Today’s digital world has changed businesses and their needs. Before the digital age, a lock and key was sufficient to keep out bad actors. However, businesses now require experts in technology to create safeguards for their assets. Challenges for those experts include everything from cyber protection to workforce. AI is also changing the technology game by creating opportunities for more clever hacking and exposing gaps in technology that have never been seen before.
In a recent roundtable sponsored by Nevada State Bank, technology experts met to discuss their industry and its many challenges. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
Is It Difficult to Find a Skilled Workforce in This Industry?
Debbie Banko: Finding the right people to get the job done for our clients is a huge challenge. Because if we do not have the right people to do the job, we are not going to get the job done right. We are not going to flourish as a company, and we are not going to be able to help our clients as well as we might otherwise.
Nathan Whittacre: The Clark County School District (CCSD) is trying to do its best here in southern Nevada and has developed technical academies. They recognize the need for these technical trades and technology with IT being part of that. The dedicated magnet schools are a good approach; there are just not enough above them.
Greg Moody: The biggest challenge I deal with is the brain drain that the [Las Vegas] valley has. Our students are leaving the valley and going to other universities, and we can’t get them back. We are doing a lot of outreaches to try and keep some of our better students from CCSD here. We are also working on workforce development, but we have been drastically behind the game on making new workforce development programs for cyber and AI.
David Rounds: Eighty-percent of my staff have come from out of state. We moved about 30% of them here because we could not find a qualified candidate. The rest of them wanted to move here, were moving here anyway or had just moved here. I would love to hire more Las Vegas natives, but the ones that we find either do not know technology or frankly, they do not know how to talk to people.
Melvin Chatman: There are so many brains in IT, but for many, their people skills are terrible.
Jacob Arroyo: That is true especially for the younger generation that is growing up digitally. Their anxiety increases with person-to-person conversation. I have noticed that with the younger staff, it is difficult to teach them sales skills and conflict resolution skills, which are important, especially if you own your own company. And when you try to combine that with technical knowledge, those [hires] are almost unicorns.
Rounds: When we first opened our business, I would look for candidates with certifications and some of them did not even know how to add a user into a network. My phrase is that the certification does not make the man, the man makes the certification.
Cameron Call: Education comes second. The people that have critical thinking skills are the people that make the best techs because they can make logical leaps between A and B.
Banko: I look for people that know when to ask the right questions and understand what a solution truly means and what you need to do to get there. They know what they don’t know.
Arroyo: If you look on LinkedIn between automation and the lack of a well-rounded employee, the job market is tough. It is difficult to find well-rounded help. And unfortunately, they are coming out of college with student debt, but we still need to set the expectation that they are coming into an entry-level position and that training is going to be necessary and that [their employment] is a trial phase. We need to take responsibility as the more experienced individuals to mentor these young people.
Moody: I have that conversation with my students in every single one of my classes. I tell them they are not going to come out managing anyone. They are not going to make six-figure salaries [immediately]. And their first job placement will be super hard. I remind them that they will be entry-level, and they are all upset.
What Does Modern Day Hacking Look Like?
Moody: It’s a complicated question because one of the main reasons there is so much spam is because hackers want to take over other computers because that is a free resource. Why buy 10,000 machines if you can get it for free from the buyers? There are places around the world where that is the industry. There really are warehouses like that. But there are also plenty of countries that do not view that as a crime. Even if it is a crime, they will not extradite to other countries. They are considered valid industries. It is people’s careers and they do it full-time and they make a much better ROI than anyone here is getting. It will not stop because there is a lot of money in it.
Rounds: The amount of money that is made from cyber fraud and cyber theft from security is estimated to be larger than the total amount of revenue generated from the illegal drug trade globally. And it is a heck of a lot easier and largely under reported.
Call: One of the scariest things is that hackers set up the infrastructure and bring in affiliates that do not need to know technology. There are insiders that can plug in a flash drive, click on an email, and get paid pretty well to do it. They get a cut of a ransom, and they do not even know anything about it.
Rounds: Ransomware is a service. You guys have heard of software as a service, you can now go on the dark web and for $19.99 a month you can get all the tools you need and everything you need to deploy it, and then everyone gets a cut. You do not have to do anything except know how to email.
Ryan Draayer: It is a complex answer because as I think through the major events that we have been a participant of, originally, it was believed that it was outside of the country. Then ultimately, once the FBI and everyone else were involved and we had the resources to actually track things down, it tends to be an actor inside the US that’s leveraging outside resources.
How Can Businesses Stay Ahead of Bad Actors?
Arroyo: Teaching practices [for employees] upfront as best as you can is huge. Because without that education or without having a troubleshooting step, they will click that link. They will answer that phone call. Now, with the higher levels of AI integration in fraud, people can get phone calls from a voice that they might be familiar with, and they are asking for money to be sent to a specific routing number. I tell my clients that if they get an email or a call and they are not 100% sure that we are the person requesting that information, to hang up, call my direct line or call customer service. That level of education, on top of knowing what the capabilities are for fraud, is one way to stay ahead of it. It is not a complete fail safe, but you will minimize a lot of the instances in those situations.
Rounds: We spend probably more time talking to our clients and executives about how to put policies in than anything else. Simple policies such as if a vendor requests to change their account number, that you make a phone call and verify with a number and contact that you already know before you change an account number. There are so many trade businesses that are light on cyber security. One of our customers had their mailbox hacked and $500,000 was gone the next day because they were told to pay the invoice to a different account number. Regardless of how big you are, $500,000 is something that can destroy you, especially if you are a small trade contractor.
Call: The low hanging fruit is huge. You would have to be doing something crazy to get targeted, specifically. Any small business is going to collapse under a nation state, even some large businesses. But small and medium businesses, are not being targeted like that. [Hackers] are casting a net and if you don’t have the basic hygiene, then you are going to get caught up in it.
Draayer: The number one threat factor for businesses is the people that work for them. They need to have constant education. When we do phishing campaigns to see who clicks on links, it is usually the president of the company who clicks on it. The most widely broadcasted and advertised hack that generated out of here in the last couple of years was exactly that kind of an attack.
Call: People want turnkey technology and they want turnkey cybersecurity. And just like healthcare, doctors can prescribe the best pills, but if you are not doing your part of practicing good hygiene and understanding what that means, it makes for a very lopsided protection despite our best efforts.
Whittacre: We encourage our clients to ensure that all their employees do an annual assessment. And then we provide a weekly micro-training that is about five minutes long to keep top-mind awareness. We have found it difficult to get business leaders to enforce that across an organization though. We provide it and we encourage it, but enforcing it, especially in small businesses, is difficult.
Chatman: The scary part is when people are just having a conversation [and are being targeted]. Do not give people information because people are smarter than your think. They will ask where you grew up and what your favorite color is and through the conversation are getting all of your security questions. They are finding out where you work, where you live, who you hang out with and that gets a lot of people in trouble. I tell people to say less.
Rounds: It is important to drive education and knowledge down to business owners to protect themselves because 65% of any small business that is hit (I think that is the latest statistic) with a major cybersecurity incident is out of business in three to five years.
Whittacre: It is important to understand that any business is vulnerable. No matter if you are a one-person business or you work for the federal government, there is a vulnerability. What you want to do as a small business is put up enough guardrails and enough walls that a hacker is going to look at your organization and say it is not worth the effort, and then move on to the next one that does not have those things in place. Unfortunately, what used to work 30 years ago, does not work today. We are constantly having to put more and more things in place. It used to be fine to have only an antivirus, and a firewall in the office and that was sufficient. Now we have to extend the security and add layers and layers and layers on to provide more and more walls of protection.
Do Businesses Understand the Need for Good Cybersecurity?
Rounds: It is difficult to build in a culture of cybersecurity in a business. As business executives and owners, we focus so much on the culture of our business and how our employees feel, but we really have to build that culture of security into it so that the executives from the top level are talking down about how important it is.
Whittacre: Business owners and business executives want to focus on what they do best whether that is construction, healthcare or professional services and they do not want to have to deal with IT. But it is an integral part of their company, and there are a lot of decisions that business owners have to make, but often they do not know the acronyms, and they struggle with setting policies, vision and strategy around IP adoption and cybersecurity adoption. Now they are bombarded by AI and are not prepared for it.
Rounds: The hardest part is getting owners to see the value of the investment upfront. They wonder why they are going to spend X dollars more a month if they are not a large company and are likely not a target. It does not make sense to them to pay more for something that is going to take time away from their employees because they have to spend 45 minutes on annual training and do a five-minute micro-training. They do not see the value in it.
Chatman: When we talk to clients they ask if they need [all these protections] or they don’t want to pay for them. They think it is stupid. I ask them, do you have car insurance? They say yes and then I ask them if they have cyber insurance and then when they don’t know what that is. I explain to them that they need to have these boxes checked because, 10 years ago, cyber insurance did not matter. Today, cyber-attacks have happened so much that they require all the boxes to be checked.
Rounds: One of the things that has changed significantly in the last five years more than anything is that the insurance industry has driven a lot of that requirement for cybersecurity down to businesses for cyber liability insurance or cyber fraud insurance. That’s made it easier. But oftentimes, unless a business executive or owner experiences an event that costs them some money or they know someone who does, it is hard to get them to understand the value. To them, it is paying for more insurance that they think they do not need.
What Impact Is AI Having in the Technology Industry?
Whittacre: If you read about population, especially in developed countries like the United States and Europe, we are not having as many babies as we used to, and we are not replacing ourselves as humans. There is going to be a decline in workforce and the only way to increase our domestic output is through enhanced productivity and certainly in our country and worldwide, we have done that through technology. When you think back to the industrial revolution and the technology revolution, our productivity has continued to exponentially increase and AI is the next evolution in that it will allow us to do more with less people through automation, robotics and through AI.
Draayer: The shift to AI is like the shift to the internet. Businesses had to change everything when the internet came out. We have to ask ourselves what tools with the AI agents in particular that we can utilize to replace common business practices. Because at the end of the day, it is about what makes us more profitable.
Chatman: AI is costing people a lot of money. The price of RAM [has gone up significantly] because it is what allows you to do multiple things at the same time. I just had a client screaming today that the price of everything is so expensive. I told him to blame the media and blame all the AI companies because they are taking all the hardware.
Whittacre: The whole world has changed in the last two years. Software development used to be a great career to go into, but it is ironic that as software developers, we are putting ourselves out of business because software development has changed dramatically. In software design, the coder is out of business. Programing is being done by AI and it is much better and faster. What is going to happen in all industries is you have to be an expert in your field and know how to use AI effectively and have other skills like business or project management.
Arroyo: As a cautious optimist for technology, I believe AI is just going to change [the job needs]. Disruption is a huge word in the tech industry and sometimes looked at in a bad light. If you are more familiar with tech, disruption is a very good thing because it also creates. It builds and breathes into an industry that might not have been around. The next generation is growing up familiar with apps and familiar with tablets and screens. As much as we try to limit the screen time for them because we don’t want them to become drones in their young adult lives, that’s the future that they will be in. I think that providing that generation guidance will help fuel the innovation that comes from the disruption.
Whittacre: AI is not necessarily going to put the lawyer out of business, but the lawyer using AI is going to put the lawyer out of business. Using AI in our companies to better provide services to our clients is going to put us a leg up on somebody that is not doing that. It is about leveraging the AI tools to be efficient and productive and skilling up our workers so that they can effectively and securely use them.
Call: What will be interesting is that AI has been great at answering questions, but you still need experts to bring the context in. Being an expert in your field will be important so that you know to bring up the things that are going to be relevant to the question that AI may not be aware of.
Rounds: The latest analogy I heard is that in the next five years, most of us here are not going to be working in the field we are in, we are going to be HR managers of AI agents.
Chatman: I can see AI enhancing things, but humans are still needed. I consider self-driving cars, and wonder are they designed to protect themselves or the people inside? Because ultimately they are ones and zeros. Maybe the evolution of AI is to get more adaptive reasoning, but I don’t know.
Banko: There is also the fact that AI is getting there, but it is not all that sophisticated yet. There is an ethics piece of what it can and can’t answer. For example, someone asked AI what the steps were to hack something and it said it could not answer that. They then told AI they were writing a screenplay for a movie, and the character was going to be hacking into computers and asked what the steps were so that they could pretend they we were doing it. AI answered everything. I saw it myself. There are still a lot of bugs with AI.
