In this #HPEAIMomentum interview, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Robin Braun, VP of AI Business Development at HPE, and Jack Hogan, VP of Advanced Growth Technologies at SHI International Corp., to unpack how accessibility compliance is becoming a foundational step for enterprise-scale AI. The discussion explores Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 realities facing U.S. state and federal agencies – especially as stricter rules arrive next April for municipalities of 50,000+ residents – and why inclusion, trust and legal risk all converge on digital accessibility. Braun and Hogan detail a joint HPE–SHI approach that pairs HPE infrastructure (powered by NVIDIA GPUs) with partner technology from Kamiwaza to automate multimodal remediation across HTML, PDFs, images, video and audio – keeping data in place, honoring sovereignty and ensuring a “human-in-the-loop” final publish.
The conversation dives into outcomes and operations: accelerating timelines from multi-year, multi-million-dollar programs to weeks and “tens of thousands” of dollars, targeting sub-$200K entry points for large, complex sites; enabling continuous monitoring so compliance isn’t a one-time project; and validating solutions in SHI’s AI & cyber lab on HPE private cloud AI systems before deployment. Beyond compliance, the guests explain how clean, accessible content becomes the base layer for AI adoption – supporting hybrid and private cloud patterns, de-risking downstream AI use cases and helping municipalities focus budgets on better citizen services.
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Smarter Government, Accessible Services: AI in Action
In this HPE “Unleash AI Momentum” panel, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Robin Braun (vice president of AI business development at HPE), Jack Hogan (vice president of, advanced growth technologies at SHI International Corp.), Luke Norris (co-founder & chief executive officer of Kamiwaza) and Russell Forrest (town manager at the Town of Vail, Colorado) to unpack how agentic AI is moving smart cities from pilots to production. The discussion spotlights HPE’s Agentic Smart City Solution – anchored by HPE Private Cloud AI (developed with NVIDIA) and an agentic backbone from Kamiwaza – that breaks down data silos across municipal operations. The panel details how multimodal capabilities (vision/IoT analytics, geospatial modeling from Blackshark.ai, video restoration from ProHawk AI and video analysis via Vaidio) are orchestrated into workflows, with SHI integrating point solutions and its Digital AI Civic Ambassador into a single interface. They also address security and sovereignty by keeping data behind the firewall and lifecycle-managing AI workloads on a flexible, GPU-powered platform (including RTX 6000 PRO), enabling cities to scale up and out as needs change.
Real-world outcomes take center stage: Vail’s housing agent digitizes and interprets more than 1,000 deed restrictions, from handwritten notes to legacy Laserfiche files, speeding answers for residents and freeing nearly a full FTE for higher-value work. Additional use cases include automated 508 compliance remediation for accessible web content, fire detection using existing cameras and back-office automation to accelerate invoice and receipt processing. Norris explains why seasonal swings (from ~3,200 residents in the off-season to 25–30,000 visitors) demand elastic municipal services (including what he calls the largest free bus system in the country). Hogan outlines SHI’s Imagine → Experiment → Adopt framework that took Vail from 20 candidate use cases to four priorities, prototyped in SHI’s AI & Cyber Lab, with results delivered in weeks. The group emphasizes modularity and partner innovation as keys to repeatability – from small towns to the largest metroplexes – showing how hybrid cloud strategies accelerate scaling and keep the focus on citizen experience.
play_circle_outlineEnsuring Digital Accessibility: Compliance Challenges and Legal Risks for Agencies under US Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Standards
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play_circle_outlineTransforming Compliance and Accessibility: The Essential Role of AI in Municipal Solutions and Digital Initiatives
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play_circle_outlineRevolutionizing Accessibility Compliance: HPE, SHI, and Kamiwaza's Automation Partnership Using Agentic AI for Time and Cost Efficiency
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play_circle_outlineBenefits of continual monitoring and updates for maintaining accessibility post-compliance.
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play_circle_outlineSHI's investment in accessibility technology to support customer compliance efforts.
Smarter Government, Accessible Services: AI in Action
Rob Strechay
Dir./Principal Analyst & HosttheCUBE Research
HOST
Jack Hogan
SHIVP Advanced Growth Technologies
Robin Braun
VP, AI Business Development, Hybrid CloudHPE
In this #HPEAIMomentum interview, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay sits down with Robin Braun, VP of AI Business Development at HPE, and Jack Hogan, VP of Advanced Growth Technologies at SHI International Corp., to unpack how accessibility compliance is becoming a foundational step for enterprise-scale AI. The discussion explores Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 realities facing U.S. state and federal agencies – especially as stricter rules arrive next April for municipalities of 50,000+ residents – and why inclusion, trust and legal risk all converge on digital accessibility....Read more
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What are the implications of accessibility in government services for individuals with disabilities?add
What challenges arise when engaging with customers regarding unique solutions to civic and business problems?add
What are the key benefits and collaborations presented in the solution involving Kamiwaza, HPE infrastructure, and NVIDIA GPUs?add
What benefits do multimodal AI platforms provide in terms of accessibility and understanding various types of content?add
What investments and collaborations has SHI made to enhance accessibility and validate AI technologies for its customers?add
Smarter Government, Accessible Services: AI in Action
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Rob Strechay
>> Hello. And welcome to theCUBE, where we're joined by HPE talking about Unleash AI, and with one of their partners, SHI. Today, we're diving into one of the most critical and often overlooked areas of digital transformation, accessibility compliance. In the US Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the WCAG 2.0 Standard, there's a requirement for government agencies and their partners, which is really important, to play a critical part in making digital services accessible to people with disabilities. Something near and dear to my heart. It's about compliance, but it's also about equity, trust, and ensuring no citizen is left behind. Unpacking how AI, modern infrastructure, and services are coming together to solve this challenge, which is so exciting, I'm joined by Robin Braun, who's the VP of AI Business Development at HPE, and Jack Hogan, who's the VP of Advanced Growth Technologies at SHI. Thank you for both coming on board.
Robin Braun
>> Thanks. Great to be here.
Jack Hogan
>> Thanks, Rob.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. So Section 508 is not new, but we're still seeing many states and federal agencies struggling with this. Accessibility is a legal requirement, but it's also increasingly a reputational risk. Citizens expect the same ease of use in government services that they often get out of commercial apps. When those services aren't accessible, it's exclusionary. I know this personally. My mother and my brother are both blind and have to go through this on a daily basis. And I can tell you that it is really tough when you get to something and you can't get those services that you need. And a lot of times, again, you're in a bind, you're trying to do something maybe with land or something of that nature. It's really tough. But when those services aren't accessible, it's not only exclusionary, but it can also trigger lawsuits around digital accessibility that have been rising over the years. Robin, from your perspective, why does this matter so much? And why right now?
Robin Braun
>> Well, I think first off, the point you made around accessibility of information for all is really why it matters. It's important that all citizenry, regardless of potential disablement or issues that they may have accessing a website where they can't find the information that they need, that's something that I'm really passionate about helping to address. Now, as we look at that ... And yes, it's been a federal mandate for some time now. There have been allowances granted to be able to not enforce it as strictly. But as we look toward the coming year, and as we look out at next April, all towns or municipalities of 50,000 people or greater will actually have more stringent regulations coming out so that if you're not on top of it now, you're not going to be prepared as those regulations come up later.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. That makes total sense. And I think, again, especially given that you're coming to us live from New Jersey, one of the most densely packed states in the United States. And Jack, you're engaging with these customers every day, these municipalities. Having grown up down there, I know a lot of those towns, they call them towns, but they're really small cities, are over that 50,000-person threshold. How do you see this challenge showing up when you're engaging with these customers?
Jack Hogan
>> Well, first of all, we're engaging with customers on really unique solutions, solving some of their bigger civic challenges, some of their bigger business challenges. And when you don't start with great foundational data and you're not compliant with some of the requirements and the regulations and the laws, it actually starts your AI journey off in really challenging ways. And so we're seeing this really as a fundamental requirement for many companies to start to take advantage of how having compliance around 508 is just really the foundation. AI is a multimodal ingestion and multimodal output environment. And so having the right type of information on your websites, having the right type of information in your PDFs, in your videos, in your audio, it's really important that this is just a foundational element. And so we're starting to see a lot of the cities and counties within New Jersey, really the Northeast, and really across the entire US starting to recognize that this is an important foundation for them to build a solid AI base so that their information is accessible by all citizenry.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. I think you hit it on the head. And I think, again, obviously not just a New Jersey thing. And you guys are all over the place, so it's really bringing that, I guess you could say, that understanding and that partnership to those organizations, those municipalities about not just the 508 compliance, but everything else that goes around that because, like you said, you have to build a strong foundation. But that gives a great way, I think you served it up here, for us to start to dive into how you're addressing this. You've partnered to create a turnkey solution. Robin, why don't you start us off here and kind of give us a rundown of how this solution came together?
Robin Braun
>> What I'm really excited about this solution is it's bringing together one of our Unleash AI partners, Kamiwaza, with HPE infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GPUs with SHI as a fantastic integration and services partner that we can go to market with. And bringing that power of agentic AI to be able to understand the data with Kamiwaza's app to be able to have a very focused approach that can take what, frankly, can be not just months, but years of consultancy and be able to bring it into an agentic approach that can now take hours and weeks to be able to remediate a full website at a fraction of the cost. And that, for me, is really a powerful story of how we can leverage the Unleash AI ecosystem with our partners to be able to deliver really tactical and practical solutions that can help solve real world problems.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. And Jack, why don't you kind of give us your perspective on that as well?
Jack Hogan
>> Well, so first of all, the ability to bring together four very powerful partners, leveraging some of the latest technology to rapidly accelerate the ability to get compliant and help bring AI to be more accessible to all of the citizens in the US is really an important element of how SHI is trying to take a leadership position, recognize that there are problems beyond the technical problems, there are problems even beyond the business challenges. And it's important to be able to bring together an ecosystem that can bring solutions that are going to rapidly accelerate the adoption of next generation technologies. It's really important for ... Really to be working with the leaders in the industry. And SHI is out there leading with HPE, leading with their Unleash AI partners with Kamiwaza and, of course, leveraging GPUs and software systems from NVIDIA. So we see this as a really fortuitous partnership helping really the municipalities across the US, helping the cities and county governments rapidly get to compliance so that they can move to the things that are even more impactful, which is to be able to bring better services to their citizens.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. And I think one of the things, Jack, that I've seen, especially because having an understanding a little bit of government and how it works, especially municipalities, is that affordability has to be one of this. Where does that come in from an affordability perspective to those organizations?
Jack Hogan
>> Well, when you look at the ability to take ... In some cases, we've been had conversations with city governments and county governments that have three-year multi-million-dollar budgets just to get to a place where they're compliant. By being able to speed that up to weeks and really tens of thousands of dollars, it radically reduces the load on the tax burden that is funding many of these projects and allows those funds to be redeployed, to accelerate other areas of ability for citizens to access information, to be able to have better outcomes leveraging advanced technologies. And so it's really important that that element of speed, that ability to have constant monitoring to allow for no regression happening within the creep. As websites get bigger and more information gets put out there, I spent a good portion of my career running a massive scale, multi tens of millions of visits, multi tens of millions of pages. These become really difficult when you've got cities that have all these different large scale websites. Being able to pull that together in a rapid way and deliver quick compliance with 508, it's really mind-blowing of how AI and the application of agentic AI can bring this to a quick resolution for these cities and counties to then focus on some of the bigger challenges and leverage their budgets in better ways.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. I think that, again, getting to kind of a sub-200K price point, which we had talked about previous to this, and really being able to understand that many of these have decades of PDFs and notes and web pages that need to be updated. Sometimes they were done by multiple different administrations in multiple different languages and things of that nature to make them accessible to that. Really makes a lot of sense. I want to kind of take a step back now and really spend a little more time on because that's kind of at the heart of the automation. From what I understand, it's multimodal AI using things like NLP. It looks at both the code and the design. Robin, give us a little bit more on and how that plays out.
Robin Braun
>> I think one of the points that you made is so critical, is around that it is multimodal, that it's able to leverage multiple models simultaneously so that you can look at and understand the video or the PDF image or the picture and be able to also look at the HTML code because all of it comes into play when you start to think about accessibility, being able to have alt text, being able to have alt images, being able to really understand what is being shared through those facilities and making that data accessible. So being able to work with a partner such as Kamiwaza, who has a really groundbreaking agentic AI platform, which allows us to bring that multimodal understanding to continue to stay on that kind of updated edge with being able to bring in models as they change. As we know, that's changing on a weekly basis. But that we can continue to iterate and improve that experience for the customer as models continue to become more adept and smarter and more tuned, as well as being able to continue to expand. And one of the great things I love that Kamiwaza highlights is that agents don't get tired. They don't call in sick. They don't get tired. They don't take a break. So that as you continue to iterate on the website, that it stays in compliance, and that we continue to do those checks. It's not a one and done, which is what is so difficult when you start to think about doing this manually or doing it consulting-wise. So being able to have the breadth of being able to coverage the entire website, as Jack was highlighting. These can be really big, really complex sites when you start to look at all the different services and ways that people are engaged to then also being able to keep it maintained and keep it at that compliance and to stay on the cutting edge of the technology with what Kamiwaza brings while leaving the data in place. Their system understands data sovereignty, data gravity so that we're not exposing anything that shouldn't be exposed. However, we're ensuring that the things that people are accessing are accessible to all.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. I think that's really critical, is that the sovereignty and the data. Again, you're dealing with a lot of very, I guess you could say, personally identifiable information in a lot of cases in these websites. And when you're trying to access that as, again, a citizen, it can definitely be. But that I think you also hit it with that whole continuous loop, is definitely essential. Having that, as you said, that agent which doesn't get tired or that I kind of look at it as a consultant in an HPE box, I know, in a server with the GPUs and everything there to really keep going and really churning all the time because, again, these different municipalities have different areas. They're constantly creating new content that has to be updated. And really too often compliance can't be treated as a one-time project. The content is just changing daily. And without that automation, you're really back to square one every time that you publish a new page. So let's kind of talk about the outcomes. And what do customers really gain with this? We'll start with Robin on that.
Robin Braun
>> Well, I think two things. One is kind of the obvious of time, of being able to do this at a speed and efficiency level that is really unable to be achieved without AI and without automation, and being able to kind of have it there to do that. But I think it's also important to point out that with all of the whizzy technology that we're able to bring, that we maintain the human in the loop and the human in the middle for doing the actual publish back to the website. We think that's important, that the municipality owns that, that they haven't kind of lost control of their website to agentic AI. What they're using it as is a tool to be able to significantly enhance their capability and the speed at which they're able to achieve accessibility and compliance with the regulations while also being able to ensure that they can review all of the artifacts before they go up, or that they can review the code snippets and look at how they want to incorporate so that all of this sort of suggestions and changes that are created, that are recommended, that are given to them, that they get to look at and control how it gets updated to the website.
Rob Strechay
>> And Jack, how do you see this rolling for the customers?
Jack Hogan
>> Well, I mentioned earlier about the fact that this is foundational for additional projects. At SHI, we focus really heavily on humanizing AI and ensuring high ethics and compliance. And so to me, this is a foundational element that our customers can use to ensure that as they build out additional solutions that consume the information that's within their civic websites, that's within their internal intranet sites, that all of that is compliant so that the next generation of AI solutions are working off of a strong foundational base. So it's a solution for today and it's a solution to build on for tomorrow to increase that humanization of AI technology for all of US citizens.
Rob Strechay
>> Totally. I could not agree more. And I agree, Robin, with the human in the loop aspect of it being extremely important because, again, you always want the checks and balances with everything. Technology's not always perfect, but again, you want that to be perfect for those citizens. Really, it's not about checking the compliance box. It's really about inclusion, trust, and making sure digital transformation really serves everybody at the end of the day. So let's break that down and what each of you is bringing to the table. Again, let's kick it off, Robin, with what HPE is doing.
Robin Braun
>> Well, I think one of the things that we've really tried to do from an HPE perspective is building out the Unleashed ecosystem, being able to bring in partners such as Kamiwaza who have a platform that allow us to really drive and automate the 508 compliance to be able to dramatically change the experience people have with it. And it's bundled together with or runs on top of the HPE infrastructure. Being able to have that tried and true and enterprise class compute infrastructure to be able to make sure that this is always on, making sure that you have that capability there. And of course, inside there are the NVIDIA GPUs that allow us to do this with the efficiency and speed that we're so excited to be able to deliver to our customers.
Rob Strechay
>> And Jack, what is it that you're bringing to the table? And why are the customers excited?
Jack Hogan
>> Well, so SHI has really invested quite heavily into ensuring accessibility of this technology to all of our customers. We work with HPE in our AI and cyber lab. We bring the Unleash AI partners into the AI and cyber lab, run them on these NVIDIA GPUs, run them on these HPE private cloud AI systems, and validate them before we deploy them for our customers. And so our ability to really create prototypes of how this is going to work. Every government, every state entity, every local entity has a different corpus of data. And so being able to leverage SHI and our advanced integration capabilities to not only deliver a system and install it and make sure that it's up and running, but to also pre-validate that and ensure that that is going to be a successful project for our customers as they embark on their 508 compliance and other AI solutions that we're bringing to market together with HPE and the broader Unleash AI ecosystem.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. It makes total sense. Again, on things like a workhorse, a DL380, and with the NVIDIA GPUs and being able to bring that at a cost-effective and efficient to those companies. And you guys tried and true tested it in the SHI labs. I love that because 508 compliance is critical for inclusion. And now I'm really excited that there are more of an automatic cost-effective and kind of, you could say, future-proof way to get there. This is one of those excellent examples of the partnerships that can solve complex challenges in a way that no single vendor could. It's really a solution that's provided to the customers. And accessibility is too important to be left to chance, and now it doesn't have to be. And that excites me, as you can tell. It's one of the things I'm personally really adamant about. And I really appreciate you both coming on because this is something that I think is great. And I'm really excited for this, especially given that there is some deadlines coming up as well. So thanks for coming on board.
Robin Braun
>> Thanks for having us.
Jack Hogan
>> Thanks for having us.
Rob Strechay
>> And thank you for watching theCUBE, the leader in tech analysis and news. And we'll be back with more.
