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Gordon Bitko

Gordon Bitko

Executive Vice President of Public Sector Policy at ITI (Information Technology Industry Council) and former FBI Chief Information Officer.

Nov 4, 2026

6:00
How are you guys seeing that?
6:02
Yeah, there's a few really important elements to dive into a little bit more there, Stacey.
6:06
The first is a lot of the requirement for the grid itself is due to the age of the grid.
6:12
It's not even due to new demand, but to the fact that we have to replace legacy transformers and legacy transmission and legacy generation, things that have been around for 50 or 70 or even 100 years in some cases, and well beyond the expected lifespan of a lot of that equipment.
6:27
And Things happen sometimes.
6:30
Storms happen.
6:31
Fires happen.

6 MINS LATER

12:10
How should they be, is this a good thing? Is it not a good thing?
6:50
When you have moved something from test to scale in the past, Gordon, What did you run up against in the scale process that maybe you didn't anticipate and had to potentially course correct for?
7:05
Yeah, that's a really good question, Francis.
7:08
A couple of different elements of that that are particularly important.
7:12
The first one is the broader sort of workforce training.
7:16
When we found we piloted something, it is people who are willing to be early adopters.
7:21
It is people who are willing to try new technologies, who are willing to try new things.
7:24
And maybe you aren't always happy if things break and you have to fix them, but understand that that's part of the process.
8:26
How do you advise people to resist the temptation to wait until the infrastructure is 100% perfect or the technical debt is 100% paid off and we're working on a modernized infrastructure before moving out on things like layering on artificial intelligence tools or layering on large language models or anything like that?

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