Thomas Phelps joins us now down here on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Thomas is the CIO and the SVP of corporate strategy at Laser Fish, one of the cooler sounding names for companies I've interviewed in quite some time.
It's nice to see you.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
It's good.
You specialize in document management as well as process automation.
So I want to start first and foremost, your broader thoughts on the software space.
There's a so-called SAS.
Apocalypse.
Yes, and you might see it makes for some very scary sounding headlines.
Is it real or a bit overhyped?
So it is here but probably not now, and it is a little bit overhyped because enterprise IT leaders are not going to rip and replace their enterprise solutions because there's something called security, compliance, and total cost of ownership that that are a factor.
And so you want to make sure that any enterprise software you purchase or.
Configured is secure, it's scalable, it's resilient, and is capable of withstanding, you know, different disaster events and things like that.
So, um, CIOs are looking at vibe coding solutions to help further the business along, but it's got to have true business applications and utility.
Vibe coding is here to stay, isn't it?
It is, yeah, very much like a newer emerging phenomenon, but it's one of those things like once the toothpaste is out of the tube, probably now going back what is holding.
Back mass AI adoption right now.
Some of those headwinds and challenges, you think?
I think the major issue is workforce readiness.
There's an appetite from CEOs and boards to adopt AI, but the workforce isn't there yet.
And so I think what CIOs need to do is they need to partner with their people teams to scale up the workforce, to upskill them, and look for those practical use cases to incentivize the workforce to adopt AI at a scale that hasn't been seen before.
How are companies handling AI security but also AI governance?
Look, you've got these long established rules of the road.
You've got to go back to the drawing board, take a closer look at those blueprints now with newly emerging technology.
You know, we've seen security being a real issue with AI because AI can chain together attacks at a speed and scale that have not been seen before.
It's been unprecedented.
So for CIOs, you have to focus on security both offensively and defensively and bring in AI tools to innovate your tech stack to make sure you can proactively identify, mitigate, and prevent security risks.
That starts with your vendors.
Security is only as good as your ecosystem of vendors that contribute to your business ecosystem.
So you've got to make sure you're talking to your vendors about what they're doing to anticipate and mitigate these AI threats.
Thomas, there's no shortage of AI companies, especially the many companies that just threw the word kind of.
AI there at the end, I'm sure you've seen that.
What AI companies out there, excuse me, look most interesting to you right now?
So there's a couple.
I mean, for example, if you have an enterprise platform, you want to go talk to them about their AI roadmap like Salesforce, for example, but for startups, some interesting ones to me is Harvey.
Harvey can accelerate contract reviews and workflows at scale for legal departments.
A second one would be Expo.
I mentioned security by offense for AI.
Expo continuously monitor your network and do penetration testing and do offensive security.
And that's also, I think, GTM Capital invested in Expo.
Another one would be, uh, well, there's many others out there, but there's, there's several out there including Harvey and Expo.
I've got about 30 seconds left.
What most excites you about not only where the technology is today, but where it can be tomorrow?
What excitement excites me about AI is leveraging and harnessing AI for process automation at scale that we haven't seen before and with the right governance, have autonomous agents to make decisions for human workforce, humans, and keep humans in the loop as well.
Really grateful for your time for being here today.
It's nice to have you, Thomas Phelps, CIO, SVP of corporate strategy at Laser Fish.
Come back anytime.
Nice to see you.
Thank you.
