Connecting Government Virtually with Microsoft Teams
Tune into this webinar to hear from Microsoft’s Federal CTO Susie Adams discuss how Microsoft Federal adapted Microsoft Teams to the rapidly changing remote work policies in government in spring 2020.
Meg:
Welcome to Dcode’s’ virtual session. It is nice to have our community here and on board. If you have not been in and around Dcode, we are the leader in driving dual use technology and innovation into the federal marketplace. Our mission is to help the government through technology, whether that’s the defense department, civilian agencies, or the IC, get access to the best tech.
As part of that, we have an amazing community and every day we’re connecting tech with our amazing partners, like Microsoft and the government, to really make a difference. Since COVID started, since the pandemic started, we’ve been hosting these live virtual sessions across our community on a wide variety of topics that are on people’s minds. This discussion and all of our discussions are going to be archived on our website at dcode.co/virtual. And again, I know I said this once, but we will take questions. We’ll get to as many questions as we can and drop those in the chat.
And today it is my honor to introduce Susie Adams. Susie serves as the Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft’s Federal Government Business, where she oversees and implements the technology strategy of Microsoft’s defense department, civilian and intelligence community businesses. She’s coming to us from her house in Annapolis with her three dogs. Susie, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Meg:
First hard-hitting question, how have you been dealing personally with the pandemic? You’re obviously at your home in Annapolis. How’s it going?
Susie:
From a work perspective, it’s pretty much business as usual for me. We’ve been working at home, Microsoft has, for years, almost since I joined Microsoft a little over 20 years ago. We typically don’t really have offices. And right now, even before the pandemic, it’s really touchdown space for most of the field, not just in the federal government, the people that serve the federal government like I do, but globally, actually, very few people have offices. We go where the customers are, we meet the customers at their locations, and then if we need to, we bring customers to ours. But it’s all basically, “What do you need to do today? Can you do things virtual? Can you actually go on site?” The biggest difference probably is I really haven’t driven my car or it seems like I don’t drive very much. Other than that, considering if you live in this region, you know exactly how bad that can be, commuting into the DC region. That’s probably the biggest change for me.
Meg:
I drive a stick and it’s always like, “Is this like riding a bike? Am I going to remember how to do this again?” I definitely feel you there. Leadership has been one of the themes that we’ve talked about over the course of these virtual sessions and in this pandemic. Is there any tips and tricks, or anything you’ve learned over the past few months that our community can draw on as far as how to make that virtual work environment great, better and how to keep engaged?
Susie:
I think one of the things that we’ve realized is that you really need to stay connected and do a lot more personal reach out than maybe you have before. And so, really that’s maybe turn on your camera a couple of times even when you’re not comfortable, have some virtual happy hours and try to make all that interaction… Actually, put a lot more time into it. And I think that’s the biggest part of it. Instead of just jumping on a phone call to talk over the particular issue or topic, maybe jump on just to catch up and have that interaction a little bit, and share some of the things that are going on in your life, both professionally and not professionally.
I think that’s really helped us. I don’t think we got that right at first. Everybody would jump on, it was business as usual. And then we all started realizing, “There’s a baby crying in the background. There’s three dogs barking,” like in my situation. Or you have contractors working outside, magically the day that you need to be on camera. Those types of things I think are the things that… It’s been a long time now, since March. I think we’re all getting used to it. I think it’ll be interesting coming out of it and what the new normal will be, what the new way to work will be.
Meg:
This is a question that came to us from the chat. Quick plug, if you have questions, do throw them into the chat. But what changes are being explored and implemented to make Microsoft Teams even more compatible in the virtual telework environment? Especially on the federal government side.
Susie:
I’m not sure what is more compatible. Today, almost all federal agencies are using Teams in some way, shape or form. And in fact, when COVID hit, some agencies that really hadn’t deployed it, they were still on Skype, and transitioned very quickly to Teams. And in fact, Department of Defense rolled Teams out across the entire Department of Defense to be able to communicate in our commercial cloud, which we thought was pretty unprecedented. We didn’t really expect that ask. And so I think some of the challenges that we have seen are where agencies, because of in the civilian space, the trusted internet connection, people working at home had to come through a VPN tunnel and they didn’t have enough bandwidth to actually support everybody working at home. Like a Snowmageddon, if you go back in time, when everybody was working at home in the DC region, and we had the same problem.
Meg:
I was in the government at the time.
Susie:
And with DHS to try to figure out with Take 3.0, how could we actually help agencies feel more comfortable by connecting directly to Office 365 from their homes to the internet without having to traverse that. And so I think some folks did implement that in cases where they were having challenges. I’d love to know, for the person who asked that question, I’d love to learn more about the compatibility issues you’re having, because if there are some out there that we don’t know about, and perhaps I’m just not aware of it, but if you let me know, I will make sure that we address it because that would be a big deal.
Meg:
Absolutely. If you asked that question, feel free to ping and we’ll get some more information there. You talked about the Department of Defense quickly moving from Skype to Teams. What other challenges has the pandemic stressed in the US government that emerging tech is waiting and ready on call to help solve?
Susie:
Well, obviously it was the work from home thing first. How do we get everybody up and working? What do we even do? How do we do this? Then we shifted into a cybersecurity challenge. How do I do this securely? And now where zero trust was this thing kind of sitting over in the corner, where everybody was like, “That’s a bridge too far. I don’t want to think about zero trust now.” I think everybody, it’s become top of mind for all agencies across the board. How do we quickly implement some zero trust technologies, or really get a zero trust mindset, because it’s really not a package or a product you can buy. It’s a maturity model to be honest. And so how do we actually do this in the cloud world and manage our hybrid world and secure in a space where everything is virtual now?
It’s a virtual enterprise that spans multiple clouds. It expands on premise, it includes people’s homes. It’s such a wide enterprise that people have to protect now. How do we actually do that? And so that then shifted once everybody was working at home. We’re going to shift and focus on that. And now we’re starting to get questions about, “Well, what are we going to do when we return to work?” It’s really a respond, recover and then reimagine. And so where we were talking about modernizing systems, I think people are now trying to reimagine how they serve their constituents. How do we do things? How do we help folks with chatbots? A lot of work with chatbots, especially around COVID itself, how do we use that type of technology to let people ask questions, but more importantly to check in.
As agencies go back to work, we’ve actually built a solution that many customers, we got deployed just on top of Dynamics and Office 365, that gives them tools to allow them to build their own back to work. You check-in like at Microsoft, you have to go to an app, you have to check in and ask you questions before you can gain access to a building. And you got to do that daily. And then where you sit, it tells you where you can sit. It tells you where the cleaning stations are, where there’s hand sanitizer. Because it’s a whole new norm. It tells you who else is in the building and then it alerts you… Contact tracing is too big of a word, but it helps your agency, or can help your agency, determine how many people actually have this in the agency.
Should we be worried about this? Did they come in the office two weeks before? Where were they? Who was in the office at the time that they were there? So you can alert them, even if the other people didn’t know. And so those are the types of solutions now that we’re starting to see people look into realizing that, while it might not be here for this region anytime soon, there’s going to come a day where we have to go back to work or they want people to go back to work. And so how do you do that? And then the whole reimagine piece. I just think people are looking so differently at the whole work environment, what does this mean? Do we even need the space anymore? Should people be working from home all the time? And so I think we’re seeing a lot of emphasis being put into modernizing their systems to be able to support that remote environment.
Meg:
And it’s incredible in the things that we’ve seen, on the Dcode side is, how different every agency has handled it, was already postured. We talked with deputy administrator Alison Fahrenheit Bergatti, maybe it was a month ago, even now. And GSA has been very telework forward and very telework enabled for a long time, since they did their revamp of their 18F location. And we also talked with the CISO over at DHS and we talked a lot about tech and what those implications are. And the fact that both of those people, in particular, were talking to the forward gleaners, but the fact that both of those people had some foresight, you could say, but also had some funding and had some plans in place.
Susie:
Funding’s important.
Meg:
It does really have to fall in place, and in order to get it right, and in order to actually be able to move the needle when something like this happens.
Susie:
I agree. Funding’s important.
Meg:
Are there places that you’ve seen that are on more of the edge when they’re looking at these emerging technologies or even re-imagining what work looks like when everybody comes back to the office?
Susie:
I think all agencies are looking at it right now. We haven’t talked to one that hasn’t thought about… How do I deliver something differently? How do [inaudible 00:14:43] citizen, do it from home? And then how do I automate some of these very manual tasks where people had to be in the office, because there’s nobody in the office, so how do you actually automate this? And that’s where we’re seeing a lot of RPA types of apps and automation types of apps, look good solutions where they can quickly stand something up and get that out there in front of an existing maybe legacy system. They’re not ripping and replacing, they’re putting a new veneer on top of it to try to automate some of that. [inaudible 00:15:19] where there are our phone. There’s a whole host of things that I think people are looking at across the board that are not expensive.
It’s just re-imagining how you’re delivering services. I think it’s a huge catalyst. We have for years now talked about we’re going to go in and we’re going to modernize the government. And this is a huge catalyst that I think is pushing everybody over that edge, realizing that they have to modernize to be able to live in this new world. And it will be a hybrid work world, where some people are in the office, some people are at home.
Even at Microsoft, think about how many people are working from home globally, but yet we’re still meeting with our customers. Whether the customer uses Zoom or uses Teams, I can’t tell you how many different tools I’ve used to communicate with people. I’ve downloaded some blue jeans, I have 10 of them on my laptop right now, and we’re making it work. And so I think that’s a big part of the piece of this, is everybody’s having to get a little bit out of their comfort zone and try new things. Whereas before people might have shied away, now they’re kind of like, “Gosh, I’ve really got to do that, or I’m not going to get paid.”
Meg:
And in the vein of trying new things, I know we have some of the more sexy AI, ML, data analytics. You talked about process automation. What are you most excited about in some of these hot topics in the government right now?
Susie:
I think if you look at artificial intelligence, and where industry’s trying to go with it and where government was, I think government’s now starting to realize that artificial intelligence isn’t that thing in a science fiction movie, we’re not there. It’s actually all about augmenting human capability and improving it. Helping you do your job more effectively. I think a lot of the work, we’re seeing some really great work in disaster response especially around floods and forest fires, any kind of major disaster to help the first responders. So it’s not just a federal activity, it actually includes offers, responders, it includes universities where they’re all trying to come together in a consortium to figure out what’s the right solution here? How do we actually get better information to the firefighters and the smoke jumpers in California wildfires? How do we know using simulation? Because some of these disasters, if you think about it, they don’t happen that often in the same region. AI is only as good as the data that it has to process. And so if you don’t have a lot of data, then you have to learn how to simulate that data and then use the simulated data to help you learn as you go along. And so I think people now are starting to look at, how do we do this?
I like to think about it as, and we call it AI for good. Instead of really trying to say, we’re going to use AI to necessarily do something that people wouldn’t even… It’s a problem people don’t think exists, we’re just tackling the basics. Let’s be more prepared for forest fires. Let’s have people with disabilities. AI for health, how can we use this to take the data even with COVID? The more data we have, the better this is. And I think a lot of people are confused on that, that artificial intelligence needs data. Without large data sets that are shared, in fact, sometimes globally across the board, which is not an easy thing to do. These large data sets are petabytes and petabytes of data. You can’t just ship them around to people and they need to stay up to date; they need to get updates.
You almost need a consortium model, where members join and then you have some governance around it with an SLA, with terms of use agreement. Where what you’re getting, and then the governance model can turn access off if somebody starts to do something nefarious or starts to manipulate the data in a way that’s inappropriate. And so I think that’s where we’re seeing the most work being done right now. And that I think it’s amazing, you could eventually cure cancer if we could get this right. Obviously, political issues globally cause many challenges around this.
Meg:
Access to data is certainly a huge hurdle. And getting that data into a place where taxonomy, the service level agreements, all of those things can be used by multiple, and therefore can also be checked by multiple. But how often do you see, just coming out of the government side, the problem of I want to use AI for this problem, my data is terrible, or my data’s not clean, or I have 12 data sources and they don’t really coincide with each other, what do I do?
Susie:
Depending on the agency, every agency has this problem. What’s the authoritative data set? Who’s been keeping it up to date? What systems are is providing data to that data set? We’re not really used to doing that. Everything’s in silos. And I think that, just coming to grips with that and determining what are the appropriate data sets and how do we share them. We’ve had the concept of data.gov forever, but when we start to really talk about big data and using some of these data sets, they really need to be shared in a much better way than they’re being shared today. And there needs to be a governance model around it, otherwise it all falls apart. Artificial intelligence, it augments human reality, the machine can’t make good decisions or can’t give you information to make good decisions unless the data is good.
And I think that is, if you think about just ethical concerns around the data, is there bias in the data? How was the data created? How do you know there’s no bias? And so you could start to make some really poor decisions based on what you got out of a model and the model’s wrong, or the data is inaccurate for this. And so those are all really big concerns that I think as we get better at this, we’ll be able to address and you’ll be able to see some standards and some norms come out around that, so that these models can produce good results for us to act on.
Meg:
Microsoft is such a big player in the marketplace, in the commercial marketplace, in the federal marketplace, in all marketplaces, we get it, Microsoft’s a big player. What do you, and Team, do to ensure that you’re integrating with good emerging tech? I know that Microsoft, a lot of companies that go through the Dcode program, run on Azure, are doing Azure for government, things like that. But how do you really make sure that as you’re providing solutions, you are looking at the tech landscape and not always just building in-house?
Susie:
It’s a heterogeneous world. It has been for a very, very long time. I’ve been with Microsoft for 20 years and I can remember the days when there was a big penguin trying to squish Redmond where our home office is. And we say, everybody thinks we hate Linux. And that’s actually not true at all. More than 60% of everything running on Azure runs in Linux. Open source, those days are way long gone, 10 years ago. We recognize that it is a hybrid space and that people need to be able to manage, run a container, for example, run a docker container in multiple environments. Whether it’s at the edge on an edge device. And I think that’s really super important in where we’re going right now as an industry. And where Microsoft really is focused is, how do we actually get some of this compute capacity that we have in the cloud but then get it to the edge so that, while we live in a city environment, there are many people in rural environments that don’t have connectivity that’s always connected. And so how do we let some of these models live there and bridge that gap between the two? How do people run? Ask any agency today, and if you say, are you multicloud? Sometimes the answer no. And then I just start asking, are you running something on Amazon? Are you running something at Salesforce? Are you running something? And we start to go through and all of a sudden they’re like, are you running Zoom? And they’re like, “Okay, you’re a multicloud.” And then, do you have something at a contractor site? Yes. Do you have something in your own data centers? Yes.
I’m like, you basically have described this new hybrid environment that we live in that you need to be able to move workloads around, you need to be able to manage it. If you look at everything inside of Azure, for example, as a portal interface, it helps you manage it. And manage the health of that and patching, if you’re using iOS. Well, we now allow you to be able to see other systems, whether they’re on premise, whether they’re on Amazon.
And so those are the types of things that you’re going to start to stew. But it’s really, how do we actually take in it… I won’t say portable, because I grew up in the years of you can run Java anywhere, but that’s not really true, or it wasn’t back then. We’re not trying to beat this nirvana, but it does recognize that everybody needs to be a player. We’re not trying to be the cybersecurity company. We want to be a cybersecurity company that plays well with the ecosystem. Because we know that many of our customers, and not all, have many point solutions that are out there that if they can get us the telemetry from it, we’ll do what we’re good at. Which is take that data, analyze it, and then digitize it in front of you so you can slice and dice it and actually see what’s going on behind the scenes. We don’t necessarily have all those tools on the network side in a variety of other places that we’re not trying to be good at that. There are people that are really good at that because they’re just impossible what the technology do.
Meg:
Anyone on the phone, if you have questions, again, throw them in the chat, keep throwing them in the chat. We will get you as many as we can. I’m going keep checking on. In a recent report, you noted that the need to find and collect data sets hinders the ability on federal agencies to take fuller advantage of that high-powered cloud and analytics tools, et cetera, et cetera. We talked a little bit about this, but as we’re talking about multi-cloud, as we’re talking about all of these different… We know that the siloed data sets are a problem, but as we’re talking through all of these different places where the data lives, what should forward-leaning folks in the government be thinking about with regards to their tech stack going forward?
Susie:
So with data, it really depends on how large the data set is, but we’ve started a program called Azure Data Share. It does sit on the Azure platform, but you can basically put a very large data set in any of our data containers that we have, and then share that in a consortium manner with members and put governance around it. Because you don’t want to really take large petabyte data sets and actually send them everywhere. One, it’s super expensive from an egress-ingress perspective. And two, you can’t keep them up to date. And so we also have a snapshot process that as new data’s added, it’ll snapshot it, so that each of these customers see it and have access to it. The idea is here that you can have a governance model where all these different members have access to that same data set, but they’re in their own tenant.
You can handle the security and privacy issues that people are super concerned about. And then, if any of those terms of service are broken, you literally just remove access. Those are the types of things, it’s not a perfect model obviously, because data’s still siloed, so you have to get it somewhere. How do you get that curated data into Azure? But I think it’s a good start. And hopefully we’ll start to see other vendors do similar things, so you’ll be able to access it from different venues. But you can get into a Azure’s browser based, so it’s not hard to run models on top of it.
I think that’s where we’re going. There’s a whole effort around data models and having basically a common data model across all of our data sources, so that it’s really easy to move data. And we’re sharing that data model in all the different groups globally today and working with industry across the board, across the world to try to figure out how do we solve this problem? How do we define data sets, the metadata around those data sets? What format should they be in? Feel like we’re going back to the days of EDI, but I don’t want to talk about that because it’ll tell you how old I am.
Meg:
We talked a little bit about how funding matters, and of course funding matters, and that many federal leaders are looking at how everything from, how do we rethink workforce? How do we rethink space? How do we rethink our tech stack? But what are some of the acquisition challenges you see when it comes to bringing that emerging tech and maybe some of the things you’d like to see changed?
Susie:
Well, obviously budget is a huge problem. A lot of times there’s no budget line item for some of the emerging tech that’s out there and it does cost money. The budget’s usually there to keep the lights on, not normally to inject new technology or modernize systems. That’s clearly, aside from just the contract paperwork, that’s clearly one of the largest issues.
Meg:
It’s for when the code breaks, you got the one person who could fix the code.
Susie:
I think the biggest issue, I think people have worked around. When we started doing this in 2010, everybody was so worried about pay as you could go because of the far, and now you look at it and everybody’s figured it out. And there’s a lot of work still being done to try to actually change the far too, to allow that to happen more without having to work around some things in the FAR.
I think people have really figured it out. I do see the acquisition cycle is still longer for government than commercial, and a lot of that’s because of law because the processes are baked-in-law. How do you actually get the funds of money? We were supposed to have the technology modernization fund, which continually gets cut. I thought that was a great idea. Hopefully, there’s again movement to really fund it. I think I saw something, somebody wants to put a billion dollars in there, that would be awesome. I think that would go a long way to helping with emerging technology and having somebody centrally look at that in government and try to figure out what’s the biggest bang for the buck that will really help multiple agencies, not just a single one. And I do think public-private partnerships are a really good way to go too.
We’re seeing a lot happen in that space now, where they’re creating consortiums with public-private and the whole concept of contests and things of that nature to try to spur on industry and those public-private partnerships and get vendors to work together too, which I think is really important. Because some of these problems, if we don’t work together as a community and industry, it’ll take many, many years to solve these problems. Because they include the hardware, the software, the cloud, mathematical folks. It’s not a single vendor that can do all of this. I hope that would solve a lot of problems too.
Meg:
And the nice part about the technology modernization fund, or the proposed technology modernization fund, is a revolving fund too. It was giving you the upfront capital to then show that you could provide the cost benefit, the savings, and making that business case. We hope that that gets through as well. One of the things as Dcode went virtual we had to do immediately is virtualize one of our procurement trainings. We ended up training a whole bunch of folks at DoD, DIC, civilian agencies, on how to do innovative procurement. We’re seeing things like you said, the price competitions, CSO awards, OTAs, so far and non-far based types of acquisitions that are ramping up. But it’s a learning curve. It’s not the standard I’m going to buy a pencil. It’s much different type of acquisition. And I think there are also some different things going around the hill that are looking to address some of the acquisition challenges specifically on the tech side too.
Susie:
And OTAs are big now and they’re promising.
Meg:
We’ve seen a lot get funded quickly there. And I think it’s the same challenge as the budget challenge, but if there’s no program of record in the out years, what do you do? It goes back to what you said, it ends up being a budget challenge in the end. For sure. One thing I wanted to definitely cover, is you’ve talked about the cybersecurity workforce shortage and how to best close that gap. Business Insider had the ex-Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, who we’ve all heard of, but he’s working to launch a university that would rival Stanford, MIT, and funnel tech workers into government work. Could this be a possible solution to that cybersecurity tech shortage?
Susie:
Sure. I think there’s two challenges, especially given COVID now, and one is, how do you train a workforce? There’s going to be people that are no longer even going to be doing the jobs that they used to do when we come out of this. I think there’s a huge opportunity to retrain many people in the workforce, that were in the workforce that now are looking for new roles. We’re investing heavily there through LinkedIn and something called Microsoft Learn, to help people that might have been in a different tech role or perhaps not even in tech in general, get into the tech workforce. Because we think it’s a huge opportunity. And if that learning’s free and you can just go and watch videos and learn how to do this, then all the better. We’re investing heavily, we just announced both of those efforts underway.
Other companies are doing the same thing with free courses, and universities are free online courses, which I think is going to be huge, especially in the cybersecurity world, to help with zero trust and bring some of maybe the professionals that didn’t grow up in the zero trust world that are now forced to learn zero trust to actually train them without having necessarily to go to a formal class, I think is going to be huge.
And then obviously, universities, I only have one nephew that’s gone into the computer field. Both my sister and I were in it, and my father was, and they were like, “We don’t want to do what you do.” And I was like, “What?”
Meg:
I know.
Susie:
I know. It really hurt. But one’s an architect, so that’s pretty cool. But I do have a nephew that’s in cybersecurity, and what I found very interesting is that even his curriculum in college, and I’m not going to say where he went, it wasn’t about zero trust and he just graduated two years ago. It was fundamental cyber-protection and the traditional way of protecting networks and intrusion detection and the very traditional types of you must do all these best practices, but from a zero trust perspective, it really didn’t talk about cloud and the analytics and the new tools that are out there.
It did a little but not much. I was like, “Wow.” I think we do need to update our universities too on some of these. And I know some universities are more ahead than others in that space. But I think that too is… And I do think, again, COVID is a catalyst for this. I think it’s just happening, grassroot’s happening. Any opportunity, even any big setback, there’s huge opportunities. And I think that that is probably, one of the biggest opportunities is around cybersecurity with what’s going on today.
Meg:
Here’s a question from the field, and it is a big picture, high-level question, but what is Microsoft’s strategy in the area of AI, big data and hybrid cloud?
Susie:
We have strategies for each of them. Let’s talk about hybrid cloud first. We have in hybrid cloud, we have always believed in hybrid cloud. We have a series of Azures appliances that you can go and look at, it’s called Azure Stack. And if you go and look, there’s a variety of Azure edge devices that are out there, all the way from a 10-pound backpack, the device you can put in a backpack, to a couple of racks in a server, to a converged infrastructure device that sits in a managed rack of servers, to portable data centers. And that’s actually running pieces of the Azure software, so it is Azure, it doesn’t have full parity for obvious reasons, because it doesn’t have the compute capacity or the storage.
But it allows you to have those edge and have that hybrid world in disconnected states and be able to move data back and forth as freely as you need to. And so we’re investing heavily in a hybrid and managing that hybrid space as well. Like I talked about a little earlier, how do you actually have a single pane of glass to help you manage this very virtual digital estate that you now need to manage and it’s no longer just in your data center?
And if you go up and I can send the link to you and you can post it, Meg, where you can actually look at that strategy for hybrid, it’s very public. On the data side and AI, on the data side, we have a very comprehensive data strategy. You can think of as a fabric across all of our data capabilities, whether it’s a data warehouse, whether it’s our analytics tools, whether it’s emerging technology and data, we’re trying to create a central fabric that it all sits on and then allow you to use the right tool for the right problem as opposed to just cramming data into something and then trying to use it when it doesn’t fit the problem, because most people are doing that today.
We’re streamlining that out, realizing that AI is only as powerful as the data underneath it. And that from artificial intelligence perspective, we’re clearly focused on what we can do today. We’ve made investments in what we might be able to do tomorrow. Think of the sci-fi piece of this where a computer might actually learn itself, but we are heavily focused in what we can do today to help augment human capability and give people tools to better do their job more efficiently.
And then take a whole strategy around quantum. Our goal with quantum computing is to allow the masses to have access to it, not just the scientific community. What we want to be able to do is have quantum capabilities available in Azure, so you’d be able to use that quantum computer through developing code. We have something called Q# that we’ve developed. You can use Visual Studio today, and we have a quantum computer simulator that simulates up to 40 qubits, where you… Bless you. Where you can literally go and run quantum code today on a traditional computer.
And we’re obviously building out a quantum computer, but we realize that post-quantum encryption is big and that’s really the next step to get us to that next phase of AI. And so it’s all about doing what you’re going to do today, but also thinking about the future and getting people ready for that future. Because you can’t just, “Wow, I have a quantum computer and now what do I do?” You’re going to need to learn how to actually program it. It’s now the reason why I wish I had taken a lot more math in college. Because I look at that and I’m like, “That’s like signal processing. I had a class on that many, many years ago.” I don’t really use that daily, but that’s what quantum’s about. And when that day comes, hopefully in our lifetimes, the world will change very dramatically. That’s a whole new way of looking at computing.
Meg:
Gotcha. One more question. I know, it was a big one. One more question from the field. Are we going to get AI assistance that have a male voice or a gender-neutral voice? I will volunteer to be a general neutral voice if you need one.
Susie:
Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s already out there. You can change the voice.
Meg:
Fantastic. Just making sure I can have my mail assistant for sure. We are going to wrap there. Susie, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. A quick preview, we still have more of these Dcode virtual sessions, like I said, visit dcode.co/virtual to find this archive as well as all of our other archives and you can register for upcoming sessions there. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you for your great questions. And Susie, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much.