>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Wright. He is the chief innovation officer at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. >> Good to see you again Dave. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, you've been around the block. You've been around theCube a few times. >> Around the block, a bad way of putting it but yeah. (laughing) >> So chief innovation officer, we've had a lot of great new product launches at this show. What are you most excited about, and what are you already thinking about when you go back to your office? >> So I think what's been interesting to me is the different way of engaging now, we've got the concept of virtual agent technology and I don't just mean the fact that we've got virtual agents. The fact that it starts to give people alternatives and it gives people alternative ways to come into the system, whether it be through our interface or whether it be through someone else's interface, I start to wonder, what'll happen going forward as we get more and more bot type technologies out. How will you have that one interface that works with all those to get that information back of the chain? How will you almost have a single interface that allows you to connect to all these bots and solve your problems? Because the benefits kind of two fold. One is the bot technology you get from being a customer to coming in and actually doing a request. But the other is you'll eventually be able to take that same technology and apply it to the fulfilled user so the power user because if I'm doing something and I can have an agent that's helping me do it, almost like the agent assist concept, you saw this morning. If I can take that to a next level and have AI running on top of that, then I can make work easier for the people coming in but I can actually improve the people that are in the system and make them more effective. >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, follow up please. >> No, I was just going to ask about, how you get your ideas? So you're here, you're interacting with customers, you're seeing how they're using your product. So is it interviewing customers to find out their pain points? Is it really just watching, I mean you're the chief innovation officer. How do you spark your own creativity? >> It's a really weird answer. I get most of it off kids, most of it off my kids. So I can tell you a story. We were in Barnes and Noble the other week and they had albums in the, plastic twelve inch albums. >> Rebecca: They're coming back. >> And they cost more than they use to. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah really. >> So I called the kids over, I said look, let's get educated. This is what I use to play music on. And now we moved to CD's and you guys miss CD's and this is why you guys buy music. Now I've got a 12 year old and seven year old. And the 12 year old was saying, well, we don't buy music. And I said yeah, and I thought, no you don't, you rent music. And then my youngest daughter said, why would you want to own a song forever? And I was like, this is interesting. We started having a discussion, >> These are deep, these are deep questions. >> It was while other kids we're over having a sleepover and they're all eating pizza and they were talking about the concept of having a job. They said, how do you decide what you want to do for the rest of your life and how do you do that? And we we're talking about how you do something, you get better. You go to another company, you get better at doing it. You go to another company. And one of them said, it sounds really boring just like doing the same thing. And then one of them had the best answer. She said, don't you think it's a waste of your time? And I said, why is it a waste? And she said, because if you're really good at something, why should you just do it for one company? And I was like, oh so, you're going to be a contactor. (laughing) But what I realize was because this whole generation don't need to own things, they just need to use things, so they don't need to know how to do something, they just know they want to do it. And they don't need to own something, they just need temporary access to it. Then it got me thinking when you talk about where could work go to. Do you get a whole concept of the gig economy becoming a gig enterprise. Because we've got a lot of people in work who've got all these different skills but we force them to do one job. And it might be that someone's doing a job but they've got skills that would be applicable outside of that job but they never get to use them. So have we seen the first generation arrive now where they expect everything to be tass based? And then it gives you control over your own career. Because then you say, well, actually I'm not good at this but I can start a bid for work. I can say to people, hey I'm only a three on a skills racing but if you don't need any complex, I'll take it cause I get to learn. So it's a whole new dynamic and I think when you ask whereabout ideas come from, some of the first stage ideas or the first horizon, I think they come form customers. Some of the second horizon, they come from people who aren't working. It's just trying to imagine how they all develop and whereabout that all goes. >> So you surround yourself with millennials? >> Not even millennials. >> Dave Vellante: They're kind of pre post millennials. >> Almost like the linksters, almost the people who've been born connected. It's definitely a Gen Z thing but it's beyond millennials. I think the millennials had a certain expectation around well it's kind of a negative connotation but before they were called millennials, people use to refer to it as the entitlement generation. And it wasn't because they were entitled, it was because they felt they just got access to everything. So it's like with my kids, they're kind of Gen Z and one of them is a linkster, but you never go to them and say, they never come to you and say, hey, I want to watch a movie and you go, great, let's go to Blockbuster's, let's rent it. They expect it to be just available on demand, available all the time. And that was what I think the kind of millennial generation started being entitled to access to data, then I think you went to the generation where it was everything always connected, no concept of banword. But now I think it's the, the real thing that's changing is the concept of ownership and I think that's where you start to see things like, will the car industry ever be the same because if you don't need to own a car because you're not driven by the same passions that people who own cars are driven by, it's just a way of communicating you don't need a garage on your house, you may as well park the car somewhere else. It comes when you need it. It can change the way cities are laid out. I mean there's so many different routes you can go down with this. >> SO how does that innovation, how does that knowledge that you gain get into ServiceNow products and services? >> That all comes back then to how you, how people are going to face new management dynamics or how people are going to manage things like IOT devices? How are people going to deal with managing work if it is a task based economy? How are people going to start to think about not just working in a system of record, or not just working in a system of engagements, but how are they going to start to build that mesh or that web that links all these different things together? And I think that's where our strand comes. Our strand comes in the ability to be able to link systems of records together. To link users with those backend systems, to be able to manage those complex work processes. That's kind of the core elements. Also I think when you look at what Fred Crasick when he built the platform and he had the whole work flow engine and it is that engine that's kind of the key pallet to the whole company. >> I think the metaphor of mesh, sometimes we talk about a matrix of digital services that becomes ubiquitous beyond a cloud of remote services, is really transforming to this mesh of digital capabilities that are everywhere that do things that Clouds don't do. They sense, they react, they respond, they read, they hear. It's an amazing time that we're entering in innovation. Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson when they wrote the book Second Machine Age talked about Moore's Law, power innovation but they also talked about the innovation curve reshaping from going from Linears Moore's Law which we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades in this industry to reshaping, to an expediential curve. And I wonder if we could get your thoughts. We've paused that it's accommodation of sort of data applying machine intelligence to that data and then leveraging Cloud economics at scale is really where the innovation is going to come from in the future. What are your thoughts on that? >> So let me try to understand the question. So you're talking about not actually the way that you've seen the growth from a process prospective but the way you actually see the growth from a machine learning capability being able to analyze that data? >> Applying that layer of machine learning. Maybe use that mesh metaphor, that top level. You know you've got horizontal technology services but then there's this new AI layer on top. The data is the fuel for that AI. >> Absolutely, I think it's the I think people can't even imagine what they can do with that data, people can't even contemplate some of the decisions they can make and it's when people start to look at things in completely different ways, it's when people start to say, well, if we apply machine learning to a user interface for example, could we come up with a better user interface because now if we understand how people interact with the system, could we actually build a better system? Or you see people starting to have this whole butterfly effect around the way that artificial intelligence works. So the best example I heard was from, I was actually at a convention with a girl called Louis Chang and she was talking to me about it. But they were speaking to hospitals. They we're talking about self drive cars and the application machine learning of being able to help cars drive. And they were saying the interest in knock on effect of this was a hospital saying it was going to be a real problem for them having self drive cars. And she said, why's it going to be a problem? And the problem was, if you look across the whole America you have about 20 people a day die because they can't get replacement organs. But 37 percent of the organs come from car crashes. So if you take car crashes out of the equation. So what they were investing in was actually looking at how they do cloning technology for organs. So no one would ever imagine (mumbled speaking) and this is going to improve cloning technology so much. And I think AI's in the same place. Everyone's using it in such a small area that they don't even see the potential of what they could do with it, they don't have any concept of what they could be starting to look at and how they could start to spot transvaterian people. Even on a base level, I was speaking to one of our customers the other night, and they managed to put an AI system in place that when they got a call in off the description of the call they could work out what the customer satisfaction was going to be and if it was going to be a bad satisfaction figure, they could preemp that and put different agents that were more skilled on that particular issue. And they said a few years ago all they were interested in was maybe one day we'll be able to categorize something asymmetrically. But now they can predict how well something's going to be resolved. >> It's very hard to predict isn't it? I mean who would of thought that Alexa would of emerged as one of the best if not the best natural language processing systems or that images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition in technology. >> That one especially. >> Could of never predicted that. So, but because you're such a clear thinker and a strategic thinker, I want to ask you to make some predictions. I'm going to run some things by you. You talked about autonomous vehicles for awhile. Do you believe that owning in the future, pick whatever time frame you want, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception? >> Yeah I think it will probably be the people who, well okay, so I definitely think driving your own car will become the exception. I think some people will always want that sense of ownership until we get to a generation that doesn't. I think they'll always be a hard core of people who do want to own and do want to drive and do want that experience, but I think you've already got the issue where congestion's such a level in most areas. Is there any enjoyment out of driving? So I love driving, I love sports cars, I collect them. But if someone said, hey you've got two options, you can sit in a high performance sports car to go to LA or you can sit in a Tesla and it will drive itself and you can read a book. I'm getting in the Tesla. (laughing) >> How about retail? Right for disruption, do you think that large retail stores will essentially, not essentially, it's never complete, but will largely go away? >> I think it depends on the nature of the experience. So I think for a lot of goods that are consumable goods, I can kind of see that going away. I don't think it will go away for luxury goods. I don't think it will go away fully for fashion. I think people always like to look at things and understand things and check fits but for some things that are high consumables maybe even for electronics, I can see those going or I can see it going for things where it's worn product. So something like a shop that just sells sneakers. I can see someone could easily offer a range and say, well look, here's what we sell. When you order something, we'll automatically ship you one size up, one size down, or two variations of color and it will be a free system return the ones you don't want. I think the whole experience of ordering one thing and hoping it works out, I think that will go away. It will be concept of ordering a group of things or maybe it will be applying to artificial intelligence to say, hey you've asked for this color, but we know that people who also ask for that color like this color as well. We're going to ship you them both. You can see how it goes and send us the one back you don't like. >> Okay, let's see. Will machines make better diagnosis than doctors? I've got to say I think you will get to a point where that will happen. Especially if it's things where it's image processing, where it's x-ray processing, MRI processing. Where it's something like process of mental health, then I don't know. Maybe, I'd probably rather have my mental health treated by a person than a questionnaire. But yeah I think the things we're using, image recognition, or things where you're looking at patent distribution or you're looking at even like virus distribution or virus structure, then I think those areas I think you will get to a point where diagnostic issue is better. But you look at where artificial intelligence is from diagnostics now and you go on doctor google and search for something, you know, everything finished with the bottom line, or it could be cancer. >> Dave Vennari: Yeah, you're dead. >> What about will there ever be a revolt, you know in the sense of, technology is so pervasive, and people just say forget it, I'm sick of just being tracked, I just kind of want to have a human to human connection and, >> Dave Vellante: Dream on. >> So are we done for? >> I was speaking to a girl who works for me, Menesha, and she was saying, we were talking on Friday and she said, hey, I was having a coffee with nother girl Cass, and Menesha's in Seattle and Cass in is San Francisco, and I said, oh was she in Seattle or were you in San Francisco and Menesha's a lot younger than me, and she went, no we weren't in the same room. We were just like doing it over video like a virtual coffee. And I was like what, so you both get coffee and sit and have a conversation? And she was like, oh yeah. >> Dave Vellante: Alright, I've got one more, I've got one more. >> Okay, let's hear it, let's hear it. >> Alright last one, it's great, thanks for playing along. >> I know this is fun. >> Financial services is an industry that really hasn't been disrupted. DO you feel like the banks will lose control, the major banks will lose control of payment systems? >> I think there's a lot of conversations now around how much those payment systems open up. Because if you, let's say you do a transaction with Amazon, you do a transaction with Google, how hard would it be for every transaction to be done that way? So rather than, if your setting off a payment for I don't know, gas bills or a car loan payments, rather than giving your bank details, why not give your PayPal details or your Amazon account details or your Google details? That could be, reduce all the banking transactions down to one interface. I think that could happen. I think you could get, well obviously you're already seeing the rise of Blockchain and I'm not a Blockchain expert. I'm itching to find a used case for us with Blockchain but I can't find it yet. But for direct transactions, if both sources can trust each other than yeah, that direct transaction between those two sources, I think that's completely possible. I think there's also areas where, you've seen happen in the past where a banking faces issues from retail coming into banking, so sometimes you'll get the big supermarket chains, especially in Europe they say, okay you're going to get (foreign name) or you're going to get Tesco's Bank, because they've got all our customer loyalty, they've got people waiting to give discounts to if they bank with them, so they can instantly bring, if you said to your shopping account base, hey, if you bank with me we'll give you 20 dollars a week off your grocery shopping, you could probably ring 10 million customers straight away. So I think banking's challenged from other industries that want to get into it, from places where you'll actually go and do each transactions now and from where places where you'll just go and order stuff online and you could filter all that through one place, I think they'll still always be the commercial side of banking. There's always going to be the stocks and bonds, there's still going to be the wealth management, but props for transactional banking, you could start to see a decline. >> Fantastic, thank you. >> I love this futurist talk, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on theCube Dave. >> Alright, thanks for having me, always a pleasure. >> Dave Vellante: Great to see you. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 theCube's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)