By Gregg Ostrowski, CTO Advisor, Cisco Observability
Digital experience is now positioned at the heart of almost every organization’s strategic priorities. Whether it’s driving employee engagement to address skills gaps and boost productivity, reaching new and diverse audiences, or deepening relationships (and expanding revenue streams) with existing customers, businesses must deliver exceptional digital experiences to be successful. We’ve reached the point where “experience is everything.”
Globally, consumer demand for applications and digital services is on the rise, focused on innovative, personalized, and intuitive experiences. Brands failing to meet these expectations are being abandoned. Consequently, digital experiences have become a crucial battleground for businesses. Success here can attract customers, strengthen relationships, and boost sales, while failure results in losing customers, revenue, and reputation.
Not surprisingly, experience is now a key focus in boardrooms around the world. Recent research from Cisco reveals that 75 per cent of senior global business leaders emphasize the increased importance of digital experience for C-level executives in their organizations over the past three years. Consequently, they are pushing their IT teams to ensure applications and digital services are available, secure and performing at an optimal level at all times.
Visibility into application performance enables business leaders to identify opportunities and manage risk
In 80 per cent of organizations, C-level executives routinely receive reports on the performance of business-critical applications, digital services and their business impact. Business leaders are now diving deeper into application performance data to gain a comprehensive understanding of the experiences customers and employees have with their brand.
This trend is driven by two primary factors. First, leaders need insights into application performance to identify trends, highlight areas bringing substantial business value, and capitalize on these opportunities. Second, they aim to pinpoint potential availability, performance, and security issues that could significantly jeopardize digital experiences. They’re urgently looking to mitigate risk and avoid a revenue-impacting incident.
For example, in the retail sector, business leaders now want to be able to scrutinize the performance of every stage of the user journey, from sign-up to check-out. They want to analyze the speed and efficiency of every phase of the workflow, identify what is working well and where improvements could be made. And crucially, they want to know where vulnerabilities exist within applications in order to manage risk.
It’s a similar story in other industries. Leaders in financial services firms are placing a massive focus on digital experience monitoring to compete and win against emerging and disruptive digital-first competition, and within manufacturing, leaders are scrutinizing the performance of each process across their vast SAP landscapes.
Threats to Digital Experience Arise from Escalating IT Complexity
For IT teams tasked with developing, deploying, and sustaining applications, the stakes are higher than ever. They understand that even minor lapses in digital experiences could yield significant repercussions for their organizations.
The reality though is that most IT teams simply don’t have the tools and insights they need to manage modern application environments in an effective and sustainable manner. And, as a result, they’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of firefighting, trying to identify and fix application performance issues ideally before the end user experience is impacted.
Anybody working in or around an IT department will know how much more complex enterprise IT environments have become over recent years. The shift to cloud native technologies has left technologists trying to manage an increasingly fragmented and dynamic landscape, where everything is continually changing. Additionally, it has also exposed major visibility gaps across hybrid IT environments, where organizations are still deploying separate and siloed monitoring tools for on-premises and cloud native technologies.
Observability is essential for technologists to deliver exceptional digital experiences
To overcome this challenge, IT teams need to progress from traditional monitoring approaches and implement full-stack observability, to generate unified visibility across both cloud native and on-premises environments. With observability, IT teams can get real-time insights into IT availability and performance up and down the IT stack, from customer-facing applications right through to core infrastructure. And they can integrate security into the development lifecycle from day one, speeding up innovation and resulting in more robust applications.
With full-stack observability, IT teams can provide business leaders with a comprehensive set of metrics and insights related to experience – from number of unique sessions, average revenue per session and average revenue per transaction, through to ‘revenue at risk’ from potential outages, and overall user experience (based on defined workflows).
Ultimately, full-stack observability not only ensures seamless alignment with IT and broader business strategies, it also cultivates a common language between IT and business stakeholders, including C-level executives. This cohesion is essential for organizations looking to excel in a market where digital experience increasingly dictates commercial success.
Several Senators Release A Framework to Mitigate Extreme AI Risks
Posted in Commentary with tags AI on April 18, 2024 by itnerdYesterday, U.S. Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Angus King (I-ME) released a letter to the Senate artificial intelligence (AI) working group leaders outlining a framework to mitigate extreme AI risks. I encourage you to read the letter, but here’s the TL:DR:
Congress should consider a permanent framework to mitigate extreme risks. This framework should also serve as the basis for international coordination to mitigate extreme risks posed by AI. This letter is an attempt to start a dialogue about the need for such a framework, which would be in addition to, not at the exclusion of, proposals focused on other risks presented by developments in AI.
Under this potential framework, the most advanced model developers in the future would be required to safeguard against four extreme risks – the development of biological, chemical, cyber, or nuclear weapons. An agency or federal coordinating body would be tasked to oversee the implementation of these proposed requirements, which would apply to only the very largest and most advanced models. Such requirements would be reevaluated on a recurring basis as we gain a better understanding of the threat landscape and the technology.
Sounds interesting. But is it useful? Here’s what Kevin Surace, Chair, Token had to say:
This is great politics and important to state publicly, but it won’t protect anyone from these threats. The major model providers already have strong safeguards in place for these and similar threats (you cannot get an answer from ChatGPT on how to create a chemical weapon).
This changes nothing from all major US providers. They already strongly limit access to such content. However open source models being used by bad actors and rogue countries are not subject to these laws and will misuse the technology anyway.
Anyone can already Google how to create a biological weapon. Having the answers faster doesn’t really help someone with the chemistry, procurement, production and so on anymore than Google already did. But AI could create perhaps new compounds not well documented elsewhere. And the bad actors are already taking advantage of that with open source models.
This has zero impact on OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and so on. And it has zero impact on a rogue country using open source models.
I’m all for guardrails and safeguards. But they have to be useful. I am not yet convinced that this effort by these senators is useful. But I am free to be convinced otherwise. Let’s see if they can convince myself and others that this is a useful exercise.
UPDATE: I have additional commentary from Madison Horn, Congressional Candidate (OK-5) and cybersecurity leader:
The plan proposed by the Senators is crucial. We are in the midst of a new kind of Cold War with China, one that includes the race to harness AI. A comprehensive strategy to not only secure but also to fully harness the potential of AI is essential. The nation that leads in AI will not only dictate global markets but also define international norms for decades to come.
Executing a plan to mitigate AI risks is loaded with challenges. First, we need a solid strategy to retain top talent for any new agencies we might set up, and we must also forge strong partnerships with the private sector. Then there’s Congress—sometimes it seems like they’re in a tech time warp, which doesn’t help. Plus, we can’t let our drive for security strangle American innovation. We need to stay agile, adapting as new models and classifications emerge, and ensure we’re not shutting out new startups or inadvertently creating monopolies.
And let’s not overlook cybersecurity challenges. Ensuring these AI models aren’t leaked or stolen is crucial—our adversaries are definitely taking notes and will be trying to tap into this wealth of information that will be retained.
Artificial intelligence poses a significant threat, one that reshapes the global landscape in ways we haven’t witnessed since the post-WWII era. With new alliances forming, notably between Russia and China, the stakes in the AI war are extraordinarily high. The power of AI doesn’t just accelerate a country’s ability to dominate global markets; it also has the potential to shift global values depending on who emerges as the leader in this technology. In the most extreme scenarios, the misuse of AI could lead to catastrophic outcomes, potentially destroying the world in a matter of seconds. The race to harness AI, therefore, is not just about technological superiority but also about steering the future ethical and moral compass of our entire planet.
We need to keep the spark of American innovation alive—it’s also crucial for our national security. Collaboration with the private sector? Non-negotiable. With many of the few qualified individuals in Congress retiring or being pushed out of office by partisan politics, it’s up to the American people to step up. We must elect leaders who are not just filling a seat but who truly understand the complexities of today’s tech challenges. Leaders who have the understanding to craft and pass laws that safeguard our citizens without choking out our innovation and economic growth. This is about securing a future where America continues to lead, not follow.
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