Cloud computing is no longer just a tool for the private sector: It is becoming foundational to national security and global cooperation. This took center stage at this year’s Munich Security Conference, where NATO allies and Indo-Pacific partners discussed digital resilience and technological competitiveness. As nations race to modernize their defense capabilities, technological infrastructure is becoming central to how countries deter foreign and domestic threats while also strengthening diplomacy.

On today’s episode of Explain to Shane, I am joined by Michael Greenwald, director of global executive relations at Amazon Web Services. He has previously served as the US Treasury Department’s financial attaché to Qatar and Kuwait, showcasing his extensive experience spanning diplomacy, financial policy, and emerging technologies. With his work at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, digital finance, and national security, his perspective highlights how cloud computing is shaping the future of national security and digital defense.

Below is a lightly edited and abridged transcript of our discussion. You can listen to this and other episodes of Explain to Shane on AEI.org and subscribe via your preferred listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in.

Shane Tews: Michael, let’s start with your background, from Treasury attaché to a senior executive at AWS, engaging NATO leaders. How has that journey shaped your thinking on technology, trust, and national security?

Michael Greenwald: Thanks so much, Shane and AEI, for having me on, really appreciate it, and appreciate the thought leadership that you do. During my time at the US Treasury, I was driven, Shane, by a core conviction that was that the financial system are national security systems. And when I was able to work in the intelligence community as a policymaker, as a diplomat, when I served overseas in the Middle East, the movement of money—or how money is blocked from moving—it really shapes not just geopolitical, but geo-economic outcomes. And to me was that belief drove from my work over the next decade, serving under two presidential administrations and treasury secretaries and working in those roles in Europe and Africa and the Middle East. When I went to Doha to serve as the first US Treasury attaché there and to Kuwait, I really leaned in to those experiences, which really taught me that trust: it’s the foundational currency of national security.

And so, I brought the same lens when I transitioned to the private sector, when I was working in finance for a multifamily office and working on those FinTech investment issues. And now with AWS—I’ve been here now four years actually this week—I get to work with the US government, international governments to incorporate cloud computing in their systems, driving AI innovation in the public sector. And so, it’s incredibly exciting because I found that the same dynamics apply. The conversations are about how governments can trust the digital infrastructure underpinning their collective defense. And that’s what gets me excited every day.

You were recently at the Munich security conference and you were dealing with defense ministers not only from the NATO allies but Japan, Australia, Italy, and New Zealand. What’s going on when we’re talking about cloud and AI and defense? Were there conversations about that?

It’s really an exciting time. And I would say we are in an era where technology—it’s inseparable from national security strategy. We’re incredibly proud, at AWS, that we get to support the US government and its national security mission from the private sector perspective. I never thought that when I left government in 2017 that I would get to come full circle. And so, it’s felt like a deepening of the same mission because the threat matrix chain has only increased and we truly do need both coming together.

You bring up Munich, which was truly a really important flag on the ground event. And while we were there, the cloud and AI defense conversation—it’s truly become global. Governments are recognizing the cloud; it’s no longer option. It’s no longer a nice have. It’s a strategic imperative. What’s driving this—it’s a shared recognition that the ability to deploy interoperable, scalable, and truly secure digital capabilities, that’s going to shape nations’ capacity to deter and respond to emerging threats. The conversation at Munich doesn’t start and stop in the US. It runs through NATO, it runs through our Indo-Pacific partnerships and our alliance structures where partners need to operate together at speed.

What’s so interesting when you go to these global forums like Munich is that the conversation, it’s matured. The integration of cloud technologies into the alliance structures, it’s no longer just an IT transition. It’s a strategic imperative. And cloud and AI are no longer just tools you bolt onto the fence. They’re the foundation for modern militaries to operate, to share information, and to make decisions from real time. So, it was very impactful, Shane.

Thinking about defense institutions, where we’re seeing there’s just more and more automation in the system, how much of that is a challenge for you from the training perspective?

I think it’s a great question, Shane. And I think a lot of the biggest challenges for large organizations to move to the cloud, they’re not technical: they’re about people and culture, two things that we care deeply about. And the biggest differences between organizations that talk about moving to the cloud and those that actually do it and are having the most success, it often comes down to a few key things that I always keep in mind.

First, the senior leadership team of an organization, it needs to be aligned and truly committed; they want to move to the cloud. They need to be setting a clear direction at the top and expectations with the rest of their organization to get everyone on the same page and working towards the same thing. I think it’s easy for others to do nothing, or to block things if the leadership team isn’t making the move a priority and really building and fostering a culture of change. I think then the most successful organizations moving to the cloud, it starts with an aggressive, really top-down goal that forces the organization to move faster than it would organically. Third, it’s really about, and really important, that organizations are trained on the cloud and comfortable, with the concepts as part of the whole process. We train hundreds of thousands of people a year for that exact purpose. And then I would just say lastly, Shane, sometimes we find out that organizations can get paralyzed if they can’t figure out how to move every last workload.

There’s no need to boil the ocean. We often work with organizations to do a portfolio analysis and assess each application, build a plan for what to move to in the short term and the medium term and last. And what this does is this helps organizations get the benefits of the cloud for many of their applications much more quickly. It helps inform them how they move the rest. And that is how we think about the process of training and upscaling their workforce.

The treasury wrapped a major public private AI cybersecurity initiative with the financial services recently. I’m a huge optimist on it, but I, being in cyber security for a long time, want to make sure that we think about that first and we’re covering that ground. Any thoughts in that area?

I think for us, and just a commanding principle is, security is at the core of everything we do. It’s not something that we add on the top of what we build or how it’s baked in to the architecture. You know, it’s been baked in since day one. When you think about how we’ve over nearly two decades of operating at scale, it’s been tested by some of the most demanding security sensitive organizations in the world, and that track record speaks for itself. I would say you have to think about it, and how AWS thinks about it is, security is always job zero. And that’s critical for looking at what that means.

I think what you mentioned about Treasury and the public private partnership—we’re working very closely with the US Treasury, my former employer at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue, so I do have a soft spot for them, and they’ve got a AI—chief AI officer there that is really breaking some great ground. And what I would say, organizations are just beginning to understand the benefits of cloud and AI, and how it’s implemented them into their core systems. I still think there is an education and understanding gap around the depth of the transformation for the institution itself. And I think this gap matters because if leaders don’t understand the art of the puzzle, they’re not going to lean in precisely at the time they need to the most. This is the core for promoting AI leadership.

Where I see AI can benefit organizations are really around four core things. I would say AI empowers the decision makers with data just in a way, Shane, that wasn’t possible. As we’ve discussed, it can process and analyze vast amounts of information, multiple sources, faster and more efficiently, than any other human could. This also means you can actually identify patterns, trends, and correlations that would have been buried in the noise. It allows you to optimize resource allocation. So that’s critical. Then you think about the speeding research, right? Genitive AI, it’s helping researchers, at scale, find information faster. Highly complex levels of analysis, right? That’s critical. Then you think about personalized, convenient services, right? And how generative AI can tailor services to an individual citizen’s needs. Chat bots, call centers, those types of things that really are critical and that we’re working across the US government with.

And then, improve productivity, speed. Generative AI can be applied to repetitive tasks so we can focus on much higher-level mission priorities. So, those are a couple of things that AI can benefit organizations and I see as a hallmark as Treasury and others are working in.