[Music] cyber defense and artificial intelligence commanded most of the buzz of techet cyber this year using AI for cyber security and securing AI tools and the data that feed them were the main categories of discussion Jonathan album is federal technology officer at service now he says there are two ways government agencies should think about cyber and AI start with how do we take advantage of these Technologies in the cyers space you know I think um a strong uh defense can be you know your best offense and so often that's about running a really secure infrastructure in the first place having a strong approach to it operations management and using these tools to help us understand what our environments really look like we can train AIS to help uh us understand when we're deviating from normal there's so much activity on these networks and if we are required as practitioners to investigate every single thing that looks anomalous uh we spend a lot of time chasing down maybe a uh um you know a false positive so when the AI knows what normal looks like and can be U very accurate in saying this isn't normal there's something going on we can train our limited resources right where it needs to be and when we continue to train these AI to understand what uh what good cyber defense looks like we can go from you know prevention into uh detection like I said but now how do we um respond when these incidents are happening you know an AI can go in there and uh make recommendations or maybe even through automation isolate a machine that's you know pinging a bad address or give us um you know the intelligence to take a group of machines offline or go into an email system to pull out Mal pull out um uh fishing emails or other kinds of kinds of things then you know maybe in a in an unfortunate situation we've lost data and we have to recover and you know an AI can can get us started down that process and ultimately you know the humans are involved in this you know human in the loop with all these things I think at this point but we want those humans to be as effective and and focused as possible I think those are the real positive things that I'm hearing and about ways that um you know agencies and the and the DOD and across government are thinking about using these systems what are you seeing agencies doing with the people who are freed up now from doing the mundane repetitive tasks that AI permits them to not have to do anymore where's that human bandwidth going well you know we for a long time we've said we want you know people focused on the high value work so I think you're asking what what's the real high value work when it comes to when it comes to cyber you know sometimes it's uh it's as simple as understanding what are all of these processes that are going on in this organiz oration how is this data being used where is it how does it flow across the organization what's what's the impact you know of these systems and um having a better view of the organization's been something that we've been after for a long time as as cios and leaders in it environments I think we could train those resources one to use AI sometimes to help us with that but that becomes a priority and a focus for an organization as opposed to I'm constantly in this response mode and I'm fighting another fire and I don't have time to get my head around what am I actually managing and what does it all mean I think that's a great use for people's time uh comprehensively as we free them up over these I'm going to take us back to one of the conversations that you and I had when you were still the CIO at the agriculture Department we talked about cyber and I asked you in that conversation could we get to a point ever where cyber security becomes a proactive exercise for the federal government instead of a reactive exercise and it sounds like you're saying now that I can help you and your peers across government to get there 100% if we're able to make that pivot you know we can be you know on the offense right when when these bad things are happening and there's bad things happening all the time there's thousands and thousands of attacks every hour or or attempts and if we're able to be on the offense you know have far fewer of those have have an impact I do think there's one other you know piece with this AI uh conversation that we can lose track of right we cannot let the techn ology outpace the humanity right so people have to stay in the loop you I mentioned human in the loop before we can't get to the point where you know uh agency leaders bring in these Technologies and say it's a Panacea we don't have to worry any longer and there's a there's a small fear that I have that we get to the point where that's happening and we start to um negate the the need for people in these roles and we're going to start Staffing other things we can't you know back off at this point on having the right people with the right training in these positions and you know at the same time the the AI is making decisions or it's mitigating a risk you know those um decisions have to be understandable by the people in that security office that has to have some transparency and that's part of the Cyber EO right transparency and observability and you know so much of that is uh you know can get lost in this conversation we got to come back to the person it always comes back to people and I think if we're doing those kinds of things you know AI becomes a a real benefit official capability we know the bad guys are using it they're writing very sophisticated fishing emails or thinking about ways to avoid the systems we have in place to prevent them the AI can help with that so we really have to be on top of our game and remain ever Vigilant even with these additional great tools