And, and Microsoft is, is emerging as a more stable, uh, uh, partner in, in sort of the cost control space.

Fellas, I, I, I've heard scenarios in which, you know, an organization, particularly one with sensitive information, PCI, PII, may not want to store their data with one of the commercially available LLMs, but rather spin up their own cloud, uh, instance.

What should agencies understand about where their data lives and, and how to make some of those choices?

Um, so that would be the, the two ways in which you can kind of get a better guarantee of your prompts aren't being saved, and your data if you're exposing it to, if you've created, you know, uh, a large data, uh, lake or something that, that it's accessing, uh, that it's not getting exposed.

Going back to what Eric heard earlier, a lot of organizations are s- uh, concerned not only about security, but also hallucinations.

Guys, walk me through some of the monitoring best practices, right? We talked about, you know, we may use too many tokens, or this AI agent answered a question that maybe it shouldn't have.

What are organizations doing to monitor these systems, uh, to look for cases that are out of the ordinary?

John, how do you break down those silos and start thinking about the organization's data rather than a department's data?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Uh, and, and I, I, I do with, with any technology system, it all starts with the data, right? Um, you know, it's like building a house.

You need a solid foundation.

And, and I do think there will be an inclination for each group to race, to buy the product that will, you know, help make their lives easier, uh, which will only exasperate the problem that we've got all of these disconnected systems, because for AI to really be put to work.

it needs to look at a picture of the entire organization.

What do I mean by that? As a transit agency, I run, I don't know, maybe a dozen different systems, all provided by different vendors that were never intended to work together.

So, you know, what I wanted to ask you, you know, as professionals in this industry, in terms of the growth of capabilities and where it seems AI is heading, you know, could you, you know, just throw some ideas that where you think this might be going, especially in that realm of the predictability, what some of these systems do for agencies as we, you know, to the future?

Um, you know, what, what was it about the technology aspect that, that really drew you in? Was there something in particular that you found, you know, f- fascinating about applying the technology to, uh, public transportation that, uh, made it an, a, a career that you wanted to pursue?

There was.

The folks that started ETA Transit all came from GeoFocus, right? And, and this is going back to the mid-'90s.

So if you think about a CAD/AVL system back then, there were no smartphones, there were no Google Maps, there certainly wasn't GTFS.

We had to build the computers from the ground up.

You know, there was no Verizon data network.

It didn't exist.

What do you think are some of those biggest opportunities for transit agencies?