>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS reInvent Executive Summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS reInvent 2020. This is special programming for the Accenture Executive Summit where all the thought leaders are going to extract the signal from those share with you their perspective of this year's reInvent conference as it respects the customers' digital transformation. Brian Bohan is the director and head of Accenture, AWS Business Group at Amazon web services. Brian, great to see you. And Chris Wegmann is the Accenture Amazon Business Group technology lead at Accenture. Guys this is about technology vision this conversation. Chris, I want to start with you because you're Andy Jackson's keynote. You heard about the strategy of digital transformation, how you got to lean into it. You got to have the guts to go for it and you got to decompose. He went everywhere.(chuckles) So what did you hear? What was striking about the keynote? Because he covered a lot of topics. >> Yeah. It was epic as always from Andy. Lot of topics, a lot to cover in the three hours. There was a couple of things that stood out for me. First of all, hybrid. The concept, the new concept of hybrid and how Andy talked about it, bringing the compute and the power to all parts of an enterprise, whether it be at the edge or are in the big public cloud, whether it be in an Outpost or wherever it'd be, right with containerization now. Being able to do Amazon containerization in my data center and that's awesome. I think that's going to make a big difference. All that being underneath the Amazon console and billing and things like that, which is great. I'll also say the chips, right? I know computer is always something that we always kind of take for granted but I think again, this year, Amazon and Andy really focused on what they're doing with the chips and compute and the compute is still at the heart of everything in cloud. And that continued advancement is making an impact and will make and continue to make a big impact. >> Yeah, I would agree. I think one of the things that really... I mean the container thing was I think really kind of a nuance point. When you've got Deepak Singh on the opening day with Andy Jassy and he runs a container group over there. When we need a small little team, he's on the front stage. That really is the key to the hybrid. I think this showcases this new layer. We're taking advantage of the Graviton2 chips, which I thought was huge. Brian, this is really a key part of the platform change, not change, but the continuation of AWS. Higher level servers, >> Yep. building blocks that provide more capabilities, heavy lifting as they say but the new services that are coming on top really speaks to hybrid and speaks to the edge. >> It does. Yeah. I think like Andy talks about and we talked about we really want to provide choice to our customers, first and foremost. And you can see that in the array of services we have, we can see it in the the hybrid options that Chris talked about. Being able to run your containers through ECS or EKS anywhere. It just get to the customers choice. And one of the things that I'm excited about as you talk about going up the stack and on the edge are things, most certainly Outpost, right? So now Outpost was launched last year but then with the new form factors and then you look at services like Panorama, right? Being able to take computer vision and embed machine learning and computer vision, and do that as a managed capability at the edge for customers. And so we see this across a number of industries. And so what we're really thinking about is customers no longer have to make trade-offs and have to think about those choices, that they can really deploy natively in the cloud and then they can take those capabilities, train those models, and then deploy them where they need to whether that's on premises or at the edge, whether it be in a factory or retail environment. I think we're really well positioned when hopefully next year we start seeing the travel industry rebound and the need more than ever really to kind of rethink about how we kind of monitor and make those environments safe. Having this kind of capability at the edge is really going to help our customers as we come out of this year and hopefully rebound next year. >> Chris, I want to go back to you for a second. It's hard to pick your favorite innovation from the keynote because, Brian, just reminded me of some things I forgot happened. It was like a buffet of innovation. Some keynotes have one or two, there was like 20. You got the industrial piece that was huge. Computer vision, machine learning, that's just a game changer. The connect thing came out of nowhere in my opinion. I mean, it's a call center technology so it's boring as hell, what are you going to do with that?(Brian and Chris chuckle) It turns out it's a game changer. It's not about the calls but the contact and that's distant intermediating in the stack as well. So again, a feature that looks old is actually new and relevant. What was your favorite innovation announcement? >> It's hard to say. I will say my personal favorite was the Mac OS. I think that is a phenomenal just addition, right? And the fact that AWS has worked with Apple to integrate the Nitro chip into the iMac and offer that out. A lot of people are doing development for IOS and that stuff and that's just been a huge benefit for the development teams. But I will say, I'll come back to Connect. You mentioned it but you're right. It's a boring area but it's an area that we've seen huge success with since Connect was launched and the additional features that Amazon continues to bring, obviously with the pandemic and now that customer engagement through the phone, through omni-channel has just been critical for companies, right? And to be able to have those agents at home, working from home versus being in the office, it was a huge advantage for several customers that are using Connect. We did some great stuff with some different customers but the continue technology like you said, the call translation and during a call to be able to pop up those keywords and have a supervisor listen is awesome. And some of that was already being done but we are stitching multiple services together. Now that's right out of the box. And that Google's location is only going to make that go faster and make us to be able to innovate faster for that piece of the business. >> It's interesting not to get all nerdy and business school like but you've got systems of records, systems of engagement. If you look at the call center and the Connect thing, what got my attention was not only the model of disintermediating that part of the engagement in the stack but what actually cloud does to something that's a feature or something that could be an element like say call center, the old days of calling the 800 number and getting some support. You got infra chip, you have machine learning, you actually have stuff in the in the stack that actually makes that different now. The thing that impressed me was Andy was saying, you could have machine learning detect pauses, voice inflections. So now you have technology making that more relevant and better and different. So a lot going on. This is just one example of many things that are happening from a disruption innovation standpoint. What do you guys think about that? Am I getting it right? Can you share other examples? >> I think you are right and I think what's implied there and what you're saying and even in the other Mac OS example is the ability... We're talking about features, right? Which by themselves you're saying, Oh, wow! What's so unique about that? But because it's on AWS and now because whether you're a developer working with Mac iOS and you have access to the 175 plus services that you can then weave into your new application. Talk about the Connect scenario. Now we're embedding that kind of inference and machine learning to do what you say, but then your data Lake is also most likely running in AWS, right? And then the other channels whether they be mobile channels or web channels or in-store physical channels, that data can be captured and that same machine learning could be applied there to get that full picture across the spectrum, right? So that's the power of bringing you together on AWS, the access to all those different capabilities and services and then also where the data is and pulling all that together for that end to end view. >> Can you guys give some examples of work you've done together? I know there's stuff we've reported on, in the last session we talked about some of the connect stuff but that kind of encapsulates where this is all going with respect to the tech. >> Yeah. I think one of them, it was called out on Doug's Partner Summit is a SAP Data Lake Accelerator, right? Almost every enterprise has SAP, right? And getting data out of SAP has always been a challenge, right? Whether it be through data warehouses and AWS, or sorry, SAP BW. What we've focused on is getting that data when you have SAP on AWS, getting that data into the Data Lake, right? Getting it into a model that you can pull the value out and the customers can pull the value out, use those AI models. So that's one thing we worked on in the last 12 months. Super excited about seeing great success with customers. A lot of customers had ideas. They want to do this, they had different models. What we've done is made it very simplified. Framework which allows customers to do it very quickly, get the data out there and start getting value out of it and iterating on that data. We saw customers are spending way too much time trying to stitch it all together and trying to get it to work technically. And we've now cut all of that out and they can immediately start getting down to the data and taking advantage of those different services that are out there by AWS. >> Brian, you want to weigh in as things you see as relevant builds that you guys done together that kind of tease out the future and connect the dots to what's coming? >> I'm going to use a customer example. We worked with, it just came out, with Unilever around their blue air, connected, smart air purifier. And what I think is interesting about that, I think it touches on some of the themes we're talking about as well as some of the themes we talked about in the last session, which is we started that program before the pandemic, but Unilever recognized that they needed to differentiate their product in the marketplace, move to more of a services oriented business which we're seeing as a trend. We enabled this capability. So now it's a smart air purifier that can be remote managed. And now when the pandemic hit, they are in a really good position, obviously, with a very relevant product and capability to be used. And so, that data then as we were talking about is going to reside on the cloud. And so the learning that can now happen about usage and about filter changes, et cetera can find its way back into future iterations of that picked out that product. And I think that's keeping with what Chris is talking about where we might be systems of record like in SAP, how do we bring those in and then start learning from that data so that we can get better on our future iterations? >> Hey, Chris, on the last segment we did on the business mission session, Andy Tay from your team talked about partnerships within a century and working with other folks. I want to take that now on the technical side because one of the things that we heard from Doug's keynote and during the partner day was integrations and data were two big themes. When you're in the cloud technically, the integrations are different. You're going to get unique things in the public cloud that you're just not going to get on-premise access to other cloud native technologies and companies. How do you see the partnering of Accenture with people within your ecosystem and how the data and the integration play together? What's your vision? >> Yeah. I think there's two parts of it. One there's from a commercial standpoint, right? Some marketplace, you heard Dave talk about that in the partner summit, right? That marketplace is now bringing together this ecosystem in a very easy way to consume by the customers and by the users and bringing multiple partners together. And we're working with our ecosystem to put more products out in the marketplace that are integrated together already. I think one from a technical perspective though. If you look at Salesforce, I talked a little earlier about Connect. Another good example technically underneath the covers, how we've integrated Connect and Salesforce, some of it being pre-built by AWS and Salesforce, other things that we've added on top of it, I think are good examples. And I think as these ecosystems these ISVs put their products out there and start exposing more and more APIs on the Amazon platform may opening it up, having those pre-built network connections there between the different VPCs of the different areas within within a customer's network and having them all opened up and connected and having all that networking done underneath the covers. It's one thing to call the APIs, it's one thing to have access to those and that's not a big focus of a lot of ISVs and customers who build those APIs and expose them but having that network infrastructure underneath and being able to stay within the cloud, within AWS to make those connections that pass that data. We always talk about scale, right? It's one thing if I just need to pass like a simple user ID back and forth, right? That's fine. We're not talking massive data sets, whether it be seismic data or whatever it be, passing those large data sets between customers across the Amazon network is going to open up the world. >> Yeah, I see huge possibilities there and love to keep on this story. I think it's going to be important and something to keep track of. I'm sure you guys will be on top of it. One of the things I want to dig into with you guys now is Andy had kind of this philosophical thing in his keynote talk about societal change and how tough the pandemic is. Everything's on full display and this kind of brings out kind of like where we are and the truth. If you look at the truth it's a virtual event. I mean, it's a website and you got some sessions out there, we're doing remote best we can and you've got software and you've got technology and the other concept of a mechanism, it's software, it does something It does a purpose. Accenture, you guys have a concept called Living Systems where growth strategy powered by technology. How do you take the concept of a living organism or a system and replace the mechanism staleness of computing and software? And this is kind of interesting because we're on the cusp of a major inflection point post COVID. I get the digital transformation being slow. That's yes, that's happening. There's other things going on in society. What do you guys think about this Living Systems concept? Yeah. I'll start. I think the living system concept, it started out very much thinking about how do you rapidly change your system, right? And because of cloud, because of DevOps, because of all these software technologies and processes that we've created, that's where it started making it much easier, make it a much faster being able to change rapidly. But you're right. I think if you now bring in more technologies, the AI technology, self-healing technologies. Again, you heard Andy in his keynote talk about the systems and services they're building to detect problems and resolve those problems, right? Obviously automation is a big part of that. Living Systems, being able to bring that all together and to be able to react in real time to either when a customer asks, either through the AI models that have been generated and turning those AI models around much faster and being able to get all the information that came in the last 20 minutes, right? Society is moving fast and changing fast and even in one part of the world, if something in 10 minutes can change. And being able to have systems to react to that, learn from that and be able to pass that on to the next country especially in this world of COVID and things changing very quickly and diagnosis and medical response all that so quickly to be able to react to that and have systems pass that information, learn from that information is going to be critical. >> That's awesome. Brian, one of the things that comes up every year is, oh, the cloud's scalable. This year I think we've talked on theCUBE before, years ago certainly with the Accenture and Amazon. I think it was like three or four years ago. Yeah. The clouds horizontally scalable but vertically specialized at the application layer. But if you look at the Data Lake stuff that you guys have been doing where you have machine learning, the data is horizontally scalable and then you got the specialization in the app changes the whole vertical thing. You don't need to have a whole vertical solution or do you? So, how has this year's cloud news impacted vertical industries? Because it used to be, oh, oil and gas, financial services. They've got a team for that. We got a stack for that. Not anymore. Is it going away? What's changing? >> Well. It's a really good question. I think what we're seeing, and I was just on a call this morning talking about banking and capital markets and I do think the challenges are still pretty sector specific. But what we do see is the kind of commonality when we start looking at the, and we talked about this, the industry solutions that we're building as a partnership, most of them follow the pattern of ingesting data, analyzing that data and then being able to provide insights and then actions, right? So if you think about creating that kind of common chassis of that in just the Data Lake and then the machine learning, and you talk about the nuances around SageMaker and being able to manage these models, what changes then really are the very specific industries' algorithms that you're writing, right, within that framework. And so, we're doing a lot and Connect is a good example of this too, where you look at it and yeah, customer service is a horizontal capability that we're building out, but then when you stamp it into insurance or retail banking, or utilities, there are nuances then that we then extend and build so that we meet the unique needs of those industries and that's usually around those models. >> Yeah. I think this year was the first reInvent that I saw real products coming out that actually solved that problem. I mean, it was there last year SageMaker was kind of moving up the stack, but now you have apps embedding machine learning directly in and users don't even know it's in there. I mean, cause this is kind of where it's going, right? I mean-- >> You saw that was in announcements, right? How many announcements where machine learning is just embedded in? I mean, CodeGuru, DevOps Guru, the Panorama we talked about, it's just there. >> Yeah. I mean having that knowledge about the linguistics and the metadata, knowing the business logic, those are important specific use cases for the vertical and you can get to it faster. Chris, how is this changing on the tech side, your perspective? >> Yeah. I keep coming back to AWS and cloud makes it easier, right? All this stuff can be done and some of it has been done, but what Amazon continues to do is make it easier to consume by the developer, by the customer and to actually embed it into applications much easier than it would be if I had to go set up the stack and build it all on them and embed it, right? So it's shortcoming that process and again, as these products continue to mature, right, and some of this stuff is embedded, it makes that process so much faster. It reduces the amount of work required by the developers the engineers to get there. So, I'm expecting you're going to see more of this, right. I think you're going to see more and more of these multi connected services by AWS, that has a lot of the AI ML pre-configured Data Lakes, all that kind of stuff embedded in those services. So you don't have to do it yourself and continue to go up the stack. And we always talk about Amazon's built for builders, right? But, builders have been super specialized and are becoming, as engineers were being asked to be bigger and bigger and to be be able to do more stuff and I think these kind of integrated services are going to help us do that >> And certainly needed more now when you have hybrid edge that they're going to be operating with microservices on a cloud model and with all those advantages that are going to come around the corner for being in the cloud. I mean, I think there's going to be a whole clarity around benefits in the cloud with all these capabilities and benefits. Cloud Guru I think it's my favorite this year because it just points to why that could happen. I mean that happens because of the cloud data.(laughs) If you're on-premise, you may not have a little Cloud Guru. you are going to get more data but they're all different. Edge certainly will come in too. Your vision on the edge, Chris, how you see that evolving for customers because that could be complex, new stuff. How is it going to get easier? >> Yeah. It's super complex now, right? I mean, you got to design for all the different edge 5G protocols are out there and solutions, right? Amazon's simplifying that. Again, I come back to simplification, right? I can build an app that works on any 5G network that's been integrated with AWS, right. I don't have to set up all the different layers to get back to my cloud or back to my my bigger data set. And that's kind of choking. I don't even know where to call the cloud anymore. I got big cloud which is a central and I go down then you've got a cloud at the edge. Right? So what do I call that? >> Brian: It's just really computing.(laughing) Exactly. So, again, I think is this next generation of technology with the edge comes right and we put more and more data at the edge. We're asking for more and more compute at the edge, right? Whether it be industrial or for personal use or consumer use, that processing is going to get more and more intense to be able to maintain under a single console, under a single platform and be able to move the code that I developed across that entire platform, whether I have to go all the way down to the very edge at the 5G level, right, or all the way back into the bigger cloud and how that processing in there, being able to do that seamlessly is going to allow the speed of development that's needed. >> Wow. You guys done a great job and no better time to be a techie or interested in technology or computer science or social science for that matter. This is a really perfect store. A lot of problems to solve, a lot of change happening, positive change opportunities, a lot of great stuff. Final question guys. Five years working together now on this partnership with AWS and Accenture. Congratulations, you guys are in pole position for the next wave coming. What's exciting you guys? Chris, what's on your mind? Brian, what's getting you guys pumped up? >> Well, again, I come back to Andy mentioned it in his keynote, right? We're seeing customers move now, right. Five years ago we knew customers were going to do this. We built a partnership to enable these enterprise customers to make that journey, right? But now, even more we're seeing them move at such great speed, right? Which is super excites me, right? Because I can see... Being in this for a long time now, I can see the value on the other end. We've been wanting to push our customers as fast as they can through the journey and now they're moving. Now they're getting the religion, they're getting there. They see they need to do it to change your business so that's what excites me. It just the excites me, it's just the speed at which we're going to to see the movement. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that. I mean, I just think getting customers to the cloud is super important work and we're obviously doing that and helping accelerate that. It's what we've been talking about when we're there all the possibilities that become available, right? Through the common data capabilities, the access to the 175 somewhat AWS services. I also think and this is kind of permeated through this week at Re:invent is the opportunity, especially in those industries that do have an industrial aspect, a manufacturing aspect, or a really strong physical aspect of bringing together IT and operational technology and the business with all these capabilities and I think edge and pushing machine learning down to the edge and analytics at the edge is really going to help us do that. And so I'm super excited by all that possibility because I feel like we're just scratching the surface there. >> It's a great time to be building out. and this is the time for reconstruction, reinvention. Big theme, so many storylines in the keynote and the events . It's going to keep us busy here at SiliconANGLE on theCUBE for the next year. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks. >> Thank you. All right. Great conversation. We're getting technical. We're going to go another 30 minutes A lot to talk about. A lot of storylines here at AWS Re:Invent 2020 at the Accenture Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit 2020. Sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome to CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a CUBE alum, Karthik Narain. He is Accenture's senior managing director and lead Accenture Cloud First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >> I think COVID-19 has been a eye-opener from various facets, first and foremost, it's a health situation that everybody's facing, which not just has economic bearings to it. It has enterprise and organizational bearing to it, and most importantly, it's very personal to people because they themselves and their friends, family, near and dear ones are going through this challenge from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organizational enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's one big change to get things done in a completely different way from how they used to get things done. Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client, customers, how they co-innovate with their partners, and how their employees contribute to the success of an organization, they're all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are launching to innovate faster in this, and there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and laggards are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders with a lot of pivot in their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the laggards, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >> So you just talked about the widening gap. You've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well in this time. Talk a little bit about Accenture Cloud First and why now? >> I think it's a great question. We believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an urgent mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says "We don't believe in cloud," or "We don't want to do cloud." It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting, they were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to pivot faster and are actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. So we are seeing that this pandemic has actually fast forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen, this movement to cloud over the next decade, it has fast forwarded it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud-first moment where organizations will use cloud as the canvas, as the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. And this requires a whole new strategy. And at Accenture, we are doing a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that capabilities together because we need a strategy for addressing movement to cloud or embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture Cloud First brings together, a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to deliver that holistic strategy to our clients. >> So I want you to delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment, and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >> Yeah. The reason why we say there is a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, "I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the rest to cloud." Certain other organizations say that "Oh, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud." Certain other organizations said, "Oh, I'm going to build this greenfield application or workload in cloud." Certain others said, "I'm going to use the power of AI/ML in the cloud to analyze my data and derive insights." But a cloud-first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey. To say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same fashion that I did it in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be reimagined, how they interact with their customers and partners need to be revisited, how they build and operate their IT systems need to be reimagined, how they unearth the data from all the systems under which they are trapped need to be liberated so that you could derive insights. A cloud-first strategy hence is a corporate-wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CDIO, but the CIOs and CDIOs felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it, and everyone else being a customer. Now the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDIO is the instrument to execute that. That's a holistic cloud-first strategy. >> And it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done what I need to get done? Talk a little bit about how this has changed the way you support your clients and how Accenture Cloud First is changing your approach to cloud services. >> Wonderful. You know, I did not cover one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is, to do all of this, I talked about all the variables an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, because if those employees are able to embrace this change, if they are able to change themselves, pivot themselves, retool and train themselves, to be able to operate in this new cloud-first world, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud-first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is directly proportional to the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot, for any kind of experimentation, there's a probability of success, and organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster, for which they need to experiment a lot. The more they experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot, and experiment them at speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track their innovation journey, and this is going to happen, like I said, across the enterprise in every function, across every department, and the agent of this change is going to be the employees who have to embrace this change through new skills and new tooling, and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >> So Karthik, what you're describing, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic-weary workforce that's been working remotely, that may be dealing with uncertainty for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is often the hardest part. >> Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come out for something else to go in. That's what you're saying, it's absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that we could create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing their complex infrastructure, complex IT landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult and a roundabout way, cloud has simplified and democratized a lot of these activities, so that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud, so that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror, on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The world of platform economy is about democratizing innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise. >> It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into his or her day-to-day activities too. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a normal evolution we would have seen, everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that gets performed by those individuals. And this is, you know, no more true than how the United States, as an economy has operated where this is a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up the value chain and US leverages the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States. And that global economic phenomenon is very true for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do themselves, there are things an employee needs to do themselves, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >> So at Accenture, you have long, deep stand, sorry, you have deep and long standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture Cloud First strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >> Yeah. We have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first capability that we started about 13 years ago, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a formal partnership with joint investments to build this partnership, and we named that as Accenture AWS Business Group, AABG, where we co-invested, brought skills together and developed solutions. And we will continue to do that, and through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like Enimbos and Gekko that we made acquisitions in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is through cloud-first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in through cloud-first, we are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones, foundation cloud packs, with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud-first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, a global pharmaceutical giant, with whom we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where the two organizations are coming together, we have created a partnership as a power of three partnership where the three organizations are jointly holding hands and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to. With this, we are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing it flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Takeda is a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, come up with breakthrough R and D, accelerate clinical trials, and improve the patient experience using AI, ML, and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joint investment from Accenture Cloud First, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And their CEO actually made a statement that five years from now, every Takeda employee will have an AI assistant that's going to make that Takeda employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of Takeda, with the AI assistant making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >> So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for Accenture Cloud First? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture Executive Summit? >> Yeah, the future is going to be evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution, from industrial first, second, and third industrial, the third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And there's a great article in World Economic Forum that your audience can Google and read about it. But the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years, we are seeing a plateauing of the labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. And when you see that kind of phenomenon over that long a period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next base camp, as I would call it, to further this productivity lag that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that, where it's the edge, especially is going to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Pictorally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center, or in a public cloud, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far-reaching and coming close to where we live and where we work and where we get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's going to be intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of manufacturing, in the field of mobility, when I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth, with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud-first is going to be plowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human race of mankind, or personkind, being very gender neutral in today's world, cloud-first needs to be that beacon of creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why in Accenture we say "Let there be change" as our purpose. And I genuinely believe that cloud-first is going to be in the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the world. >> Excellent. Let there be change indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. What? Welcome, everyone to the Cube Virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we're talking about the power of three. And what happens when you bring together the scientific know how of a global bias Bio pharmaceutical powerhouse in Takeda, a leading cloud services provider in AWS and Accenture's ability to innovate, execute and deliver innovation, Joining me to talk about these things we have Aaron. Sorry. Arjun, baby. He is the senior managing director and chairman of Accenture's Diamond Leadership Council. Welcome margin, you Carl Hick. He is the chief digital and information officer at Takeda. >>Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Rebecca >>and Brian Bowen, global director and head of the Accenture AWS Business Group at Amazon Web services. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you. So, as I said, we're talking today about this relationship between your three organizations. Carl, I want to talk with you. I know you're at the beginning of your cloud journey. What was the compelling reason Why? Why I moved to the cloud and why now? >>Yeah. No, thank you for the question. So you know as ah, bio pharmaceutical leader were committed toe bringing better health and a brighter future to our patients. We're doing that by translating science and toe some really innovative and life transporting therapies. But throughout, you know, we believe that there's, ah responsible use of technology of data and of innovation. And those three ingredients air really key to helping us deliver on that promise. And so, you know, while I think I'll call it this Cloud Journeys already has always been a part of our strategy. Andi have made some pretty steady progress over the last years with a number of local it diverse approaches to the digital in AI. We just weren't seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see. Andi, I think that you know, there's a there's a need ultimately to accelerate and broaden that shift. And, you know, we were commenting on this earlier, but there's, you know, it's been highlighted by a number of factors. One of those has been certainly a number of the large acquisitions we've made Shire being the most pressing example, but also the global pandemic. Both of those highlight the need for us to move faster at the speed of cloud ultimately on. So we started thinking outside of the box because it was taking us too long and we decided to leverage the strategic partner model on. It's giving us a chance to think about our challenges very differently. We call this the power of three on. Ultimately, our focus is singularly on our patients. I mean, they're waiting for us. We need Thio. Get there faster. It can take years. And so I think that there is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy. >>So as you are embarking on this journey, what are some of the insights you want to share about? About what you're seeing so far? >>Yeah. No, it's a great question. So I mean, look, maybe right before I highlight some of the key insights, I would say that, you know, with Cloud now as the as a launchpad for innovation, you know, our vision all along has been that in less than 10 years we want every single to Kito associate. We're employees to be empowered by an AI assistant. And I think that, you know that's gonna help us make faster, better decisions that will help us. Uh, fundamentally, you know, deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to to that ecosystem, to our patients, to positions to payers, etcetera much faster than we previously thought possible. Um, and I think that technologies like cloud and edge computing together with a very powerful or call it data fabric is gonna help us to create this this really time. I'll call it the digital ecosystem. The data has to flow ultimately seamlessly between our patients and providers or partners or researchers. Etcetera. Uh, and so we've been thinking about this, Uh, call it. We call it sort of this pyramid. Um, that helps us describe our vision on a lot of it has to do with ultimately modernizing the foundation, modernizing and re architect ing the platforms that drive the company, heightening our focus on data, which means that there's an accelerated shift towards enterprise data platforms and digital products. And then, ultimately, a, you know, really an engine for innovation. Sitting at the very top, um, and So I think with that, you know, there's a few different I'll call it insights that you know are quickly kind of come zooming into focus. I would say one is this need to collaborate very differently. Um, you know, not only internally, but you know, how do we define ultimately and build a connected digital ecosystem with the right partners and technologies? Externally, I think the second component that maybe people don't think as much about but, you know, I find critically important is for us to find ways of really transforming our culture. We have to unlock talent and shift the culture, certainly as a large biopharmaceutical, very differently. And then, lastly, you've touched on it already. Which is, you know, innovation at the speed of cloud. How do we re imagine that you know how Doe ideas go from getting tested in months? That kind of getting tested in days, you know, how do we collaborate very differently on So I think those air three, perhaps of the larger chocolate insights that you know the three of us are spending a lot of time thinking about right now. >>So, Arjun, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit. Let's let's delve into those a bit. Talk first about the collaboration that Carl was referencing there. How how have you seen that it is enabling colleagues and teams to communicate differently, interact in new and different ways, both internally and externally. As Carl said, >>No, thank you for that. And I've got to give called a lot of credit because as we started to think about this journey, it was clear was a bold ambition. It was, uh, something that, you know, we had all to do differently. And so the concept of the power of three that Karl has constructed has become a label for us as a way to think about what are we going to do to collectively drive this journey forward? And to me, the unique ways of collaboration means three things. The first one is that what is expected is that the three parties they're going to come together, and it's more than just the sum of our resource is, and by that I mean that we have to bring all of ourselves all of our collective capabilities as an example. Amazon has amazing supply chain capabilities there. One of the best at supply chain. So in addition to Resource is when we have supply chain innovations, that's something that they're bringing in addition to just talent and assets. Similarly, for Accenture, right, we do a lot in the talent space. So how do we bring our thinking as to how we apply best practices for talent to this partnership? So as we think about this, so that's that's the first one. The second one is about shared success. Very early on in this partnership, we started to build some foundations and actually develop seven principles that all of us would look at it as the basis for this success shared success model. And we continue to hold that sort of in the forefront as we think about this collaboration. And maybe the third thing I would say is this one team mindset. So whether it's the three of our CEO's that get together every couple of months to think about this partnership or it is the governance model that Karl has put together, which has all three parties in the governance and every level of leadership, we always think about this as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center. And what this, I think, ultimately has enabled us to do Is it allowed us to move its speed, be more flexible and ultimately all be looking at the target the same way the North south? The same way. >>Brian. What? What about you? What have you observed? What are you thinking about? In terms of how this is helping teams collaborate differently? >>Yeah, absolutely. And Georgia made some great points there. And I think if you really think about what he's talking about, it's that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint and even culture. Right? And so we see that in the power of three. And I think if we drilled down into what we see at Takeda and frankly, Takeda was really, I think, pretty visionary and on their way here, right, and taking this kind of cross functional approach and applying it to how they operate day to day. So moving from a more functional view of the world to more of a product oriented view of the world, right? So when you think about, we're gonna be organized around a product or service or capability that we're gonna provide to our customers are patients or donors. In this case, it implies a different structure, although altogether in a different way of thinking. Right, because now you've got technical people in business experts and marketing experts all working together in This is sort of a cross collaboration, and what's great about that is it's really the only way to succeed with Cloud, right, because the old ways of thinking where you've got application people in infrastructure, people and business people is sub optimal, right, because we can all access this tools and capabilities. And the best way to do that isn't across kind of a cross collaborative way. And so this is product oriented mindset of Takeda was already on, I think is allowed us to move faster in those areas. >>Carl, I wanna go back to this idea of unlocking talent and culture, and this is something that both Brian and origin have talked about. Two people are are an essential part of their at the heart of your organization. How will their experience of work change and how are you helping reimagine and reinforce a strong organizational culture, particularly at this time when so many people are working remotely. >>Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I think we all have to think a lot about. I mean, I think, you know, driving this this call this this digital and data kind of capability building takes a lot of a lot of thinking. So I mean, there's a few different elements in terms of how we're tackling this one is we're recognizing. And it's not just for the technology organization or for those actors that that we're innovating with. But it's really across, you know, all of Takeda. We're working through ways of raising what I'll call the overall digital leaders literacy of the organization. You know, what are the, You know, what are the skills that are needed almost at a baseline level, even for, ah, global biopharmaceutical company? And how do we deploy? I'll call it Those learning resource is very broadly, and then secondly, I think that, you know, we're very clear that there's a number of areas where they're very specialized skills that are needed. Uh, my organization is one of those, and so, you know, we're fostering ways in which you know, were very kind of quickly kind of creating avenues, excitement for for associates in that space. So one example specifically is we use, you know, during these very much sort of remote sort of days, we use what we call global it me days, and we set a day aside every single month and this last Friday. Um, you know, we create during that time, it's time for personal development. Um, and we provide active seminars and training on things like, you know, robotic process automation, Data Analytics Cloud. Uh, in this last month, we've been doing this for months and months now, but in his last month, more than 50% of my organization participated. And there's this huge positive shift, both in terms of access and excitement about really harnessing those new skills and being able to apply them on. So I think that that's, you know, 11 element that can be considered. And then thirdly, of course, every organization has to work on. How do you prioritize talent, acquisition and management and competencies that you can't re skill? I mean, there's just some new capabilities that we don't have, And so there's a large focus that I have with our executive team in our CEO and thinking through those critical roles that we need to activate in order kind of thio build on this, uh, this business led cloud transformation and lastly, probably the hardest one. But the one that I'm most jazzed about is really this focus on changing the mindsets and behaviors. Andi, I think there, you know, this is where the power of three is really kind of coming together nicely. E mean, we're working on things like, you know, how do we create this patient obsessed curiosity? Um, and really kind of unlock innovation with a really kind of a growth mindset, Uh, and the level of curiosity that's needed not to just continue to do the same things, but to really challenge the status quo. So that's one big area of focus. We're having the agility toe act just faster. I mean, toe worry less. I guess I would say about kind of the standard chain of command, but how do you make more speedy, more courageous decisions? And this is places where we can emulate the way that ah, partner like AWS works? Or how do we collaborate across the number of boundaries, you know, and I think origin spoke eloquently to a number of partnerships that we can build so we can break down some of these barriers and use these networks. Um, whether it's within our own internal ecosystem or externally, to help to create value faster. So a lot of energy around ways of working we'll have to check back in. But, I mean, we're early in on this mindset and behavioral shift, but a lot of good early momentum. >>Carl, you've given me a good segue to talk to Brian about innovation because you said a lot of the things that I was the customer obsession and this idea of innovating much more quickly. Obviously. Now the world has its eyes on drug development, and we've all learned a lot about it in the past few months. And accelerating drug development is all of is of great interest to all of us. Brian How does a transformation like this help a company's ability to become more agile and more innovative? Add quicker speed to >>Yeah, No, absolutely. And I think some of the things that Karl talked about just now are critical to that. Right? I think, where sometimes you know, folks fall short is they think, you know, we're going to roll out the technology and the technology is going to be the Silver Bullet, where, in fact it is. The culture it is is the talent, and it's the focus on that. That's going to be, you know, the determinant of success. And I will say, You know, in this power of three arrangement, Karl talked a lot about the pyramid, um, talent and culture and that change. And that kind of thinking about that has been a first class citizen since the very beginning. Right? That absolutely is critical for being there. Um and so that's been that's been key. And so we think about innovation at Amazon and AWS, and Carl mentioned some of things that, you know, partner like AWS can bring to the table is we talk a lot about builders, right? So we're kind of obsessive about builders, Onda. We mean what we mean by that is way at Amazon, we hire for builders, we cultivate builders and we like to talk to our customers about it as well. And it also implies a different mindset. Right? When you're a builder, you have that curiosity. You have that ownership. You have that steak and whatever I am creating. I'm going to be a co owner of this product or the service right getting back to that kind of product oriented mindset. And it's not just the technical people or the I t. People who are builders. It is also the business people, as Karl talked about right. So when we start thinking about innovation again, where we see folks kind of get into a little bit of innovation, pilot paralysis is that you can focus on the technology. But if you're not focusing on the talent and the culture and the processes and the mechanisms, you're gonna be putting out technology. But you're not gonna have an organization that's ready to take it and scale and accelerated right, and so that's that's been absolutely critical. So just a couple of things we've been doing with with Takeda indicate, has really been leading the way is think about a mechanism and a process, and it's really been working backwards from the customer, right? In this case again, the patient and the donor. And that was an easy one because a key value of decadas is to be a patient focused biopharmaceutical, right? So that was embedded in their DNA. So that working back from that, that patient, that donor was a key part of that process. And that's really deep in our DNA as well in eccentrics. And so we're able to bring that together. The other one is, is getting used to experimenting and even perhaps failing right and being able to reiterate and fail fast and experiment and understanding that you know some decisions, what we call it at Amazon or to a doors meaning you could go through that door not like what you see and turn around and go back. And cloud really helps there. Because the cost of experimenting and the cost of failure is so much lower than it's ever been. You could do it much faster, and the implications there so much less so just a couple of things that we've been really driving with a kid around innovation that's been really critical. >>Carl, where are you already seeing signs of success? >>Yeah, No, it's a great question. And so we chose, you know, with our focus on innovation to try to unleash maybe the power of data digital in uh, focusing on what I call sort of a maid. And so we chose our plasma derived therapy business. Um and you know, the plasma drive therapy business unit? It develops critical lifesaving therapies for patients with a rare and complex diseases. Um, but what we're doing is by bringing kind of our energy together, we're focusing on creating called State of the art digitally connected donation centers. And we're really modernizing. You know, the donor experience right now we're trying Thio improve. Also, I'll call it the overall Plasma Collection process. And so we've selected a number of uncle at very high speed pilots that were working through right now specifically in this in this area, and we're seeing really great results already on DSO. That's that's one specific area of focus. >>Arjun, I want you to close this out here. Any ideas? Any best practices advice you would have for other pharmaceutical companies that are that are at the early stage of their cloud journey. >>Sorry. Was that for me? >>Yes. Sorry. Urgent? >>Yeah. No, I was breaking up a bit. No, I think the key is what sort of been great for me to see is that when people think about cloud, you know, you always think about infrastructure technology. The reality is that the cloud is really the true enabler for innovation at innovating at scale. And if you think about that, right and all the components that you need, ultimately, that's where the value is for the company, right? Because, yes, you're gonna get some cost synergies, and that's great. But the true value is And how do we transform the organization? The case of Takeda and a life sciences clients, right. We're trying to take a 14 year process of research and development that takes billions of dollars and compress that right. Tremendous amounts of innovation, opportunity. You think about the commercial aspect, lots of innovation can come that the plasma derived therapy is a great example of how we're gonna really innovate to change the trajectory of that business. So I think innovation is at the heart of what most organizations need to do. And the formula the cocktail that Takeda has constructed with this Fuji program really has all the ingredients, um, that are required for that success. >>Great. Well, thank you so much. Arjun, Brian and Carl was really an enlightening conversation. >>Thank you. It's been a lot of >>fun. Thank you. >>Uh, been fun. Thanks, Rebecca. >>And thank you for tuning into the Cube. Virtual is coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Brian Bohan, he is the Director of the Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group Global Lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, Managing Director Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group. Oh my word (all laugh) how big are your business cards? >> Exactly >> Well welcome for both of you Thanks for coming on the show. So the relationship between AWS and Accenture is now in its 13th year. I want to hear from both of you, what's new what's exciting about the relationship and I'm going to start with you Chris. >> Yeah, so it's been 13 great years. Four years since we used the AABG, we use the acronym to make it easier to say >> Rebecca: Okay, thank you, and now you tell me. >> The Accenture AWS Business Group. So the partnership continues to get stronger, continues to grow, we've doubled down on the partnership this last year, really increasing our investment and our focus. We've done in the last year really a lot of focus around industries. So we continue to build our teams we continue to grow on the number of certified resources we have. And our clients are just eatin' that stuff up. So it just gives us more opportunity to grow. >> Ryan? >> Yeah, I mean I think you can see, it's consistent with what you see here at the event and also with Andy's keynote. The emphasis on enterprise and as we see large enterprises really accelerating to AWS, I think that's what we're seeing as well. At any given time we have hundreds of projects going on around the world, but when we formed the business group in 2015 it was really around driving really large transformations with customers and what we're seeing now is customers at the place of maturity and willing to take, embark on those journeys and I think we're really well set up to make that happen together as a partnership. >> So as you kind of enter into this new phase now of kind of working with companies, are you seeing any kind of increasing specialization in the types of companies you're working with? >> Yeah, no absolutely. So I think that's why the answer's really exciting. So I think if you look across this is fairly typical. We started out in a lot of horizontal capability areas and they're still incredibly important to us around data and SAP, mass migrations and these are areas we continue to invest in and we tend to get even more specialized as we do so, but we're also seeing this last year is getting more industry focused. So as we move up the stack and we start talking about cloud native development, we start talking about machine learning and analytics, customer care has become a really interesting thing. So you see a lot of companies, whether it be tire companies, CPG companies, moving from products companies extending into services, it completely changes how they think about customer care and how they need to understand their data and understand their customers. So necessarily as you move up that stack, you have to have that deep domain expertise and so what's fantastic is we have great technology, we're building out some teams with domain expertise, but Accenture has got thousands of people with this expertise. So it's again this kind of combining of strengths that we're able to bring to the table for our customers. >> Yeah we saw when we started the group, we knew Accenture's strong position in industries, right. Our deep industry knowledge, knowing those industries really well we knew they would come together at some point, the technology and industry. And we've seen that over the last 12 months really start to take effect. Companies are now specifically thinking about how they leverage Amazon for their specifically industry solutions and capabilities, and we're just going after that. >> So Andy Jassy in his fireside chat this morning talked about innovation at AWS and he said, we're a big company but we need to think of ourselves as a big startup. So here are two big companies, how do you innovate together what is your relationship like? I mean you said it's 13 great years, but what's your creative process? >> So I'll take a stab. So first of all, I'll say that in recognition of that we actually on our team, and this year into some light of and Chris mentioned a doubling down the partnership, we're growing the team we have on the AWS side to support the partnership. And with some of the things we're doing in addition to adding industry folks, is I've added a full time team to focus on innovation. And it's innovation with customers but it's also all the mechanisms we use. So if you think about with AWS, a lot of customers come to us and want to understand how does Amazon innovate, what is our culture of innovation? So at Amazon we have a program that we've rolled out around that. Accenture also has many mechanisms around innovation. Small teams driving very agile projects, and it's our job, that team's job and my team to go around and pull the best of breed across the world and make sure that we're delivering that to clients every single day. And so more and more clients want to see not just the outputs, but they want us to imbed in their teams and also show them by doing. So yes, give us the deliverable but we want to build the muscle around what Accenture and AWS can do together around innovation. So that's more and more what we see. >> Yeah and we follow the Amazon principles, right. The principles that Andy talks about that are core to innovation there, we follow them. From the beginning when we started this partnership we started working backwards, what we wanted it to be in five, ten years and we follow those. So our teams act that way, they work that way, they follow those day to day out and it makes us, it allows us to integrate well into AWS into the AWS people around the world. For Accenture it gives us, our people a insight into how AWS does it, and then we can share that with our customers as well. >> Interesting, so Chris you've been doing this a long time. Right, okay and so, and you guys have been collaborating for a long time, when Amazon first started there was a whole new breed of companies they were coming out, we'd call kind of born in the cloud. Companies that were agile and fast moving, taking advantage of a lot of the technology stack to do things that a lot of legacy companies couldn't do. Now we're starting to see what has been termed kind of companies being reborn in the cloud, right. Older, leg--, you know older companies now that are transforming moving their workloads to the cloud and then getting new types of capabilities. I'm wondering in your work, are you seeing some examples of companies that are kind of undergoing that kind of transformation? >> Yeah absolutely. I think we see what we would call an epic disruption of these companies right. It's happening, it's been happening for awhile. I think they've gotten, they've looked at Amazon now more as not just a cloud, and not just infrastructure, going up the stack and doing that. So they're going through these transformations and we see them balancing between moving their workloads to AWS versus innovating. And also changing, they've realized they have to change the organization to go along with that. It's just not moving and acting in the same old way so we're seeing agile and cloud come together to drive that transformation. So I would say almost every customer we're seeing today is going through that transformation in some form or fashion >> Yeah, I would say that's also a really interesting change Again, years ago we were, if you were focused on a mass migration today, the conversation is if you're a pharmaceutical company how do you get your pipeline of therapeutics out to market faster, right? How do you start thinking about patients differently or patient services, the data you have on those patients how do you integrate further into the value chain and to providers and payers and get that information. So, and what happens, what you find is to be able to deliver say precision medicine and pharmaceutical you need to rethink about your data, then you have to look at your application portfolio and say, okay what does that need to look like to support this completely new paradigm serving our patients? And that's what ends up pulling the workloads through to support these new business initiatives. So I think that's a bit of a difference that we've been seeing as well in the last couple years. >> One of the messages we're hearing is that journeys of the cloud really represents the fourth industrial revolution. I'm wondering, in terms of the pace of innovation are there any new technologies that maybe even just from a couple of years ago that are just table stakes today? >> Yeah no, I think the table stakes, AI and ML are quickly becoming table stakes, right. And that's what I love about AWS, they make the stuff easy to consume. Right, SageMaker and that stuff. Last year I was able to go in through DeepRacer and going through that I was able to do a model in 30 minutes. I don't do a lot of coding anymore these days, but on a plane I was able to create my first model. And so that stuff is becoming table stakes. They're making it very easy, so there is no excuse to not do ML or AI in your application. I don't need a separate set of data scientists sitting off to the side. So that to me, and data in the cloud, right. So the data being there so I can consume it in AI and ML that's table stakes, there is no more hey, I'm just only going to put what I don't care about, or what I want to low cost data store, it's table stakes to have that data there, accessible to your people 24-7. >> And what does that mean for your workforce? Because as you said, these are now basics. You need to know how to use these tools and be willing to experiment with these technologies. How do you make sure your workforce has the right skills and the right mentality and approach? >> So one of the things I talked a little bit about DeepRacer last year when DeepRacer came out, I was sitting there kind of scratching my head and saying, what is this, right? It's a glorified RC car. And one of my team members was texting me and saying, we've got to do this. And what that, we've run a private league, and what that's done is it's taken well over 1400 people who never knew what machine learning, R-reinforcement learning was and got them engaged in doing it. So now they've got that experience, they're now hungry for more knowledge through a fun activity, a competition. You know we're all very competitive people at Accenture, so that was just, it caught on amazing, it was amazing just around the world at how these people took onto it and why our employees took onto it. >> Yeah, the person who won that league, so it was across 30 different innovation centers at Accenture, plus hundreds of people virtually building cars, and the guy who won it out of Kronsberg, Germany had never touched AWS the day before. And I dunno if this is true, the story's great, he supposedly wrote his model on the train to the innovation center that day, he ran the model and came up like four one hundredths of a second off the world record. So great example, yeah, of somebody who wasn't in the AWS kind ecosystem at Accenture, got turned on my this new technology, this new capability, dove in and now he's enabled, right. And we talk about innovation, so innovation is also like I said, not just what you're delivering for the client but how you're doing it. So that same team actually who started the DeepRacer league down in Australia, they've been creating what they call a hackathon as a service. So working with customers, not just doing slideware and going through courseware, but getting folks in a room like this and you've seen it here at the event, have a business problem that you want to solve, get a bunch of people in a room, business people, technology people, and hack away. In a low risk environment that's collaborative where you can share and you're learning by doing. So we're seeing a lot of that, and so you've got to really, like think of new ways that you're going to enable the workforce especially if you hope to scale this. >> So one of the things obviously that Accenture brings to the table, AWS got a global platform but you're a consulting firm with global reach. And everybody wants to use data in new ways but how you use data in different regions and different localities can vary. So how are you working with customers to be able to kind of enable that? >> Yeah, so obviously a lot of different regulations, country by country, and they're changing very rapidly so we have to stay on top of it. One of the things we've done is through our we formed a state of business group last year. We've completely focused on data. Includes AABG folks, Amazon folks, but they're very regionally based. So we stood up a lighthouse here in North America, in New Jersey, and the experts sitting in that are very well versed in what North America or the US is doing around data privacy and security and things like that. So they're taking what they learned, the same thing, we opened it in London last, a few weeks ago in Canada, other places. So we're definitely taking a regional focus but we're making sure through the partnership that the techniques, the tooling, the capabilities are being pushed down into those groups. So they're taking all that experience and that knowledge but putting a local slant to it and making sure it's locally compatible. >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting too is you talk about, I mean data we're seeing this take off in every industry and it's so critical, but two of the areas that the data business group is seeing the most traction actually are financial services and life sciences pharmaceutical health care. So you would think, those are two of the most regulated industries in the world, extremely sensitive data, you wouldn't think those would be the ones out in front but they are, and because there's so much value to be had. So even in Europe, working with pharmaceutical companies there together, and their R and D process around patient services and being able to use native data lakes on AWS, use machine learning to gain new insights in terms of how therapeutics are working on patient populations, right. And so this is again, very sensitive information but hugely valuable, and Accenture through this business group has all the capabilities so that we can have the best of both worlds, right. And have it accessible, analyze it in AWS but have it secure as well. >> And a lot of research show, actually the constraints can power innovation. The fact that it, because it is so sensitive and there are these regulatory concerns around it that that in fact enables people to be more, they're forced to be more creative. >> Yeah, and it's the old, you know cars didn't go fast until they put brakes on them, kind of a thing, right. And we see that, absolutely. And I think that sort to thing is, big enterprise customers, they want to move fast but they're public companies, they have to ensure that they're mitigating risk. So again we're investing a lot in moving fast but doing it in a way that controls risk and is able to kind of give them the assurances that they need. >> And definitely the platformed has helped, right. Amazon investing in that platform, bringing the tools like you saw on Andy's keynote, some things around the S3 bucket, you know those type of things. Those are enabling, and those regulations, us to deal with those regulations much faster and less work on our side to build the things that are need to meet those regulations. So definitely the platform growing and expanding is definitely helping us go faster. >> That's a great point, right. I mean because also if you have, you know whether your data, your applications in your on-premises environment chances are you don't have the granular visibility that you would like into that environment, whereas you move it into AWS, you have all these tools to really get as granular as you want and really understand your environment and make sure that you have control over it. So it really creates a new paradigm for that. >> One of the things that really struck me during Andy's keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy's keynote, was the fact when we was announcing all these, this dizzying number of new products and services >> Brian: I'm not sure how he does that (all laugh) >> I know, just how many of them rely on the technology ecosystem to be successful. So can you just riff on that a little bit about how really the landscape for technology has changed so dramatically in the sense that all these companies need to cooperate and collaborate, and here we are. You two, you're a living and breathing example. >> Absolutely, you know I think you'll hear Andy say it, is the right tool for the right job. AWS, we're very much about giving customers choice. So there's a lot of options and you know we went through all the different database options that we have. So they're very specific to specific use cases. Now that also implies that you have to know which tools to use for the right job and you have to have very skilled craftsmen. So that's where we rely on partners like Accenture who have those skilled craftsmen, in addition to our own to really extend that. And then you look at the ISV ecosystem, right and some of those ISVs and our technology partners who've done an amazing job of taking our capabilities but then extending them further into whatever domain that they're very expert in, and there's a very specific IP delivers extra value to their customers. And so that's what, we want to give all this choice, whether it's a customer, or a technology partner, a consultancy like Accenture can really thrive. >> And I think if you walk through the show floor you see what these companies are doing. And they're not afraid to innovate and they're not afraid to take on some of the bigger challenges out there because they don't have to invest in the platform underneath. They're able to start with something that's solid, known, recognized by the market, right. No one is going to get in trouble for building something on AWS. So they're taking that and taking the next level and you're right, the partnerships between 'em we see if you just walk down there, you see them talking, you see them collaborating and saying, oh well I'm doing this, if we integrate this, can we do this differently? So you know I think we're only going to see more of that. And we're going to see it more industry focused, coming back to what we were talking about earlier. We're going to see more things stand up in the industries. We've seen this with FinServ, we've seen this you know but I think across all the industries we're going to see more of this collaboration. >> Yeah, I agree, in fact I have someone on my team now that's new this year to focus exclusively on we'll call the power of three. So it's AWS, Accenture, and plus a technology partner. And so if you go in the Executive Summit, Salesforce being a really obviously example, right. Accenture's got very large successful Salesforce practice very important partner of AWS's, how can we come together and drive more value for our customers by figuring out solutions. You know we announced at Dreamforce, the connect integration with Salesforce that's a perfect example, right. So the end-to-end customer care I talked about earlier, even more powerful, we can bring that power of three together. >> So going into the 13th year, lucky 13 (laughs) what are some of the things we're going to be talking about at next year's Executive Summit? What are some of the things you're most looking forward to in the coming year? >> I have to say machine learning and AI. And I have to say Outposts is probably the third of my, I think I live the quantum computing stuff, and Accenture has been doing a lot of research and a lot of work in quantum computing. We were super excited to see what was announced, I guess Monday, and so we're super excited about that but I think that's a little farther out. I think the ML, the AI, the new things in SageMaker are super exciting and I think are only going to make that stuff go faster. So I think that's all we're going to be talking about next year I think we're going to be talking about all the new models that have been created, all the new problems that have been solved, and just a new paradigm in computing off of that stuff 'cause it's getting simpler to use, faster to use, and cheaper to use so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's just, these announcements yesterday just continue to remove barriers, and so you think about the announcement with Verizon around 5G, so now the possibilities that opens up in terms of the applications and the analysis and the machine learning that can get pushed down to the edge is really amazing. And I think what's going to be fun is, we work with customers to figure out what these services should look like, but even at launch we're not sure how they're going to be used. So now it's going to be really exciting turning all these developers, all the Accenture developers, loose on this and just let's see what we create together. >> In 2020 all the developers are loose, I love it. (all laugh) Brian, Chris thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again. That was a really great conversation. >> Well, thanks for having us >> Thanks for having us >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

(techno music) [Narrator]- Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian, in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Chris Scott, Managing Director, Accenture AWS Business Group and J.C. Novoa, Senior Manager, Accenture AWS Business Group. Chris, J.C., thank you much for coming on the show. >> No problem. Thank you Rebecca for having us here. >> So we're talking today about the call center transformation. And I'm excited about it as a customer who loathes call centers. So Chris, why don't you paint the picture for us right now of what a call center looks like, the customer experience, and then also the business experience too? >> Absolutely. Thanks again for having us here. We're really excited to talk about Amazon Connect. I think it's one of the services in Amazon that everyone, as you were saying, can really identify with 'cause they've all been through that kind of customer experience before. So I think what's really interesting about contact center is that it really hasn't dramatically changed last ten or fifteen years. It's all kind of the same, kind of phone tree type conversations. So I think there's a few companies that do it a little bit better but still it hasn't really radically changed over the last ten or fifteen years. And I think Amazon's really playing in that space of disruption, in really thinking how can we do something different in the contact center. So I think there's a lot of challenges that we see with contact centers today. They're not scalable, right? And a lot of representatives spend 90% of their day handling inbound calls. And that's just not scalable. You can't train people up to address that. Also there's an issue with reporting. You don't get as much data about the customer experience. When they call you you don't understand their intent and what happened and how you improve in the process for the next round. And then, I think another big challenge they have is the solutions for contact centers are very complex. And it takes a lot of time to address and change those solutions. So you amass a lot of technical debt over the years of operating this 'cause you can't make those changes that you really want to. So I think Amazon is really playing in the space, like I said, in disruption, in really creating the better customer experience. >> Not only creating that but making it easier making it more human, to some extent Enabling customers to kind of peer behind the green veil and say you know what? This is not that difficult. You should be able to implement something like Amazon connect, which is a contact center as a service. And not have to worry about infrastructure, not have to worry about all the details and the minutiae that goes into actually making that happen and then be able to innovate immediately. Being able to introduce additional artificial intelligence to make that contact center experience more human. Again, to be able to introduce natural language processing and understanding, and then all these capabilities out of the box are able to be integrated with Amazon Connect in a way that improves that, and then additionally increase containment from their perspective of dedicating live agent interactions for things that matter. And then automating some of the activities that are more Q&A, FAQ type of things that can be addressed by a machine in a manner that makes it more understandable by the person that is calling. So that's kind of where we're going here with Amazon Connect. >> I want to dig into some of those features and capabilities because what you're describing is making me excited about the next time I need to call a contact center. So explain exactly how this will work for a customer who calls up. What will happen and then what's sort of happening behind the scenes with the technology? >> So when a customer calls, the idea will be to try to first identify the intent, as Chris was mentioning. What are they calling for? And then be able to identify who they are. Maybe there were interactions that were happening in different channels. These are some of the things that Amazon Connect provides, which is a mechanism for our clients to experience Omni channel and kind of graduate across experiences for their client. Being able to leverage that is important. >> Yeah, Omni channel. I don't think I can underscore the importance of that enough. Because it's all about interacting with a system and a business the way you want to interact with them. Some folks want to be able to call up and have a conversation with an agent, but others want more rapid response. Maybe using a chatbot, or even moving between all of those different channels within the same conversations. When we work with a client, for instance Utility, in order to pick a date to schedule service, it's a lot easier to get a text message, go to a web site, pull up the little calendar and choose your date rather than the representative giving you ten options and you're thinking which one works best for you. And then you're also feeling I've got to rush because this person needs to move on to the next customer. So this Omni channel thing really creates a much, much better experience for the user. >> And Amazon Connect kind of enables that, in a sense. It's our entry point for that Omni channel experience. >> So describe for me how Accenture works with clients implementing Amazon Connect. >> Yes, normally we want to be able to understand what the client's needs is, and understand their customer base. So we go through the process of identifying what that use case looks like. How do we then determine what are the different channels that they want to leverage initially? How do we help them graduate to the full Omni channel experience, one channel at a time? We conduct these workshops, we identify what is the current need. How do we ramp up, and how do we introduce Amazon Connect? Chris will tell us a little bit about the... >> Yeah, great example, and I believe you're speaking with them a little bit, Rebecca, is Mutual of Omaha. Great client that we've worked with, and actually doing a break out session here at re:Invent to talk about their journey out to Amazon Connect. They really started with, you know the problem statement is they wanted to improve their customer engagement. They wanted to retain customers, they wanted to establish new customers and sell new services to their existing customers. And they said the best way for us to do this is to improve our customer engagement through our contact center. So they went about in the market, looked at all the different solutions, looked at their existing solution and they said Amazon is the platform we want to use. We want to innovate on Amazon. It provides us a lot better features, that Omni channel experience. And that's let to better customer engagement, it's led to better tools for the agents, and world leading computer response and machine learning through Amazon. And an overall better experience. Because now they can also get more metrics about what's going on, and they can tailor that and continue to improve their solution and respond to customers, and improve customer engagement. >> So I'm curious though, starting with the business problem, which is Mutual of Omaha, they said we want to do better by our current customers and then also attract new ones. Retract and retain. So is that where you like, is that the starting point in terms of how you start to work with clients? >> That was their starting point. And they said "We found a solution, and that's Amazon. "Now we need to find a partner "that's going to help us with that transformation." And that's when they selected Accenture to help them with the journey. >> But starting with the question... >> Correct, absolutely. They want to understand, a couple of things; they want to be able to innovate, but they also want to be able to provide this excellent customer experience. And what has happened thus far is the current offerings that they have in place are on premise, they're not reliable. They're not scalable and they're costly. At the end of the day, a lot of this actually hits their bottom line. But the reality is that they want to be able to delight their customers. And be able to provide channels that eventually are going to grow with their customer base. Because if you think about it today, that customer is going to expect more of these interactions to follow them through their day. In the morning they might be able to talk to a device. While in the car they might want to talk to a live agent, but when they're at the office they might want to be able to chat with someone. And that kind of day in the life of a customer is what we're actually trying to help our clients solution. >> Also to your point, the folks that are interested in Connect are no longer just I.T. and AWS. It's now the business wanting to engage with AWS in really understanding this new solution. So I think this is a game changer in how Amazon interacts with businesses. 'Cause now it's the business users that are buying, not just I.T. >> And it's those decision makers who are ultimately... talk a little bit about who you go to in terms of... is it the CIO, is it the CTO, about the business decision, and what kind of ROI these folks want to see. >> I think it's a little bit of both, and there's a client that you've been working with, J.C., that's kind of been on this journey. We've started with them, they're looking to expand their business and for that new business expansion, they were looking to have a new solution for their contact center. So we started selling to I.T., because that was the main buyer. But after I.T. heard about, wow, these are all the cool things that we can do, here's how we can improve our customer engagement. We went to the head of customer service for this company, and they were blown away by the capabilities. They said wow, this is really a platform that we can innovate on. It changes. >> And the beauty about that is that those synergies actually is something that we brought together. They themselves were not talking to each other, within the company. So how they can help each other. But the reality is the customer experience relies on data and all these workloads that were helping I.T. move to the cloud actually going to power Amazon Connect and create this more human and natural experience to their customers. So that's kind of the end game here. >> So when you are bringing this new technology to these companies, how hard is it, how big of a challenge is it to get the workforce onboard. (laughter) In some ways the technology's the easy part. >> It is, but I don't think it's all that difficult because people are really excited about doing something different. As I said, this space in contact center hasn't really radically changed in ten to fifteen years, so now folks are saying wait, I can do that? And it doesn't take me three months to do it? I can have what I want next week? That's a game changer, I think that that's what's really getting people excited. And that's why the folks in the business want to work with us to implement Connect. Yes, of course there is change management, which I understand. There's folks that are going to push back, and we understand that. But the reality is at the end of the day, we have the buy in from the executive team in these companies that we're working with and they understand the value. And at the end of the day they help us drive change. Operationally is very much something that we're doing with them, together as a journey, but at the end of the day we're also working with the individual stakeholders within the company, actually to deliver. So we're taking them there. >> Final question. What is the most exciting thing that you're seeing, you're thinking about innovating on for the contact center of the future? What will it be like? >> Artificial Intelligence. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you think about how that conversation is going to happen in the future, you're not going to know whether you're talking to a human or you're talking to a machine, and if we can achieve that, then I think we are getting there. So that's what I see. >> Absolutely. It's understanding customer intent, and being able to intelligently route someone to the right place, without even knowing necessarily why they're calling, or having to tell the agent what they're trying to do. We know why they're calling. Maybe they had a billing issue in the past. So we know that ahead of time, and we can address that proactively in a conversation. >> Great. Well Chris and J.C., thank you both so much for coming on the CUBE. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)