(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Daugherty, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, Global Managing Director of Thought Leadership and Technology Research, Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book, "Radically Human." >> Thanks, John. It's great to be with you and great to be present at re:Invent. >> We've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolution is going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but I noticed you got the structure, part one and part two, this book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation, and what was some of the background in putting the book together? >> That's a great question, John. And I'll start, and then, Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on the book can join in too. If you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called "Human + Machine", which focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the human plus machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, it was the COVID era. COVID came on line as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing. Once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies, and what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of 2x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap widened into 5x. And I think that's played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in "Radically Human." And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud, data and AI, and the metaverse that signal out as three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. In the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >> Jim, weigh in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. >> You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate it using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability? >> I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you set the table. It's like, 'cause people right now are like in the mode of what's going on around me? I've been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home. Like, here's the current situation and then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or society. >> Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where "Radically Human", the title came from. And what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And the whole hypothesis or premise of the book I should say, is that the more human like the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the I in IDEAS. The ideas framework is the first part of the book. The five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence and we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques in addition to machine, the big data driven machine learning techniques, which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >> I love the idea, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, and contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >> I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really interesting how you guys put that together. It feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think observing how developers becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need? What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to lay out with the S in IDEAS, the strategy. The subtitle that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays and therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talk about, forever beta, which is, think about a Tesla or companies that it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days as Paul was saying. >> It's interesting because that's the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just aside on the Tesla example, is well documented. I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off scripts and get to humans back in charge 'cause it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up to part two, which I like, which is this human piece of it. We always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, trust, talent, experiences. That's more of the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key 'cause it all could point to that in a way. Skills gap points to, hey, humans are valuable. In fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think that's something that is not, kind of nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, go ahead Jim. >> I was going to say it, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, really zooming in on talent. I think you might think that for every hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you might put 50 or 75 into re-skilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means on talent, on getting the best talent, on re-skilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >> That's a huge point. >> And I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist 'cause the technology changing so fast. So the companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such, and shape to tale as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're going to be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology. Things like Amazon's Honeycode is an example, low-code/no-code development to spread development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new ways. >> I think you nailed it, that's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination, whether it's group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world, and what does it mean for the future of business? >> Yeah, I think the metaverse is radically misunderstood to use the word title when we're not with the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse and the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, infused with the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. So you have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds, but trust becomes more important because just as AI raises new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five-part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >> Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT so they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we were doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI using that sense of humanity 'cause other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that AI system is learning from. Some really interesting innovations happening in that trust space. John. >> Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about. Because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and we've been calling it supercloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with chat and some video. It's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low-code/no-code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >> Yeah, no, I go back to one of the, the E in the IDEAS framework is expertise. And we talk about from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. Machine learning is maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI. One of the examples we give is one of the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >> Well, yeah, it's interesting. I want to to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the the future. They got to start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table. We were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things you guys are hitting in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge certainly that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? >> I'll go first then Jim can add in. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why the fact you're at re:Invent is so important because companies are, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that as the foundation to go forward, to do, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. Do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. >> Yeah. When we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. One statistic is that 70% of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies were not trying to do it themselves and to necessarily build an AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale, and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >> If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re:Invent, since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been a thematic thing. It was startups, enterprise, now builders, and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming categorical applications in for this new era. And we're calling it supercloud, superservices, superapps, 'cause they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools, or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? It's like take a temperature or we like radical enough, what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening? How do you know if you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? >> Yeah, I think one. >> You can go ahead, Paul. >> Yeah, I was going to say one of the tests is the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business, and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. That's still something you need to do. But now our focus with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for your new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test whether you're being radical enough is on the one hand, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. >> Totally agree. >> Interesting enough, we love this topic and you guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like IDEAS, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. I think you see it, look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >> Yeah and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows and the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great, again, that you're at re:Invent. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times 'cause we tell a lot of customer company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. >> Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great 'cause it has the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging. Thoughts on the global impact 'cause you take your book and you overlay that to business, like you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, as a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >> Well that's why you got to think about cloud as one technology. We talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, clouds, it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to re:Invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started. And it's 'cause the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability if you're in Europe. For many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities that you need to deploy differently in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways. And so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in IDEAS is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and just modularity was the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. >> Yeah, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, "Radically Human" and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at re:Invent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >> Thanks, John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. People who need to be relevant in the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those that need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we've mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human change in technology that's happening. >> Great. Buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big wave that's coming. this is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset, reflip the scripts, refactor, replatform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John. Great discussion. >> You're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS re:Invent '22. I'm John Furrier, you're host with Accenture. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hello and welcome to the Cube's coverage here at AWS Reinvent 2022. This is the Executive Summit with Accenture. I'm John Furry, your host of the Cube at two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is gonna be the topic. Paul Dardy, the group Chief Executive Technology and CTO at Accenture. And Jim Wilson, global managing director of thought Leadership and Technology research. Accenture. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube for this conversation around your new hit book. Radically human. >>Thanks, John. It's great to, great to be with you and great, great to be present at reinvent. >>You know, we've been following you guys for many, many years now, over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. I mean, and as these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact. And more than ever, we're kind of in this, I call it the systems thinking, revolutions going on now where things have consequences and, and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are becoming the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as, as humans. And so I love the book. Very, very strong content, really. Right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations. But, you know, I noticed you got the, the structure part one and part two, This book seems to be packing a big punch. What's, what was the motivation and, and what was some of the background in, in putting the book together? >>That's a great question, John, and I'll start, and then, you know, Jim, my co-author and, and part colleague and partner on this, on the book and join in too. You know, the, if you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called, you know, Human Plus Machine, which talked about the, you know, focused a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the Human plus machine pairing. And then, you know, when we started, you know, working on the next book, Covid was, you know, it was kinda the Covid era. Covid came online as, as we were writing the book. And, but that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing, you know, once Covid hit, every company became more dependent on technology. >>Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies ba, you know, and what was different from the first, you know, research we had done around our first book. And what we found, which was super interesting, is that, is that, you know, pre pandemic, the, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data, AI, and related technologies faster, we're outperforming others by a factor of two x. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic. We redid the research and the gap widen into five x. And I think that's, and, and that's kind of played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline, you know, from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around, you know, inflation energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. >>And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in, in Radically Human. And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud data and ai and the metaverse that signal out is three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. And the first part of the book, to your question on the structure, talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are gonna set companies apart as they look to, you know, to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. >>Jim, weigh in on this. Flipping the script, flipping the assumptions. No, >>You, you, you used a really important word there, and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence, and when Paul and I have now talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as kind of a point solution. They don't think of about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that, all right, if you're gonna build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the, the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate using your talent, focusing on trust, experiences and sustainability. >>You know, I like this, I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you kind of set the table. It's like, cuz people right now are like in the mode of, you know, what's going on around me. I'm been living through three years of covid. But coming out the other side, the world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation's great, but people are finding out that the human's key, but people are trying to figure out where I am, where am I today. So I think the first part really to me hits home, like, here's the current situation and then part two is, here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce or this new production system or you know, society. >>Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. And that's where, you know, radically human, you know, the title came from. And you know, the, what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human like in its capability. When you think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot and, and that, you know, the whole hypothesis, you know, or premise of the book I should say, is that the more humanlike the technology is, the more radically human or the more radical the, you know, the, the the, the human potential improvement is the more, the bigger the opportunity. It's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I, you know, talk about, you know, talked about, you know, talked about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get to dramatic gains that they can get. >>Just a couple examples from the ideas framework, the eye and ideas is each of the, the ideas framework is the first part of the book, The five areas to flip your Assumptions, The eye stands for intelligence. And we're talking about more, more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques, things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people, engaging humans in the systems that we build, using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And you know, things like emotional ai, common sense ai, new techniques in addition to machine the big data driven machine learning techniques which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's, that's just an example of, you know, how you bring it together and enable that human potential. >>I love the, we've been, >>We've >>Go ahead Jim. >>I was gonna say we've been used to adapting to technology, you know, and you know, contorting our fingers to keyboards and and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus. In fact, the human is in the ascended. That's one of the, one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. >>You know, I love the idea of flipping the script, flicking assumptions, but, but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, s for strategy, notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution really kind of interesting kind of how you guys put that together. It kind of feels like business is becoming agile and iterative and it's how it's gonna be forming. Can you guys, I mean that's my opinion, but I think, you know, observing how developers becoming much more part of, of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to its conclusion, the application is the company, It's not a department serving the business, it is the business, therefore developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is kind of how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation? If you take it down to a conclusion, strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need. Is that, can you, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, yeah, I think, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in, in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old, old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to, you know, to lay out with the, the essence ideas, you know, the strategy and the, the, the fun. You know, the, the subtitle that chapter is is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, That's what I hear when I talk to these suites and CEOs and boards, is everybody's recognizing the essential world that technology plays and therefore they need to, to master technology, well, you need to think about strategy differently than because of the pace of technology innovation. >>And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really report it's about continuous strategy in all cases. Yet an example is one of the techniques we talk about forever beta, which is, you know, think about a Tesla, you know, companies that, you know, it's never quite done. They're always improving and the product is designed to be connected and improving. So it changes along, you know, the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we, we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. Yeah, those multi-month strategy sessions, you know, might play out over two or three quarters of going away. And strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days. As Paul was saying, >>It's interesting because that's the kind of the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation. But the human plays a much critical role. And, and just as a side on the Tesla example, you know, is well documented, I think I wrote about in a post just this week that during the model three Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off script and get to humans back in charge cuz it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up the, the part two, which I like, which is, you know, this human piece of it, you know, we always talk about skills gaps, there's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that, that second half, you know, trust, talent experiences, that's the more the person's role, either individually as part of a collective group is talent. The scarce resource now where that's the, that's the goal, that's the, the key because I mean, it all could point to that in a way, you know, skills gap kind of points to, hey, you know, humans are valuable, in fact the value's going up if it's properly architected. What's your reaction to that, guys? Because I think, you know, that's something that is not kind of nuance point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe, I don't know. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, it's, go ahead Jim. I was gonna say it, you know, we're, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book. You know, really zooming in on talent. I think, you know, you might think that for every, you know, a hundred dollars that you put into a technology initiative, you know, you might put 50 or 75 into reskilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw a, a economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you are likely gonna need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means, you know, on talent, on, on getting the best talent on reskilling and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. Really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology's critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. >>That's a huge point. >>I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we, we talked about in the book are, are becoming a talent creator. We believe that the successful companies of the future are gonna be able not, not just to post, you know, post a job opening and hire, hire people in because there's not gonna be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist, you know, cause the technology changing so fast. So companies that succeed are gonna know how to create talent, bring in people, apprentices and such and, and, and, you know, shape to tail as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. They're gonna be learning based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what you know, employees want. And then democratizing access to technology, You know, things like, you know, Amazon's honey code is an example, you know, low code, no code development to spread, you know, development to wider pools of people. Those types of things are really critical, you know, going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is, yeah, the, the human talent's important, but it's magnified to multiplied by the power of people, you know, giving them in essence superpowers in using technology in new >>Ways. I think you nailed it, That's super important. That point about the force multiplier, when you put things in combination with it's group constructs, two pizza teams, flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is kind of a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think, you know, groups and collectives, you're gonna start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these kind of, you know, ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or, or, or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously Metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're gonna start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the Metaverse play into this new radically human world and and what does it mean for the future of business? >>Yeah, I think the Metaverse is radically, you know, kind of misunderstood to use the word title, word of a, when we're not with the title of our book, you know, and we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential, and I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So, you know, that that's the potential of the metaverse. And it's about, it's not just about the consumer things, it's about metaverse in the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I, I believe you know that it is, has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. >>And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You, you have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward that's gonna shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence in how you work, you know, in infused with, you know, the human talent and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. You have cloud AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to, to generate experiences for, for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds. But trust becomes more important because the, just as AI raises new questions around trust, you know, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book we outline a five part framework or or five, you know, essential, you know, parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. >>Yeah, we're seeing that, you know, about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, you know, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their it, so they're, you know, they're focusing on security and privacy transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems. Explainability. One of the, you know, the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we're doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by kind of a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, the, they're, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So kind of turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then training the AI kind of using that sense of humanity cuz you know, the other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that that AI system is learning from or some really interesting innovations kind of happening in that trust space. John, >>Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about because you know, you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the, the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline and you know, we've been calling it super cloud, some call it multicloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's gonna happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with Chad and some video, you know, it's, it's group behavior, it's group con groups, convening, talking, getting things done, you know, debating doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low code no code, this completely changes strategy. I mean this is a big point of the book. >>Yeah, no, I go back to, you know, one of the, the, the, the e and the ideas frameworks is expertise. And we talk about, you know, from machine learning to machine teaching, which, which is exactly that, you know, it's, you know, machine learning is, you know, maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithms. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with ai? One of the examples we give is one of the, the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design. A very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to code in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected in, you can create, you know, amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, bringing the two together. >>Well you, what's interesting is that I wanna to get your thoughts as we can wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in, in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the, the future, they gotta start thinking about things like generative AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table where, you know, we were, we were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write, it just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are, these are new things you guys are hitting on this in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge, certainly that is an opportunity. How, how do you apply all this stuff for, for business >>Now? I'll go first then Jim Canad. But the, the first thing I think starts with, with recognizing the role that technology does play and investing accordingly in it. So the right, you know, technology, talent, you know, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why, you know, the fact you're at reinvent is so important because companies are, you know, again rebuilding that, that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that, you know, as the foundation to go forward, to do, you know, to, to build the other, other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. You know, do you, do you have the right the, do you have the right talent brand? Are you attacking the right, attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right way so that you have the right future talent going forward and then you marry the two together and that's what, you know, gives you the radically human formula. >>Yeah. When, you know, when we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of, of research, and this was ju and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier, but one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. You know, one statistic is that 70% of, there was a, there was a of companies that had never tried AI before, went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up, but the thing is companies are not, or we're not trying to do it themselves and to, you know, to necessarily, you know, build an it, a AI department. They were partnering and it's really important to, to find a partner, often a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the, that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. >>If you see the transformation of just aws, we're here at reinvent just since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been kind of a thematic thing. It was, you know, startups, enterprise now builders and now, now change your company this year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and, and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are are changing and refactoring and replatforming, categorical applications in for this new era. And you know, we're calling it super cloud super services, super apps cuz they're different. They're doing different things in leveraging large scale CapEx, large scale talent pools or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real, something's happening here and you know, we've been talking about a lot lately, so I have to ask you guys, how does a company know if they're radical enough? Like when, what is radical? How do, how can I put a pin in that say that could take a temperature or we like radical enough what some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point because there are new things happening. How do you know if you're, you're you're pushing the envelope radical enough to, to take advantage? >>Yeah, I think one, yeah, I was gonna say one of the, one of the tests is is you know, the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business and is it really taking you to another level? You said it perfectly, John, it used to be we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. Yeah. That that's still something you need to do. But now we, our focus, you know, with a lot of our customers is on how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's, what is, you know, how, how, what's the platform you know, that you're using to, you know, for your, the new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers. I mean it is the business and I think that's the test. Whether being radical, you know, radical enough is on the one hand, is this really, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation and real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping, you know, people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the the two tests that I would give. Totally agree. >>Yeah. You know, interesting enough, we, you know, we, we love this topic and guys, again, the book is spot on. Very packs a big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think, you know, one of the things we're looking at is that people who do things differently take advantage of some of these radical approaches like ideas your framework and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner. They stand out in the, in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx is taken care of. Now you got your cloud, I mean some, you're building clouds on top of clouds or, or something's happening. You can, I think you see it like look at like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. >>Yeah, and that's a good example and it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows the portability of being able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is, is, is is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why, you know, you talk about companies doing things differently, that's why it's great again that you're at reinvents. If you look at the index of our book, you'll see, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times cuz we tell a lot of cus of cus customer and company stories about how they're leveraging aws, AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in your, in their business. And I, I think that's what it's, that's what it's all about. >>Yeah, and one of the things too in the book, it's great cuz it has kind of a, the systems thinking it's got really relevant information but you know, you guys have seen the, seen the movie before. I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. You know, we're global economy, you've got regions, you've got data sovereignty, you're seeing, you know, all kinds of new things, emerging thoughts on the global impact cuz you, you take your book and you overlay that to business. Like you gotta, you gotta operate all over the world as a human issue. It's a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? >>Well that's, that's why the, the, you gotta think about cloud as as one technology, you know, we talked about in the book and cloud is a lot, I think a lot of people think, well clouds it's almost old news. Maybe it's been around for a while. As you said, you've been going to reinvent since 2013. You know, cloud is really just getting, you know, just getting started. And, and it's cuz the reasons you said, when you look at what you need to do around sovereign cloud capability, if you're in Europe for many companies it's about multi-cloud capabilities. You need to deploy, you know, differently in different, in different regions. And they need to, in some cases for good reason, they have hybrid, hybrid cloud, you know, capability that they, they match on their own. And then there's the edge capability which is comes into play in, in different ways. >>And, and so the architecture becomes very complex and we talk the A in and ideas is architecture. We talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture, which was more static and mod and you know, just modularity was kind of the key thing you thought about. It's more the idea of a living system, of living architecture that's, that's expanding and is what's much more dynamic. And I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage in a global environment today with the, with the pace of technology advancement. >>You know, the innovation is here. It's not stopping. How do you create some defacto standards while not stunting the innovation is gonna be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's gonna be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on the queue as we break down your new book, Radically Human and how it, how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and access to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at reinvent. Thanks so much for, for sharing and congratulations on a great book. >>You know, Thanks John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the, the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. You know, people who need to, you know, be, be relevant to the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those who need to reskilling. And the final point I mentioned is that we mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds for the book are being donated to not NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling. Those who need a skill refresh in light of the radically human new, you know, change in technology that's happening >>Great by the book proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book if you're in the middle of this big way that's coming. This is a great book. There's a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to, to reset re flip the scripts. Refactor, re-platform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing, really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. >>Thanks, John. John, great discussion. >>Okay, you're watching the Cube here, covering the executive forum here at AWS Reinvent 22. I'm John Furrier, your host with aen. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a great panel here today, we have three guests. We have Hilary Burns and Caroline Lester, both Reporting Fellows for the GroundTruth Project, and Tori Bedford, who is a Field Producer for the GroundTruth Project. It's great to have you guys on here. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, I'll start with you, Tori, since you were a reporting fellow last year at the Grace Hopper Conference, tell our viewers what the GroundTruth Project is, and what your mission is. >> So, the GroundTruth Project is a non-profit based in Boston and it hopes to encourage young journalists and earlier-career journalists all around the world. So there is a series of fellowships going on, pretty much at all times. Different projects, there's one going across America right now that's looking at, it's called Crossing the Divide, it's looking at divides in America. It's a very divisive time for American politics so they're doing stories about that. And, obviously, we are re-upping our women in tech, women in leadership fellowship this year which we're really excited about. >> And so, each of you are working on your own, individual stories and then you will get back to Boston and produce. So, Hilary, let's hear from you, what are you working on here, what's your topic? >> Sure, so most of my time spend at the Grace Hopper Celebration so far has been spent talking with student about their career aspirations, any barriers they foresee, coming across any concerns they have about entering a male-dominated industry. And it's really been fascinating hearing their stories, some of them are international students, others are from universities all over the world and including Canada and the U.S. So, it's been very inspirational to hear. >> So, but here the ones that are aspiring to careers in technology and they're here at Grace Hopper, but there must be other ones who are too discouraged so they're not here. Are you also getting that angle, too? >> Well, I think it's important for that group of women to see these women who do feel empowered and are, a lot of them use phrases like, "We are making a difference in the gender gap "and if I don't do it, who else will do it?" So, I think it's important for all aspiring technologists to hear these women's stories. >> Are they discouraged, though? Because the headlines are bleak, I mean, we know that it's the numbers, but it's also the Google manifesto, it's the shenanigans of Travis Kalanick and people like him in Silicon Valley. What do they make of that? >> It's interesting, all of them are very intelligent, very aware of what's going on in the world. I've heard a mixed bag of responses from, "I try not to "read too much because I don't want to go in expecting "and having my own biases, I want to see for myself." Others are saying, "Yeah, I am nervous and I want to see "more women creating a path that I can then follow." So, I think there are a lot of people that are optimistically optimistic about their future. >> Cautiously optimistic. >> Thank you. Thank you for correcting me. (laughs) But, it's been interesting to hear all the different perspectives. >> Great, Caroline, how about you, what are you working on? >> Yeah, so, I am personally interested in the more personal stories of some of these women speaking at the conference. I've talked to the four really, wonderful, inspirational women. So, one of my favorites, I've just published a story on her, Chieko Asakawa, who is an IBM Fellow which is the highest honor you can receive at IBM. And she went blind at the age of 11, and has spent her life programming and creating programs and tools to help the blind access the world that is pretty hard to navigate if you don't have eyesight. So, she is super inspirational, super smart, super funny. So, it was a pleasure talking with her. And then I'm talking with three other women, Yasmine Mustafa, who started something called Roar for Good. >> Rebecca: We've had her on the show. >> Oh, you did? >> Yeah. >> Wonderful, great. So, she's fantastic, I'm really glad you covered her. And then another woman named Sarah Echohawk, who, sort of, is an advocate, an activist and is getting more and young, native women involved in STEM. And then, finally, I'll be talking with Stephanie Lampkin of Blendoor, who started this wonderful app to try and overcome the implicit bias, and unconscious bias that happens when people are hiring women or people of color in recruiting for them. >> So she's starting this app that she will then sell to companies, or sell to other recruiters? >> So, she's already started it and she has a lot of major tech companies involved. I think Airbnb uses it, I want to say SalesForce uses it, you're going to have to check me on that one. But she's got about 5,000 people on it right now. >> Wow, so the goal of these stories is to inspire other women by their success. >> Exactly, so these are four radically different women coming into tech in radically different ways and it's just really incredible to see how they've managed to overcome all sorts of obstacles in their way. And not only overcome them, but, sort of, utilize them to their advantage and stake out a place for themselves in this industry. >> Great, Tori, what are the projects that you are working on here? >> So, we've been hearing a lot about diversity, diversity is so important, and we've been hearing about how increasing diversity in a company makes your company better. It just brings in more perspectives, and it also, what's really interesting is that, in tech, it can catch people who have a diverse range of perspectives, can catch problems with products, or with a code, or with something, and how it would be implemented out into the world. I caught this really interesting panel yesterday about disability and looking at how people with disabilities can make companies, specifically tech companies, can help to improve them. This woman, Jennifer Jong, who is an Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft, she was really interesting. She was talking about how, I wrote a piece on this yesterday, she's talking about how, when you bring people in with a disability, how they can catch things that other people just don't see or wouldn't normally notice. And also how, when we create things for those with disabilities, you know, a lot of things that have been implemented by the Americans with Disabilities Act. She talked about the button that you press to go through the door, how it can also be used by people who don't have disabilities and how it's important to create things that can be used by everybody, but that have inclusion in mind. >> So, why is that true? What is her perspective on why people with disabilities have this special ways to detect blind spots? >> So, if you're creating something, there's no way that you can know how many users are going to be interacting with it, there's no way that you can predict that a person with a disability won't be using it, and so it's diversity, it's really important to bring in different perspectives. So, they had talked about a video, a really beautiful, promotional video that showed a range of visuals, it was very effective but it had no sound and a blind person wouldn't get anything out of it. And so, it's like looking at a product, you need somebody to be in the room, just like you want women and people of color and a range of ethnicities, you want diversity, you want someone to be able to say, "This isn't going to work for me, this isn't going "to work for my child, this isn't going to work "for a range of people." And that's a really effective and important thing that ultimately saves your company's bottom line, because then, you won't have to go back and change your product in the future. >> And fix it, fix it as a problem. >> Right, you'll spend more money fixing your product than you would if you had just talked about, had inclusion and diversity, if you'd just considered that from the get-go, you'll ultimately save your company more money. >> So, the question for the three of you, really, is that as you said, we hear so much about the importance of diversity and of getting a variety of perspectives, and having people of different genders, and races, and cultures feel included and having a voice at the table, I just want to know, I mean, do companies really feel this way or is that what they say at Grace Hopper because this is what makes sense to say to their target audience? >> It's totally possible that it's just a marketing ploy, it's totally possible that they're realizing that half the population makes money and can do things, and that makes more money. I mean, a lot of tech is driven by the bottom line, it's driven by financials, but in the case of the disability thing, it's like, it almost doesn't matter. It is not only the right thing to do, if you need a financial incentive, that's not good. Obviously, it's the right thing to do so you should be doing it for that reason, but if you do also have a financial incentive, that's not bad. And if we're, sort of, driving more towards empowering women and giving women a voice and allowing women to do things and taking them seriously, ultimately that's not a bad thing. >> And just to add to that, I think there is a lot of research out there today, for example, having more women on corporate boards, that that does impact the bottom line and, obviously, that's what companies are most concerned about. So, I think that companies are starting to realize that having that diversity and inclusion is good for business as well as a marketing ploy. >> And I think, I mean, just to add, I also think that, you know, whether or not this is a good thing, I think companies do realize that that is important. And they're realizing that it's necessary, I don't know, it's necessary to impact the bottom line and that is something that, whether or not we like it, it is the most convincing factor for many of these companies. >> I think it's also, when you have women moving up to positions of power, to the C-Suite, to positions of leadership, they understand that women are people with skills and they are the ones who are, you know, hiring more women, and that ultimately helps the bottom line. So, as you have more and more women moving higher and higher to the top, that's when, like when we talk about the companies changing, that's because women are changing. And they're changing the perspectives of men and everybody else in between that works at the company. >> Are women changing? I mean, I think that's a question, too, is that we're all as collectively as a society, becoming more aware that these biases exist in hiring and recruitment practices. But, I think that's the question, are women starting to change, too, the way they behave in the workplace, the way they go about managing their careers? >> I know it's changing minds, like other peoples' minds. >> That's a really interesting question, though. One student I talked to who was from India, talked about the gender discrimination she has faced. And she said she did change how she acted, she shut down all emotions, she took any emotion out of her responses because her colleagues would say, "Oh, you're a woman, "you're so emotional," and she was tired of that. So, it's an interesting question to look at. I don't know, I don't have the data in front of me but it would be interesting to look into that. >> Yeah, great, that's the next GroundTruth project. Excellent, well Hilary, Caroline, Tori, thanks so much for being on theCube, we've had great fun talking to you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back the the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Angelo Sciascia is here, big Tom Brady fan, Senior Vice President of NetX Information Systems, from Brooklyn, New York, I don't think so. >> Not a Tom Brady fan. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE do you think it matters, how much it airs at a football. >> No, not at all, Tom Brady doesn't care about that. >> No, well, listen, thanks for coming on. We have a great conversation, we love talking sports on the Cube. So welcome, how's the show going for you? >> Ah, it's fantastic, you know, lots of great material Veritas has been talking about. 360 Data Management, obviously we all know the benefits of that by now. So we have a lot of customers here so I'm glad they they got to see it from a senior leadership perspective, rather than our sales guys and sales engineers going in there and talking to them, and seeing Veritas executives really getting behind what we're talking about. So it backs up our story and, you know, our customers are pretty excited about it, actually. >> What's the nature of your relationship with Veritas. I know you have a relationship, and maybe still do, with Symantec. How's that all, how did it all evolve? >> Yeah, so we are a Veritas Platinum Partner, we would be, what we consider, a solution-provider type partner. A lot of our business today is either directly or indirectly tied to Veritas, which was kind of funny because we started as a security company, so our roots are systems management, you know. That's where we were in 2005 when I joined NetX, that's where we were for many, many years after Symantec acquired a company called Altiris. We just stayed in that vein, you know, managing endpoints, securing endpoints, encrypting data. And then, somewhere in 2013, we said hey, you know, let's try to diversify the portfolio a little bit. And we used to manufacture an endpoint management appliance for Altiris so we said hey, Symantec's got these things called NetBackup Appliances, let's check it out. It's a formed fact that we know how to sell and, shoot, four years later it's been a great partnership for us, great partnership, I'm sure, for Veritas, and for our customers and that's a lot of our business today. >> So, I mean, it's hot market, you know. Data protection is exploding, and security. I mean, you're in two of the sweet spots in the market right now. So how do you approach the business with customers? Do you, are you a specialist around data protection? You deliver services around them. Maybe you can explain it on the model? >> Yeah, you know, that's actually a good question, because it's evolved quite a bit, right? So, you know, when you had a limited portfolio of just one or two products that you can sell to a customer, you're really doing a product sale, right, which, I would say that was probably the most difficult transition from the split from Symantec to Veritas, because at Symantec we had thousands of products in the portfolio, or hundreds of products in the portfolio that we could actually talk to. And for a little while, really we had a handful, you know, we had NetBackup Appliances, Enterprise Vault and ancillary things to bulk on to that, like Clearwell. I think one of the most exciting things for us, as a reseller, is to now be able to go have a discussion with our customers that we were never able to have before. And rather than sit there and try to sell them a backup product or a storage solution, we could sell them a platform that solves many problems for them, right? Rather than sitting there and trying to sell one-off. So, our conversations are significantly more strategic now then they've ever been, and frankly I speak for myself and my whole team, I know everyone enjoys the conversation more now that we have a portfolio to talk about, than just a handful of products. >> Angelo, you've got an interesting viewpoint on this split off of Aritas from Symantec. What have your customers said about it? What's been your interaction with the organization? What can you tell us about kind of the inside going on? >> Yeah, look, I've lived firsthand on a Symantec acquisition of a company, okay. I was, we were not a Symantec partner when they acquired Veritas. Funny enough, I was actually doing Veritas consulting, you know, on my own on the side prior to Symantec purchasing Veritas. So I really, I'd made my career on two products; Veritas for backup and Altiris for systems management. Symantec bought Veritas and I was like okay, you know, I'm just going to stay with Altiris. Symantec bought Altiris and here we are now, so we can talk about all of them. The thing I noticed was Symantec was always going to be a security company, right, and they weren't going to change that no matter how much they try to integrate it. It's two radically different stories. You know, and for many, many years, things that we look at as new products today were kind of already there in the Symantec portfolio, but buried underneath other products that really never saw the light of day because when you have hundreds or thousands of products, like I said earlier, you know, the ones that are going to move the most are the ones that are going to get the attention. So I think the benefit of the split is that it really allowed Veritas to focus on what they do well, which is managing data, and Symantec to do what they do well, which is securing your infrastructure and securing your data. From my perspective, our customers really appreciated that. Sure, a couple of them were a little annoyed that they had to now split contracts and deal with that kind of stuff, but I think that was a momentary blip and for the most part, it's been well-received from everyone we've spoken to. >> Angelo, you said you're having, your conversations are evolving. Who are you talking to? And maybe take us inside some of those conversations. What are the big challenges they're having? >> Yeah, a year ago, a year and a half ago I was talking to either somebody who was on the messaging side and needed to archive emails or IMs, or on the backup side and they just wanted to be able to meet their backup windows and maybe to get some better d dub rates, right. Fun conversation to have, bit mundane. It's not really solving problems as much as backing up data or archiving data. Today, we're having overarching conversations at a C-level, or a senior VP level, or a director level, and talking about dramatic changes to the way they do business, and how we can do business with them. Six months ago, NetX, we weren't doing anything in the Cloud, you know. We were selling to some customers' Vdub space to the Cloud, and that's about it. We weren't talking Cloud strategy with them. Today we're talking to our customers about moving workloads to the Cloud, doing it in a way that's predictable for them, and doing it with Veritas. >> That's a really interesting point. I have to imagine that changed who you're talking with inside the company. Can you walk us through kind of a typical customer's, you know, and how you kind of move up into a more strategic discussion for Cloud strategy? >> You know, so for full transparency, that whole thing's still evolving, right. 360 Data Management is still fairly new. So what we're seeing, the conversations turned, it would start, again we're talking to somebody that we've been talking to historically in the backup side or architecture side, and we talk to them about wanting to do better things than what their backup is, and start to talk about, hey this is what 360 Data Management is. What's relevant to that person he's going to want to talk about but then there's going to be things in there that are not relevant to him. So he'll make that introduction and he'll get other stakeholders in the boat with him. And that's something we've really appreciated because the people you used to talk to are now bringing in stakeholders to offset their own desires and their own budgets, so want to bring in other technology. And typically, when we get to that point when we're starting to talk about strategic pricing, is when you're getting that C-level person to really have that aha moment, and say wow, we're offsetting costs here, we're doing things like truly getting rid of tape, or moving to the Cloud and things like that, and it's a conversation that really evolves and it's still starts at the bottom. But we're figuring out ways to start it at a higher point. >> Well, those strategies are still evolving for most customers; the roles of those people that might have had one role definitely are changing. I'm curious, one of the big transition points, especially for a company like Veritas, is going from licenses to some kind of more of a subscription model. Any commentary you have on your customers; their embrace, or like, dislike of some of those transitions? >> I think the one thing the Cloud has done is it's opened up a different avenue of how people consume IT, right. Cloud is very much consumption-based billing, and while that can complicate our lives from a reseller perspective in terms of how to collect and track monthly billing and things like that, they like it because they feel like, and it's the truth, they're only paying for what they're truly using, rather than paying for products or infrastructure that they're only using part of the day, or software that they're only using for a particular project. A lot of our healthcare systems might have a research project that their going on, and they might like to scale up for some backup licensing and scale back down once that project is done. Consumption licensing allows that, versus having to go to them and saying, hey, well now you got to buy 200 terabytes of perpetual licensing, and justify that capital expense, rather than having an operational expense on just that one particular workload that you have to back up for that one period of time. >> Angelo, Stu and I are always interested in the human capital management aspects of things, and you talked about, you went from sort of talking about having a conversation around email archiving or backup, to one about the Cloud, Cloud strategies. From your internal organization perspective, how did you manage that? Are you rescaling, are you retraining? Is it just you got really supersmart people that can adapt? >> We definitely have supersmart people, because they're all over there, that's right. But I definitely have supersmart people. But, you know, it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of, you know, you take one of our data protection projects; see Christian Muma, you know, he's been in the data center for god knows how many years, he has seen technology evolve. It was a natural fit to look at Cloud infrastructure. Started taking some classes, consumed it, all the information he could, and now we're out there actively selling it. In some other respects, we had to hire from outside and bring in some services ourselves to actually use, maybe some third party partnerships to help us better understand how we price out Cloud for our customers. So it's a little bit of everything, and I think that that's what's exciting about it, because I think for the first time in a long time, everyone's learning something new at the same time, because, I don't care what anyone said about the Cloud years ago; it's different today, it's going to be different in six months, it's going to be different in nine months. And I think that that's exciting, and I've been in this industry since 1996. I've seen a lot of really cool things come and go. I just think that there's still infancy in the Cloud and I think it's exciting because everyone's still learning. And any time you can still learn, I think that's, I think an important part of your job. >> So when you think about your, sort of, near-term and midterm and long-term plan for the company, how do you sort of describe that? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Near-term, I want to have a solid end of the quarter. >> Business is good, right, I mean market's booming right now. >> Business is very good. Veritas will tell me it's not good enough but they're just never happy. No, business is, business is very good. I think, near-term for us, you said hey, how do we get our head around it? Near-term for us is, as we're absorbing all this information, is start to really figure out what our path is going to be. So near-term, I think we still have to identify other ancillary partners that we need to bring to the table. We've got our partnerships with Azure, Microsoft Azure, and our partnerships with AWS. We'll probably have to look at Google and IBM and see what they're doing, and then we have to look at other partnerships that are not related to Veritas but still drive that home. We maybe look at a different colo partnership or partnerships around outsourcing billing, things like that, that we can make where it's easier for our customers to consume the technology. So I think six to nine months from now if we were to have the same conversation, everything that we're doing today is probably going to be somewhat different. But I just think that there's still a lot of planning to do. >> Angelo, any feedback from your customers on what there's still on the to-do list from the vendors? We talked, you know, the strategy, Cloud's changing a lot, you know. What are some of the pinpoints that they said hey, if we could get this into the offering from Veritas or some of the others it would make our lives a lot easier. >> I mean, that's a tough question, because we're going to them now and changing the conversation already. You know, obviously they're always asking for different features, but I don't like to get into a feature conversation with the customers. I try to solve the problem. >> Dave: You're leading that conversation, is what you're saying. >> Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds of talking about well, this widget does it at 50% and you do it at 48%. You know, I try to sit a little bit more macro. I think that one of the things our customers have asked us to do a better job at is figure out better ways to make it easier to consume the technology from budget perspective. So we're trying to figure that out now; 360 Data Management is a subscription, Veritas would like them sold in three years, we're trying to figure out ways to get creative with our customers on that. What's the right bundle, what's not the right bundle. One thing that I've noticed, and Veritas have been great at it, is we have to have some flexibility in terms of adding things in and make it seem like it's all part of that bundle. There's been some flexibility and I think that, because of that, we haven't hit that roadblock yet where, well, we really want this product in the bundle. Reality is that we'll work through that and try to add it in there, some way, shape or form, even if behind the scenes. >> The customers see you as the experts, and what we often see is that technology is the technology; it's pretty much understood. What's not understood by the customers is how to apply it to their business, and their business is changing so fast that it seems like they're looking to organizations like yours saying okay, here's our business challenge. How can you help me? You tell me, and then the best answer is somebody he'll be able to work with. Is that a valid, sort of, premise? >> Yeah, it is, it certainly is and I think we're really uniquely positioned in the fact that, here we've got, we've got our partnership with Veritas and we're 100% focused to everything in the Veritas portfolio so we don't compete from within. That's the same thing that we could say, basically, on Symantec and some of our traditional storage partners as well. That'll change most likely, on our storage partners, especially because of what Veritas have been releasing with Access and some of the other software providing storage technology. When we're brought in, we're brought in as the experts in that finite area, so we're not brought in as a generalist-type of reseller. We're brought in as, hey, I've got a data management problem, I've got a data security problem, or I'm trying to do some high-performance workloads on storage. So yeah, we are the experts, but at the same time we're being brought in for those handfuls of things, so we're not having these, hey, can you maximize my span on anti-virus software because I want to sell you commoditized software. It's just not us, it's not our thing. We're not adding any value to the customers, or the poor owners for that matter. >> Angelo, curious that there's a lot of startups in the data protection space. What do you here, your customers asking you about them? You know, what's your thoughts there? >> I guess I got to be nice, right? Because I'm being streamed everywhere. >> Stu: They're not listening, go ahead, be a New Yorker. >> Listen, I challenge Rubrik at any point of time, you know, those guys, Rubrik, Cohesity, those guys, they're new, they're the shiny new toy. The problem, the problem is they have their messaging out there, and the problem we have is that they're the shiny new toy. But when the rubber hits the road and when it's time to actually go and prove out what the technology can do, we'll win all the time. We will win ten out of ten times if we get the seat at the table, right. The problem is is because we were a limited portfolio, a limited product, limited integration type of company before, we weren't getting that seat at the table. I think they see it now, I think they're starting to get a little concerned about, hey, you know what, if this 360 Data Management is what it's going to be, and we all know it is, I think they're going to be concerned. They're new, and they're going to get attention. My honest opinion: I'm glad they came out, I'm glad that Rubrik and Cohesity and all these guys came out and did all this different ways to go to market, because I think it really forced all of us to say hey, we got some real tough decisions to make here, the competition has caught up, in certain ways. Let's change the game, and 360 Data Management does that. I think they should take as much business as they can right now, because it's going to be short-lived. >> You said it makes you rethink your strengths, and like you said, change the game. >> Yeah, it changes the game. >> Yeah. Uh, okay, predictions on the MLB? Yankees won their getaway game today to put the pressure on the Red Sox, two and a half to two and a half games back. You know, the Indians are looking good, my man, Terry Francona. What's your prediction for it? >> The Sox fan's outnumbered two to one here, so go ahead. >> You know, so I shouldn't say that the Yankees are going to win the World Series? >> No, he's a Yankees fan. >> I'm a Yankee fan, too. >> Honestly, as a Yankee fan, I think we all know that they weren't supposed to be this team, so I think this is, that's the team to look out for. >> Dave: Maybe this is their year. >> I think this is the year that they're going to challenge people, I mean, are they going to win? It's Cleveland, do you really think Cleveland's going to win anything? They won one thing in the last, what, 30 years. >> That's what they used to say about us in Boston. Angelo, thanks so much coming on, really appreciate it. Keep right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from-- (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Veags, it's theCube, Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're at NAB 2017 with 100,000 of our closest friends. Talking all about media, entertainment and technology. The theme this year is MET, cause the technology is so mixed in with everything else that you can't separate it anymore. And we're really excited to do a deep dive into kind of the customer, or not the customer, excuse me, the consumer side of this whole world with Yves Bergquist. He's the project director, Data and Analytics Entertainment Technology Center at USC. So Yves welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So when I was doing some research on your segment, really interesting to see that you're involved very much in trying to figure out what people like to watch how they like to watch and get a bunch of data because now the choices for the consumers of media and entertainment are giant, like never before. >> Yeah. There's a, very very basic question that I think not a lot of people in media and entertainment can answer. Is that why are people watching your stuff? And they have sort of surface level answers, but there's ways that the content out there, that we watch, resonates cognitively with us, that is really important, is very fundamental in how we consume media and entertainment. And even the decision making of why we decide to go watch a show on Netflix, or play a mobile game, or watch a Youtube video. Why do we make these specific choices? What drives those choices? All these questions don't have a lot of really good answers right now, and that's where I, where we're focus all of our work at ETC. Is to really understand people's drive to entertain themselves or decisions to entertain themselves at a very deep level. And really understand how various narrative structures in film and trailers and brands and advertising resonate with people at a cognitive level. >> So it's pretty intersting, it really goes with the whole big data theme and the AI theme. Because now you can capture, collect, measure data in ways, and consumption in ways you couldn't ever do before. >> Yeah, that's a good point. So, you know, there's three things that are really impacting the media and entertainment industry and every industry, really. It's, number one, the ability to think in systems, right? We used to think about problems in a very sort of siloed manner, right, we think about a problem in isolation with other forces. Like we look at the flu in isolation with the environment that we're in, so like that. There's another way to look at things, in a more holistically, it's a system called systems thinking. And the ability to think of audiences as a system, just like your body's a system inside a system, right, is really revolutionizing the way we're looking at entertainment and media. The second thing thing is the availability of data, just there's an enormous amount of data out there. A lot of it is unstructured, but there's, the good thing about entertainment and media is that it drives passion and drives conversation. And anything that drives passion and conversations get very rich in data. And the third thing that is impacting the industry is machine living and AI. And the ability to really look at all of these data points across the system holistically in a very intelligent more semantic manner. And make sure that you're measuring the right things. For a very very long time the media and entertainment industry has been measuring the wrong things. And it's really now catching up very very fast and making sure that it's measuring the right things. For example, how do we measure how specific narrative structures in film resonate with people cognitively in a way that translates into the box office? Is there a specific character journey that resonates better in an action movie with males versus females. How does that matter for how a story's being told? Where do you innovate in script, right? Interesting point is the entertainment industry is very unique in that it has two major problems. Number one, its clients, its customers are absolute experts in the product. Because if you're 25 or 35, how many movies have you watched? Thousands of movies, right? So you're an expert in movies. >> Jeff: Certainly the ones you like. >> Exactly. If you're 25 you haven't bought hundreds or thousands of cars, right? So, but on the other hand the supplier of the content doesn't know as much of the customer as the customer knows about the product. So you have two problems. You have a really really really highly expert client, and, but you don't know a lot about that client as a studio, right, or a network or a media company. So that's very very unique distinct challenge that they're starting to get very very smart and very advanced in thinking about. >> The other thing is, that I see in the movie industry and I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination but it seems like the compression pressure is huge. The budgets have grown to be giant. And the number of available weekends for your release are small. And the competition for attention and eyeballs around those weekends, it just seems to really have a really high kind of risk reward profile that's getting more and more extreme. And is that driving people more to kind of the known? Or is it just my perception that they're taking less risks on modifications from the script or modifications of kind of the norm especially around these big budget? I mean just the fact that you've got version 1,2,3,4,5,6, pick your favorite theme seems to be a trend that continues and gets even more, I mean Superman. How many Superman movies are there, or Spiderman? >> So you know, that's really interesting right? So the very natural tendency of the media and entertainment industry is when it doesn't know, as I was mentioning, it doesn't know as much as it could or should know about who its audience is. The tendency is then becomes to just take less and less risk in telling stories exactly the same way that's why you see a lot of really really formative very formulaic movies. What we're trying to do is, and the challenge with that is that, again you have an audience of experts and so if every single movie looks like the same one, look like the other one, you're going to have a problem. People aren't going to go see, going to go gravitate towards another kind of entertainment or some of your competitors. So you have to know where do you meet peoples expectations in a movie and where do you innovate? Deadpool is a really interesting example. Deadpool has the structure of a basic superhero movie but it has a lot of innovation underneath that. And so for the studios knowing where do you stick to the formula and where do you innovate in telling a story when you make a billion dollar movie, is going to become more and more interesting. Because if you innovate too much you're going to turn people off. If you don't innovate enough, you're going to turn people off. So we actually have some research looking at the mathematical definition of why we think certain things are interesting and certain things are not interesting so we can separate. These are the things you need in your movies, this is some aspects, if you go back to Deadpool, there's some aspects of Deadpool as a movie that are very traditional to the superhero genre. And a lot of other aspects that are very very innovative. So you have to innovate in certain areas and you have to no innovate areas. And that's a real challenge, and so that's why we're really applying our work to looking at narrative structure in storytelling at ETC is because that's where a lot of the revenue opportunities and the de-risking opportunities are. >> And it's interesting before we went live you were talking about thinking of storytelling and narrative as a little bit less art and a little bit more science in terms of of thinking at in terms of algorithms and algorithmically. Because there are patterns there, there is data there. So what does some of the data that you measure to get there? You mentioned earlier that in the past people were measuring the wrong thing. What are the right things to measure? What are some of the things you guys are measuring now? >> Yeah, so you know, it is still very much an art, right? It's making it, making art a little bit more optimal, and optimizing art is what we're doing, but it's, it will remain art for a very long time. I think for, and since we're at NAB, sort if in a broadcasting environment, I think a lot of the measurements and systems that have been in place for decades now are looking at demographics. And demographics, whether you're a male or female, Your age, your ethnicity, or your income, used to predict what you would watch. It doesn't do that anymore, and if you have kids, you know like me, you watch the same thing that they're watching, you're playing the same video games that they're playing. I think there's a new way to measure things more cognitively and semantically and neuroscience is starting to get into the issue of why do we think certain stories are more interesting or more appealing than others. Why do certain stories lead us to make actual decisions more than others? And so I think at a very very basic level you have to unpack this notion of why do people go see this movie? And it's a system, you know, that decision happens in a system where some of the system is demographics, demographics aren't going to go away they're still predictive to a certain extent. But it's also, you know, cast, it's also who has recommended this movie. And what are the systems of influence in driving certain people to see a movie? And all these things, and of course, what we're focusing on, which is storytelling and narrative structure and how that, sort of translates to making decisions to see this movie. A lot, you know, we're still in the infancy of measuring all of the system in a very scientific granular way, but we're making very very quick progress. And so even things like understanding the ecosystem of influence around why certain communities are influenced to go see certain movies by other communities and what happens there, right. So I'll give you an example, we did, we pulled months of data on Reddit about where supporters of Hillary Clinton and where supporters of Donald Trump would engage on that topic. Are they talking about that amongst each other or are they really going out there and trying to convince other people to vote for Trump or to vote for Hillary Clinton? And we saw some, two radically different patterns. So pattern number one, the Clinton people would mostly engage with each other on Reddit. So that's cool and that has very little value because you're not being an ambassador. On the other hand, the Trump people were engaging far outside of the Trump subReddit and trying to convince people to join the movement, to donate, to vote for Trump. So we think there's a model there that can be ported to the entertainment industry, where if your fans, if your fan base is mostly engaging with each other it has less value than if your fan base is really going out there and really trying to get other people excited about your movie. And why do certain people get excited and how do your fans, what argument do your fans use out there to convince others to go see your movie. All these things we're looking at, and it's brand new world now for media because of all of these data points. >> The systems conversation is so interesting because it's not only the system, but the individual. But it's like you said, it's all these systems of influence today. Look at the Yahoo reviews, the Rotten Tomato reviews, you know, what are there, Reddit, you know, as a system of influence, who would have ever thought? >> Yeah and we're getting it, we're going into a world very quickly, we're going to be able to understand entertainment and storytelling and narrative and it's cognitive power almost on a neural network base. In looking at what kind of neural network in our brains get fired when we are exposed to this type of character, or this type of storyline, or this type of narrative mechanics. And so this is a really exciting time. >> The other thing that's interesting, we talked again a little bit before we turned the cameras on, is about the trailers. Because that's kind of the story within the story. And depending on your objectives, and the budget, you know, they can make all kinds of number of trailers, in very different way, to approach or to target very specific audiences. I wonder if you can get into that a little bit. >> Yeah so, you know in the media and entertainment industry decisions have been made, and if you think about it it's amazing that the media and entertainment industry has made so much money, so I think it's a testament of the enormous creative talent that's involved. But, you know, especially for trailers a lot of the decisions about trailers are made sort of looking what's worked in the past in a very sort of haphazard way. There really isn't a lot of data and analytics and science applied to, hey what kind of trailer, what structure of trailer do we need to put out there in each channel for each target audience to get them really excited about the movie? Because there's many different ways you can present a movie, right, and we've seen, we've all seen many different types of trailers for many different types of movies. What we're doing, and nobody's really worried about hey let's analyze, for example, the pace, right, the edit cuts, the structure of the edits for the trailer and how that resonates with people. And now we have the ability to do that because people, you know, we will count views on YouTube for example, or there will be a way to measure how popular a trailer is. So what we're doing is we're just measuring everything that we can measure about a trailer. Is it a complete story? What is the percentage of the trailer is the main character in? What is the percentage of the trailer that the influence character is in? We're looking at cast. Does a trailer with Ben Affleck, you know, work better if Ben Affleck is a lot in the trailer, or not a lot in the trailer? And what kind of trailer types work better for specific genres, specific target audience, specific channels? So we're really unpacking that into a nice little spreadsheet. And measuring all the things that we can measure. And the thing about this is, if you think about the amount of money that's involved in making these decisions, you know if you're a studio and you're spending 3,4,5 billion dollars a year in marketing expense, and my work can make it even 10 percent more efficient, that's like half a billion dollars in savings. >> That's a real number. >> That's enormous right? So it's a really exciting time for media and entertainment because there are all these things on the horizon to help them make better decisions, more data driven decisions. And really free up creators, because if we can tell the people who tell the stories in film every, you can innovate so much more now because we've, we know that we've boiled it down to a science, and we know that in this, if you have these four or five things in your script, everywhere else you can innovate, go nuts. I think it's going to free up a lot of creative talent. We're going to see a lot more interesting movies out there. >> The other piece I think, I mean obviously a trailer for a movie's one thing, but take that little genre of creative that's purely built to drive behavior and that's a commercial. And I always joke with my kids, I watch a lot of sports, and there'll be a car ad and I'm like, just think if you're the poor guy that gets the assignment to make another car ad, I mean, how many car ads have been made, and you've got to think creatively. But the data that you're talking about, in terms of the narrative, what types of shots, the cutting, based on the demographic that you're trying to go after for that specific ad. That must be tremendously valuable information. >> Yeah it is really valuable. So you know, our philosophy is that everything is story. You're tie is a story, your haircut's a story, you're cereal's a story, your cars, everything. We make decisions based on the narratives that other other people tell us and that we tell ourselves about how to represent the world. Simply because the universe out there and the reality out there is too complex for our brains to really represent as it is, so we have to simplify, compress it into a set of a behavioral script that says, okay I'm, it's sort of an executive summary of their reality. And though that executive summary is a story. And so it's especially powerful in driving how what we buy and how we consume things. And so, I've build a platform that looks at, that extracts very very structured data from conversations about what is the narrative structure about a specific brand. You know, is it focused more on, you know,emotions? Is it focused more on ethics? Is it focused more on the, sort of the utility of the product? And trying to correlate that to look at what kind of narrative structure's around your brand? What kind of story around your brand, drives more sales? And so that's really really interesting, in sort of understanding, again, that cognitive relationship between stories and how efficient they are in driving specific behavior. That is exactly what my research is about. >> Yves, we could go on all day, but unfortunately we are out of time. So thank you for spending a few minutes and dropping by. Fascinating conversation. Alright, he's Yves Bergquist from USC, where all the film stuff's happening. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. We'll be back NAB 2017 after this short break. Thanks for watching. (uptempo rock music)