Al Chen leads customer engineering for Splunk Agent Observability at Cisco. His public work explains the engineering evidence needed to deploy AI software inside banks, including vulnerability remediation, data recovery and protection against sensitive-data leaks.[3]
Start with Shipping AI Into 5 Major Banks Without a 12-Month Compliance Wait — Al Chen, Cisco →
Links
GitHub LinkedIn 
X · thealchen X · bigal123 Software engineering leader, customer engineering for Splunk Agent Observability · Cisco
Career
Chen’s 2019 first-person interview describes working at Google, freelancing as an Excel consultant and becoming a solutions architect at Coda. In a 2026 conference interview, he describes moving from spreadsheets and productivity software into AI frameworks, then joining Galileo before its acquisition by Cisco.[2][1][3]
Contributions
Chen’s public repositories include scripts for moving data between Coda and Google Sheets and a LangChain customer-support assistant template. This earlier work gives concrete examples of the integrations behind his path from productivity tools to AI application infrastructure.[1]
Ideas
In his AI Engineer talk, Chen treats deployment approval as a problem of showing evidence. For vulnerability remediation, he describes having an agent write an exploit against an older package and testing it against the proposed replacement. For recovery, he checks restored row counts and replica convergence rather than relying only on a successful job status. He also describes separating a model judge’s score from its explanation, because reasoning about raw traces may reproduce sensitive information. These examples explain checks for particular failure modes, rather than proving that an entire deployment is safe.[4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
A conference talk about making security, recovery and data-handling decisions inspectable during bank deployments.
Begin with the vulnerability-remediation example, then compare recovery and judge-output checks. Familiarity with containers and application deployment helps; these examples do not replace a bank’s own security review.
Speaker[4]Original source
Tools
- Coda Google Apps Scriptgithub.com
Scripts for synchronizing data between Coda and Google Sheets.
Repository maintainer[1]