[ina■nudible conversations]t in, d. C. This is about half an i want to welcome everyone to our first panel, its an amazing panel. Probablyheost important topic in recent history. The emergents of ai and models and what it means to our industry, what it means to the country and as we estublic polid responsibility through encompasses 501 c 3 foundation, what we hope to do is to bring leaders together and probably theres no more Impressive Group of thought leader t we have on stage. Milo whod fiber and google wireless and has tremendous background in the industry and continues as a what should i say, startup, engineer . Former fcc chairwoman, commissioner, South Carolina commissioner, just a tremendous friend, competition has worked in advisory roles with the department of defense as it relates to ai cybersecurity but from the government leader and one with experience and one who can spe communities and and organizations around the country we are very pleased to have minon w with us in incompas. I used to say he was an old friend but then congressman markie, in the early days of the formation of policies that brought this competition and cable and satellite and wireless, 1996 telecommunications act, Net Neutrality work at the then he went onto establish the Government Affairs offices for twitter not only in the United States and washington■cut around the world and now heads up a wise group called the blue aisle group and we are pleased to have colin, his longthoughtful policy advice, leadership, guidance and then from granite telecommunication who is can tell us from the iustry and who is serving both government and commercial enterprises around the country, if you thiny post office, cvs, burger king, granite touches almoston market, everything everywhere. So we are pleased and proud to have everyone on this panel as we talk about ai and how we should approach it. What are the enduring principles of technology that is coming across the country. So im going to milo, we will start with you and go down to list. Any key issues that you want to point out or how we should approach ai from a Public Policy from an industry are the big issues that you see coming ahead . Well, that was a specific question. Yes. [laughter] i think, you know, im old. I remember working on internet days before the web and in those days you had to know a lot about the network in order to use it, right,e med files, we had email, before the domain name system, et cetera. And then the browser showed up and the browser made it raze to easy to use the internet without having to know about ai has been around for a long time, my old company, virtually every product that google makes, made has ai in it but the Large Language Models that are out right now have now made it easy to use ai without having tense flow programmer or pie towards engineer, et cetera. I think youre going see a whole going to have people enabled by these kind of tools to do things that only experts do before and given this is encompass and about competition more competition into the space, so photographers, for example, who go out and do shoots for commercial clients, right, theyt of things, well, youre now going to have a whole set of people competing for that business who never used a camera. At google there were some of the best engineers in management and data service and then they came out with a ai model that not exceeded that performance and so you dont now you dont necessarily check out these pictures. [laughter] my pixel again. Now you end up with this where t necessarily have to go, have the elite engineers anymore because youve got the new tools that bring you in i think theres a t opportunity for people to up skill their what they work on and improve productivity and for companies to compete in a more m aggressive way. Mignon, as you think what are the guardrails in Public Policy and concerns that you might havd opportunities that you see . Well, good morning, everyone. Ive got as you can tell new hardware, software or forgive me for limping in. But i think its somehow symbolic that im limping in and i say that and im going to take some liberties with your question if you would allow me to because when i tannot help but think about what ive been and thats regulation and when you talk about efficiencies and accuracies and innovation and when we talk about ai, how does that become ubiquitous and standard inside of government from a regulatory perspective . We going to see there . How can we keep up . When i came in, you know, in regulation in 98 it seemed very analog, very analog and even then we were speaking about, you know, how we moved forward and we keep up withous in terms of innovation. Now that i cant even i hate to say on steroids but im in ah of a challenge, so if i can take your underlying question, really how does government keep up and how does government Leverage Technology itself. How do we better adopt it comes to decisionmaking, you know, how do we better leverage to keep up with you guys. All of those things are really important and as we continue talking and maybe i will answer your question later, i really wanted, you know, to set the stage there b i really think, you know, from in and of itself cannot divorce itself not only with kee with you but how you guys process and how this ai evolution should become internal and embedded within■■x. Colin. , im as i think through your role in the early legislation for competitive policy across every network and platform and policy formation on the internet, are there enduring principthat is you can apply to ai that could be insightful to the audience today and establish the center to guide usti ourct. I was just reflecting on what milo was saying about the early internet days and one to h■y■ av to when i think about ai as a revolutionary technology from a consumer standpoint is that oftentimes revolutionary technologies bring some enthusiasm, some trepidation, anxiety and Phil Zimmerman released pgp encryption onto a used network and quickly found itself into the growing internet. So pgp stood for prettd privacy. In 1991, encryption was treated under regulation as ammunition. It was treated like rocket launchers onades and you needed an export license to■■ commercial encryption outside of the United States. Phil zimmerman found himself under federal investigation for violating exportt pgp upload occurred of that strong encryption Law Enforcement, the Intelligence Community and a variety of other players in policymaking circles concerned. Why because with that technology terrorists could use it, organized crimes syndicates could use it and child predators and there was a parade of horribles and congress decided ultimately not to break encryption and to dumb it down so to speak but Congress Took note of t■he concerns in 1994 r Law Enforcement act which gave access to Digital Communications under valid Law Enforcement requests because of unbreakable encryption arriving congress had to enact a in 1998 and talk about the affirmative defenses that would go to Digital Rights management that included encryption, so Congress Responded and helped to create a framework not through one am omnibus law but series of laws and when i look that chat gbt was launched into thild, when you see Law Enforcement community and theres a parade of horribles that could spin out of that that are nontrivial, you know, the world is new again and so there is an element of what we are seeing in policymaking debates where a new framework may be needed, issues that hadee settled for the previous era will need to be revisited including copyright licensing, including concerns about with any technology and the values you asked about, chip, the values we care about, the human values that should animate technology are immutable, so even as the technology changes, the core values of the rldiversity, localism, universal service as augmented in the telecom act in 1996 bydding values of competition and embrace of innovation and global markets, those values wen1 the s but we have to come up with a framework that embraces the benefits of the new technologygd to the nontrivial downside consequences as well and build in protections as best we can. No one is like granite more connected to a wide diversity of businesses around the country. As you talk to your customers, what are the and the services, the benefits and the Network Optimization that you think would be important with ai, rob, ceo of granite, one of the leading philanthropists in the country cares deeply about cancer and cancer research. One of our advisers that is center is dr. Bobby who is the current president of the university of ceo of the Largest Cancer Research center in the world at the texas medical center. Md tremendous benefits that, i think, from a granite perspective about what you care about phihrnd Health Research but your business customers. Tell me what youre hearing and what you think ai means to your absolutely. First off, thank you so much for having me, thank you for the incompas team. With regard to Granite Health communications i want to start by giving background about what exactly granit so granite started years ago as really aggregating phone line we really have focused on is listening to our customers over time our customers came. Both from a back end but what that means from us we are using automation to enable efficiencies across on one end and the vast amount of data that our customers have coming from all the data scenes were able to use ai in one platform and able to use that information to be able to tell customers, hey, this what has they are able to use or make their decisions, thats what is happening on the back end. We areouting automation to really enhance our provisioning troubleshooting, enhance configuration all to really minimize human error, so our customers are getting a the day. On the flip side our customers seeing us do on the front end and they want to see on backside. A new platform 360 which is using ai to provide customers with all of the information that they need at fingertips instead of having to reach out, wait for especially in our case when we have customers that have locations across the United States. They dont want that raw data. Some of them do. They can make that analysis but what they are really looking for is a partner, leveraging ai, olution and all this Ai Technology being able to organize data that way is giving us the ability to provide our the upmost Customer Experience but also toe stomer driven on ai and other as well. I will leave you with two words for the day . Yes. Its two words today. Avoid, regret. What we want to do is avoid andy guardrails as regulators as Business Owners and what we dont want■r to do come back and say, we should have, could have. At end of the day its going to take a community to do that. A vision to recognize that we really we want to do no harm, you know, we want to enable. We want to leverage innovation. But if a significant vulnerable sector of our population is harmed all of this, we are going to have problems in the longterm and avoiding regrets i think is what i want to leave with this sort of the ead. Im not suggesting that all guardrails are bad but depending on guardrails to prevent bad things from happening with information probably not a wise strategy. What i mean by that is betting on what youre doing by saying were going to try and prevent the tools from giving people information that could be used bad ways its also been used to do bad things. Ai is going to be the same way. The other thing, i think, that guardrails sometimes can do is cause the researchers to feel like they dont have to have quite so much responsibility about the products they put be the government who would put in you think guardrails would create that part of it in terms of guardrails im sorry. Im not trying this is very good. [laughter] what we are going to be doing in the years to come. All the tensions that are a transformational. During the maven controversy at google i remember having this conversation with finger leader , de said, well, the reason why the researchers are so upset about this is they feel like physicists in the 40s and 50s, they didnt want their work used for Nuclear Weapons and i said, well, i actually worked on Nuclear Weapons at livermoore when i was in school at cal and we never opened like, you know, its one thing to say we are going to publish everything, make ehen its up to the government to prevent bad things from being done with that information. I just dont think government can do that and thats what i mean. And i guess finally learn how to use the mic, sorry, and i guess my definition and how i interpret that term in terms of guardrails is more of a checkin balance. Its more of every one of us including government understanding what their rhat ts are and this is not a responsibility freezone and if we all recognize that and then its notot, you know, tampering competition, you can tell we know each other. Yeah. Colin. I will also say we dont need laws for good ethical people. We pass laws for the people who are going to c ethical lines who are attempted too greatly to do so perhaps and so those guardrails are there not for the 90some percent of the people who will go about their day lives or their commercial lives and uphold ethical values, its their for those who might the second reason why there are guardrails sometimes is to deal with aintra industry relationships and those guardrails arepetitive guardrails, they are guardrails that compel openness and opportunities for greater choice and so the irony is sometimes you need regulation to enhance competition and thats an irony but its quite often true. As we had the conversation income to asses history we were the first in 1981 to advocate for competition in telecommunications and the then nathan Long Distance industry which became the internet backbone of our networks and under the open networks is the inner connection of networks as we got into the internet age, open internet because that openness, the access of anyone to content enterprises from small to large to have access to a Worldwide Market with equal reciprocity and equal access in open internet principle was something incopas advocated, now we get to ai, how can we have the most open ai, the most competitive ai with the safety and responsibility that we can try to create and why incopas discussion, debate or to make recommendations to policymakers and our membership is unique in washington. We have the leading Technology Companies that have been on the forefront of developing degenerative ai models, microsoft, meta, and we have the competitive infrastructure to data centers to National Fiber to National Tower to 5g to satellite, to fixed wireless, toocal fiber. I have everything in the ecosystem, the infrastructure and the applications and the ofe critical infrastructure, how do we protect and secure that aspect of what will be deployed and and the applications that will come to every user of our networks and enabled by the applications of ai that will be enabled by the networks for wonderful sometimes scary to us applications. So i think we are uniquely positioned, we want to work with regional hubs of universities, whether its my alma mater that just started, Just Announced, the Intelligence Center working with the department of defense, the university of arizona and all that they represent and their med school, Law School Business school, land grant, engineering, but how do we have regional hub that we can bring about stakeholders not only here in dc within the industry but i middlo tell the benefits and do the research and create the curriculum and the workforce training around so that we can truly lead globally competitiveness maximize the benefits, minimize the harms and this panel kind of represents the thought leadership that we hoped, that we can bring to the debate, the house, senator schumer has had■vg a thoughtful group, Bipartisan Group of members and industry coming in to begin the early discussions, kind of reminds me of the early work 1990s act, how do you get everybody in the room to begin driving what you hope wila policy framework and is im going to close with this, any any policy recommendations, whae next cool grade application that you may have heard about or you may want to tell the crowd is coming as it relates to ai . Im going to start with you and back this way. Sounds good. In terms of any policy that are going to be really important first an foremost is education and chaining. As you saw the wave of computer science, curriculum, i think we will need to see a wave brought into the quick curriculum as well like this is he toy its made such extensive progress in just the last couple of years so that really on the education side but on the training side with the workforce not Everybody Needs to be an expert in ai but what we are really working on doing especially as weve been s new automation at granite and all the new different Machine Learning operations is really using teammates on how to an ext on how it works on the back end of it all but we can teach them all the cool things they can do to put them in a better position to support our customers so from a policy standpoint i think its really education and training, its something that im really looking forward seeing what the Committee Comes out with and how thats going to the new regulation. I