Coffee with the Council Podcast: Meet This Year’s North America Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Tom Koulopoulos

Welcome to our podcast series, Coffee with the Council. I’m Alicia Malone, Senior Manager of Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. Today, I am so excited to bring you a sneak peek interview with PCI SSC’s North America Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Tom Koulopoulos. Mr. Koulopoulos is Chairman and Founder of Delphi Group, a 30-year-old Boston-based Think Tank, named one of the fastest growing private companies by Inc. magazine, and the founding partner of AcroVantage Ventures, which invests in early-stage technology startups. He is also the author of 13 books, an Inc. .com columnist, the past executive director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, the past director of the Dell Innovation Lab, and a professor at Boston University. I’m delighted to have you join us today, Tom.

Tom Koulopoulos: I am so glad to be here with you, Alicia. Thanks for having me.

Alicia Malone: Wow, you are a man of many talents. It’s hard to give you just one title as you have a very robust and varied resume. You’ve done so many things. How do you define yourself? What title best suits you?

Tom Koulopoulos: Yeah, so I try not to define myself because once we define ourselves, we put ourselves in a bit of a box, if you will. I think what describes me best is that I am just terminally curious. I am curious about all things, and that curiosity sometimes serves me well, sometimes it gets me into trouble. But I love to learn, and I love to share what I’ve learned. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a very simple-minded person and for me taking complex, obtuse ideas that are otherwise difficult to comprehend and making them simple so that I will understand them, gives me the ability to then convey those ideas to others. And I love doing that. I love taking complexity, making it simple, getting beyond the priesthood, if you will, and making those ideas accessible – things like AI, which seem to be so much more complex to most of us than they really are at the end of the day. So, at the center of my writing, my speaking, my businesses, I think is that desire to make the complex simple and to share that simplicity with others to make it accessible.

Alicia Malone: Well, we are very excited to see you on stage this fall as our keynote speaker at our North America Community Meeting in Boston. And you actually live in Boston, right? Are you from there originally?

Tom Koulopoulos: Boston is my center of gravity, I call it. But I was born in New York. I spent my early years actually growing up in Athens, Greece. But Boston has been, since six years old, Boston’s kind of been my center of gravity. I’ve lived overseas a few times in my early adulthood, and I travel quite a bit. So, I’m a bit of a citizen of the world. I love the many cultures of the world. But Boston really is my center of gravity. And I’m so happy to be at the event here in Boston. It’s not often that I get the chance to do that, to do it in my hometown, so it really is going to be special.

Alicia Malone: Yeah, I think you’re probably going to have the easiest commute to the Community Meeting.

Tom Koulopoulos: I’m not so sure about that. You could take a plane flight to New York or D.C. probably faster than you could drive to into Boston on some days, but it is close by.

Alicia Malone: That is true. That is a good point. So, you’ve spoken in the past on a wide variety of topics, everything from the greatest technological shifts of the 21st century to artificial intelligence to the cloud, innovation, cybersecurity. So, without giving away your keynote, can you give us a little sneak peek at what you might expect, what we might expect, to hear from you? What topics are you planning to focus on? And what do you ultimately want attendees to take away from your session?

Tom Koulopoulos: So, you were going to say topics I might expect and frankly things change so quickly that I’m not always sure what to expect. Right now, there are three things that I think are sort of top of mind when I look at what is most going to shape and disrupt the future dramatically in terms of our work, but the way we live our lives, how we play our leisure activities, all of these will be affected by things like number one, first and foremost, AI. I mean everyone’s grandmother is talking about AI now, right?

And I’ve seen these phenomena in the past and the dot-com era had shades of this sort of enthusiasm and hyperbolic irrational exuberance we used to call it, but there’s something different here. I mean AI does have substance behind it and I think that we both underestimate and overestimate AI, right? We underestimate the impact that it will have in the long term, and we overestimate the impact it will have short term, so AI is definitely going to disrupt a lot of things. I’ll talk about that disruption and, fundamentally, I’ll look at it in an optimistic way. You can paint a wonderful gloom and doom picture of how AI will become our overlord and how it will control us, and some people say make us extinct. I think all of that is much too hyperbolic. The reality is that AI will be a collaborator. It’ll be one of our greatest tools that we’ve ever created as humanity, and it will help us solve some problems that we can’t solve otherwise that are too big for us to solve without the collaboration of AI. So, we’re creating this new species that will be a wonderful collaborator in building the future. So, we’ll talk about AI because everyone has to talk about AI these days. You can’t get through any conversation about technology of the future without it.

The second is the shift from classical computing to quantum computing. There’s a lot of discussion lately about, especially in the area of security, about how quantum is going to obviate so much of what we know about security and encryption. So, there’s a different arms race that we’re going to see as a result of quantum computing. But classical computing is getting much faster as well, and we’re at the point where by 2025, classical computers will be as powerful – based on the number of neurons and parameters and the number of calculations per second – as powerful as the human brain. So, we’re at a precipice here. We’re at a very interesting precipice where computers will be as powerful as human beings are intellectually. Doesn’t mean they’ll be you know, somehow sentient beings, but they will have intelligence that will rival ours. So, we’ll talk about that shift from classical to quantum.

And the third is the data sphere. We are collecting data at absolutely unprecedented rates. Our appetite for data has exceeded anything that we could have predicted. We talk about some of the companies that we’ve invested in. We make projections around how quickly data would increase in terms of its size and scope, and every projection has been exceeded in the course of the last two to three years. So, it’s astounding, and it stretches the imagination to think beyond what we thought was possible just five years ago and what will be possible. What I tell people is that the change we’ve seen in the last 60 to 90 years will pale in comparison to the change we see over the next 10 to 20 years. I mean, it’ll be that dramatic, almost a 10x increase in the rate of change. That will be disruptive, it’ll be tedious, but it’ll also create enormous opportunities for us. And it’ll help us solve some problems that otherwise, like I said, we can’t solve on our own. So that’s a bit of what I’ll be talking about. And interlaced with all of that will be a lot of anecdotes about how it will affect our lives in a very personal way, not just our professional lives, but the way we live our lives, the way we play, the way we relate to our children, the way we relate to each other, all of this will be impacted by these trends.

Alicia Malone: Wow, I’m hooked. I can’t wait to hear your keynote. And I know that everyone listening is really excited to get the opportunity to see you in person at our North America Community Meeting. I’m always curious about how people find their way into roles like yours, into cybersecurity and technology-based careers in general. What is your story, and how did you get started in this whole realm?

Tom Koulopoulos: Oh gosh, so honestly, I don’t think I had a choice. My dad was one of the first early computer engineers and he would bring home all these devices, early disk drives, and computer components and show me how they worked, and I was hooked from the get-go. I mean I grew up, you know, my dad’s idea of father-son time on the weekends wasn’t playing catch or shooting hoops. It was going to Radio Shack to test the vacuum tubes and the vacuum tube tester. I mean that’s how much of a geek, you know, I was. It was a fun childhood in some ways and in other ways I wish I had known how to throw a football before I was 16. But I had no choice. I grew up in that environment. So, for me, my curiosity coupled with this constant exposure to technology, really just developed a passion in me for how technology can alter our lives in meaningful ways and in very, very positive ways. So, I think that’s how I got started. And I’m forever grateful to my dad for instilling that sort of ethos, that technology ethos in me, but at the same time I want to live long enough to really see the dramatic impact that technology is going to have over the next 30, 40, 50 years because again I think what we’ve seen so far pales in comparison to the enormous, enormous changes that we’ll see coming over the next few decades.

Alicia Malone: You said Radio Shack and it just took me back to a moment in my childhood when I got my first robot, and it was a piggy bank, and you would put the coins in its mouth, and it would act like it was chewing the coins and then swallowing the coins. And I thought it was like an amazing invention. It was a long time ago.

Tom Koulopoulos: Well, at the time it was, I think we all had a version of that, by the way. But the difference is that back then technology was visible, right? Now technology is invisible. You know, we don’t see AI. We see the results of it, but we don’t see it. And as a result, we don’t engage with the technology as much as you and I used to when we were growing up as kids. And that concerns me. I think with AI especially, you have to get hands-on to really understand what its capabilities are, what it’s good at and what it’s not good at.

And I encourage people to get their hands dirty because this is going to move so quickly that if you wait, it’s going to be really tough to catch up. But yeah, today’s technology is invisible, which is the big difference between what you grow up with and what I grew up with and what my kids are growing up with. It surrounds them. It’s in the fiber of the world. They don’t see it. They just take it for granted that it’s there.

Alicia Malone: Absolutely, it is and it’s evolving so quickly. It’s almost really hard to keep up with so yeah, we have a big world out there and a lot of big technology coming and so I’m excited to hear everything that you have to say about what the future holds. What do you enjoy most about what you do? Is it public speaking? Is it writing books? Is it teaching, is it all of the above and what do you find are the biggest challenges you encounter in the tech industry?

Tom Koulopoulos: Yeah, wow, those are all great questions. What I enjoy most about what I do is making ideas accessible that I think are meaningful ideas. I think AI will have great meaning to us as a species and to us as individuals. It will make our lives better. It will give us back time that today we spend doing tedious mundane things. The human mind is much too precious to waste on a lot of the drudgery that today we waste it on. So, for me there’s great passion in being able to expose people to ideas that will help shape their lives in very meaningful ways. The challenge of technology is that we create priesthoods, and the challenge has always been that we obfuscate purposefully some of these ideas. And we do that because we’re proud of these ideas and as technologists and creators we want to believe that we’re creating something which has never existed before and it’s special and it’s unique. And yes, all of that’s true, but it’s not about tech. This sounds very strange, but technology is not about tech. Technology is about changing behaviors.

If you think about how you use Waze or your onboard GPS on your smartphone today, that’s a behavioral shift. And you look back and you say, how did I live without it? How did I find my way to the corner grocery store without Waze? We become, in some ways, enslaved by the technology, but in other ways, we’re freed by it as well, because we can now do other things that we couldn’t do, that we didn’t have time to do before. So, I think we have to get beyond the priesthood and part of my mission has always been to make these ideas, democratize them. Make them available to the broadest possible audience because that’s the way that ultimately, we cause behavioral change, positive behavioral change and hopefully we can do a little bit of that at the event in September. But at the end of the day technology is never about tech, it’s about us and how we behave and how it changes our behaviors.

Alicia Malone: Well, speaking of broad audiences, you are the author of 13 books published in 12 languages, so I know you’re reaching worldwide audiences. Congratulations, as I know that it is no easy feat to do that. But if you could recommend just one of your books to this particular audience, to the payment industry, which book would it be?

Tom Koulopoulos: So, it’ll be the latest book Gigatrends and the reason for that is Gigatrends looks it’s the broadest perspective I’ve ever provided on the various immutable trends that are going to shape the world. These aren’t just technology trends. There are trends like the demographic shift, the aging population of the world, and how these will create a very different future than what we’ve grown up with and really challenge a lot of our social institutions that we’ve come to rely upon. You know, health care, education, agriculture, all these will be challenged fundamentally in ways that will acquire a lot of creative solutions.

So, Gigatrends is definitely the book that I would recommend. It is the broadest perspective on what is altering the future, and it looks very carefully at things that are especially important to folks who look at security such as digital identity. You know, how will I prove that I am who I am? Especially in the era of deep fakes. We’ve seen the enormous risk that deep fakes, vocal deep fakes, video deep fakes, can create, and I’ll show some of this at the event in September. It is astounding the degree to which we will simply not be able to tell what is real and what is not real. So, things like digital identity will become absolutely crucial to the security industry.

So yeah, there’s a lot in Gigatrends to unpack. It was an ambitious book, but it was definitely the most enjoyable for me to write because I learned so much. And I ended up being even more of an optimist than I ever have been because I really believe that we will have the opportunity to construct a world, a future, that includes not just four billion of the eight billion people on the planet, but all eight billion, nine billion, 10 billion people.

Today half of the population of the world lives on less than seven dollars a day, right? That’s a challenge for us. We have to take that on and do something about it, and a large part of that is giving those people identity, digital identity, to be able to participate in our global economy. So, a lot of cool stuff going on there and Gigatrends gave me the opportunity to really put a voice to a lot of these problems and offer up some solutions.

Alicia Malone: Well, that’s great, and I encourage all of our listeners, everybody out there, to grab your copy of Gigatrends. And I’m sure you’ll be seeing people reading that on their flights out to Boston this fall to see you on stage. Very exciting stuff. I’m really interested in your books and learning more.

So, Tom, since you are on Coffee with the Council, we like to ask our guests how they take their coffee, or if you’re not a coffee drinker, what do you prefer instead?

Tom Koulopoulos: I’m not a big coffee drinker. I’m definitely not a coffee snob, but my only requirement is no sugar. As long as it doesn’t have sugar, I’m good. But yeah, not a participant to the coffee culture in a real sense. I have my two cups of coffee in the morning and that’s pretty much all I need to get the motor running.

Alicia Malone: Same here. I just have a black coffee and I’m good to go. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Coffee with the Council, Tom, and we look forward to seeing you at the Community Meeting this fall.

Tom Koulopoulos: Thanks, Alicia. I really enjoyed it, and I am so looking forward to seeing everyone in September.

Alicia Malone: You can catch Tom on stage as the keynote speaker at PCI SSC’s North America Community Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, September 10th through the 12th. Registration is now open on our website, and we hope to see you there, and grab your copy of Gigatrends! 

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