#195: Purdue's Enterprise AI Challenge + Montana's State-Wide Cyber Hub [EDUCAUSE 2024]

Joe Toste: Welcome to The Public Sector Show by TechTables. Super excited to have you all here today. Because my voice, I'm trying to save it for the five podcasts I have to do today. After yelling on the floor in the afternoon, I'm going to have you introduce yourself. So I'm not shooting my voice the whole time.

Joe Toste: Man, you'll kick off with you title where you're from and something interesting about you. 

Mani Nagothu: My name is Mani Keerthi Nagothu. I'm a field CISO at SentinelOne. [00:01:00] As part of my role at Sensen One, I interact with product and engineering teams. And from last one and a half year, I've been focusing on AI and data.

Mani Nagothu: And specifically, I focus on cyber incident response, risk management, as well as cyber security strategy. And yeah, I'm based out of Dallas, and this is my first time at Educause 2024. And I'm really excited to be part of it. Interesting about me I travel a lot.

Joe Toste: Favorite place you've traveled to?

Mani Nagothu: I really liked my trip to Bolivia. 

Joe Toste: Okay. 

Mani Nagothu: Yeah, it was very interesting, yeah. 

Zach Rossmiller: That's awesome. Zach? Hi I'm Zach Rossmiller. I'm the Chief Information Officer at the University of Montana. I've been at for about 15 years now. A little seasoned veteran, been CIO for a little over four years now.

Zach Rossmiller: I grew up, I guess the interesting thing about me is I grew up in a really small town north central of Dutton called Dutton, Montana. It's a small farming community, like less than 300 people. You learn to drive a tractor before you can ride a bike kind of thing. So that's what [00:02:00] I have. And where'd you learn how to play golf?

Zach Rossmiller: Self taught YouTube. 

Joe Toste: And probably not the best. Every conference that I've seen Zach at, he is golfing. Someday he's golfing. We'll cut that out. , . Oh, we can keep that in. 

Timothy Winders: Tim, I like it. So I'm Tim Winders. I'm the assistant Vice President for Information Technology, chief Technology Officer, and Deputy CIO for the Purdue University system.

Timothy Winders: I have been with the Purdue system for nine years now. And interesting thing about me you can't tell. I found the Fountain of Youth as evidenced by my more than 35 years in information technology. I don't know if I believe that. 35 years? 35 years. More than that. More than that. I start, I started in IT back in, say, 86.

Timothy Winders: I was born in 88. 

Joe Toste: Birthday's 

Timothy Winders: next month. Gotcha. See, I told you. Fountain 

Joe Toste: of Youth. You did find it. That's incredible. Tim, as universities like Purdue are exploring integrating generative A. I. Into higher ed. What strategic [00:03:00] approaches do you see as crucial for addressing the challenges of access, workforce training and student credentialing? 

Timothy Winders: it's a really tough space because Gen A. I exploded just recently. And so as the industry we're trying to react to this to access to the technology All right. Everybody's heard of chat GPT, but there are dozens of new AI platforms and apps that are rolling out every day. And so the space just grows incredibly.

Timothy Winders: My concern is really on the access side because while everybody has access to free platforms and technologies in order to take advantage of the advanced features. You're going to have to pay a subscription for that to get the pro license or whatever somebody calls it. And this comes in and impacts directly the equity that we have around who has access to these technologies or not.

Timothy Winders: In higher education historically we have just, put in air quotes, [00:04:00] provided access to tools and platforms for students to use. But with GNAI, that Enterprise or professional model is it blows the the paradigm out of the water in how we've been able to afford that in the past because Gen AI does not scale.

Timothy Winders: If I've got 100, 000 users using the platform the company providing access to the technology has to provide that for 100, 000 users, right? It doesn't scale one to ones. It scales one to one. It doesn't scale exponentially like you can if I've got 100, 000 users accessing Microsoft Office, for example, right?

Timothy Winders: The amount of bandwidth that we're needed for that is, is much smaller than if I've got 100, 000 people using ChatGPT. And so it gets very expensive very quickly. And we as institutions have to decide where are we going to spend our millions of dollars to support these. And then if we're not providing equitable access, we end up with students that have or have not.

Timothy Winders: So it's a [00:05:00] very complicated question that, all of the universities are grappling with across the board right now. It's related to, to access for that. Do you think there 

Joe Toste: is, because I, actually every CIO, across the board. You'd be higher ed, everyone's we cannot pay for the number of licenses.

Joe Toste: Do you have a solution to that or something creative? Is it just going to be? The stick approach. It's bad, but 

Timothy Winders: yeah. Yeah. So we're pointing users, whether they are our faculty and staff or students towards the free enterprise licenses that we already have, because it's as universities, we've got access to Microsoft and they provide, co pilot for the web as an enterprise license for us as part of what we have with our agreement, we point people there as the first course of action.

Timothy Winders: And then we provide information around what tools you can use and the limitations around those because, with most free versions of applications, they're going to use your data to retrain the [00:06:00] models and improve those models. And so we don't want users putting their private information, the university information, P.

Timothy Winders: I. Into these free models. Because it just creates data leaks that are out there. So pointing people towards, you're using some of the tools that we have and then we have developed access to some open source LLMs that we have available. There are just a number of them that are out there.

Timothy Winders: And connect those for research purposes to our, on campus high performance computing platforms. Last 

Joe Toste: follow up, because I'm really curious about this topic. How do you handle with the shadow AI piece of it, right? Used to be shadow IT, and now it's like everyone, there was some staff from Microsoft that was like Oh, we know that like X number of public sector email domains are using the, using chat GPT outside 

Timothy Winders: of the, like, how do you think about that?

Timothy Winders: We don't have a problem with shadow it and higher education right now. Not at all. So let's just do it. Doesn't that? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It is a real problem because again, anybody can sign up [00:07:00] for access to these different platforms. So you would have to do it through training and awareness.

Timothy Winders: Constant vigilance, related to what platform people can and should be using. And then again, guiding them towards what we have, we have a more difficult problem because we're a high research university. With individual departments that want to purchase and do purchase their own GPU computers and show up and say, All right, I've got this, four are you server that's got your eight GPUs in here?

Timothy Winders: Stick in your data center somewhere. That's harder for us to handle and have to get in front of that working with departments across the board to understand what are your needs? What can we provide centrally? What we provide through our high performance computing environments. Versus what do they need to be able to tear down, build up and experiment on, be able to blow these servers up and then put those in a space that provides the necessary power and cooling for those machines that they want to build and provide your research access to their students [00:08:00] and and their research labs.

Timothy Winders: Okay, 

Joe Toste: that's fantastic. That's a great foundation. Zach, I want to build on Tim's answers. About the strategic approaches to A. I. Integration. So the University of Montana hosted the A. I. Symposium with over 300 attendees to explore A. I. In higher ed. You were there, right? A little bit right from your perspective.

Joe Toste: What strategies have proven effective in addressing the challenges and leveraging opportunities related to A. I. Access workforce training and student credentialing. 

Zach Rossmiller: I think the hardest thing is balancing that kind of what you mentioned, Tim, but the the balance between data security and privacy and not stifling innovation and letting people go out and do it.

Zach Rossmiller: So setting up those guardrails to let them let people dabble in generative AI and play around with it, but then also making sure that they're doing it safely, ethically and all that. We've taken the approach at where we're dipping our toes in multiple different areas.

Zach Rossmiller: So like marketing [00:09:00] communications we've deployed a few tools that kind of give us more advanced analytics on our web, seeing how people call around the web. And then more in it, we've been using generative AI. We've created a couple of custom GPTs that we fed a bunch of our own data.

Zach Rossmiller: To just see can we create our own chatbot or FAQ and most recently we created a thing for our we have a student body government and we took all their constitution, their bylaws, all that, and dumped it into one single thing and made it an FAQ for the new senators who can come in and query can I do this?

Zach Rossmiller: Does this violate this? And we've have, it's still a work in progress cause there's a bit you Some hallucinations here and there, but we're working through that. But on the workforce front, though, this is what has been awesome to do is we're leveraging generative AI to really try and people throw this buzzword out like operational efficiencies and we can recognize it.

Zach Rossmiller: And so we've taken the approach of look, we're not eliminating. [00:10:00] It doesn't eliminate jobs right now. What we're looking at and what we're focused on is how can we help improve writing, communication. And just like getting rid of those silly tasks that take forever. And so we've taken things like role descriptions and writing out email communications and things like that, that sometimes can take a couple hours.

Zach Rossmiller: Now we've shrunk that down into 20 minutes with several different prompts and. That's helped more on the management and leadership style on that side of like, all right, now they can spend less time digging through all that. Now they can focus on helping and supporting their staff.

Joe Toste: How are you handling, how is handling the like recording of meetings? Are you allowed to do that, to grab transcripts? 

Zach Rossmiller: What's the dynamic there? So right now we're piloting a few different products like Otter and Microsoft Teams Premium and Copilot and trying to, we're experimenting with how that works and in IT we've been doing that with Microsoft Teams where [00:11:00] we will set up a meeting with an actual structured agenda and then when we do the recordings it actually spits out the transcript and it actually highlights, who, who said what and where and gives us a good breakdown.

Zach Rossmiller: It allows us to not take as much notes, if you will, but it is interesting too, because then I'll take that trans the transcript and summarize it through generative AI. And I'm like, wow, so maybe that meeting could have been done in an email. 

Joe Toste: Okay, I love this is one of my favorite use cases right now, because we talked about this because we met on zoom and then afterwards.

Joe Toste: And so I use an app called fellow and it will process the transcript. And then my assistant Riley, thanks, Riley goes in, gets a notification. Slack goes in, grabs the transcript, uses the pre made prompts, runs it in Claude, and then we in notion, we have a database of every meeting, every podcast, and then she will then Slack me the notion doc.

Joe Toste: And it has exactly what I need, right? [00:12:00] The most succinct summary key takeaways. I'm thinking to this should have been an email. We talked a long time and then I'm going through this and what I love is then being able to connect it's basically a private LLM and I'm like, Hey, so Timothy's at Purdue and he really cares about gen AI.

Joe Toste: What other CIOs care about this type of topic? And then it will comb through my entire and I label it to these specific databases and it will go through the databases I have and go, Hey, you know what? This person talked about this person talked about this person says, don't ever talk about Gen AI with them too much.

Joe Toste: They're bored. And I'm like, Oh, great. I will never talk to that CIO about that. And so like that finding themes, insights, like speeding up those tasks, love those use cases so much. Yeah, it's game changer. You could tell I'm excited. I'm like, Oh, I love it. Those are, those 

Timothy Winders: are fantastic use cases. I love those.

Joe Toste: Yeah. So Manny, let's shift to cybersecurity. So you've spoken about AI, particularly LLMs [00:13:00] impacting both threat actors and defenders in the context of higher ed where institutions often have to balance access to data protection. How do you see this kind of AI versus AI scenario playing out? 

Mani Nagothu: Yeah.

Mani Nagothu: So when we talk about education sector, right? So it's usually social engineering or some kind of malware attack on the university or the college. And when we speak about this we definitely have to see like what's going on the threat actor side. Because according to National Cyber Security Center of UK threat actors are using AI.

Mani Nagothu: So particularly LLMs to improve their reconnaissance process, to improve their social engineering techniques. And in the recent news, you have seen a lot of talk about DSpace too, right? There are like various areas where thread actors are trying to use LLMs. And there are like other research reports which also talk about helping out with language translation.

Mani Nagothu: When we talk about language translation, it's just not English. We're talking about other languages in the world too, right? LLMs is helping with that as well. You basically [00:14:00] refine the payloads out there. And on that side there are like varied attacks that you, that threat actors are exploring as well.

Mani Nagothu: Prompt injection attacks, data poisoning, AI business email compromise, or AI powered malware. And all of them doing in the whole kill chain process, like starting with reconnaissance and then execution. As per this National Cyber Security Center report so definitely it's helping out novice threat actors.

Mani Nagothu: It's giving them some level of upskill because earlier they needed knowledge about a particular malware to write a code or write anything else related to a particular ransomware family. Now they have it all on their hands, writing about it. But if we flip the script to defender side, there's a lot of progress going on cyber defender side as well, how AI can be leveraged by security teams.

Mani Nagothu: So starting with the SOC because security operations team always burdened with these challenges of like skill shortage, SOC burnout, trying to look up like tons of alerts coming through their console, [00:15:00] trying to find out if this alert is an incident or not. So helping them out in those respects. And Central AI which is basically based on NLMs as well, helping out SOC analysts.

Mani Nagothu: Trying to understand okay, so can I can I ask a question to the, NLM, Purple AIs, basically am I being am I threat, or do I have a threat actor Swing 12 in my environment? And then it spits out a threat summary, detailing out all the endpoints related to that.

Mani Nagothu: Leveraging that, and understanding that you have to defenders can maximize their potential, exploiting. The expertise that comes with A. I. Because that gives you the leverage and also handling the volume because you have volume of alerts coming into your console and always talk have this problem of backlog of threat detection.

Mani Nagothu: So addressing that and then time, right? It's also necessary that when you're in cyber incident response, you have to respond timely. So it's like understanding like where sock and use A. I. To the maximum. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, I really like [00:16:00] in Arizona when we had that event. There's a lot of talk about upscaling the junior analysts with AI, which I think is super smart.

Joe Toste: On a consumer side, I love what you said about Gen AI for the threat actors I grew up in the era I was selling stuff on Craigslist all the time, right? I'm sure you, maybe Craigslist, come on, yeah. And at the time it would be like, these are so bad I was just the kid that was like, this person's not in Santa Barbara you're not even in this country.

Joe Toste: Now I'm getting phishing emails, I'm like, this is really good this is really, man. And I'm the one looking at this and I'm like, if I'm thinking, if I'm my wife, my friends, they're going to be clicking on stuff. I'm like, I saw the cost of the town. I'm like, do not think just because Joe at tech tables is sending you an email that this is really me.

Joe Toste: And but I liked that you you got, you brought that up. It's really good. Zach is dovetails really well with cyber Montana which serves as a state hub for cyber workforce education, providing cybersecurity opportunities, training and development across Montana. Tell us more about Cyber Montana and how these [00:17:00] initiatives are enhancing cybersecurity awareness statewide.

Zach Rossmiller: Cyber Montana was an initiative that we launched a few years ago at the University of Montana to focus on how do we educate and train the workforce across the state of Montana on cybersecurity and so we have, we've been tackling in different buckets. One is around upskilling current IT folks making sure that they're staying current with the latest and greatest trends.

Zach Rossmiller: Performing security and awareness trainings. And so we go into a business and we provide trainings and everything to their staff to make sure they don't fall for, the, hey, can you go get me a gift card attack. And then third, we've hosted tabletop exercises.

Zach Rossmiller: And so we've done one with the energy department. So we brought in the large energy business company in Montana and a lot of co ops. And we actually ran through an exercise of what would happen if, and that's been really successful and great. And the other piece that we've built out is a security operations center [00:18:00] where we bring in students through our two year program at Missoula College.

Zach Rossmiller: That's a two year cybersecurity program. We also have a four year cybersecurity bachelor's degree program through our College of Business now. So what we're working towards is bringing in these students, have them work in our help desk in IT. For about a year, and then we pivot them into the sock where they can get real life hands on experience.

Zach Rossmiller: So we have tools like Sentinel one, which purple AI I'm super thrilled with and excited for. And we get the students really hands on, get them trained up, get them real life experience of understanding what that looks like. And I call it experience. It's experiential learning experience for them because they're getting their hands The degree, the academic, the book smarts, but then they're also getting their hands dirty with actual work with the idea that then we can let them graduate.

Zach Rossmiller: And, as our friend, Kevin Gilbertson said in his [00:19:00] podcast with you, sometimes cybersecurity or entry level jobs are still requiring multiple years of experience. And so fresh graduates. Don't have that experience. So when we graduate them, they'll have multiple years of experience working on a very large enterprise of cyber security to get them placed at maybe the state or something.

Zach Rossmiller: And we've had examples to where just recently I had a cyber security position where this person was a student. We hired them as a full time cyber security analyst. They worked for us for two years and now they are working at a very large corporation doing cyber security. And just in our idea of that pipeline model of starting young with our students and moving them into a career and letting them launch with the idea again, going back to Kevin's podcast about having an alum, like now we have that alum who can very speak highly of what our sock has done for them, how it helped prepare them for their career.

Zach Rossmiller: With the idea that, you know, [00:20:00] maybe in a few 20 years when they want to settle down and come back to campus to work for us again great. The Cyber Montana thing has been very actually it's very rewarding because it's like my side gig with other folks across but it's just one of those things where, we go in, sit down with the business and talk to them about what happens if this happens?

Zach Rossmiller: And they're like I don't know. I don't even know who I would call. Then also helping them understand alright, if your clerical staff fell for a phishing attack here's how we could help. And it's just helped creating a lot of awareness across the state, because we're a rural state, and a lot of people don't understand that, and now with AI, how sophisticated these attacks are gonna get.

Zach Rossmiller: And just thinking in the back of my mind with you, Joe, it's you have. How many podcasts out now with your voice? I could go in and make a deepfake of you pretty dang quickly. So easy. It's so damn 

Joe Toste: easy. Don't do that. 

Zach Rossmiller: And I can go maybe tell your wife, Hey, actually, you should have Joe go buy Zach [00:21:00] new golf clubs.

Zach Rossmiller: He really deserves it. 

Joe Toste: There's that's got babe. Don't do that. Okay. Okay. This is really good. It's so funny. Okay So first off for some context of the audience who he's talking about is Kevin Gilverson Who is the CIO for the state of Montana and Kevin is absolutely fantastic. He's been on podcast twice and Episode 81 will link of the show notes is where we specifically talked about the workforce of the future Growing your public sector alumni you summarized it perfectly As far as the whole deep faking me, don't do this at home now, even more now when people say, Hey Timothy said this, Joe said this, it actually really might not be true.

Joe Toste: And so you're like, I love this quote, I think it's from Ronald Reagan. It was like trust, but verify, right? Like very apropos to to like everything. And so that's how he was like. I trust you, but let me just verify that what you said is actually true. [00:22:00] Especially in today's context where my voice is on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, every transcript is online.

Joe Toste: You could say, Joe said that you could go to Canva right now and create a graph. You can create an iPhone message. Joe texted me this. I'm like, I've never seen that in my life. But you could do it. Don't do that at home. Yeah, it's a very crazy world. And my wife, babe, if you get a request for golf clubs, since you know I don't golf, please don't buy golf clubs for Zach, maybe send him a gift card.

Joe Toste: So Tim, Purdue has a strong reputation for innovation, especially in the STEM fields. How are you integrating AI and cyber security concepts across the school and not just in computer science? 

Timothy Winders: Oh, yeah, Purdue is big engineering school. And so one of the things that we did was create the Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence.

Timothy Winders: Or as we call IPI. And this is a research institute that, we're looking at how to incorporate artificial intelligence into the [00:23:00] everyday world, right? The physical objects that we use. Not just talking about Gen AI but talking about, how we can improve what we're doing across the board.

Timothy Winders: So we've incorporated this into, agriculture where we now have We're at a conference, we're at a conference where we now have robots that will go out and inspect the the cornfields to look for rot or insects or actually inspect the the produce that's out there in the field, right?

Timothy Winders: We've got robots that can, start to pick tomatoes and go through a vine and actually pick the right tomatoes that leave the green tomatoes behind. And so how can we make our world enhanced with using artificial intelligence? So this covers all of our fields, right? We've heard about a lot of the things that are happening in medicine.

Timothy Winders: You'll obviously be doing some stuff with Gen AI and in writing and how we think about how we think about that. But, in fields, even in computer science, we say, Ooh, this is hard. In creating new, for example physical safety [00:24:00] systems, gunshot detections that have artificial intelligence built into the capabilities where now we can, recognize, gunshots in a very inexpensive way with, very in it like Raspberry Pi devices.

Timothy Winders: We can you put sensors around an entire building you can cover something like this conference center. We're a few hundred dollars Which is absolutely amazing when you think about the millions of dollars that your gunshot detections, cost just a few years ago so so we have the last I counted 25 different disciplines that were doing some sort of AI research across Purdue using our high performance computers.

Timothy Winders: And they cover all of our areas in colleges. It's really exciting things that are happening. 

Joe Toste: I love that. That's, no, that's a lot of fun. I also want to tour at some point when I visit you guys. Oh, yeah, it's great area. Yeah, I'd love to. I'd love to show you our data centers.

Joe Toste: I love that. I love that. Manny, as AI reshapes the cybersecurity landscape, you've touched a lot on this. But what essential skills should universities prioritize for their students as they're [00:25:00] looking to the future? 

Mani Nagothu: Sure. I think I really like what Jack mentioned about getting that experience and then going into the market like with experienced professionals.

Mani Nagothu: I think you do it better. I, I think having those industry interactions like, folks working in cyber security, having those connections and adjusting your curriculum according to the tech changes in the market would definitely help. And also bringing awareness about different careers in cyber security because Cybersecurity is just not security operations.

Mani Nagothu: You have GRC, you have network security, application security. I think that awareness is also key so that, students are aware of these career paths that they can take. And definitely, yeah, having those interactions. And Sentinel 1 is a strategic partner with women in cybersecurity. So as part of that, we do have continuous webinars over the year that we do with them.

Mani Nagothu: And we basically share our experiences working in AI or cybersecurity. For example I think a few weeks back our women from Sentinel 1 basically did a [00:26:00] webinar with women in cybersecurity talking about our experiences of working at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. It gives an awareness to students as to what are the career paths and what can be done.

Mani Nagothu: And, so yeah, so that's, that, that would be it. 

Joe Toste: Love it. Tim. So as we close out right now I love this conversation. Who would you recommend? Who should join the conversation next on the podcast? Oh, wow. Put me on the spot. 

Timothy Winders: You did. You did. You did. Everybody. I'm gonna I'm gonna pass. I don't know. I think you could talk to you.

Timothy Winders: Talk to anybody today if you want to talk about a I and they're gonna have some opinion on that. You obviously, I, you work closely to represent, people in the Big Ten but from community colleges to state colleges to private institutions in the higher education space, we're all looking at higher ed at AI and what does it mean for our business practices, for instructional learning I think that'd be a great space is do you have people that you've interviewed yet talking about teaching and learning specifically.

Timothy Winders: So outside of the [00:27:00] IT space and more into the classroom space. Or faculty that how they are actually incorporating AI into their and into their pedagogy and learning practices, right? You talked a little bit about how you use AI in developing this show. All right. And I think that type of introspection will give a lot of eye openings that Oh, you can do that.

Timothy Winders: That's really cool. And it's not cheating, right? I'm not using it to write my English paper, right? I'm actually using a I to become more productive in a way that used to take me. hours or 10 people now just ask, who should I talk to about AI? And that's a great example. But I'm not going to give you any specific names.

Timothy Winders: That's okay. 

Joe Toste: That was exactly like Kyle Bowen. Who's the deputy CIO at ASU. He was like, I can't think of anybody. I will email you, but here's the type of people you should talk to. Exactly. Zach, who else should I interview? Students. Okay. You should 

Zach Rossmiller: get a student's perspective on this. I had multiple student groups over last spring and this summer and just talked to [00:28:00] just random student groups across campus to get in their field of what kind of AI tool do you use or what would you use?

Zach Rossmiller: How are you feeling? And it was interesting, the perspectives of each group because each group had different came from different walks of life and different backgrounds. And the equity piece around AI is a very interesting thing with students because some can afford it, some cannot.

Zach Rossmiller: Some would prefer just, getting the AI tool from Grammarly and that's all they need. They just need coaching on how to write. They don't want to actually have the tool right for them. They need just coaching and how to do things and give feedback. And that other people that I've talked to, they because a lot of faculty Worry about cheating and you know all that kind of things and it's interesting that some students that I've talked with they're like no, I just need help just understanding And so then we get into this big topic around these virtual AI faculty advisors and then the question of intellectual property and who owns what comes into [00:29:00] play And that's the interesting piece, and I've, I won't, I will never give away the student's name, but they're like, I, if I'm cheating, I'm just gonna go on Chegg or something and getting the answer.

Zach Rossmiller: I don't need AI for that. And it's it's just fascinating. That would be my advice, is go talk to students from all high school to college, and just get their opinion on what that looks like for the future for them. And then if you're a nerd, which I know you are, Joe the Nair project with the National Science Foundation, they're doing a lot of different research with AI.

Zach Rossmiller: And just keep your eye out on who those principal investigators are, and maybe reach out to a few of them, and just interview them, and just ask them how they're working with AI in their research field, because I think that those types of projects are going to be, this might be over exaggeration, but could, revolutionize or evolve over time.

Joe Toste: Yeah, it's great. For those who don't know, I coach high school basketball. So I, and tryouts are November 1st. But during the season, I see the high [00:30:00] schoolers. I actually, I copped to this on camera already, but there was a guy last year, he was a senior, applying for colleges and scholarships. It was like, I need help writing my scholarship.

Joe Toste: I will not name the student, but I sat down, helped him go, get out of zero and get to, at least get to one and then help him from there. And he was just like, this is amazing. This is a game changer. I get a text message. Do you not write my biology paper? First year in college. I'm like, guys, no, I have this.

Joe Toste: I'll like, no, like you better be like. Not using the whole thing or 

Zach Rossmiller: you think about non native English speakers and how that helps lower that barrier for some of them of writing college entry papers or even scholarships like that helps to flatten or level the playing field for a lot of non native English speakers.

Zach Rossmiller: But kudos to your student. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. Yeah. There's a democratization that is just, I am one guy with a camera right there in a [00:31:00] bedroom and then here at the event. It's crazy what you can do just with media and code and like at scale, which is pretty cool. Mandy, anyone you would recommend?

Joe Toste: It could be a CIO, CISO, a friend of yours. 

Mani Nagothu: I would say that I think you are already doing a great job. And definitely I cannot name like, how Tim and Jack said, but you are already creating a collaborative environment. I think this collaborative partnerships like Today I learned a lot from like Tim and Jack with the unique and the specific challenges that education sector faces and how you're managing them.

Mani Nagothu: So creating this collaborative environment and definitely sent you one want to be part of that. And yeah, share, learn. So learn so much as well as share whatever insights that we get. 

Joe Toste: Love it. Thank you for coming on the public sector show by tech tables. Appreciate y'all. Pleasure being here.

Joe Toste: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Hey, what's up everybody. This is Joe Tossi from techtables. com. And you're listening to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. [00:32:00] You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders.

Speaker 2: Through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events, we offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today, and to make sure you never miss an episode. Head over to Spotify, Apple podcast, hit that follow button and leave a quick rating, just tap the number of stars that you think the show deserves.