Intelligent Automation Radio

The IT industry, not unlike biology, evolves at a measured pace.  Innovations perceived as great leaps forward are more often usually just novel combinations of existing capabilities repurposed for new tasks.  The wow factor generated by the latest vendor offerings is primarily due to their inventive approach to solving current problems, not the revelation of some unimaginably futuristic scientific advancement.  It therefore behooves us to consider the solutions IT automation produces in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, terms.   One such executive taking this long view is Travis Greene, Director of Strategy for IT Operations Products at Micro Focus. As witness to a couple decades worth of progressions in IT operations, he has a clear-eyed perspective on where our industry is going, based on where we've been.  Travis drops in to share his insights with us, and along the way we'll learn why developers will never be able to wish IT Ops away, the future role of humans in automated enterprises, & the biggest factors in making IT automation successful.

AI's impact on people, organizations, and countries is now so far-reaching there soon won't be any aspect of our lives left untouched by it.  To even begin understanding how wide-ranging the effect of artificial intelligence is currently, we undertake a wide-ranging discussion with Neil Sahota, AI advisor to the United Nations.  Neil takes us on a grand tour of some really exciting ways AI's capabilities are being used around the world today.  He also introduces us to a thinking framework he developed that can guide us on how to harness AI's capabilities to create disruptive advances.   Along the way we'll learn what the biggest challenge is for organizations deploying artificial intelligence, the unheralded metric which best captures the impact of AI on business & IT operations, & what the biggest area of growth will be for artificial intelligence over the next 3 years.

We've all heard the term "growing the pie" in the context of enlarging an economic opportunity to enrich more people.  That kind of pie growth is visible today in the automation & AI space, where swelling revenue streams are accelerating prosperity for software vendors & service providers.  This in turn is driving the formation of an automation- & AI-centered business ecosystem which ultimately will have a significant macroeconomic impact on numerous industries.  At least that's the prediction of Jay McBain from Forrester research who, perhaps more than anyone else, has devoted himself to studying this ecosystem.   Jay's insights are highly sought after, which is why Channel Partners Magazine named him their 2021 Channel Influencer of the Year.  In this episode we catch up with Jay, who shares his vast erudition with us on the mind-boggling number of market opportunities going unmet by automation providers;  the biggest disruptions we'll see in the coming years for the automation and AI ecosystem; & why every company is becoming a tech company.

When it comes to digital transformation, as the saying goes, we may all be in the same storm, but we're not all in the same boat.  Just ask any 2 people and you'll get 3 different testimonials reflecting an incredibly broad spectrum of experiences & outcomes.  For senior IT leaders captaining their operations vessel, what should they know to best navigate the turbulence of this technology tempest and ensure their enterprise makes it to safe harbor?   For insights we turn to Isaac Sacolick, who much like a beacon guiding travelers through treacherous waters, advises CIOs on how best to avoid the unseen hazards that could sink one's digital transformation initiative.  In a wide-ranging discussion we learn what constitutes Digital Transformation 2.0, his frank advice to IT leaders on overcoming robophobia, and the people-centric direction he sees automation heading towards as the next big thing in digital transformation.

Whether undertaken by individuals, departments, or entire organizations, the automation journey is virtually certain to include a hearty mix of progress and pitfalls.  Ambitious objectives often go unrealized, but unexpected benefits frequently emerge as well.  These mixed results prompt some to pull the plug on their automation pursuits, while compelling others to double down in their quest for digital transformation.  Uncovering the causes driving these varied outcomes is one of the subjects explored by EY Partner Sandeep Parikh in his recent book "Automation Conundrum".   As EY's Leader for Intelligent Automation, Sandeep has assiduously examined why automation & AI work well for some, but less so for others.  We do a deep dive with Sandeep about his observations, and along the way learn what it takes to create a culture of automation within an organization; why the biggest automation & AI challenge facing the technology sector has nothing to do with technology; and why FTE reduction shouldn't be the metric used to judge automation's success.

It's been often remarked that the Chinese symbol for "crisis" is comprised of two other characters representing danger and opportunity.  The coronavirus pandemic has perhaps been the most dangerous global crisis since the Cold War, but for many economic sectors, it's created great opportunity.  The MSP & cloud service provider market is one such sector, which according to Steven Hall of ISG has grown an astounding 50% over the last 4 quarters.  Much of this is due to the crisis spawned by COVID-19, which accelerated adoption of both cloud and automation services, leading to enterprise digital transformation initiatives being expedited across the board.   As publisher of the ISG Index, the standard for marketplace intelligence on the global IT services industry, Steven is uniquely positioned to not only assess the current state of automation, but also peer over the horizon and see where things are heading.  In this episode we learn what Steven sees as the five major areas of automation MSP's must focus on to optimize their cost structures; why the number of bots deployed doesn't necessarily translate to fewer FTE's but still provides high value; and the many ways he sees automation affecting the business of MSP's.

In Part II of this 2-part episode, we continue our conversation with Chetan Dube, who for over 2 decades has been haunted by the seminal question Alan Turing posed in 1950 - "Can Machines Think?"  Chetan's years-long Odyssey in pursuit of an answer led him to found Amelia, one of the market leaders in enterprise AI software.   During this segment, we'll learn how the government can significantly reduce its trade deficit by leveraging AI, when the majority of the workforce will be digital (hint: it's sooner than you think), and Chetan's tips on how to "hire" the right digital employee.

Progress, in just about any endeavor, is often driven by pioneers who see pathways where others only see dead ends.  In the field of AI, one such trailblazer is Chetan Dube, whose quest to make machine intelligence approximate human intelligence led him to found IPsoft (now Amelia), the world's largest privately held AI software company.   In Part I of this 2-part episode, we speak with Chetan & learn why traditionally risk-averse industries went all in on conversational AI and the differentiating edge it provides them; which metric (other than ROI) best captures the impact of automation; and the biggest challenges organizations are experiencing in deploying automation and conversational AI.

By 2023, Gartner projects that citizen developers will outnumber professional developers more than 4-to-1 at large enterprises.  This astonishing development reflects the emergence of employees with "digital dexterity", who are comfortable using new technologies that drive "better business outcomes". One example of such technology is Tonkean's Adaptive Business Operations Platform, a no-code/low-code automation tool that empowers citizen developers, or “makers” to optimize processes at the operations layer.   Sagi Eliyahu, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tonkean, and he's on a mission to transform upskilled personnel into makers, who use automation to identify problems and build solutions without any programming, or the need for IT resources.  We talk with him about human-in-the-loop automation, and along the way we learn about the importance of optimizing for humans rather than data, the biggest challenges organizations are experiencing in deploying automation, and the surprisingly high percentage of IT & operations teams that have adopted or are working on adopting no-code/low-code tools.

Had the great modernist poet D. H. Lawrence lived in our time, perhaps he would've alternatively phrased this famous quote as follows - "Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with shifting technological paradigms." Today, many people realize that the shifting paradigms of AI, automation, and digital transformation will disrupt numerous human-involved processes, but few ponder how these disruptions will affect ethics and equity and principles of justice.  Fewer still contemplate how to address these technoethical challenges, and what framework should be applied in doing so.   Enter Steven Umbrello, Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.  Steven emphatically advocates for Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as a systemic approach to ensuring human values are accounted for throughout a design process. Steven joins us to discuss his research, how to incorporate VSD into AI systems, and the negative ramifications of excluding VSD from the innovation process.

People of a certain age will fondly remember an American TV game show called "Name That Tune", where contestants won prizes for correctly identifying a song with as few notes as possible played by an orchestra.  Name That Tune offers a fitting analogy to explain Indico's value proposition - automating complex processes involving unstructured content, using as little as 200 sample documents for its AI model to learn from.  With just a fraction of what their competitors require, Indico can name that tune (automate unstructured content workflows) in very few notes (documents), using a proprietary "transfer learning" algorithm.  Since Forrester Research estimates that up to 85% of all enterprise content is unstructured, this represents a huge untapped opportunity.    Founder/CTO Slater Victoroff is the driving force behind Indico's ambitious goal of helping organizations turn process into profit.  He joins us to discuss the path that led him to embrace transfer learning and what makes this technique ideal for automating workflows involving unstructured content of intertwined images and text.  Along the way we learn why "time on task" is a much more intuitive metric than ROI, why machine teaching is better than machine learning, and why companies are lying about how much data they actually have.

Build or Buy?  It's a question both IT & business operations have grappled with ever since John W. Tukey first coined the term "software" in 1957.  As automation & artificial intelligence quickly permeate nearly every aspect of enterprise ops over 6 decades later, the question still remains.  Should an organization build its own automation & AI application, or let someone else do the heavy lifting? Building custom solutions allows companies to retain control, but at what expense?  Then there's ongoing maintenance costs and other considerations.  On the other hand, buying software can accelerate time to value, but that often entails making compromises on functionality.   To delve further into this question, we turn to Shan Haq, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development at Transcepta, an intelligent Procure-To-Pay vendor.  Transcepta's platform leverages automation augmented by AI to deliver 100% straight-through invoice processing across supply chains. Shan shares his insights with us on why buying the services of an automation platform can make more sense, & the beneficial ripple effects enterprises can experience by automating just one area of their organization's operations.

Who among us hasn't called a contact center at some point for customer service, tech support, or some other matter?  Usually those interactions are mundane, unremarkable, and ultimately forgettable.  You get what you need and go on with your day, blissfully unaware of what transpired behind the scenes to provide you that friction-free encounter.  It turns out however that automation & AI often play a key role in delivering those satisfying outcomes, and NICE Ltd. (formerly Neptune Intelligence Computer Engineering) is a key player enabling those experiences.   Oded Karev runs NICE's RPA division, and has a lot to say about how the attended & unattended real-time automation they've innovated has digitally transformed their contact center customers.   He joins us to share his insights about some interesting use cases, whether or not all the various forms of automation will eventually merge into one singular platform, and briefly talks about NICE's next major innovation - robots building robots.

Prior to their acquisition by Oracle, Sun Microsystems operated under a memorable tagline - "The network is the computer".  Their slogan illustrated the maxim that tapping into the combined computational power of an entire network would yield far more impressive results than what a lone desktop could deliver on its own.  That principle is center stage again today, thanks to the promise of intent-based networking (IBN), which leverages AI & machine learning to automate many network processes now managed manually.  The pandemic accelerated demand for IBN-driven network automation when organizations were forced to accommodate the work from home mandate with an agile infrastructure.  Consequently, network automation has emerged as one of the most important areas of focus for enterprise digital transformation, and Cisco is one of its leading providers.   As Cisco's Sr. VP & CTO of DevNet Ecosystem Success, Susie Wee is the executive entrusted with growing the community of developers & IT professionals whose skills will deliver the promise of network automation worldwide.  We talk with Susie to learn her motivation in founding DevNet, the skills necessary to succeed in network automation, and what IT leaders can do to create an innovation mindset that enables their teams to solve complex network automation challenges.

Failing fast is one of Agile development's conceptual pillars. Embracing the principle of failing fast leads to lower cost of failure, accelerated learning, and innovation-driven organizational culture.  In the AI & machine learning world however, where testing & fast failing of models is heavily dependent on access to computing power, these desirable benefits are often out of reach.  If your employer is computationally affluent like Facebook or Google, your machine learning models enjoy the best environment to fail fast & get rapidly fine-tuned towards a minimum viable product.  If your employer doesn't have those resources, then not so much.   William Falcon wants to remedy that inequality with a Training-at-Scale system that compresses research & testing from months into days.  Expediting that process not only gets machine learning models into production faster, but can also accelerate an organization's journey towards digital transformation.  We talk with William about how his startup Grid.ai will provide this “superpower” and how doing so can provide enterprises with a competitive advantage.

The trenches of technology's marketplace battlefield are strewn with the remains of high-tech leaders, undercut by adversaries marching in with the next great innovation.  It's a manifestation of Creative Destruction, economist Joseph Schumpeter's famous theory about the continuous cycle of annihilation & creation that enables the new to replace the old.  Of course "old" is a relative term in IT, but some are beginning to view automation in its current form as a legacy encumbrance.  If it is, then what's next?   To find out we turn to Gaurav Dhillon, Chairman and CEO of SnapLogic, a leading provider of Integration Platform-as-a-Service.  Integrations are the synapses of the online world, enabling creation of neural circuits between applications, which ultimately coalesce into a computational nervous system we call the internet.  Gaurav believes that combining iPaaS with AI will redefine how enterprises interact with their employees and their customers.  The result will be organizations whose whole is greater than the sum of their parts.

There's a quote circulating on the internet that "trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair".  Its author was almost certainly referring to human relationships, but it turns out this sentiment applies equally to AI-driven decision making.  Complex machine-learning models feeding AI algorithms can take a long time to develop.  However, if they result in people's credit applications being erroneously rejected or medical conditions being misdiagnosed, confidence in that AI will evaporate, and possibly never be restored.  That's where Explainable AI comes in.   Explainable AI seeks to transform a "black box" model into a fishbowl, so that its outputs are understandable, explainable, and ultimately trustworthy.  One leading proponent of Explainable AI is Krishna Gade, a software engineering veteran of Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Microsoft who Co-founded Fiddler Labs, an Explainable AI company.  Krishna joins us to discuss how Explainable AI can address unconscious or unintentional bias, expedite debugging of AI models, and accelerate acceptance of and trust in AI-driven decision making.

As women bridge the diversity gap in the technology industry, female executives like Cognizant's Mariesa Coughanour, have advanced their careers to prominent positions in our profession, and it's worth taking note.   As head of Cognizant's Automation Advisory, Mariesa runs a practice for one of the world's leading professional services companies that transforms hyper automation from a buzzword into a reality. By tying together analytics, AI, and automation, Mariesa's team has generated tens of millions of dollars in savings for Cognizant clients.  She joins us on the podcast to share her insights about the key issues surrounding hyper automation and discuss implementations she's overseen in the pharmaceutical, insurance, and airline industries.

"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." That quote was coined by William Edwards Deming, the famous 20th-century management consultant, who viewed process excellence as a sine qua non to performance excellence.  When it comes to digital transformation, process excellence is very much foundational to automation excellence.  Yet surprisingly, many organizations can't fully describe what they're doing as a process, suggesting that Deming was more prescient than many realize.   One man on a mission to bring process excellence to the mid-size market is Robert Hutter, Founder and CEO of FireStart. His firm focuses on human-centric process modeling, documentation, and enterprise workflow automation, resulting in holistic digital transformation.  We chat with Robert to learn how enterprise workflow automation differs from robotic process automation, the natural limitations facing citizen developers, and why you should value process as the most relevant asset in your company.

If a parallel could be drawn between the history of Artificial Intelligence and a professional star athlete who rehabilitated his career, it might go something like this.  As a rookie, AI flashed occasional signs of brilliance that enthralled a million minds with the promise of greater possibilities.  Then it floundered, getting sent down to the minor leagues to overhaul & revamp itself.  Eventually it worked its way back up to the big leagues, and began fulfilling the expectations of greatness many had predicted.  Now that AI is delivering consistent superstar results, organizations seeking their own operational victories want to sign it to a long-term contract.  Has AI finally redeemed itself enough to gain everyone's trust though?   That's a topic of particular interest to Bob Friday, Vice President, CTO, and Co-Founder of Mist Systems, a Juniper Company.  As a pioneer in smart wireless networking, Bob has seen a lot in his storied Silicon Valley career.  He stops by to share with us why 2014 was a watershed year for AI, why adoption of AI is accelerating for enterprises with complex networks, and the risks for companies who don't develop an AI for IT strategy in the coming year.

Bain & Company, one of the world's three largest strategy consulting firms, has been at the forefront of digital transformation for many years now.  Leading global organizations retain Bain's services both to keep pace with technology advances, as well as gain competitive advantage in their markets.  It's not a bad place to be employed either, as evidenced by Glassdoor ranking Bain #1 on their list of Best Places to Work (four times!).  No wonder then that Bain attracts the best, both customers and employees, which in turn leads to some of the best insights available on the state of automation.   We take a peek inside this prestigious firm by interviewing Michael Heric, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, and the executive in charge of their Automation Center of Excellence.  In his 20 years at Bain, Michael's seen a lot, and he shares with us why automation is increasingly sitting outside of IT's jurisdiction; how Bain took a disappointing automation program that yielded only a few million dollars in savings to one generating savings of over a hundred million dollars a year; and why it's unlikely there will ever be a single platform delivering all of an organization's automation needs.

Longtime Harvard professor Theodore Levitt once said “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things”.  By that measure, ServiceNow must be among the most creative AND innovative organizations in the world. The disruptive product stream they've introduced to the ITSM market just in the last decade alone has propelled their growth into a $100 Billion software leviathan. They don't appear to be slowing down either.  Accordingly, much of the IT world wants to know - can they maintain the same level of entrepreneurial creativity & innovation necessary to sustain that blistering pace?   For insight, we speak with ServiceNow's Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright, the man in charge of nurturing his company's innovative results & ensuring its market dominance.  Along the way, we learn about the three different vectors ServiceNow uses to measure the maturity & effectiveness of everything from digital transformation to hyper automation; some of the most innovative automation use cases ServiceNow witnessed due to the pandemic; and the one really important skill IT professionals must have in order for them & their organizations to succeed.

If you've already started & led the intelligent automation practice for McKinsey & Company, one of the world's three largest strategy consulting firms, and prior to that you did the same for Ernst & Young, one of the "Big Four" accounting firms, where do you go next?  If you're Pascal Bornet, you and your co-authors publish a book that instantly becomes the standard reference work on intelligent automation.  In this opus, you collectively distill all the valuable experience & insights gained over the years working on some of the world's biggest & most complicated automation projects. By doing so, you not only illuminate and dispel much of the mystery surrounding automation, AI, and digital transformation, but you advance its democratization for the masses.  And you title it, what else, “Intelligent Automation”.   We speak with Pascal about the monumental work he and his co-writers recently completed.  Our discussion ends up revealing how automation raises the importance of the employee experience to the same level as the client experience, the key to getting middle management on board supporting a digital transformation, and the three most important metrics which best capture the effectiveness of automation to an enterprise.

Bots.  They're everywhere, proliferating fast, and evolving their capabilities.  Most of us are familiar with them in the form of chatbots, crawlers, and of course RPA bots, but what about an emerging class of autonomous software programs called Digital Coworkers?  They're not just next.  They're now, and are already impacting the future of work in verticals such as the insurance industry.   To learn more about Digital Coworkers and how they'll interact with their human colleagues, we talk with Chaz Perera of Roots Automation.  As the former Chief Transformation Officer of AIG (America's 4th largest insurer by assets, as of 2019), he sought a better way to deploy robotic automation in enterprise operations.  Chaz explains to us why Digital Coworkers succeeded where other bots failed.  Along the way we'll learn what the magic number is of automatable processes organizations need to have in order to justify establishing their own Center of Excellence, why a bot's greatest value might be freeing up staff so they can spend more time with customers, and what a future with Digital Coworkers might look like.

The Great British Bake Off is a popular BBC reality TV series showcasing contestants' baking skills as they advance through a series of challenge rounds.  The final baker remaining after weeks of elimination stages is declared the winner.  It's a grueling competition requiring culinary dexterity that encompasses numerous skills & techniques.  It's also a microcosm for the future of work.  In the 4th Industrial Revolution, professionals (like bakers) will need to expand their repertoire of expertise in order to acquire the digital dexterity enterprises will need to compete & win globally.   London-based Kieran Gilmurray is an internationally recognized intelligent automation expert.  He's been preaching the gospel of digital dexterity for some time, and has some dire predictions for organizations failing to heed his advice.  He joins us to share his insights, and along the way we learn why implementing a Center of Excellence is Automation 101, what the minimum ROI percentage should be to justify automating a process, and what some of the biggest disruptions will be due to digital transformation over the next few years.

Wikipedia defines Customer success as "...the business method ensuring customers achieve success, their desired outcomes while using your product or service."  If automation is your product/service, what are the keys to ensuring it succeeds for your internal and/or external customers? When digital transformation projects have a documented failure rate as high as 84%, how should you approach implementation of automation to be part of the 16% that succeed?   For answers we turn to Balaji Uppili, Chief Customer Success Officer at GAVS Technologies, one of the leading global IT service providers for midsize enterprises.  As the man tasked with assuring GAVS clients get the desired outcomes they demand, he's developed critical insights on how to increase their odds of success.  He shares some of his accumulated wisdom with us, including why cost reduction shouldn't be your most important measurement of success.

Is conversational AI all it's cracked up to be, or is hype eclipsing hope when it comes to deliverables?  Has the gap between expectations and reality grown so wide that disappointment is inevitable, both for end-users and enterprise decision-makers?  Or have the majority of chatbot vendors simply been targeting the wrong use cases, inadvertently leading their customers to insurmountable dead ends?   One man with a clear-eyed vision of the market opportunity uncluttered by misconceptions about the technology's potential is Kevin Collins, Founder & CEO of Charli.ai.  Following GE Digital's acquisition of his IoT company Bit Stew, Kevin set out to build a personal AI Chief-of-Staff front-ended by a chatbot.  With Charli.ai recently emerging from stealth mode, Kevin joins us on the podcast to explain why despite expert predictions falling short about conversational AI's advances he's still enthusiastic about the technology; why front-end conversational interactions must never exceed back-end automation capabilities; and how CIO's should approach conversational AI implementations.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has divided AI's evolution into 3 distinct waves.  Currently, we find ourselves in the 2nd wave, dominated by machine learning and big data.  The 3rd wave however, is nearly upon us, and will allow AI to go from learning and perceiving to reasoning and possibly even generalizing.  The ability to generalize is AI's holy grail.  Though rarely mentioned by its name – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – it's often depicted in SciFi movies and books.  DARPA predicts that next-generation methods will be required in order to achieve AGI. Peter Voss is the man who coined the term AGI and is one of the field's foremost thought leaders.  Peter joins us on this episode to discuss cognitive architecture, a theory of computational structure he advocates for, and which he believes is our best path to an AGI future.  We chat about a number of interesting subjects, and along the way learn why the very nature of cognitive architecture may eliminate the problem of bias in AI, why conversational AI is the killer app for cognitive architecture, and why the Turing Test isn't very useful for appraising a machine's intelligence.

Some of you were introduced to automation in school, or at work, or perhaps even by a family member or friend.  Our guest on this episode began his automation journey in the US Marine Corps.  Corporal Dwayne White's first automation project involved "digitally transforming" a manual process done on a Xerox typewriter into a far more efficient solution done on a PC. From there, he progressed through successive levels of technical & executive responsibility, until reaching his current position as VP of Technology Automation at LPL Financial Services.   As the largest independent broker dealer in the country supporting nearly 17,000 financial advisors, technology plays an outsized role in LPL Financial's success.  Dwayne was instrumental in leveraging automation to power LPL's growth, both as a hands-on techie and as a manager.  He shares some key insights with us in this episode, and we learn how automation mitigates risk for LPL Financial, the specific kinds of processes LPL automates, and why you shouldn't look at automation as a replacement for your staff.

Perhaps you've heard the famous African Proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others". Our guest on this episode has gone far, but he's also gone pretty fast. Yousuf Khan has been CIO for a number of high-profile startups, a couple of them quite notable in the automation space.  His talent and vision led him to those roles, but his networking and outreach allowed him to excel.  Now as Partner with an early stage venture capital fund, he advises both CIOs and startups on how they can work together to bring next generation innovations to market.   We learn quite a few insights from Yousuf in this discussion, including when it's better to use artificial intelligence versus automation, how IT executives can prepare themselves to become CIOs, and why the CIO Group Therapy Dinners he started have not only led to better CIO decision-making, but better features in technology products.

"To me, Microsoft is about empowerment... we are the original democratizing force, putting a PC in every home and every desk." That quote by CEO Satya Nadella, of course, reflects the ubiquity achieved by the Windows operating system. His company's feat of democratization however, is just prologue to the coming revolution Microsoft foresees in automation. An upheaval expected to be so disruptive to the status quo, it will empower the information worker masses to finally overthrow the oppressive yoke of robotic tasks smothering their productivity.  With newfound freedom to unleash their ingenuity, they'll not only enrich their own lives, but add greater value to the organizations employing them.   The Microsoft executive charged with redressing the imbalance between toil & talent plaguing white collar wage earners is Charles Lamanna.  As Corporate Vice President, Low Code Application Platform, his portfolio of responsibility encompasses all the critical assets needed to bring Microsoft's lofty vision to life.  In this wide-ranging discussion, we get first-hand insight from a senior executive on the vital role automation plays in the software giant's Cloud-First, Mobile-First strategy.  Along the way we'll also learn why the shifting ratio of repetition to creativity within a given task will determine which automation type it's best suited for; the automation skills one should master to position themselves for success in the future; and what the single biggest disruptor for automation will be over the next few years.

HBO's emmy-nominated comedy series Silicon Valley offers a humorous behind-the-scenes take on the trials and tribulations of technology startups.  Its techie-driven dialogue is unusual for mainstream entertainment, but refreshing for those of us in IT.  Pulling back the curtains on life at Silicon Valley IT departments is a specialty of our guest on this episode, Mark Settle.  As a 7-time CIO of companies such as Oxy, BMC Software, & Okta, Mark reveals quite a bit in his latest book "Truth from the Valley, A Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade".   Drawing upon his many experiences leading IT shops, Mark succinctly articulates both the problems with current approaches to IT, and his prescription for how people, processes, and technology must adapt to a digitally transformed future.  Along the way we'll learn what he thinks are the top three characteristics a CIO should look for when hiring an IT professional (other than intelligence), the key to overcoming robophobia among staff, and why a CIO's success depends on them picking a handful of things to be Best-in-Class at.

The Millennial generation is still retail's most coveted demographic, but Generation Z isn't far behind.  Both cohorts grew up as "digital natives" with computers, game consoles, and mobile phones.  It's no surprise then that being online is second nature to them, and increasingly, chatbots is where Millennials & Generation Z can be found interacting online with retailers & other businesses.  Conventional marketing wisdom has long dictated that you have to meet your customers where they are.  Our guest on this episode argues that means chatbots are where marketers should go.   As Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, Beerud Sheth knows quite a bit about chatbots.  His bot-building platform is already being used by over 30,000 businesses worldwide, and was selected by Amazon as one of two preferred bot builders for their .bot registry services. With bots increasingly automating many tasks & activities currently done manually, Beerud also has interesting insights on how they may disrupt the labor market, another topic he's well-versed in having previously co-founded eLance which kick-started the gig economy. Beerud shares his vision with us about the opportunities that lie ahead, and the steps businesses must take to maximize their return from automating this growing customer touchpoint.

"First is the worst, second is the best, third is the one with the treasure chest." Some of you may recognize this old children's poem, variations of which can be found on the internet that replace the last two words "treasure chest" with....well, I'll leave it up to you to find out. Though quaint, this rhyme is actually quite germane as shorthand for the many iterations AI projects must cycle through before they start delivering trusted data, trusted decisions, & trusted outcomes. The worst results are at the beginning, but as time goes on and the AI continues learning & improving, the results can be quite good, and for organizations who stick with it, very successful. When it comes to AI projects, significant time often passes between inception and dividends, due to the many steps which must be taken to get things right. Our guest Matt Sanchez argues that in order to protect customer's trust in your brand, there should be no short cuts taken along this route. In fact as Founder & CTO of CognitiveScale, a company focused on helping clients to pair humans with machines, he advocates for “responsible AI” as a framework to ensure that AI never breaches customer trust. Matt joins us for a broad-based discussion that taps into his wide-ranging insights on AI dating back to his days as a Leader of IBM's Watson Labs. In this episode, we'll learn about the 6 key components that make up responsible AI, why data needs to be "nutritious, digestible, and delicious", and the bottomline proof that leaves him so optimistic about AI's future.

In ancient times the task of threshing, sifting edible grains of wheat from chaff, was performed with an agricultural tool called a flail. Modern farmers today accomplish the same undertaking at significant scale using huge mechanized vehicles called combines. When it comes to threshing the real from the imagined about AIOps, many IT executive decision-makers literally feel like they're flailing about. Everywhere they look, vast undulating fields of marketing buzz extend deep over the horizon making inflated claims about what AIOps can do for them. If only there was a metaphorical combine to sift facts from hype, expectations regarding the practical capabilities of AIOps would be more realistic, leaving the disappointment of unrealized objectives to flutter away like chaff in a light breeze. Since no such apparatus exists, metaphorical or otherwise, we turn instead to John Gentry, CTO & Sr. VP of Virtana, a leading AIOps provider. John's trenchant perspective on the current state of AIOps & its near-term prospects leaves listeners with a clear-eyed, pragmatic view of how this transformative technology is reshaping the data center. Along the way we'll learn what differentiates General Purpose AIOps from Domain-Specific AIOps, how AIOps helped one major company grow their transaction volume 700% while only scaling their infrastructure 300% with no head count increase, and why geography might be the key to attracting data scientists who perform the critical work AIOps relies upon.

When you think of Scandinavia, what comes to mind? If you're like most, then fjords, saunas, ABBA, the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and LEGO's are probably among your first thoughts. What about Skype, Linux, Spotify, Nokia, SMS texting, and "Erwise" - the first GUI browser? These innovations also emerged from the Nordic countries, who it turns out have a heritage of high tech innovation as rich & varied as a holiday smörgåsbord. That tradition has led to a high level of digital maturity among Scandinavian enterprises, and a culture eager for digital transformation. To better understand the unique IT characteristics that differentiate this region of the world, we speak with Himadri Das, Head of Automation at TietoEVRY, Scandinavia's biggest IT, business consulting, and outsourcing services provider. Himadri shares with us how best to sell AI, ML, and other advanced technologies in Scandinavia, the 3 "buckets" Scandinavian C-suite executives want addressed when these technologies are proposed to them, and Himadri's advice on moving forward with digital transformation based on his extensive experience with organizations in Nordic countries.

Fans of "Westworld", HBO's dystopian science fiction drama, recognize the understated yet outsized role of Lee Sizemore's character as crucial to the series plot. As head of the Narrative and Design division of Westworld’s Mesa Hub, Lee is responsible for the storylines of the "hosts". The scripts he creates for them ultimately determine the experience of Westworld's guests, and whether or not they'll become repeat customers. Lee Sizemore's futuristic-sounding job is somewhat paralleled in the present-day by people who architect conversations for AI chatbots. It's a field of growing importance that's crucial to the outcomes generated by conversational AI, and ultimately, digital transformations. For insights on the current state of this craft, we turn to one of its more notable practitioners, Rebecca Clyde, CEO & Co-Founder of Botco.ai. Rebecca shares many of her unique insights with us, and along the way we learn how early adopters of conversational AI are experiencing triple-digit percentage improvements in their sales conversion rates, how technology can make AI-driven chat conversations more engaging for people, and why taking the ontology learning approach to natural language processing might ultimately be better long term than machine learning.

Much of the world was caught off-guard when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. As governments began issuing stay-at-home orders in an effort to slow transmission of the virus that causes the disease, the corporate world struggled to redeploy their staff to remote work. A notable organization that didn't break stride during this upheaval was OneShare Health from Irving, TX, who leveraged automation and AI to execute a seamless transition to telecommuting for their workforce. The result enabled their personnel to continue working at the same or higher levels of productivity as before the shutdown. The man behind this impressive feat was Toby Buckalew, OneShare Health's CIO. As a veteran of digital transformations in healthcare, Toby had already laid the groundwork that would be crucial to OneShare Health continuing to offer uninterrupted services to its end users. Toby joins us on this episode to share numerous insights, including why transforming people is the most important part of an enterprise digital transformation, why introverts may not be cut out for the job of CIO, and why road maps are better than detailed plans when it comes to transformation journeys.

Every moonshot needs a rocket. For many enterprises around the world, digital transformation is their moonshot, and automation + artificial intelligence is their rocket. In order for those digital transformations to achieve mission objectives though, enterprises must scale up their automation & AI deployments. When they do, the results can be out-of-this-world. But why do some automation & AI initiatives deliver such extraordinary returns while others fail to launch? Why do others manage lifting off, but fail to break free from the gravitational bonds of corporate inertia? For answers to these & other questions, we turn to Danilo McGarry, Global Head of Automation at Alter Domus. Danilo's track record of producing outsized results with automation and AI at his current & prior roles might be unprecedented. He shares his valuable insights with us, including the surprisingly aggressive minimum ROI you should aim for in year one of your automation projects, the specific steps to take to overcome internal robophobia about automation & AI, and why proof of concept projects are a waste of money.

Worldwide spending on digital transformation services is expected to reach nearly $2 Trillion by 2022. However, anecdotal evidence suggests the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating digital transformation initiatives ahead of schedule at many organizations. This has more than a few IT executives wondering how they can best move faster in the midst of a global health emergency, while contending with the notoriously high failure rates digital transformation projects have become known for. In seeking insights & advice, we turn to what may seem to some a bit of a surprising source. Micro Focus is the company most synonymous with COBOL, a legacy programming language entering its 7th decade of operation. Yet Joe Garber, its Global Head of Strategy and Solutions, explains why Micro Focus' primary focal point today is helping enterprises with digital transformation. During our conversation, he provides insights on a number of use cases, one of the most important things to consider when formulating a digital transformation strategy, & what organizations need to fundamentally do right now in response to the changing work reality.

According to MarketsAndMarkets, “The managed services market is expected to grow from over $180 billion in 2018 to $282.0 billion by 2023, a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 9.3%.” Yet despite the rosy forecast, Gartner is advising MSPs to make an investment in automation now in order to reap profitable & sustainable benefits down the road. Otherwise, they'll have to face an exit from the market "...with a strong focus on damage limitation.” It would seem the labor arbitrage game MSPs leveraged for so many years has played itself out, and now the game has changed. To better understand how to master the new MSP game, we turn to Taly Dunevich, VP of Global Business Development and Alliances at Ayehu. Her relationships with key executives at almost every major MSP, provides her with a unique perspective on the challenges they face, and what they must do to survive. Taly shares numerous key insights with us, including why the low-cost labor model that drove growth for so many MSPs is being pushed aside to make way for higher-cost services that expand an MSP's footprint with their client; why MSPs who become experts in automation will translate that expertise into more services with their clients (and greater market share overall); and what the cost reduction "magic number" is that CIO's are expecting from MSP's today.

Societal transformations are often epoch-defining milestones in mankind’s history. The transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age. The changeover from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The overthrow of Communism in favor of Free Market economies & democracy. The fall of the Iron Curtain was a particularly defining event for this episode’s guest, who grew up in Poland & witnessed his nation’s conversion to capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. What he experienced then not only continues inspiring him, but also influences the advice he gives organizations on digital transformation. As the person in charge of Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence for one of the world’s biggest IT and business consulting services firms, Tomasz Jamroz is uniquely positioned to be an enterprise change agent. He draws upon his vast expertise to share with us some fascinating use cases he’s worked on, the 2 key factors organizations must address before undertaking digital transformation, and the technologies most likely to advance our capabilities & impact our world over the next 10 years.

As artificial intelligence opens up new possibilities that make the unimaginable routine, it also raises unasked ethical questions whose answers will determine if humanity reaps the benefits of AI equitably. Increasingly however, we find ourselves in uncharted territory, grappling with unanticipated ethical quandaries stemming from the continuing entwinement of machine learning & mankind. Perhaps now more than ever we should recall Albert Einstein's prescient assertion that "Relativity applies to physics, not ethics." To help us navigate between the Scylla of moral dilemmas and Charybdis of virtuous justifications AI provokes, we call upon Dr. Michael Quinn. As Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Seattle University, Dr. Quinn & his colleagues recently launched a free public course entitled "AI Ethics for Business", an offering whose timeliness can’t be overstated. We speak with Dr. Quinn about the journey students of his course will cover, as well as some of the universal terrain all AI practitioners inevitably encounter. En route we'll learn about getting software developers to think more ethically, the 9 common rationalizations people use as moral excuses to avoid ethical thinking, and the dark side to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto “Move fast and break things.”

In response to the growing balkanization of IT management practices among its various government branches in the 1980's, the United Kingdom developed a set of standardized practices that all their agencies & vendors were expected to follow. These standardized practices eventually evolved into a widely adopted framework for administration of information technology commonly known as ITIL. Worldwide, 47% of surveyed organizations use at least some form of ITIL, making it the most popular IT framework, according to a 2017 Forbes Insight survey. Given the accelerating drive by organizations to digitally transform their operations, ITIL has gained even greater prominence as an enabling factor in their success....or failure. To better understand the promise & perils of organizational transformations, and what role automation, AI, and machine learning will play, we turn to Troy DuMoulin, VP - Research and Development at Pink Elephant. Troy shares his thoughts with us about what he believes is the "gift of ITIL", the 5 questions CIOs & IT leaders must answer before an organization considers using a shared tool chain, and why process and tool projects are really people change projects in disguise.

The renowned business management guru Tom Peters once wrote that "Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas." Automation, arguably, is a bold large idea that's taken root in large enterprises. Less well known is the fact that it's pretty popular among smaller businesses as well, where it's become no less of a bold large idea. That may come as a surprise to some who only think of automation as a tool for roboticizing complex, large-scale processes in big organizations. Nevertheless, automation’s diffusion has made it readily accessible at all levels, just as computers went from being once rare machines of the privileged to ubiquitous tools of the masses. The democratization of automation is creating a bonanza for service providers who can accelerate the benefits an organization realizes from its deployment. One such provider is DataAutomation, whose cofounder Will Christensen has gained a unique perspective on this trend through his extensive experience helping SMB’s automate a broad diversity of processes. Will joins us to share the surprising #1 driver for automation among SMB's, the 4 basic questions to answer before automating any SMB's manual process, and the litmus test SMB's should go through before deciding whether or not to even automate a manual process.

Automation in the enterprise has proven efficient, cost effective, & mature enough that early adopters have begun scaling up their deployments to increase returns & amplify their competitive advantage. The long-term repercussions of this will likely widen the gap between market leaders & laggards. In the short term, this expansion will raise questions about the best way to approach sweeping organizational change management for what is proving to be one of the most profound changes organizations & their personnel will ever go through. In Part I of this 2-part episode, Lee Coulter, CEO of transformAI joins us to examine the issues surrounding how automation deployments should be upscaled, the value propositions most effective in persuading a CEO to move forward on automation, and which senior executive is best-suited to lead an organization's intelligent automation initiative.

Automation in the enterprise has proven efficient, cost effective, & mature enough that early adopters have begun scaling up their deployments to increase returns & amplify their competitive advantage. The long-term repercussions of this will likely widen the gap between market leaders & laggards. In the short term, this expansion will raise questions about the best way to approach sweeping organizational change management for what is proving to be one of the most profound changes organizations & their personnel will ever go through. In Part I of this 2-part episode, Lee Coulter, CEO of transformAI joins us to examine the issues surrounding how automation deployments should be upscaled, the value propositions most effective in persuading a CEO to move forward on automation, and which senior executive is best-suited to lead an organization's intelligent automation initiative.

Traditionally, learning & work have been viewed as mutually exclusive domains in our lives. Each took place in its own chronologically segregated time, often sequentially, but occasionally overlapping each other. However, organizational digital transformation obliges us to re-examine that approach, as perpetual reskilling & upskilling become prominent fixtures in the future of work. Is it time to integrate learning & work to the point they're indistinguishably co-mingled in one’s job description? Will doing so bolster a digitally transformed organization’s competitiveness, particularly in attracting & retaining talent? And how should responsibility for continuously refreshing people’s skills be allotted between individuals, organizations, academia, & government? At the dawn of the 4th Industrial Revolution, & against a backdrop of ever-lengthening lifespans, these questions have begun taking center stage. Those entering today's workforce can expect to be employed for 6 decades. Or more. Given the recent pace of technological change, it’s a sure bet the skills they inaugurated their careers with won't be the same ones they’ll need to maintain, much less, advance them. For insight on how people & organizations should realign their expectations of and bearings towards this new paradigm, we consult with Caroline Styr, Sr. Executive at the Center for the Future of Work. Caroline’s recently published study “Cycling Through the 21st Century Career, Putting Learning in its Rightful Place”, highlights this critical, yet lamentably under-discussed issue. We'll learn about some startling findings her study uncovered, her prescription for how organizations can initiate the shift towards a modern career model, and the one surprising thing she believes individuals should focus on in order to adopt a continuous learning mindset.

In just about every data center worldwide, there's a lot of experience, expertise, and instinct stored in the brains of the people keeping that data center running. However, the surge in demand for data center services, combined with the increasing complexity of their IT infrastructures, is putting a tremendous burden on their staff. It turns out that while hardware and software may be scalable, people are not. Further exacerbating matters is that previous concerns about the age of the equipment have given way to concerns about data center staff aging faster than the equipment. These converging predicaments are fueling the search for a solution. Enter AIOps, which at its essence is a way to bottle a data center’s tribal knowledge, and supercharge the speed at which it's applied. To learn more about how an enterprise can benefit from AIOps, we turn to Gabby Menachem, CEO of Loom Systems, which publishes an AI solution that predicts IT incidents before they impact operations. Gabby shares with us many specific use cases where AIOps can add both value and competitive advantage to an enterprise. Along the way, we'll learn how AIOps might ultimately allow organizations to reduce the skillset required for some IT positions, how rapid determination of incident root cause can unexpectedly save an organization millions of dollars, and how AIOps can not only cut costs but surprisingly help grow a business.

Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution has long been applied outside biology, to domains such as medicine and psychology. Evolutionary principles have also found applicability in the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning via algorithms that have the ability to evolve. Ironically, over 150 years ago, Darwin described himself in almost algorithmic terms when he stated "I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions." Leveraging Darwinian doctrine to optimize AI outcomes for clients consumes much of the day for Bret Greenstein, VP and Global Head of AI for Cognizant Technology Solutions. After a 3-decade stint at IBM, Bret joined Cognizant to lead their Evolutionary AI program, which accelerates delivery of those optimal outcomes for a variety of use cases in a broad array of industries. Bret shares with us some finer points about Evolutionary AI’s workings, and the impact it’s having on enterprises today. Along the way we'll discover why implementing AI & machine learning is going to re-prioritize the agenda for CIOs & CTOs, laying the groundwork for IT to transition from a cost center to an enabler of revenue growth.

It’s been said that the enemy of execution is complexity. Nowhere has this rung truer than corporate data centers, where growing systems complexity threatens the execution of digital transformation strategies. How can enterprises successfully transition to this new digital business paradigm, without succumbing to the hazards that can jeopardize increasingly complicated IT environments? According to one expert, the answer is AIOps. In this episode, we speak with Gadi Oren, Vice President of Technology Evangelism for LogicMonitor. His company recently conducted a global survey of 300 senior IT executives and found that 90% of them had experienced a serious outage in the past 3 years! A shocking figure which LogicMonitor directly attributes to the rising complexity of IT infrastructures. Gadi shares with us how the emerging field of AIOps can counteract this negative trend, mitigate industry talent shortages, and ultimately reshape the future of data centers.