Good morning and welcome to the fourth meeting of the Constitution, Europe, Excellency Affairs and Culture Committee in 2024. We have apologies from Mr Brown this morning and we're joined at committee not for the first time by Jim Fairlie, so I don't think there's any need for any declarations, so welcome Mr Fairlie. Our first agenda item is to continue to take evidence on the committee's inquiry on the Scottish Government's national outcomes and indicators relating to international policy, and we are joined this morning by Pete Wishart MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, who will speak to his committee's recent report on promoting Scotland internationally, and a warm welcome to you Mr Wishart. I'm going to be open with a question. The committee took evidence last December from selection of Scottish Government's international offices. The lead official in Washington DC suggested that we should be thinking forwards and engaging with culture and the diaspora in the US to talk about what Scotland does now, and in that we're thinking of biomedical sciences or space technology renewables and close to the heart of this committee because it covers or remit the games industry. Your report touches on this topic and in your view are we making the most of the potential of the diaspora promoting Scotland internationally? First of all, thank you ever so much, convener, for the very kind invitation to come and speak to you today about what we consider to be one of our most important pieces of work in the course of the past few years, and that is how Scotland has promoted internationally, looking specifically at the network and the diplomatic infrastructure provided by the UK and how well the Scottish Government engaged with the UK Government to make sure that that has utilised its best effect. It's important that our committees continue to make those type of relationships and ties in the look forward to being here a lot more in the future, as you will be more than welcome if you've been any enquire ever doing in the House of Commons. To address your point, yes, we went to New York and Washington to discuss those issues with colleagues that were identified and categorised as the Scottish diaspora and we had very useful meetings with them just about the range of activities that they're engaged in and the views about current arrangements that we have in place, how well they're supported, the type of things that they feel they require in order to be the voices of Scotland when it comes to their host country, particularly in America. I think that the US, particularly because they do have tartan week and the events around tartan week are probably the best designed and probably the best put together organisations that we have when it comes to Scottish diaspora. That's mainly because they have the task of tartan week and making sure that the events are organised and co-ordinated and people are asked to come across to enjoy the events that are taking place. There is a real challenge and I think we felt a real sense of frustration that their value wasn't particularly well appreciated. They felt they weren't sufficiently resourced in order to do some of their work and the Scottish Government has very generously given a number of grant supports over the course of the years since tartan week is in place. However, I think that there's a sense that they seem to be doing this all on their own. All of them are of course volunteers, mainly none of them are actually in a paid position, so it does take a bit of time and commitment in order to be part of what we would see as these collections and groups and organisations around the diaspora. I think that there's a sense that, in the way that they amplify the work that's happening in Scotland and promote our very many attributes, there's a sense that they feel that further information is required for the resourcing could help in the system in that mission. It's a traditional image of Scotland that they present and I don't think that that would be any surprise, a lot of the Caledonian societies particularly, that's the type of activity they engage in. I think that there is a sense of how much they could do in order to promote some of the more modern images of Scotland and that was again something that we were keen to try and harvest and our inquiry was just the usefulness of all the traditional images of Scotland that it has as a means and a gateway to try to get to giving a more contemporary image of Scotland in the work that we're currently undertaking. I don't know if that answers most of your questions but that was simply our experience when we met up there and again I think we're all very grateful to the time and indulgence that they gave us when we were both in Washington and in New York. Did you engage with the Global Scots Network at all when you were in New York? Well we came across people who were associated with this, we didn't actually sit round the table with them and have any real in-depth conversations about their work. We came across a number of people and leading figures in the Global Scots Network and I think what we found from them and speaking to them seemed to be a very positive experience in something that they felt very helpful and I know that the efforts that have been made by Scottish Government in order to try and ensure that that supported adequately around the world but yes it was something that we came into contact with rather than have direct evidence from in our inquiry. I'm going to open to questions from the committee and can invite Mr Stewart first please. Thank you very much, give me a good morning Mr Bishop, good to see you. I want to maybe touch on the intergovernmental cooperation and you know it's good to see that there seems to be a very positive links taking place and cabinet secretary Angus Robertson talked about that positive relationship that extends and creates opportunities across the showcase that we're trying to manage. But there also have been some tensions I think of late in where that intergovernmental process has been going and there were a number of reports about the foreign secretary making some more comments about where and how things should be managed and I would just like to get a flavour of was that the real sense of things or is there a tension that is building across the between the two governments rather than having this positive activity and if there is how does that be resolved to continue to ensure that we capture and we promote and work together to ensure that we get the best? Well thank you ever so much Mr Stewart, this was a good part of what we were looking at in terms of our inquiry and some of the disputes and fallouts between the foreign secretary and the cabinet secretary that in fact take place as we were conducting this inquiry and almost concurrently when we spoke to them particularly the secretary of state who came to our committee to explain some of his concerns about what he saw as Scottish Government transgressions into what he told us were clearly reserved areas but I think the first thing and I think you've captured in some of your question and I know that you've taken evidence from a number of the British embassies where Scottish Government international the place and where SDI work very effectively with government officials is that the work in arrangements underground are fantastic and there has been no complaint whatsoever by any party about how well officials are serving both the UK Government and Scottish Government. We went to Washington which I think is an exemplar on good positive working arrangements. The Scottish Government of course have a pretty large mission in the US embassy. We've got an ambassador in Karen Clark who understands and gets Scotland who's personally very interested in what's happening here and makes a real effort to ensure that everybody's catered for and everybody gets their place within the whole organisation. I think Washington's also helped because the DVT leads as a Scot who takes a real interest in ensuring that Scottish businesses particularly are well advertised across the United States and all the support that's given. So that was all great and then we get a series of disputes and letters and a number of deputations to our committee just about what they considered to be some sort of dispute and the Secretary of State himself got rather quite exercised about the whole issue of what he observed as Scottish Government ministers speaking about issues which were other than the devolved areas and responsibilities that the Scottish Government had. The Secretary of State came to our committee with a list of what he considered to be transgression. I'll leave it up to the committee to decide whether they merited the response that was given in terms of a directive to UK missions that everything had to be accorded and an official had to be present in all meetings between Scottish Government ministers and foreign delegations. For example, we were told that the Cabinet Secretary for Constitution during a meeting with the French EU Minister discussed the EU Erasmus scheme and the UK Turing scheme and said, no alternative other than Scotland to be part of the EU again. Most of the comments were about views around Brexit. There's another one which was a trade event in Poland. Ivan McKee was a minister at that point and said that Brexit was a mistake. Again, Mr Robertson described Brexit as a clarity. This was the list that the Secretary of State read out to us as transgressions. We offer no opinion about that in our report, but that was what he was keen to communicate to us with a problem in the issues. The cabinet secretary told you very much the same, like I fully understand and respect that foreign affairs is an exclusively reserved matter, but in the explanatory notes in the section where it is reserved, there is an inclusion that says that the Scottish Government is free and that liberty is to make the road arrangements internationally to communicate with international governments. There's an expectation that that is confined to devolved issues and devolved matters, but I don't know how you control conversations would be the first thought I would have if you asked a direct question. You could say that I'm not going to answer that because it's not permittable. I haven't got the permission to do that or whether you actually engage with all that, but it is an unfortunate development. It doesn't reflect anything that we observed in the work in arrangements throughout the diplomatic network of the United Kingdom. I think that, like all of you around here, we hope that it is resolved of anything that seems to be up to the statement from the foreign secretary that support might be withdrawn if there's any more examples of this, but it was something that we did capture in our inquiry where we referred to the conversations that we had with the Secretary of State in Iran. We include correspondence from the cabinet secretary, and we did hear from him directly about his experience with all this. Everybody was keen working relationships, good, the air war that is currently being conducted, perhaps not all that useful. I think that you make some very valid points about the constructive work that requires and it is being done, and I think that that is appreciated. I've certainly, as a member of the committee, seen much of that displayed in what is trying to take place. I hope, as you say, that we can look over and we can manage that, because that is a distraction to what we are all trying to achieve in ensuring that we have that positive impression and image that we are collectively and responsibly working together to achieve that. Are there any areas that you think, as a committee, that you might want to further expand on, or areas that you think are possibilities in the future that would build some of those bridges back? That has been a regular feature of our conversation with the Secretary of State. We're fortunate that we have three sessions in the parliamentary year with the Secretary of State, and he's always been keen to bring the whole of the Scotland office team, including the senior civil service department. It features a large part of the discussions and conversations that we have. All of us are keen to see if we can de-emphasise some of those difficult issues. I know that your committee is in a position to look at this again and perhaps suggest a way forward, because it does indeed get in the way of the very good and positive work in arrangements that there are across and throughout the diplomatic network. We know the value in that. What was told to us in Washington and what we heard from other missions is that, in the eight embassies that the UK has, where the Scottish Government is in place, the added value that is right to Scotland is quite significant. There's an opportunity to engage in a meaningful way that perhaps the normal apparatus of the UK diplomats don't do and don't reach because of the exclusive focus of Scottish Government officials. It also helps with the arrangements with Scottish Development International if there's a mission there from the Scottish Government. It brings that together a bit more, ties it in more with the work of DBT. Those are positive developments. We saw ourselves just how well this works, and it would be very unfortunate if anything came along, which put that at risk and perhaps curtailed the very important and good work that's been done. Thank you very much and good morning. When we had a number of the Scottish Government office staff in front of the committee, we were discussing some of the distinct advantages that come from promoting Scotland in terms of the Scottish brand, the Scottish produce and Scottish talent. Of course, that started under Governments prior to the SNP, and it has continued under the SNP, but I wondered in your discussions what you saw as the advantage to the Scottish economy very specifically of having, as it were, a Scottish mission that's ever so slightly distinct, even though it's often housed within UK embassies. I think that there's no doubt whatsoever where those arrangements do take place and there now exist across eight of our major embassies across the world. There is an added value that's brought to Scotland. I think that most people were keen to describe it as such, and that was the term that they used. What the Scottish mission did bring was an added value to Scottish business, to Scottish trade, to being able to foster and develop the links with the diaspora and the people who identified Scotland right across the whole of the different nations that we looked at. I think that there's no doubt that that happens, but I think that what was also stressed us, which is also quite important, is that the UK Embassy Network is one of the biggest in the world that's 280 different missions across 180 different nations. We're always keen—I should say this straight out—that they feel that they're doing that job on behalf of Scotland. We're the representative of the whole of the United Kingdom, and we're always keen to stress to us that Scotland is a central part of the work that it does, and it's part of the mix of the things that it does. There's no doubt whatsoever that having been part of that network has obvious advantages, the fact that it's so far-reaching, and it's well supported by FCDO, DBT and other UK Government officials who are highly experienced within that field. I think that the question that has to be asked is not about that exclusive focus that the Scottish missions can bring, so where we found the Scottish missions in place within the UK embassies, that work was being done, that extra value was being brought. The other embassies in high commissions perhaps weren't able to do that same task with the same amount of enthusiasm and energy. I think that what we found is that where that happens is very good—extra value to Scotland, and I think that we've seen some of the work that's been done. I know that the cabinet secretary was keen to explain to this Parliament just the value that some of that overseas work was doing, but that tends to happen in the areas where there should be the added value that comes from having the Scottish Government mission attached to the UK embassy network. I have a follow-up one that, having talked about the advantage to the economy in terms of trade, obviously Scotland faces quite challenging demographic forecasts just now in terms of people, and it's somewhat frustrating that we don't control these arrangements, but nevertheless have been promoting Scotland as much as possible, inviting people to come and live and work here. In your work, did you consider what it takes to really help to make that decision for people to go from seeing Scotland as something positive reputationally to Scotland as somewhere that they might actually want to put down routes? Unfortunately, we didn't look at that aspect of the work. There was a number of things in terms of the oral evidence that suggested that that was the case, and we know that we have a fantastic reach, and there's a very high worldwide impression of Scotland. Several people have references when it comes to Scotland. One of the—we're highly identified nations in the world. I think it's that there's anhold ipsus index out of the six key characteristics. I recognise Scotland as being 15th in that out of 40 nations, and we're not all that far behind the UK when it comes to this. There is a sense that Scotland seems to be to a lot of people in attractive destinations and a possible place to live. Maybe more could be done to encourage them to come, to recognise the comments that you made about our specific demographic challenges and our obvious problems with some of our population requirements. That doesn't happen in UK embassies. There's no specific—in a different inquiry, for example, we went to Canada to look at the federal arrangements as part of another inquiry. I think that Ms Forbes will be aware that Quebec has its own immigration arrangements. What we saw and spoke to the officials directly involved in that, there was a whole department that was dedicated in order to try and bring to Quebec people that they thought were important and essential to their economy. Having that facility felt to be very helpful and useful. Of course, none of that exists within the UK diplomatic network at all. Interesting reporter promoting Scotland internationally. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of points. I think that there was a recommendation that the UK Government should work with the Scottish Government effectively to create a Scottish brand. I'm just wondering how easy you think that would be to do, because there's clearly an intersection in terms of interest around the economy and joint aspirations, but I'm wondering to what extent it can go beyond that and how you would see that. I don't think that we recommend directly that they should work together to create some sort of Scottish brand. I think that what we said in our report, we concluded that work needed to be done on all this about how Scotland has promoted, how the brand is assessed and recognised across the world, and joint work with the UK and Scottish Governments might be helpful to develop that a bit further to make sure that when it does recite that story and tells people about the brand of Scotland that some of the contemporary activities are included, because we felt, and certainly that was what we were told by numerous witnesses of the community committee, that we're really good at telling the story of Scotland and a lot of the activity that goes on in the UK diplomatic networks. It emphasises that they see storytelling as part of the future of their delivery, support to nations and reach them across the UK, but I think that there was a sense that we need to do more in order to try and promote some of the contemporary things like our science sector, space sector, biotechnologies, things that we recognise, that we're doing particularly well in when it comes to some of those new industries that are emerging. I think that we're asking the UK Government and the Scottish Government to work together to see what more could be done. The one thing that we took away from all of this is that it's not part of most of the work that the recognition around Scottish science, for example, in the link-ups between research institutes and universities, particularly in America with Scotland, is really worthwhile and something that seems to be very valuable, and that's why we're now conducting an inquiry into Scottish science, which I could report convener is going really well and we're really happy and satisfied with the progress that it's making. The other thing, of course, was the space sector. Again, that's something that people recognise as a real key feature of Scotland and we're in an ideal position to not just become a European hub for that work there but also a worldwide hub. And again, we're now at the same time concurrently doing an inquiry into the Scotland space sector, so it was more of that type of story that would encourage both Governments to tell. I think that it's quite hard to shift international perceptions and brands. I think that it's a very strong impression that Scotland has and, of course, it's reinforced by the way that maybe our diaspora sort of go around their activity, so it's a lot of work that would be required and all that. Again, I think that this committee could make really good examples of how that work could be conducted and progressed. Just in terms of those international offices and the joint working between the missions and the embassies, there's obviously a different programme of work is what we're finding between, say, the Danish Copenhagen office and the Irish office and Washington will be different again. But do you think there needs to be a kind of consistency of approach there? I think that you've highlighted already that there's perhaps a difference in terms of the energy or focus from one office to the next, and is that something that just plays out in terms of our interests in those particular countries and regions? Or is there something more about the joint working that needs to be codified or brought into a more consistent approach? I don't know. I think how you could categorise the approach when it comes to Scotland across the whole UK embassy network is mixed. It seems to be, and we're told this consistently by a number of our witnesses, that it seems to censor around the enthusiasm of the leadership in that embassy with mainly the ambassador. If that ambassador has a scot, what's the thing happening around Burns Night, around St Andrew's Day, and there's a bigger interest in ensuring that Scottish products are, perhaps, but to market a little bit more, there's more interest in that. I remember being in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and it was a Scottish ambassador that was in post, at that point, it's gone back about 15 years ago, and it was so different from a number of other embassies that I visited because, you know, the first thing you did to all guests was getting a ball of whiskey out, whatever, and these things are important when it comes to, like, how ambassadors engage with the very many visitors that will come through the embassy. So, these are important. It was told to us consistently, it's all about the leadership, about their enthusiasm for Scotland, whether that happens or not. There's a couple of things that are happening, and, again, in our report, we recommend that this should be perhaps fast-tracked and developed further. There is training for senior civil servants so that they are brought up to speed with the range of specific and distinct Scottish issues. We suggest in our report that maybe more attention needs to be devoted to that so that people have a better impression about the type of work that they'd be doing on behalf of Scotland and the interests that they have. So, we're looking at all that, but the key thing when it comes to activities, Scottish activities and embassies, is the days. I don't think that it should come as any surprise to this committee, and that's around Burns Night, which we've just celebrated, and St Andrew's Day. There's always a community care that's put out from the foreign office to say that there's an expectation that these days will be celebrated across the UK embassy network, whether that happens or not. Again, it's dependent upon the enthusiasm and the leadership and whether that's something that the ambassador would find something that he wanted to do. So, again, in our report, we say that more should be done around the break, because I think that we all look jealously at what Ireland achieves around St Patrick's Day and the world-wide reach that has and just the benefits that it's able to bring to Ireland, to its image of itself and how that's presented abroad. Good morning. I'm very good to see you here. Thank you for your report as well. I was going to ask you about a section in the report beyond the tartan. I think that it's a well-known argument that's hard to refute, which is that Scotland is so much more than tartan and shortbread. At the same time, and you'll know this as the MP for Perth and North Persia, but huge amounts of people that visit love the tartan and the shortbread and the views. I just wondered where you, the important as it is to say that Scotland is so much more than just that. How we strike that balance? How would you strike that balance? First of all, beyond the tartan introduction to that chapter, it wasn't mine. It was probably the most elegant phrasing when it comes to some of the themes that we were trying to capture when all that. I think what we were trying to do in that is to suggest and say that there is more to the traditional images of Scotland, but you're absolutely right, Mr Cameron. I don't think anybody that came to our committee would for a minute suggest that we try to dispel and get rid of all the important features and facets of traditional Scotland if you want to characterise it as such. These are important and most nations would give the right arm to have what we have in terms of international reference points. It collides the scope of cultural images that people are able to conjure up when they think of Scotland. I mean, it's a really powerful calling card. We see that reflected in some of the things that happen in the annual calendar in Scotland, whether that's international festival in Scotland or the tattoo. We heard from Colonel Buster about his efforts and all those things are really important. It brings people, it brings tourists to Scotland and they're interested in finding out more about some of those things. I think what we were keen to try and impressed with this report was that those are great and those work. Is there anything that we could do, A, to see whether we could use some of the more traditional aspects of that to encourage people to look at some of the more contemporary activities that Scotland has? Secondly, is there anything that we could do is almost like a standalone effort that draws people to some of the new things that Scotland does? I think that science is the key thing. That was why we were, as soon as we came back from this, we were keen to initiate our science inquiry. Scotland is leading in so many sectors just now. Is there anything that we could do to use those traditional images to look at that and making that effort, convener, throughout the course of this inquiry, to see if there's anything that we could do? Of course, there's the whole history of creativity and invention that Scotland has all the way back to the Scottish enlightenment all the way through to some of the things that happened that day. That's the challenge that we've got just now, but there was never a question at all that we were looking to dispel or try to play down those additional images because it is a fantastic feature that we have and it's just such a useful contribution to promoting Scotland internationally. Thank you for that. I didn't intend to make that sort of accusation at all and your report is very clear about that. Moving on to the link question of diaspora, because I agree with the report. It seems to me to be such an untapped resource at the moment and there are so many associations and, as you'll know, across the world, not just in the traditional areas of North America and Australia and New Zealand but in other parts of, say, the Far East, etc. To drive this forward, what do you think the Scottish Government and the UK Government can do to really turbocharge those links? The diaspora that you're talking about, the diaspora that you're talking about? Absolutely. Again, we say in this report that it's a much underutilised resource that we have. We have 40 million people, we reckon, worldwide who do claim some sort of Scottish heritage and there's a huge interest, as you will know, through your own constituent activities and heritage trails. People come to Scotland to find out a little bit more about their background history. The big TV and film dramas also help to drive that type of tourism towards Scotland. I remember being at the early days of Tartan week in the early 2000s when Visit Scotland came out and put up a stall in Grand Central Station and there were actual queues of people waiting to sign up to get the information and documents to go home to try and see where they fitted in with Scottish Heritage. It's an important and attractive feature. We only met the groups in the United States and they are probably the most advanced groups that they are worldwide because, as I said earlier, they have a distinct task in organising activities around Tartan week, so that gives them a purpose over and beyond what other groups might not have. We didn't take much evidence from groups outside the US that we visited, but what we tend to hear a lot of them are much more ad hoc, particularly focused. They look constantly and continually for crumbs of support from the UK embassies that that's forthcoming if there's an interest from the ambassador and the team there. Obviously, they're never turned away, nobody ever is when it comes to the UK embassy network, but the interest in that seems to go with ambassador and post in the different missions. There is no direct support at all other than the small amounts that the Scottish Government gives to Tartan week activities that goes to the diaspora. There's nothing available to them and maybe that's something that we could look to build up in the future. We don't suggest that in our report. We suggest that better engagement must be pursued and attempted to try and get the most out of all this because there are amplifiers for our country. Those are the people who claim to be Scottish. We want to demonstrate and tell everybody just about what they consider to be the homeland. There must be ways that we could better support them. We didn't do enough on this to come up with any solutions or recommendations other than to say that this is something that should be attempted by a Government, but you're absolutely right, we need to make more of this. GlobalScot is fantastic and the Global Network is the Scottish Government initiative. It says all the right things. There's not much detail there about how that's done, but in terms of the headlines, those are the things that should be done. Maybe getting a bit more, meeting the bones of all that might help address some of those issues. Thank you. Just one last question for me, which is about how do we measure the efficacy of our international efforts, if I could put it like that. It's something that we've grappled with as a committee before, particularly when it comes to Scottish Government funding and work. I think that everyone accepts that it's very hard because a lot of this is quote soft power, soft influence, but did you come to any conclusions about the metrics that should be used or how we should measure them? No, we didn't. Probably rather unfairly, we charged the UK Government to go away and determine that, without really giving them in their recommendation conclusion much in the way of guidelines. One of our main asks—it's not a recommendation heavy report—we're keen to draw together some of the conclusions and perhaps be more suggestive than recommended, but one of the things that suggests and stroke recommendation was to try and find a way of measuring that, because it is really important. We won't know exactly the impact and effect that various interventions are making unless we're able to determine a way of measuring it, but it is a hard challenge to do that. Particularly when we don't know what really exists in the way of resource and support that's available to those groups. Perhaps we can speak to them a bit more. I think that they were all quite surprised to find that there were members of Parliament sitting across from them when we turned up in Washington and New York and other than fleeting visits from people during the entire week that doesn't tend to happen. So I think that they just found this quite exotic, the fact that they were talking to UK members of Parliament about Scottish diasporas, so perhaps just listen to them a bit more about me, quite useful. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, convener. It's nice to see you here, Mr Wishup. I'm staying on the theme that Mr Cameron has raised beyond the Tartan Scotland's international brand. This isn't meant to be a provocative question, despite the fact that it will come across that way. The Anhalt Ipsos Nation Brands Index, used by the Scottish Government to monitor Scotland's international reputation, has Scotland ranked as, I think it says, 15th in that ranking. It's got the UK as number six. Where is England's place in that? I don't think that there is an England's place. The UK as a whole. Wales and Northern Ireland are ranked separately. Wales and Northern Ireland also ranked quite highly within that index, but there isn't a specific English classification when it comes to that. So if we go back to the question that Mr Cameron has just asked you, how do we measure that? Isn't it difficult to extrapolate out of that if you're looking at the overall branding of the UK as a brand? I find that strange given that the UK is not actually a country. Isn't that difficult to extrapolate where Scotland is taking the direct benefit and where England takes the direct benefit of their own culture? I also refer back to Mr Cameron's point that the cultures that sometimes people in this country go, I hate that, the C U Jimmy Harts or the Irish talking about leprechons and we all take offence at that, but internationally recognition-wise it's hugely valuable to us. Does that not make it a little bit more difficult for us to get the real value of what it is that Scotland promotes internationally? I think that what was attempted by that index was just to try and suggest the activity. We have Scottish Government that is a form of government across the other nations of the UK. There isn't an English Government as such, so it always tends to be the fact that that's then assessed in terms of the whole of the United Kingdom. I would suspect that, in England, the UK does rate higher than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and that would be probably in the back of tourist travel to London issues around some of the English cultural figures in the UK, whether that be Shakespeare, Dickens, whatever, which would drive traffic. Also, what we know too is that the UK gets lots of tourism due to its cultural offering, whether that's concerts, West End shows in London again. That would probably be captured in the UK features, because culture is a big part of the anholy ipsus index, and a lot of waiting is given to that part of the assessment in how countries are ranked. However, there isn't any specific, and I suppose the UK activity would take an account of Scotland too, I would imagine. I'm not sure about that, but I suspect that that would be all the work that the UK international infrastructure does, whether that's through embassies or through the Department of Trade and Technology, so I suspect that that would be captured. Perhaps it is frustrating that we can't assess Scotland against the major nation in the UK, which is England, and we therefore don't get the true picture of our place in that index. I would have thought that it would be equally frustrating for English people not to be able to talk about and celebrate their own culture and everything that they do that is absolutely brilliant. However, I want to move on to the... Anthony Salmoni in your report, the founder of European Merchants of Scottish Political Analysis, Firm wrote, that it is still the case that many people around the world recognise Scotland more for its past than its present, and no Scotland's culture is the addition, but not its scientific excellence, and I reiterate that I'm absolutely... If there's nothing I like more than getting a kill on and marching down somebody else's high street, we're at Berlin or someplace else, because it attracts a huge amount of attention. But isn't that also a failure the fact that we are the country of the Enlightenment, we are the country of so many scientific innovations, medicinal innovations across the world that have made such a huge difference across the world that we're still only recognised for the traditional cultural things, rather than the scientific and engineering expertise that Scotland's given to the world? First of all, I'm still resting with the image of Jim Fairlie walking in the realm where he's killed just now, but anybody will leave that aside. I think you had Mr Salmoni at your committee, too, and a very compelling witness who, I think, has expertise on these issues, is highly regarded. He certainly made a useful contribution to shaping up our inquiry, and we found his input very helpful. This is a thing that runs through our report in response to the questions from Mr Cameron. It was the thing that we constantly tried to emphasise as much as we can. We've got fantastic traditional images of Scotland, which we're really good at using utilising and taking the most advantage from, but we don't tell the contemporary story of Scotland in a way that is particularly useful. I think that you put the nail right on the head, and where you link the past, the tradition, the current and contemporary, is linked to the enlightenment and the fact that that plays part of all that. I know that the Hutton Institute is doing a bit of work on all this, because it says that it is 200 years since James Hutton, and it is going to be doing a lot of work when it comes to trying to tell that story a little bit more in terms of Scotland's scientific journey to where we are just now, making use of some of the historical references. I think that that will be a really important piece of work, but we've got much more to do. That is why I was keen that our committee would look at science, and a big part of that will be to try and take that journey from where it all started, which is the Scottish Enlightenment, and the great culture of invention and creativity all the way through to where we are just now at a cutting edge biotech. What we're doing in quantum, some of it is just amazing, but we're leaders of what we're doing in small satellites, which again, we're a European hub. All those things have to be told, and we're great at telling the old story. We'll love it if you're right with your kilt on going down that. That's all really important stuff, but equally important is the modern message about Scotland, about what we're doing here in order to try and attract some of the further activity around those industries. I hear what you're saying in terms of we've got to do more.  Murray Pittock talking about the innovation, the contemporary strengths, the sector such as space, and he said that more could be done by the UK Government to platform Scotland's innovation, because it's not currently happening optimally, his quote, not mine. If we take that forward, that's something that we're going to be looking at. He also said in one of your conclusions in the response to the report that the UK Government should agree a definition of a Scottish brand to be advanced internationally, followed by annual reporting updates on embassy activity promoting Scotland that has taken place each year. That, I presume, would be in conjunction with the Scottish Government in order to make that as effective as possible, so you can possibly respond to that. St Patrick's Day across the world is huge, and if there is nothing gets that Irish brand out there more than St Andrew's Day, whether it's in Sydney, whether it's in Beijing, whether it's in New York, whatever it is, it's happening and it's huge, should the Scottish Government not be doing more to make St Andrew's Day a much bigger festival so that we get that, even if we are hooking into the traditional, if we hook into that traditional it gets that voice out there far more internationally. If we don't do it at home, why would we expect others to do it in the diaspora? Your latter point, excuse me. First, it's a day celebrated. We can make it whatever we want. St Andrew's Day is a national day of Scotland. Just like the Irish sometimes have different theme days towards their St Patrick's Day celebration events, there's nothing to stop Scotland doing whatever they want and that could be agreed by both Governments about if there was anything that we wanted to particularly transmit during St Andrew's Day. So it's up to us to design that. That would be our job as leaders and Government's job if we would be organising most of the international event. So that would be a matter for people who are decision makers concerning that day. In terms of the brand, yes, you're right. We did ask Government to do that again, perhaps slightly unfairly because it's a massive piece of work that I think it's all pretty much subjective about how you would assess that. I'm just looking at the Government's response to our recommendations and support. What they list and what they feel is the most important part of their job is some of the work around St Andrew's Day and Burns Night increasingly, but they feel foreign missions, foreign trips is what the value that they can bring, about delegations to different nations and they highlighted when we asked about the branding issue and the work that they're doing, they highlighted the Japanese seafood show in Tokyo, the Visit Britain workshop in China and the Four Nations festival of flavours in France. This is the type of work that the UK Government I think feel is important and that's what they can offer when it comes to transmitting and telling the story of the Scottish brand. I'll just leave that hanging there whether you think that's for the more to be done or whether that's sufficient. In the Government response to nearly all our recommendations, and they aren't hard recommendations, they're more helpful suggestions about how things could be done. They tend to come back to international visits, what they contribute in international trade, which is quite significant, but also the hosting of events and the placing of Visit Scotland perhaps into some of the international exhibitions and stalls that they have. I could go on. Thank you. We might have a little bit of time at the end, Mr Fairlie. Can I bring in Neil Bibby, please? Thank you, convener. Good morning, Mr Wishart. I commend the committee on its report. In it, you talk about the lack of strategic big picture on behalf of the UK Government's work in relation to Scotland. Obviously, you talk about the need for co-operation and also the shared priorities that there are between the Scottish and UK Governments. I wonder to what extent is the lack of a strategic big picture from the UK Government in relation to Scotland is down to perhaps a lack of a strategic big picture from the UK Government and the Scottish Government generally? I know that you talked about the important work that the UK Government is doing in terms of defence and security, and that's really important at the moment in particular. The important work that the Scottish Government is doing in terms of the work around the diaspora is specifically in relation to economic interests and inward investment. To what extent do you think that the lack of strategic big picture for the UK Government's work in relation to Scotland actually comes from a lack of strategic picture, both from the UK and the Scottish Government, in relation to those economic aspects, notwithstanding the good work that you've highlighted and I would agree with in terms of defence, security and diaspora? That's a really good question, and thank you for that being like the lack of a clear strategic vision as something we came back to repeatedly. It does go through some of the suggestion-stroke recommendations that we presented to the UK Government about how that could be addressed and how that could be designed. I think it's a challenge to both Governments, not just to the UK but also to the UK and the Scottish Government and how they work together in order to try and deliver it. There's a couple of things that we sort of suggested that they might want to look at, and that was horizon scanning for things that are going to be coming along in the future, which could be utilised and taken to advantage of Scotland in terms of how it could promote itself. One of the most important thing was an order of international activity. What are we doing? Where are we just now? How are we promoting Scotland? Is it working? An assessment about whether it's working? Why we went to tarp weekends? Perhaps the biggest single event of promoting Scotland anywhere in the world at any point during the calendar year, so it was important that we went there and talked to people. There's a couple of things that we've got back in terms of feedback about how that could be better used. For example, maybe the UK Government could engage a little bit more and we again suggested that to them, but I think that just knowing exactly what we're doing, and I gave you a list of three things that the UK Government highlighted to us as part of the work that they are doing in order to promote the Scottish brand. It would be good to see all of that written down and it was one of the things that we did ask, but we didn't get a commitment from them to deliver this. We will probably revisit this because I think that that would be perhaps the most useful thing that we could actually get from UK stroke Scottish Government, because I'm pretty certain that there would be a request from Scottish Government to help list some of the other activities too, but that would give us a picture that we could have an assessment about whether they were working, whether they were delivering in terms of getting that promotional activity to Scotland, but I think that that more than anything else. Look into the future about what lies down the road. Cop was a revelation and a development that maybe Scotland in the past would have expected to host at a conference. That was something that we were able to do, we did very well. There are other things like that coming down the pipeline that we were able to take advantage of. Thank you for that answer. I'm still assured that that's very helpful. Obviously, there's different strands of work here. We've got international work, we've got investment, inward investment work, reaching out to the Aspera cultural work as well. In terms of inward investment in economic interests, I've heard the desire from businesses for a single point of contact in order to take forward inward investment plans. That can be very challenging when you've got obviously a UK Government and a Scottish Government, but even within the Scottish Government, for example, you've got different agencies and you'll have that at a UK level as well. We obviously want co-operation, but we want to avoid duplication and we want to attract as much inward investment as we can. I just wondered if you had heard similar reflections on that, the need to try and streamline approaches and have a single point of contact to attract that inward investment during your port and any further reflections you've gotten there. That wasn't something that we did conclude in this report. We said that there's a number of things that could be done in order to try and improve particularly the trade reach of the UK Government, but what we found, Mr Bibby, in response to the different agencies—Scotland Development International, for example—came across really well and a lot of other things. Everybody appreciated its input and efforts and the difference that they make in order to secure further investment to Scotland in supporting and facilitating our businesses in Scotland to reach markets overseas, so that was very much appreciated. I think how it was characterised to us is that all the stuff is happening in the UK network. I think that they told us something like £41 billion worth of Scottish trade comes through the UK, but what SDI particularly offered was added value, and we were able to get a competitive advantage possibly to other regions of the United Kingdom or other nations. That seemed to be what we secure and gained from having that distinct network working in Scotland. Do they work closely together? Well, what we saw, yes, they did. We saw that as an example again in our Washington US embassy visit, and there did not seem to be anybody standing on anybody's toes at all. When we heard from the Scotland office team, they gave a couple of examples in areas where SDI perhaps isn't so prominent and there isn't a Scottish Government mission that we're talking about nations. I think it was Lord Offord who talked about Chile and Peru in South America. There's an extra emphasis on the UK Government to do that work for Scotland, but they said that there was nobody else doing that, so they picked that up. I think that without that specific input from SDI or the Scottish Government, there perhaps isn't the same sort of energy and emphasis going on that work. Did you want to come back in? I think that means that it's okay. Are there any further questions from committee members, Mr Roskell? Yes, I was just reflecting. The focus of the report is on promoting Scotland internationally, so it's all about culture and economic development and the diaspora and everything else. I'm just thinking about, is there a question in here for your committee about how Scotland projects itself internationally, particularly from a global justice perspective? Our history is in being given birth to the industrial revolution. We were part of a colonial project of empire. There are perhaps questions there about how we relate to the world now and thinking about Scott Malawi's link as being a way to address those issues of global justice in a modern age. Beyond the work of embassies and economic development and promotion, which are, of course, hugely important, is there something there that needs to be considered in terms of how we project ourselves as an international player and that brings in soft power and cop and things that you already mentioned? We didn't capture that. Some of those teams did come through in the evidence sessions that we had and some of their evidence was presented to the committee. That strikes me as being a distinct and separate piece of big work about the impression of Scotland when it comes to issues beyond promotion and beyond trade. I think that it would be a fantastic piece of work to undertake. I don't think that it would be the job of my committee to look at that, though it would be something that would personally interest me and would be more the job of you. We recognise, and I think certainly some of the evidence that we got from the cabinet secretary in particular, that there is a distinct impression that Scotland wants to make internationally, which is perhaps distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom. It captures the values of this Parliament, for example, some of the cultural tradition of Scotland, our history of involvement in a number of events that you referenced in your question. I do think that there is a big piece of work that can be done on that. We unfortunately didn't capture much of that at all, but I certainly recognise the efforts of this Parliament to try and ensure that Scotland is presented in a way that reflects our society, the community that we live in and the values that we hope to express. Clearly, there can be an intersection there. When you look at COP, for example, there are elements of trade and business, but there are also elements of global justice, international negotiations, some of which would be more reserved but impinge on devolved responsibilities. The Arctic Circle noticed that Secretary of State's office, whereas the Arctic Circle and RecuVec, again, is about trade and business, but it is also about the big challenge of climate and that. It feels like there is something there. That is absolutely right. It is all interconnected. Had we done this inquiry perhaps five years ago, COP would have been a massive feature of that just because of the outreach work that the Scottish Government particularly was able to do to transmit the fact that we hosted that event. It did not feature much at all, and I can say that candidly to you, Mr Ruskell. It was not a part of the things that we look at, but the interconnection, as you suggest, is something that is recognised. I think that that is recognised in the work of the UK Government. They listed some of the events that they have attended. Those would be features and discussions that they would have. The last thing that I would say is part of the dispute that Mr Stewart was discussing. Perhaps he came to a head in the latest COP with what was implied—I would not say threat, but a suggestion—that if continued transgressions according to the UK, the Scottish Government would be asked to leave and vacate the UK Government offices, which I do not think is particularly helpful. I think that that is something that would alarm everybody in this Parliament, and certainly those who are concerned about Scotland being able to do its job in terms of extracting trade and being able to promote itself properly internationally and making these connections and links. I think that my last plea is that we could resolve some of those outstanding tensions, de-emphasise them and get back to the thing that seems to be working, which is captured in our report that everything on the ground is working well. Work arrangements are sounding in a good place and there does seem to be a mutual respect across all the different distinct threads to this for the Scottish Government, with its SDI, with its Department of Trade or with the FCDO. Hopefully that will be able to be continued and we, as a committee, will continue to put that case and try to ensure that it happens. I suppose that my last query, if I may, was then just around how that relationship plays out in Ireland. I did not hear on the list of concerns from the Secretary of State that there have been inappropriate bilaterals or meetings in Ireland. When we went to Ireland recently, as a committee, my sense was that there is a very different set of expectations in Ireland, that conversations are far more fluid between politicians in the north and south and across the UK and that there is less concern or stricture put on the nature of those conversations that have to be in the room. Is that your sort of conclusion as well? Well, I think that the Northern Irish like committee did the piece of work that was roughly similar to how Northern Ireland reached the world a few years ago, when that was conducted and taken place. The conditions around Northern Ireland and the whole island of Ireland are totally distinct and different and separate from our concerns that we have here in Scotland. There are always different arrangements and emphasis when it comes to how arrangements with Ireland are conducted and observed by the UK. There is perhaps a little bit more latitude when it comes to these types of international conversations. I think that some of the letter that came from the foreign secretary came as a surprise to everybody who was involved in all this. Speaking to the cabinet secretary, I know that he was quite surprised and quite shocked when it appeared and he obviously wrote to try and get issues clarified. I think that every Government, every nation should have the right opportunity to express itself, to represent themselves adequately and properly in international fora. Obviously there are rules that are designed and I think that everybody in our report stresses again that foreign affairs is exclusively reserved matter. Within all that, there must be a place and an opportunity to do that. Lastly, you mentioned the Malawi exercise. That was a fantastic exercise. The Malawi partnership that Jack McConnell delivered as part of his Parliament in the early 2000s was a distinct piece of work. I was desperately trying to find out what Jack called that, but when there was a way that we were able to form these links, which was to everybody's benefit and maybe look further at these arrangements again. We didn't look at that part of the report, but I would suggest that that was an example of good relationships between the UK and the Scottish Government and allowed us to do some distinct work within the confines of the constitutional arrangements that we find ourselves in. The relationship with Wales and the south door at that time. You picked up the point about SDI that it can sometimes gain regional advantages or added value in some of the interactions that it has. On the other side of that, there are clearly, when it is the UK that is talking, they have the primacy over any discussions that are had. The best example I have of that is when a Japanese delegation were being spoken to by the UK Government, Richard Lochhead had very much tried to get scotch beef on the menu as an export potential. I was told that that is not currently a priority for us, so there are going to be tensions between whose priority is more important. Is that just a cost of doing business of being part of the union? My own personal views, which I will probably leave with myself, but I think that in terms of the work in arrangements when it comes to things, you are absolutely right in the way that those bilateral talks and arrangements are made. We see that again in the number of trade deals that the UK Government is currently negotiating with a number of third-party nations. It will be the Department of Trade that will lead those discussions and conversations. I do not know enough to suspect that the opportunities for enterprise bodies such as Scottish Development at National are rather limited given the way in the nature of how those talks will develop. The only thing that I would say, Mr Fairlie, is that in the other report and inquiry that we conducted when we were looking at federal arrangements across Canada, we all jealously looked at the input and involvement of the Canadian federal provinces when it came to having conversations and discussions about trade deals, how they were intrinsically involved and that they were consulted and used about any development, anything that was being negotiated and how their input was valued when the federal Government was making those trade deals and arrangements. In that report that we had all those years ago, we noted that in the influence that they had when it came to shaping up the final trade deals that were negotiated by the federal government. Scotland most definitely does not have anything like that when it comes to the shaping of current trade deals and arrangements that are currently being negotiated just now. It is a bit about the perception and we have been mentioned that we are kind of jealous of Ireland and the opportunity it has when we were visiting in Dublin, we learned that they were opening up their hundred and thirty-first mission. Our work has shown unanimously from the committee members that were involved in it that the Scottish foreign offices and the work that is done by the international offices is of great value and very welcome and that we want it, but sometimes in the bubble that is the Scottish Parliament, we hear them described as pretending foreign offices and waste of money and that rhetoric seems to come forward quite a lot in this bubble and I just wondered if you had any reflections on how they are perceived in Westminster by your colleagues there. I think that they are viewed and received very positively and simply that is the experience of all the work that has been done with them and any assessments made of their value and what they bring to Scotland. Relatively, I would say that they are viewed as something that has benefitted to value to Scotland. I do not think that there is that general political perception certainly amongst colleagues in the House of Commons. I know that it could be unfairly characterised within the press and we see constant references to stuck away in a broom cupboard or something like that, which is so far from the actual reality. If you look at the offices that the Scottish Government has in Washington, for example, I think that they would all be rather jealous about what is available to them and the connections that they have. They are viewed very favourably by ambassadors, by key figures and officials within the embassy network. I do not know where all that came from and I do not think that it is a helpful description of what goes on and the important work that the Scottish Government missions do. I think that those who suggest that go out to Washington, have a look and see how this work takes place, the connections that it has, the extra value that it brings to Scottish business and I think that they will be very surprised and we would probably hear the end of the observant practice. I think that we have exhausted questions from the committee this morning. If I could finish on a reflection of a visit that I had to Taiwan a few years ago, I was completely unaware that there was a contemporary of David Livingstone who had visited the island of Formosa. There was a museum in one of the hospitals because he started medicine on the island and it was done. Having visited Taipei 101 on the top floor, there was an exhibition of engineering feats of the world and on there was the Falkirk wheel and I had no idea that that was there. As the representative of regional MSP at the time, I was absolutely delighted to see it. Sometimes I think that we do not know what opportunities might be out there for us to build on Scotland's place in the world from history and for the future.


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When the time comes to take the exam, the exam will appear at the top of the MyOpenMath page above the calendar. There will actually be two parts. One is the exam itself, and the other is a place where you can submit additional work. The only things you're allowed to use on the exam are blank pieces of scrap paper and a scientific calculator. You may not use your notes, you may not use the text, you may not use a graphing calculator, a cell phone, any internet resources, any outside person or any other resources. When you're ready to begin, click on the exam, and again, another reminder of what you're allowed to use on the exam. Now the exam is timed like the quizzes, and like the quizzes, the timer does not pause for any reason. So make sure you have enough time to take the exam. Once you're ready, start the assessment. Another reminder that the timer does not stop for any reason. So if you're really ready to begin, start the assessment. So you'll see a bunch of suggestions for how to show your work if you want to enter your work on the exam itself. Your instructor will probably give you some additional details of how they want to see your work presented. The first question on the exam is an honor pledge. This essentially says that you'll take the exam in the way that you're supposed to take the exam without outside resources and so on. In particular, you're not going to use outside resources, you're not going to use non-permitted technology, and all the work is your own that you haven't given or received help from anyone. And if you are willing to make this declaration, type in your full name in the answer box. And importantly, every time you finish an answer, click the check answer button. Now on the quizzes, this will actually give you a score. But since many of these questions have to be graded by hand, the score is not going to be relevant. Ignore the score. If you scroll down, you see that the questions will be very similar to those on the quizzes with a slightly different format. So just like on the quizzes and the homework, there will be an answer box where you can enter in your answer. But there's also a space below the answer box where you can show your work. And in this space, you can type in the work that you would do to solve the problem. It's very important to keep in mind that only a small portion of your grade is going to be assigned for the right answer. Most of the grade is going to be based on the work that you show, so it's very important to show your work. You must show your work to get full credit for an answer. And it's your choice whether you want to do the work on a piece of scrap paper and then transfer it into the answer box, or you could just type your work in the answer box itself. And just like the assignments and quizzes you've been doing all semester, your answer should be typed into the answer box. And just like on the assignments and quizzes you've been doing all semester, every time you complete an answer, check answer to submit your work. And again, ignore the score. In particular, the only part that's going to be graded automatically is what's in the answer box. Your work is going to have to be graded separately. So ignore the score. So again, type in the answer to the questions just like you've been doing for all of the assignments and all of the quizzes to date. In the answer box below, show the work. And don't worry too much about the formatting. Write down the relevant computations that you made. And always check answer. Once you've answered all the questions, submit the assessment. It will ask if you're sure you want to submit the assessment. And again, ignore the score. Now the best thing for you to do is to type up your work in the answer boxes provided for showing your work. But if you don't want to do that, you can also do your work on a piece of scrap paper and scan or photograph it and upload the images. To do that, after you've completed your exam, click on where it says Exam Additional Answers. And this will give you the opportunity to upload some additional work. Now start the assessment, and this section will allow you to upload additional pages of work. After you've scanned or photographed your work, choose File and Upload. And once you've uploaded all your files, submit assessment, confirm that you're ready, and again, ignore the score.


Welcome back, everyone, to SuperCloud 4, our fourth episode, the topic this episode is generative AI and the impact. Obviously, SuperCloud is next gen cloud, multiple environments, large scale. The role of data has been the topic. Ben Koos is the CTO of Box, is here with us. He could not make it in studio for our live in-stage forums is here. Remote, Ben, thanks for coming on. Remote, we appreciate your time. Happy to be here, thanks for having me. So the role of generative AI is all the rage, obviously machine learning, MLOps have been around for a while, we've seen a lot of supervised supervised machine learning over the decade. Role of data, Box is not a stranger to that in the enterprise. Enterprise data can be kind of hairy, you got enterprise surge, how do you all wrangle it again? A lot of tech there. Now with generative AI, a gift has fallen in the industry. You're in the middle of it, you're doing a lot of work there at Box. How are you looking at this? How is it impacting your company and your customers? Oh, you said it was a gift and completely agree. So the power of the new generative AI models is just wonderful, even compared to the previous models, which were also very awesome, it's already the last 10 years of all the advancements in machine learning and neural networks. And then a lot of things became possible that weren't really possible before, but with Box and with many of our enterprise customers, one of the big concerns, of course, is this unstructured data. It was just always so hard to do ML and unstructured data. And since like 90% of the data in any organization is unstructured, audio files, video, doc files, PowerPoints, PDFs, all this really valuable data these companies have, it was just always so hard for them to be able to process it. Like the way you process, like if you have your data structured, you can do a lot of wonderful things with it. But if it's unstructured, you kind of have to read it. And then when the new generative AI came out with these new wonderful large language models, suddenly you could actually have the AI not only sort of understand things, but also start to help you create some content. So this has just been really eye-opening for everybody. And in particular, I think many large enterprises are looking at it and they're saying, wow, like what's possible now is different than what was possible a year ago and in their minds of sort of production class AI. And in many ways, I think a lot of companies are still thinking about like, what can we do with this? There's a lot of interesting use cases of many people are adopting, but still like almost every day we talk to customers, they're still thinking, what more can I do? And they're seeing that the rapid evolution of this AI is continuing. You know, one of the things I really admired over the box over the years, since the early days of the founding with Aaron and the team was they made things simpler in an era where enterprise playbook was to solve complexity by making it more complex. Just the classic enterprise playbook, right?  You guys also took some territory down in a competitive enterprise market where there's a lot of muck and toil and undifferentiated heavy lifting. Database is now the advent of unstructured data coming in. Now with IoT and everything's connected, there's a tsunami of devices, analytics at the top of mind. But the budgets aren't increasing as fast as the data increase. So the problem is, okay, how do I create value? And this is a technical problem, not just the apps. So I got to write apps for the business, but I got to run IT and platform engineering at the same time. How are you looking at this as the CTO? Because you got to wear both sides of that hat. You got to look internally and make some innovation happen to enable that app value in the front end for the customer.  They'll say, I need to be able to prove that this helps me in my business concerns. Of course, the technology is totally awesome. And of course, there are many different aspects that everyone wants to talk about. But at the end of the day, when it comes for them to pay more money, they're going to want to make sure that it is giving them value. So things like making sure it drives productivity, making sure that it is helping create things that maybe were not possible before. Those kinds of things are sort of the number one, the sort of the business value conversation that our customers are having. So for us, we look at that, like being able to take the AI and apply it to their data, the content. This sort of begins the conversation of, okay, now how, if we start to do that and we start to do more of it, then how can I make people more efficient inside of my organization? Or how can I achieve things faster? How can I get to market faster? How can I do all these tasks that everybody does kind of every day, but then just do it either faster or better? And I think that's where most of our customers' minds are at right now. I want to get your thoughts on and reaction to a statement I'll make. And I want you to look at it from the perspective of a pro AI perspective. You got a couple of things emerging. You got the AI wrapper apps that just wrap around some of the large language models, feed it some data, very well engineered on the prompting side. I'm over simplifying it, it's simply like, I would call it like building a website on top of the web. Okay, you can do it, it's a great app, people use it, great. I'm a fan of that by the way, I was kind of poo-pooing it before, but I think AI wrappers are not a bad thing at all. Secondly is native AI apps. And then third, AI systems. Okay, so three kind of categories of things emerging. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? Would you elaborate? Do you see the same thing? What's emerging? I mean, what's the spectrum? Yeah. You have the system, the native and then the wrapper. Yeah. So I think, so for the idea of the wrapper, which is to say like, the AI has certain capabilities, why don't you just expose it directly with sort of minimal, maybe other value propositions around that? Like in many ways, again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. There are many companies who exist because their job is to make things better. Like in it matters a little bit less if it's like the revolution, crazy technology versus like just, they just focus on solving problems really well. From our view, like one of the things that is critically important is that you have to have, not just solve the AI problem, right? Maybe a long time ago, like AI was a competitive advantage, but even the fact that we're talking about like a wrapper, AI is everybody has access to the same fundamental technology, like which is either online via OpenAI or via Google or via any of the wonderful vendors that are out there. And so it's not that hard for anybody, big companies, medium-sized companies, small companies to just start to use it. So what is the advantage that you have on top of that? And so of course, the way we look at this is to say the value of content overall is to make sure that you can apply AI to it safely, securely. One of the big concerns with some of these things is that you have to be a little careful with like security permissions. Like if you're not careful that AI itself becomes like a source of data leakage, which especially when you talk about bigger enterprises, this becomes a big challenge. And so I think this is where you start to see that you want, for companies to start with a really cool proposition of the wrapper, they have to either build out the rest of their product offering or of course other companies are always looking to add AI to what they do. So on the system side, do you see any impact like a new neural network, LLM, data APIs? I mean, is there a paradigm shift on the far end of the spectrum that's emerging that you see? Because we're seeing the conversation range from, okay, low hanging fruit to a lot of experimentation. Some production mostly through some tooling and some picks and shovels helping people get some stuff into production. But there hasn't been a lot of conversations around. That's large scale, that's in production. That's a full big workload. We're not there yet. Is it going to be there soon? Do you see the progress happening faster or are there good stuff in production for workloads or is it still progressing? I think it's kind of all the above, right? Like you start to see that there's a lot of companies, like maybe a year ago, they were like talking about ideas and then they started to then say, oh, and I'm going to have the betas. And then nowadays, I think we're starting to see that like many companies are releasing like in production, their systems. And so I think in many cases though, they're starting with the most obvious base use cases in some cases, like that then people will then need to adopt and build upon. One of the challenges for enterprises is that like some of them are very scared of AI. Again, for some of these reasons around like AI, like you don't, you have to really know the regulatory landscape, you have to know the security landscape, you have to really think this through. And so even the first use case can sometimes be very hard for them to adopt. And then I think over time, like as they do that, then the next wave of features that are more powerful, maybe the next wave of technology, some of the new stuff coming out of some of our like partner vendors are just like the way that it's not just about text anymore. It's about multimodal images. We start to see some interesting ideas with how people are dealing with videos and audio. Like these things are where I think once enterprises start to digest and adopt some of the things that are coming out available now in production and start to scale them up overall, then you'll start to see that it'll be easier for them to adopt the next level of AI technology that's coming out. And I think this is why many companies today are looking at like, what's the platform that they can adopt to that would then help them deal with their content or deal with their emails or deal with their editors and so on. Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, definitely, I think it's not even the first inning. I think it's pregame right now, but it's clearly some low hanging fruit, as you mentioned. I still like this idea. I think there's going to be a system emerging. There's still some cost concerns. I have to ask you, how do you see the continuing, on the continuum of AI, do you see it ranging from mostly cost savings or to generating new revenue? Where do you believe where this falls in right now? I mean, I can see both sides of the coin, but is it mostly cost savings initially or is it moving quickly to generate new revenue? It's, I think there's sort of a bit of all of it. Like at some point, if your employees and if people who are working have things like AI assistance, if they're able to understand their data better, if they're unable to, and in some cases, like you can actively engage AI and brainstorms, if you can actively involve them in product development. Like these kinds of things, I think will, for almost any company, cross industries, it helps them. And you could say, well, it could be cost savings because then if you're more productive, then you'll be able to save something. But at the same time, what we're seeing with a lot of our customers is that they're not saying, I want to save, they are saying, I want to do more. I want to do, I want to turn that new value into something that I can externally consider to be a business value. I think one of the good examples is like GitHub, like co-pilot, right? Like the idea of using AI in your engineering, like I have not heard of a single person who's like, oh, now that we're just saying 10%, 20%, 40% more productive because of AI, great, we'll get rid of that staff.  So then they're just going to be doing more. They're going to be releasing more. They're going to be making better products. And I think that we're going to see that in a lot of places. Yeah, I think that's a trickle down for sure. I definitely think that's, no one's turning that around. And he just kind of, I was going to my next question was going to ask you, how do you see the generative AI influencing how organizations and your customers, whether it's your direct customers or your partners in the ecosystem, how does it influence how they build software? And does it change the type of software it can build in the future? I think it does. Like many of the customers we talked to, like there's just sort of this traditional aspect of the way that you sell software. One of the first things you want to do is understand like what are some of the problems that customers have so that you can then focus here on how you're a solution to it. But with AI, like one of the first things everybody's digesting is just what is possible? In fact, I had a customer there they just say like, okay, before we start this call, don't ask me what I'm going to do with AI. I need to understand more about AI so that I can figure out what to do internally. And so then this is a little bit more of the idea of AI becomes a platform by which people then think of new capabilities to be able to deliver inside their organization, both for internally, just running their org, creating new external facing products and so on. It's not a product that's in April or totally got, that's a great point. That's worth calling out. I got to ask you on that point, I think data's become obviously we're hearing that on the show in this episode of Data's Key. What's interesting is the conversation has been shifting to kind of like, what was once, passe, an old school taboo is now kind of in vogue, right? You got walled gardens, proprietary data sets.  You got like, no one wants a walled garden. Everyone's going to be open. But now with data being intellectual property, if you look at the large language model, we introduced on the CUBE research team the power law on helping our audience understand that there's a power law of language models. You got the big three or four at the top. They're not going anywhere, but you can interface with them. They're large public models. They call them proprietary, but they're actually public. It's like interesting, right? So like, so you have a mindset shifting going on. You have open source, you got small language models. It could be our transcripts. It could be, so I see an ecosystem more like a neural network API economy around data, where distributed data that's walled garden, but open and disposable is going to be a thing. What do you think about that? I mean, it's kind of out there, but what's your thoughts? Well, I mean, it's a good question. I was talking to one of our customers recently and we had this discussion. Will the AI models of the future be more like, like a coffee or like wine?  And then, but if you want specialist coffee, they're available, but versus wine, if I say like, name me three wines, like probably everybody's going to call it a different set of wine. So my guess is that you will probably end up more like in the world where there's some very powerful, very dominant models like we've seen so far, like the technology from OpenAI, the technology from Atthropic, the technology from all the big clouds, Google is a great partner of ours. Like everybody is making not only their own models, they're very great, but they also then have these model gardens that you can select amongst these other great technologies. And so we believe that that is going to be, these models will continue to evolve, they'll continue to get very, very good. Now they are very general purpose and they are very powerful. And so then that leaves open this world of like, sometimes you want a specialist model.  And then oftentimes that can lead you to a potentially a cost benefit because the models are smaller. It can lead you to a benefit of maybe a specialized or something you're doing. And I think people will use those. But for many cases, like especially for our, you know, we have all this unstructured content, like the more general purpose models are performed very well. And so then we continue to see that as they get more capable, which you kind of just even see in the last few months even. And then their price in many cases keeps going down. Like it's just going to get, those are going to be that one of the first things that people think about when they're thinking about the idea of doing AI for their organization. I mean, it's interesting point. You mentioned the specialty models. What's interesting, and you mentioned unstructured data. One of the problems with unstructured data, as you pointed out earlier, is that it's a sea of unstructured data or a lake of unstructured data. But as you get into these verticals, we have domain specific linguistics or data, whether it's multimodal, whatever mode it is. The vector database trend has kind of pointed to the fact that you can start doing these embeddings within the vertical to get better insights for retrieval, which could also accelerate some of the data transfer, some of the data addressability. What's your thoughts on that? How important is that? Yeah, no, it's like the vector embeddings. I think in an interesting way, like it's like the unsung hero in many cases of the new AI revolution. It's similar technology in some cases about there's a big difference between a really good, powerful, well-trained embedding versus one that maybe wasn't so good. But then you start to see that when you have this giant corpus of data, again, an enterprise might have petabytes of data, hundreds of millions of these pieces of unstructured data. And in order to understand it and get the large language models or any of these foundation models to process it, they have to be able to find roughly the kind of data that you want. And it's so much cheaper, more efficient, better, more secure to be able to retrieve it ahead of time and then feed a little sort of like a single question in as opposed to you try to train on your whole corpus, which is constantly changing, permissions are changing. And so the RAG approach, the retrieval augment generation, that's excellent, the vector databases are getting more powerful seemingly every day. There's a lot of great vector databases out there. So I think this is going to be a big part of many of the especially in an unstructured data world, like the way that you handle on AI overall. It's interesting. We're talking about performance and cost. The word memory comes up, you mentioned RAG, which is retrieval, the retrieval aspect of it. There's memory aspect now of these embeddings and there's no, there's new observability metrics emerging that no one has, if I change my model and how do I know whether it's smarter or not, does it restore its memory as in remembering the retrieval versus actually memory on the machine which lowers your cost for say inferences. We're kind of in a weird time here, don't you think? So you got cost on training and inference and now when you got, I could use maybe open AI for training because they already got built in costs there, but inference now becomes a challenge. And data and memory, whether it's memory, for first token out and all kinds of throughput challenges to inference memory. I mean, this is, how do you rationalize all this? How does, customers, it's kind of complicated. What do you think? At some point, some of the underlying aspects of how the systems work, the compute, the memory, even the pricing schemes get quite complex. And so I think for most enterprises, some of them are going down the path of building stuff themselves. And then of course, many ISVs are building stuff. We build them a lot, but usually I think you wanna start to associate the cost for some higher level value piece, trying to understand the underlying aspects, economics of like, if I rent my own GPUs versus if I use an off the shelf model, like we're big fans of the idea of the, we have big partners who have these wonderful models, so we wanna use those whenever we can. And although in some cases, it can be expensive, you should be looking at the overall cost for value. So if something that was taking a human an hour, and you can do that with AI that would have make that person more productive, and that costs, let's say a few cents or a few dollars in some cases, like that, I think you just start to compare those at that level. And then it's very important to look at the total cost of ownership of these things. Sometimes people get distracted by the like, the token costs or the inference costs of that moment, instead of, and then they try to maybe optimize the wrong things. And so we're big fans of optimizing holistically as opposed to optimizing per one little unit. Yeah, I think that comes up a lot when people talk about end to end versus like going in the weeds on one specific thing. What process are you looking at? That's a great point. I gotta ask you, what are you guys doing in a box that's a compelling, what's the coolest thing you're working on right now? If you don't mind sharing without giving any public information away. Oh, no, we just released a bunch of boxworks. So the thing that we, since we have so much unstructured data and for our enterprises, again, most of the data is unstructured. And we believe that we need to be offering just infused throughout the whole product, like the useful AI capabilities, being able to ask questions of your documents, being able to, as you're searching for things, being able to ask things and have the system go out, retrieve for you the answers and provide them to you while you're actually finding your data, being able to do things like structure your data, help you with security, tagging your data, like these are the things that before, like it would take humans to go do and now the AI can do it and it's just very compelling. And then, of course, on all of that, like we want to make sure that we are also a platform by which people can do AI and their content overall. And that is something that is important to us and to our customers. Is it at some point you have companies like us who are solving these problems around like AI on unstructured data? And in other people, you're talking about some of the wrapper companies, like at some point there's a holistic view of how to do this and we're solving all those problems. We think we're pretty good at it and so we want to offer our services wherever possible to all of our customers. The big joke, or not joke, but the rhetorical question I always ask is, is there an AI operating system coming? Is there, you know, can almost go, there's going to be like a Linux moment for this industry where when people go, okay, there's a system that can run across an enterprise and abstract away all those hard problems about silo data, enterprise search, privileges and permissions and compliance and governance, how do you scale data integrating without clean rooms? I mean, this is like the nirvana. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in many ways, the ML ops that kind of came along to help you with the ML set of problems, that was a very powerful set of infrastructure. And then I've seen some companies talk about AI ops, but really I think that since the AI is so powerful, like you start to say, I need to have like my AI, but in conjunction with like a set of use cases, like on your data or on the way that you're pushing your data out through knowledge bases or other things. Like, so this is where I think that you'll start to see like companies that are specializing platforms for that, as opposed to just the underlying infrastructure, which is kind of how the ML revolution sort of unfolded. I think there's going to be so much action. I think the whole platform engineering under the hood infrastructure is going to be exciting. You know, when I saw Databricks announced, you know, Parquet and Iceberg support, that's a shot across the bow of the industry. It completely democratizes SQL to SQL and unstructured structured data. It's incredible that could be, that could literally put an entrepreneur on the playing field tomorrow with a competing product, a connector. I mean, this is going to open up huge innovation. Yeah, I totally agree. Well, Ben, thank you for taking the time to contribute to our SuperCloud 4 and coming on remotely into our event. Appreciate your time and great contribution with great, great highlights. Like a little masterclass there, thanks. Thanks for having me. All right, Ben Coos, the CTO box here, breaking down all the action, the role of Generative AI in the enterprise and how companies that have the data, working with data, unstructured data, bringing value and taking away a lot of that undifferentiated heavy lifting to create the next generation of infrastructure and applications. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Palo Alto after this short break.


Sometimes you're wanting to add a comment and mentioning somebody who made it and Facebook won't give you the right person. So Tina Miller here, for example, I'm trying to do at Tina Miller and Facebook won't give me the right one. So what do I do? I move my mouse over her name and then I noticed, well, I can open up her profile in a separate tab and basically I get her username on Facebook, right? Tina Miller 222 and that's what I do in here. So I go at Tina Miller 222. Instantly Facebook gives me the correct person that I can mention and tag so that she could be notified. So I hope this is helpful.


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