(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at AWS re:Invent made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We going to talk about The Automation Advantage, embrace the future of productivity, and improve speed quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. And we're here with Bhaskar Ghosh who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture and Rajendra 'RP' Prasad who is a Senior Managing Director and Global Automation Lead at Accenture. Guys, welcome to the cube, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Hello, David, thank you. >> Hey, congratulations on the new book. I know it's not like giving birth, but it's a mini version if you will. The automation advantage embraced a future of productivity, improved speed, quality, and customer experience through artificial intelligence. What inspired you to write this book? Can you tell us a little bit more about it, and how businesses are going to be able to take advantage of the information that's in there? That's great. Maybe you could start. >> Okay. So I think, you know, if we say that what inspired us, primarily the two things really inspired us to start this project. First of all, is the technology change, step change in the technology. Second is the maturity of the buyer, maturity of the market. So let me explain a little more. When I talk about the technology change, automation is nothing new in the industry, starting from the industrial revolution, always industry adopted the automation. But last few years, what happened, that there is a significant change in the technology in terms of lot of new technologies are coming together like Cloud, Data, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and they are getting matured. I think that created a huge opportunity in the industry. So that is number one. Second thing I think the maturity of the buyer. So buyers are always buying the automation, adopting the automation. So when I talk to this different buyer, different industrial buyer, suddenly we realize, they are not asking about what is automation. How that will help. But primarily they're talking about how they can scale it. They have all have done the pilot, the prototype, how they can take the full advantage in that enterprise to scale. And after talking to a few clients, few of our clients, they don't realize that it would be best to write this book and help all our clients to take advantage of this new technologies to scale up their business. If I give them a little more insight that what exactly we are trying to do in this book, primarily we dealt with three things. One is the individual automation, which deals with the human efficiency. Second is the industrial automation, which deals with the group efficiency . And third is the intelligent automation, which deals with the business efficiency or business value. So we believe that, this is what will really change their business and help our client help the automation IT users to really make an impact in their business. >> Yeah, and so you talked about that, the maturity of the customer and I liked the way you sort of described that spectrum ending with intelligent automation. So the point is you're not just paving the cow path if you will, automating processes that maybe were invented decades ago, you're really trying to rethink the best approach. And that's where you going to get the most business value and RP in thinking about the maturity, I think in pre-pandemic, people were maybe a little reluctant or as Bhaskar was saying, maybe needed some education. But how have things changed? Obviously the pandemic has had a huge impact. It's accelerated things. But what's changed in the business environment in terms of the need to implement automation, RP? >> Thank you for that is an excellent question. As we went through the pandemic, most of the enterprises accelerated what I call as the digital transformation. Technology transformation. And the overall time that it takes to do the transformation has compressed. Most of the enterprises now do compress transformation. The core of it is innovation and innovation led technology and technology based solutions. To drive this transformation, automation, artificial intelligence becomes part of what we do, while we are implementing these accelerators, innovation enablers within the enterprises. Most of the enterprises prior to the pandemic, we're looking, automation and AI as a solution for cost efficiency, saving costs and not deriving capacity efficiency as if they do the transformation (indistinct). Let me press the fast forward button through the transformation journey, leveraging automation. What happens is most of the enterprises switch the focus from cost efficiency to speed, to market, application availability and system resiliency are the core. When I speak to most of the CIO's, who are involved in the tech transformation, they now embrace automation and AI as a core enabler to drive this journeys towards, growth, innovation led, application availability and transformation and sustainability of the applications through their journey. Our book addresses, all of these aspects, including the most important element of AI, which is compute, storage and the enablement that it can accomplish through cloud transformation, cloud computing services and how AI and machine learning technologies can benefit from transformation to the cloud. In addition, we also address and talk about automation in the cloud. Automation, taking journey towards the cloud and automation, once you are in the cloud, what are the philosophy and principles you should be following to drive that automation? We also provide holistic approach to drive automation by focusing process technology that includes talent and change management, and also addressing automation culture for the organizations in the way they work as they move forward. >> So you mentioned a couple of things, compute and storage and when we look at our surveys, guys, it's interesting to see, especially since the pandemic, four items have popped up, where all the spending momentum is cloud, but for obvious reasons, scale and resource, and be able to work remotely, contain us because a lot of people have workloads on prem that they just can't automatically move into cloud, but they want to do development in the cloud and maybe connect to some of those on-prem workloads, RPA, which is _automation, and of course, AI. And, RP, you mentioned compute and storage, and of course the other pieces' data. So we have all this data. But so my question is, how has the cloud and AWS specifically influenced changes in automation in AI? >> Brilliant question and brilliant point. I say, whenever I talk to my clients, one of the things that I always say is, AI is nothing but an UI for the data. Let me repeat that, AI is the UI of the data. So that data plays a underlying and very critical part of applied intelligence, artificial intelligence and AI in the organizations, right? As the organization move along their automation journey, like you said, robotic process automation to containerization, to establishing data, building the data cubes and managing the massive data leveraging cloud and how AWS can help in a significant way to help the data stratification, data enablement, data analysis, and data clustering, classification, all aspects of that what we need to do within the data space. That helps for the large scale automation effort. The cloud and AWS plays a significant role to help accelerate and enable the data part. Once you do that, building machine learning models on the top of it, leveraging containers, clusters, DevOps techniques to drive, the AI principles on the top of it is very, it's kind of makes it easier to drive that and foster enablement advancement through cloud technologies. Alternatively, using automation itself to kind of enable the cloud transformation, data transformation, data migration aspects to manage the complexity speed and scale is very important. The book stresses the very importance of fueling the motion of the entire organization through agility, embracing new development, whether it's like automation in the cloud, DevOps, DevSecOps and the importance of oral cloud adoption that builds the foundational elements of making sure your automation and AI capabilities are established in a way that it is scalable and sustainable within the organizations as they move forward. >> Great. Thank you for that, RP. Bhaskar, I want to come back to this notion of maturity and just apply it to automation. So, Andy Jassy made the phrase, undifferentiated heavy lifting popular, but that was largely last decade applied to IT. And now we're talking about deeper business integration. And so, automation certainly solves the problem of, okay, I got to take mundane tasks like provisioning, storage, and compute and automate that. Great. But what are some of the business problems that deeper business integration that we're solving through things that, and I want to use the phrase that you used earlier, intelligent automation. What is that? And can you give an example? >> That's a very good question. As we said, that the automation is a journey. If we talk to any clients, so everybody wants to use data and artificial intelligence to transform their business. So that is very simple, but the point is that you cannot reach there unless you follow the steps. So in our book we have explained the process. That means, we defined in a five steps. We said that everybody has to follow the foundation which is primarily the tools driven, optimize, which is process-driven then efficiency improvement, which is primarily RPA driven, then comes predictive capability, the organization, which is data driven and then intelligence, which is primarily artificial intelligence driven. Now, when I talk about the use of artificial intelligence and this new intelligent ID in the business, what we mean is basically improved decision-making in every level in the organization. I'll give you an example. We have given multiple example in this book and a very simple example if I take. Suppose a financial sector organization, they're selling wealth management product to the clients. So they have a number of wealth management products and they have number, there are number of clients with different profile, but now what is happening, this artificial intelligence is helping their agents to target the right product for the right customer, so that the success rate is very high. So that is a change. That is a change in the way they do business. Now, some of the platform companies like Amazon and Netflix, you will see that this skill is a very native skill for them. They use the artificial intelligence, try to use everywhere. But there are a lot of other companies who are trying to adopt this skill today. Their fundamental problem is that they do not have the right data. They do not have that capability. They do not have all the processes so that they can inject the decision-making artificial intelligence capability in every decision-making to empower their workforce. And that is what we have written in this book to provide the guidance to this in this book. How they can use the better business decision, improve then create the more business value using artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. >> Interesting, Bhaskar, I want to stay with you, in their book, in the middle of last decade, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee wrote. The Second Machine Age and they made the point in the book that machines have always replaced humans in sort of various tasks, but for the first time ever, we're seeing, machines replacing humans in cognitive tasks, and that scares a lot of people. So how do you inspire employees to embrace the change that automation can bring? What are you seeing as the best ways to do that? >> That's a very good question. Intelligent automation implementation is not an IT project. It's primarily change management. It's primarily change in the culture. The people in the organization need to embrace this change and how they will get empowered with the machine. It is not about the replacing people by machine, which has happened historically into the earliest stages of automation, which I explained. But in this intelligent automation, it is basically empowering people to do the better job. I will give you example. That is the thing we have written in the book, about a newspaper, a hundred years old newspaper in Italy. And this industry has gone through multiple automation and changes. So black and white printing to color, printing to digital, everything happened. And now what is happening, they are using artificial intelligence, so their writers are using those technologies to write faster, so when they're writing immediately, they are getting supported with the data, they are supporting with the related article. They are supporting with the script, even they're supported with the heading of this article. So the question is that it is not replacing the news, the content writer, but it's basically empowering them so that they can produce the better quality of product, they can be better at writing in a faster time. So it's a very different approach and that is why this needs a change management than a cultural change. >> Got it. RP, what's in it for me? Why should we read the automation advantage? Maybe you could talk about some of the key takeaways and maybe the best places to start on an automation journey. >> Very good question. The fastest step in your automation journey and cloud adoption journey is to start simple and start right. If you know what's happening, one of the process guru says, "If you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you." So to start right, a company needs to know where they are on a map today, identify the right focus areas, create a clear roadmap and then move forward with a structured approach for successful adoption. The other important element is if you automate an inefficient process, you are going to make your inefficiency run more efficiently. So it is very important to baseline and establish the baseline and know where you are on the journey map. This is one of the key themes we discuss in the Automation Advantage book. With principles and tips and real world examples on how to approach each of these stages. We also stress the importance of building the right architectures for intelligent automation, cloud enablement, security at the core of automation and the platform centric approach. Leading enterprises can fit on adopters and whether they are in the earlier stages of the automation journey or they're in the advanced stage of automation journey. They can look at the Automation Advantage book and build and take the best practices and what is provided as a practical tips within the book to drive their automation journey. This also includes importance of having right partners in the cloud space like AWS, who can accelerate automation journey and making sure a company's cloud migration strategy includes automation, automation-led AI and data as part of their journey management. >> That's great. Good advice there. But Bhaskar, bring us home, maybe you could wrap it up with the final word. >> So let me keep it very simple. This book will help you to create difference in your business with the power of automation and artificial intelligence. >> That's a simple message. And no matter what industry you're in, there is a disruption scenario for your industry, and that disruption scenario is going to involve automation. So you better get ahead of the game there. The book is available of course, at Amazon.com and you can get more information at accenture.com/automationadvantage. Guys, thanks so much for coming in the Cube. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this episode of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire, you're watching the Cube. (upbeat music)