ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Last week, OpenAI published an open letter and over a hundred companies signed on. CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, AWS, Anthropic, basically every major name in cybersecurity and enterprise tech. The letter warns that AI-enabled cyberattacks are about to get faster and more sophisticated, and it specifically calls out hospitals, water treatment plants, and critical infrastructure as the places most at risk.
It lays out a plan: every organization needs to raise its security standards, cybersecurity companies need to build AI-powered defenses, governments need to fund the utilities that can't fund themselves, and frontier AI labs — the OpenAIs, the Anthropics — need to hand tools and support directly to the defenders who need it most.
I went through every name on that signatory list. Not one of them is an MSP. Not one of them is the company that actually shows up when a small-town water authority's systems go down at 2am.
So today on CyberCall, I've got Alan McDonald with me, as he runs an MSP that services a number of municipal water districts. And I want to find out: when the biggest names in cybersecurity write a letter about protecting critical infrastructure, where does someone like Alan actually fit in?
