>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Gene Reznik, the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Gene. >> My pleasure, Rebecca. >> So, Accenture is calling this period of time that we are all living through a period of epic disruption. Define what that means for us. >> Sure, sure. So, well, I think we're living in a very disruptive age right now. But again, I think we believe over the next 10 years it's going to become even more epic. And I think what's driving that, some things are geopolitical in nature. Alright, uh. Sort of, everything between U.S. and China relations, what's happening in Europe, all of that. Of course, there's technological. Dynamics around artificial intelligence. Of course, there's data, there's privacy, there's security. And all that really compounding on each other. We believe it's creating an environment where it's just going to be very challenging for people, but also for companies to navigate. And I think leadership and big organizations and their teams have to be very thoughtful of how they navigate this time. And I think there's going to be some big winners and I think there's going to be some big losers. And I think we see companies today that have been around for hundreds of years challenged to really adapt, adjust, and transform to really be prepared for this next wave of change. >> So, as you said, it's a very restive time politically, technologically, business wise. How are companies approaching this? I mean, as you said, you have to be very thoughtful. You have to have a real strategy in terms of how you're going to approach this, an approach innovation. How would you say companies are doing? Give them a report card right now in terms of how industry is responding. >> Yeah, well I think the first thing we would sort of say, and we've done quite a bit of analysis, and study through Accenture research, and as you'd expect, different industries are under different amounts of pressure and disruption. Some, like music industry and book publishing and currently retail, are under tremendous pressure. And, many have not responded well. They were too slow. They saw the digital natives just really take away their businesses. Others are better protected. So we have really gone through and analyzed industry by industry how they are prepared for today and really what they need to do going forward. And I guess our assessment is it's very, very difficult, as you would expect, to take a big organization and transform it. And the issue is again, while a lot of it is technology, the people side, the culture side, the organizational side, the incumbency dimension, the shareholders, all those things that make change very difficult are at the core of the transformation agenda. >> And innovation is really sort of the answer to it all because once you're move innovative, then you are going to ride this wave of epic disruption. So, first of all, how would you, so many companies are saying we want to be more innovative. What's the answer to that? I mean, what does that mean to be more innovative? >> Yeah, it's a good point. So we have, Accenture has looked at this. We sort of codified something that we call the wise pivot. Which is how should an organization really pivot to transform their business. And it's got elements, we believe strongly that you have to transform the core. Innovation can't be on the edge. At some point, you have to transform the core which usually gets at cost reduction, using automation to transform the business, transform the core economics. Then you have to grow the core and that's really I think the hard part, which is gaining market share in the core business we believe, whether it's in automotive business, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in even retail, you have to grow the core, cause ultimately that gives you the investment capacity to scale the new. So, how to orchestrate that journey in a methodical way, again, keeping in mind the organization and what it delivers today and not leaving different parts of the organization behind is what we work with our clients on. >> And, what separates the winners from the losers? So the companies that are doing this well, how are they focusing on their core? And the core competencies? >> Right. We believe investing is a very big thing. Right, so the hardest part of all of this, in terms of economically, I mean there's a lot of difficult dimensions, but economically, as the pressure mounts, the ability to invest diminishes for most companies. And they don't have the room to invest in the business that their future depends on. And really freeing up that room and making the difficult decisions, you may have seen there were some announcements of mass lay offs, even today right? It's some of the biggest companies in the world. They're trying to create the room to invest in their next generation business that will take them into the future. And I think that's really the hardest part. How do you ultimately create the capacity to invest? And how do you make those investments? Again, cause there's also a lot of other examples of companies that have invested in the wrong way or in the wrong thing, that ultimately didn't lead them to the future So those two elements, creating the room to invest, then investing it in the right things and the right ways is what we find is key. >> So you're talking of course about GM which announced today that it was laying off about 15 thousand white collar and blue collar jobs. And the reason they're doing this is because they're saying there's no longer any room for six passenger cars in this market. We want to focus on self-driving vehicles. Is that a good move? I mean, I know you're not a GM analyst here but at the same time, it sounds as though that is smart, as you said. It's making room for investing in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that GM is clearly seeing autonomous cars coming, sort of form factors, everything that they're doing. And again, I don't think particular it's that in GM's case but again you read it that way. You'll look at General Electric. They're restructuring their entire company to better compete in the new. You'll look at IBM. IBM is acquiring Red Hat to have the kind of assets to compete in the new. So I think the biggest companies in the world are really trying to sort of say what the next ten years, what is their business going to to be? And then how to they take what got them here which for many of them have been 50 to 100 year journeys. And really figure out how to restructure that, to give them the room to invest into building a new business. And really, that takes tremendous leadership by the entire, you know, by the CEO, the board, the entire executive team and the people. The people have to commit to go along for that ride, and endure some of the pain for the greater good. >> So it's really a change management issue here, but in terms of, you talked about leadership, it also takes the foresight to actually know what your business is in the future. So GM is saying autonomous vehicles, which an average layman can say, yeah, that looks as though that's where the car industry is going. But how does a company even begin to imagine it's future at this time where there are new technologies being invented everyday, which are disruptive as we started talking about in the earlier conversation. >> Yeah, I think that's a very good question. Cause also if you look at where's the money going. The money is going to the disrupters. Right, if you look at the top five, the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, let's put Microsoft in there. Combined last year they invested over 70 billion dollars, and that's about 15 percent of all of the fortune of the global one thousand. So the capital, as measured by what companies are expending, what the start-up, the VCs are at an all time high. 155 billion dollars invested last year, double what it was in 2001. The IPO market is at an all time high. Right, then you have these things like division fund, which is a whole other investment vehicle to fuel technology. So the reality is, there's never been more money going in to create the next wave of disruption, which is why we believe many of the existing companies really need to create those partnerships where they benefit from that. They can't compete with it. They can't outguess it, right? They need to be making equal systems that ultimately enable them to leverage those investments, to really help power their next generation business. >> So as an ecosystem driven world, where is Accenture doing this kind of work? >> Yeah, so the good news for Accenture is we built our business, built services in an ecosystem kind of model. Initially with SAP, with Oracle, with Salesforce and now it's with companies like Amazon and the AWS. And I think our view, and what we try to work with our clients on, is really to create the construct. And by the way, a lot of these constructs are just now being formed. What does partnering with an AWS to create your next generation digital business, what does that look like? And there's some models emerging in terms of co-innovation. And I would tell you what Amazon has done, what Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase is an example of partnering to transform healthcare. Interesting way to do that. You look at something, another Seattle company Starbucks partnering with Alibaba to basically power their entire business in China. So you're starting to see different constructs where big companies are really coming together in different ways. And then again, those partnership constructs, incentives, business models around that, I think that's really where the innovation is going to take place. How do you do that? How do you align your incentives? And how do you jointly benefit from that partnership? >> So you announced something today with your Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle, Washington. Tell our viewers a bit little more about that. >> Well, first of all we look at AWS and we say, clearly this is a company that is really important. >> It's doing something right. >> It's doing a lot of things right, it's doing a lot of things right. And I think a lot of our clients are looking at them, are leveraging them. So, it's our responsibility then as a services organization to build up capabilities and skills, and make their, and enable our clients to really tap in to this tremendous innovation. So, yeah, we did announce at Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle. It'll be one of many centers across the United States and globally with a simple premise of building skills, building proof of concepts, building use cases, building MVPs to really around different industries and different solutions sets so again, reimagine business processes, catalyze transformation, and really make it something that our clients can tap into. >> You are the Chief Strategy Officer, what is your piece of advice for companies out there, at AWS, at reInvent here, what's sort of your one piece of strategy advice in this period of epic disruption and this cloud world. >> Yeah, I would say that unburdening ourselves from the day to day, and really immersing ourselves in this amazing environment. Learning, really understanding what makes one of these, one of the greatest companies in the world tick. Understanding how they do things. Not only, and as you know, there's more to Amazon than just technology. Right? There's a very strong culture. There's a very strong customer centricity. And really sort of understanding that, and really trying to apply it to our respective businesses. And seeing how it could really be, make the pivot to the digital more effective. And that's what I would sort of say. Come with an open mind. Learn a lot, and take it forward. >> Great, well Gene Reznik thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> This is a lot of fun. >> My pleasure. Thank you, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit in just a little bit. (techno music)