Data Security and AI Regulation with ECI’s Rich Itri

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Rich Itri- Leading AI Regulation with ECI.

Rich Itri serves as the Chief Innovation Officer at ECI, bringing over two decades of experience in IT management within the financial services industry. His career began with a passion for technology ignited by an IBM PCjr, which has since evolved into a deep expertise in managing and implementing innovative solutions. Prior to joining ECI, Rich held several prominent roles, including Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer at PJT Partners, a boutique investment bank, and Principal and Chief Information Officer for Sky Road. His extensive background also includes CIO positions at Arrowhawk Capital Partners and Arbalet Capital Partners​​​​.

At ECI, Rich focuses on delivering secure, compliant AI solutions tailored to the financial services sector. His work involves developing strategies that align IT initiatives with business goals, driving revenue, and enhancing operational efficiencies. Rich has been instrumental in the creation of ELLA, the first secure large language model application for the alternative investment market, which addresses critical concerns around data security and compliance​​​​.

Rich is also actively involved in advisory roles and volunteers his expertise to help non-profits leverage technology. His contributions to the field are not limited to his professional roles; he frequently publishes insights on technological advancements and their impact on financial services. His recent whitepaper, “Rush to the Edge,” explores the business risks and compliance challenges posed by rapid digital transformations, offering guidance to organizations navigating these complex landscapes. Rich’s commitment to innovation and strategic IT implementation continues to shape the future of fintech​.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: So you and I are about the same age. The internet was becoming a thing in high school and college for us. What was the first computer you ever had? Hey, welcome to PayPad, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here today. I spoke with Rich Itri, the Chief Innovation Officer with ECI. They’re a provider of technology solutions covering everything from cloud solutions to cybersecurity. We talked about a variety of topics, including data security, AI, of course, and their AI product ELLA, his insight into the progression of technology in the financial world, as Well, as where it’s heading, is a fascinating listen. So without further ado, here’s Rich Itri. I’m going to launch in. Okay.

Richard Itri: Great.

Kevin Rosenquist: So you and I are about the same age. The internet was becoming a thing in high school and college for us. What was the first computer you ever had?

Richard Itri: I had an IBM PCjr. My dad brought it for me back in. It was 1984, 1985, around then. That’s what got me turned on to technology overall.

Kevin Rosenquist: I had a Commodore 64 myself.

Richard Itri: Yes. My friends had the Commodore 64. I bought one of those. You could buy them now online.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh no! kidding?

Richard Itri: Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: You got one, huh?

Richard Itri: I got one in my closet. I was playing around with it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Were you playing some of the games and stuff?

Richard Itri: Yes, playing games. Well, it was funny because when we got the IBM PCjr, the first thing my brother and I gravitated towards was games. my father was like, look, I didn’t buy this for you to play video games. I don’t want another Atari in the house. So he sent us to computer camp that following summer and we learned how to program, how to use the computer, learn more about application development and the different software that ran on those machines at the time. That was the launching-off point for me.

Kevin Rosenquist: I remember having a book of games that you could code on the Commodore and my brother would read it off to me and I would type because I was a faster typer. Then you’d go to run it at the end and it would say, error, syntax error line 155. You’d go to line 155 and you’d be like, no, it’s right.

Richard Itri: That’s the way it worked back then. I remember we had a bunch of games that for IBM PCjr and I picked up coding pretty quickly and I was able to go in and change. If I selected player two, I got an extra guy in the game. If I died, it added a guy back. My brother could never figure out why that was happening.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s pretty awesome. That’s pretty great.

Richard Itri: Useful.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’re like, hey, learn how to code if you want to figure it out.

Richard Itri: That’s it, that’s it.

Kevin Rosenquist: It sounds you were pretty hooked immediately on that. Then in college you studied finance. Did you did you study computer science or did you kind of keep it more as an interest?

Richard Itri: It wasn’t an official minor, but I’d say, a lot of computer science classes, it was always an interest. I was in the computer club, I worked in the computer lab. So for me, it was always something that I was interested in. Throughout my career, in college, it was to me was like, doing it was fun. Then I took the classes when I could. I always thought I was going to go into finance. I never thought that technology would take over my career in finance.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, ironic that you had that base, that background in computers, and the way it all worked out.

Richard Itri: Yes. When I came out of college, it was there was such a demand for people with technology skills. When I interviewed at AIG, they were like, hey, your finance. I was like, well, I also built computers pretty Well. It was in the investment accounting group, at the job it was in the technology team, and I was able to answer, I think, more questions than the person that was in the existing role around technology. So I was hired right away. I think a lot of doors opened up for me after that because of technology.

Kevin Rosenquist: But were you an analyst when you came out, a financial analyst?

Richard Itri: Yes, a financial analyst, working in the investment accounting technology group.

Kevin Rosenquist: Got it. The term fintech, it was very new at that point. Mostly, it was about the back-end technology. Right?

Richard Itri: Yes. I think to me too, fintech was the world I was living in. Back then, it was so narrow-minded, like, this is what you and I live every day, this is what fintech is. I think over the years it’s evolved into so much more.

Kevin Rosenquist: And there are even podcasts about it.

Richard Itri: It is. I mean, God! BSB that, 25, 27 years ago, I probably would have said like, what is that?

Kevin Rosenquist: A pod, what now?

Richard Itri: Yes. The industry has evolved quite a bit since then. I was telling some of my background the other day and I was like, wow, I graduated college in 97. So I’ve been doing this for almost 27 years, but it feels like yesterday. But I think with the way that we’ve been working with technology within finance, I think people are under the impression that finance lags sometimes from an innovation perspective. But finance is always at the cutting edge on how you can leverage that technology and secure, compliant way. I feel that journey has been so fast over the last 27 years, like on a roller coaster.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think a lot of times people feel like, when they log into their bank, it’s like, oh, this is sort of antiquated. So I think the only thing they see from the financial perspective is, is that. That’s probably why they think that the finance industry is behind.

Richard Itri: Yes. But I think when you also work on the buy side, I’ve worked most of my career, trading, portfolio management, and your risk, those industries have evolved. I remember coming out of school and working at AIG and going over to the trading floor every now and then and seeing the technology they use versus what is used today. It’s 100% changed. The ability to execute trades so quickly, algorithms that run, all the college kids coming out now are almost programmers. I see that quite a bit through our client base as well, where they’re coming out with pretty advanced technology skills. They get exposed to it at a very young age now, carry that through college along with the finance background.

Kevin Rosenquist: What did fintech mean to you when you first got out of college? What kind of technology were you working on?

Richard Itri: were running basic. At that time, I remember we had upgraded some of the computers in 97 to Windows 95. That was like, whoa. It was still a little buggy, here or there. I think that was one of the biggest things that I remember was a lot of the applications were very problematic, There were a lot of memory issues back then. Computers were much smaller. The software wasn’t tested the way it is tested today. There was a lot of innovation going on. So things were being deployed faster than you would have liked. So, so many little problems. I feel like I was a firefighter back then. We would run to go upload date data and it would take two hours to upload filings and other stuff. We would pray that the internet connection didn’t go down, the program didn’t crash, or there wasn’t some bad bit in the file that we didn’t see or clean up. I mean, it was so many things back then. Now, I think we take for granted where things have progressed. You could get a Starlink dish with 300 megs upside down. Back then you had a dial-up modem and you were lucky that you could push a small file across it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, totally. My wife and I talk all the time. We have a three-year-old, and I think about my three-year-old, and he’s never gonna understand the dee doo dee doo. I’m speaking to the internet, and now being able to watch pretty much whatever he wants at any time. It changed quite a bit, no doubt.

Richard Itri: Now it’s a different world. I remember listening to a CNBC analyst, one day, saying that this internet thing was never going to take hold because it was going to be too expensive, that would be too premium of a product, and people wouldn’t want to buy it. I remember thinking to myself, I’m making no money right now. I’m living at home and I’m spending whatever disposable income I have on an internet connection, Prodigy or EarthLink or whoever I was using back then. I’m like, this guy has no idea. He’s totally missing the boat.

Kevin Rosenquist: Totally.

Richard Itri: Everyone wants the internet.

Kevin Rosenquist: Not a great prediction on his part.

Richard Itri: Definitely, not a great prediction.

Kevin Rosenquist: Was there a particular technological advancement that you’ve kind of felt was a game changer and changed fintech that it sort of turned?

Richard Itri: It’s hard, I’d say, to pin one thing. I think in the buy side and in the financial service space where I’ve kind of lived a lot of my career, bandwidth and the accessibility to bandwidth, being able to co-host things next to the exchange, I felt was a real game changer. It kind of leveled the playing field for smaller hedge funds, and asset managers, where that technology had only been accessible to the big boys. Then when bandwidth became pretty prevalent in the industry, high-speed bandwidth and being able to co-host things next to the exchange, right next to the larger organizations, I think, opened things up. For the asset management industry, the smaller players in the space, I think the cloud has had a significant impact as well. I remember when were spinning up SQL databases and it would take us a week to get all the licensing installed and get the machines configured and get everything stood up so you could actually start pumping data in there. Now I can go into Azure and probably in under five minutes, I could have an Azure-managed SQL instance up and running connected to Azure’s machine learning and running that against my data. If I don’t like it, I can turn it off and that’s it. I paid for what I use. Back then, the investment in technology was so high. You had the barrier to entry was pretty big. That’s lowered now. I think that’s leveled the playing field quite a bit. That’s why you also see a lot of innovation in the fintech space itself, whether that be private wealth management other areas of fintech where their payments, and other areas because you can build these applications now without the same overhead that once needed.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, no doubt, no doubt. All that stuff was so much more expensive before. Also, what about when things like PayPal became a thing? I mean, obviously people had to figure out how to trust that process and all that. So that’s always part of it. But Do you remember how big of an impact that had on people?

Richard Itri: I remember it having an impact on my life overall when people started using it more and rather than exchanging cash, you were using PayPal. Now it’s Venmo, Zelle, and other tools. But I think in the beginning, like everyone else, I was, especially, being a technologist, I was like, this is scary. I don’t know if I want to link this to my bank account. This could easily be compromised. There’s too much risk here. I’ll give you cash if we go out to dinner, you don’t need to use PayPal. If you’re using your credit card online, I think it took a lot of comfort for a number of years to be able for people to do that.

Kevin Rosenquist: I remember, when I started messing around with eBay is kind of when I was like, well, I guess I better get PayPal, and I didn’t have a lot of money then, so I couldn’t afford to lose it.

Richard Itri: I know, I know. I think eBay’s drove a lot of people right to have PayPal. That was the primary opinion method.

Kevin Rosenquist: So now you’re with ECI, a global technology solutions provider, and you guys do a lot of different stuff from cybersecurity to managing IT and cloud strategy. Talk a little bit about what your kind of bread and butter is as far as your role at ECI and what you think is the most valuable thing you guys do.

Richard Itri: Sure. So I spent my career on the other side of the fence. So not on the provider side, but working at various asset managers, and financial service companies. So joining ECI, the goal there was to bring that kind of experience as a client to the table make sure that we’re evolving the product offerings in alignment with the market because so much is changing. Cloud is a commodity now. Everyone services cloud, how can we differentiate ourselves in the financial service space, what are the additive’s offerings that are needed in the marketplace today? So it’s not about moving your assets to the cloud, but how can you leverage the cloud to its fullest from a cost perspective as well as helping deliver alpha to the organization and reduce risk, and create operational efficiency. I spent a lot of time advising clients as well. So trying to bring all the pain of those 27 years I’ve been in the industry to help mentor our clients and help them get strategic around it and be more business aligned.

Richard Itri: I think today’s IT professional needs to truly understand their business. That’s something I always prided myself on in terms of getting very close to the business and making sure that I was able to align what were doing from a technology perspective with the overall goals of the business. That’s what we’re trying to do as an organization. I think we’ve invested a lot over the last several years in becoming a full-stack enterprise IT provider. So not kind of your nuts and bolts like cloud and infrastructure and networking and help desk, but cyber, risk, digital solutions with data and AI and bringing that together into one offering. So clients have one-stop shop to go to for those types of things. I think it’s important, especially, as things AI evolve, and I’m sure we’ll talk about AI today because That’s a hot topic.

Kevin Rosenquist: Why wouldn’t we?

Richard Itri: Financial services security and compliance, the regulatory environment plays such a huge role in everything you do from a technology perspective. Having that integrated across the stack is very important and is the reason why we jumped into the AI space several months back because we needed, our clients need it, I should say, the opportunity to leverage AI in a secure, compliant way.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, that’s one of the biggest I think fears for businesses and everyday people is the security of their data, of AI in general. I mean, that’s a pretty significant talking point.

Richard Itri: Yes. When I chatGPT kind of hit the market, and it took me by storm. I was talking with a lot of former colleagues and peers and they were like, you’re rich, so I’m going to block you. I’m like, that’s a bad idea. They’re like, why? I’m like, come on, we all know our users are like water. They find the path of least resistance all the time. So whether you block it or not, I have the chatGPT app on my phone. I have filled it out on my phone. That technology is there. They’re going to type the data in. So you have to figure out a way to enable it in a secure, compliant way. It makes them want to use your tool, not go off the reservation. I think that to me it is the more modern way of kind of thinking about some of this in today’s environment. Because users are our users in our environment. They are going to find a way to use it if they think it’s valuable.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely.

Richard Itri: And then y your data out there. Right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. I’m very interested in talking about ELLA which the ECI website states is the first secure large language model application for the Alternative Investment Market and other highly regulated industries. We talked about data security being a huge concern for people these days. maybe nowhere more than finance is. So this was a pretty daunting task, I would imagine, developing an LLM for the finance sector.

Richard Itri: It was. After I’d gotten off the phone, I had a bunch of those conversations with former peers. I kind of put my CIO hat on and said, look, if I was going to enable this in an organization, what would my CCO be banging on my door about? I started with some of the key pillars. Data loss, how can we prevent data loss? How can I use my data to let it stay within my four walls? How can I use these models like ChatGPT? But how to use them in a secure way without it learning like any of the other kinds of open-source models? How can I look at things as hallucinations? Because one of the biggest concerns that I would have is if I’m using this for business purposes, how do I know the answer is right? So we took some of those concepts and said, if we’re going to build something, let’s build that, let’s build the secure container. Because there’s so much investment going on around models. Now you have to think a lot of money into the innovation around it.

Richard Itri: And my view is that there’s so much innovation going on there. I want to be able to take that and put it in my secure, compliant container. I don’t want to invest in building models. I want to invest in building the container that allows you to use that. That was the original premise behind ELLA. We wanted you to be able to bring your own data, and we also wanted to be able to provide surveillance, we knew the regulators at some point were going to say, you’re using this to invest in markets, you’re using this to interact with investors. You need to have surveillance around. At some point, they’re going to say that explicitly. They’ve said it in a roundabout way, up until now. So we took those concepts and said, this is going to be our platform, and went ahead and built ELLA and now we have ELLA Plus which is a more advanced version of ELLA that does a little more automation around some of the tasks that we’re seeing clients wanting to use the original version of ELLA for.

Kevin Rosenquist: You kind of touched on the regulation, and stuff like that. The fact that we’re not 100% sure what AI regulation is going to look like. It’s coming, but we don’t know what it’s going to look like. Is it hard to build a product like this, not knowing where it’s going to go, especially, being in the finance world?

Richard Itri: It was. But I think with those basic pillars, we know already what the regulators want, from a more broader data security, and cyber security perspective and those principles carry over to whatever. Because what I try and tell people too is that AI leveraging LLMs is no different than implementing another platform. You want to follow those same best practices when implementing that platform in AI. I think we all get excited, including myself, about the power of AI, and what LLMs can do. We almost sometimes kind of jump ahead without thinking about, hey, let’s follow best practices, let’s develop an MVP, let’s stay aligned with what we would do and what the regulators expect us in terms of how we want to protect client data, how we monitor, what we’re doing, what guardrails we put in place around that. so it wasn’t easy. But I think carrying those principles over where we were able to get, pretty close to what eventually the regulators will come out with some guidance probably later this year around how appropriate use for AI.

Kevin Rosenquist: You discussed some of the security and compliance hurdles with Ella, that typical LLMs may not address or might not be concerned about.

Richard Itri: Well, I think the first is around you don’t want to be putting your data in out there on open source models. There were a lot of companies early on that were excited about ChatGPT and OpenAI and went to the website and uploaded data, only to find out later on, it learns the models. So you can go in and now and ask questions. We all know those companies, I won’t name them here on the podcast. I don’t want to get in trouble. But I think quickly, people realized like, whoa, this is scary. And we want to use this stuff but we can’t use the open-source technology. How do we use it in a secure way with our data? I think that was the problem that we focused on solving by providing some surveillance as well, so we have the ability to log everything that you’re using the LLM for and all the underlying artifacts or content that you use. So if you ask a question about a document, we have where it was found in the document and what document it was. We save that in posterity so that if you ever had to go back and answer a question, how did I get to this answer? You have that. Some of the other things that we spent time building around were hallucinations. That is not taking mushrooms. But rather like the LLM, LLMs are designed to always return an answer.

Richard Itri: The answer may not be right. They want to give you an answerback. So you want to know the strength of that answer whether or not that answer was 100% accurate. So we added functionality where we could tell you if we feel the answer is weak and where the answer came from. So you know, hey, let me go look at this. I’ll wait a change from this document. Well, some of this data was buried in the table, so it didn’t grab all the information it needed to, and let me go back and do this myself. The old school way versus using the LLM for, I think, those were important pieces that we had to build in to make clients feel comfortable using the tools, and then data loss is important. So we wanted the ability to be able to put some additional DLP rules on top of whatever data you were going to bring into the lab. You may want to share salary data that you want to share with another colleague, but you don’t want them to see who’s making what. We want to be able to mask certain things. So we wanted to add some features there as well, so that people felt comfortable using the data, and control it once it got into that sandbox.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, probably a lot of trial and error, I would imagine, of or at least of testing out and being like, oh no, we don’t want that. We better figure out a way.

Richard Itri: It was. Although I have to say, our QA team on the development side was very excited about this project. I think we had a lot of people lining up to work on ELLA within the organization.

Kevin Rosenquist: Was there pushback? Were there people who were very nervous about this? I’d imagine not everyone was like, all gung ho, let’s do it.

Richard Itri: Yes. There’s a lot of skeptics around it. We still have skeptics around it because we’re still in our very early phases. We have a lot of users on the platform now, and we’ve launched some newer versions of it. We have a lot of good momentum around some use cases where we’re building out, but we’re five months into the journey and there’s still a lot more to be had and I think you’re always going to have skeptics around new products and solutions. I think you have people weary of is this going to take, is this here to stay?

Kevin Rosenquist: Like CNBC anchor it is.

Richard Itri: This is here to stay whether it’s in the form it is today or it’s certainly evolving. But this technology is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s not going anywhere.

Richard Itri: I use ELLA a lot in my day to day. I also use Microsoft Copilot. We do a lot of work with Microsoft around the copilot product. I was telling someone the other day, if you took those tools away from me, I would be pretty upset. I mean, it summarizes content for me quickly. I send a lot of stuff out to clients around industry trends and things like that. I read a ton of articles, and being able to summarize that stuff for me because it’s insanely so much time. So I go in and clean it up and I send it out so that they don’t have to do any work. But it helps.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think I have ChatGPT open every day. I have a window on one of my monitors here with ChatGPT on it. I use it or Claude, I’ve been messing around with Claude lately. You’re right. If that went away all of a sudden, I’d be like, I have to start doing this myself.

Richard Itri: You’d be annoyed. Like, who took this away? Right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, it’s a time saver. No doubt. No doubt. In the broader sense of AI technology, what are you most excited about to see what can happen with it, what it can do?

Richard Itri: I think there are so much that could be done to automate a lot of the tasks that people spend so much time on. The other value is unstructured data for a long time. There’s always been this kind of thing that no one wanted to touch. As a former CIO, someone like Rich, I got all these PDFs, can you help me, read them, or pull some data from them? I’m like, so I go talk with the trading guy. I’d rather go work on something else. That’s very hard, very tedious. There weren’t a lot of good tools. These LLM models now are amazing at reading large amounts of unstructured data thousands of we have clients who trade things mortgages, and they may have information on some of the underlying mortgages and the terms in there. But to go through all of those, there are tens of, thousands of mortgages in these tranches. So we’re able to go through and read those documents, summarize where there might be different terms, different outs, and where rates move. It’s super powerful.

Richard Itri: To be able to do that. That to me is where a lot of the value add comes in these tools being able to rip through all of that unstructured data and quickly compare and analyze. That’s going to be a huge time savings for people. The other thing I do a lot of which I think is, is your work across industries is meetings. How many of us are double-booked, triple-booked on meetings? You want to be able to attend them all, but you can’t. You don’t want to always have people reschedule. You can record meetings and summarize them now in a very concise way. It’s it saves so much time. I think it’ll give time back to people to focus on the higher-end tasks that they need to do. I don’t think it’s at the point where it’s going to replace jobs, right, in a very significant way. But I think it’ll make people’s work lives a lot easier over the next 18, or 24 months.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. That would be great even in personal life to take away some of the mundane sort of busy work tasks that everybody has in their lives.

Richard Itri: Yes. Now I think it’s gonna be very helpful in that regard. So the great and there’s so much innovation coming out as well. Now, I think the open-source community has been driving towards new models and new solutions. You go to websites, Hugging Face and every day there’s something new out there, text to image, image to text and that’s why the secure container concepts of being able to take those, put them in, test them, it works. Let me license it. Now I use it or it didn’t work quite the way I wanted to. I’ll try something else. That adds a lot of value. As this innovation is happening, you can quickly try it and see if it works, if you can leverage it in your organization, and move forward you’re not having to build those things anymore. I think being able to build agents that execute tasks to be able to do those things is going to become very commonplace over the next year, I feel.

Kevin Rosenquist: I would agree. I would agree with that.

Richard Itri: I mean, you see that banking apps have changed, the chatbots, I would never use a chatbot up until this year because I thought chatbots were terrible.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s true.

Richard Itri: They would actually answer questions for you.

Kevin Rosenquist: They were totally useless before.

Richard Itri: They were totally useless and now these large language models are super powerful. They understand the entire English language. You get asked it any question you want in any language. It’s super powerful. I think we’re in a very exciting time. The other thing I see is the business has never been more engaged around a piece of technology than they are around AI. I know so many senior business leaders that are driving CTOs and CIOs to develop programs around AI. I’ve been doing this for a while. As we mentioned earlier, I haven’t seen a piece of technology that the business has been that engaged in.

Kevin Rosenquist: Not even the internet? Then I guess, you were in the corporate world at the very beginning.

Richard Itri: But I think people were always a little standoffish with the internet and whether it was going to work or not. Then I think once it kind of established a footing, it was kind of like, oh what can we invest in? He answered it and make money less around like, what it can do from an innovation perspective.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. It’s more about tools. That was maybe more about investment.

Richard Itri: Yes, it was more about investment. At least that was my exposure to it. But I think here I mean it’s we see a lot of engagement from the business which has actually been good because now it allows you to have that more strategic conversation around it more broadly and rethink all of your business processes through a fresh lens. I think oftentimes we all get heads down in our work and we never kind of say, hey is there a better way to do this? And the natural language element of these albums and being able to ask the question and get an answer is what I think makes it very exciting and attractive to everyone. Is when we’re doing a lot of work now around structured data as Well,. So being able to take these lessons and apply them to structured data sets database tables, Excel structured Excel files and things that. Because imagine being able to go in and say, hey, can you tell me what my performance has been for my long, short Asia strategy over the last six months? Can you tell me what my performance would have been if I invested in this instead of that? Being able to get those answers by asking those questions versus.

Kevin Rosenquist: Setting Up a bunch of formulas and formulas.

Richard Itri: Dragging and dropping, is this the right table? Is it not? So I think to me, that’s the next evolution. Where we’re spending a lot of time working out solutions around that as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: So what scares you the most? What are you most worried about when it comes to AI? Oh, God.

Richard Itri: Oh, God. Well, it scares me. I think from a business perspective, it’s kind of what I mentioned earlier. People jumping the gun. There’s a lot of situations we go into where people started using it already and not thinking through the right process right around securing data. How are you going to use these tools? so many people jumped into using some of the open source tools and thought they were okay. So kind of getting everyone to kind of think again, the way that we would deploy normal it, develop out the proof of concept and MVP and then building from there I think more broadly data security, I think even before I it was something that always concerned me. Again, people jumping to wanting to use AI and forgetting right around all the things they’ve done around data security already and not letting that letting that be an integrated solution and not not jumping the gun. Because, look you expose something to the internet now it’s going to be consumed that in, in an instance. So data security has never been more important. behind that is data quality. You still have to spend time curating data you can’t forget about good data hygiene as well.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. Yes. I mean, there’s obviously a whole plethora of concerns when it comes to this. We could have a whole series of podcasts on that.

Richard Itri: Yes. It taking over the world.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure, Absolutely.

Richard Itri: I think that we’re not quite there yet. I mean we can’t make the processors fast enough. But there is some things that scare me around AI or we away from financial services. Some of the things you can do with images and false flags, deepfakes. That stuff is pretty scary. It’s real and it’s very hard to manage. Social engineering and cyber risk was a problem to begin with. These tools make it so much more difficult now. I mean, being able to fake voices and images and hear it with the election coming up deep fakes. I mean, there’s so much that to, to be concerned about around some of these tools. That’s why when people ask about regulation, I’m actually all for it. I think there needs to be some regulation around what’s acceptable use of it and some strict enforcement around it, because it could be weaponized very easily. people get away with things right now. And look, there’s plagiarism and everything else that where we’re dealing with around this.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely. So that was going to be one of my next questions about your favorite in favor of regulation. What needs to happen in order to maintain safety? Does that start with regulation?

Richard Itri: I think so I think you need the key players in the space to own up to the fact that regulation is needed and I think they have a social and moral responsibility to, to do that. We all know as technologists that it’s needed. I don’t think that you can talk to any technology. As to who’s being true to themselves and and that that they wouldn’t admit that some type of regulation is is needed, especially those of us who live in this kind of day to day and understand the risks that it can create. Uh, certainly it’s it’s needed and it was needed, ahead of this. so I generally feel that we’re behind in putting some parameters around it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. It’s interesting because I feel for the most part, us humans are pretty trusting of the entities that handle our data. Now, I know there’s there’s lots of there’s lots of conspiracy theories and a lot of people who are maybe a little bit more nervous than others. I mean, I admit I don’t I don’t read the fine print when I’m signing up for something I scroll, I scroll through, I hit a hit. Agree. I can get to playing whatever dumb game I downloaded on my phone. I don’t. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t read it and I don’t know. Are we naive for not being more diligent?

Richard Itri: I think so, I think we’re all guilty of that. I, I take a risk based approach. So if I’m downloading a game like, okay, so where are you going to find out that I to play golf when I’m traveling between New York and Dallas, hat is that like? but that’s a good point. But when it’s other types of things, it’s like, wow, whoa, wait a second. Like, what am I going to put here? you tend to be a little more judgmental of like, personal PII type information. but even that, someone being able to see that, I to play, golf games on my phone or things that that is still a little much like, ah should they be able to see that? And should I have to go through so many steps for them not to be able to see that? That’s why. Isn’t that my default? Why isn’t that my privacy? It’s it’s hard these days. So much of our information is out there. how many people when you go to a website they get the little you get the little banner allowed cookies? How many people actually go through and only click essential, Because you’re you’re going there. You want to look at the thing you want to look at. Get this message box out of my face.

Kevin Rosenquist: And that’s how they agree, agree, agree.

Richard Itri: Oh, okay. My trip to blah blah is going to go you’re trying to get to the thing and they’re putting this something in their way. They know you’re not going to take the time to do it So or they put it at the bottom of the screen so you can’t see it.

Kevin Rosenquist: So I know cyber security is one of those industries that is that needs good people right now. I’ve, I’ve been reading about how it’s the, there’s it’s light on it and it’s I’m sure with, with the fact that it’s moving so fast doesn’t help. But as a general rule, do you, do you feel our data out there is, is pretty, pretty secure? I mean, do you think most most companies are doing the right thing, or do you think it’s still kind of the Wild West out there?

Richard Itri: It’s a wild West., I do think look, the companies come from a place of profit. so they’re going to use the data in a way that they feel is the most profitable for them and, and their organizations. If they can get their hands on information that’s available through, third party data sources or whatever it is, they’re going to do that, and use it. I think most firms want to secure their data. I think they let other things get in the way. So usability being one of them, I used to call it the trifecta. How do you provide the users with the functionality they’re asking for. How do you secure it and deliver it in a mobile way? Very hard right? To do all three. You got to give something up, and usually you want to satisfy the people at the top of the triangle. so you’re giving something up on, on the security side to be able to do that. As a result you’re pretty data at at risk., and so it’s it’s a challenging fight. It’s a challenge. I think you have a balance on what you can invest in, right, in terms of security and your data security versus I and other functionality the business wants you to deliver.

Richard Itri: You have you strike a balance. I kind of stress the clients. I call it know your data, the who, what, where, when, why around data. It putting good permissions around information. Part of what we do is our kind of AI onboarding initiative is exactly that. Because if you don’t build that right foundation, AI makes it so much easier to access stuff. Really, if you’re if you have employees who could access any files that they have access to, they didn’t even realize you could ask the LLMS questions around compensation for other people in the organization, and they may not have known they had access to it, but now they do. because the lab can find it. So around putting good data security in place and then governance and controls to make sure you maintain it, that’s the other problem I see is companies. spent so much money kind of cleaning things up and investing in technology to secure data, and then they go on to the next project. It’s like, whoa, whoa, wait. It’s everything around. That data is always changing. You need good controls and governance around maintaining this kind of secure posture. You spend all this time building.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good point too. the actual maintenance of what you what you spent the time and money on. It’s not a, it’s not a set and forget kind of thing. Yes.

Richard Itri: It’s look it’s not sexy work You know everyone wants to work on AI projects, but no one wants to work on data security. The ones who do that, it’s hard to find you mentioned it cyber such. It’s been very hot for the last look seven years. But there’s still a shortage of talent, especially in certain areas that require a level of sophistication that only experience can bring. Uh it’s it’s still tough. It’s it’s tough.

Kevin Rosenquist: So all you youngsters out there listening go into cybersecurity.

Richard Itri: They need that guy. Yes. I tell my son that all the time. So.

Kevin Rosenquist: Me too. Mine’s three. But I tell him that all the time. Either that or left handed pitcher. Those are the two things that I wanted.

Richard Itri: Oh, look that’s a little more fun.

Kevin Rosenquist: A little bit touch. A touch. Well, Rich, thanks for being here. Uh, the website is eci. Com and it was great talking to you. I appreciate your time.

Richard Itri: Chadwick. Thank you. I appreciate the conversation today. I enjoyed it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Me too. Thank you very much. Thanks.