Cybersecurity Is Not A Checklist! Navigating Security Challenges Amid The Fast Pace Of Technological Advancement With Kevin Neal

Have you ever considered how one day our efforts to manage cyber risk might not be able to catch up with how fast new technologies are advancing together with their attendant risks? This is not a far-fetched thought. Things like artificial intelligence are evolving at an exponential rate and people are very quick to jump into the bandwagon. But are our cyber management efforts just as quick to adapt? Or are we still ticking boxes instead of being proactive? This is what keeps Kevin Neal awake at night. To him, cybersecurity should be a top-of-mind concern instead of just a checkbox. He joins the podcast to share his insight into the cybersecurity industry and the need for it to evolve at a faster rate as new forms of threats appear in the horizon with the rapid development of emerging technologies. Join in and learn about the things that we need to pay attention to if we are to stay on top of things in this time of reckoning.

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Cybersecurity Is Not A Checklist! Navigating Security Challenges Amid The Fast Pace Of Technological Advancement With Kevin Neal

We have an amazing guest, the Chief Executive Officer of P3iD Technologies. He’s a document master and an animal enthusiast. Welcome, Kevin Neal.

Thanks. I’m excited to be here.

We are going to jump right in here and ask our leading question, which is, if the cyber risk was a pizza and the frameworks are the crust, what’s the riskiest topping you have seen and what topping would you equate that to?

I’d say cybersecurity is anchovies. Why anchovies? I love a nice crust and I love pepperoni, and I love pineapples on pizza, but I don’t care for anchovies so much. The analogy I like to draw, and I will talk about a lot of analogies and draw parallels, is that some people like anchovies, but oftentimes people don’t like them and they want to avoid it, and it’s not a fun thing. I think that’s cybersecurity. If you are a worker bee, you want to do your work. If you are a manager, you want to manage the people. Dealing with cybersecurity is something I don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to have it, but I have to.

You have got to respect that. I think that anchovies are a good analogy because it’s something you got to deal with. If you avoid it and you want to not deal with it, then there are consequences. You look at ChatGPT. I will use them as an example. I don’t know if they got hacked or whatever, but there’s some controversy right now because there were mixing the chat histories of people. One person was able to view another person’s chat history, and that’s very dangerous.

I don’t know if it was a hack or something in their code, but now this company and technology are going like crazy because of the impression that they were hacked. Whether it’s true or not, is a big concern for them. I’d say that they should have had anchovies on their pizza and embraced it as I do. I’d say anchovies. That was a long answer to say I don’t care for them, but I got to deal with them

It’s like the book, Eat That Frog! Start every day by eating the frog. You got to do it.

I’m one of those weird people who likes anchovies on my pizza.

It takes all kinds. One size doesn’t fit all, especially for cybersecurity. You can’t go in and say, “This is my encryption, my blockchain, and my multifactor authentication.” You got to deal with different environments. There are existing systems and people. I don’t know how many different variations of pizzas you can get, but there are probably millions with all the different toppings and the different crusts and all this stuff. It’s like a building block. To your point, you got to have a framework for cybersecurity. Pineapples on pizza is a very good analogy.

In your chief excitement role, what keeps you up at night? What problems are you seeing in the industry?

I use ChatGPT as an example. They have got hundreds of millions of dollars or like a big overnight sensation. What worries me is that people like this, in their zest to get their product to market or solve a problem, discount cybersecurity. I’m not picking on them, but it’s in the news. If you don’t take it seriously, it could ruin everything that they have been working for. It’s a huge concern. That does keep me up at night that if I build P3 for a company that’s growing and growing and I’m not paying attention to cybersecurity, one little mistake, one little open firewall port, or one little data that are not encrypted or redacted could be catastrophic to my business.

That keeps me personally up at night, but it also keeps me up at night on behalf of my customers. They are trying to run a business and they don’t have to be or shouldn’t be cybersecurity experts. They rely on companies like P3iD or other companies to come in and help them. If companies aren’t sincerely helping them and reviewing your security policies and always checking systems, checking people, that’s concerning. You don’t want to work so hard to build a beautiful business and have it go away or be discounted because they can’t trust you. Now when people go to ChatGPT, they are giving very sensitive information because they were saying, “I need to build a software product with these attributes.”

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Now that data could have been potentially shared with other people and that data’s out there and now they have that perspective. If I go there now, I had this in the back of my mind, “Should I put it in there or not?” There are companies like that. There’s Equifax. Their breach was years ago. I forget how long ago, but I still think of that breach to this day when I hear Equifax. You got to be careful with this stuff because it’s your reputation, it’s your business, and it’s trusting. Your customers got to trust you. That’s what keeps me up at night. You don’t want to let everything get ruined by overlooking something. Cybersecurity is got to be at the top. It’s not a checkbox. It’s one of the most important things.

We used to refer to at least some of the security assessments that we had seen done. The company shall remain nameless, but call it Checkbox Theater. Ticking a checkbox is not enough. You need to go take a look at it, make sure it works and is enforcement happening, those sorts of things. It’s very similar to maybe protection at a concert. Is that gate locked? Does that mean somebody’s got to go check to make sure that you don’t have a bunch of people running into a ball game or at least through what essentially you think was a protected gateway or barrier?

When you get into things like artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, you don’t even know what’s happening. As you mentioned, artificial ethics that are built into such a tool may not be wanted by the dark web side of the home or the digital deviants that are lurking amongst what essentially are the tunneled environments that they call the dark web.

You hear it often, but people appreciate it. It’s a shared responsibility. In your example of going to a concert. You got to still watch your surroundings, but you have to have trust that the gates are being monitored and all that stuff and people are checked as they come in. Somebody takes that responsibility, but then you still got to be careful of sup protecting yourself too.

When it comes to AI, for example, it’s not a security-related thing, but I have always heard that being very transparent in your code is a good thing because that way, any security concerns or privacy concerns are addressed because you know maybe not the actual code itself, but the way that they develop their AI models should be disclosed. I have always heard that’s a good thing. I have heard from Intel, they use a certain type of encryption that was open source, and they said, “We use open source. We want people to know about it because we want to be transparent about our security.” Yes, absolutely.

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Transparency is always appreciated when organizations say they are transparent. If you don’t know what’s going on within your code, things can get out of control. I see a future of people saying, “I got to see Michael Jackson live. He performed online in this virtual meeting,” like somebody who’s younger who doesn’t even know that Michael Jackson passed away some time ago. All done with what essentially are AI technologies.

This is potentially our future. Being able to dis distinguish what’s real versus what is not might get a little muddy as AI advances. A poignant note. Years ago, I attended a conference where there was a scientist who was researching AI. I do not recall her name, but she made it very clear as a researcher that AI is about as smart as an earthworm.

Ways to go. We are probably years away before it is intelligent enough to be as smart as a German Shepherd. That’s going to be a long journey of what are going to be mistakes and catastrophes. The future looks bright, but probably. At least from a ChatGPT perspective, we have got to watch what’s going on. We will see.

It’s a very exciting time, but we need to consider the implications of it because it can learn so fast. As with any good technology, it could be abused for nefarious purposes. We need to consider the implications. To your point, what do we know what’s real, these deep fakes like you are saying? We could run an AI model and put somebody on TV and it looks like they are saying exactly what you think that’s coming out of their mouth, but it’s not. How do we do that?

Those deep fakes need to maybe have some digital signature that we know, or TV decrypts it and says, “This is authentic video,” or some crazy thing like that. That’s where we are going. ChatGPT is a good example of exposing something very cool to the masses, and there are all kinds of different use cases for it, which is wonderful. There are also kinds a lot of things that need to be considered. It can’t be the Wild West because then it could be abused and whatnot. It’s exciting times, but keep you guys in business for sure.

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What are your biggest challenges when you are meeting regulatory requirements nowadays?

Staying abreast of these. This is our business, but they are always coming out of the woodwork and it’s hard to stay on top of them. Understanding the requirements is one thing and then applying the technologies to do that. I will give you one example. CCPA, I live in California, and the California Consumer Protection Act.

If you go to the California DV and ask for your 60 days, “Has anybody accessed my records in 60 days?” They are supposed to give you some report, I think, within 24 hours. Can that happen? I don’t know. If I ask them to delete my data, does that happen? That’s the State of California. We have tons of technology resources. How can even some people in the state of California stay on top of all these regulations and all these things?

It’s hard to stay abreast. They are always coming out with regulations and compliances that want to help data privacy, but it’s hard to stay on top of it. I can’t imagine a business that doesn’t focus on this, how they can stay ahead. People that freely share information and have webinars and are sincerely trying to educate the market, I give them kudos because it’s hard. That’s the challenge for us. I’m sure it’s a challenge for other businesses.

Regulators are always coming out with regulations and compliances that want to help data privacy, but it’s hard to stay on top of it.

I think everybody struggles with it at this point, especially keeping up with the different laws and everything else that is going on. It’s a common thing that we hear.

I don’t think you jump into deploying technology. You got to start with a framework. If you start putting technologies together that are incompatible, don’t have a support plan, or aren’t implemented properly, then what do you do? You create a bigger mess. I say you step back, get a plan, get a framework because in cybersecurity, sometimes it’s not even about the technology. Oftentimes it’s not about the technology itself. It’s about people. Governance of people. Who has access to the data physically? Who has training? Is your data segregated the right way? Is it encrypted the right way? There are all kinds of considerations outside of technology. It takes a well-thought-out framework before you start implementing technology like crazy.

What solutions have you developed with P3iD to help with this?

We are in the business process business. We are a business process automation company that helps companies be more efficient. We started layering all these cybersecurity technologies on. The first one we did was document encryption. You capture a document and they encrypt it and not encrypt it like in one place. We fragment the files, encrypt each chunk, and we scatter the files in a distributed file system like you put 40% on Amazon and 20% on Google, and the other 40% on your premise. It’s in three storage targets, and every chunk is encrypted and you got to decrypt it. The odds of getting that. Encryption is number one.

Authentication. Single sign-on, multifactor authentication with biometrics, even a 3rd or 4th form of authentication, because usernames and passwords aren’t good enough. Firewall ports to be able to offer services like authentication service without opening a NAT firewall inbound port. Our technology can make an outbound request to what we call a request collector that’s collecting authentication requests. You could still make an authentication request without opening port 389 or 636 on your firewall. Those are a couple of things. Encryption, multifactor authentication, and then firewall ports closed.

We are also getting into blockchain. Blockchain’s another way. I mentioned the distributed storage but also document authenticity. I was talking about deep fakes with videos, but you can also provide a blockchain hash with the scanned image or the captured image, and you could say, “Is this the authentic document or not?”

There are a couple of things we are working on. I know this is a long-winded answer, but this is important too. Everybody’s talking about zero-trust networks now. We work with machines that work with people, we are implementing all kinds of zero-trust architectures because you can’t trust a system to system or human to system by default. It’s got to be by default. It’s not trusted. How do you provide authentication? We are doing all kinds of crazy things to provide authentication. We have some encryption expertise on staff. We are in inventing different encryption algorithms

It almost seems like this industry in security, and we have been through iterations. There always appears to be some buzzword. Zero trust is if you have been in the industry, you immediately know what it means. The general public probably does not. I do wonder about with artificial intelligence. You have seen the movie Minority Report where you can predict when somebody is going to be malicious in their activities before they do it. These Hollywood-type scenarios are grandiose and will make you overthink something if you are not careful with that side note. There is a lot of research happening right now on being able to do predictive technologies, and there are a lot of applications for it.

Predictive cybersecurity hacks or someone who might become a hacker that you catch six months before they go on the wrong path based on their behaviors and AI models. Is that the future that we are headed for is what I often ask? For somebody that’s collecting thousands of documents in terms of document collection or scanning. I imagine that there has to be some predictive analysis happening in the industry already, so you know where to put a document and you yet 12, 14, or 16 documents and you realize, these are all this category, so we think the rest of them are going to be the same. Is that happening?

You nailed it. What we have been doing in the past is like DLP, Data Loss Protection, or Data Leak Protection so DLP. At the firewall, you can review the documents coming in and going. If you see all of a sudden documents going out with social security numbers from an accounting person. Why do they have social security numbers? Maybe an HR person. That’s reasonable. We do have that brute force at the firewall DOP protection, but it’s too late by that time. It’s catching it. If we can apply an AI model, and you nailed it is like, can we predict possibilities not based on historical events but some other patterns?

I don’t know what that is. It’s still early days, but if you can detect a potential breach before it even happens, that’s huge. That’s where Equifax got to clean up stuff. FedEx is having to clean up stuff after the data breach. If you could save even one potential data breach, I think that’s a good application for AI for sure. I think smart people that think, maybe ethical hackers that think like hackers and can create these models and test, see, and learn with machine learning, not just AI, but machine learning too. It learns and gets smarter over time. As you said, Minority Report, it has to be the future. and we have to embrace technology.

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If you use it for the right purposes, it can solve a lot of problems because machines can think a lot faster than we can, but you are right. They are dumb machines. They are still binary. They are 0s and 1s. That’s all they are. They are trained by humans. They don’t learn on their own. They have to be fed a lot of data oftentimes, and they need to see patterns, but they can detect patterns. A good use of AI is to create models that can prevent data breaches.

I hope it’s better than my predictive text on my cell phone. The one in Minority Report, we got a long way to go because it gets it wrong more than half the time. What events do you go to and where can people learn more about this?

There are a couple of events I love to go to. The first one is called AIIM Event. It’s Association for Information and Managers. To George’s point, managing documents, information, and databases. That’s what we do. We organize it, and we assign policies to it and rights to it. The website’s AIIM.org. There are also records management. It’s called ARMA. It’s Association for Records Managers Association. ARMA.org. There’s also a small event that I go to called the Twain Direct Developers Day. This is for people that are coding digital transformation solutions. AIIM, ARMA, and then TWAIN Direct Developers Day. Those are three events I like.

What kind of folks might we find at one of these conferences? Are they mostly technical or is there a combination?

I’d say AIIM and ARMA are not technical people. They are mostly the people managing the information. There will be people from NARA, National Records. There will be people from county governments, state governments, and federal governments. They will be people from school districts. It’s the people in charge for managing information. Not personal, but businesses. Small businesses and big enterprise businesses. Those people that have this pain. They need to collect, organize, index, and secure data. They are usually not security experts. They are usually a records manager type that knows how to collect the stuff, but they are not focused on security at the top of their list.

A lot of the events that are available to businesses or even the general public tend to cater more towards the technical community if it’s technical in nature in any way, shape, or form. I do prefer events that are attended by normal humans solving simple problems. The technologists are building their widgets to what essentially is necessary in the market. Who am I to judge from the perspective of a conference? Sometimes I have gone thinking there’s going to be a bunch of technical people and you end up with completely different crap.

I was at Developers Week, and it was a great event. I loved all the vendors and stuff, but everybody’s technology was the greatest thing since sliced bread and all this. It was like, “I’m tired of hearing about low-code, no-code. I’m tired of hearing about Kubernetes. How can I apply it in my business?” These events that I’m talking about, AIIM and ARMA are business people that have real business problems and they have solved a lot of these problems, but they are always looking for the next. They know they need help in certain areas.

Cybersecurity, those shows aren’t for those kinds of things. They are about business process efficiency and applying certain rights and governance, risk reduction. Cybersecurity is a part of it, but it’s not the main priority for those groups. Those are both great events. They are not massive Comdex events. They are small. They are a couple of hundred people, maybe thousands, but they are not giant. They are always good. You can get good conversations with people. I’d encourage both of those for anybody interested.

Thank you. That’s great feedback. I appreciate it.

Are there any books that you’d like to recommend to our audience?

Yes, there are three that hit homerun for me. The first one was a Net Promoter Score. That’s basically about how the perception of your company. Do they like your product? Do they like your services? Do you like their people? It’s on a 1 to 10 scale. If you get an 8 out of 10, that’s pretty good, but you always want to strive for the best. Some companies have terrible net performer scores because they don’t answer the phone and they don’t have good technology. Net Promoter Score is one.

The next one is a Blue Ocean Strategy, and I love that. Why go to the Red Oceans and fight where it’s so difficult? I will take my business. There are a lot of companies that do business process automation or digital transformation. There are a lot of companies that do that, and they do it very good. When I started P3iD, I said, “We are going to have a unique spin because we are going to focus on cybersecurity.” That’s our uniqueness. I went to Blue Ocean.

I know business process automation and information management, but as everything moves to the cloud, you need all these cybersecurity things. That’s where that big long list of encryption and multifactor authentication of blockchain, all these things, that’s why we put it in. Blue Ocean Strategy is my second one.

The one I finished was Venture Deals. That’s about business and raising money and the business side of stuff. Any entrepreneur, whether you are raising money or not, you always got to be thinking about that. Venture Deals is a book that’s written to real people. You love to talk to people and they talk from the VC’s and entrepreneur’s perspective, and you get good insights. Venture Deals is a good book to read too.

Here’s the other big question for you. What excites you about the future?

We have talked about it a lot, but I love ChatGPT. Part of my history was using natural language processing before it was a fad. Many years ago, I was selling NLP technology and it was called Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Processing. I saw Alexa and Google Home. I think voice assist is here to stay. My wife talks to our Alexa machines and does grocery shopping all the time. I talk to my car and I’m starting to talk to my appliances like they were people. They are a person. I think voice is very exciting. I still think the blockchain, people are figuring it out. All the crypto stuff that’s going on, it’s given it a bad rap, but we don’t focus on that.

We focus on blockchain as a distributed ledger. The use cases and the applications around that are cool. One I mentioned was document authenticity in our business. You could forge an invoice and mortgage title. How can you prove that this is an authentic document? You could do that through blockchain. I’d like to take blockchain and make it a simple thing for people to understand and provide real value. I think voice, blockchain, and the cloud.

To summarize, the cloud is still in its infancy. I think it’s been confusing for a lot of people that everybody like a couple of years ago, was transitioning everything to the cloud. They found they were spending a lot of money in the cloud when it was supposed to save money, then they started bringing some workflows back. There will be a hybrid world and the cloud still is in the early innings. Marc Benioff from Salesforce famously said about the cloud, “We are in the early innings of the cloud,” and I still think we are there. We are not even scratching the surface of what can be done. To summarize, voice control, blockchain, and the cloud are three exciting things for me.

Maybe we should change it from a cloud to a tide because it comes in and goes out. As the oceans rise, it keeps coming in further and further. A new analogy.

I think John is right. We used to call it hosting and now they call it cloud. Tide is next. Is there some other unique term that will evolve? I know some people that would essentially say, “My cloud is all the computers that I have hacked.” What’s changed and that’s always the challenge, and maybe there are technical people that are better at answering certain parts of that question. I don’t think it’s a single-person answer. You want to call them the subject matter experts. Networking will have a different answer than the subject matter experts in development. If you are writing code and you know how to make you go faster and easier. In a few years, ChatGPT will be writing my code for me. I heard somebody say once.

That’s one of the trends that I haven’t mentioned, but low-code, no code. Go to ChatGPT and say, “Write me a front-end application and no JS and make sure it’s compliant with AWS.” Hack and code together for you. Maybe it might not work, but with a little massaging, you have got 80% done. That’s applying all kinds of things that we have been talking about. The low-code, no-code, the cloud, and voice control chat altogether.

This merger, this confluence of these different megatrends, if people think through strategically and apply it, then it’s a great time. It’s not even a few years ago when there weren’t a lot of good web API cloud services. There weren’t API systems, there weren’t APIs developed, and there weren’t all these cool things coming around. We can create incredible applications. Early innings, it’s a great time.

I believe that lots of opportunities still remain out there that I, somebody at least my age anyway, who’s lived most of their life. Let’s pretend I’m going to live to be 100. I’m halfway there. Who is looking back and saying, “That no-code, low-code, I think I heard that before in the ‘90s from a developer.” He said, “Look at this great web development application. It’s no code, it’s low-code, and it’s wonderful.” I think things change in our minds sometimes. How it evolves and something that’s monumentally different you could argue that code automation is coming.

I have to go back to the movie. Is Cyberdyne coming and the Terminator movie will come to fruition? We don’t know for certain, but what we do know is that there’s a lot of work to be done. Those that are behind are probably where the security vulnerabilities will emerge. Not everybody goes at the same speed, so we will see what happens.

I got to say that low-code, no-code is way better than WYSIWYG, which is What You See Is What You Get coding. That was our old term. Tell us, how do you get here? How do you become the document expert and master that you are, and what journey led you here?

I will tell you honestly because you are nice guys, and pineapple and pizza is a fun thing to do. There isn’t magic to my success. I simplified things. My forte, my best quality, is being a product manager. I was frustrated because I had a very advanced product and I wasn’t very successful with it. What I did was simplify the message in a way that people can understand. Sometimes technology people love to get wrapped around the axle and tell about the feeds and speeds and all the specs of their technology, and that’s great. How do people use it? What’s the value add? What’s the benefit? I finally said, “What’s the pain?” I went to customers and I listened to them, and I listened very well, and I have good skill of listening.

What I did was, one of my customers was AutoNation. I went to AutoNation and I listened to them. The guy gave me the time of day. He articulated some of the problems that he knew, and then he couldn’t quite understand the other problems. I said, “What about this? What about that? We can do a solution.” That was a massive deal and I learned from it, and I said, “When you listen to the customers, they will tell you as much as they got a problem.” Simplify the message. Don’t confuse the customer. Be very sincere about trying to help them and solve their pain and their problem.

It will come back to you. Don’t expect that. Just be fair. People that are doing education about cybersecurity. I put them on another pedestal because they are doing what’s good for the industry and they are trying to drive more understanding because it’s confusing and it’s hard. Simplicity, that’s where P3 is coming in. We want to make advanced technology very simple. When you want to use our solutions, you could talk to them. You could say, “I want to scan this document to John and make sure it’s routed over to George and make sure that all the PII data is redacted.” You can talk to it. That’s very simple. Let’s use a lot of technology behind the scenes to do something. The magic is simplicity. Let’s be more simple and put yourself in the customer’s position.

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Don’t confuse them. Stop it. I hate vendors that do that, and they try to confuse them to a point and they are like, “I don’t know vendors A, B, C. I can’t make a difference with these people, so I’m not going to make a decision because I can’t.” Somebody that comes in and offers a consultative attitude and helps the customer. That’s the secret. A lot of people won’t do it. They want to sell and not listen. I think that the customer’s empowered more than ever. They could do internet research, they can download the software, and could try it. Give free trials. Guess who’s empowered the customer? Vendors that have this selfish attitude. They are going to lose. The big stack is not the way they go anymore.

Tell us about your history. Where did you specifically come from?

I have risen the ranks. I started in the warehouse. This was a beautiful experience. I got to learn this part number goes with this part, but this part. A pack list would have the configuration. I learned the part numbers. I memorized them. I started there and then I went to a hardware company, a document scanning company. That’s where I was the product manager. I learned the hardware. I remember I wasn’t successful at first, but I said, “I got this advanced technology, how do I be successful?” I went to AutoNation and I listened and we won. I went to a software company. That’s where I was selling the natural language processing software.

I got the hardware software. A couple of years ago I said, “I’m talking about all this stuff. I’m talking about cloud and blockchain security. I’m blogging about it. I’m trying to educate people sincerely. I’m going to start my company.” That’s what we did. I said, “If I can’t eat my dog food, then who else is going to do it?” I did it, and I’m very grateful for all the friendships and partnerships. We haven’t had to spend the money on marketing yet. It’s all been word of mouth.

Having a high net promoter score personally has helped a lot because I say, “Can we do business?” All of a sudden it becomes business. We can do the terms and we will figure it out. It’s been good. That’s a long story. People that start in warehouses or dig in ditches, there’s an upward path in your career path. I encourage everybody to always strive to get better and bigger.

I’m with you on that. There are a number of things you can do when you are younger that pay off exponentially as you get older. I think that’s this part of the equation. As you go back and you look at your younger self and you have given yourself some advice, I always look back and say, “Make sure you take that theater class in high school. Don’t miss that theater class in high school.” It was important. I’m curious, what was your advice to yourself as a young man or during those pivotal college years? Maybe you are figuring out why you decided to Major in Natural Resources Management like I did because that was not a fit for me.

You got to have good character and be a trustworthy person. I think that’s a good quality that I have. My dad and mom instilled that in me. That’s number one. A lesson that I have learned is that although I’m a very trusting person in business, you have to be very suspicious at times too. I would say that sometimes I was a little bit too trusting and I got burned a few times. I would still say, “You got to be a sensible business person. Not everybody’s out for your best interest too. You got to look out for your employees, you got to look out for your shareholders. If people are not a culture fit for you, then they shouldn’t be part of your company.”

I have had good salespeople. They are good salespeople, but they are not a culture fit. We had to split ways. No hard feelings. If you are not getting along with the other people, then you can’t be part of our company. P3iD, P3 is for People, Process, and Policy. I will enforce that. To answer your question, you have to be a very kind person, but also you got to be a good business person too, because there are a lot of snakes out there, not just in the AI world, but in general. That’s the advice I would give to my younger self. Be trusting, but also verify as well.

What do you do outside of work? What are your passions? What fun things?

I’m a workaholic, so I don’t mind working, but I do take a break. When I do, I love to spend time. I have got 2 dogs, a wife, and 3 cats. I’m a very big animal lover. They are all adopted and re-homed. We love them all. Spending time with them is a full-time job. We don’t travel much, so I like to work. There’s so much stuff to learn and the different kinds of technologies that are available to try. I’m so grateful for open-source software. I got my learning with Apache, MySQL, PHP, and all those tools. ChatGPT is open source. I’m even creating my own ChatGPT language models using their open-source software.

I use my websites or WordPress. It’s all open-source software. I like to tinker with technology and spend time with my animals. Those are two things. I don’t watch much TV, but my wife’s a foodie, so by default, I get to watch the Food Network and all these YouTube cook-at-home shows. It’s always fun to watch those. That’s about my life. Technology, animals, and food

Where can people find you?

I’m easy to find. You can go to our website, it’s P3iDTech.com. ID, by the way, is for Intelligent Data, so you can find me there. I’m easily available on LinkedIn. Put in Kevin Neal and P3iD. You can find me. Connect with me or my email address, [email protected]. Send me an email. Let me know what you are up to. I love working with other entrepreneurs. I love working with other businesses. There’s always this build versus buy thing. I know we cannot build everything on our own. We want to partner with good companies that offer services, offer technologies, have the expertise, and do referral business. I think the primary place is to go to our website. You can find me there. I love to have conversations like this. It’s always fun.

We appreciate having you and it’s very insightful. Your ideas coincide with some of the things that we have built over the years. I’d like to thank you very much for being part of this. To our audience, I’d like to thank you for reading. If you have learned something or laughed, tell someone about the show. If you haven’t laughed, then don’t tell anybody, but go ahead and tell them that you didn’t laugh and they should read it too. It’s been another great episode. We will see you next time.

Thanks. Take care.

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About Kevin Neal

Building the secure business process automation platform of the future one web service at a time.

Chief Executive Officer of P3id Technologies

*“With 25+ years’ experience of business success, Kevin is recognized by AIIM (Association for Information Management) as an expert on Document Capture and Business Process Management. Kevin has built long-standing strategic relationships worldwide based on integrity, trust, and proven results. Kevin also serves as the Marketing Chair for the non-profit, TWAIN Working Group, in addition to his role as CEO of P3iD Technologies Inc. – a company delivering business cloud solutions which combine the benefits of digital workflow efficiency with the necessity of cyber security protections.”