Kevin Magee, CTO at All human

In his Sage Spotlight, Kevin McGee, CTO at All human, discusses his 30-year journey in tech and his current focus on making AI operational. Kevin explores the concept of “vibe-scaled engineering” — transitioning from innovative front-end experimentation to rigorous, secure production. He shares how Sagetap has helped him move past the “torturous” process of traditional vendor discovery to find specialized partners like Jericho Security and Rootly that solve specific, high-stakes challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Operationalizing AI via Vibe-Scaled Engineering: Kevin is focused on bridging the gap between creative, innovative front-end experimentation and the high-quality production rigor — security, performance, and maintainability — required for enterprise-grade AI products.
• The Ticking Time Bomb of Unmanaged AI: Kevin warns that AI features are living organisms that require constant monitoring for drift and engagement. In many organizations, a lack of clear ownership over these evolving features creates a significant long-term risk.
• Discovering the “Human Recommendation System”: After years of fighting through “mountains” of inbound sales emails and tedious security questionnaires, Kevin uses Sagetap to regain control over the discovery process and leverage peer-to-peer insights for honest vendor references.
• Modernizing Phishing Defense with Jericho Security: Kevin bypassed “safe” legacy simulation tools for Jericho’s AI-powered platform. The solution delivers personalized, evolving phishing simulations that are measurably improving the organization’s security posture.
• Solving Incident Management with Rootly: While preparing for ISO 27001 certification, Kevin discovered Rootly on Sagetap. It automated the manual, clunky process of incident logging and documentation, providing the evidence and reporting templates his team needed to succeed.

Full Transcript

Kevin Magee: I'm CTO at All human. We're a services business. We were set up about 20 years ago. And basically we run companies’ digital businesses. 

It’s from e-commerce and sales journeys to the retention journeys in these organizations, their support challenges. And then sometimes we end up doing a lot of business transformation to support all the other stuff that I just mentioned.

I've been in the tech sector for over 30 years, building AI and data products over that period. And right now I'm really focused on the whole challenge of making AI operational. 

I think the other thing that I will be very focused on, I call it vibe-scaled engineering. And essentially, it's this idea of how can we harness all these really amazing tools on the front end, the creative tools, the innovative tools, bringing all that, the innovative stuff early in a cycle to find out what we can and can't do and the art of the possible and all of those things, but then bring it to production with all the rigor and the security and performance and maintainability and all the other stuff that you would expect in a high quality–production organization. 

As the GenAI boom has been really taking off, it's been a catalyst, but versions of that have been very early in my career, like I've been in AI before it was popular in the GenAI sense. And we had similar problems, but now it's just, everything is on steroids, and it's incredibly fast. So exciting, but challenging.

Meghan Lafferty: So it sounds like a big part of your responsibility is to stay ahead and know what's coming up so that you can support all these different companies. How do you do that?

Kevin: Sagetap is one of those ways that I do it. My peer network of CTOs that I talk to all the time, lots and lots and lots and lots of reading, staying close to the open-source ecosystem, conferences, all the usual areas. 

But Sage is one of those things that has helped me in that the recommendations that I get all the time are things that I wasn't aware of, or companies I wasn't aware of, or products I wasn't aware of. That really helps me stay aware of opportunities early.

Meghan: In all of your research, is there anything that you're not finding? Is there something the industry isn't talking about enough that you think should be discussed more?

Kevin: When you look to put a feature, an AI feature, actually into a product or an experience, you can't just do what would have been done with a traditional project and run it as a project, build it, and walk away. 

These features are like living organisms. You've got to continue to look at what is happening with them and how they're evolving, how they're answering, how they're engaging, what the recommendations are like, and is there drift? 

Who owns it? Because it impacts so many parts of an organization. At the moment, unfortunately, the answer is probably nobody, or marketing, or somebody. And that's essentially a ticking time bomb, I think, in a lot of these organizations.

Meghan: If I'm a vendor, is there a positive side of all of those challenges and things to consider? Is there an opportunity for me?

Kevin: Of course. I've talked to many of them, some on the Sagetap platform, around AI observability and governance tooling. That's incredibly important. Tooling to monitor everything, to understand things, to understand, are the bots hallucinating? 

And I haven't even mentioned anything about agents, but it's a similar challenge. Things, they can go rogue. 

And I think particularly, it's kind of governance, but it's also into the privacy area. The privacy-enhancing technologies, they become opportunities for vendors, either to protect privacy or to explain things or try to articulate what's actually going on, how do we get to that conclusion? 

I also think, just as a completely different non-AI-related topic, we're moving beyond just one major solution solving all the problems. I want best of breed. I don't want monoliths. I want to be able to quickly plug different things in. It can solve a small problem, and be very focused. And so I think they will be areas that are prime for vendors that I think about.

Meghan: Before Sagetap, how did you used to identify the right vendors to evaluate and then eventually the right vendors to go with?

Kevin: It was everything. It was my peer network. It was reading, research, and open-source ecosyst — conferences, feedback from my team. It was all the usual. 

The other one, which was the, if you like, what I would call the problem one, which is the mountain of inbound sales emails and LinkedIn messages and so on. 

I need to go pretty quickly to get to proof of concept, but I don't want to have to jump through 50 million security questionnaires and due diligence and stakeholder alignment, NDAs, and everything. And I know I’ll have to do some of those, but it's a torturous process going through that.

Meghan: Let's talk about what life has been like since you joined Sagetap.

Kevin: There are two things that I really value right now from Sagetap, and one is the control. I'm in control. The other one is the discovery piece. 

When I say, look, we're not ready to go right now, I don't want you to kind of stalk me for the next three months. Sagetap changes that for me, because now I can engage. I can be really excited about a product, or a technology, or an organization with lots of products. And we now have time to take our time to decide when we're ready. 

We're going to talk about some companies that I have gone and bought solutions from. But during the journey with those organizations, the thing that would really accelerate that for us is the ability to talk to other Sages, other peers on the network who have experience with the vendors that we're interested in, or even somebody who can say, "I looked at that company. Eh, yeah, they weren't really great for what you're looking for, but here's this other one that might be interesting." 

It's like the human recommendation system, the serendipity thing. That's the next stage in where I'm going with the platform.

Meghan: Now that you've been on Sagetap for a while, I know that you've had success and you've made some purchases. Do you want to talk about Jericho Security and Rootly?

Kevin: I was looking for traditional solutions in this space, kind of security, phishing simulations, and so on. We were kind of at the point going, "Yeah, that's it, we'll just settle. That's our lot, that's what the industry has to offer." 

Then I came across Jericho through Sagetap. We went through the review process incredibly quickly. And we're using it today, every day, and it is measurably improving us as an organization. 

What Jericho does is it turns that around, and it changes the whole thing into AI-powered phishing simulations where every single person in the organization is going to get a different message tweaked slightly differently for them. But the whole idea is that we now have something that we can work with, we can build with. And we have a partner who are incredibly easy to work with.

The other one was, I was in a different organization a number of years ago. The challenge in this case was around managing incidents. And it's all so manual and so clunky, and everybody's all over the place. When an issue comes up, we want to get it, solve it, move on, report all of the information, learn from it as an organization. 

And so I came across, through the platform, a company called Rootly, and they were a perfect solution. Also, at the time, we were a company that was going for ISO 27001 security certification, and so we needed to have all of the evidence for incident logging, and tracking, and documentation, and all of these things. So now we had this platform that was just capturing all of that information, and it was summarizing it, and it was doing it in a way that if I wanted to report it out in a particular template that we liked, yeah, we could do that too. 

I was never aware of that organization, back to that serendipity point that I made before. I came across and engaged, got the demo, and it was just really obvious that I needed to bring my team on board. And we did, and it all went through incredibly fast to get through the trial periods and just get it up and running. So, very positive experience.

Meghan: Let's say there is somebody who's you a few years ago. They're not on Sagetap yet. They're considering joining. Do you have any advice for them?

Kevin: Where Sagetap was a few years ago, when I engaged with it, probably the control and discovery, they're the real drivers. But I think the platform is now evolving to have this other, let's call it the peer dimension and leverage. 

If you use it correctly, the platform over time will gradually start to surface opportunities for you. But of course, you can go into the platform and just look for other organizations and vendors, and then reach out to peers and so on as well. 

The easy option, the safe option, is to go with all the name brand organizations. But this gives you the ability to see this whole other community of organizations that can provide solutions to weird and wonderful challenges that we all have in our work, and a way to engage with them, and a way to find others who can give you references and talk about their experience.