Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness

John Gilroy
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

The federal government spends $90 billion on technology every year. If you are a tech innovator and want to expand your share of the market, this is the podcast for you to find new opportunities for growth. Every week, Federal Tech Podcast sits down with successful innovators who have solved complex computer system problems for federal agencies. They cover topics like Artificial Intelligence, Zero Trust, and the Hybrid Cloud. You can listen to the technical issues that concern federal agencies to see if you company's capabilities can fit. The moderator, John Gilroy, is an award-winning lecturer at Georgetown University and has recorded over 1,000 interviews. His interviews are humorous and entertaining despite handing a serious topic. The podcast answers questions like . . . How can software companies work with the federal government? What are federal business opportunities? Who are the cloud providers who work with the federal government? Should I partner with a federal technology contractor? What is a federal reseller? Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/ Want to listen to other episodes? www.Federaltechpodcast.com

  1. 4d ago

    Ep 331 Autonomous AI and Observability in Federal IT

    In this episode of the Federal Tech Podcast, John Gilroy interviews Justin Fessler, Vice President of Public Sector at LogicMonitor, about the growing role of autonomous AI and observability in federal government IT operations. Fessler explains that autonomous AI is not about replacing people but about automating repetitive operational tasks, correlating complex system events, and helping IT teams make faster, better-informed decisions. Rather than allowing AI to operate without oversight, LogicMonitor focuses on keeping humans "in the loop" while AI handles time-consuming analysis and routine remediation. A central theme is the importance of complete visibility across increasingly complex federal environments. LogicMonitor's agentless monitoring technology discovers devices, cloud resources, applications, and shadow IT without requiring software agents on every endpoint. This broad visibility enables agencies to identify unmanaged assets, reduce blind spots, optimize cloud costs, and strengthen security. The discussion also highlights observability's critical role in Zero Trust. Fessler notes that agencies cannot secure or verify assets they cannot see. By discovering everything connected to the network—including servers, cloud services, IoT devices, cameras, badge readers, and physical infrastructure—LogicMonitor helps agencies build a stronger Zero Trust foundation. Gilroy and Fessler examine the challenges of managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments, emphasizing that agencies require a single operational view regardless of where workloads reside. LogicMonitor integrates information across cloud providers and third-party platforms, including ServiceNow, Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, and IBM Watsonx, enabling AI-driven event correlation and faster incident response. The conversation concludes with the future of autonomous IT. Fessler predicts increased automation, AI-assisted self-healing infrastructure, and significantly reduced mean time to identify and resolve incidents. Rather than replacing IT professionals, autonomous AI will eliminate repetitive work, allowing skilled personnel to focus on higher-value mission objectives while improving operational resilience, reducing alert fatigue, and delivering better digital services to citizens.         For more information, visit www.logicmonitor.com/solutions/federal-government.

    24 min

  2. Jun 25

    Ep. 330 Lessons from Ukraine on Defending Against Cyberattacks

    Craig Bowman, Senior Vice President at Trellix, discussed Trellix's project to secure Ukraine's cyber environment against nation-state attacks, highlighting the rapid evolution of attack vectors from Ukraine to the U.S. He emphasized the importance of AI in cybersecurity, noting Trellix's use of AI to autonomously mitigate attacks, as seen during the 2025 cyber espionage campaign. Bowman also explained Trellix's detonation chamber technology, which isolates and analyzes threats without affecting live data, and its Agentic AI, which operates on-premises without data movement to provide real-time cybersecurity insights. Ukraine has become the world's most concentrated cyber battlefield, giving security teams unprecedented visibility into emerging attack techniques. In this interview, Trellix's Craig Bowman revealed that attack patterns once took six months to reach the U.S. after appearing in Ukraine—today, that gap can be as short as six seconds —highlighting why AI-powered cyber defense is becoming essential for federal agencies. It is essential because a human simply cannot fight an autonomous machine by clicking through alerts. It is time to use AI to fight AI.

    21 min

  3. Jun 23

    Ep. 329 How Federal Agencies Can Unlock Hidden Workforce Skills

    Today, we examine the strategy for filling technology roles in the federal government. Everyone reading this sentence knows that the federal government is competing with commercial organizations for tech talent. Combining that with an arduous federal hiring process, a reduced budget, and a drastic increase in cyberattacks heightens this concern. We sat down with Nav Singh, the Chief Marketing Officer at Eightfold.ai, to discuss the company's mission to match job candidates with roles based on skills. For example, Eightfold has analyzed 1.6 million skills and 1.6 billion career trajectories, enabling it to identify and upskill employees for roles like cybersecurity. Singh emphasizes the importance of reducing bias in hiring and leveraging AI to discover hidden talents within organizations. During the interview, he reviews the idea of training people who you already have on staff for cybersecurity positions. It is possible to assess talent and identify which candidates can make this transition. This "hidden talent" theme makes even more sense for the federal government. One may need a specific kind of security clearance. It may be easier to assign an existing employee with that clearance and train them rather than go through the whole vetting process again. Singh also mentions introducing an AI interviewer to enhance hiring consistency and efficiency. He states that the future workforce will be a combination of humans and agents. This is a scenario in which agents perform repeatable tasks, while humans set the strategy and exercise judgment.

    24 min

  4. Jun 16

    Ep. 328 How LMI Is Accelerating Defense AI for the Modern Army

    John Gilroy and Josh Wilson, CEO of LMI, discussed the shift from traditional defense technology development cycles to rapid deployment, emphasizing the need for integrated hardware-software systems. For decades, the military would assemble detailed requirements, solicit bids, select a winner, and wait years for the contract to be completed. This approach can work with some hardware systems, but today's combat requires maximum flexibility and adaptability. This approach prompts the question of whether a company is judged by how perfect its product is on day one. What about day two? What about the pace? Can they figure it out based on what they learn? Wilson suggests a more flexible approach in which a combat system is proposed, evaluated quickly, defects are identified and replaced, and the system is then reassessed. He highlights LMI's approach, which combines software, hardware, services, data, and AI to deliver outcomes, citing examples like asset management in shipyards and the He stresses the importance of trust, earned through demonstrable solutions, and the cultural shift towards outcomes over ownership and the SHPRD program. Wilson also notes the success of the Ivy Sting exercises, which prioritize user feedback, and the potential for scaling rapid development models across the Army and other federal agencies. You can read the press release here:  https://www.lmisolutions.com/press-release/anduril-partners-with-lmi-to-generate-battlefield-technology-for-the-u-s-army

    17 min

  5. Jun 11

    Ep. 327 Is Cybersecurity a Data Problem? Elastic Explains Why

    Finding a needle in a haystack would seem like a minor endeavor compared to what today's federal systems managers must face. Let's take a stab at a correct farmyard analogy – the haystacks double in size every day and are moving. That sounds like an exaggeration, but recent reports show that nine million zero-day exploits are released every day. AI is putting malicious actors on steroids. Chris Townsend, Global Vice President of Public Sector at Elastic, discussed the company's role in federal cybersecurity and data management. His argument is, essentially, that cybersecurity is a data problem. If threats are viewed from that perspective, the more data you can bring into your security environment, the more effective you are at defending it. Elastic enables security operations analysts      who are responsible for detecting threats to keep up with today's tlandscape and cyber-attack velocity. Elastic's platform and tools     can reduce false positives and help federal security operations centers (SOCs) prioritize valid threats. Townsend highlighted Elastic's agentic AI tools, which help SOC operators prioritize and remediate threats, reducing mean time to detect and respond.  Elastic's partnership with CISA for a managed  Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as-a- service was also mentioned, emphasizing the importance of standardizing data for effective AI-driven cybersecurity. Townsend goes on to articulate Elastic's launch of a SIEM-as-a-Service offering for federal civilian agencies, featuring Elastic Security on Elastic Cloud. SIEMaaS delivers a cloud-based platform for next-generation, AI-powered threat analytics, incident response, and open-standards-based cybersecurity data ingestion. Here is a link to Chris' blog describing     CISA's SIEMaaS offering and how it supports federal agencies' cybersecurity posture while reducing costs

    23 min

  6. Jun 3

    Ep. 326 Kong Explains the Future of Federal API Security

    John Gilroy hosts Dennis Woo, Director of Federal Sales at Kong, to discuss the rise of API management in federal security. API management has been a slowly growing concern for the past decade.  Cloud adoption has driven API adoption; now we see cheap storage and AI systems making many API connections. Voilà, API security is now a topic for federal security leaders. During the interview, Dennis Woo discusses the origin of Kong and brings up topics of major concern for cybersecurity: The perimeter is disappearing.  Before the cloud, a perimeter might have been the walls of a data center.  APIs caused that to increase dramatically.  Today, we see agents talking to APIs, APIs talking to models, and models consuming MCP tools. Woo remarks that the last thing a federal agency wants is token consumption at enterprise scale. Kong offers an API and AI management tool to ensure compliance, avoid vendor lock-in, and reduce cost. If we fast-forward five years, Woo predicts systems that are semantically aware, systems that can understand intent and detail, and systems that can manage risk.  This can extend to semantic guardrails, semantic compression, and even token management. Listen to the podcast to understand how to manage an AI environment that can get out of control

    22 min

  7. May 29

    Ep. 325 Federal Cyber Leaders Face the AI Vulnerability Wave

    Today, we sat down with Snehal Attani from Horizon3.ai to discuss the impact of large language models (LLMs) like Mythos on federal cybersecurity. He makes a range of startling statements. First, he admits that AI tools like Mythos can find bugs in code. In fact, he claims that the effort to find it may drop to zero. He also warns of the potential for AI-generated exploits to overwhelm security operations centers. Attani predicts a surge in vulnerabilities, what some call a Vulnpocalypse, and stresses the importance of prioritizing remediation and building muscle memory for incident response. However, that does not mean the effort to exploit the vulnerability is also zero. Knowing vulnerability does not guarantee a successful attack. Second, this new information can overwhelm a system administrator. His call to prioritization can yield effectiveness. He makes statements like, "The hardest part of the job is deciding what not to fix." Finally, in a twist on the cybersecurity business, Attani admits that the attacker will get in. The best perspective is to see yourself as in the business of blast radius management. Attani advocates focusing on core cybersecurity fundamentals and cautions against chasing headlines to avoid organizational distraction. Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn   https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/

    28 min

  8. May 21

    Ep. 323 AI Threat Detection and Federal Cybersecurity Trends

    Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn   https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/ Everyone seems to have an opinion on AI. Today, we interviewed Levi Gundert, the Chief Security and Intelligence Officer for Recorded Future. He thinks that AI gives federal leaders an opportunity to fight back. For example, one aspect of cybersecurity is velocity; the number of attacks has expanded exponentially. Gundert thinks this is an opportunity to match this attack's velocity. Many will balk at this opinion. They will describe federal data as challenged in cross-domain sharing, data labeling, and data trapped in PDFs or legacy systems. During the interview, in a refreshing observation, Gundert observes that defenders have always been on the back foot. Always in defense. Finally, AI can give tools that level the playing field. One application of AI is the ingestion of the data provided to federal systems. AI can be used to provide actionable intelligence. In some systems, this deluge can result in false alerts. When used properly, AI can filter through the signal and identify what is critical. Gundert emphasizes the need for automation and decision advantages in threat intelligence, the challenges of data fragmentation and legacy systems, and the urgency of upgrading systems to address vulnerabilities. They also touch on the role of AI in insider threats, the potential of Mythos to increase vulnerabilities, and the importance of sharing threat information to enhance cybersecurity.

    24 min
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The federal government spends $90 billion on technology every year. If you are a tech innovator and want to expand your share of the market, this is the podcast for you to find new opportunities for growth. Every week, Federal Tech Podcast sits down with successful innovators who have solved complex computer system problems for federal agencies. They cover topics like Artificial Intelligence, Zero Trust, and the Hybrid Cloud. You can listen to the technical issues that concern federal agencies to see if you company's capabilities can fit. The moderator, John Gilroy, is an award-winning lecturer at Georgetown University and has recorded over 1,000 interviews. His interviews are humorous and entertaining despite handing a serious topic. The podcast answers questions like . . . How can software companies work with the federal government? What are federal business opportunities? Who are the cloud providers who work with the federal government? Should I partner with a federal technology contractor? What is a federal reseller? Connect to John Gilroy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gilroy/ Want to listen to other episodes? www.Federaltechpodcast.com

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