>>From Las Vegas, it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services entails their ecosystem partners. >>Okay. Welcome back everybody to the cube live in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon web services reinvent 2018 upshot four with David, Dave, our sixth year covering AWS reinvent. We EV except for the first year we weren't there, but certainly it's been fun to watch the massive, massive rive of the wave of the cloud and Amazon's discipline and execution. Our next guest is Roger Barga, general manager, robotics and autonomous services for Amazon web services. Great to have you thank you for joining us. It's great to be here today. So a lot of stuff to talk about this, Amazon's got like this cult personality, or they do cool things. Uh, they innovate as well as they take care of the basic cloud needs more compute, better networking, more storage, or the core engine, uh, robotics, autonomous, you think of cars, you think of future flying drones, maybe in the future. >>What's going on? What are you, what are you working on? I think it mentioned explain what your job is and what you're doing at Amazon. I think it's super important. We actually look at robots as being anything that census computes and acts, and that opens up such a wide range of the definition of robot from a washing machine to escape the system to the robots. We think of actually that's the full spectrum is what we're trying to address. And we've announced a new service called AWS robo maker. It is designed to support the end to end application development life cycle for building intelligent robot, deploying it to one 10 hundreds, thousands of robots out in the field, monitoring them. We are really addressing the developer need on how to build and scale and run a robotics business. You know, what really resonates with me and, uh, with you guys at Andy's keynote this morning was he used the word builder a lot of times, um, tool for the right job. >>I think that really connects with the culture that we're seeing in the world today. Maker fair started it out. Robotics clubs in high schools were probably at an all time high in terms of interests. It's not just a nerdy geek thing. It's actually kind of mainstream. People are attracted to rabbis. People have wearables. So you're seeing a world where technology and robotics are colliding. So this kind of falls into the new kind of persona developers that's out there. Who's building a robotic stuff. It used to be some like special group of people. Not anymore. Explain how you guys are going after the developers with this. Okay. So it is very focused on the developer. And we started talking to our internal customers who are building robots. We started talking to external customers, building robots to really understand the struggles that they had and have to face. >>And you actually realized that the roboticists tend to actually are deepened hardware, drivers, actuators, sensors, and they are forced to be software engineers at the same time, because there's just not ready-made software and they have to go roll their own tooling. So we're actually providing them with the tools so they can actually focus on the hardware and the innovation that goes on there, or adding the intelligence to the robot to carry out the more meaningful task. And again, we've had conversations with companies that are, that are building small appliances that basically they think of as a robot, a dishwasher that has sensors, they've actually sense how the water flow is going the temperature and then take action all the way to our group. That's actually putting a robot in the space station to take photographs all over underwater robots, air robots, and the drones. So those deed came in robotic competitions, right? >>You're familiar with those, right? It was all high school kids. And there's always a hardware team, which is kind of clear. And then the software team, which always struggled. So I'm envisioning these guys are now going to be using robo maker as part of that team. So if I understand it, the mission is kind of develop secure, deploy, and manage robotic apps. That's really what you guys are a little bit more also, please. So we've actually bundled in our cloud service for machine learning, for analytics and for monitoring. And so now with Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex integration, you can talk to your robot, your robot can respond to you. We can stream the video off the robot through Kinesis, video streams and send it to recognition. So the robot can actually see, you'll be able to see what your robot is seeing, run it through recognition. >>You can identify what it's, what it's seeing and be able to tell it, go to the refrigerator. And it knows where the refrigerator is something else we have done. I think it's interesting to share with you is that we've actually working with something called the robot operating system, which is the most commonly used open source software framework for robotics ROS. Um, we have contributed all of our cloud extensions as open source to the community. And we're also technical steering committee members for Ross two, which is the next generation of Ross. We like to think of it as a commercial grade version of Ross, the Linux for robots. And we're also contributing open source to that as well, because what you'll find is this is what developers are using and reusing. So if you have a sensor or an actuator for a robot you'd like to use, you're probably going to find ross' package already out there to actually drive that sensor or drive that actuator that you can use. >>And now you see new ones for our cloud services that you can turn monitoring on machine learning services on as well. So you contribute to open source community you're so that's going to accelerate the adoption. So you're also making it easier. I want you to explain how you guys are working to do that because if this kind of continues on this track is going to remove some of the blockers or the barriers to get into this and that's to get the applications up and running, which should have a impact on like fleet management to, you know, anything. I mean, that's really the problem statement here. Isn't it, it really isn't, it's really what our mission is. We're always looking at developers and how we can accelerate them and make them more productive. Let's say the three of us wanted to go off and build a robotics application. >>We'd have to make sure that the environment and all of our machines are the same, because you might have a DLL, a different DLL or a different package, which means when we deploy to the robot, we're breaking it. We're not consistent. We actually offer a cloud development environment for robotics. With one click off the AWS management console. You can choose the operating system that you'd like to deploy to your robot. It'll download it. It'll configure that for you. It'll create scalable storage to store the artifacts. As we build our robot and try different algorithms out it'll provision compute for, to compile our, our robot application. We even have pre-built applications to get you started and you have access to all the ROS packages. And so within minutes we could it be up and working together, writing a robotics application. That's just part of it though. >>So again, I talked about the cloud service extensions, but simulation is such a huge thing because we may not even have a robot bill yet. And we want to simulate our robot. We offer pre-built worlds like a room in a house or a retail store or a racetrack for the race car that you heard about today. And you can drop your robot in these environments and test it. You can turn a physics model on and say, my robots carrying 500 pounds simulate. When you're happy with it, then you can deploy that over the air to your actual robot and the simulation. You can actually run hundreds of them in parallel, faster than wall clock time. So it's literally, we could actually do a thousand simulation hours, probably in 15 or 20 minutes to test our robot and all this compute, you spin up a supercomputer, basically bring it all together. >>You mentioned the formula. One thing, that's interesting. What insights can come into this. And I want to get down to the intelligence piece because when I met Andy, I just wrote an article yesterday on Forbes with my, on my interview with him, he made a comment. I want to add to the conversation. He said, the clouds are the brains on premise as their environment. So robots will deep rains. So talk about the connection to the AWS. Yes. So that's a key part, right? It connects to the, they got a lot of brains. So you got a lot of opportunities to connect services. What kinds of services do you envision connecting to the robots? Okay. So what was announced today with the race car it's at that car is actually trained in robo maker through simulation, through reinforcement learning. And so hundreds of simulations of the car, trying to go around the track, all that information is being fed to SageMaker, which is using its reinforcement learning to actually build an algorithm, a better algorithm, and then pulling it back to the car and trying it over and over again. >>That's how you actually train the car and you see that beautiful partitioning with the cloud, big compute, reinforcement learning, large datasets. The car wants you to deploy the machine learning model to the car. It can actually continue to set up signals for more information. So as the car is being used for racing, you're still learning. It's still updating the model. So again, this beautiful part, how's that how's that data flow. So you have data coming off the car, you send it back up to the cloud, you then that's where the heavy modeling occurs. And then you push it back down. The small machine learning model, back down, we have Kinesis data streams. We also have IOT MQTT messages. We can send back up to the cloud and you really start to see the role of the cloud. When we have hundreds of devices out, each one might make a mistake every once in a while, but collectively you're getting a large training set for returning a model and pushing it back down. >>It's where deep learning really adds value, too. It really is. And you mentioned adding more personality to it before we came on camera robot, you saw, this is really kind of where it's going to really kind of make it personalized. It, it is. And in fact, Leah, it's this it's a robot that's made by by robot care systems, excuse me, robot care services. And Leah is an intelligent robotic Walker. Absolutely brilliant. The elderly and disabled canal live more independent, more agile lives. Um, it has 72 sensors since compute act. It figures out what the user is trying to do. The user now can actually interact with it with voice through our Amazon Polly and Amazon's Lex integrations. So with the walkers across the room, the user can say, Leah, come to me and Leah will actually motor over to the user user can get on. >>Leah will sense that it's carrying load and it can say, Leah, let's go to the front door and Leah will start moving our way to the front door. That's just so natural. And that's the impact of real life impact of that. People who live alone, could it be diabetes or maybe something as they get sick robot could be tied into a health meter. I mean, this is kind of real world scenarios that aren't far away. No they're happening now. It's happening right now. And again, you're starting to see the value that robots are going to bring to our lives. And again, robotics has to have such hard problems to solve with the hardware and that algorithm, the writing. We really don't want the other work to have to be a burden for them. We really want to simplify that. So I'll talk about the CHAM, the total market adjustability here, because the F the formula one, the developers, I get that Jennifer's I get the formula one. Is there a market for robots? Who's doing it. Where is it? Is, is it embryonic and early? Is it, how's this forming you in your mind? Um, marketplace, as we've looked at this, we have been amazed at all the places we're finding robots. Again, we see robots underwater. We see drones in the air. We see robotic arms and factories. We see them in education. I have yet to see an area where a robot can assist or carry out tasks to help humans. How about doing interviews? >>Yeah. We're not gonna be replaced yet. Although we have >>Robot on the cube one, despite the fact that we'd like to think how advanced robots are, you can't replace humans, not the NR, the mobility, our intelligence or personality. So if the number of things robots could do keeps getting, >>Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't that long ago, robots couldn't climb stairs. >>That's right. That's right. Amazing. Let's talk about your goals for the year. What are you trying to do with the, with the service? Um, and what can people expect to see coming from AWS? We're definitely going to be listening to our customers now that we've launched and we're working backwards to actually add features that they tell us. They'd like to see. We're really pleased that we've got a partnership with first robotics. We want to work with with first, actually bring our service to allow students and learners of all ages to learn robotics. We have an education and research program with about 25 universities with more signing on as well. They're very interested in using the service for teaching robotics and for education and research as well. So I really want to, we really want to push hard there's because we think robotics has a great future. >>It's going to help our lives. And we think robo makers, the way that they're going to do, I can tell you from my four living in Palo Alto, which is again, a different zip code than middle America, robotics is hot. People like robotics. They like to play with the robotics. And it has now it's software democratization tools and frameworks. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to code sheet language. Yeah. Yeah. That's I think the power of our service is that basically the developers no longer limited to the code. They write in the software. They can hardware that can put on their robot that can take advantage of cloud services, glue them together and start building a robot. Well, we are very interested in covering, uh, what goes on with your area and certainly want to know more about how the community's developing. Certainly the open source I think, is going to be a very big part of your plan. We agree. We're committed. Roger. Thanks for coming on. Great insight, robo maker. One of the top announcements is a great demo on the keynote, uh, from, uh, the formula one, uh, spokesperson. I think the executive great demo that I think is worth watching. Congratulations on the success or cube coverage here. No robots here. We're live coverage. Re-invent 2018. We right back.

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering Red Hat summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat summit here in Boston, Massaachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Armughan Ahmad, he is the senior vice president and general manager solutions and alliances at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> It's my pleasure, good to see you, Rebecca. >> So we've had you on the program before, but your role has changed a bit at Dell EMC since then. Tell us what you're doing now. >> Sure, I have the pleasure to now lead our solutions business unit that we have under infrastructure solutions group. What we drive is focus areas of customer outcomes. Work load orientation around high performance computing. Driving data analytics, business critical applications, software defined solutions, and then also hybrid cloud. So those are our five big priorities. >> It's a big mandate. >> It is a big mandate, right? And as you know, Dell EMC is Number one in everything. That's all we talk about. You'll hear this at Dell EMC World next week. But you know, at Red Hat summit, we're really having this discussion, right, Red Hat open stack summit, which is really around our differentiation, how we're driving human progress forward, social innovation forward. So that's exciting. So as we take our applications and partner with our alliance partners, that's the differentiation we're excited to share with customers and partners here at Red Hat summit as well. >> So Dell EMC, as you said, is uniquely suited to do these things and lead in this way. But how do you make deployment easier? I mean, that's the big question that customers and partners need to know. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you as you know, being number One in everything, when I joked about this, not joking about this, if you really think about our market share in compute or servers, if you look at our market share in storage, external storage, internal storage, you look at our market share in converge infrastructure, hyperconverge infrastructure, if you see our market share in data protection, or our market share in open networking, right, so we're all the way to the far top right of the Gartner magic quadrants, number one in market shares and revenue. That's all interesting, but what's fascinating for the customers is really more about how do you make all of this real? If you envision like a pyramid almost, and you think that the bottom is all of these infrastructure layers, the next one above that is virtualization, the next one above that is orchestration, but really on the top, is a platform, top of the pyramid, that's where the business sits. Business wants a platform, and what we're doing is trying to make all of that easy. We know that customers will build and they would want to do a DIY solution. And we obviously have that, we've been doing it for decades. But we're really trying to move to that top end of the pyramid with our hybrid could solutions, our converge solutions, but more the solutions that my organization leads is the blueprint solutions. And the whole idea about blueprint solutions is that how can we offer ready offerings to customers so that they don't have to really worry about the bottom of the pyramid, but the top of a platform so that's it's easy to deploy. >> And customized for their business. >> Absolutely. >> Armughan, in the keynote on day one, we heard that one of the top priorities for customers is figuring out their cloud strategy. Now, at Dell EMC, you have a number of offerings, can you bring us up to date, where does open stack fit into that, and of course, we're going to want to talk about the Red Hat joint solution that you're after. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, open stack, let me take it even a step back, you know Michael, 31 years ago, since he founded Dell, has always stood for choice for customers, open ecosystems for customers. And even though we have Dell technologies now, the acquisition of so many of the other assets that are under Dell technologies, we're really delighted to partner and ensure that we have the right kind of choice that we're offering to our customers. So open stack, Stu, puts a very big differentiation forward. You know, I'm here with our Dell EMC team at Red Hat open stack summit and our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, is that they're looking for Dell EMC to really provide open source based solutions in telecom markets, in, you know, when you take a look at telecom and it's moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it's really going to be the applications and how those applications become scaled out versus just infrastructure becoming scaled out. So now the evolution of open stack and how Dell EMC contributes to it, we never really wanted to build our own ecosystem of open stack like some of our other competitors have done. We've always stood by Red Hat open stack based solutions to say hey, if they're number one in open stack markets and they're already tuning that, why can't we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way so that one plus one equals five for the customers, and it becomes much easier for them to deploy that. >> Great, so absolutely, you mentioned some of the telecoms. NFV was probably the most talked about use case for open stack at last year's summit. We've got the open stack summit here in Boston next week, we'll be covering it. Is that a top use case for your solution with Red Hat, what are the real business drivers for people doing open stack, is it just private cloud solutions that they offer that you said mentioned the open source, people are still trying to figure out where this open stack fits compared to some of the other options that they have. >> Stu, what I'm finding, and you and I have had these discussions several times across the stack of server storage networking and others, the largest cost associated with deploying or consuming IT is really your OPEX cost. So if you envision for a second a pie chart and you look at a customer spend, a capital spend, about 25% of that is CAPEX oriented, which is how much you pay for infrastructure or software. About 75% of that is OPEX oriented, which is your human cost of managing it, your serviceability and others. The whole idea about us talking about this Dell EMC ready bundle solution that we're taking to market, so we announced yesterday our opportunity to really go out and simplify all of this for customers, for cloud solutions, or for their NFV or NFVI solutions, as we're seeing NFVI-- >> And for our audience that doesn't know NFVI, what's the differentiation there? >> Our opportunity to take network function virtualization, then taking VNF capabilities, and then also making sure that we're virtualizing a lot of those aspects on NFVI so that our customers are driving service provider opportunities to then containerize these opportunities as part of open shift and others. And we feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really, then, ends up becoming our tested validated offerings so that customers don't really have to worry about the infrastructure layer, or even the software layer for that matter, and we can just give them a platform that I was referring to earlier. So that ready bundle for open stack that we have offered, and I will be taking about it in my keynote today, that whole ready bundle at Dell EMC solution has been validated, tested. It's got not just reference architectures, but deployment guides, run books. But we've also taken it one step forward, we actually internally called it jetstream. And the whole idea of jetstream internal codename was, if you guys are familiar with jetstreams around the world, and you catch one of those jetstreams, they usually go from west to east. And if you go from Boston to London, you can get there pretty quickly if you hit one of those because it's 160 miles an hour. That's why we selected the name jetstream. And the whole idea is if you actually imagine if you put a concord in that jetstream, you can actually do that trip now in three hours, or you could've done it in concords around at the time. So if we can actually create that concord-like style of a ready bundle solution that is running open stack platform, we can not only get the customers to deploy much faster and reduce their OPEX, but there's a tooling that's required. So for example, the customer wants to deploy an open stack solution. We actually created a jetpack, jetstream, jetpack, and the whole idea of a jetpack is very quickly us providing sizing tools and deployment tools for customers so that they can get to their destination very, very fast. >> And how fast are we talking here? >> So we're talking, I'll actually have a customer, East Carolina University, on stage with me. Something that would take three weeks, they've got it done in three days using this jetpack solution. So us creating these ready bundles and deploying open stack much faster, either for cloud environments or environments for NFV and eventually for NFVI. And then we're also working with our Dell EMC code group, which is now looking at containerization solutions as well. So that's sort of the differentiations that we're talking about. >> And Armughan, I know, we're really good usually at quantifying that kind of deployment, that shrinking months to days or days to hours, that operational efficiency though, once it's in there, do you have any metrics or cost savings that your customers in general are seeing of rolling this out versus the old kind of putting it together themselves. >> Great question, Stu, so we all measured, Rebecca, you know this, you've written for HBR, which is really about ROI, TCOs for customers, what is your return on investment and your total cost of ownership. And really, what we're finding is that we can do this about 30% more effective. I'd love to say it's 80% more effective where we can take your OPEX down and others. But realistically, if you really look at East Carolina University or many of the other customers who are deploying this, they're seeing on average about 30% improvement in their operating costs. Now, it's not just related to cloud or it's not just related to NFV and NFVI. We're also seeing a huge use case of open stack now as part of high performance computing. So as high performance computing is evolving from traditional research and moving more into machine learning and AI frameworks, we're also seeing customers leverage open stack in that environment as well. >> and I wonder also, I mean, just talking about the difficulties with calculating ROI, but talking about how it's having this big impact on high performance computing, what about high performance teams, the people who are actually doing the work? >> Absolutely, and so talking about high performance team, right, the web tech, it started in Silicon Valley, now it's in Dublin, Ireland, or it's in China or all of these other places, they've really figured out, right, how do you drive efficiency. I mean, at Facebook, I think one server admin manages 50,000 physical servers or something like that. That's a scale out ways. >> And the thing we always say, it's that person's job is varied, it's not just that their doing three orders of magnitude more than the poor guy running around the data center, they've changed really how they focus on the application, and that job is very different. So they don't really even have server admins, they just have the number of head count that they need. >> The number of head count that's required. >> Hyperscale model, very different from what we have in the enterprise world. >> Absolutely, absolutely. But there are lessons to be learned from the hyperscale model. And if you can drive, I mean, according to IDC, one server admin manages about 40 physical servers, somewhere between 30 to 40 physical servers versus the number that I just shared with you, right, from these big web tech providers. So if we can even improve that to 100 or 1,000 to one admin. I think sys admins still should continue to exist even though this whole public cloud is coming in. But the rise of edge computing for us is also a big, big phenomenon. And we want to ensure that the rise of edge computing, Dell EMC is at the forefront of ensuring that we're providing analytic solutions to our customers. And a lot of the analytics are really happening at the edge 'cause you need to make those analytics decisions very quick 'cant really have a lot of latency back to public cloud for that. So our hybrid cloud solutions, working very closely with open stack to drop OPEX costs down, all of that really matters to customer right now. >> Armughan, I want to go back to something you talked about in the very beginning, which is this element of human progress. It's a professional and personal passion of yours to use technology for good, to solve some of the world's most complex problems, educating young women, working in developing countries, curing cancer. Talk a little bit about what you're doing. >> You know, Rebecca, that's a huge passion of not just mine, but Michael, and all of our executive leadership team at Dell EMC. We were talking earlier before this interview started, it's a passion of yours and Stu's. We all love to, as human beings, contribute to society. And human progress is really technologies impacting human progress in different ways. Right, if you talk about manufacturing jobs versus what automation is. But at the same time, technology is also helping in many different areas. So if you look at developing countries, now I'm personally involved in girls' education in third world countries where they're not prioritized, and what can technology do at schools to really get them to learn coding and get a differentiation out very, very quickly. But at the same time, our Dell initiatives, we call it the legacy for good. The Dell initiatives are really, not just about diversity and inclusion, it's also about improving the human progress. I'll give you an example. We have a great customer, T-Gen. And T-Gen is in the healthcare field and they drive genome sequencing solutions, so they have scientists who drive genome sequencing. Now, if you think about genome sequencing before technology, how long it would take somebody to sequence certain genomes for the purpose of cancer research, that would take you years. Now, if you can get that done in minutes, and that technology will learn, and then next time you do it, it would be even seconds for the same platform. So we actually developed a life sciences genome sequencing high performance computing cluster for this customer. And now they're able to very quickly help young girls and young kids improve their longevity with their cancer treatment that they're going through. So those are the things that really matter to our teams. And I know it matters to our customers and our partners. Because now we're not talking about just open stack or Dell EMC and our great number one in everything solutions we have. Those are fantastic, but how do you relate that social innovation, how do you relate that to human progress. To me, that is really the differentiation that we all collectively need to continue to drive and talk about this a little bit more. But we do need to find more connection points that we know that technology can help, but it's really those medical professionals and those researchers, they're really the brainiacs who use our technology, our opportunity as tech geeks, or I call myself a geek, at least, is how do we take that and then take that out to them and then real researchers can build their platforms on top of it to cure cancer. Or to go drive manufacturing jobs for social innovation purposes in middle America or around the world. That's the difference and those are the solutions that my team, along with many others at Dell EMC, along with our partners with Red Hat, we're focused on, we talk about that a lot. And Jim Witers talked about social innovation and how Red Hat is also making that a priority this morning in his keynote. >> Armughan, it sounds like your team is quite busy. And I know you've got your big event coming up next week, so you finish the keynote here, you'll be jetting our to Las Vegas. Rebecca, a big set of our Cube team will all be out in Vegas to cover the show. So give our audience a little bit of a preview of what you can about what we should expect for the new Dell EMC world as kind of taking together what EMC world has been doing for many years and Dell world in the past. >> You know, we're really excited, Stu, about Dell EMC world because this is the first time Dell world and EMC world comes together in Vegas. So we'll look forward to having you guys there. We have great speakers lined up, it's really focused for customers and technical audiences. We've got lots of partners there. But more importantly, we're showcasing all the solutions and the culmination of Dell EMC merger that has happened along with our Dell technologies group of companies like Pivotal along with VMWare along with Secureworks along with Virtustream. And how do we differentiate not just the Dell brand, which is our client computing group that we have, but also our Dell EMC, that's server storage networking, and then with VMWare and Pivotal and others. What you'll see is not just great keynotes, but some great speakers, great entertainment. I don't know if that's been released, I think it's been released. Gwen Stefani, I think she's-- >> Andy Grammar, and yeah, Gwen Stefani. >> Gwen Stefani, yeah, so that's going to be pretty cool, so we're excited about that. But the speakers that we have lined up on main stage along with, I'm more excited, I geek out, I'm a nerd, I love going into these technical breakouts where we've got lab equipment set up where people can actually get to enjoy and, I call it enjoyment, which is really geek out with understanding what are all of those solutions that we have, kind of, you know, put together. And those blueprint solutions, what are they. We have obviously, our server storage networking and data protection. But then how do you get into those labs and run some demos and proof of concepts, that makes it easy for the customers. So we're excited about that as you can see. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, we'll see you there. >> Yeah, we look forward to hosting you there. >> Armughan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> This has been Rebecca Knight and Stu Miniman, we will return with more from Red Hat summit after this.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, this is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, Head of Research at siliconANGLE and wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jennifer Renaud, who's the CMO/Global Marketing Lead for Oracle Marketing Cloud. She's the brains behind this show, underneath Laura Ipsen, who was on yesterday, General Manager, SVP. Great to see you, Jennifer. >> Thanks, it's great to see you. >> John: Thanks for coming on, I know you're super busy, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, I'm really happy to be here. >> So we talked last year. You guys were new. Laura popped into the position, took over the helm at Oracle Marketing Cloud, you joined the team. It's been quite a transformation over the past year. A lot of great feedback on the show. I mean, the Markies was like the Golden Globes, was glammed up, and people screaming, you mentioned. And then now, the conversations in the hallways, certainly great feedback on the sessions, and people in there saying, "Hey, I'm getting great, qualified people walk through, having great conversations." What happened? Between last year and this year. Give us some insight into what was the big shift. >> The big shift? Well, we've had a big shift in our team. You know, during that time period. (both laughing) Which is really interesting. >> And as manifest by the show, a big shift in direction. >> Yeah, a big shift in direction. You know, two things I think, seriously, there was a big shift in the team, overall, you know, my marketing team, we've made a lot of changes, we're relooking at how we do the work that we do. Really looking at the stories that we tell. You know, there's been a lot of change in that, as well. And then, how we tell our stories together with the rest of our CX team. That's been really important. I spend a lot of time with the rest of my CX peers, you know, that are here also. >> It's interesting, we've been following Oracle, this is our eighth year covering Oracle as Oracle proper, and two years covering Marketing Cloud, with theCUBE, and it was interesting, we were observing that how you guys got here, or there, last year, a lot of great acquisitions and integrated pretty well. But the question was, man, if you can just put all this together. Which you guys were kind of smiling, smirking, but you were doing that, so you have now this cohesive story and platform. You still have pillars of solutions, but, yet integrated under one customer experience. Give us some insight into where that is, and what's next, and how that's going. >> So, the connection with the entire customer experience cloud? >> John: Yeah. >> You know, we've been sharing that message for a while. You know, across Oracle. And I think you probably heard it the first time at Open World, which is where I met you, this last year, and we made some announcements then, but we are continuing to drive that total experience, you know, for our customers to engage with their customers. And, you know, I think probably the best way to look at that, and we were just talking about this a few minutes ago, you know, when I was thinking back in marketing 25 years ago. I've been reminiscing a lot lately. And I was looking back at re-reading the one-to-one future. And at that time, they were really saying, you know, the great thing you can do is engage with a customer in a way where you're a learning organization. So every touchpoint has the right reaction. I might call it, maybe, the physics of marketing. You know, we're going to have the energy that goes with this, so, you know, if I talk to you, if my last engagement with you is a services conversation, then the next marketing message better be in reaction to the last services conversation. And I think now with the ability for us to connect everything that we do in customer experience, and be able to connect our data, and be able to connect our interactions, our transactions, we have the ability to have a really great experience for our customers as result of having this connection. >> And the Marketing Cloud has gotten some good props, too. But I want to ask you about the CMO summit that you guys had in parallel here at the Mandalay Bay, we didn't get a chance to cover it, we were busy doing interviews all day yesterday, but we heard some good feedback. Mark Hurd came in and laid down some, like, "We have all this technology, why are we getting a 1% conversion improvement?" Or, I mean, all that tech. So it makes you rethink about CMO roles. And I want to ask you specifically, what was the conversation like when marketers were trying to think of progressive ways to get modern? What were some of the conversations around where they turn things upside down, what are some of the conversations that the CMOs were having, and saying, look, we know the future's the certain direction, directionally correct data, what do I got to do? >> Yeah, well, it's interesting, we talked a lot about data. We talked a lot about hiring people who can govern data, integrate data, manage data. Several of the companies said, you know, we're in merger and acquisition all the time, and it's a huge issue for us, because a whole new data set comes in. And it may have the same customer touchpoints. You know, the same customers. And now we have to figure out how to match the IDs. And so they said it's a huge challenge for them, you know, to be able to merge all of that. >> It's a great marketing opportunity for you to go to startups saying, hey, if you want to get by the big company, and they're on Oracle, make sure you're on Oracle! >> Jennifer: Make sure to call us. >> But that's a good point. >> Peter: Extends the ecosystem. >> Jennifer: Yeah, exactly. >> But that, the whole system of record, this brings up the integration challenges of moving fast and integrating in data. >> Right, and one of the things that came out of that, which was fascinating, is, the question was asked, is IT doing that, or is business doing it? And, without fail, almost all the marketers said, we own this now. This is our thing. You know, it's the customer touchpoint, business has to own it. >> What percentage of that is ownership by the marketing folks? Because I would say that I see a similar pattern where the digital end-to-end life cycle, from beginning to moment of truth is owned by the marketer. >> Yeah, well, it's happening more and more all the time, of course. >> John: 50/50? 60/40? 70/30? >> I mean, in reality? >> Yeah, reality. Middle America, middle of the world, not Silicon Valley. >> Let's see, in reality, it's maybe 50/50, maybe. I mean, I think we have a long way to go. >> John: Well had the commerce folks on earlier, saying that, 'cause we interviewed her, two years ago at Open World, 50% now are on the cloud vs. on-prem. >> Jennifer: Right. >> On commerce cloud. That's pretty significant. >> Oh yeah, big move. But I think as far as, you know, going back to the question on managing the data, how many people, how this is happening, and who owns it yet? I think there's probably still tension across all the businesses on who owns it and how you do that. If you could drop that tension and say we really do want that customer experience, we are going to focus on the customer. >> But are seeing that, and it's an interesting point, are people battling for control of the process, or are people battling for the control of the data, or both? 'Cause there's a difference. >> I think they are controlling the data. I don't think they're controlling the process, and it would be really great if they got to just obsessing about the customer instead. 'Cause if you did that, then the question of process or owning the data would go away. 'Cause you would do what was right for your business. >> So how has that relationship been between, the crucial relationship between sales and marketing starting to evolve? 'Cause in many respects, marketing used to be in service to sales, especially in the B2B universe, and now what we've heard today, and what we agree with, is marketing needs to be put in service to the customer. You need to do valuable things for the customer, otherwise you're not going to get any business, and you're not going to get any data back. So how is the marketing/sales relationship evolving as both of you try to focus on the customer? >> Well, you know it's interesting. Of course I'm doing that in my own role. Not just watching what's happening with my customers, but in my own role, my relationship is evolving with our salespeople. And, you know, relooking at what happens with the lead? And when we get a lead, what kinds of customers are we doing this with, and how do we want to engage with our customers? And we're completely changing how we've been doing this. I think, in the past, and I think it's really easy for customers to follow the numbers. >> What changes are you guys making right now that you can talk about that would be notable business practice wise that has been based upon data? >> So right now, just reducing our numbers of leads. Making sure that they are the right ones, and match the sales models we have. >> You're still taking a lot of inquiries you're more than happy to have pour in. But you're doing a better job of qualifying. >> We have a lot of demand. Making sure the demand becomes the right lead and opportunity, I think is the most important piece of this. You know, it's interesting language. We call it MQL, a lead score lead that comes out of Eloqua. And, to me, that's not really a qualified lead. I feel like there needs to be human interaction for it to be qualified. So I think it's interesting that the industry, over time, has started calling it an MQL. To me, it's an ML. >> Is the funnel changing now? 'Cause now we also observed and had conversations here on theCUBE where, if there's now super omnichannels, not just omnichannel, but like, every channel's open. There's been a flattening of channels. So you can have anything could be a channel. The entry point to the cloud for you guys could be Marketing Cloud, it could be commerce, it could be something else. Either way, the market is involved. So there's so many channels out there, so what does that do for the funnel? Because, if you're using third party data, which you guys have announced here, with the first party data, that's a compelling, game-changing shift in thinking. So the vertical funnel to your point of, you know, what's at the top. >> There's no such thing as a vertical funnel anymore. I mean, it just doesn't exist that way. Really, if you think about how we are engaging with customers, or consumers, you know, all the time. We talk about the omnichannel world, just like you just said, you can't look at it and say, "I'm going to go out and target someone" and wait for that to come in. People are searching all the time. They're picking up their phone. We just released that CMO Club whitepaper today, you know, talking about mobility. I was laughing, because we said people look at their phones 150 times a day, and I thought, seriously, I do it 150 times an hour. I can't even imagine. >> You're the first CMO that I've ever met that has agreed with me on this one. You're awesome. All right, so the funnel is sideways, it's all over the place, it's everywhere. That brings up the data question. And I think I know where you're going with this, so I'm going to try to see if I can lead you on there. So if that premise is there, which I agree is true, 'cause we have a lot of data that we're putting out there. That's our engagement data with siliconANGLE and all of our assets. The question is, it's the data. So, if the funnel was built for a certain reason, to track things, but that's to get the data, now the data's everywhere, so this brings the question up: how do you find the right data? So is the data available? 'Cause you mentioned the customers are talking, they're doing things. >> Data's available. We have it all over, we just have to make sure we're aggregating it in the right way. So, you know, for us, we're using our DMP, we're connecting it to our third party data, which I think is a great way to do this. You can know more about your customers. In some cases, maybe more than they might know about themselves. We're learning a lot about them as a result. And I think, with that, as we talked about earlier, I want more data. I don't want less data. I want more data. I want to know more about-- >> That's counterintuitive to what most people think about it. >> Exactly, I think it's very counterintuitive. I'm really excited about IOT for that reason. I would love to be marketing to people in space and time. I want to know where you are and what you're doing so that the conversation and the dialogue I'm having with you is exactly relevant to what's happening at that moment. >> You might be an outlier, maybe, but because you work for Oracle, you got a big net. You walk on the tightrope, but you got a net called Oracle. A lot of marketers might not have that support. So you're data-driven, you want more data, bring on the data is what you're saying. >> Yeah. >> Which is good, 'cause you can make sense of it. How does a company get to that position where they would have the courage and confidence to say "bring it on, bring on the data"? What would they-- >> Find the right partnerships. I mean, you can get that data, you have your own first party data, you can get second party data with other groups. There's no reason why you can't go in and say, hey I want to partner with another business on this. Companies have loyalty programs. You can go and share, you know, anonymized data with another group like that and learn more about your potential customer base. There are ways to get at this. >> And you guys are opening up the data cloud to them. Is this a true statement? Oracle customers can get access to the data cloud? Which is all the data that you guys are providing, third party data? >> They can purchase the data. >> John: Well, they can subscribe to it. >> Yeah, they get it with purchasing DMP as well. Yeah, they can subscribe to the data. Yeah, any customer can get access to it. >> I have two questions about what you've said thus far. One was, I heard you say, I want to make sure I heard it, that it's an ML, it's not an MQL until it touches a person. Because that, at a conference where everybody's talking about AI and everyone's talking about automation, that is counterintuitive. Totally agree with you, but want to hear what you mean by that. >> Okay, so we'll distinguish what I think AI will do versus what happens when a lead comes out from Eloqua that's lead scored. So, when a lead is lead scored, you know, it's still human interaction right now that says how do I come up with a lead score? You know, so my team, we spend a lot of time, like, which metric should we be using to make sure we figure out, is truly a lead that should come out of Eloqua at this point. We spend a lot of time, and then we run the data, and we look at it and figure out what's going to be the right mix. >> So you're, in many respects, training Eloqua. Just in a very labor-intensive way. >> Jennifer: Yes, it is a labor-intensive way. >> John: That's a human-curated algorithm. >> It is a human-curated algorithm, yes, and we talk to all of our global teams, we look at absolutely every way we should do this, and then we start testing it and making sure that we get the right leads that are coming out of this. At the right rate. That matches the number of people that we have that can serve the leads, as well. Too many doesn't help us if I don't have enough salespeople. Too few doesn't help me if my salespeople are sitting there not doing anything. >> So the readiness is the knob you're turning. So that the flow of leads are popping out in capacity to fulfill them. >> Exactly, exactly. It's an interesting mix. You know, we've been doing the model that says more is better, more is better, more is better. And after while you say, you know, how are this many people going to service this x many times leads that come out of this? But lead scoring is still based on my less than perfect -- >> Peter: Discretionary observation on what this actually means. >> Jennifer: What this actually means, exactly. >> That's great, that's great-- >> So I still need a human to pick up the phone and call the person and say, you know, are you actually a perspective customer? Are you a student, or are you, you know. >> So you're using some of the inside to then validate and use your judgment, it can be very quick, and very simple, but it's a central feature of the whole process, and it's the ultimate data. It's the ultimate first person data. Did you talk to someone, are they there? That's great. Second question-- >> John: I'm not sure I agree-- >> Now we can go to the AI, I think, which is the other part of that question, which is the predictive analytics that's coming out of this now. So now we have predictive analytics are coming out of this, that are looking at this and saying, hey we can look at this a little differently and do a little more listening and see how people are really engaging. Do we have different search patterns? We're saying, do we see search patterns inside of a company that might say there really is a buying activity happening here? So, great way to look at it from a B2B perspective. Now that begins to change what's happening with the lead. >> So it sets priorities on who they should be calling. Do you still anticipate that that customer's going to get a phone call? >> Jennifer: Yes, yeah. >> Okay great, second question-- >> Hold on, I'm going to push back on that side. One little caveat I have. I agree with your statement, in the all-digital world, the users are self-serving, so you can imagine a scenario where there's no human involvement at all. I'm flying around the web, I'm surfing, I'm discovering, and I'm a person, and I'm into some marketplace, and I'm buying, I'm buying. No human touched me at all. I'm a qualified lead, but I get link-baited, or I get tracked into a discovery pattern that is completely digital. There's no human involvement in that. >> In a B2B sense, though, it's setting up the contract so someone can buy off a contract, for example. So the buying activity may be set up. >> John: Oh, you're talking about B2B? >> Yeah, B2B, always. >> Yeah, and B2C I think it's a totally different scenario. >> When was the last time you got a call from somebody at Amazon? >> John: Never. >> Yeah. So second question, and I think this a great point, it ties back to the conversation we had earlier about partners. The partner often is the weakest chain. Weakest link in the chain. In a world where digital is both informing the customer about what's good and what's bad, but also you're sharing data. You run the risk that that partner defines the quality of the entire chain. So you've got to start sharing more data, you got to start sharing. How is the role of data impacting and influencing the activity of bringing on, nurturing, measuring, ultimately managing, partnerships? >> I think you guys talked to Doug Kennedy yesterday. >> John: He's a pro. >> Yeah, he's fantastic. From a marketing standpoint, in the same way, we are going to continue to share with our partners. So if we're looking at the numbers of partners that we engage with. Could they be the weakest link? I would probably challenge you on that, I think our partners can be our strongest link in what we're doing, and are probably closer to our customers than we are, in marketing, by a long shot. So I count on my partners to bridge that gap that way, absolutely, but will we share data so we can absolutely have a better relationship, from a selling perspective? Yeah. >> First let me qualify, that when you have multiple partnerships involved, and typically a solution, a complex solution like the Marketing Cloud, what we're talking about, is going to have multiple partnerships involved. You may have three phenomenal partnerships, and one good partnership. But that one good partner could have an enormous influence over the three very good partners. That's what I mean. So the second thing is, what I'm talking about is, does Oracle compete, or does Oracle utilize its willingness to use data, especially through tooling like Marketing Cloud, and the customer experience cloud, as a way of making Oracle more attractive to partners? >> Yes, absolutely. We would absolutely want to do that. We haven't been doing a lot of it, but we are moving forward that way, absolutely. We want to have that engagement. Absolutely, we want to have that engagement with our partners. I think, especially in marketing, we don't want them to just buy technology. I mean, they need to buy the really great creativity that comes with our partners, as well. And so we have to share as much data as possible to create that great experience for our customers, through our partnerships. >> Jennifer, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on, sharing the insight into your role as CMO from Oracle Marketing Cloud. Appreciate it. Just share what's up for next year. Will there be another, bigger Markies? What's on the agenda for in between this event and next year, what's the plans between event windows? What do you got going on, what's the plan? >> Okay, so, when the 12th annual Markies happens next year, roughly about this time. I think it's almost the same week. Which will be fantastic. In the meantime, we're going to do a lot of storytelling. You will hear a lot about the Markies nominees and Markies winners. We have some incredible stories to tell, it gives us a great opportunity, actually, to talk about the people. You know, for us, the heroes, that created all of these great stories for us. The technology. And how they were using the technology to really make all of this happen, and the partners that they were using. >> Yeah, Doug rolled out his new strategy to the partners, he's been seven weeks on the job, back to Oracle from Oracle in the old days. So he's a pro. >> Jennifer: Yeah, oh yeah, he's great. I worked with him at Microsoft. >> And integrating into the Oracle cloud, still part of the plan? >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Cool. >> Just staying connected with the rest of Oracle, absolutely, we are Oracle. >> We will keep track of the stories with you guys. So we'll be tracking them. >> We'll be telling them with you, all year. >> We'll be documenting them. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the very successful event. >> Thank you very much. >> We're looking forward to hearing the data stories that you're using, and expanding on that next time. It's theCUBE live here at Las Vegas, at Mandalay Bay, for Oracle Modern CX show, #modernCX, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, more after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube covering South by Southwest 2017, brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hey, welcome everyone back for day two of live coverage of South by Southwest. This is the cube, our flagship program from Silicon Angle. We go out to the events and extract the (mumbles). We're at the Intel AI Lounge, people are rolling in, it's an amazing vibe here, South by Southwest. The themes are AI, virtual reality, augmented reality, technology. They got great booths here, free beers, free drinks, and of course great sessions and great conversations here with the Cube. My first guest of the day here is Ben Parr, a friend of the Cube. He's been an entrepreneur, he's been a social media maven, he's been a journalist, all around great guy. Ben, thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me again. >> So you're a veteran with South by Southwest, you know the social scene, you've seen the evolution from Web 2.0 all the way to today, had Scobel on yesterday, Brian Fanzo, really the vibe is all about that next level, of social to connecting and you got a startup you're working on that you founded, co-founded called AI? >> Ben: Octane AI. >> Octane AI, that's in the heart of this new social fabric that's developing. Where AI is starting to do stuff, keep learning, analytics but, ultimately, it's just a connection. Talk about your company. What is Octane AI? Tell us a little bit about the company. >> So Octane AI is a platform that lets you build an audience on Facebook Messenger and then through a bot. And so, what we do is allow you to create a presence on Messenger because if I told you there was a social app that had a billion users every month, bigger than Snapchat plus Twitter plus Instagram combined you'd want to figure out a strategy for how to engage with those people right? And that social app is Facebook Messenger. And yet no one ever thinks, oh could I build an audience on a messaging app? Could I build an audience on Messenger or WeChat or any of the others. But you can through a bot. And you can not just build an audience but you can create really engaging content through conversation. So what we've done is, we've made it really easy to make a bot on messenger but more importantly, a real reason for people to, actually, come to your bot and engage with it and make it really easy to create content for it. In the same way you create content for a blog or create content for YouTube Channel. Maroon 5, Aerosmith, KISS, Lindsay Lohan, 30 seconds to MARS, Jason Derulo and a whole bunch more use us to build an audience and engage their fans on Messenger. >> So let me get your thoughts on a couple of trends around this. Cause this is really kind of, to me, a key part that chat bots illustrate the big trends that are going on. Chat bots were the hype. People were talking about, oh chat bots. It's a good mental model for people to see AI but it also has been, kind of, I won't say a pest, if you will, for users. It's been like a notification. A notification of the economy we're living in. Now you're taking it to the next level. This is what we're seeing. The deep learnings and the analytics around turning notifications which can be noisy after a while, into real content and connections. >> Into something useful, absolutely. Like look, the last year of bots. The Facebook platform is not even a year old. We've been in that fart apps stage of bots. Remember the first year of mobile apps? You had the fart app and that made $50,000 a day and that was annoying as hell. We're at that stage now, the experimentation stage. And we've seen different companies going in different, really cool directions. Our direction is, how do you create compelling content so you're not spamming people but you have content that you can share, not just in your bot but as a link on your social media to your followers, to your fans, on Twitter, everywhere else and have a scalable conversation about whatever you want. Maroon 5 has conversations with their audience about their upcoming tours or they even released an exclusive preview of their new song, Cold, through our bots. You could do almost anything with our bots or with any bot. We're just learning right now, as an industry, what are the best practices. >> So where do bots go for the next level? Because you and I have known each other for almost over 10 years, we've seen the whole movement and now we're living in a fake news era. But social media is evolving where content now is super important that glues people together, communities together. In a way, you're taking AI or bots, if you will. Which is a first, I mean, .5 version of where AI is going. Where content, now, is being blended into notifications. How important is content in community? >> Content in community are essential to any product. And I feel like when you hear the word bot, you don't think community and that you could build a community with it because it's a bot, it's supposed to be automated. But you, actually, can if you do it in the right way and it can be a very, very powerful experience. We're building features that allow you to build more community in your bot and have people who are talking with your bot communicate with each other. There's a lot of that. What I feel like is, we're at the zero point one or zero point two of the long scale of AI. What we need to do right now is showcase all the use cases that really work for AI, bots, machine learning. Over time, we will be adding more other great technologies from Intel and others that will make all these technologies and everything we do better, more social and most of all, more personalized. I think that's one of the big benefits of AI. >> Do you see bot technology or what bots can turn into being embedded into things like autonomous vehicles, AR, is there a stack developing, if you will, around bots? What you're talking about is a progression of bots. What's your vision on where this goes down the road? >> I see a bunch of companies, now, building the technological stack for AI. I see a bunch of companies building the consumer interface, bots is one of those consumer interfaces. Not just chat bots but voice bots. And then I see another layer that's more enterprise that's helping make more efficient things like recruiting or all sorts of automation or driving. That are being built as well. But you need each of those stacks to work really well to make this all work. >> So are there bots here at South by Southwest? Is there a bot explosion, is there bots that tell you where the best parties are? What's the scene here at Southby? Where are the bots and if there were bots, what would they be doing to help people figure out what to do? >> The Southby bot is, actually, not a bad bot. They launched their bot just before South by Southwest. It has a good party recommendations and things. But it the standard bot. I feel like what we're seeing is the best use, there's a lot of good bot people. What I'm seeing right now is that people are still flushing out the best use cases for their bots. There's no bot yet that can predict all the parties you want to go to. We got to have our expectations set. That will happen but we're still a few years away from really deep AI bots. But there are clearly ones where you can communicate faster with your friends. There's clearly ones that help you connect with your favorite artist. There's clearly ones that help you build an audience and communicate at scale. And I feel like the next step is the usefulness. >> Talk about the user interface. Robert Scobel and I were talking yesterday, we have some guests coming on today that had user experience background. With AI, with virtual reality, with bots, with deep learning, all this collective intelligence going on, what's your vision of the user interface as it changes, as people's expectations? What are some of those things that you might see developing pretty quickly as deep learning, analytics, more data stats come online? What is the user interface? Cause bots will intersect with that as an assistant or a value add for the user. What's your vision on? >> I'll tell you what I see in the near term and then I'll tell you a really crazy idea of how I see the long term. In the near term, I think what you're going to see is bots have become more predictive. That, based on your conversations, are more personalized and maybe not a necessarily need as much input from you to be really intelligent. And so voice, text, standard interfaces that we're used to. I think the bigger, longer run is neurological. Is the ability to interface without having to speak. Is AI as a companion to help us in everything we do. I feel like, in 30 years, we won't even, it's, kind of like, do your remember the world when it had no internet? It's hard, it feels so much different. There will be a point in about 20 years we will not understand what the world was before AI. Before AI assistance where assisting us mentally, automatically and through every interface. And so good AI's, in the long run, don't just run on one bot or one thing, they follow you wherever you go. Right now it might be on your phone. When you get home, it may be on your home, it may be in your car but it should be the same sets of AI's that you use daily. >> Doctor Nevine Rou, yesterday, called the AI the bulldozer for data. What bulldozers where in the real world, AI's going to do that for data. Cause you want to service more data and make things more usable for users. >> Yes, the data really helps AI become more personalized and that's a really big benefit to the user to every individual. The more personalized the experience, the less you have to do. >> Alright, so what's the most amazing thing you've seen so far this year at Southby? What's going on out there that's pretty amazing? That's popping out of the wood work? In terms of either trend, content, product, demos, what are some of the cool things you're seeing. >> So, as it is only Saturday, I feel like the coolest thing will still come to me. But outside of AI, there have been some really cool mixed reality, augmented reality demos. I can't remember the name. There's a product with butterflies flying around me. All sorts of really breaking edge technologies that, really, create another new interface honestly where AI may interact with us through the augmented reality of our world. I mean, that's Robert Scogul's thing exactly. But there's a lot of really cool things that are being built on that front. I think those are the obvious, coolest ones. I'm curious to see which ones are going to be the big winners. >> Okay, so I want to ask you a personal question. So you were doing some venture investing around AI and some other things. What caused you to put that pause button on that mission to start the chat bot AI company? >> So I was an investor for a couple of years. I invested in ubean, the wireless electricity company and Shots with Justin Bieber which is always fun. And I love investing and I love working with companies. But I got into Silicone Valley and I got into startups because I wanted to build companies. I wanted to build ideas. This happened, in part, because of my co-founders. My co-founder Matt, who is the first head of product at Ustream and twice into the Forbes 30 under 30. One of the king makers of the bot industry. The opportunity to be a part of building the future of AI was irresistible to me. I needed to be a part of that. >> Okay, can you tell any stories about Justin Bieber for us, while we're here inside the Cube? (laughs) >> I wonder how many of those I can, actually, tell? Okay, so look. Justin Bieber is an investor in a company I'm an investor in called Shots. Which is now a super studio that represents everyone from Lele Pons to Mike Tyson on digital online and they're doing really, really well. One of Justin's best friends is the founder, John Shahidi. And so it's just really random. Sitting with John, who I invested in and just getting random FaceTime's. Be like, oh it's Justin Bieber, say hi to Justin. As if it was nothing. As if it was a normal, it's a normal day in his life. >> Could you just have him retweet one of my Tweets. He's got like a zillion followers. What's his follower count at now? >> You don't want that. He's done that to me before. When Justin retweets you or even John retweets you, thousands of not tens of thousands of Justin Bieber fans, bots and not bots, start messaging you, asking you to follow them, talking to you all the time. I still get the tweets all the time from all the Justin fans. >> Okay don't tweet me then. I'm nice and happy with 21,000 followers. Alright, so next level for you in terms of this venture. Obviously, they got some rock stars in there. What's the next step for you guys right now? Give us a little inside baseball in the venture status where you guys are at. What's the next step? >> We launched the company publicly in November, we started in May. We raised 1.6 million from general catalyst, from Sherpa Ventures, a couple of others. When we launched our new feature, Convos, which allows you to create shareable bots, shareable conversations with the way you share blog posts. And that came out with all those launch partners I mentioned before like Maroon 5. We're working on perfecting the experience and, mostly, trying to make a really, really compelling experience with the user with bots because if we can't do that, then there's no use to doing anything. >> So you provide the octane for the explosive conversations? (laughs) >> Yes, there you go, thank you, thank you. And we make it really easy. So we're just trying to make it easier to do this. This is a product that your mom could use, that an artist could use, any social media team could use. Writing a convo is like writing a blog post on media. >> Are moms really getting the chat bot scene? I, honestly, get the Hollywood. I'm going to go back to Hollywood in a second but being a general, middle America kind of tech/genre, what are they like? Are they grokking the whole bot thing? What's the feedback from middle America tech? >> But think of it this way. There are a billion people on Messenger and it's a, really, part of the question, they all use Facebook Messenger. And so, they may be communicating with a bot without knowing it. Or they might want to communicate with their fans. It's not about the technology as much as this is like connecting with who you really care about. If I really care about a Maroon 5 or Rachel Ray, I can now have that option. And it doesn't really matter what the technology is as much as it is that personal connection, that experience is good. >> John: Is it one-one-one or group? Cause it sounds like it's town hall, perfect for a town hall situation. >> It's one-on-one, it's scale. So you could have a conversation with a bot while each of the audience members is having a conversation one-on-one. When you can choose different options and it could be a different conversation for each person. >> Alright, so I got to ask about the Hollywood scene. You mentioned Justin Bieber. I wanted to go down that because Hollywood really has adopted social media pretty heavily because they can go direct to the audience. We're seeing that. Obviously, with the election, Trump was on Twitter. He bypasses all the press but Hollywood has done very well with social. How are they using the bots? They are a tell sign of where it's going. Can you share some antidotal stories or data around how Maroon 5, Justin, these guys are leveraging this and what's some of the impact? >> Sure, so about a month 1/2, 2 months before Maroon 5 launched their new song, new single, Cold. They came to us and wanted to build a distribution. They wanted to reach their audience in a more direct personal way. And so we helped them make a bot. It didn't take long. We helped them write convos. And so what they did was they wrote convos about things like exclusive behind the scenes photos from their recent tour or their top moments of 2016 or things that their fans really care about. And they shared em. They got a URL just like you would get, a blog poster URL. They shared it out with their 39 million Facebook fans, they shared it with their Twitter followers, they shared it across their social media. And 10's of thousand's of people started talking with their bot each time they did this. About 24 hours before the bot, before their new single release, they exclusively released a 10 second clip of Cold through their bot. And when they did that, within 24 hours, the size of their bot doubled because it went viral within the Maroon 5 community. There's a share function in our convos and people shared the convo with their friends and with their friends friends and it kept on spreading. We saw this viral graph happen. And the next day when they released the single, 1000's of people bought the song because of the bot alone. And now the bot is a core of their social strategy. They share a convo every single week and it's not just them but now Lohan and a whole bunch of others are doing the same thing. >> John: Lindsay Lohan. >> Lindsay Lohan is one of our most popular bots. Her fans are really dedicated. >> And so you can almost see it's, almost connecting with CGI, looking at what CGI's doing in film making. You could almost have a CGI component built-in. So it's all this stuff coming together. >> Ben: Multimedia matters. >> So what do you think about the Intel booth here? The AI experience? They got some Kinetic photo experience, amazing non-profit activities in deep loading (mumbles), missing children, what do you think? >> This is some of the best use cases for AI which is, people think of AI as just like the direct consumer interface which is what we do but AI is an underlying layer to everything we do. And if it can help even 1% or 1,000% identify and find missing children or increase the efficiency of our technology stacks so that we save energy. Or we figure out new ways to save energy. This is where AI can really make an impact. It is just a fundamental layer of everything. In the same way the internet is just a fundamental layer of everything. So I've seen some very cool things here. >> Alright, Ben Parr, great guest, in venture capitalist now founder of a great company Octane AI. High octane, explosive conversations looking forward to adopting. We're going to, definitely, take advantage of the chat bot and maybe we can get some back stage passes to Maroon 5. (laughs) >> (laughs) There will be some fun times in the future, I know it. >> Alright Ben Parr. >> Ben: Justin Bieber. >> Justin Bieber inside the Cube right here and Ben Parr. Thanks for watching. It's the Intel AI Lounge. A lot of great stuff. A lot of great people here. Thanks for joining us. Our next guest will be up after this short break. (lively music)