Scaling Technology Adoption with Mike Pansky

Mike Pansky:
You can't be experts on everything. And as quickly as this technology is changing and I'll relate it to AI because that's kind of what I deal with on a daily basis. As quickly as the tech is changing, I can barely keep up with it. I mean, there's new announcements and stuff. I go away for a couple weeks to Italy, and the AI world has changed in the month of August and so I'm constantly trying to keep up. So it's not fair for us to expect government customers or program offices or PMS and folks that have to manage so many different things to be experts on everything.

Bonnie Evangelista:
All right, let's do it. I'm Bonnie Vangelista with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, joined by Mike Panske. Thank you for spending some time with me today.

Mike Pansky:
Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, very cool. There are very few people that I know of that understand. I'll say the chessboard of what we deal with in the Department of Defense in terms of multiple divisions of labor, as a mutual colleague of ours calls it, and the vertical and horizontal layers that things have to move through the handoffs that are required to get solutions to where they're supposed to be to make an impact in the mission environment. You very much seem like one of those people who have a really well rounded understanding of what it takes to move, whether it's commercial solutions or emerging technology, through those hurdles and those handoffs that I'm talking about. So if you can orient me and others to who you are and how you kind of gain that perspective over your career, I think then we can have some good conversation.

Mike Pansky:
I appreciate that and thank you for the wonderful intro. So let me go back a little bit and I'll try to keep this pretty brief. I talked about it on other podcasts, but it's good because as you kind of mentioned, I think a lot of the history sort of rounds out from various different perspectives of this ecosystem. So I started my career working for a large defense prime. And after several Years Of doing that, everything from business process all the Way to mergers And Acquisitions, of Acquiring Small SBIR type companies and international organizations, then Moved. On to sort of the commercial lens and commercial focus of working in a lab in the Bay Area doing some market strategy, business development that was very know bricks to clicks. As Amazon was becoming, the mall was slowly becoming and trying to become Amazon while also investing in startups. And I think that gave me a very different perspective of commercial tech and some of the challenges that are experienced raising capital as well as trying to scale products.

Mike Pansky:
And of course you meet up with enough startup founders and companies that have been on Shark Tank that you get the buz to want to start your own business. So I did that, started a company in 2016 and it was a SaaS product, primarily focused mostly on the industry surrounding defense and aerospace. Ended up scaling that and selling it in 2018 to graduating small Systems Integrator. Came sort of mid tier and then in 2021 we sold that company where I'm at today, as their chief product officer. And so what started as a SaaS product became sort of the underpinnings of a data and technology practice within a traditional systems integration firm, which as we've seen over the last five to seven years, has been necessary. Right. In digital transformation you need to have the product side. And now having scaled that to close to a 900 plus person organization has been pretty amazing.

Mike Pansky:
And I get sort of a different lens. So sort of at all size spectrums, maybe not the largest of the large Primes or services, but yeah, definitely a different perspective there.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, I love it when the people like yourself in these roles that you're talking about that have nothing to do with what I would call some of the levers on the department side like contracting and acquisition and budget. You can call it like you see it. And I think where in your observation, have you seen those choke points or those places where things get stuck in this pathway we're supposed to be creating to getting capability into the field?

Mike Pansky:
Yeah, it's sort of fascinating, right, because I've seen it at a bunch of various different lens as a startup and getting onto my first federal contracts, the choke point was always the what next? When working through systems integrators. Or for example, I got picked up on an R and E program and we went out of a pilot effort and it kind of got stuck after that pilot effort as to the, well, what's next for this type of program. And when the program got large enough, there was a lot of infighting as to, well, does it fall under the scope of other big services firms? You've got all these product companies that are competing and have capabilities that would ultimately wipe larger services contracts. And so what happens with that? I think maybe one of the benefits that I had coming from the big defense company is actually helping those small CIBER organizations actually bridge that sort of valley of death, ironically enough. Because when you get to a certain size and you then try to go and tackle these large program of records, you realize that most of these organizations can't scale. And they actually do need the support of Primes. They do need the support of Systems Integrators to actually help them do that overnight. Imagine scaling manufacturing of five to ten what would be considered like an L rip of something on the hardware side to hundreds or thousands.

Mike Pansky:
Right. This is a problem that we're going to probably see for most organizations with the announcement of this Replicator program. Or imagine being a great technology or digital transformation firm on the services side, creative agency. And then having to scale that across hundreds of individuals at an organization, which is something that I experienced, being a part of Intellibridge and having to scale programs for Homeland Security or law enforcement or for DoD, where yeah, overnight you have to staff at a scale that most smaller organizations aren't ready for. And so I think that as we think about how do you help companies sort of transition on the contracting side, a couple of thoughts here. I love where the federal government has gone towards a show don't tell it's no longer about a white paper or a PowerPoint. It's about getting into a coding challenge or an orals demonstration of your capabilities. I think that's one thing that from a contracting perspective, I hope to see more of that because the cream will always rise to the top and we have a system where sometimes the best teams don't always win.

Mike Pansky:
But I think that at the end of the day, the best companies will ultimately rise there and then. From an actual contracts perspective, having now been on this and trying to get customers to be able to adopt AI technologies, I think that whether it's at the forefront of a contract, setting up the proper ODCs and forethoughts, related to data ownership or software ownership rights or the use of sort of what are the nontraditionals? Although it's basically traditional now with an OT, they're there, and you can use those and you can actually set up the right steps, I think, to take that from pilot efforts to production. As long as the companies have a really good understanding of how to best leverage that. And your government counterpart understands. So maybe that's a long winded answer.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Well, you're saying words that are piquing my interest. I heard you say scaling and there were some I don't think you said it this way exactly, but what resonated with me was quick entry points type of things. I think we're turning a corner where more and more people on the government side are understanding how to create those quick entry points, whether it's through piloting or prototyping or there's a couple of other aces in our I was going to quiver. Yeah, that was not a good analogy. But there are other plays in our playbook maybe is more appropriate where it's not as common, but there are ways to do super quick piloting get what like you see the commercial tech get it through the door very quickly and using potentially non far based strategies. Getting it through the door. I still think there is when we going back to the scaling word there is whether that door was I think what I'm trying to say is there is no holistic glide path to get from pilot to you mentioned L rip for hardware and I'm not sure what the software equivalent is. Maybe you can speak to that too.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Maybe an MVP or an MVC or something. How do you get from that to that incremental step to the next incremental step to the point where we are, no kidding, scaling ten x. So I'll pause there and see what resonated with you.

Mike Pansky:
Yeah, talk about a fascinating challenge going from a crater or a PR or something, where there might not be funding or limited funding or an OT, where you've got sort of a smaller piloting effort, maybe to a big program. I think this is where it's the ecosystem. And I've kind of talked about this on other podcasts and I hear a lot of this at conferences. It's the ecosystem that you kind of bring around, which is you got to have the organization that gets you to the pilot effort able and open to bringing in other customers and partners. It's on the company themselves to really understand where is their end state of where they're trying to go and who that end customer is, whether it's an operator downfield or it's a bigger federal agency budget that they're trying to tackle. I think it's getting sort of a coalition together as you're going through the process. Again, you don't go from siber phase one to a phase three production effort overnight. You're consistently trying to bring your Peos, the PMS, the technical points of contact, the people that can help, then be your support mechanism.

Mike Pansky:
Maybe it's a defense prime to be your support mechanism to get you to that next phase. And so, yeah, it's hard too, as we kind of talked about, it's hard when there is no single entry point, right? There's a new innovation.org every single week, it seems like, and you don't know who that sort of sherpa is to walk you through. And you've got great organizations out there. You've got some charlatans, I think, that exists out there that say they can help you through, but they're just paying the monthly bills off consulting fees. And so I think it's very difficult for tech companies and commercial companies to try and navigate in this space. And again, it's about finding a right podcast to listen to, to understand what's that path it's about following the right voices inside of the government who are trying to mature the process forward. So I don't know if there is like a golden answer to all of this.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Well, to your point, there isn't one. If I've learned anything in being in this emerging technology land for the short time that I have been in, their answer is there's no silver bullet, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But what we can do is we can continue to learn and iterate from our learning, like what's working, what's not working. So I want to reflect that back onto you. So in your career, when you were doing these things, you were in that seat, you were the startup, or you were trying to work with the big primes to do the systems integration piece, what worked for Know, you weren't given the glide path. So how did you figure out those steps? What worked well or what didn't work well for you?

Mike Pansky:
Yeah, I'm going to hijack something that Stephanie said. Stephanie Wilson I think it was Demystifying Contracts because I absolutely loved it. And it's kind of ironic that the statement held true was something I was talking about in a recent conference. So one of the things that Stephanie said about OTS was that you start by reading the guide and the statute. So in 2016, I had a SaaS platform that was crawling and scraping a lot of this OT data before it was really a popular thing and I had to get smart on it. I had to understand OTS. I used to train big prime contractors on how they could leverage OTS. And ironically enough, these are organizations that have been using them for 50 years.

Mike Pansky:
And the authorities existed, whether it was NASA all the way up to on the defense side. But oftentimes in these big companies, they don't talk to each. So, you know, I thought what really resonated for me and I think I hope what people can take away something that Stephanie said. It's about reading the guide. Know, when I was talking about this on a recent AI blueprint panel in Nashville, it's the old Mark Cuban was on NPR's how I Built this and his sort of statement. Read the Frickin Manual RTFM when he built Microsoft, he's they kind of specialize in helping customers integrate software into existing systems. And he did that by going home every night, reading the software manuals, the stuff that nobody wanted to do right. And at the end of the day, I think with most of this stuff, it's about reading the manual.

Mike Pansky:
It's about going back, doing your homework on any topic, learning and truly understanding it, and then being able to apply that to the challenges that you're experiencing.

Bonnie Evangelista:
You also mentioned you were educating some of the big. So once you did read the manual, you then took your knowledge and tried to share disseminate accordingly, of course, so that it became easier for you, it sounds like, to do what you needed to do. I've had a similar conversation with some others. More recently, though, it was another one of my podcast guests. His name is Vince Pecorero. He's a program manager at Air Force Digital Transformation office. And we talked about industry kind of being the knowledge center. It's like you're talking or describing educate your customer.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yes, I've never actually talked to industry, and so I'm kind of putting you on the spot here. But you share as well. I point blank ask Vince. I'm like, is that fair to ask industry to do that? And he had some comments on that. But what is your opinion on that?

Mike Pansky:
I think the short answer is absolutely yes. The longer, maybe a little bit more difficult because I'm like the worst salesperson in the world, I think. But when I was trying to sell SaaS software and demonstrate the value to a customer of why this market is so important, I had to do training, I had to go in and inform them and ironically enough, that led to more sales. So it's kind of like some of the experiences that I'm seeing today on the AI side in that you could just hang sort of AI shield on your company banner and what does that mean? Right? If you're not informing your customers and helping to drive change, then you're not really doing anything. So yeah, maybe that's again, the answer is absolutely fair to ask industry to inform the customers. On the government side, you can't be experts on everything. And as quickly as this technology is changing and I'll relate it to AI because that's kind of what I deal with on a daily basis. As quickly as the tech is changing, I can barely keep up with it.

Mike Pansky:
I mean, there's new announcements and stuff. I go away for a couple of weeks to Italy and the AI world has changed in the month of August and so I'm constantly trying to keep up. So it's not fair for us to expect government customers or program offices or PMS and folks that have to manage so many different things to be experts on everything.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I also am thinking about what you said earlier about Sherpas and so maybe you've accepted as the startup or the small business that I need to have a really good understanding of what my pathways are, how do I get in and then once I'm in, what are those handoffs? I call those options or COAS. Right? If you're army background like me, army civilian. So I'm doing that. But also I could be thinking about how do I distinguish? I'm going to say the shady car salesman Sherpa versus maybe the real Sherpa that's going to take you to the summit. Do you have any tips or criticisms there?

Mike Pansky:
Yeah, I have a lot of criticisms. Everybody knows I'm extremely critical of primes and systems integrators. So let me talk from the systems integrator perspective because I do think that there's maybe a lot of organizations that are stood up to be Sherpas. But I think coming from an industry perspective and representing a systems integrator, even though we're small compared to a lot of the bigs, that's where I think government can differentiate, is working with trusted partners that understand how to bring in the best tech, how to bring in not just their capabilities, but also the commercial companies that are needed to do this. And so can I kind of talk about what I've sort of seen in the changes in the systems integration market and maybe a lot of organizations catching up to where I think we were a little bit forward on the Intellibrich side about bringing the right tech in and especially on the AI.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Absolutely. Yeah, please.

Mike Pansky:
Yeah. So, I mean, going back over the last six months, I've just been baffled because I do think that with AI systems integrators and the way that business model works today is going to get commoditized from knowledge based tasks. And we've seen this actually come to fruition over the last few months. In June, Accenture announced a $3 billion investment over the next few years in data and AI practice to help their clients across the industry. McKinsey in July partnered with Cohere to harness sort of what they're doing on the generative AI side and through their AI arm at McKinsey, the Quantum Black Organization. So that's like thousands of practitioners from data engineers, data scientists, all the way to designers that are now going to be using some of that AI technology. BCG just recently announced a partnership with Anthropic to bring sort of their Clog two model LLM model to some of BCG's clients. And then just recently EY announced EY AI, which is going to be their sort of platform to boost sort of AI adoption.

Mike Pansky:
And they said they're going to put $1.4 billion to a platform and embedding some of these foundational technologies where they already have a user base of 60,000 clients. To me when you can do a pilot like EY is doing with 4200 team members with their own LLM model, which I won't go into, maybe why that's not the best approach, but I think that scale and that trusted broker aspect is what is going to help these commercial AI companies get into trust and adoption from customers and what I think the government is going to experience to get the benefit of commercial tech through a trusted si. I mean, I'll use the Intellibridge example here, close to over 900 people now. It's going to be close to 1000 here pretty soon. Analysts DevSecOps engineers, program support, back office that know customer problems intimately and are those trusted advisors can have done the discovery on the government side to inform the AI products that my team is building. And so I think that there's a huge opportunity in working through trusted SIS. The challenge always becomes working with the right si, protecting the intellectual property who ultimately owns it. And also making sure, and I've talked about this a lot is that everybody's incentives are aligned.

Mike Pansky:
These SIS are going in the systems integration side. They're doing services work. So if you're a product company, know that you have that partner to do your systems integration, inform them how best they can gain value out of implementing your product for their clients. I think it's also a challenge I've seen with a lot of integrators in that they always want to build everything in house as opposed to bring the best tech in. And that's something where on the government side, you have to reinforce behavior for these companies to actually bring in the best tech, as opposed to I won't name the systems integrators, but, oh, we can build that here. We'll make that here, and we'll turn that into an eight or nine figure software development program for our company, as opposed to something that can be exponentially cheaper.

Bonnie Evangelista:
You're saying other words that are piquing my interest. You talked about incentives and making sure incentives are aligned. I'm trying to think in practical application, how do we actually incentivize what you're talking about in order to actually incentivize a systems integrator to bring in the best tech versus us relying on them to do it themselves. And that's just we're in the cycle of doom. I feel like where we throw money at an Si, we just know they're not going to innovate the way the rest of the market is innovating. And so we want to incentivize them to bring in what's working really well. Have you seen anywhere where that's been successful or even tried to be executed differently where incentives were aligned in the manner you're speaking to? Because I want to make sure we're not just saying platitudes about this, like, oh, we just got to communicate. No, there's a real tactic here that.

Mike Pansky:
Probably needs some conversation 100%. You can yell about the problems all day, but if you're not trying to change it or you haven't actually implemented it, then you're just sort of yelling into the wind. So I'll talk sort of three lenses. And again, on the Intellibridge side, one of the things I've been very fortunate enough is to get the latitude to support organizations. The nonprofit side, like Svdg, and the three areas I've seen from an Svdg lens as well as Intellibridge is it starts with policy, right? If the policies are in place for your government customer to bring in commercial tech and they understand that and you as a company understand how best to support that, then I think you've covered one battle. The policies have to drive behavior. I think first and foremost, then it's the education side. From an education perspective, from a customer.

Mike Pansky:
Again, I think that's where it's on the systems integrator. So the policy is on most of the government to drive that behavior forward. The education is on the si to actually inform to their customer that, hey, here's how we're differentiated in bringing commercial tech. You have organizations that are stood up now within systems integration firms. I do a lot of this on the tech scouting side across all of our three business areas to actually bring in commercial tech where they need it, right. I run a product organization. Our job is to do that and help our government customers there. And then the third piece is on the connect side.

Mike Pansky:
And this is the hardest part. Right. How do you know what exists out there from a commercial tech? There's so many companies, and so you've got to find the right organizations that can introduce you to great tech that can help fill the gaps for your government customers. Again, I don't expect everybody to be the tech scout for their organization, but hey, I have great tech scouts. I find from our analysts on the ground at law enforcement agencies, great technology companies all the time. And they'll ping me and say, hey, we're working with this really great data provider. I think this could help benefit. And so fostering that ability to collaborate and connect with those tech companies is sort of the third piece there.

Mike Pansky:
So it's a policy piece, it's an education piece. And then it's like the ability to collaborate and connect with this tech. There are three legs to a stool and yeah, I wouldn't say that there's a one size fits all to it.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. On the policy side, I'm just curious, can you think of an example of policy where you don't believe it's incentivizing the right behaviors or actions that you're talking about?

Mike Pansky:
So I might get in trouble for saying this, so I'm going to speak in abstracts about the system. And this is maybe something that's changing now is traditionally what I've seen on the government is a sun cost fallacy. We've invested all this money into a system. We have to keep investing into it. Right. You don't get that on the commercial side. You can fail and then quickly pivot. And so one piece of that, I think that in the system we have what is allowable.

Mike Pansky:
It's called BNP Bid and Proposal. When it's unallowable, it's bought and paid for. It's the activities that happen to influence behavior that doesn't change the ability for this process to happen. And so I don't know if I have a silver bullet answer to how you change the artificial constructs or the very real constructs of what I hear a lot of podcasts say is like this military industrial complex. I think it comes from the ecosystem changing, which we're seeing now with a lot more commercial tech. But yeah, it's hard, right? There is no silver bullet in that.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, I mean, we've quickly, I feel like, come full circle to most of the conversations I have, not just on this podcast, but in general when I'm having either these philosophical or abstract conversations about what is it going to take, no kidding. And it always kind of seems to come back to culture. And I think that's kind of what you're kind of touching on this. Maybe not fiercely, but the culture is not incentivized to you said fail fast. I'm embracing a new term, pivot fast because for some reason everybody has sensitivities to fail fast. I'm like, but you can't ignore the truth behind it. So even if you don't embrace maybe the negative connotation of the failing part, we should for sure be embracing the fact that when something's not working, you have to pivot, period. You said it earlier, this stuff is changing so quickly that should just be our mindset is how do I pivot and how quickly can I pivot? So these sunk cost type legacy systems are likely not enabling me to do that in the fashion maybe I should be.

Bonnie Evangelista:
So I'm kind of just pontificating a little bit because I'm like, oh, here we are again.

Mike Pansky:
Let me beat that drum. And some of the things I'm excited about that I've seen on the DoD and intelligence side, I mean, we're now seeing Diu reporting to the SecDef, which is something that on the Silicon Valley Defense Group we've been advocating for a long time. We're seeing in the NDAA that they're now requiring DoD to involve venture capital in the development of new technologies. And we can talk about the failures in the past of the government being a VC, but also the successes as well. They've rescoped on the R E side integrating commercial tech into the DoD requirements, which I think is great. On the intel side, I mean, I go back, know, two years ago, a little over now, when Director Burns announced the first CTO of the CIA NAND, who I think is like a national treasure. You want to talk about somebody who's like companies have been acquired by Oracle and VMware and Cisco and Citrix, I mean, you name it. You could throw a rock at a tech company now and he's probably had a tie there.

Mike Pansky:
Like bringing that sort of mentality to an amazing organization like the CIA I think is especially, you know, in this state that we're going to be getting to and I'll bring it back to, you know, ubiquitous technology surveillance and generative AI. I think that we're going to get to the point where that forcing function of a culture change might actually happen. But yeah, there are little wins along the way that I'm really excited about.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, that's sorry, I'm still reeling. You calling non to national treasure. That's hilarious.

Mike Pansky:
I'll probably get a text like stop.

Bonnie Evangelista:
So I'm encouraged to hear you say you're kind of excited. There is trickles here and there. I feel it too in terms of there are pockets of either teams or individuals who are figuring this out and getting that story out and getting others to pay attention and let's see if this is a good place to land with our conversation though. So what else is there to look forward to? What other opportunity do you see on these themes of scaling? And I'm going to add scaling fast, which oh my gosh, right? That might be unheard of, but honestly that should be the vision in my opinion. We should be getting to a point where that is, no kidding, normal. So where do. You see opportunity, where are you encouraged? What else can you leave us with in terms of from your perspective, any insights that we can learn from?

Mike Pansky:
Wow, it's a difficult question, right? Difficult to sort of nail it down to one thing where I'm most excited about and let me bring it back to the piloting to get to the scaling. I'm most excited about the ecosystems that are being created. And hats off to the CDAO for tradewinds. The ability for a company to now pitch their value proposition to not just a pilot effort, but hopefully maybe one day that end user. And to see that through, I think is huge for me. I think these sort of trusted marketplaces have always been a passion of mine. I'll save the trusted capital program maybe for the Defense Scars podcast, battle Scars podcast and not Mavericks, but I think that these trusted marketplaces, the ability to create an environment and there's a ton of organizations that are connecting to peos, to operators, bringing them forward, the connection to the venture capital side, helping the market. Traditionally that VC portfolio and their sort of investment thesis model is almost counterintuitive to defense.

Mike Pansky:
First, I think we're changing that and the integration of VC and private equity into the process is going to help companies scale. We need that ecosystem to help these companies scale. I do this on the investment side, making capital available so that when companies do get a contract, they don't end up becoming a bank because the government doesn't pay their bills every 30 days like maybe a commercial entity would. And so I think that it's a whole of industry problem that will fill the gaps to help those companies scale and be able to do this. So I'm most excited about the maybe it's the excitement of not only tackling the hardest problems in the world and defending the ideologies of the sort of democratic republic that we're in. And I've talked about these are great problems to try and solve and it's just about getting the right team of people together. I want to beat that drum. You want to get from small little wins to big efforts.

Mike Pansky:
You got to bring a team. It takes a team to be able to do this. And that's I'm most excited about.

Bonnie Evangelista:
I can't help but add on to something you just said because I couldn't agree more. So the teaming part, and it's interesting, you were talking about VCs, I too would love to see more integration of that element of the whole of industry part that you were talking about be more involved or that connective tissue, maybe just have more connective tissue there. I don't even say they have to be super involved, but just having more ability to connect to like you said, that's kind of the hardest part sometimes is connecting to the right pieces of the puzzle. But I've talked to VCs about this as well and even when they're selecting startups they want to invest in, it's 100% about the people. It's, like, way less about the product, or at least that's the impression I was given.

Mike Pansky:
You can check me, the jockey, not the horse. Absolutely. Early stage investing. It's the jockey, not the horse.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah. So I love the people focus, and I'm excited, too, and I appreciate you being able to do a little storytelling with me today to help highlight what there is to be excited about, because and you also mentioned Stephanie Wilson. She is one of the few people in my community who has made me excited about right. Like, everyone's, like, boring contracting.

Mike Pansky:
We're just rock island, get after.

Bonnie Evangelista:
It. I guarantee you. People who know Stephanie or learn about Stephanie, they're like, wait, she's where? At island? Like, who's doing anything at island? But we're being funny about it. There's a lot to be excited about.

Mike Pansky:
Well, thank you very much for having I really appreciate it.

Bonnie Evangelista:
Yeah, thanks so much.