How AI Security Helps Companies Adopt Generative AI Safely with Steven Walchek

Chris Daigle (0:00)

Hey, before we start the show, I got to tell you, most executives I read into, they're using AI, but they're writing emails and summarizing documents. But I only see a smaller group doing what I call thinking in AI.

They see a decision in the business, and they already know where AI fits. So if you're using AI most days, and you suspect you're getting 5% out of what's possible from the models, that's the exact gap that my private practice handles.

In my private practice, you and I will work together one-on-one throughout the month, using AI to handle real decisions in your business, build custom agents that you can start delegating to, and save you from making 6-figure mistakes when it comes to budget decisions for AI software services. Now, my private practice is limited to 10 executives only. If you're interested, go to chrisdagel.com and find out more. You and I can jump on the phone, we can see if it's a fit, and I can give you a clear idea of the impact it would have on your business. Now, let's meet our guest.

Steven Walchek (0:51)

I didn't write a single line of code. You don't need to be an engineer, you just need to be able to capably communicate your vision.

Chris Daigle (0:57)

What's one thing that you have been able to hand off to Generative AI that has been a huge win for you?

Steven Walchek (1:05)

My favorite app that I built, I call it the Pocket Sales Engineer. I built an application that listens to calls in real time. When it detects a question, it sends that question over to a knowledge base and hunts for the answer to that. It's really cool because it turns our salespeople into weaponized sales engineers.

Chris Daigle (1:23)

You've made a lot of mistakes. Pick one that happened with this business getting started.

Steven Walchek (1:27)

I think we took a little bit longer than I felt comfortable with to adopt modern AI coding tools.

Chris Daigle (1:33)

But you mentioned something. You said that it's almost contraindicative to their terms of service for them to keep your stuff private. What do you mean by that?

Steven Walchek (1:40)

I'll give you three. One covert way that they're using your data, one overt way that they're using your data, and even one nefarious way in which these organizations are using your data. We'll start with the covert.

Chris Daigle (1:51)

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle and I'm the host of the show. Before we get started, I want to mention that some of you have sent me an email that the opportunity to work with our team on identifying some $50,000 opportunity, we call that exercise in our ads, the link was dead. I've now fixed that link. You should be good to go. Today, we talk to executives all the time. I think at this point, we've trained over 18,000 non-technical business professionals over the past three and a half years that we've been doing this at Chief AI Officer through the podcast and everything like that. There's always a few top concerns from executives. One of them that I hear regularly is, we'd love to use AI more, but we don't quite understand the risk.

They don't necessarily just want to turn their teams loose with chat GBT or a Claude license, although they know they need to do something. The time to sit on the fence or to watch and see if this stuff is working, that's over. I talk to them, and most companies are thinking that the AI decision is simple. We'll pick some tools, we'll block some tools, but today's guest actually sees a third path. And that's giving people the room to use AI, but putting real controls around the data. And that's what most executives are looking for. So today's episode is going to help your company decide how to introduce the tools to your teams with the safest governance protocol in place. Our guest today is Steven Walchek, the founder of liminal.ai, and this is what they do.

Steven started as a software engineer, then spent roughly a decade without coding. He had some successful exits. But modern AI has pulled him back into building because he knew that he could create the applications without personally writing the code, including the infrastructure heavy work that we've talked about in our pre-interview. He's now leading Liminal with some known brands that you would recognize for sure, on how they're using AI adoption through the lens of security and governance. Steven, before we get started, anything that you think the audience needs to know about what we're going to talk about today?