A Cloud Nobody Owns: Sovereign Infrastructure for the Agent Era with Dominic Williams

Aaron (0:08)

Good morning, good evening, wherever you are, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host Aaron, and I'm back home after two weeks on the road. And, uh, quick aside, this is my, I think, fourth time trying to actually record this. Had a little bit of technical difficulties. Actually had a tornado go through and had to go to the basement, and a tornado touched down a couple miles from the house. But everyone is fine, everything is safe, uh, and we certainly hope everyone out there is safe as well. But moving on to today's show. So what we're looking at today for our topic is how to build a sovereign agent-ready cloud without relying on a single hyperscaler. So Brandon sits down with Dominic Williams, founder and president and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, to talk about the internet computer, private cloud engines, data sovereignty, and an AI-aware replacement for traditional SaaS. And of course, all of that is coming up right after this quick break

SPEAKER_2 (1:18)

Today's show is sponsored by Palo Alto Networks. Every time your team deploys a new cloud workload or AI agent, another identity gets permanent access to your critical systems. Legacy tools were built to manage human employees, leaving modern machine and AI access largely unmanaged. That's why Idira by Palo Alto Networks comes in. Human, machine, AI, one identity platform for all of them. Idira replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access, so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your business.

Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks. Visit paloaltonetworks.com/idira.

Again, that's paloaltonetworks.com/IDIRA.

Aaron (2:04)

What does the outside world already know about your company?

Cybercriminals could be seeing leaked credentials, compromised session cookies, exposed infrastructure, and even impersonations of your brand and executives. NordLayer Intelligence by NordStellar gives security teams visibility into those threats across the deep and dark web, data breaches, attack surfaces, and brand impersonation all in one platform.

Find out what attackers know before they can use it. Visit nordlayer.com/intelligence/enterpriseai and use code ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off your NordStellar plan

Brandon (2:52)

And we're back. Joining me today is Dominic Williams, founder, president, and chief scientist at Definity Foundation and founder and CEO at Upt Lab. Welcome to the show, Dominic

Dominic Williams (3:02)

Thank you for having me, Brandon

Brandon (3:04)

All right, listen, we're gonna have a great conversation about sovereignty, private clouds, maybe a little agents, a little AI, right? We can't-- We have to talk about that as well. But before we jump into all that, we always wanna get a chance to know our guests. So give us a little bit of information about how'd you get into this, what's your background. Tell us your origin story, if you will

Dominic Williams (3:22)

Well you probably don't wanna hear my entire origin story. It goes back a long way. I've been what I'd call an engineering entrepreneur for some decades. I've got a particular interest in distributed systems but I've also built things like MMO games for kids. Back in 2010, I launched a game called Fight My Monster, and it grew to three million users. And that was exciting 'cause, it, it actually involved a lot of really interesting backend infrastructure that led me to what I'm doing now.

But the actual product itself wasn't an infrastructure product

Brandon (3:52)

So have you always been a gamer? What… That's like kind of an interesting story in itself. How did you get into building kids for game, or games for kids rather?

Dominic Williams (3:59)

I had s- some young boys and my eldest used to go to a lot of chess tournaments.

And so I wanted to replicate that experience inside an MMO.

And the game was conceived as something akin to a giant tournament, and it was designed to have s- to be more like a game of skill than just something where you grind away and level up. And you would generate these unique monsters, and you could fight them against other players' monsters and trade them. And it was this kind of hybrid game social network. It was nothing's really ex- existed like it before or since. A lot of kids say that it defined their childhoods, so I'm

Brandon (4:38)

Oh, that's awesome. I know a lot of kids like Roblox and Minecraft.

Dominic Williams (4:41)

that, yeah,

Brandon (4:42)

everybody's kids, I think when they're young they go through those things. So that's fun. That's super fun. That's, but that seems completely different. So now I guess flash forward, tell us about the D'Affinity Foundation. I think I hadn't heard of it as much, so why don't you assume we don't know too much about it. What is this thing that you've created here?