ICYMI: Keynote Fireside Chat, Transformation Reimagined (part 1)

In this insightful fireside chat, Joe Adamo from SAIC and Dr. Kelly Fletcher, Chief Information Officer of the United States Department of State, discuss the Department's ongoing digital modernization efforts and the role of technology in global diplomacy. Dr. Fletcher highlights the State Department's unique mission, emphasizing the importance of maintaining robust communication networks in crisis situations and the game-changing potential of low earth orbit satellite communication (LEO satcom). She also delves into the implementation of AI to enhance productivity and reduce administrative toil, while addressing the challenges associated with legacy systems and cybersecurity. Dr. Fletcher encourages industry partners to engage proactively with the Department, stressing the need for collaborative solutions to advance technological capabilities. Audience members pose questions on AI agents, human-centered approaches to large-scale transformations, and AI security, which Dr. Fletcher addresses with clarity and expertise.

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound

(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
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DAVID HERNANDEZ: [00:00:00] Hope everybody enjoyed their lunch. Thank you very much and as we are going to continue forward with the next presentation, we're gonna be having a fireside chat, Joe Adamo of SAIC, as well as Dr. Kelly Fletcher of Department of State. You guys wanna come on stage
DAVID HERNANDEZ: Fed Scoop 50. Winner. Yeah. Recent Fed Scoop 50 winner.
DAVID HERNANDEZ: You should know. You should be good. Turn on, make sure it works
DAVID HERNANDEZ: is Oh yeah. Okay. Great. Set. All right. 
JOE ADAMO: Are you good? Okay. Well, welcome everybody. Uh, my name's Joe Adamo. I am the market leader at SAIC. I lead the Department of State, department of Justice and Law Enforcement account for SAIC. Uh, if [00:01:00] I may, I'd like to start out by leading a, a little bit of an intro about you.
JOE ADAMO: Um, so, Dr. Kelly Fletcher serves as this Chief Information Officer of the United States Department of State and the assistant secretary level, head of the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. She oversees and guides the depu, the delivery of simple. Modern and secure technology to support the global diplomacy.
JOE ADAMO: For over a hundred thousand users in 190 countries, she has improved the cybersecurity posture of the State Department and led the successful identification, response, and recovery of the Chinese hack of Microsoft. In addition, she has improved user experience through operational excellence, enhance global connectivity, and the delivery of new capabilities at all classification levels.
JOE ADAMO: This is where we get into the depressive part. Dr. Fletcher's career has been at the interface of national security technology and strategic resourcing. Previously serving as the principal deputy, CIO at the Department of Defense, and prior to that [00:02:00] deployment as the Navy Deputy CIO. Dr. Fletcher has been acknowledged as a leader in technology delivery through numerous awards, including the Washington Executive 2023 Government, CIO of the Year, and the Fedco 50 Awards in 2022 through 2024, and I think we just heard recently as well.
JOE ADAMO: Congratulations. Congratulations. That's impressive.
JOE ADAMO: So let's talk about the State Department. Um, it's what we're, everybody's here to hear. Um, as the State Department continues its digital modernization journey, how do you see technology shaping the way state carries out its mission around the world? 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Okay. Okay. Oh, look at that. Okay. Um, yeah, thank you for that really nice introduction.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I just, the first thing I wanna say is, man, I inherited the best team of humans at the State Department. Um, uh, this is a long list of, of things I got for work, [00:03:00] other people did. Um, so I'm incredibly grateful to be there. I have wonderful colleagues. I had wonderful colleagues who moved on. I see you, um. And I, yeah, I'm just really thankful to be there.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: But I do, before I even move to the question, I wanna talk a little bit about, um, I think everybody here knows, like, generally what the State Department does. I'll be totally honest. Uh, when I came over from DOD three years ago, uh, I had never been in an embassy. Whoops. And, um. I honestly just didn't have a, a clear vision of the span and scope, um, of the State Department and also the risk that we accept every day.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, so we're in 190 countries. Um, we have about a hundred thousand users. Um, and one big difference from DOD that I would note about state is that, um, the, the core mission and also how we conduct that mission. So we live in these countries, right? We like buy bread from the baker. We go to the [00:04:00] mall to buy our shoes.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: We live there. Um, and our core mission is. To promote, you know, to help American citizens. Absolutely. You have a baby overseas, they need a birth certificate, you lose your passport, you're on vacation. That's us. That's all us go to the embassy. Um, but our main, our main mission really is to engage with the people of that country.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And so, uh, what that means is, and I, I've stolen this from my colleague, I love it. It is our job to open emails from foreign nationals that we do not know, and then it is our job to open the attachment that they provide. Like it is crazy. It is a crazy risk posture. The other thing I will say is when you go into an embassy, something I did three years ago and thought like, oh no, um, it is filled with yes, state Department employees, foreign service employees who are awesome.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, but it is also filled in most cases with local staff. So these wonderful people who are from the country that we're in, who [00:05:00] are helping us to be successful, and they're on our, uh, network. They have emails and they are the local folks. And I did not expect to see this. So, uh, we have a really diverse, uh, employee profile and then we have a really unique mission.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, so the two things I wanna highlight for like, what are we doing with technology to do awesome stuff for our mission? The first thing is, um, safety of life. So, uh, when I was at State for just like three months, I think we had to evacuate Sudan. Um, and this doesn't happen all the time, but it just happened to happen when I had been there for three months and it was totally overwhelming because you know that there are people that.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Are in the middle of a very scary situation and they need to make it so that we can leave that embassy and not leave anything critical. Um, and also successfully engage with the folks who are gonna come in with helicopters and they're gonna get on those helicopters and they're gonna leave. And they also need to engage with headquarters.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: What's [00:06:00] happening, who's where is everyone? Okay? Um, and so every day I woke up during that time and I said, what comms do they have? How resilient is it? Do their cell phones work? Does OpenNet or unclassified network work? What about classified? Like every day? The only thing I cared about was how robust were their communications.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And you can imagine if we're evacuating an embassy. It's because bad stuff is happening. So like eventually your cell phone isn't gonna work in this kind of environment. Um, and so this brings us to low earth orbit satcom. It is a true game changer. Like I think it's a true game changer for emergency situations where you know that you can remain connected.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Uh, with this capability, but we're also starting to deploy it, um, in those places that are really tough, where they have intermittent connectivity because of the local government, maybe they turn off the internet. Um, I would Google that. Like it turns out a lot of countries turn off the internet and it's not that infrequent.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Uh, if they do that. Our embassy still needs to be connected. Um, if there's a [00:07:00] natural disaster, our embassy still has to be connected. So Leo satcom, uh, I can go on and on. I think it's changing the world, uh, and it's a place where we're leaning into new technology and honestly, it makes us look like wizards.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: You know, like 20 years ago, no one expected these places to maintain connectivity, and today I say no, no. We gave them a Leos SATCOM terminal and, and my leadership says like. Are you a wizard? And I said, yes, yes. But actually it's just, it's just new technology, so it's awesome. And the other place, uh, is definitely ai.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, so we're a narrative based organization. Uh, when I came to state from D-O-D-D-O-D is a very mathematical, sort of graph oriented organization. They'll make a graph out of words, you know, uh, the state Department will use words to describe a graph. Um, and so generative AI was made for us. Uh, we're operating in so many languages and we're a narrative based organization.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: So generative AI has been a huge game [00:08:00] changer. Um, and we're using it not just for increased productivity, but also for, um, improved performance and insights. So those are the two, I'd say. 
JOE ADAMO: That's fantastic. So in that digital journey. With that comes a lot of challenges, you know, are, are there any sort of roadblocks in that journey that I think are causing you to pause or maybe you want to have a bigger idea to, to overcome those?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Uh, this is a good question. So, um, one, one roadblock or challenge, I would say a challenge is, uh, we're in 190 countries and, uh, what that means in like 270 locations, what that means is anything that we develop or build. We got a field and fielding is hard. Uh, we have to fly physical things, places. Um, those are places that are hard to get sometimes.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, so one example I'll give about this is we have a new network architecture. I think it's wonderful. It's called Tron. I've been talking about it for three years. Three years. And um, we have this big dt, [00:09:00] so diplomatic technology chiefs. Those are the technologists who live overseas. They live at an embassy.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: They live at a consulate. Um, and they're the tech pro at that place. And we meet all together once a year, um, virtually or in person. And, uh, every time I meet with them, I tell them like, you are gonna get this thing called Tron, and it's a new network and it's really cool. And they are, they are gonna get it.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I wanna be clear they are gonna get it, but, but when I first came to state, I was like, let's go. You know what I mean? Look at he split too, too. Um, that doesn't work in 190 countries, it does not work. Um, are we gonna do it? Yes. But like, there are gonna be exceptions. I keep driving to simplicity, but honestly, we're in wildly variable postures globally, and part of that is things we can't control.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Like phones. It turns out not every country uses E sims. You know what I mean? Like there's things that totally outside of our control that make it really hard to be consistent. Um, and also there are things that we can control, but we just [00:10:00] have to say, you know what? It is gonna take a little bit longer to get Tron fielded to 190 countries than it would if I was fielding it to 200 locations in the United States.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And then the other thing, and I think this is true of the federal government across the board, is, man, we've got a lot of legacy tech. Um, I think everybody knows that and nobody's surprised. Um, what I've started saying is that the, the trailer is duct taped to the car. You know what I mean? Like, is it attached?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah. Um, is it attached in the way that you want it to be? No. And that means you can't get on the highway. That means a small bump might like, whoop, you might lose the trailer. So like we've inherited this legacy technical debt and at, and, and we're 24 7. So we've, we've, um, printed 25 million passports this year here.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Like, awesome. Yeah. But what we can't do is stop printing password. We can't be like, hold on that. We'll get back to that in a minute. Like, no, we gotta do that, but we gotta modernize the underlying [00:11:00] systems at the same time. 
JOE ADAMO: So you brought up legacy IT and you know, scale across 190 posts. Cyber's obviously always been a big deal.
JOE ADAMO: State department's trying to be in the leading edge of cyber. Can you talk a little bit about how we're, cyber is a, a big piece of where we're trying to go. 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think, um, you know, when I looked at the risk that we inherently accept at the State Department and I was like, oh, this is a lot, you know, once again, the opening the attachment from the unknown foreign national, um.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: You know what, what I say is of how we win, right? We are gonna have cyber events. Let's just be real. Um, but we should have a reasonable cyber readiness posture. You know, we gotta do some best practices. We can't get embarrassed. We can't have a cyber event driven by someone in their basement. You know what I mean?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, so reasonable cyber readiness posture, which means we're measuring things, we're measuring applications, we're seeing what we [00:12:00] patched, we're seeing, we're red teaming. So when we rolled out generative ai, uh, we found the nerdiest nerds, and I mean that in the best way. And we said, red team, this hack the heck out of this.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And, um, they found some stuff. They found some stuff and we fixed it. Um, but so that's one thing is like get your cyber readiness posture up to something that is not embarrassing. But even if you're there. You're gonna get had sometimes, uh, and the way that we win is we know that we're getting had, right?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: That's step one. Uh, and then you respond and you recover. And this is like the Chinese hack of Microsoft. This was a case where we had exquisite logging. Uh, we prioritized our alerts as appropriate, and we were the only entity in the world that knew something weird was happening. Yeah, we won. That's awesome.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: That's awesome. And then we told Microsoft, and they fixed it for everyone globally, but this is sort of the, the posture that we're aiming for, which is exquisite alerting and visibility and prioritization of alerts, because of course we're [00:13:00] getting thousands of alerts. 
JOE ADAMO: Oh, that's fantastic. Um, you have a lot of friends sitting in the crowd, a lot of industry partners.
JOE ADAMO: A lot of them have told me they're gonna rag on me after I get off the stage. Hopefully not, not you're gonna be great. Everybody's looking to help. Um, you know, what's the best way for industry to get engaged? You know, how should they reach out? What can they contribute to Department of State's mission?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, I love this question. So, um, I met with some industry partners who will remain nameless, uh, just last week. And they came to me and they said, man, you guys like aren't patching stuff. You gotta do this upgrade. Like, we're looking at your environment and there's a whole bunch of stuff wrong. You know what I mean?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And I said like, what is it that you do here? You know what I mean? Like if you're my partner, like share some responsibility and ownership with me. Like now is the time, right? So if you're my partner and you're my environment [00:14:00] and you're looking at stuff and you're seeing stuff that doesn't make sense or is inefficient.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, we're making changes right now, right? So start telling your government people, we could fix this, we can help you fix it. We can put on white gloves and assist you in fixing it. Um, I really want sort of a true partnership and exchange of ideas. Um, we have priorities. Obviously we can prioritize everything that said, like where we can get industry to sit right next to us.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah. And, and help us with hands on keyboards, not with big ideas, not with like, you know, if we hit a green field and a hundred million dollars, we're not doing that. Uh, we have what we have and what I need is help to improve it. And I need real help. Like real, like not a big idea. Not pointing out problems with no solutions, but like real legitimate.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Hands-on keyboard help. So that's number one. Number two is if you're not in the environment, you're like, man, I think I have some tools that could help. I think I have some people who could help. The fastest way into the [00:15:00] environment is through another vendor, right? Simply put, like, obviously I wanna see new cool stuff.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I love that. I want my folks to see new cool stuff. Um, but we have, uh, a lot of vendors already in the space and so I would say like, find somebody who's in there and partner up, um, and see if you can't help. I think this is actually like a really exciting time for the Department of State. We have a ton of opportunity to simplify.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: We have a ton of opportunity to turn off things that there's five people who've been loving that thing for the last 15 years. Uh, I have the support of my leadership to say, cheers, we're gonna turn that thing off. So there's, we're prioritizing efficiency. We're prioritizing modernization in a way that's really exciting.
JOE ADAMO: Oh, that's fantastic. Um, you talked about AI a little bit earlier, so I wanted to frame this AI question for you. So a AI is everywhere and it's in basically every conversation right now. Um, how do you see it being used in ways that are both responsible and impactful for states work? 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, I love this. [00:16:00] So, um, I think what we've done with AI and I wanna acknowledge Matthew Gravis right now.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: You can ignore me. He's ignoring me. He won't make eye contact. Um, but I did, I did a lot of this work with him when he was the Chief Data and AI officer at the State Department. He was the vision behind this, and I'm gonna steal words he said to me now and say them back to him. I feel awkward about it, but I'm gonna do it.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah. I'm gonna do it. Um, so. Uh, what we've been doing with ai, the, one of the big things we did is we rolled out a generative AI chat bot and we rolled it out to 80,000 people. Uh, holy cow. And, uh, I think it's, I think it's pretty magical. It's, you know, this generative AI that helps with translation. We've loaded in State Department data, so we have something called the Foreign Affairs Manual and the Foreign Affairs Handbook, uh, if you need to know how to move your cat with you to conakry, that is what you would reference.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, and many other things. Um, but so you can type into the generative AI chatbot, this agent, this [00:17:00] like, uh, foreign affairs manual agent. How do I move my cat to concrete? And it will find all the locations that explain how to move a cat. And then we'll let you, you know, click on them and read the actual text or give you a summary.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Like it's, the idea here is in large part to reduce administrative toil, right? This like, I'm. Control F-ing in a hundred page document. We're gonna, we're gonna reduce administrative. I, I don't know what template to use for my talking points. Um, so a lot of what we did with this chat bot is actually like the generative AI is the magic.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: It's the coolest thing, but we made it very usable. So let's say you're writing talking points. Um, you need this template, right? Some things are bold, some things are tabbed. I don't know. Um, no one knows, right? That's the point. That's why it's the toil. Um. And then you can click, I need this into a Talking Points template, and we will take it from the generative AI chat bot and boop it into a Microsoft Word [00:18:00] document that is in the right template.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: This is magic. You know what I mean? This is just the reduction of administrative toil. Um, so that's one thing we've done and I do in talking about ai. I'll tell you. Um, when Matthew and I were rolling this thing out, we had 3000 people who were like beta testers. They used the thing all day, every day. If we changed the underlying prompt, they would tell us if they liked it before we even told them we had done it.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Like they were amazing. And then when we're gonna roll the thing out to the whole department, right? 80,000 people. Um, I was asking questions like, what if 15,000 people log on tomorrow? Uh, those were the kinds of questions I was asking. And, um, they did not, 15,000 people did not log on tomorrow. Um, it has taken a huge amount of education and training and very detailed and very focused education and training to get even up to like 45, 50,000 people.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, this is a [00:19:00] tool that is like on our environment. It's called State Chad. It has a little logo. We put it on the homepage for government employees who work at the State Department. And one month ago I answered the question, is it allowable for me to use it? Yeah, we made it for, I made it for you. Oh my. It was, it was an employee.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: It was an employee. But I take that to be that. It's so magical. They can't imagine it's allowable, but, but I will say like something I wildly underestimated with ai. Is that the amount of training and education and conversation required to get folks who would benefit greatly from it to use it. Um, so that's what we've done in the last year, and, and I think it's been really impactful looking forward.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I, I think that AI is gonna be embedded in just about everything, right? So, um, I think the trick is gonna be getting people comfortable, making sure it's [00:20:00] secure. Um, and then, you know, I do want a thousand flowers to bloom where I'm using AI to prioritize my cyber alerts where I'm using AI to ask, you know, how much leave do I have?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Who knows? Like, let's, let's use AI to help with that. Like there are so many places that we can use it. Um. And I think that the trick is gonna be how do we embed it smartly? Um, how do we ensure that people know what to use it for? Right? It's not an encyclopedia. Um, and I'll, I'll give one more example. So we embedded a chat bot in our patient portal.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: So this is for our electronic healthc record. We're deck, we're testing it right now. And, uh, I thought like, oh no, you know, because what I don't want is a chat bot that's like, that might be a heart attack. I don't want WebMD. Do you know what I mean? Like we could, we've all gone down that rabbit hole. I don't want that.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I was very nervous about the chat bot in the patient portal because I didn't want folks to go into the patient portal and say, I can use this chat bot to diagnose, you know, I'm gonna take a photo of this. Is it a ward or is it a [00:21:00] mole? And I'm gonna use this chat bot to solve that problem. And so we tested the chat bot like really thoroughly.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And you know what the chat bot will do? It will say. I will help you make an appointment. Here's the screen. Click here, click here, and you can make an appointment. It will say, oh, your prescriptions run out. Oh, click here to do that. So what it does is it helps you navigate the portal and then the second you type in, which I can assure you we did, I have a headache and nausea, might I be having a heart attack?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: It was like, I can't help you with that. No, absolutely not. Um, and it said, my, you probably should make an appointment with your, your provider. And so like. What I, this was a perfect example of what I want, which is embedded AI that has a defined responsibility, um, that is clear. So even if you try to game it, you know, you can't, but, so that's my dream is more embedded AI in the future.
JOE ADAMO: Uh, that's great. Uh, I know we wanna leave a few minutes at the end for some questions, so maybe I will close with this one. [00:22:00] If you could leave industry partners with one takeaway or call to action. What would it be? 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, now is the time. Now is the time. If you see something that is busted, right? So there's a lot of busted things.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: It's easy to eyeball them, but like find the ones that you think are most fixable and find or most serious. And raise them to our attention with a solution like that is the trick. We can't, we can't greenfield, I don't have a greenfield, but what we can do is shore up what we have and pick a couple of priority items to sprint with.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Like we are really valuing partnership at this time. And I will say like we've a ton of opportunity, um, where a lot of like administrative sort of bureaucratic barriers are down. We can be, um, more efficient, we can modernize faster. So now's the time. 
JOE ADAMO: I appreciate that. Uh, I think there's somebody in the crowd with a microphone.
JOE ADAMO: I think we're gonna open up for a little bit of q and a with Dr. [00:23:00] Fletcher. Uh, anybody wanna raise their hand?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Hi. Um, I'm curious if you guys are looking at or considering using AI agents at the State Department, and could you tell us how and why? Yeah, I love this. So, um, we have some, some that are agents. So like this Foreign Affairs manual is actually an agent and you can call it. From other AI platforms, but isn't an agent.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, it's sort of like the nerds call it an agent. I call it an agent. It is an agent like by definition, but what I really wanna move to is AI agents that will take action for, uh, humans, right? So I want it to not only tell me how much leave do I have, which is in a system, I'm not sure, but then I want it to put in my leave slip.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Which is in a different system. Um, and we're building to that. [00:24:00] There's a lot of opportunity in that space. I will say, like, um, in the long term, I'd like all of these administrative functions to be behind one sort of chat bot of, like, I, I asked for new headphones for my computer and also I put in my leave slip.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: And also I, uh, am waiting on a package. Where is it? Like, I would love it if that was all behind one. Moving to that is gonna take a minute. And then there's some really interesting and very nerdy. So for this crowd, not for my customers. There's some really interesting thing about, um, like rights of the agents, right?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: You know what I mean? Like, is the agent me? Does the agent need to be in the active directory, or is the agent supervised by me and has even. More defined in careful rights. So I think we're gonna see a proliferation of agents. Um, but my hope is that we can consolidate to some degree around like maybe certain missions and then administrative, which would apply [00:25:00] to everyone.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: I.
GUEST: Hi, um, Aaron Branch with Qualtrics, and given all of the diverse stakeholders and needs both, you know, externally and internally, um, that Department of State isn't supporting, how do you navigate like the, the human side of these, like large scale transformation initiatives? 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, humans, uh, humans are, are an area of challenge, but, uh, so what I can say is.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Uh, you know this, a lot of it is training and education. Look, we made this thing, it's allowable, it's magical. Um, there, there's some of that, but I also think, like, I've been thinking a lot about constituencies, right? So I got my bosses right, I got my bosses in the building, and what they want is operational excellence.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: They want to come to work, they want everything to work. Um, they wanna be modernization leaders. Uh, the details less important, do you know what I mean? But everything has to bloody work right now. Um, then I have business owners. So [00:26:00] within diplomatic technology, we have applications that support hr. We have applications that support consular affairs, that's passports and visas.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: We've applications that support logistics. We have all these applications and, um, those are business owners, right? So my peers own that business. Um, med, these doctors, they, there's an application in diplomatic technology, but med is sort of the business owner sort of being very intentional about how we.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, engage with business owners and make a shared governance model. So business owners shouldn't opine if this is in the AWS or Azure Cloud, you know what I mean? That's not really their domain. Um, but they do have to own the requirements and the priorities. And so we're being very intentional around these constituencies.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, and then I would say also have a constituency, which is like a normal state department user, right? They wanna come to work, they wanna reduce administrative friction, they want their, it [00:27:00] to be easy to navigate and simple. And then the last constituency, which I would say is the toughest, is the technologist at the department.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Um, because they kind of know, they know how magical things could be and um, they know where we're limiting. Um, so that's sort of how I think about it. Now, I will say, like, I'm consistently surprised by how much communication is necessary at every level all the time to every constituency. And so that's a place where we're spending a lot of time and energy is like making sure that the information we share with our regular customers is in English.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: You know what I mean? Nobody, nobody needs to know how to configure the flux calculator. They need to be told, like, after you turn on your computer, put in your PIV card. It's to the left. You know what I mean? Like, so we're, we're trying to clean up our comms. 
JOE ADAMO: Uh, so we have a minute, minute-ish left. I think maybe we'll take one more in the back.
Speaker 5: Hey, good afternoon, Kelly Mark FCI with [00:28:00] Palo Alto Networks. Question for you on, uh, AI security. Something near and dear to my heart, um, with the Gentech AI and potentially privilege access for, uh, gentech AI within your enterprise. The AI security, which you brought about earlier, is tantamount, right? It's the most important thing we could do.
Speaker 5: So just kind of, if you could share kind of like what, how you're going through the process of understanding, you know, that security, um, capability and any lessons learned you can share with the audience would be great. Thank you. 
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'll say, you know, number one, red teaming has been really valuable to us.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: We've seen like. Um, what are the areas of vulnerability? I'll also say like identity. So I feel really good about where we are in identity and it is not where we should be. And so if I don't have my human identities under control, like age just adds like a layer of difficulty to that. Um, one thing we've done at State that I'm proud of is the master user record, which is, again, this is only for this audience.
DR KELLY FLETCHER: No one else cares. [00:29:00] I try to talk about it, people's eyes glaze over. Um, but you know, really you have a single source of identity. And a lot of this gets around managing data and authoritative data sources. So like part of our challenge with Agen to AI is what is my authoritative data source for how much leave do I have?
DR KELLY FLETCHER: Do you know what I mean? Like, and I only want it to touch those things. So I actually think like by deploying agents we're gonna learn a lot and there's gonna be a bunch of things we have to fix surrounding that. Does that make sense? 
Speaker 5: It does. Thank you. And this is a complex area, you know, you're at the tip of the spear with this and a lot of thoughts there.
Speaker 5: So happy to follow up with the after and talk more. Thanks. 
JOE ADAMO: Well, we're at time. Um, super fast. Amazing conversation. Um, for the audience, for myself, thank you for joining. We really appreciate it. Great job. Thank you.