious in the behavior of what’s going on. So if you look at it from that aspect, that’s the power of like a stairwell. Stairwell being, you know, non-biased to everything that touches that endpoint now gives you the visibility to that extra 20%. So I always say to the customers, if with the combination of R-SOC, your antivirus or EDR that you have, whatever brand that is, plus adding in a stairwell, now you’re starting to take that 80% and maybe you’re at 90, 92, 93.
I would love to be in that percentage.
And I think that’s where the powerful piece is. And I think if you can explain to the customers that way too, like, look, you got all this tech, great. You did a really good job. We still got to go address what those technologies don’t detect. Some of that’s human. Some of that’s some additional pieces of software.
So I guess you’ve answered that. You’ve kind of talked about the advice thing. And I think for partners, if they haven’t seen, I think what’s great to see this is as you bring up, you ask some of these questions about SOC and the needs for some of these services, pay attention to some of the cool things on these demos that happened and really get to see, I think in combination with what you’re recommending, you know, read this, research this, but really see these things in action. I think it’s mind blowing to see. And then that really helps the partners and helps anybody articulate how the value is what it is in those conversations. And then the way that the universe works, I promise you, when you go and do that once, you’re going to find another opportunity or another customer that goes, Oh my gosh, yeah, I need that exact thing. And you’re going, Oh, it’s just what I learned about perfect timing.
So I love that.
All right.
We got to talk about the future. So really easy. We’re just going to predict the future on AI for just a second. So we’ve got the never ending talent shortage. We’ve got a barrage of AI. We’ve got investment. You got the sequoias, you’ve got all the private equity dumping money. We did a previous episode on the money coming out of Y Combinator dumping into AI. So obviously money flowing, marketing flowing, development flowing, talent shortage. So you think about that. You think about customers trying to build their own SOC. You know, we’ve done episodes on that. Where do you see SOC ops going in the next few years? And are there any innovations in that that you’re most looking forward to?
I mean, I think that most more will shift towards automating most of the SOC. I mean, if you compound that not only is there the resource shortage is probably the best way I like to put it is the resource shortage, isn’t that there’s not jobs and there’s not talent. It’s just the skilled talent that you need that can honestly do a better job than like an AI answer can give you. It takes a while to train it. Either I need a facility to do it in or you’re going to have to go out market. So I think that’s the opportunity. I think people thought SOAR, security orchestration automation response. I think people thought that was going to be the game changer, right? That was going to automate my SOC. And I think if you looked at when Mandiant bought respond, I think that they even thought that potentially too, that like we can do this, we can go fully automated SOC.
Yes and no. The yes pieces, is it possible? Yes. The no pieces that you still need to write responses.
Can AI write those responses better? If you look at the rehumanization of what I’ve heard in every single alert for the customers,
there’s a story to be told there. It’s close. Where I think that the AI investment in the space comes from is actually going to be in that conclusion piece. And you’ve seen like, I saw Adam Vincent just launched Bricklayer.
We helped him work on some of the early stage of that with just trying to write the report component, which is inevitably the conclusion of what happened in the incident or alert. I think you’re going to see more like that coming down to the play where people are going to have a plugin that’s going to be an AI plugin that’s going to facilitate a step. It might not be the full path. Someday it will be the full path. Unevitably you’ll drop it down to report. Somebody’s going to look at it and they’re going to be able to use rationalization to say, look, you know, administrator got locked out of their account 475 times a day. We got 475 of those alerts. Okay. Obviously there’s like a configuration problem or, you know, somebody’s trying to, you know, brute force administrator account, or you’re trying to brute force yourself. One could, one could be, but you know, I think you’re going to find that the AI piece, it’s really just going to be around, like I mentioned, taking that component. They’re going to invest in trying to get the answer right. Will they get the answer right? It’s going to be a question because the data sets are not similar. So one lookup and just, I’m just going to use chat GPT for an example, because that’s one of our biggest power sources in our rehumanization. And when you look at it from the chat GPT standpoint, if I send it three times, I get three different answers.
So somebody has to solve that, the consistency element too, in order to make it work. I think if you fast forward five years though, whether they’re going to have this solved, you know, you inevitably, you’re going to go, be able to go to the internet. You’re going to be able to buy a fully automated SOC that probably talks to you in live chats in a fully automated way.
Hopefully that’s 360 SOC doing that. You know what I mean? If the path goes that way, but you know, it’s interesting and how people use AI is all over the board. Like, you know, I found a niche way to be able to get customers to drink that koolie, you know, give them another way to read the alerts quicker. Right? The next guy is going to do it totally different. He’ll say, Chris is crazy doing it that he’s wasting, you know, 92 cents for every lookup. You know, they’re not even reading it. I’m going to do it this way. And then like you said, with the private equity back companies, all the folks that are going through the series right now, whether it’s series A or B, I haven’t seen any series C in the AI space, or they’re still doing angel investors. They’re all seem to be focused heavily on the conclusion, which inevitably is producing a report in the end. Right. And then, you know, where I look at it is if that report is too long, you also can’t report on the report. Now you’re bringing back a manual process into a fully automated world.
Yeah, keep it simple. You know, so back to your keep it simple model. I love it. And I’m with you too, on the the AI and the vertical is the idea of it has to get verticalized, right? Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it takes a lot of GPUs. Yes, it takes a lot of resources to train a model. But I see a lot of that specialization and verticalization happening and training a model, right? Maybe it’s specific to cloud specific to security, maybe it’s specific to problems that customers and manufacturing face. But if I can if I can layer in and bolt in and or integrate my AI model to a vertical that understands me so that I can ask questions and it understands this uniqueness that every business feels like they have you brought up custom custom custom. It’s true. Everybody’s is slightly different. There’s commonalities that people have problems. People have pain points, staffing shortages, whatever it is. But at the end of the day, if I if I can bolt that in, I’m fully in that model of, you know, verticalization and specialization will win out. It’s too hard, too many different businesses to generalize it up. It’s just fun to use. And you can get some quick answers out of it. Sure.
My man, that wraps us up. I really appreciate you coming into the studio today. A lot of great stuff. Fun AI topics.
Thank you for having me, Josh. Appreciate it, man.
Okay, everybody, just make sure you’re going to Apple Music. You’re going to Spotify. You’re subscribing. You’re getting these drops every Wednesday. So you don’t miss a beat on that. So until next time, AI at the helm, transforming sock Chris Ichelson 360. I’m your host, Josh Lopresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Next Level BizTech.