A Cloud Nobody Owns: Sovereign Infrastructure for the Agent Era with Dominic Williams

0:08Good morning, good evening, love y 'all, and welcome back to the Enterprise AI Show. This is your host Aaron, and I'm back home after two weeks on the road. And quick aside, this is my, I think, fourth time trying to actually record this. Had a little bit of technical difficulties, actually had a tornado go through and had to go to the basement. and a tornado touchdown a couple miles from the house, but everyone is fine, everything is safe. And we certainly hope everyone out there is safe as well. But moving on to today's show. So what we're looking at today for our topic is how to build a sovereign agent-ready cloud without relying on a single hyperscaler.

0:52So Brandon sits down with Dominic Williams, founder and president and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation to talk about the internet computer, private cloud engines, data sovereignty, and an AI-aware replacement for traditional SaaS. And of course, all of that is coming up right after this quick break.

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2:51And we're back. Joining me today is Dominic Williams, founder, president, chief scientist at DFINITY Foundation and founder and CEO at Uptilab. Welcome to the show, Dominic. Thank you for having me, Brandon. All right, listen, we're going to have a great conversation about sovereignty, private clouds, maybe a little agents, a little AI, right? We can't, we have to talk about that as well. But before we jump into all that, we always want to get a chance to know our guests. So give us a little bit of information about how'd you get into this? What's your background? Tell us your origin story, if you will.

3:22Well, you probably don't want to hear my entire origin story. It goes back a long way. I'd been, I'd call it engineering entrepreneur for some decades. I've got a particular interest in distributed systems, but I've also built things like MMO games for kids. Back in 2010, I launched a game called Fight My Monster and it grew to 3 million users. and that was exciting because it actually involved a lot of really interesting back-end infrastructure that led me to what I'm doing now. The actual product itself was an infrastructure product. So have you always been a gamer? Well, that's a kind of interesting story in itself.

3:55How did you get into building kids for game or games for kids rather? I had some young boys and my eldest used to go to a lot of chess tournaments and so I wanted to replicate that experience inside an MMO. And the game was conceived as something akin to a giant tournament. And it was designed to be more like a game of skill than just something where you grind away and level up. And you generate these unique monsters. You could fight them against other players' monsters and trade them. And it was this kind of hybrid game social network. Nothing's really existed like it before or since. A lot of kids say that it defined their childhood.

4:37So that's awesome. I know a lot of kids like Roblox and the Minecraft. Everybody's kids, I think when they're young, they go through those things. So that's fun. That's super fun. But that seems completely different. So now I guess flash forward, tell us about the DFINITY Foundation. I think I hadn't heard of it as much. So why don't you assume we don't know too much about it. What is this thing that you've created here? So actually going back to the game quickly, I I built that when I was in the UK and I later relocated to Palo Alto, California. And in the UK, historically it's not been so easy to raise venture capital and things like that.

5:12I had previous ventures and I had some of my own funds, so I funded it myself. But I did have lots of money and I needed infrastructure that would scale very easily with low effort and low cost. And I was one of those pioneers of NoSQL databases. and Fight My Monster was actually the first sort of serious production use of a database called Cassandra. We were using it in beta. Actually lost all the data at 880 ,000 users. That's a very tense 24-hour getting it back. But the beautiful thing about that database is you can just add nodes to add storage capacity and write throughput and, of course, read throughput.

5:53So that helped with the scaling and I also built a kind of custom game server that scaled horizontally. You can just add nodes. And that experience made me think about how decentralization can be used in context of scaling. And later in California, I became very interested in decentralized networks, initially like Bitcoin, that were fully decentralized in the sense that there wasn't just a decentralized architecture, but there was no controller, but also had these wonderful security and resilience properties. So I became a pioneer in that field, working a lot of underlying computer science theory that makes those networks run.

6:38And eventually, in 2015, I started talking about the DFINITY project, which aimed to create what was essentially a blockchain that could function as a cloud. and I said back then look we it's possible with enough research to create a network that can host code that's tamper proof doesn't need to be protected by firewalls unstoppable and has various other desirable properties and at the time people were skeptical but I kept persevering and in 2016 I actually had a share in a decentralized incubator that that would funded incubate projects in Palo Alto called String Labs. And I persuaded my co-founder, hey, look, let's incubate Affinity.

7:24Let's try and do this. And by the end of that year, we created the Affinity Foundation in Switzerland. And then in 2017, we ran a fundraiser, got some funds into it, and it became independent of the incubator. And that's how it began. By the end of 2017, we had a pretty good team running. So some very famous people, actually our employee number five was the co-inventor of WebAssembly, for example. WebAssembly is this new, it's the internet's compute format, and that's now present in every single web browser. And a lot of people are using it for backend compute too, like Cloudflare supports WebAssembly workers and things like that.

8:06They're called Timo Hanke, who was someone who'd been prominent in the Bitcoin community, designing algorithms for Bitcoin miners and things like that. So a lot of interesting people working on this in the early days, but we scaled it out. And by the time the network launched May 21, we had about 200 people, predominantly researchers, very PhD heavy. I think we used to hire mainly from Google. And then over time, we had two research centers, one in Palo Alto, another one actually in San Francisco as well, then another one in Zurich. Over time, the center of gravity swung towards Zurich for a bunch of reasons.

8:41And in 2021, I relocated from Palo Alto to Zurich. And that's where I am currently, although I still spend a long time in California. Okay. And so what kind of, what's the mission? So I mentioned a lot of things distributed, and I know you're going to get into a little David and Sovereign a little bit. So what is it like today? Think of it. What's the key problem that you've settled on as you've gone through these different phases of it? Yeah. The key problem for me was to really just create a new backend compute stack, an end-to-end, a new end-to-end backend compute stack. And I think that was important to me because I've been coding personally for many decades.

9:19I started coding when I was like 10 years old. I've built just about every kind of system you can imagine. And therefore, I'm acutely aware of the shortcomings of the traditional backend stack. So I wanted to create a completely new backend stack that solved a wide array of problems. And that included, obviously, the simplicity of software. I wanted it to be much easier to write backend software and systems and services. I wanted to solve for security. I wanted to create a stack where everything you built was secure by default, and you didn't need a security team to protect it. You didn't need patches and firewalls and configurations and so on.

9:58I wanted a stack where software would be guaranteed to run. So you didn't need a sysadmin team tinkering with it. And then the other piece of it for me was I wanted this backend stack to be a cloud, naturally. And I wanted that to be part of the internet. I wanted to extend the internet and create a cloud the internet way. Essentially, I started coding before, it sounds crazy, before the web. and so I started out just programming sockets using C a long time ago I was very interested in the internet and I rode the whole kind of internet boom if you like and the internet connects software like right now it's connecting our video conferencing client software it connects our web browser to a server it allows SMTP to relay emails and that's what the internet does It just connects software.

10:52And on top of that, it's created this sort of global open marketplace and afforded us all these social freedoms. And it's a really cool thing. Like nobody owns the internet. The governance is a bit centralized. I can, but the technology didn't exist in those days to solve that. The internet's a wonderful thing. And we much prefer the internet to America Online and CompuServe. And I think Bill Gates came out with this idea of the information superhighway. He wrote this book. And initially he was proposing that big corporations, Microsoft, would create this information superhighway and it'd be much better than the internet.

11:26And thankfully that's not what we got. And he then changed the next edition of the book. He rewrote it. And so, yeah, we have this global internet that nobody owns. And it's a key foundation of modern society and the global economy and everything else and the way we live. So my view is, can we use a network protocol to extend the internet so that you can build on the internet? The internet can actually host your software and run it. Wouldn't that be great? And then this is where, is this where the internet computer, as you refer to it? Yeah, that's why it's called the internet computer, exactly.

12:04And so, yeah, why don't you give us a sense? Because I think what's going off in my mind and maybe other minds is, so we have the traditional hyperscalers. You've mentioned a couple, AWS and Azure. And then I think you have this idea, a slightly different take, like kind of the internet computer. So maybe like contrast, like exactly what is the internet computer? And then for all of us that are familiar with hyperscalers, why is it different?

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13:06Yeah, so first of all, the internet computer is the world's only compute stack created by network. So a mathematical network combines nodes, which are run by independent parties professionally, and they can also run on hyperscalers too. And it combines these compute nodes to make a single unified serverless cloud platform where code is tab proof and always on and so on. And that's very different to the way traditional clouds are created. Traditional clouds are created by taking a machine, installing an operating system, installing virtualization software, then the customer of the cloud installs their own operating system on top of the virtualization software, then they install their software and so on and so forth, right?

13:52And as it turns out, there's just no way that you can make a stack of software, a system that consists of a stack of software all the way down to the silicon, secure. You just can't do it. You can find holes and plug them and just hope that you find holes and plug them for an adversary finds the hole and exploits it. And that's what a zero-day exploit is, right? That's a hole in your stack that nobody knows about yet. And especially in the era of AI, this is kind of a risky way of creating compute stacks. Just really gambling that your AI is more powerful than your adversary's AI, and therefore it's going to find all the holes.

14:30And so you can plug them before they do, but before they exploit them. And I always thought that was the key thing we need to fix. And it's become increasingly true. Also, of course, that's very vulnerable to disruption. If you're running systems on machines that are just a stack of software sent down to silicon and someone blows up those machines, your systems and services and apps and so on are going to stop working. So I wanted to solve that too. Internet Computer is powered by a protocol called ICP, Internet Computer Protocol, and it combines the compute capacity of these machines to create a single unified serverless cloud environment.

15:06It's different to traditional serverless clouds in the sense that there's data in the serverless environment. And we'll get back to how that works. And they can also process web, so they can serve their own user experience. So it's very different to the kind of serverless software you find on Amazon Web Services. And essentially what's happening is that protocol ICP is redundantly replicating your computation and data. You don't see it, of course, it just looks like a cloud, but inside the protocol, that's what's happening. Your data replicates. and computation are being replicated. First of all, it's redundant, so you can blow up some machines and all your systems and services keep working.

15:44But also the way those different machines doing the replication synchronize themselves involves something called Byzantine fault tolerance, which is a sort of arcane branch of computer science, distributed computing that's been popularized by blockchain. And this essentially ensures that even if some of these nodes start misbehaving, the cloud itself continues functioning. Let's say you created what we call a cloud engine by combining four nodes and they were dedicated to you or seven nodes. You have the seven nodes, you have two of those nodes controlled by Dr. Evil. You thought you went to a marketplace and you selected these nodes to be part of your cloud engine.

16:29Turns out those nodes are run by Dr. Evil and the nodes are corrupting your data or corrupting copies of the data they're responsible for and not following the protocol and sending bad messages to the other nodes. What's really cool with presenting fault tolerance is that they will be unable to stop your cloud engine functioning. So all of your apps and services will continue running without a hitch and none of their computation and data will be corrupted. That's a really powerful property. In addition to that, there's no infrastructure to hack. like your software and data live within this network, this mathematical network protocol.

17:06It's only possible for that network to run your correct software logic against your correct data. There's just no other way it can work. So that's a guarantee. If your app has some, you've written your app's logic and there's data associated with that, the network guarantees that only the logic that you've written can run and against its correct data. So you don't need a firewall, you don't need security admins, and so on. And the network also is redundant. And so even if some of these nodes fail, even if some of those nodes get taken over by Dr. Evil, the whole thing keeps on running. Okay, so I like the Dr.

17:43Evil. So maybe take us in side, because it all sounds good. But I think probably many of us listening would be familiar with it. You write some application logic. Maybe you put it in a container or you package it up in a serviceless or lambda-type format. And then of course, like on the data side, we're all familiar with like S3 and files and obviously databases. So like, what am I like, what am I like packaging up here so that you can go run this on kind of all these other nodes that are out there ready for me to take advantage of? From you, your perspective as a developer, this is just a serverless cloud and you can just deploy to it.

18:20And today, probably you're not writing the code yourself. Probably you're using Claude Code. and Claude Code's building this thing, this app, this service for you locally. And then when you're happy with the latest version, you tell Claude to deploy it to the internet computer. So really, you're just interacting with this thing through your AI prompts. It's all very seamless. And I don't want to get too technical, but for those that have a technical background, you can map a domain name to multiple nodes and things like that, right? So although it might have one internet address behind that, there can be lots of individual compute nodes.

18:54So one of the cool things is serverless, right? And you don't need dependencies like databases. So in actual fact, the code, the logic runs in persistent memory. So rewinding a bit to what code runs, actually you're running WebAssembly in that persistent memory. Any language that compiles to WebAssembly can be used within the serverless environment. So the two most popular languages are Rust and a domain-specific language called Motoko. But people are also running other languages on the internet computer. Now, you might be writing it in Rust, but there's no file system. There's no database to connect to.

19:34And the reason is that your code is running in persistent memory. So one way to understand that is if the power on your laptop gets low, it goes into hibernate mode. And all the memory pages just get written to disk. and then when you put the power back in, it comes back on and it loads the memory pages from disk and your desktop experience continues from where you were. If you had a bunch of apps open, like a Photoshop, you were editing a photo or something, your power on your laptop ran out, it would hibernate and sync all your memory pages to disk and then when you put the power back in, it will resume like bringing those memory pages back off disk and there will be your Photoshop app with your photo that you're editing where you left off.

20:16so it's a bit like that but obviously rather than a sort of clunky hibernate like these these memory pages are being persisted constantly and obviously this is greatly aided by the replications if you're running some code on the internet computer in actual fact that identical logic is running against the identical data on several machines at once okay even if one of those nodes blow up there's still copies of the data on the other machines and so on and so forth you can lazily sync that memory to those nodes can lazily sync the memory to that to that drive okay so that makes sense on the so i get i kind of take then i can really write anything that can you know compile down to web assembly that makes sense lots of great solutions for that and we've actually had some guests on the show talk about that so that part totally makes sense i guess i'm a little bit like okay so then i don't know just pick anything i got a database like a lookup database of whatever customer data let's say it has a thousand customers and then the the code looks it up, displays it, and maybe it makes some updates.

21:13That's the part, I guess, if I give that, how do I give that to you? And then more importantly, if I give that to you, how am I going to make sure that it isn't accessible to intruders, other people? Oh, yeah, that's the second. Yeah, that's the second question. So first of all, with respect to databases, memory is much faster. Persistent memory is much faster. So if you spend a lot of money on Oracle's solution, it'll give you a symmetric SQL database. where you have a bunch of nodes that all share equally the role of replicating the database. Like each node has a copy of the database. The more nodes you add, the more read query capacity you add, but they all do the right.

21:53But then the architecture would involve like you might have like some, you know, some front-end servers running node or something orchestrated by Kubernetes, like on Amazon Web Services. And then they are forwarding database requests back to this Oracle, symmetrical Oracle cluster. And those application servers are having to marshal data in and out of database requests. All of that's pretty slow. And you've got complex because two different apps might try and update the same field in the database simultaneously. And the first one might succeed and the second one might override it. And you've got to manage all this infrastructure and it's expensive.

22:30On the internet computer, the memory just lives in, or the data just lives in memory, excuse me. You don't have to do anything special. In fact, the data lives in the logic that you write. So you just write the logic that describes the essence of your application or service. And that's it. It's called orthogonal persistence. You don't have to do anything about persistence because that code is running in memory that's persistent. So if you create a variable or a data structure, that's where your data lives. There's no need to copy it into a database. There's no concept of the code crashing and needing restarting, and therefore you need to copy it into a database to keep the data safe.

23:12The memory's updated transactionally, and that's where your data lives. That massively simplifies what's involved creating the functionality of your application or service. It massively reduces the amount of code involved. But it also hugely increases the performance because there's no levels of interaction. If you run a query, the code is just pulling that data directly from memory. And you imagine what would happen with the Oracle database. Guess what? You set a query to your application through some web front end, right? It's got to package that up and put it in an SQL query and put it in a database connection pool, which sends it across the network to one of the database servers, which unpackages it, runs it against all its indexes and through the query processor and everything else, sends the results back.

24:01You've got to unpackage that, marshaling stuff in and out. There's a lot going on. So all of that's gone and you get much better performance. In a sense, so the new thing that's coming, which we think is what's going to unlock massive enterprise adoption of the internet computer is called Cloud Engines. And Cloud Engines, this kind of answers the other part of the question, allow the enterprise to select the nodes from a marketplace. So there's about 1500 nodes in the marketplace now. And you have to select nodes that are the same class. If you select a nano node, then all the other nodes in your cloud engine have to be nano nodes.

24:37If you select dense, no, the other nodes have to be dense. The protocol combines these nodes and creates this private agentic cloud infrastructure for you. And you choose, you choose who's providing the node, where it is, what data centers installed in. or maybe it's on a hyperscaler infrastructure. So the last part, I guess. Control that. That makes sense. So you kind of get everyone comfortable with it. So I think I'm following along here. So obviously application code, we get that in WebAssembly. Sounds like you're going to put everything in memory. We'll come back to it in a second because I'm a little bit more like, what if I have a lot of stuff, but table that for one second.

25:13But then more importantly, I think what people are going to wonder is, okay, so if I pick these nodes, like what's the, I can obviously see the blockchain influence here and I'm thinking like the hashing and all this, but like what's the security protection I have so that when I pick these nodes that my runtime can like interact with the data in memory but you, what'd you say, like Dr. Evil, if I did pick the Dr. Evil node, Dr. Evil can't get into my memory and read it. How's that working? Internet Computer Protocol is implemented by a piece of software called a replica and it supports TE environments if you want.

25:51The Internet Computer currently does support running apps and services inside TEs. So this is basically a kind of hardware encapsulation. So for example, if you went and got one of these traditional Internet Computer Nodes, about 100 companies run them. If you went and got one of these traditional Internet Computer Nodes and opened it up, you'd just find random bytes on the hard drive and in memory. And that's because it's running a thing called SEV, SNP, which comes from AMD. so there's you can there are hardware privacy protections okay so every to be on this basically it's a trusted computer it's basically got all this to be a node you're basically saying this node is like running some type of like confidential trusted computing yeah exactly kind of layer is that a fair way to say it they don't all run it with cloud engines you can choose and some of these nodes will support that others not but you can choose nodes from rec providers that you trust Yeah, obviously there's a risk if you choose a smaller nodes from a smaller company and you go to their website and it all looks a bit shady.

26:53Maybe they will be poking around in your memory. But yeah, if you want, you can choose nodes from established providers that are clearly trustworthy. With cloud engines, you can also use on-prem nodes. So you don't even have to use someone else's node at all. And the idea very much is that whoever creates a cloud engine or cloud engines, it's not enterprise generally, has complete control over who's running the hardware, what the hardware is, where it's located. And they can change that at any time. What's really cool is, for example, you could create a cloud engine that runs on hyperscalers. So let's imagine this.

27:30Say you started off running a cloud engine where the nodes are running on different Amazon Web Services data centers. So Amazon has a lot of different data centers and because the nodes are in different Amazon data centers, if one of the data centers hosting your node went down, and they do, actually, there are pretty regular outages of Amazon Web Services data centers. Then it's okay. Your cloud engine will keep on running because it's fault-on, right? You could even do it in the Middle East, which has had a lot of problems with drones flying into Amazon Web Services data centers. Yes. Yeah. You get, so long as all of the data centers didn't get hit by drones.

28:06Someone's left. Someone knows what's going on, right? Yeah. So let's say you start off like that and then you realize, I forget how long ago it is, time flies, but I do remember, was it 10 years ago, 15 years ago? There was a time when all the Amazon Web Services data centers went down. They had something, some problem with their message. Yeah, like a configuration error went crazy. Yeah, it actually went down. Yeah, so you could then think, actually, I'm not so sure about that. And so you could, what you do is you just add in new nodes from, say, Google and Azure and Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, whatever you want.

28:39And then once you've done that, maybe you delete some of your Amazon nodes. And now you've got a much more reliable cloud engine because it's very unlikely that failure is going to be correlated. If Amazon goes down, it's very unlikely Google's going to go down. um and so you then you're very happy with that and and by the way when you reconfigured your cloud engine by adding the new nodes and then deleting the old nodes everything kept working that there was all of your enterprise apps and services that you've got running on your cloud engine all of that kept working there was no interruption whatsoever okay but then you decide you know what i'm against all this hyperscaler stuff and i'm worried that they're spying on me or whatever, you could then reconfigure it again and you add in a bunch of nodes run by independent providers in traditional data centers around the world and then just delete the high-fascaler nodes and it'll again keep on running, no interruption.

29:32So, you know, it's complete freedom from vendor lock-in because essentially your cloud engine is a network configuration and you have to be able to sync the new nodes to the network. so then on the and then how does someone pay for all of this so is this sort of like someone stands up some nodes and it's like a marketplace it's like i'll give you a node for x amount of money and i pay you somehow so there's a token economy but with cloud engines which i think we're i think we're beginning to give out coupons next week it's already in use so for example pakistan pakistan's running a cloud and some cloud engines and they're using them to build like a sovereign national chat app.

30:12And they also, they've used AI to build enterprise infrastructure that's actually been used by their government. UN is deploying this across country offices. And so the cloud engines are already in use, but they're not in wider release. But I think probably next week, they're going to be available to all. People will just apply for these coupons and it's on opencloud.org for people. So internetcomputer.org and then opencloud.org is where you get your cloud engine. and yeah that that's coming and people will be able to create these cloud engines and they're just network configurations inside in the payment inside the market there's a marketplace of nodes you choose the nodes you want to combine and then you pay now this is the interesting bit the entire cloud engine experience looks like it's run by a company it looks like it's an amazon web services configurator or something like that in actual fact it's part of the internet computer a network.

31:07And when you pay via payment services provider, and there'll be a few of these, anybody can do it, that the network registers. And then the payment services provider takes your money through a credit card, and behind the scenes, they convert it into something called cycles. So the internet computer, because it's a protocol, it can't handle a bank account or something like that. Like there's no, a protocol's an anonymous thing. It's not a legal entity, right? So the The protocol moves around these things called cycles, and these are used to remunerate the providers, and the providers can turn those cycles back into cash because there's a market for them.

31:45There's another type of ICP that's in there. But with cloud engines, all of that's hidden. So if you're an enterprise, you go to opencloud.org, you'll see a marketplace. You can choose which nodes to combine. You choose a payment services provider on checkout, give them your credit card, and And it just looks like it's, it looks like a centralized infrastructure. In actual fact, it's not. It's a decentralized network. And then you mentioned a little bit about who's using it today. Because I think that's always, and I think you mentioned, so is it, I know data sovereignty is something that comes up that you mentioned on your website and things like that.

32:19Is that, that seems like maybe one of the key use cases is sort of somebody that doesn't want to be tied to any specific provider. Is that, are those kind of the people that are motivated to adopt this or is it someone else? I think it's certainly a large segment. Actually, the Internet Computer Project, I guess it's 10 years in, and it really, Dfinity was very much a research institute kind of operation. And we weren't great at productization, but the technology was great. About a year and a half ago, a sort of transition happened where we started focusing on productization with the help of partners.

32:56And for example, there's a product called Caffeine. It's a builds on the internet computer, you can just chat with AI and it'll build you something on the internet computer. So that was actually quite consumer. And I think there's like some hundreds of thousands of apps that have been built by consumers and some enterprises too. Umptilabs, which is a new company known as heard of, has built something called OpenSaaS, which is the other end of the spectrum, which is a replacement for every SaaS service on earth. And it's free and it's AIware. So it's much more powerful than traditional SaaS too.

33:28And you can just install it on a cloud engine. You've got everything from consumer through to that. The main news so far, yeah, you're right that around the world, there's a lot of people realizing that tech is one of the key foundations now of modern societies. And the danger is if your tech stack is running in a foreign country or powered by code that's not open source, there are hidden kill switches and backdoors. For example, there's something in the US called the Cloud Act. And this requires any US-based cloud services provider, whether they're providing infrastructure, like physical infrastructure, whether they're providing just software, it could be SaaS.

34:08It could be SaaS. If certain US agencies request backdoor access to data, the Cloud Act requires them to furnish that access, even if the data is located on servers in a foreign country, anywhere in the world. There's growing awareness of this kind of thing and during the latest tensions over Greenland and things like that, People like the French were very worried that their tech was going to be switched off by America. So I think there's just a general awareness that you really need to have around the world. You really need to have your own sovereign infrastructure. And that means the hardware is in your own country.

34:43And whatever's being used to create the tech stack is open source. So you can see there's no backdoors and kill switches in there. And I don't think, by the way, my wife's American. That's American. Go back all the time. This isn't anti-America at all. I think there'll be huge adoption of this technology in America. But there is a reality there that if you're a sovereign country and you're building your critical government and corporate systems on another country's infrastructure, very likely the other country is going to extract the data and put it in a palliative database. I'm British originally, and I'm sure the UK would do it.

35:21This is the way this thing works. There's a general push around the world toward sovereign tech stacks, just as there is for AI. People want to buy chips from NVIDIA and install them in local data centers where they feel they have more control. of data. Yeah, no, no doubt. Data sovereignty, I think, just becomes more and more important by the moment, right? More and more countries, more and more reasons. I think that's going to change. So as we wrap up, though, I always like to try to give people that are interested a chance on how to get started. So you kind of mentioned a little bit of AI at the top and Cloud Code or Codex and things like that.

35:51So why don't, for someone that is, like all of us out there trying to do something, are there specific, do you have an MCP server or is there a good way to get started with this using a coding assistant? What do you recommend for someone that kind of wants to know more. Yeah. So this is what I'd recommend. First of all, you can develop your Apple service locally. Go to skills.internetcomputer.org. Sorry, skills.internetcomputer.org. And they'll give you like a prompt to paste into your coding assistant, whether that's code code, codex, or whatever. And that'll give it the root skill. I would tell it to code the backend in Motoko because this has a bunch of really wonderful features that are designed for people building predominantly with AI.

36:40So in fact, the first language designed specifically for AI agents rather than humans, and has a lot of very powerful build-for-purpose features. When you upgrade an app in production that was written in Motoko, you have to specify a transformation for memory if it's necessary and the framework that runs that out the motoko language framework can detect if you're if the ai has made a mistake and some it might result in a lossy update like some data could be lost during the update and this is actually a real problem with traditional tech when you update apps and services there's always this fear that it's going to go wrong and going to create a security hole it's going to stop working all that, you make a mistake and somehow the migration of data has failed and you've lost some data.

37:30Toko guarantees that content. So I choose Toko as the backend language and just see what you build. I use CloudCode and take a big, incredible substance with CloudCode Mac subscription to see what you can build. And then you can deploy to the internet computer. Historically, that's been a bit more involved because you need these tokens and things like that. But what I can tell you is there are changes that are coming as well. So you'll be able to just pay with a credit card into a thing that pops up while you're using the coding assistant. You can deploy right now. And many tens of thousands of people have done that.

38:03But it's a bit more involved. But then you've got cloud engines coming. So the next week or two, get on the list, get yourself a coupon, and you'll be able to create yourself a cloud engine for free. And once you've logged into your cloud engine console, again, it'll just give you a prompt that you put into your coding assistant. And again, you'll be able to start building on it. And phase one, I think, of the rollout is, it's just agentic infrastructure. So it's conceived as the ideal infrastructure for agents to build on. You don't need a security team, you don't need a systems admin team. It guarantees if you're using Watoko that when you're upgrading your apps in production, you can't lose data.

38:38The second phase of the rollout, Umpty Labs will make OpenSaaS available. So, for example, like Divinity is running on OpenSaaS. And we're going to push that out in alpha soon. And it's an amazing change from traditional SaaS. If you're a big old like Dufiniti, I think we use like Bamboo HR for HR, Oracle NetSuite for accounts. We did anyway. And yeah, we're not using Linux, we're using Jira for product management. All the usual stuff, right? All the SaaS stuff that comes with any touch company. All the sign-owned stuff that costs loads of money. Open SaaS, obviously it's one suite that's constantly expanding to cover everything.

39:15But it's all integrated. But most importantly, it's AIware. So there's AI on the inside. And so essentially, subject to the permissions of the user, AI can see the datagraph in memory and it can access the actual APIs inside the code. And this means you can ask it the most extraordinary things. So a simple example would be, rather than going into OpenHR to manage PTO requests, you would say to the AI assistant, hey, please look at all the PTO requests for customer success staff. approve those that aren't intersecting, make sure that we always have coverage in all the different time zones we have customers, where there are overlapping PDR requests, give preference to our best employees, and give me the emails that ask people to choose different dates where necessary.

40:06And it'll go away and do this incredibly complex optimization problem for you. That would be almost impossible to perform as a human. And a few minutes later, it would come back and there are the emails and you just press approve. Done. And this is the extraordinary thing. If you can get all of your enterprise's data into OpenSaaS, it can be as good at running a company as it is writing code because it's got all the context. So that's something we're very excited about. And by the way, you could also create, once cloud engines are out, or even now, you can already create AI where with Motoko, there's a skill and the AI can find out how to do this kind of stuff.

40:45All right. I love it. I love the idea of not having to interact with so many SaaS systems. That was honestly, that's the dream of all of us. I don't want any more emails about PTO. No more SaaS systems. Even better than that, you'll end up spending it as much as you have to use SaaS. Like if you're an organization, a big enough organization, you're going to need something to manage your HR and you're a customer. But instead of spending all your time like stuck inside the usual user experience screens, you'll instead spend probably 80 % of your time just chatting to AI and telling it what to do for you.

41:16once you've tried it you never want to go back well it sounds a lot like coding like once you stop writing code and start telling to like build stuff it's just a different one and modern AI is just getting so wonderfully powerful good at these things yeah alright listen we have a lot of fun stuff to do I've learned quite a bit in this conversation I'm going you mentioned a bunch of links I'll get all the links I'll make sure they're in the show notes and on the website so everyone can find those as well but if someone has heard you and they want to get in touch with you personally any specific way any good way for them to reach out to you maybe on social media something like that I'm a difficult person to reach my inbox to be honest email has just got 50 ,000 I've read emails there are ways like you can get find other people here you can get and get a hold of me and you're always open to talk to people that's fantastic alright Dominic thanks a lot for coming on the show today I really enjoyed the conversation thank you Brandon it's been great and for everyone listening we really appreciate it of course if you're watching on YouTube or listening to your podcast player it always helps if you subscribe or give us a click we appreciate that And with that, we'll talk to you next time.