Q&A with Al Chen, Software Engineering Leader at Cisco

For the AI Engineer NYC event, Al Chen, a Software Engineering Leader at Cisco, shared his insights on deploying AI agents in major banks. His talk focused on the challenges and solutions encountered while navigating security reviews, compliance requirements, and preventing data leaks during these deployments. Al started his journey into AI by getting fascinated by ChatGPT and later delved into LangChain and other AI frameworks.

He joined a small startup, Galileo, which was later acquired by Cisco, and began working on deploying their software within the largest banks and financial institutions globally.

When banks encounter a tier 1 security review, the initial hurdle is dealing with CVEs, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. This is the most significant obstacle they face before any hardware or software can be considered. Al's team encounters these CVEs daily and works tirelessly to remediate vulnerabilities. Each bank has its own unique processes, policies, and scanning software to evaluate exploits and vulnerabilities.

Al's primary responsibility is to develop a systematic approach that can be applied uniformly across all customers, despite the diversity of their requirements.

Balancing execution, strategy, learning, and problem-solving is a common challenge in Al's role. He compares it to building a plane while flying it, as he didn't have prior knowledge of CVEs or Kubernetes clusters before taking on this position. He relies on AI to learn about these concepts and then applies his understanding to address the practical issues at hand.