theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioners Series | Stacey Moore, Flock Safety

theCUBE.net

Clips
More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Practitioners Series

Stacey Moore

Senior Vice President, IT

Flock Safety

play_circle_outline Governing the AI Surge: How IT Shapes Strategy, Security, and Compliance for Rapid Adoption

play_circle_outline Shadow AI and empowered citizen developers building prototypes across organizations

play_circle_outline CFOs shifting budgets: run, growth, and transformation allocations for technology investments

play_circle_outline Secure, Compliant Agent Deployments: Sandboxes, QA, Escorted Rollouts, and Human-in-the-Loop Oversight

play_circle_outline Cloud-native foundations meeting AI-native stack; agents layer atop Kubernetes infrastructure

Info
Transcript

Stacey Moore, Flock Safety

Stacey Moore

Senior Vice President, IT Flock Safety

In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Practitioner Series, Stacey Moore, senior vice president of IT at Flock Safety, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how the rise of agentic AI is transforming the IT leader's role from gatekeeper to enabler. Moore describes the current moment as a "waterfall effect" — a wave of disruption no IT leader can stop, but one that demands the right guardrails and best practices. Rather than suppressing shadow AI, she advocates for arming citizen developers across the organization with enterprise-grade tools, letting ... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

How should IT leaders respond to the current rapid transformation and disruption, balancing innovation and automation with appropriate guardrails, security, compliance, and outcome-focused practices? add

How should IT leaders respond to shadow IT (including shadow AI) and the rise of citizen technologists within the organization? add

How do you view the CFO’s shift to run, growth, and transformation budgets, and what are the implications for managing technology investment amid rapid data and AI-driven growth? add

Is it necessary for organizations to thoroughly address compliance, identity, and security before deploying agents, and what practical steps should they take to manage the associated risks? add

What is the reaction to the idea that cloud-native and AI-native approaches are coming together, and are there observable linkages or cultural synergies between them — where is this convergence working? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Stacey Moore, Flock Safety

search

John Furrier

>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here at our NYSE studio, of course. We have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is part of our Practitioner Series, part of the NYSE Wired program. It's a CUBE Original. It's an open network of community sharing their ideas. We've got a great lineup here. We got Stacy Moore, Senior Vice President of IT at Flock Safety. Stacy, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming in.

Stacey Moore

>> Thank you. Glad to be here.

John Furrier

>> You're part of the Mayfield Fund, having a big dinner tonight of practitioners. Shout out to Mayfield. Very active on connecting people. Obviously, they're in the VC business. They love it. And they create that network. But it's very timely for us because this Practitioner Series is one of our hottest areas because peers are talking to other peers because we're in a, I won't say therapy moment, but we're in a more of, "Hey, what are you working on?" Because there's so much change and velocity with cloud native now standardizing, cloud computing going next level. AI native, on-prem, edge, and cloud, you have this distributed computing paradigm and the software market is basically being commoditized to coding engines. So IT technology is going to be infused, and all the tools, the software applications. So you're an SVP of IT. You've been on the pre-AI wave, building systems.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> People process technology. Now we're on the real-time AIs hitting. What's your take on this? Because I think it's transforming certainly the transition. We crossed the threshold.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> What's your opinion?

Stacey Moore

>> Well, I think we're at a stage of transformation and disruption like we've never seen. I see there's a large waterfall effect happening. As an IT leader, I'm not going to stand in the way of that waterfall, but I need to work on where do we provide the right guardrails, the right best practices. Also focusing on, are we doing this for the sake of doing it or are we doing it for outcomes? And really trying to point our business leaders to leveraging the technology, go be innovative, go be disruptive, find innovative ways of automating your operations. We'll work with you on doing it in a secure, compliant, observable way. We're actually a little behind on that because the onslaught has happened so fast. So the proverbial flying the plane while it's in the air, it has never been truer.

John Furrier

>> Or run to the high ground.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Flood's coming. Well, this brings up a really interesting dynamic because, one, there's a lot of experimentation, it's well documented, but it's also success. Since January, we had been focusing on people who have had success with agents, for instance, at the NRF, which is a retail show. There's many companies that were investing last year we talked to who were seeing top line revenue growth. Not just cost cutting and cost savings. They're seeing revenue. So certainly there are examples, if done right. So I have to ask you, with IT, since you were born in the cloud as a company, the cloud era was made by shadow IT.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> As you know, we called it back then. Shadow IT was, "Hey, I don't really want to get approval. I'm just going to put my credit card down, do a prototype. No one's going to know." Experiment and then get some data, bring it to the table and say, "Hey, what if we did this?"

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> That kind of helped grow. We're kind of in a shadow AI market.

Stacey Moore

>> It's shadow IT at its finest. I think though, again, as an IT leader, I need to make a decision. Maybe the old guard would say, "We need to stop shadow IT," the traditional way of thinking. I'm actually changing my mind about that. And why wouldn't we let the technologists that are now everywhere in the organization? Technology isn't the only team that has technologists. Let the technologists go do the work. I don't want to be a bottleneck. I don't want to have to have an army of IT engineers when I have the army out there. But what I want to be able to do is give them tools that are enterprise grade, make sure that we're following best practices for security, that we're being careful about how we're sharing things. Giving them all the other risk management considerations while we can encourage them to go build and be innovative. We're becoming big fans ever more than before of the classic citizen developer, the citizen builder.

John Furrier

>> It's actually more relevant now than it was when it was coined.

Stacey Moore

>> Ever before. Yes.

John Furrier

>> It was a citizen data scientist, the citizen architect. Talk about the impact to the organization. Has that been received well by the team?

Stacey Moore

>> Oh, it's been heard loud and clear. So AI has... You obviously have the bottom up where you have a lot of really good people wanting to just be those innovators, that early adopters, they want to get their skin in the game, they want to get into it. But we actually, in our organization, we have management all the way from the top, from the founder down who are promoting and advocating for our company to be using automation, AI. So it really resonates when it comes from the top down. But also trying to encourage departments to think about it responsibly, think about it again, what's the ROI? Do things that are going to really move the needle, to point back to what you said, show me ways we can move revenue. Not just getting rid of manual work and workforce reduction or workforce redirection, I like to think, but it's more, where can AI start to uncover and expose what a human never could do? And that's where we're really trying to get into that next level. Right now, we're probably on the quick and dirty, quick wins to save. But I think the next exodus is going to be people moving out of that into... But how are we generating the top line, the revenue growth and ?

John Furrier

>> It's interesting. There's a lot of leverage in technology, and I think the top-line revenue focus is where execution is successful.

Stacey Moore

>> Absolutely.

John Furrier

>> And there's an old expression that I've said on theCUBE, I've heard from other people too. Data growth is growing at a zillion percent, but my budget isn't. Okay. Which basically says, how do I deal with all this new things? And there's not a lot of budget. Last night I was talking to a CFO and the CFO was telling me that she's now changed the budget structure. We have a run budget, a growth budget, and a transformation budget. Well, we tell the people to lower your run budget, so that's not going to grow. Actually, that's going to get smaller. However, use your growth budget to drive your run. So there's a little bit of a waterfall kind of incentive tiering. Go run your budget, do whatever you want to do, put the guardrails in place, run the business, the growth, those projects. So she's trying to put structure as a CFO. How does that resonate with you? Because you got to manage the budgets because even though the technology tsunami is coming on the AI side, that's essentially data too. It's like massive amounts of data.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Automation's good there. Check.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> What's your thoughts?

Stacey Moore

>> So what's interesting is in my position at this particular company, I report to the CFO. However, I'm not seen as... Sure, I'm a cost center to manage, but I'm also an investment center. So my prerogative is to ensure that we're investing in technology that will help us divest of costs in other areas. So it's a little bit of a balance between where are we going to invest to increase some costs, but in the end, the greater good in the aggregate, we're going to be more cost conscious.

John Furrier

>> It's interesting. The CFO's role has changed. It's funny that you mentioned that. I interviewed a CISO. They also report to the CFO.

Stacey Moore

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So what that means is it's an operational role, but it's not a finance-only role.

Stacey Moore

>> Right. A risk management, cost management, all of that. Yes.

John Furrier

>> And it's all tied together because allocating capital has been what we've heard from Jim Kavanaugh at IBM, who's been on theCUBE yesterday. He said IBM's turnaround was based on the fact that they weren't really focused on where they were directing their capital. They had outshored to India and all these money everywhere, it was fragmented. They took seven billion off and redirected that capital into buying Red Hat as an example. And then now they have capital allocation discipline. That never used to be the IT conversation. It was like, "Here's your budget. Go get some more servers or get some more cloud."

Stacey Moore

>> I couldn't agree more. And where the pricing model is going with a lot of the AI, the vendors out there is it's moving more towards a usage-based model. At the same time, I'm actually in active conversations with leaders of teams. When they're building an agent, they're hiring an agent. So that agent is going to incur some cost. It's going to generate-

John Furrier

>> Work....

Stacey Moore

>> work. And hopefully it will also be able to be attributed to generating revenue. But they're also managing that as part of their cost, like you said. Also, it takes it to the next level of, it's also another level of performance management of their team. Is your team adopting the agent? Is your team using the agent that we've invested in? Why not? So that's a performance issue on the people side. But also, are you team leader managing your agents? Do you know what your agents are accountable for? What is measured gets managed. Are you managing your agents to go drive more of your bottom line or top line growth?

John Furrier

>> Yeah. We have a Transformation Edge Series again, and you just brought up basically three departments, finance... Actually multiple departments, but just say IT is one department. Finance, IT, and HR.

Stacey Moore

>> And HR. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> You basically just said, how are we going to measure the performance of the employee or worker? Okay. So obviously that's now key. So I have to ask you, because this is a common theme we're seeing in this new era of transformation where there's real value being created. That is the teamwork at the C-suite. It wasn't just, it's moving from, "Hey, here's the staff. What's your department doing?" To, "What are we doing because it's all integrated now." What's your thoughts on this?

Stacey Moore

>> It is all integrated. I think we're seeing at the C-suite, there is a coalescence around automation and IT as a leadership point of view. And then I'm also, from an IT standpoint, we see everything. We are seeing when teams are siloing versus when teams are collaborating and sometimes we're bringing those teams together. I think we have a role to play to take that message from leadership to actually put the tactical collaboration into play. And then you'll have leaders that will start to coalesce and see how they can hand off and automate between their teams.

John Furrier

>> I like how you use the word leadership and leaders. You didn't say manager.

Stacey Moore

>> No.

John Furrier

>> Because leadership is the principle.

Stacey Moore

>> It is the principle and it requires the vision to encourage people to see the benefit for .

John Furrier

>> Okay. So about agents, because like I said earlier, the agents, the people who have done agents well are seeing rewards and they're seeing the risk reward kick in the form of revenue as well as some cost optimization. I'll see end-to-end workflows if they're well known, easy to throw agents at it. But the common thread of all these successful people that I've talked to and we've researched is they have a couple things in common and I want to get your reaction to this. They grind out the compliance, they grind out the identity, and they grind out the security. Meaning, when I say grind it out, they means they do the work. They actually get in the weeds and get that right. What's your reaction to that? And do you have any thoughts on this? Because it seems to be the prerequisite for agents because in a way they're going to be running around. You see OpenClaw out there, it's running wild. That's not very secure. Now NVIDIA comes in, "Hey, we got OpenShell." So you start to see how this goes and if you don't do your homework upfront, what are you... I think you agree, you're smiling, are you?

Stacey Moore

>> It's on so many different fronts. So tactically I'm looking at, are you using enterprise company sanctioned tools where we're on enterprise contracts. So we're not sharing our data with external parties, but also what are the agents doing? How do we build that trust? So we are keeping humans in the loop before we let them earn our trust. But we also, this is where my IT team is scrambling fast to build that compliance education, best practices. We're working, our security team is more and more prevalent. Our compliance team has a voice in this. Customer privacy, they're all, I think, moving faster, whether it's through language in our employee policies, and also how do we build tools and mechanisms so people are in a safe place. But we're then also looking at how I bring a team in to provide a support model for what other teams are off doing. We're also following a good old-fashioned DevOps model. You can go build citizen developers, we'll give you a sandbox, you can build, and it's low barrier to entry, do it. But then IT, we escort you through QA, test, and then we deploy it to production and try to keep the craziness.

John Furrier

>> It's a great point. I interviewed at AWS re:Invent two years ago, Lori Beer, who's the CIO for JP Morgan Chase. And I ask her, "Hey, so you're going to bring in generative AI?" And of course, see what she would say, right? She goes, "Oh yeah, when it's ready." I go, "What do you mean?" "Well, we're using machine learning all over the place, fraud detection, blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth." And I go, "So what is your criteria for GenAI?" She goes, "Well, we just look at it like another application review." Very pragmatic answer saying, because their bar, their cyber resilience bar is so high, and it's like, when it's ready and they're not jumping on the van that they have sandboxes probably put out there and secure. But for her production mindset, it's like, "Yeah, this is the bar."

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And so the staff just aligns with that. And it was a very easy answer. It was probably the most straightforward answers I've ever heard because she's just like, "That's the way we do it."

Stacey Moore

>> Well, I love what that answer is because AI is just the newest thing in technology, but the core principles of technology still remain the same. We still have to follow best practices around a DevOps model. We still have to make sure that we're queuing the product and it goes through the right procurement process and the right vetting process before we purchase. It's still, come with a business need, we'll qualify the vendor, make sure they meet all of our criteria, and then we contract and we buy. So it is a little disruptive in that it's not always a clear use case that people know precisely what they want. In the old-fashioned world, you knew what you wanted, you put it out to RFP for vendors to fight for your business and you picked the best one for a very clear vision. A little bit of that script has flipped though, because it's more of a, we don't know what the art of the possible is. But if we got our hands on the tools, we could proliferate more and more good ideas.

John Furrier

>> Hence your idea of letting chaos rain, rain in the chaos.

Stacey Moore

>> Chaos has to get comfortable for a while. And so we're okay with that because, again, the position from the top down is go innovate, be creative.

John Furrier

>> And you do your vetting on the tools.

Stacey Moore

>> And we are.

John Furrier

>> The tooling is the key.

Stacey Moore

>> The tooling is key, making sure we're giving the right tools to the players .

John Furrier

>> And your DevOps foundation's solid. It's funny, Linux Foundation is having their KubeCon CNC in Amsterdam this week, and I wrote a post summarizing kind of my thoughts on it. And my opening sentence was, "Cloud native, meet AI native." Almost like introducing two people because most of the cloud native folks have been grinding so hard and doing such a great job of getting everything stable. Kubernetes is rock solid. All that work is done. That's not going away. AI is on top of it. So all the agentic infrastructure, but in a way, it's almost a redo of cloud native, but they're coming together.

Stacey Moore

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> What's your reaction to that? Are you seeing linkages? Do you see cultural synergy? Where is that working? Because most people would agree, yeah, cloud native is meeting AI native, but cloud native is not going away. It's just going to expand into.

Stacey Moore

>> It's just now another layer where the agentic piece is coming right on top of it. But I think again, we have the best practice foundation already there. So we don't need to recreate the wheel in some respects. We just need to remind ourselves, just fall back into the best what we know.

John Furrier

>> It's like hire a new one. Meet the new AI native practice and then the agents are now workers, to your point about teams.

Stacey Moore

>> Yeah. Yeah.

John Furrier

>> All right. So do you sit down with HR and say, "Hey, here's how we're managing our agents so they get performance reviews"?

Stacey Moore

>> Not yet. Not yet, but I would not be surprised. And I've had a very open conversation with one of our department leads who's doing that and we've actually had that conversation of, "Wow, that's true. I've actually hired an agent. I need to think about that as the 11th person on my team."

John Furrier

>> Are they doing a good job?

Stacey Moore

>> Are they doing a good job? Are they giving me return for what I've invested in them? And are the rest of my team playing well? Are they actually working well together? And if not, that's a performance conversation that they're having, but they can measure that performance a lot easier when it's an agent because we have logging and we have observability. You can see things that agents do. You can't read humans' minds, but it's a complement to the teams they have and they are starting to act like that more and more in terms of resource management.

John Furrier

>> And we're seeing a lot more humans in front of the AI equation because agents can do all kinds of remediation and then you press a production push button. Because a lot of times they're writing agents saying, "Hey, push off the code on some of remedial tasks."

Stacey Moore

>> Yeah, that gets a little dicey. Yeah. So I think that's where we're not there yet. We're absolutely not.

John Furrier

>> Stacy, great to have you on our series. Put a plugin for Flock Security. What are you guys working on? What's some of the momentum? Give us some of the data and stats.

Stacey Moore

>> Yeah. So Flock Safety, we are a nine-year-old company just celebrating that recently. We do deliver security for both private and commercial. Our role is to create safe communities. I think we have an astounding team of very creative, talented, and mindful technologists and people who really want to make sure we're delivering a quality product to the communities we serve. And I think we take that very seriously. And it is in our best interest as well as the company's best interest to make sure we deliver.

John Furrier

>> Well, we appreciate what you guys do at Flock Safety. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Practitioner Series just getting going. It's very popular. Peers are talking to peers. They're active in communities. There's a real community developing around the next-generation IT technology leaders, which is everyone from the technologist side to the forward-deployed employee and soon to be agents. We got you covered here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. Thanks for watching.