What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation.

This time out, Palmer spoke with TK Keanini, former VP of security architecture, CTO and distinguished engineer for Cisco. Keanini has more than 25 years of network and security experience, and a penchant for driving technical innovation. At Cisco, he was responsible for integrating security solutions with private and public cloud-based computing platforms.

Editor’s note: The following is a summary of what Palmer and Keanini discussed in their conversation, edited for length. To hear the full conversation, be sure to watch the video.

Matt Palmer: What big problems are enterprises, hyperscalers and service providers trying to solve? And what does that mean for us as technologists going forward? What cool stuff do we need to start inventing and working towards to help people solve the problems they're having today?

TK Keanini: There's a lot of attention right now — almost in the same way cloud native got attention a few years back — but you know everybody is trying to figure out where they fit in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) (genAI) universe. I just came from a conference where I have a pretty good feeling about what's available, open source and commercially. What kind of questions customers are asking about it, how they're using it, what they know, what they don't know. It's always exciting to be in a market when it's so young. The conferences are so small. Everybody's really passionate talking to each other in the hallways.

From a business side, in terms of the defenders, they're trying to figure out how to leverage it in their business. GenAI is about to touch every single application, every single thing we do, whether we like it or not. And to the degree that it's helpful it'll kind of earn its keep and evolve. If it's going to be critical to the business, frankly, that just means it's going to introduce a new attack surface and how people protect themselves. Some of the stuff is truly fundamental. You gotta sanitize the input you have to have strong authentication. All the stuff that are the security fundamentals, they all apply. But in addition to that, where these large language models are applied — which is core to generative AI and technology — you really have to be able to afford the stochasticity of that technology. If it's not stochastic, which we know in programming, if I give it the same input, a hundred times, I should get the same output. This is not the case with large language model (LLM). So you know where that might not be a bad thing, it might actually be exploratory. It might be novel, it might be something where I can afford that stochasticity and I want it to evolve that way.

The thing that I see people do is think about the most critical function of their business. And if they're thinking, where can I apply genAI? Please. Let's not do the critical stuff. Let's start with documentation and things like that. So I think everybody's on the journey at a different point. But as this technology becomes critical for businesses, in the same breath it's going to become the target.

Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends and colleagues, who also happen to be tech visionaries.