Join us for an exciting Ask Me Anything session featuring Benjamin Rockwell, the seasoned host of Computer Talk Radio. With decades of experience navigating the ever-evolving world of technology, Benjamin brings a unique blend of expertise and approachable insight to help you tackle your tech challenges. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage directly, learn from the tech nerd who makes complex topics understandable, and get your questions answered live. Register today to submit your questions and be part of this interactive tech conversation!
Research Code: TBW2088
Cannot make it live? Register and submit your question. The answer will be in the video on TBW Advisors’ YouTube Channel.
NO AI note takers allowed. Event copyrighted by TBW Advisors LLC All Rights Reserved.
Benjamin Rockwell, host of Computer Talk Radio, has worked with computers professionally for decades.
He began exploring computers as a pre-teen, starting with a Commodore Vic 20, and quickly became proficient with Apple II, TRS-80s, and other early systems. His passion grew when he discovered Bulletin Board Systems, eventually launching his own BBS. In 1990, he began his professional journey as a field technician.
Though he calls himself a computer nerd, Benjamin breaks the stereotype. He’s approachable, eager to help, and deeply experienced—from field support and help desk roles to over 15 years as an Information Services Manager and consultant for hundreds of clients.
Benjamin thrives on learning and teaching. His calm, friendly demeanor puts users at ease, and he’s known for making technology work—whether it’s building systems, troubleshooting networks, or developing websites. He specializes in solving problems and making computers work for people, not the other way around.
“Effective strategies for securing customer data include encryption at rest, in transit, and during compute; cautious AI adoption; and strict access controls. Removing or masking personally identifiable information (PII) and training staff on cybersecurity best practices are essential. Legal compliance, intellectual property protection, and customer trust drive the need for robust privacy measures in customer interactions.”
We took the most frequently asked and most urgent technology questions straight to the technologists gathering at Customer Connect Expo 2025 held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This Whisper Report addresses the question regarding What are the most effective strategies for ensuring data security and privacy in customer interactions? There are two reasons security and privacy are critical in this space. As Ford’s Dr. Kalifa Oliver pointed out, “to first really understand the laws..” In fact, all governance program definitions start with legal requirements, then industry regulations and requirements, then internal privacy promises made to customers. The second critical reasons for ensuring data security and privacy as Claritiv’s Sean Gigremoss reminds us, “your knowledge for your business comes from all the conversations that you’re having – that is your IP (intellectual property).”
Figure 1. Four Pillars of Customer Data Protection
As Macy’s Siva Kannan Ganesan pointed out, “all those regulation and implementing an regulation it’s a multi-step approach like data and motion data at rest should be encrypted and you have to make sure it’s like the access strict access control and frequent evaluation of the data breach.” With security depth is always valuable. TBW Advisors LLC advises clients to not only use encryption at rest and in transit, but to leverage protections during compute leveraging Confidential Computing. For additional research, enjoy Industry Whispers: Public is Privacy – Confidential Computing in the Cloud available on TBW Advisors YouTube Channel.
TBW Advisors has frequently warned if you are not being charged for the product, you are the product. If you are the product, you should assume you do not have privacy. Today with many of the advanced AI products, even lower tier paid products do not get privacy; rather they are being used to further train the product. As Ford’s Dr. Kalifa Oliver observed, “you really got to start asking organizations that have AI technologies about their Blackbox about how the data is being trained. You have to ask them about data breaches you have to be conservative about how you implement things because I think the law is going to catch up and the hardest thing to do is trying to go back and fix it.”
One critical step to ensure privacy is to not send PII or personally identifiable information to tools. Enthu.ai’s Atul Grover denoted, “we also ensure that we deduct the PI information we deduct almost 16 kind of PIs including social security data birth credit card information …. we do that in the recording as well as all the analytics.” While removing the information is a common practice, masking data is also quite common. As Mitrol’s Pedro Lopez Slevin shared, “our banks for example you will probably have on premise data servers. Everything will be with TLS 1.2 two or higher you know and create your data. We’re talking about AI, we usually do rack so you will have to process every information into embeddings and those embeddings are..unreadable if you just put it in a vector database.”
While the term Human in the Loop has gained popularity with generative AI and agentic solutions, cybersecurity has always known the human in the loop as being a critical risk factor. Thus in order to truly ensure data security and privacy, you must train those humans! Randy Simmons from FaxSipIt shared the common journey towards compliance. “we’ve gone through a HIPPA audit and we’re secure there we just finished the SOC 2 audit and we’re SOC 2 compliant so people have come in they’ve audited our system our policies they’ve come with recommendations or not and we pass the audit for the socks 2 audit so our staff all goes through cyber security training as well we go through a wiser cyber security training and then also we send phishing to our to our employees and see if they’re going to click and if they click on a link then guess what they’re doing they’re doing that training all over Again.” So remember, do not click on that link without checking the link is safe first!
Join us for an inspiring Global Accessibility Day Interview,
Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day with an empowering Ask Me Anything (AMA) session featuring international best-selling author and accessibility advocate Victoria Essner.
With over 30 years of professional experience in assistive technology—and more than 50 years of lived experience navigating the world with vision loss—Victoria’s journey has been one of innovation, advocacy, and empowerment.
From navigating the early challenges of digital accessibility to becoming a trusted expert, she has helped countless individuals find independence through technology.
In this heartfelt, one-hour session, she’ll share personal experiences, lessons learned, and how her passion for accessibility has shaped her work. Discover the milestones that led her to write From Tech Frustration to Freedom and why she remains committed to making tech inclusive for all!
Come be inspired—and bring your questions! Whether you’re new to accessibility or a long-time advocate, you’ll walk away with practical insights, renewed hope, and a reminder that inclusive tech is possible for all!
Research Code TBW2082
Cannot make it live? Register and submit your question. The answer will be in the video on TBW Advisors’ YouTube Channel.
NO AI note takers allowed. Event copyrighted by TBW Advisors LLC All Rights Reserved.
Victoria Essner is a legally blind assistive technology coach, caregiver advocate, speaker, and international best-selling author. With over 50 years of lived experience and 30+ years of professional expertise, she empowers blind and visually impaired individuals — and the caregivers who support them — through personalized training and compassionate support. Victoria has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and government agencies on accessibility and inclusion. She hosts the Blessed Thru Blindness podcast and founded AT Made Easier, a membership designed to simplify tech and restore confidence. Her signature message: Breaking Barriers. Building Independence. One Breakthrough at a Time.
Heather Osborn was most recently Engineering Manager at Zapier, leading the Developer Enablement team focused on incident management, observability, and service catalog. With over 25 years in tech, she’s worked across systems engineering and operations, including a long tenure at Ticketmaster where she helped scale their infrastructure from a handful of gaming desktops to a global, hybrid cloud system handling massive traffic spikes.
More recently, she’s specialized in cloud-native infrastructure, with an emphasis on AWS, Kubernetes, and enabling developer autonomy through secure, maintainable systems. She’s spoken at Southern California Linux Expo three times, most recently on Turning Incidents into Insights, Not Insults.
Heather is a longtime advocate for diversity in tech—founding and mentoring in women’s groups, and often being the only woman on her team. She believes accessibility is essential to building inclusive, empowering technology for everyone.
Outside of tech, she’s a distance runner, live music fan, immersive camping nerd, proud mom, and devoted cat herder.
Dr. Doreen Galli is the Chief of Research at TBW Advisors LLC. She’s led significant and measurable changes as an executive at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT, and most recently Microsoft. Dr Galli was Chief Technology and Chief Privacy Officer in Azure’s MCIGET. Gartner recognized Dr. Galli as an expert in data ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management, and all forms and analytics including sensor data.
Dr. Doreen Galli is the Chief of Research at TBW Advisors LLC. She’s led significant and measurable changes as an executive at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT, and most recently Microsoft. Dr Galli was Chief Technology and Chief Privacy Officer in Azure’s MCIGET. Gartner recognized Dr. Galli as an expert in data ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management, and all forms and analytics including sensor data.
Join us on Earth Day for an insightful panel featuring the CEOs of Enerdrape, Storj.io, DigitalBedrock.com, and GraphEnergyTech.com. This event will explore cutting-edge innovations in renewable energy, data storage, and digital preservation. Enerdrape will showcase their pioneering geothermal panels, while Storj.io will discuss decentralized cloud storage solutions. DigitalBedrock.com will highlight advancements in digital preservation, and GraphEnergyTech.com will present their latest in sustainable energy technologies. This panel is tailored for CIOs and CTOs and other technical executives seeking to drive sustainability and innovation within their technical organizations. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights and network with industry leaders.
Research Code TBW2072
Margaux Peltier is an engineer and science entrepreneur with a MSc. in Civil Engineering from EPFL Lausanne. During her master thesis, she developed a strong interest in renewable geo-energy systems, recognizing the untapped potential of shallow geothermal energy and the need for innovation in this domain. She co-founded Enerdrape, where she serves as CEO, defining and overseeing the startup’s vision and strategy. Before founding Enerdrape, she worked as an engineer on several R&D projects related to BIPV-T and solar-power houses in Canada, and as an HVAC engineer in Geneva. Margaux also worked on various international projects as an engineering consultant in energy geostructures.
Colby is the Chief Executive Officer at Storj, a seasoned cloud tech executive leading growth initiatives to usher in a new era of cloud computing. Before Storj, he co-founded and served as CEO of CrowdStorage, the world’s largest distributed cloud storage platform, acquired by Storj. He scaled CrowdStorage to serve over 1,000 customers, including Western Digital and Vivint, and managed strategic partnerships for Vivint Smart Home, the leading smart home services provider in North America. Colby is a member of the Fast Company Impact Council and Forbes Technology Leadership Council.
Linda Tadic is the Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service. With over 35 years of experience, she has held positions at HBO, the Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, ARTstor, and Pacific Film Archive. Linda consults and lectures on digital asset management, audiovisual and digital preservation, metadata, and the environmental impact of digital preservation. She received the 2021 SMPTE James A. Lindner Archival Technology Medal for her leadership, research, and work in digital asset management, audiovisual and digital preservation, copyright, metadata, and environmental impact. Linda has taught as an Adjunct Professor at UCLA’s Department of Information Studies and NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program.
Thomas Baumeler is the CEO and founder of GraphEnergyTech, a startup pioneering highly conductive carbon-based (graphene) electrodes for renewable energy applications. He holds a PhD in chemistry from EPFL, where he conducted groundbreaking research on perovskite solar cells under Prof. Michael Graetzel at the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces, earning the 2023 EPFL Doctorate Award. Driven by a passion for sustainability, Thomas founded GraphEnergyTech to develop cost-effective, high-performance alternatives to metal electrodes, with applications in solar energy, energy storage, and printed electronics.
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This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time.
Research Code 2036.
Industry Whispers (SM): Generative AI & Deep Learning in Production – Lessons Learned
Friday, May 24, 2024 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM(UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed deep learning and generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time.
Can’t attend? Register and submit your question anyway, the answer will be on our YouTube channel.
Research Code: 2045
Dr. Doreen Galli has 6 degrees including a Waterloo CS Ph.D. in SIMD data storage and 8 patent held by IBM with 2 more pending at Microsoft. She has led significant and measurable changes at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT and most recently Microsoft where she was the platform architect for Azure and CTO in Azure’s MCIGET. She was trained as an analyst by Gartner where she was recognized as an expert in all things data from ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management and all forms and analytics including sensor data.
An All-American Athlete Collegiate Runner, Dr. Galli enhanced her formal education with process improvement certifications of Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma, and Pull Thinking, along with Technology and Network Transformation Certifications from AT&T. She is a Top 25 Women on the Web recipient and a published author with over 200 articles. Her first book, “Distributed Operation Systems” was published by Prentice Hall in English and Chinese. Her second book, “Galli’s Keys to Success: Optimize your College Career” is available via online bookstores. Dr. Galli has been an invited speaker at such distinguished venues as Forbes Executive Summit, CIO Summit, CIO Academy, Grace Hopper, Network+ Interop Las Vegas, Gartner’s Catalyst as well as The Internet Security Conference.
Omer Segal is the Head of AI at Pixellot, overseeing the AI group responsible for researching and developing automated sports production and automatic game highlights generation for Pixellot AI-automated sports camera systems. He has extensive leadership experience as CTO and R&D Director at companies in homeland security, mapping, and sports technology, where he oversaw the development of innovative AI applications. Omer’s project portfolio includes creating land vehicle and aerial mapping and navigation systems, AR applications for archaeological reconstructions, and athletes’ video analysis applications.
Omer holds a BSc and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, specializing in the application of advanced technologies such as deep learning, computer vision, and signal processing.
With 20 years of experience as a Character Technical Director, I bring expertise in motion capture and avatar creation for diverse productions. Originally focusing on rigging for films, commercials, and games, I transitioned to real-time motion capture and game engine rigging over the past five years. Integrating AI into motion capture and avatar systems has been a recent passion, alongside a commitment to exploring new technologies and their synergies. From rigging for TV shows like “The Flash” to contributing to 3D Bitmoji development and virtual concert setups, my journey reflects a dedication to innovation and collaboration in the ever-evolving landscape of AI and entertainment technology.
Heather Osborn was most recently Senior Director of DevOps at Cerebral, an online mental health care company which filled a much needed gap in access to this critical service.
She has worked in technology as a systems and operations engineer and manager for over 25 years. Much of her career was spent working with on premises systems at Ticketmaster, where she helped grow the online presence from a handful of Windows gaming desktops set up as web servers to a global system, a mix of on premises and cloud-based systems that experienced unbelievable surges in traffic whenever a popular event went on sale.
Her more recent career path has been entirely cloud-based, with a focus on AWS and Kubernetes. The goal is to lead teams to creating maintainable, secure infrastructure to enable developer autonomy and rapid iteration.
She will be speaking at Southern California Linux Expo for the second time this coming Saturday with a presentation entitled: Organic Isn’t Always Good for You, which is a discussion of the methodology employed in bringing an organization to a more mature stable infrastructure rather than something that grew organically over time.
She has been actively involved in women’s groups at her companies, including being a charter member of Minority Genders in Tech at Cerebral. She’s also served multiple years as a mentor of young women and girls who are interested in exploring technology. She is drawn to this cause because she’s often been the only woman on a team.
She is also an avid distance runner, technology evangelist, live music aficionado, immersive camping enthusiast, dedicated mother, and cat mom.
Ziyuan(Zac) is the Chief Scientist at Birch.AI, where he spearheads the research and development of LLM and ASR models to automate healthcare call-center workflows. He is responsible for selecting and designing ML models, data processing, production system architecture, and deployment. With over 10 years of experience in speech recognition and natural language processing systems, Ziyuan has a proven track record of delivering production-ready systems for tasks such as classification, named entity recognition, and real-time transcription. Ziyuan holds a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University Beijing and a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University where he worked at the Center for Language and Speech Processing on projects that led to the creation of many open-source NLP and ASR toolkits
This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed deep learning and generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time.
Can’t attend? Register and submit your question anyway, the answer will be on our YouTube channel.
Research Code: 2045
Omer Segal is the Head of AI at Pixellot, overseeing the AI group responsible for researching and developing automated sports production and automatic game highlights generation for Pixellot AI-automated sports camera systems. He has extensive leadership experience as CTO and R&D Director at companies in homeland security, mapping, and sports technology, where he oversaw the development of innovative AI applications. Omer’s project portfolio includes creating land vehicle and aerial mapping and navigation systems, AR applications for archaeological reconstructions, and athletes’ video analysis applications.
Omer holds a BSc and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, specializing in the application of advanced technologies such as deep learning, computer vision and signal processing.
With 20 years of experience as a Character Technical Director, JC Leon bring expertise in motion capture and avatar creation for diverse productions. Originally focusing on rigging for films, commercials, and games, I transitioned to real-time motion capture and game engine rigging over the past five years. Integrating AI into motion capture and avatar systems has been a recent passion, alongside a commitment to exploring new technologies and their synergies. From rigging for TV shows like “The Flash” to contributing to 3D Bitmoji development and virtual concert setups, my journey reflects a dedication to innovation and collaboration in the ever-evolving landscape of AI and entertainment technology.
Ziyuan(Zac) is the Chief Scientist at Birch.AI, where he spearheads the research and development of LLM and ASR models to automate healthcare call-center workflows. He is responsible for selecting and designing ML models, data processing, production system architecture, and deployment. With over 10 years of experience in speech recognition and natural language processing systems, Ziyuan has a proven track record of delivering production-ready systems for tasks such as classification, named entity recognition, and real-time transcription. Ziyuan holds a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University Beijing and a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University where he worked at the Center for Language and Speech Processing on projects that led to the creation of many open-source NLP and ASR toolkits
Register early to submit your questions for this exciting AMA (Ask me Anything) with Katya Lainé who founded the advanced conversational and Voice GEN AI product known as Talkr.AI
Katya Lainé is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of TALKR.ai and world-renowned for her expertise in Conversational AI. Katya has spent over a decade reshaping the way organizations handle customer interactions, playing a pivotal role in modernizing call centers by replacing traditional Interactive Voice Response Systems with Intelligent Voice Conversational AI Assistants. Katya is also a respected expert at the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) contributing to cutting-edge AI research and international cooperation. Beyond her GPAI role, Katya serves on the board of Numeum, where she is President of its AI Commission, championing ethical practices and advancing the adoption of AI technologies. Katya co-founded OpenLLM-France, further exemplifying her dedication to advancing technology and ethical standards in AI. Additionally, she is a Co-founder and Vice President of Le Voice Lab, underscoring her commitment to shaping the future of voice technology in Europe. She holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA), in addition to a Master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski.
This webinar will feature a panel of engineers that have deployed generative AI and their solution is in customers’ hands. You will be able to take away insights on the selection of technology, the process of realizing a solution, pitfalls, nightmares and what the panelists would do differently next time.
Research Code 2036.
Dr. Doreen Galli has 6 degrees including a Waterloo CS Ph.D. in SIMD data storage and 8 patent held by IBM with 2 more pending at Microsoft. She has led significant and measurable changes at IBM, DPWN, Dell, ATT and most recently Microsoft where she was the platform architect for Azure and CTO in Azure’s MCIGET. She was trained as an analyst by Gartner where she was recognized as an expert in all things data from ingestion, quality, governance, integration, management and all forms and analytics including sensor data.
An All-American Athlete Collegiate Runner, Dr. Galli enhanced her formal education with process improvement certifications of Black Belt, Lean Six Sigma, and Pull Thinking, along with Technology and Network Transformation Certifications from AT&T. She is a Top 25 Women on the Web recipient and a published author with over 200 articles. Her first book, “Distributed Operation Systems” was published by Prentice Hall in English and Chinese. Her second book, “Galli’s Keys to Success: Optimize your College Career” is available via online bookstores. Dr. Galli has been an invited speaker at such distinguished venues as Forbes Executive Summit, CIO Summit, CIO Academy, Grace Hopper, Network+ Interop Las Vegas, Gartner’s Catalyst as well as The Internet Security Conference.
Ofer is the CEO of Tomato.ai, a speech GenAI startup that’s raised $10M to soften accents on calls in real-time. Previously he led a virtual agent startup within Google’s Area 120 incubator, for which he closed >$500M in Call Center AI deals. Prior to that Ofer led and sold a developer tools startup to Google, and an ad network startup to IAC. He holds a MS/BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, and an MBA from Cornell.
Kevin is Cofounder and CEO of BirchAI, a leader in automating complex workflows in healthcare and other high-compliance call centers. BirchAI is a venture-backed spinout from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, one of the country’s leading AI research organizations.
Previously in his career, Kevin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, GE Capital, McKinsey & Company’s global healthcare practice, and as an independent consultant across the healthcare sector. He also led business development in healthcare for the Austin-based AI startup, SparkCognition. Outside of work, Kevin cofounded Start Reading Now, a research-based non-profit that addresses Summer Setback and the Achievement Gap by funding thousands of young kids each year to buy their own personal library of 30 new books.
Kevin was a German and Political Science major at the University of Nebraska, and completed his MBA at the University of Minnesota.
Stephan Müller is Co-Founder and CTO of FLOWIT, a Swiss HR-Tech Startup. FLOWIT is a GenAI-powered people development platform that drives employee engagement and reduces employee churn. Prior to joining FLOWIT, Stephan Müller obtained a Master’s degree from ETH Zurich in Data Science, with a focus on theoretical Data Science and in particular Generative Networks, and worked in AI consulting, completing various project in the space of Recommender Systems and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Raika came to the United States when she was 15 years old and received her Bachelor of Science in Physics from California State University Northridge. She started as a junior system engineer and is currently the lead engineer at Livenation/Ticketmaster Information Security.
Esha Joshi is the cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Yoodli, an AI powered speech coach. Her dream is to help women become more confident communicators so they get the opportunities they deserve. After struggling with public speaking for many years, Esha’s now a fomer Toastmaster speaking champion and Grace Hopper keynote speaker. She’s passionate about helping others become the best communicators they can be. Prior to Yoodli, Esha worked at Apple in engineering and product management capacities to help launch Apple TV+.
