(orchestral music) (energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It's the Cube! Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everybody! Jeff Frick here with the Cube. I am joined by Peter Burris, the Chief Research Officer at Wikibon. We are in downtown San Francisco at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2017. It's a lot of practitioners. It's almost 200 CDOs here sharing best practices, learning from the IBM team and we're excited to be here and cover it. It's an ongoing series and this is just one of many of these summits. So, if you are a CDO get involved. But, the most important thing is to not just talk to the IBM folks but to talk to the practitioners. And, we are really excited for our next segment to be joined by Allen Crane. He is the assistant VP from USAA. Welcome! >> Thank you. >> Jeff: And also Glenn Finch. He is the Global Managing Partner Cognitive and Analytics at IBM. Welcome! >> Thank you, thank you both. >> It's kind of like the Serengeti of CDOs here, isn't it? >> It is. It's unbelievable! >> So, the overview Allen to just kind of, you know, this opportunity to come together with a bunch of your peers. What's kind of the vibe? What are you taking away? I know it's still pretty early on but it's a cool little event. It's not a big giant event in Vegas. You know, it's a smaller of an affair. >> That's right. I've been coming to this event for the last three years since they had it and started it when Glenn started this event. And, truly it's probably the best conference I come to every year because it's practitioners. You don't have a lot of different tracks to get lost in. This is really about understanding from your own peers what they are going through. Everything from how are you organizing the organization? What are you focused on? Where are you going? And all the way through talent discussions and where do you source these jobs? >> What is always a big discussion is organizational structure which on one hand side is kind of, you know, who really cares? But is vitally important as to how it is executed, how the strategy gets implemented in the business groups. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how it works at USAA, your role specifically and how does a Chief Data Officer eat it, work his way into the business bugs trying to make better decisions. >> Absolutely, we are a 27 billion dollar 95 year old company that focuses on the military and their members and their families. And our members, we offer a full range of financial services. So, you can imagine we've got lots of data offices for all of our different lines of business. Because of that, we have elected to go with what we call a hub and spoke model where we centralize certain functions around governance, standards, core data assets, and we subscribe to those things from a standard standpoint so that we're in the spokes like I am. I run all of the data analytics for all of our channels and how our members interact with USAA. So, we can actually have standards that we can apply in our own area as does the bank, as does the insurance company, as does the investments company. And so, it enables the flexibility of business close to the business data and analytics while you also sort of maintain the governance layer on top of that. >> Well, USAA has been at the vanguard of customer experience for many years now. >> Yes >> And the channel world is now starting to apply some of the lessons learned elsewhere. Are you finding that USAA is teaching channels how to think about customer experience? And if so, what is your job as an individual who's, I presume, expected to get data about customer experience out to channel companies. How is that working? >> Well, it's almost like when you borrow a page back from history and in 1922 when we were founded the organization said service is the foundation of our industry. And, it's the foundation of what we do and how we message to our membership. So, take that forward 95 years and we are finding that with the explosion in digital, in mobile, and how does that interact with the phone call. And, when you get a document in the mail is it clear? Or do you have to call us, because of that? We find that there's a lot of interplay between our channels, that our channels had tended to be owned by different silo leaders that weren't really thinking laterally or horizontally across the experience that the member was facing. Now, the member is already multichannel. We all know this. We are all customers in our own right, getting things in the mail. It's not clear. Or getting things in an e-mail. >> Absolutely. >> Or a mobile notice or SMS text message. And, this is confusing. I need to talk to somebody about this. That type of thing. So, we're here to really make sure that we're providing as direct interaction and direct answers and direct access with our membership to make those as compelling experiences as we possibly can. >> So, how is data making that easier? >> We're bringing the data altogether is the first thing. We've got to be able to make sure that our phone data is in the same place as our digital data, is in the same place as our document data, is in the same place as our mobile data because when you are not able to see that path of how the member got here, you're kind of at a loss of what to fix. And so, what we're finding is the more data that we're stitching together, these are really just an extension of a conversation with the membership. If someone is calling you after being online within just a few minutes you kind of know that that's an extension of the same intent that they had before. >> Right. >> So, what was it upfront and upstream that caused them to call. What couldn't you answer for the member upstream that now required a phone call and possibly a couple of transfers to be able to answer that phone interaction. So, that's how we start with bringing all the data together. >> So, how are you working with other functions within USAA to ensure that the data that the channel organizations to ensure those conversations can persist over time with products and underwriters and others that are actually responsible for putting forward the commitments that are being made. >> Yeah. >> How is that coming together? >> I think, simply put it, it's a pull versus push. So, showing the value that we are providing back to our lines of business. So, for example, the bank line of business president looks to us to help them reduce the number of calls which affects their bottom line. And so, when we can do that and show that we are being more efficient with our member, getting them the right place to the right MSR the first time, that is a very material impact in their bottom line. So, connecting into the things that they care about is the pull factor that we often called, that gets us that seat at the table that says we need this channel analyst to come to me and be my advisor as I'm making these decisions. >> You know what, I was just going to say what Allen is describing is probably what I think is the most complicated piece of data analytics, cognitive, all that stuff. That last mile of getting someone whether it's a push or pull. >> Right. >> Fundamentally, you want somebody to do something different whether it's an end consumer, whether it's a research analyst, whether it's a COO or a CFO, you need to do something that causes them to make a different decision. You know, ten years ago as we were just at the dawn of a lot of this new analytical techniques, everybody was focused on amassing data and new machine learning and all that stuff. Now, quite honestly, a lot of that stuff is present and it's about how do we get someone who adapts something that feels completely wrong. That's probably the hardest. I mean, and I joke with people, but you know that thing when your spouse finds something in you and says something immediately about it. >> No, no. >> That's right. (laughs) That's the first thing and you guys are probably better men than I am. The first I want to do is say "prove them wrong". Right? That's the same thing when an artificial intelligence asset tries to tell a knowledge worker what to do. >> Right, right. >> Right? That's what I think the hardest thing is right now. >> So, is it an accumulative kind of knock down or eventually they kind of get it. Alright, I'll stop resisting. Or, is it a AHA moment where people come at 'cause usually for changing behavior, usually there's a carrot or a stick. Either you got to do it. >> Push or pull. >> And the analogy, right. Or save money versus now really trying to transform and reorganize things in new, innovative ways that A. Change the customer experience, but B. Add new revenue streams and unveil a new business opportunity. >> I think it's finding what's important to that business user and sometimes it's an insight that saves them money. In other cases, it's no one can explain to me what's happening. So, in the case of Call Centers for example, we do a lot of forecasting and routing work, getting the call to the right place at the right time. But often, a business leader may say " I want to change the routing rules". But, the contact center, think of it as a closed environment, and something that changes over here, actually ultimately has an effect over here. And, they may not understand the interplay between if I move more calls this way, well those calls that were going there have to go some place else now, right? So, they may not understand the interplay of these things. So, sometimes the analyst comes in in a time of crisis and sometimes it's that crisis, that sort of shared enemy if you will, the enemy of the situation, that is, not your customer. But, the enemy of the shared situation that sort of bonds people together and you sort of have that brothers in arms kind of moment and you build trust that way. It comes down to trust and it comes down to " you have my best interest in mind". And, sometimes it's repeating the message over and over again. Sometimes, it's story telling. Sometimes, it's having that seat at the table during those times of crisis, but we use all of those tools to help us earn that seat at the table with our business customer. >> So, let me build on something that you said (mumbles) 'Cause it's the trying to get many people in the service experience to change. Not just one. So, the end goal is to have the customer to have a great experience. >> Exactly. >> But, the business executive has to be part of that change. >> Exactly. >> The call center individual has to be part of that change. And, ultimately it's the data that ensures that that process of change or those changes are in fact equally manifest. >> Right. >> You need to be across the entire community that's responsible for making something happen. >> Right. >> Is that kind of where your job comes in. That you are making sure that that experience that's impacted by multiple things, that everybody gets a single version of the truth of the data necessary to act as a unit? >> Yeah, I think data, bringing it all together is the first thing so that people can understand where it's all coming from. We brought together dozens of systems that are the systems of record into a new system of record that we can all share and use as a collective resource. That is a great place to start when everyone is operating of the same fact base, if you will. Other disciplines like process disciplines, things that we call designed for measurability so that we're not just building things and seeing how it works when we roll it out as a release on mobile or a release on .com but truly making sure that we are instrumenting these new processes along the way. So, that we can develop these correlations and causal models for what's helping, what's working and what's not working. >> That's an interesting concept. So, you design the measurability in at the beginning. >> I have to. >> As opposed to kind of after the fact. Obviously, you need to measure-- >> Are you participating in that process? >> Absolutely. We have and my role is mainly more from and educational standpoint of knowing why it's important to do this. But, certainly everyone of our analysts is deeply engaged in project work, more upstream than ever. And now, we're doing more work with our design teams so that data is part of the design process. >> You know, this measurability concept, incredibly important in the consultancy as well. You know, for the longest time all the procurement officers said the best thing you can do to hold consults accountable is a fixed priced, milestone based thing, that program number 32 was it red or green? And if it's green, you'll get paid. If not, I am not paying you. You know, we in the cognitive analytics business have tried to move away from that because if we, if our work is not instrumented the same way as Allen's, if I am not looking at that same KPI, first of all I might have project 32 greener than grass, but that KPI isn't moving, right? Secondly, if I don't know that KPI then I am not going to be able to work across multiple levels in an organization, starting often times at the sea suite to make sure that there is a right sponsorship because often times somebody want to change routing and it seems like a great idea two or three levels below. But, when it gets out of whack when it feels uncomfortable and the sea suite needs to step in, that's when everybody's staring at the same set of KPIs and the same metrics. So, you say "No, no. We are going to go after this". We are willing to take these trade offs to go after this because everybody looks at the KPI and says " Wow. I want that KPI". Everybody always forgets that "Oh wait. To get this I got to give these two things up". And, nobody wants to give anything up to get it, right? It is probably the hardest thing that I work on in big transformational things. >> As a consultant? >> Yeah, as a consultant it's to get everybody aligned around. This is what needle we want to move, not what program we want to deliver. Very hard to get the line of business to define it. It's a great challenge. >> It's interesting because in the keynote they laid out exactly what is cognitive. And the 4 E's, I thought they were interesting. Expert. Expression. It's got to be a white box. It's got to be known. Education and Evolution. Those are not kind of traditional consulting benchmarks. You don't want them to evolve, right? >> Right. >> You want to deliver on what you wrote down in the SOW. >> Exactly. >> It doesn't necessarily have a white box element to it because sometimes a little hocus pocus, so just by its very definition, in cognitive and its evolutionary nature and its learning nature, it's this ongoing evolution of it or the processes. It's not a lock it down. You know, this is what I said I'd deliver. This is what we delivered 'cause you might find new things along the path. >> I think this concept of evolution and one of the things we try to be very careful with when you have a brand and a reputation, like USAA, right? It's impeccable, it's flawless, right? You want to make sure that a cognitive asset is trained appropriately and then allowed to learn appropriate things so it doesn't erode the brand. And, that can happen so quickly. So, if you train a cognitive asset with euphemisms, right? Often times the way we speak. And then, you let it surf the internet to get better at using euphemisms, pretty soon you've got a cognitive asset that's going to start to use slang, use racial slurs, all of those things (laughs) because-- No, I am serious. >> Hell you are. >> That's not good. >> Right, that's not bad so, you know, that's one of the things that Ginni has been really, really careful with us about is to make sure that we have a cognitive manifesto that says we'll start here, we'll stop here. We are not going to go in the Ex Machina territory where full cognition and humans are gone, right? That's not what we're going to do because we need to make sure that IBM is protecting the brand reputation of USAA. >> Human discretion still matters. >> Absolutely. >> It has to. >> Alright. Well, we are out of time. Allen, I wanted to give you the last word kind of what you look forward to 2017. We're already, I can't believe we're all the way through. What are some of your top priorities that you are working on? Some new exciting things that you can share. >> I think one of the things that we are very proud of is our work in the text analytics space and what I mean by that is we're ingesting about two years of speech data from our call center every day. And, we are mining that data for emergent trends. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know and it's those unknown unknowns that gets you. They are the things that creep up in your data and you don't really realize it until they are a big enough issue. And so, this really is helping us understand emerging trends, the emerging trend of millennials, the emerging trend of things like Apple Pay, and it also gives us insight as to how our own MSRs are interacting with our members in a very personal level. So, beyond words and language we're also getting into things like recognizing things like babies crying in the background, to be able to detect things like life events because a lot of your financial needs center around life events. >> Right, right. >> You know, getting a new home, having another child, getting a new car, those types of things. And so, that's really where we're trying to bring the computer more as an assistant to the human, as opposed to trying to replace the human. >> Right. >> But, it is a very exciting space for us and areas that we are actually able to scale about 100 times faster than we were fast before. >> Wow. That's awesome. We look forward to hearing more about that and thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. Appreciated. >> Peter: Thanks, guys. >> Allen: Thank you. >> Alright. Thank you both. With Peter Burris, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube from the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll be back after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, this is the Cube, covering Spark Summit East 2017, brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody, where the town is still euphoric. Mike Gualtieri is here, he's the principal analyst at Forrester Research, attended the parade yesterday. How great was that, Mike? >> Yes. Yes. It was awesome. >> Nothing like we've ever seen before. All right, the first question is what was the bigger shocking surprise, upset, greatest win, was it the Red Sox over the Yankees or was it the Superbowl this weekend? >> That's the question, I think it's the Superbowl. >> Yeah, who knows, right? Who knows. It was a lot of fun. So how was the parade yesterday? >> It was magnificent. I mean, it was freezing. No one cared. I mean--but it was, yeah, it was great. Great to see that team in person. >> That's good, wish we could talk, We can, but we'll get into it. So, we're here at Spark Summit, and, you know, the show's getting bigger, you're seeing more sponsors, still heavily a technical audience, but what's your take these days? We were talking off-camera about the whole big data thing. It used to be the hottest thing in the world, and now nobody wants to have big data in their title. What's Forrester's take on that? >> I mean, I think big data-- I think it's just become mainstream, so we're just back to data. You know, because all data is potentially big. So, I don't think it's-- it's not the thing anymore. I mean, what do you do with big data? You analyze it, right? And part of what this whole Spark Summit is about-- look at all the sessions. Data science, machine learning, streaming analytics, so it's all about sort of using that data now, so big data is still important, but the value of big data comes from all this advanced analytics. >> Yeah, and we talked earlier, I mean, a lot of the value of, you know, Hadoop was cutting costs. You know, you've mentioned commodity components and reduction in denominator, and breaking the need for some kind of big storage container. OK, so that-- we got there. Now, shifting to new sources of value, what are you spending your time on these days in terms of research? >> Artificial intelligence, machine learning, so those are really forms of advanced analytics, so that's been-- that's been very hot. We did a survey last year, an AI survey, and we asked a large group of people, we said, oh, you know, what are you doing with AI? 58% said they're researching it. 19% said they're training a model. Right, so that's interesting. 58% are researching it, and far fewer are actually, you know, actually doing something with it. Now, the reality is, if you phrase that a little bit differently, and you said, oh, what are you doing with machine learning? Many more would say yes, we're doing machine learning. So it begs the question, what do enterprises think of AI? And what do they think it is? So, a lot of my inquiries are spent helping enterprises understand what AI is, what they should focus on, and the other part of it is what are the technologies used for AI, and deep learning is the hottest. >> So, you wrote a piece late last year, what's possible today in AI. What's possible today in AI? >> Well, you know, before understanding was possible, it's important to understand what's not possible, right? And so we sort of characterize it as there's pure AI, and there's pragmatic AI. So it's real simple. Pure AI is the sci-fi stuff, we've all seen it, Ex Machina, Star Wars, whatever, right? That's not what we're talking about. That's not what enterprises can do today. We're talking about pragmatic AI, and pragmatic AI is about building predictive models. It's about conversational APIs, to interact in a natural way with humans, it's about image analysis, which is something very hot because of deep learning. So, AI is really about the building blocks that companies have been using, but then using them in combination to create even more intelligent solutions. And they have more options on the market, both from open source, both from cloud services that-- from Google, Microsoft, IBM, and now Amazon, at their re-- Were you guys at their reinvent conference? >> I wasn't, personally, but we were certainly there. >> Yeah, they announced the Amazon AI, which is a set of three services that developers can use without knowing anything about AI or being a data scientist. But, I mean, I think the way to think about AI is that it is data science. It requires the expertise of a data scientist to do AI. >> Following up on that comment, which was really interesting, is we try and-- whereas vendors try and democratize access to machine learning and AI, and I say that with two terms because usually the machine learning is the stuff that's sort of widely accessible and AI is a little further out, but there's a spectrum when you can just access an API, which is like a pre-trained model-- >> Pre-trained model, yep. >> It's developer-accessible, you don't need to be a data scientist, and then at the other end, you know, you need to pick your algorithms, you need to pick your features, you need to find the right data, so how do you see that horizon moving over time? >> Yeah, no, I-- So, these machine learning services, as you say, they're pre-trained models, totally accessible by anyone, anyone who can call an API or a restful service can access these. But their scope is limited, right? So, if, for example, you take the image API, you know, the imaging API that you can get from Google or now Amazon, you can drop an image in there and it will say, oh, there's a wine bottle on a picnic table on the beach. Right? It can identify that. So that's pretty cool, there might be a lot of use cases for that, but think of an enterprise use case. No. You can't do it, and let me give you this example. Say you're an insurance company, and you have a picture of a steel roof that's caved in. If you give that to one of these APIs, it might say steel roof, it may say damage, but what it's not going to do is it's not going to be able to estimate the damage, it's not going to be able to create a bill of materials on how to repair it, because Google hasn't trained it at that level. OK, so, enterprises are going to have to do this themselves, or an ISV is going to have to do it, because think about it, you've got 10 years worth of all these pictures taken of damage. And with all of those pictures, you've got tons of write-ups from an adjuster. Whoa, if you could shove that into a deep learning algorithm, you could potentially have consumers take pictures, or someone untrained, and have this thing say here's what the estimate damage is, this is the situation. >> And I've read about like insurance use cases like that, where the customer could, after they sort of have a crack up, take pictures all around the car, and then the insurance company could provide an estimate, tell them where the nearest repair shops are-- >> Yeah, but right now it's like the early days of e-commerce, where you could send an order in and then it would fax it and they'd type it in. So, I think, yes, insurance coverage is taking those pictures, and the question is can we automate it, and-- >> Well, let me actually iterate on that question, which is so who can build a more end-to-end solution, assuming, you know, there's a lot of heavy lifting that's got to go on for each enterprise trying to build a use case like that. Is it internal development and only at big companies that have a few of these data science gurus? Would it be like an IBM Global Services or an EXIN SURE, or would it be like a vertical ISV where it's semi-custom, semi-patent? >> I think it's both, but I also think it's two or three people walking around this conference, right, understanding Spark, maybe understanding how to use TensorFlow in conjunction with Spark that will start to come up with these ideas as well. So I think-- I think we'll see all of those solutions. Certainly, like IBM with their cognitive computing-- oh, and by the way, so we think that cognitive computing equals pragmatic AI, right, because it has similar characteristics. So, we're already seeing the big ISVs and the big application developers, SAP, Oracle, creating AI-infused applications or modules, but yeah, we're going to see small ISVs do it. There's one in Austin, Texas, called InteractiveTel. It's like 10 people. What they do is they use the Google-- so they sell to large car dealerships, like Ernie Boch. And they record every conversation, phone conversation with customers. They use the Google pre-trained model to convert the speech to text, and then they use their own machine learning to analyze that text to find out if there's a customer service problem or if there's a selling opportunity, and then they alert managers or other people in the organization. So, small company, very narrowly focused on something like car buying. >> So, I wonder if we could come back to something you said about pragmatic AI. We love to have someone like you on the Cube, because we like to talk about the horses on the track. So, if Watson is pragmatic AI, and we all-- well, I think you saw the 60 Minutes show, I don't know, whenever it was, three or four months ago, and IBM Watson got all the love. They barely mentioned Amazon and Google and Facebook, and Microsoft didn't get any mention. So, and there seems to be sentiment that, OK, all the real action is in Silicon Valley. But you've got IBM doing pragmatic AI. Do those two worlds come together in your view? How does that whole market shake up? >> I don't think they come together in the way I think you're suggesting. I think what Google, Microsoft, Facebook, what they're doing is they're churning out fundamental technology, like one of the most popular deep learning frameworks, TensorFlow, is a Google thing that they open sourced. And as I pointed out, those image APIs, that Amazon has, that's not going to work for insurance, that's not going to work for radiology. So, I don't think they're in-- >> George Gilbert: Facebook's going to apply it differently-- >> Yeah, I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to apply it to the millions of consumers that use their platforms, and then I think they throw off some of the technology for the rest of the world to use, fundamentally. >> And then the rest of the world has to apply those. >> Yeah, but I don't think they're in the business of building insurance solutions or building logistical solutions. >> Right. >> But you said something that was really, really potentially intriguing, which was you could take the horizontal Google speech to text API, and then-- >> Mike Gualtieri: And recombine it. >> --put your own model on top of that. And that's, techies call that like ensemble modeling, but essentially you're taking, almost like an OS level service, and you're putting in a more vertical application on top of it, to relate it to our old ways of looking at software, and that's interesting. >> Yeah, because what we're talking about right now, but this conversation is now about applications. Right, we're talking about applications, which need lots of different services recombined, whereas mostly the data science conversation has been narrowly about building one customer lifetime value model or one churn model. Now the conversation, when we talk about AI, is becoming about combining many different services and many different models. >> Dave Vellante: And the platform for building applications is really-- >> Yeah, yeah. >> And that platform, the richest platform, or the platform that is, that is most attractive has the most building blocks to work with, or the broadest ones? >> The best ones, I would say, right now. The reason why I say it that way is because this technology is still moving very rapidly. So for an image analysis, deep learning, very good for image, nothing's better than deep learning for image analysis. But if you're doing business process models or like churn models, well, deep learning hasn't played out there yet. So, right now I think there's some fragmentation. There's so much innovation. Ultimately it may come together. What we're seeing is, many of these companies are saying, OK, look, we're going to bring in the open source. It's pretty difficult to create a deep learning library. And so, you know, a lot of the vendors in the machine learning space, instead of creating their own, they're just bringing in MXNet or TensorFlow. >> I might be thinking of something from a different angle, which is not what underlying implementation they're using, whether it's deep learning or whether it's just random forest, or whatever the terminology is, you know, the traditional statistical stuff. The idea, though, is you want a platform-- like way, way back, Windows, with the Win32 API had essentially more widgets for helping you build graphical applications than any other platform >> Mike Gualtieri: Yeah, I see where you're going. >> And I guess I'm thinking it doesn't matter what the underlying implementation is, but how many widgets can you string together? >> I'm totally with you there, yeah. And so I think what you're saying is look, a platform that has the most capabilities, but abstracts, the implementations, and can, you know, can be somewhat pluggable-- right, good, to keep up with the innovation, yeah. And there's a lot of new companies out there, too, that are tackling this. One of them's called Bonsai AI, you know, small startup, they're trying to abstract deep learning, because deep learning right now, like TensorFlow and MXNet, that's a little bit of a challenge to learn, so they're abstracting it. But so are a lot of the-- so is SAS, IBM, et cetera. >> So, Mike, we're out of time, but I want to talk about your talk tomorrow. So, AI meets Spark, give us a little preview. >> AI meets Spark. Basically, the prerequisite to AI is a very sophisticated and fast data pipeline, because just because we're talking about AI doesn't mean we don't need data to build these models. So, I think Spark gives you the best of both worlds, right? It's designed for these sort of complex data pipelines that you need to prep data, but now, with MLlib for more traditional machine learning, and now with their announcement of TensorFrames, which is going to be an interface for TensorFlow, now you've got deep learning, too. And you've got it in a cluster architecture, so it can scale. So, pretty cool. >> All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. You know, way to go Pats, awesome. Really a pleasure having you back. >> Thanks. >> All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is the Cube. (peppy music)