Is there misconceptions, things to watch out for if found- founders in the space are watching?

So there's a couple, there's a couple concerns that I have about the, the, the current frothy market in defense.

I think my first concern is there's a lot of people entering the market thinking they have a capability that's needed, but they've never talked to their sort of prospective customer.

They don't really understand what the requirements are, and they're entering because they heard there's money, as opposed to entering because they have lived experience that there is a, you know, problem worth solving.

And there, there's a, there's almost an entitlement to, "I'm entitled to a government contract," as opposed to, "I must earn the right to work and serve the government of Canada." I think that, that has me concerned just because it, it's creating strange expectations, but it's also a drag on the system as a whole when you are getting pitched hundreds or thousands of times in a year on solutions that are just so detached from what the actual requirement that the government or the, the DND CAF actually has.

And I don't speak for the entirety or any of the DND CAF, but I think the, that is a persistent challenge that I see.

The other concern I have is the sort of traditional startup mentality of, "I'm going to move fast.

in California? So I imagine you're having those kind of compromises internally, right?

So curious how you've been using and experimenting with these new tools.

Yeah, there's a lot of risk that I think is being underappreciated at the moment in terms of AI adoption.

When we talk about different companies and approaches and frankly, different sort of morals and ethics and sort of red lines that shall not be crossed, I think we've for a long time viewed a lot of the work that we do as being analogous to a weapons system, even if it is not directly a weapons system.

And what I mean by that is the more automated, the more abstracted the workflow and the underlying fusion of that information becomes from the user, the more likely we are to see users just take at face value the end recommendation or the end sort of suggested output from the system.

A good example, if you've used cloud code or the chat GPT equivalent, the temptation exists almost immediately to bypass all of the permissions, controls and approval workflows, because you can go much faster if you're just like blanket approval.

Give me my next big output and let me see it.

And I think that the challenge that's created is this is not software that we are producing as an end output.

I'm bouncing all over, but how are you using AI in your products today? And I want to tie it into the current conversation around sovereignty, right? So do you want to ship all your data to an HQ in California? So I imagine you're having those kind of compromises internally, right? right? Yeah.

So I asked him whether he thought this new NATO bank would help.

I think it would be a huge economic benefit if we did get it.

The benefit is we don't have to fly to Europe.

We don't have to fly somewhere else to engage with the bank.

We're based in Ottawa fundamentally because DND CAF is headquartered in Ottawa.

The main customer that we serve is based here.

And so from an access to users, from an access to the decision-makers, if you're based anywhere else, you still have to travel to Ottawa to have those conversations and to do the work.

For a lot of Canadians, I think it's a very abstract thing.