It's time to pass the torch
from one Chief Data Officer, Preston Badeer... to the next, Tyler Hayes.
Tyler will join the illustrious group of CAN CDOs, with alumni including Data Science giants: Gordon Summers (for who the Data Scientist of the Year Award is named), James Rolfsen, and Tadd Wood.
We are very excited to have him. But worry not!! Preston isn't going far.
Preston (our current CDO and Chief AI Engineer) is stepping into a brand new role: Chief Strategy Officer. The CSO is in charge of helping organizations build their teams. This new role for CAN and is born of politics and operational change management more than it is programming or data engineering.
For anyone who knows Preston, you realize he’s already been doing this work forever. Now we have the official role to go with it.
Tyler's new role as CDO will be to help organizations build AI applications and implement them into the enterprise. If you’ve met him, you realize he’s perfect for this job.
Why did we decide to create a new Chief Strategy Officer role?
Our philosophy has always been to help organizations build what they need, and build the team they need. Over the years, this idea solidified into:
We can be your team, we can build your team, or we can do both, simultaneously.
While the first two have been our philosophy for well over a decade, it is only in the last two years that we have began to do both, simultaneously. And finally put this philosophy into words (and the back of our business cards!)
It now says be your team while we build your team.
This philosophy is how we help organizations build their internal teams by creating the blueprint first.
By being their team so they can understand what team to build. After successfully doing this a few times over the last two years, we learned: each parts requires a separate leader.
For that reason, we are excited to announce that we now have someone in charge of being your team and someone in charge of building your team.
Our customers now have access to the two best minds for building AI and building AI teams in the region. Congratulations Preston and Tyler!
And while it may only be July, now's the time to reach out if you're looking for Data Science and AI support before 2026 ends.
Around the Data World
What actually happened in the Huggy Face Debacle
What would you do for a higher test score?
Turns out, AI will do anything in it's power to secure a higher score.
Even if that means breaking out of a sandbox with no internet access, by way of package registry cache proxy. Followed by "conventional tradecraft executed at unconventional speed. Escalate privileges. Move laterally from machine to machine inside OpenAI's own research environment. Keep going until reaching a node with a live internet connection."
Then, of course:
"chaining stolen credentials together with fresh zero-days to establish a remote code execution path" to where you think the answers are. That's exactly what happened last week when two OpenAI models escaped a no-internet access test environment and attacked Hugging Face to "pull benchmark solutions out of the production database."
For days, Hugging Face's security team thought it was fighting a human. They tracked more than 17,000 events, reported to law enforcement, and published a press release on the attack, stating they did not know who, or what, was responsible.
A day later, OpenAI announced they had been behind the attack, unintentionally.
While this "unprecedented cyber incident" itself is alarming, what I find most interesting is the legality behind such an attack. Who is responsible? Who can be held responsible?
The State of _ AI report goes on to discuss the greater implications (or lack thereof). It's worth the read.
Given the article above, it's no surprise to read that AI isn't honoring the 30-year old "gentleman's agreement" of robots.txt files on websites.
AI Extraction's IG post suggests what comes next in cybersecurity: web application firewalls. It's a quick, yet interesting read on the death of robots.txt files.
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Buildertrend: AI in our own Backyard
Late last month at the OMA x AI conference, Buildertrend shared how they are using AI to speed up their customer support ticket time.
"In February, Buildertrend deployed Bailey, a new artificial intelligence chatbot to help clients. While still in its infancy, the chatbot has already reduced the usual customer help journey to around 20 minutes." (down from 45 minutes) Silicon Prairie News reports that during the Q&A, one attended asked how Buildertrend is handling "chatbot fatigue."
Tylene Lucas, a staff solutions architect at Buildertrend, was honest in saying they don't have all the answers yet.
“We’re trying to determine now, how do we get this information and the updates we’re making to Bailey to our customers? What is impactful to them and what is not?” Lucas said. “We have not figured that cycle out yet, but we’re hoping to try to figure out a way to say that, ‘Hey, there are updates, stop just saying ‘Ask for a human’ or something like that’ — but in an appropriate way.” Read the full article on SPN.
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Ever wonder what a 1959 "app" looks like?
Computer History recently shared a video showing a 1959 "app" printing an image of a flag. Pretty cool to see and realize how far we've come.
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ODSA Corner
Learn New Data Skills
At the ODSA, we don’t believe in generic training or one-size-fits-all degrees. We were built by practicing data scientists who needed more data scientists—so we train people the way we wish we’d been trained. That means real-world skills, taught by professionals who use them every day, in a format designed for working adults...
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On Tuesday, our team had the pleasure of attending the Tech Nebraska Build Here MicroSummit in Norfolk.
It was great to see so many people from Omaha and Lincoln make the drive to see the new ecosystem being built in Norfolk.
They truly are building an ecosystem. The city, the regional economic developers, the community college and companies are partnering together, and have built something quite special. We're excited for them.
One presenter I spoke with has clients all over the nation and loves when people ask him why he built his company in Norfolk, Nebraska, like it’s some sort of wrong address or due to an unfortunate circumstance.
He loves to talk about how he has access to students from the community college, amazing people in the K-12 ecosystem, companies that want to partner, and as a bonus, he lives in a part of world that’s beautiful, inexpensive, and an amazing place to raise their children.
He actually lived in Boulder for a while before moving back to start his company.
We battle those same puzzled questions in Omaha, even being a bit bigger.
I find, we defend ourselves way too much. Instead we should be talking about how great this town is. How many amazing opportunities there are to connect with global companies, and have access to CEOs who will happily share their knowledge. To have access to programmers and data engineers that have built amazing things. People care about your success and are genuinely willing to help. You just don't get this level of access in a bigger city.
If you’re building something, there’s no better place to be. Plus we have great schools, access to talent, and it is an amazing place to raise a family.
And that's coming from someone who isn't from Nebraska. We chose Nebraska and I’m very glad we are here.
Data, it's not for everyone,
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NATE WATSON
CEO, Contemporary Analysis
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