Ep. 46 – Learnings from Building a Massive Private Cloud with David Morales

00:00 - From Software Engineer to Cloud Pioneer

Matt Pacheco
Welcome to the Cloud Currents podcast where we explore the strategies and technologies shaping the future of cloud computing and cybersecurity. I'm your host Matt Pacheco from tierpoint and I help businesses understand cloud trends to help better make decisions about their IT strategies. Today we're joined by David Morales, the SVP of Technology and CIO at WGU Western Governors University. David helped pioneer large scale cloud computing at companies like Walmart. Now he uses that experience to keep a fully digital learning environment running smoothly for over 193,000 students.

David Morales
Around that number, yes. Yeah, it's a big number. That's a lot of people.

Matt Pacheco
In our conversation, we'll explore David's incredible journey from software engineering to cloud pioneer, discussing lessons learned along the way. Managing massive cloud infrastructure, diving into how AI and cybersecurity are kind of helping reshape education technology. And we'll also talk about the unique challenges of running education programs and platforms with the same rigor as E commerce systems and what the future holds for cloud learning. So, David, welcome to Cloud Currents today.

David Morales
Hey Matt, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about this conversation.

Matt Pacheco
Yeah, I'm excited to learn a little bit about what you're doing now and your journey to this point. Can you walk us through where you started and where you're at now?

David Morales
I'll be happy to. So early in my career I started doing software engineering. I was really deep into software engineering. I was deep into infrastructure and that was the reason was is I wanted to understand how to better code software and how to better integrate my software to the solutions that I was doing within the infrastructure. And that led me to a deep on hands cloud infrastructure. First is infrastructure as a service and then that helped me develop skills that understood the business also and what I was solving for. When I really appreciated being an engineer and implementing the technology and rolling the technology out, I realized that the technology is specifically fundamental for the business to be successful. But how the business can evolve and grow is in the decision making on how to address the technology.

Not necessarily how you build amazing architecture and great reliability and resiliency on your software, but it is also how do you actually consume the technology that will enable your business. So that's when I started switching into how do I enable people to develop, how do I enable the strategy to develop the business, how do I empower the business through technology? And I can tell you that at wgu, technology is a fundamental support for everything that we do here and how we lead our students to success. And that is one of the big things that attracted me at lgu. The technology is a core fundamental component of the culture. But the outcome is how do we enable students to be successful? In a nutshell, I decided to migrate into the leadership roles because I understood that the technology consumption is key for the implementation.

03:50 - Startup Agility vs. Enterprise Governance

Matt Pacheco
If you worked at both startups and massive enterprises, how have those contrasting experiences shaped your approach to leadership today?

David Morales
Oh, it has actually helped me drastically when I truly enjoy and I'll say this with the utmost respect, when I truly enjoy both areas. They have opportunities in both areas. One of them is sometimes you do things so fast because you have to wear so many hats and you're trying to pull things out to production and you're trying to do as much as possible that you cut a lot of corners and that could come back and hunt you down in technical debt. In poor architecture, sometimes it drives you back to solve for the same problem again. And when you're in a big enterprise environment, at times the governance, if you don't define governance the right way, governance can slow you down, can be that red tape.

What I like to tell everyone is if we don't design our solutions with governance already as part of it, governance is going to be a bolt on, that is going to slow the process instead of being a built in the solution. Right. So I've enjoyed both, I have seen both great areas. So now that I am responsible for this technology department, I try the best I can to really have a balance between, okay, how do we really enable agility, how do we truly enable innovation and creativity to move as fast as a startup, but at the same time execute on governance that it's built into the solutions that we bring.

05:36 - Building Walmart's Private Cloud & the Robot Pilot

Matt Pacheco
And you mentioned that you worked at Walmart as well. Can you tell us a little bit about what you did there and your experience there?

David Morales
Yes, I'll be happy to. So I did a lot at Walmart. I was with them a little over 15 years doing technology for them. From software engineering for decision support systems. At the time, that's kind of data analytics and data support to pricing models to understanding software global scale and actually doing software for the merchandising areas and the merchants and the vendors to develop myself as an architect, to develop myself as understanding infrastructure. And because I had a background in software engineering, a heavy background in software engineering and a really strong background infrastructure, they came to me and they tapped me on the shoulder and they say, hey David, we're trying to understand how to spell the word cloud. That was back in 2011, 20, something like that. And they said, would you mind helping us?

Because we understand that infrastructure as a service is more than just building the compute, the network and the storage. It's actually automating it and you have to automate it through software. So I took upon that challenge and I started building a team that was across the country. We had people in California, people in Arkansas, people in Virginia, and later people in different parts of the world as were building this at scale. So we started doing infrastructure as a service drastically. And we make our own private cloud utilizing a technology that is out there, that is open source. And I'm just going to tell you it's called OpenStack for those OpenStack fans out there. But I just. We deployed Diablo. That tells you how long ago it was, right?

That was the D, the letter D. So we deployed that and we started utilizing it in ecommerce specifically heavily. We were able to deploy over 385,000 virtual cores in our first iteration of cloud and they were being consumed drastically fast. And we realized, well, you know, infrastructure as a service is phenomenal and it's just actually doing what it's supposed to. It's giving us that flexibility that savings that we need as we move forward. But we need more than that. We need, we need to understand first what cloud native software looks like, what cloud ready software looks like and enable our developers to deploy. So we created the platform as a service.

So we started working then on platform as a service and I had the privilege to learn and to from great engineers and meet great engineers and all over the country and the world actually because we have people from multiple countries and we created such a great platform as a service that our engineers, they were deploying and they just didn't care where we're deploying as long as it was meeting the SLAs and the KPIs that they were looking for their software to be. Later we introduced the public clouds, but we introduced it as part of that orchestration pass layer and it was easy for us to start deploying in different clouds, cloud providers. So that was a great experience that taught me a lot.

But as I was doing that, I had the fortune of they came to me and they said, hey, listen, you really know cloud, you really understand what it means to write software to be deployed in a cloud native environment in which the resources are ephemeral. How do you feel about deploying cloud at the store? How do you feel about bringing all the technology that is at the stores into the cloud. So I took upon that challenge and the team there was just phenomenal. The, the store systems team, great individuals, great engineers, delivering constantly for the business. So I was responsible for the technology running most of the stores, not Moses, all the stores around the world for Walmart in partnership with internationals and stores and stuff like that. But I had that privilege of doing that and were successful as were doing that.

One of the big pilots that we did, I don't know if you guys remember this, you can actually go out there and Google it. We deployed robots at the store. We had robots running the aisles, scanning the aisles, looking into what are the merchandising that we're missing. How can we provide information to the associates to react upon. We actually did this in a way that enable us to. In five minutes after the robots scanned the aisles, the store associate got a list of. This is what you have to do. You go into this aisle, you go into the back room. This is where you're going to get, this is how you're going to put it on the shelves. These are the new pricing labels that you're going to have to print and all that.

It was just phenomenal at the time I'm talking about, this was in 2015, 2016. We weren't necessarily as a society that ready for that level of AI and that level of automation. We introduced robots in the back room and those were working well mostly in logistical components of this goes there. But we couldn't continue with that pilot. We did that pilot with about 50 different stores and it was just phenomenal. We learn a lot. But one of the things that we learned is that our society, our culture wasn't ready just yet. So we needed to pivot.

Matt Pacheco
Yeah, that's really interesting. You were ahead of the AI and kind of automation and analyzing data really early on. And we'll talk a little bit more about AI, but in your Walmart experience. So building out that massive cloud infrastructure, that's a huge undertaking where there's some big challenges you came across at the time that you needed to overcome. Like what was some of the biggest things you dealt with at that time?

David Morales
So there were several right from at the time. There were a lot of vendors of infrastructure from storage components, if you like, from network components, if you like, that they were trying to catch up to cloud. They were really trying. So there were not that many type of adopters or connectors. So we could actually manage the configuration of the systems. We had to introduce a lot of configuration Management that was automated because it was not coded within or embedded within the appliances that we needed to manage. So that was a big challenge. But being Walmart and having so many great suppliers of technology and great partners in technology, they sat down with us and we talked to them, we decided how to approach it and we did multiple phases to solve for that, manageability and interoperability.

But one of the challenges that we had, and I mean this with the. Highest respect, because these guys are just. Second to none, there was a security team at the time, they were trying to figure out, like, wait, wait, what do you mean?

You bring up a server and you put it down and then you deploy software and then they were all out of the place. They were trying to figure out, okay, how do we catch up to this new thing of cloud and what clouds means to architectural security, what it means to the actual implementation of security? How are we going to manage this and where are you going to be deploying it? And coming from a very, extremely well managed environment in security at Walmart into something that was so ephemeral, something that was so still new, we're still trying to spill it out, how to do cloud, that was a big challenge. But I wish to express my gratitude to all those engineers and security that did great. They adopted, they changed, but at the beginning was a little give and take, right?

Like, no, you cannot do that. I'm like, well, if I cannot do that, then why are we doing so? That was so challenging, but it was so great to see everyone willing to partner and get things done.

Matt Pacheco
That's really cool. So you talked a little bit about the ephemerability of cloud. That's a, that's a mouthful. And in the past you've talked about why lift and shift doesn't necessarily always work when it comes to COD architecture. Can you explain what you mean by that and why so many organizations might get it wrong based on your experiences doing this in the past?

David Morales
Most definitely. Especially back in the day when were doing this and there were several cloud providers that are specifically doing infrastructure as a service, the people were accustomed to deploy monolithic software. Meaning I'm going to scale by nature of adding more horizontal or, sorry, more vertical power to my CPUs on my software, right? Like, oh, I'm running out of memory. Well, put more memory in it. I'm like, oh, I'm running out of. Right. And so this monolithic software required the very strict connections, very strict amount of storage, very strict controls on the network. And we understood that. But cloud is all about deploying compute, network and storage as fast as possible based on what is needed.

Now you need to start thinking, instead of building something that's going to scale up now, you need to scale it across now you need to start thinking about how do I write software that is doing small workers, that I can spin up as many workers as I can and if one worker dies, that's okay because I can spin up another box and I can deploy another worker and it's going to pick up after that. They needed to start thinking about how to keep state versus before the state was kept by the infrastructure, not by the software. So we needed to start changing that mentality. So when people came to us like, hey, your cloud is broken.

I deploy my software in your cloud and now I'm down, I'm like, yeah, that's why you need to start thinking differently on the architecture that you bring to cloud. That's why you need to start thinking differently about how you distribute the workload across multiple workers, let alone distributing across multiple regions or availability zones. But start thinking about that and then start thinking about how are we going to start distributing that across different geographical areas, different regions. So that was a complete mind shifter, right? Going from what we started calling at the time at Walmart we said you have your monolithic software and then you have what we said, cloud ready, something that could have like maybe a three tier architecture that will enable us to do something and then a cloud native.

Cloud native was actually deployed, architected in a way that had multiple workers, in a way that had multiple instances running, small instances running so we could spin up as many as needed and reduce as much as needed when the workflow was low. So, so as we started doing that, a lot of engineers, software engineers started picking it up and architecture and that shift changed. So that's why I always told everyone it's not a lift and shift you really need to think about is my software ready for this?

17:29 - Running WGU Like an E-Commerce Platform

Matt Pacheco
That's an excellent point. So we talked about your experience at Walmart. Really you did a lot of things there, you built a lot of cloud infrastructure there. Now you're at wgu. So let's talk about what you're doing there and like how big was it a shock to the system going from these projects with Walmart to wgu? What's the biggest surprise or change you found as you arrived to WGU and how they operate versus how Walmart operated? Because I'm sure they're different.

David Morales
They're certainly different. WGU though is a huge Corporation I will, I won't take that away from wgu. So when I joined, when I first joined, I'll be honest to you, I was thinking like, yeah, this is going to be a piece of cake. Not a big deal, it's not going to be that hard. But I can tell you that the leadership, the people at wgu, not only the leadership, everyone at W is so innovative and they're always pushing the envelope and they're just challenging our status quo constantly. That for the over seven years that I've been here, at times I've been playing catch up, at times I'd behind completely, at times I've been a little upfront.

But it has been a great environment in which we've been able to do a lot of great fundamentals change a lot of fundamentals that are now enabling us to deliver big and big promises for our students. So it's a different, yes, different approach, different mentality, different operating environment. But I love the fact that even though WGU is a big corporation, I mean it's not as big as Walmart, but it's big. The mentality is not okay, we're big, we're enterprise, which is going to move slow. Oh no. Go, go. New ideas, new designs. Let's try this didn't work. Let's change it for this, let's change for that. It's just been so refreshing to see that from everywhere, from the president all the way to every single individual.

Matt Pacheco
That is really refreshing. And it seems like the innovation, the pace of innovation is as quick as you're saying. And in the past you've mentioned you run WGU Technology, kind of like an E commerce site. Can you explain what that means in practice and what E commerce principles from Walmart experiences as well translate to the education world?

David Morales
Oh, I'll be happy to. So let's rewind. Seven years ago I show up here and we start asking questions about, hey, tell me about how we're doing in our availability of our application because we are 100% online university, so our students get to see our portal, they get to see the technology, that's how they learn, that's how they interact with mentors, with faculty, with staff, right through everything, through technology. So start asking questions about operations, tell me about how we're delivering, tell me about the experience of our students. And everybody just started looking on as funny on me specifically. I was like, what, what do you mean? And I started saying like, well, if our software is not available, then how are students going to be Successful.

If the experience is not an experience that we're reducing friction for our students, how are we going to want them to come back to us? We started to change that. We did an initial assessment. I can tell you that we started about 84.6% availability across the entire year. Our initial assessment was. And now we have moved that to a 99.7% availability. That has drastically changed the way that we think about what our students are consuming, how we support it. We created a NOC similar to what I had when I was in E Commerce at Walmart. We're monitoring our systems 24 7. We have added a bunch of monitoring and alerting to the systems that systematically will tell us, hey, this is happening. This is something that you need to get engaged.

I am happy to tell you that our meantime to acknowledge any type of issues is less than five minutes. Our teams are super proactive. We have a tier one, tier two and three tier level of supports for our students. We still experience outages. That's something that I know we will continue to see. Not because of us, not because we don't like doing things the right way or architect the right way. It's just we have so many vendors and our vendors will go through issues too. But at the end of the day to our students, we are down. I cannot go to like, well, you know what? So and so is down. So I'm down. No, we have to solve for that problem. And my team has matured drastically that way.

So in addition to that, we are also instead of just thinking like, well, here's a portal. Good luck. We're all now thinking more about, okay, what is the experience, the holistic experience of this student? How do we want them to navigate through this such that it's so easy. When I got here, we would go to one screen and you had the buttons on the top left and then on another one you had them on the bottom right. And then another month you had a little French fries menu and then the other one you had them on the top. So like, wait, wait. Why are students going through this experience? Right? We need to start changing and evolving. So E Commerce taught me a lot about, okay, think about your customers first. Think about what is that experience?

Think about how do you reduce clicks on the screen? How do you reduce friction for those customers? And I translate that to students, right? So how do I reduce friction for my students? How do we bring systems that are super simple to log in, super simple to go through the flow without adding a lot of friction?

23:30 - Vendor Accountability, Security Culture & CI/CD Governance

Matt Pacheco
Speaking of friction. There's also friction for you guys as trying to manage 100% digital environment for 193,000 active students. What are some of the challenges, the unique challenges that you experienced in this space compared to where you were in the past?

David Morales
So there are a few. I'll say the very first one is to make sure that we stay on top of all the partners that we have, great partners and vendors that we have in technology to make sure that our availability is as high as possible. We want to make sure that we're there for our students all the time, which could be chaotic when you have over 880 people helping all companies, helping you put all these environments together. Right. The second that I would say is, in my very humble opinion. When you deploy new technology, when you bring new experiences to bear for your students, you cannot just go out there and do everything at once. You need to make sure that the fundamentals are clear. You need to make sure that you have the different layers of that cake ready to get there.

But as you do, then you start deploying and bringing and remove legacy from for new software. Right? So there's a lot of legacy components that I have that I'll be extremely honest, have been proven to be harder to remove as we bring new layers. And what we're trying to do the best is create the right obstruction layers so we can start bringing other technologies and start solving for our students better. That has been a challenge that we are still working towards and we are now being successful. We have tried multiple times. But one thing I learned here at WGU is you cannot just deploy a whole new environment and say, I'm done. No, you actually have to do the layer approach.

Matt Pacheco
Interesting. So you mentioned partners a few times. Vendors and partners. How do you hold them accountable? Because you. You have these uptime goals, you have to make sure you stay available. How do you hold them accountable to help you achieve those goals?

David Morales
So there are a couple ways that we do. So one of the things that I like to do is I do have meetings with my partners, especially with those key partners, constantly. I. It doesn't go a month without me touching base with people from the different companies that are helping us make sure that we deliver the best experience for our students. And as we do, as we sit down, we talk about, okay, you're doing this well, your operational availability is this. We have some struggles here, but we see that what you've done there for us. So that's one way. The second way is to make sure that you have clear Expectations clear, SLA defined in your contracts. Make sure that when you do this, you sit down with them and you tell them exactly what is it that you're trying to accomplish.

And this is not only for big corporations that are out there. There's several startups that we're working with, local startups here in Utah that we're working with to deliver. And I can tell you that those guys are just second to none. Like I've done with, done business with big technology companies. And the startup community here in Utah is just fantastic to work with. They are committed, they will bleed with you, they will cry with you and they will laugh with you. So make sure that you establish that relationship and then you make define the SLAs and then you make the cadence of let's come together, let's talk about how good things are going.

Matt Pacheco
So earlier you talked about security at Walmart a little bit and how they were trying to keep up with all the great cloud things you're doing. Now as a leader of an organization, security within your organization, is that good?

David Morales
That is correct, yes.

Matt Pacheco
So as a leader, IT leader and a security leader, what is your philosophy for making sure that security is kind of part of the process? Because it sounds like you're moving fast. Wgu, how do you ensure that everything's secure and secure the right way and you're catching the vulnerabilities and you're built securely?

David Morales
So here at wgu we have great, phenomenal security team. Kudos to my security team, I'll say that, because they keep me sleeping at night for sure. But I'll tell you this, there's several things that I learned at Walmart that were procedural things that I came here and we started talking about them, we started implementing them. We have through the entire software life cycle, we have embedded our security teams to make sure they're part of the gatekeepers as we move from one point to another one. We have created the right CI CD pipelines going back to the fundamentals that I was mentioning before, we have gone back to the secure, to the CICD pipelines and implemented built in that governance of security so our developers clearly understand where we at and how we're doing.

We have created the right risk assessment process, we have created the right security committees that enable people to really understand, okay, this is the governance, but this is the actual built in of implementation of that governance, sorry, inside the technology that we're building. So I think that's just been phenomenal to see because even though I was able to bring some ideas from this big corporation that again, they're doing fantastic work at Walmart Security here, were able to adapt those and put them together as the WGU one. And again, having great visionary leaders in security has totally helped me and enabled me to be successful there.

Matt Pacheco
That's great to hear because you hear from a lot of companies that sometimes security kind of becomes a. It makes it hard to enable innovation and to move nimbly. So it sounds like from a cultural perspective you're building that as well. How do you measure the success of kind of integrating your security into all of these processes that you mentioned?

David Morales
So what we do is since we're implementing this at the CI CD pipelines, we need to make sure that every single one of our engineering teams is consuming the CI CD pipelines that we have created for the environment. So we keep track of, okay, what teams out there are not deploying through the right pipelines, what teams out there are actually using third party software that may be a SaaS provider that was not. So we do keep tabs on all that information. And our security team is constantly implementing security audits across our technology and across our laptops and across our network such that we get reports on very specific things, details. I have a meeting that we call the Monthly Business Operating Report.

So we bring all the directors and above to my organization and we have created a table, a scorecard in which we cover multiple things depending on which type of director you are. If you're a product director, you have your set of KPIs. If you're our engineering director, you have your set of KPIs. And we come all together, all of us come together and we go director by director and then we group to the VP and we all ask questions like, hey, I see that you have that, hey, I see that you have this issue. Hey, I see that you still have tickets open for having software that is out of compliance. Right? Compliance to us is extremely important for multiple different factors, but we keep track of that.

And then we challenge in a big meeting where all directors and above are sitting at and we say, okay, so and so you own your little sphere. What are you doing to fix it? And that has helped us so much. And that's something actually I learned here at Top gu that has helped us so very much because it brings the responsibility and the accountability to the right groups and they also feel empower to actually solve for what is required of them. So it's not just a rapport that I get every once in a while. No, it's something that we stay on top of.

32:23 - 10,000 Attacks Per Minute, SOC Operations & AI Readiness

Matt Pacheco
So speaking of things to stay on top of, you said your security team keeps you asleep at night, but we know that with the proliferation of AI tools, the bad guys have new ways to try to disrupt operations and sometimes even ransom money out of a lot of organizations. What keeps you up at night about AI and cyber security? And how do you, how are you approaching AI from an attack perspective? Because I know that's growing. It's, it doesn't seem to be stopping. If anything, it's grown exponentially over the last few months with the availability of these new tools.

David Morales
Yes, yes, certainly. And we have seen an increase. And I'll say also, and I, I mean this with the. I'm, I'm hopeful and I actually like this. We have the school of technology inside the school of Technology. We have the cyber security program. So a lot of our students will kind of poke the bear just to make sure that we are doing well. I'm right now going really quick through some data. There you go. We actually get about over 9,000, almost 10,000 attacks per minute. And, and I don't say this just for, to people who like, oh, let's just talk.

And even more right now, my security team has created the right structure with the right tools and we're utilizing AI as well so we can stay on top of what is happening and how we are being attacked and how we're being covering our tales to make sure that in every single aspect we are supportive. We actually have a soc. You know how I told you we have a NOC and network operating center. We also have a security operating center that works 247 that is constantly through the right set of automation and alerting and monitoring, looking into our system, making sure that we're secure and we're safe. And knock on wood, my team has done phenomenal work in keeping us safe. We also have the right segregation of concerns to make sure that our data is protected.

Matt Pacheco
One of the trends with socks and using some of these AI tools for cybersecurity, one of the trends is kind of this alert overload. How do you manage that for all the noise? Because you, as you mentioned thousands of attacks per minute. How do you, how do you figure out the right ones to, I guess, address in your operations?

David Morales
So what we have done is we try to figure out how many attacks do we get a minute, I said, and how many actually are flagged that are controlled by automation. So my team is constantly reviewing those, looking into the different type of monitoring and learning that we have and then we create software to enable the resolution for it. So we see how that number of alerts are diminishing and the VP of security is on top of okay, how do we enable automation? And sometimes that automation is through AI as well. That enables us to reduce the noise so we can focus on the components. So as part of my meeting that I told you about, we review the alerts, we review the.

What is it being monitored and what was a false positive and how do we avoid not acting upon something that is out there that we need to act upon?

Matt Pacheco
Yeah, I bet not. Yeah, a lot of noise. I'm also curious about so cybersecurity talent. So as a leader, you have to make sure your teams are filled with the right people with the right skills and so is everyone else. There's there. It's been said that there's a shortage of cybersecurity talent in the industry. How do you overcome that challenge of making sure you have the right talent there to keep your operation running? And, and then also on top of that, how do you upskill them to keep them up to date with all of the stuff that is constantly.

David Morales
Changing in that world? Well, Matt, you're actually giving me a slow pitch, so I'm going to take it. I'm going to tell you this. At wgu, we have this cybersecurity program that is just phenomenal. It's just helping so many companies hire the right talent. Our alumni coming from this school of technology are just fantastic individuals with the right level of skills. So we hire a lot of our graduates. That's one of the things that we do. And Jane Chandler is the name of the vice president of security. He has done a great job of not only hiring the right talent, but keeping the right talent in. So I have people that have been at WU for over 10, 12, 15 years in the security environment cyber security group because of the great culture that this team has been able to develop and to establish.

In addition to that, going out there to our school alumni and be able to pull new professionals with the right skills have been something that we have been benefit from.

Matt Pacheco
I swear that wasn't a softball on purpose, but it's pretty good. It's like a cheat code for talent. You guys have a step up compared to all these other organizations because it's, it's a challenge. It's, it's. How do you find that talent and getting the people to learn the things they need to learn? Because one, it's not about like almost everything you learn in school, it's learning on the job, finding people who are flexible to learn, hey, this is a new attack and learn on the fly because things constantly change. That's, that's really cool to hear that you guys have that, that pipeline and then retaining, which is cool. I'm sure it's very exciting place to be. So we talked a little bit about AI cybersecurity, both from an attack and a defense perspective.

Can you talk a little bit about your AI integration potentially operationally at WGU for your, the other side, your product or if you're using it for your cloud management or anything like that. You tell me how you're using AI other than cyber security, I'll be happy.

David Morales
To, I'll say this. I recently had a conversation with people from a different company and they were telling, talking to me about, hey, we wanna figure out how to do, how to be AI ready. And I think most universities out there and most companies out there, they want to do things to be AI ready. So to us, and specifically to me, being AI ready is not about the tools, but it's about the fundamentals going back to that work. What do I mean with the fundamentals? How clean and well governed is your data? Right? Do your teams understand how to ask good questions, not just to prompt a model? Are you aligning ethics, security and even accountability to whatever tool you bring in AI? Right? Is your culture such that can understand those principles?

And I will say most importantly that AI is here to augment, not to replace. So remember I told you about the robots we deployed at Walmart and I told you that's culture as a warm. We weren't ready for those. Well, let me tell you that, let me tell you this. A lot of customers came mad at Walmart saying like, you guys just want to replace your employees for robots. Like, no, no, that's not what we want to do. Not at all. Right? That's not what, like, no. Now you guys want to automate the world and it's not. So we started asking the store associates, like, go and ask customers if there's anything that you can help them with because now we're freeing up some of your time. We want you to go and serve the customer.

And as the store associates started going there and I was like, hey, what do you need? How can I help you people? Customers started looking at them like, why are you asking me? I've been in this Walmart for My whole life I know that the Walmart like the back of my hand, maybe even better than you. Right? I mean. No, just leave me alone. So as a culture, weren't ready. So if we see AI as an enabler, something that is going to augment, not replace, then people trust the intent and start embracing and start gaining adoption. So at wgu, what we're doing is we are thinking about AI into how do we bring AI to not only improve our operations. There's a lot of areas that I can tell you.

We're going to improve our operational process through AI, from assessment, evaluation to conversation intelligence to decision intelligence to a twin and intelligent or an AI twin. Digital twin. Yeah. There's a lot of things that we can do in the operational piece and we're already implementing a lot of that one. And going back to the partners, I have great vendor partners that are helping me make sure that we have the right components. And since our fundamentals are ready, okay, now how do we take advantage of the products? Right? But then secondly, we're also thinking about, okay, how can we reinvent ourselves with AI? How can we come back with the different models of learning? What is the new way of learning in an AI world? It cannot just be the same. So what is the new model of learning, the new pedagogical model?

Is there such thing that enables AI consumers to move faster in their learning journey? So that's kind of how we see it from two different perspective.

44:46 - The Future of AI, Cloud & Closing Advice

Matt Pacheco
How do you see the future looking with tools like these AI tools? How do you see that changing the world both from an IT perspective and a cloud perspective? And what do you see in the next five to ten years as your prediction for the future?

David Morales
I'm so excited about it, I really am. I really mean it with the. If you have align your ethics, your security and your accountability over how you're bringing AI into the, the sky is the limit. You're really going to be able to implement new processes. You're gonna, the jobs will change, the jobs will evolve. But I don't see a future in which we're going to be jobless. The, the job will change. And, and as we do this and we, if we do it right, things improve in productivity gains, things will enable the individuals to develop new skills and continue to grow in their learning environment and we will be AI powered but human driven. So I don't know, maybe I'm too optimistic about the future. Maybe somebody listening to this, were like, yeah, whatever David. But I really mean it.

I really see a lot of great potential with AI. But if we are not aligned ethically, if we're not aligned with security, if we're not aligned with the right fundamentals of your data, it's going to be challenging.

Matt Pacheco
It almost sounds like the adoption of AI and cloud have a lot of parallels with each other. It's really interesting hearing that and hearing your story of back in Walmart and hearing now and how you see the future. It's. It's really interesting realizing that. So one last final question for you. What one piece of advice would you give to our listeners today about anything you've talked about today when it comes to building cloud infrastructure or getting your cybersecurity team AI ready and or using AI for your product, which is your education platform, what's one piece of advice you would give to listeners if you can get it to one piece of advice? You talk a lot of things.

David Morales
Let me try to do it. I'll say. I'm gonna break it into three specific pieces of one advice. As you guys go out there to implement new technology or you go into a new job in which you're going to be, or you go into a new challenge inside your company that you're bringing AI, I would say do the following. There's three steps. The first one is listen. Understand the problem, the business, the culture, what is happening with the individuals that are doing this? How do they feel? Understand the underlining, think you're trying to solve for. Don't just go and implement a technology for the sake of implementing a technology. The second piece is make sure that you have the right fundamentals. I spoke a lot about fundamentals.

The right architecture, the right security posture, the right data maturity, the right cloud deployment and partners and providers. Make sure that you have great partners and technology that are going to enable you to implement that. And third, but not least, don't try to do everything at once and focus on outcomes, not outputs. Go after the outcomes. What am I trying to do this? Why am I doing this AI for here? Does it really make sense if the outcome is not moving the needle? Don't try to inject technology for the sake of technology. Just focus on the outcomes and make sure that, yes, through this step one and step two of my advice, you can be successful.

Matt Pacheco
Excellent advice. Thank you so much. It's a good one to remember. That's a quotable one. Outcomes, not outputs. I love that.

David Morales
I wanted to thank you, David, for.

Matt Pacheco
Being on the podcast today with us. We learned a lot of exciting things happening at wgu, and I'm really excited to see what happens in the future for educational platforms like that. That's, it's really cool. So thank you, Matt.

David Morales
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoy this conversation and for.

Matt Pacheco
Our listeners, thanks for listening in. Stay tuned for more episodes of Cloud Currents, wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you soon. Thank you very much.