The AI Network Podcast: Recent Episodes
Seth Adler
The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise’s transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: “It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.” Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their new goal was to focus on the customer and increase associate empathy. The leadership team achieved this with some creative physical props that mimic certain hardships their clients experience. However, leading by fear negatively impacts the service a customer receives as well, so Genworth devised a new workforce strategy. “If you really truly believe that the customer is the most important person--because he or she pays your salary--then the front line employees are the most important people, and therefore, your team leaders are the most important leaders. Most people leave their leader. They don't leave the organization.” The team details how they achieved this monumental task.
McDonald’s senior director of innovation, Deena John, joins us to talk about digital transformation. While definitions vary, Deena describes digital transformation as “transforming through integration of technology” with the goal of generating maximum value for the customer. End-to-end disruption means looking into the future and creating a transformation road map that leads to a new operating model. Deena discusses the differences and similarities between agile and lean, and the iterative process that makes scaling sustainable. Deena frames her key points with specific examples. Next, she asks and answers the question, “In an innovation culture what’s the importance of failing fast?” Ultimately, this insightful conversation with Deena focuses on the future of the enterprise and what needs to happen now to ensure corporations can keep up with the ever-changing landscape that technology brings to business.
This BFSI Panel features key industry experts who share their strategies around pushing their organization into the future. They note that the technology available is user-friendly and rarely the barrier to entry. It is the mapping, the process, and post-implementation that makes or breaks a digital transformation. Agile development and change management are both initiatives that work. Automation has the potential to save time, money, and improve the customer experience, but if it isn’t applied in a purposeful way, it is useless. The panelists share their personal journey through transformation, offering insights and advice along the way.
Max Just is accompanied by a special guest on this episode of Future of Work. Julie Seitz is an expert on all things workspace, which makes her the perfect partner for the topic of—you guessed it—the future of workspaces. While she notes that an enterprise can’t necessarily futureproof themselves in this regard, she encourages them to get out of their insular spaces for the sake of spotting trends in how people are working in universities, airports, etc. Flexibility and simplicity in a workspace make more practical investments than technological ones that will become outdated. Julie also reflects on the evolution of the public school classroom and how examining that process helps illustrate how different generations work differently. Max jumps in with the ah-hah moments he had while working with Julie, including the importance of providing collaborative workspaces for collaborative work. Ultimately, Max and Julie agree: workspaces matter.
Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkel’s approach to the shared services process of master data management. Next, the conversation turns to RPA and AI more specifically, including its role in shared services and how to make sure it is being deployed effectively. Further, Roland discusses Henkel’s four business priorities: fund growth, drive growth, excel at digitalization, and increase agility.
Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&D and certain purchasing aspects. One of the most difficult components of implementing RPA across the workflow is acceptance and adherence. Dmitri doesn’t mince words when it comes to what it takes in a person—not just an enterprise—to accept change, no matter how positive that change may ultimately be.
Deepak Subbaru joins us again, this time, to discuss unstructured data. The recent explosion in technology inputs has raised the bar for customer expectations. They want more, and they want it now. Requests are coming via phone calls, social media, emails, etc. The product of this feedback is unstructured data. Deepak goes in depth on three actionable steps to take in order to leverage the power of unstructured data: know your data, know the sources of your data, and prepare your data. Next, Deepak discusses the importance of defining outcomes for your data, as opposed to cramming data into an algorithm and receiving an output that has no use case. As Deepak reiterates throughout the conversation, context is key.
Heather King is the managing director for both the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network and the Intelligent Automation Division for the Americas. She oversees a team that puts on the dynamic events of relevant content for the industries of the same name. Having been in her role for the past seven years, Heather gives a brief timeline of the creation and growth of the IA series that was born out of SSON. The term RPA first presented itself in 2014 during a panel session and kept cropping up until Heather’s team decided to give it its own plenary session. It was just a matter of time before it became clear that automation needed its own home outside of SSON, and IA was born. Next, Heather goes into detail about the other conferences her team puts on each year, including the largest shared services event in the world, Shared Services & Outsourcing Week. Her passion for the importance of conferences—and the act of conferencing—is as clear as it is contagious.
Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, “Interactive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence.” Dr. Howard pursues interactive computing for the greater good, including robotics in healthcare and education. She also discusses ethics in computing, including privacy and security.
BitCherry’s Paul Bao explains the blockchain process behind the platform’s commercial applications. Working similar to Amazon’s eCommerce model, BitCherry will offer a platform to buy, sell, and network goods using digital currency. Regulatory roadblocks make penetration in the U.S. difficult, but BitCherry has over 2 million members and 120,000 active daily users. Currently, these users simply buy and sell digital currency in anticipation for BitCherry’s retail applications. Bao expects the retail platform to go live in Q1 of 2020. Next, he details the brainstorming process behind BitCherry’s unique independent investor philosophy and marvels over the future implications of blockchain. While he may be a little ahead of his time, BitCherry’s users prove that there is a lot of faith in the future of eCommerce and digital currency.
Malta, a small European island, is quickly becoming a blockchain hub, and thus, accurately nicknamed “Blockchain Island.” This panel discussion delves into blockchain developments, standards, and laws. Malta’s progressive, global view of blockchain implications has allowed Blockchain Island to progress in a healthy, robust, safe way, complete with governance and legislation. The panel shares the infrastructure that has led to its success in the hope that others will implement a similar solution. With an end goal of international blockchain standards, a panelist sums up this discussion nicely: “We anticipated the need to regulate blockchain technologies, and that was while everyone else was focusing on the cryptocurrency aspect.” “The ISO standard is starting. So, the ISO standard is anticipating other jurisdictions, and it's starting to look into what it means to regulate blockchain technologies or standardize blockchain technologies.”
Tom Trowbridge is the former president and one of the founders of Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology. He is also an avid investor and advisor in the technology space. Hedera’s governing council consists of companies like Nomura, Deutsche Telecom, IBM, Boeing, and Swisscom. Tom notes that Hedera met with the Facebook Cayenne team in 2018—they did not join. A year later, Facebook announced the digital currency Libra and its accompanying—but separate—digital wallet, Calibra. Tom has studied and followed the digital currency phenomena in great depth and puts blockchain technologies in perspective—including the strategy Facebook may deploy in order to get users on board with its digital currency. Will the Zuckerberg Reserve give the Federal Reserve a run for its money? Tom has thoughts on that as well.
Kexin Xie is a data scientist for Salesforce. Among other things, Kexin is responsible for building the engineering infrastructure, services, and frameworks that makes the Salesforce marketing cloud so powerful. In this conversation, Kexin discusses how the power of predictive analytics is leveraged in businesses for “next-best-action” interactions. While these tools drive more engagement and revenue from the customer side, which Kexin touches on, he dives deep on how data science makes this possible. Kexin makes the intangibles tangible by describing the process by which algorithms are designed—including some pitfalls to be aware of—and recognizing “valuable noise.” Kexin is a realist, though, saying, “There's the use case part, there's the data part, and we're trying to build a bridge between the end solution and how we get there from the initial raw form. Eventually, we’ll start to understand the raw data more and start to build even more pipelines and then see how they connect with each other; their commonalities. And eventually, I think the bridge will be formed, and then building new things will be much easier than the initial use case.”
Kenneth Farrugia is the chief business development officer with the Bank of Valletta. Kenneth starts this conversation off with a bang, making the case that if banks don’t stay on top of the technological revolution, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Next, Kenneth, perhaps counterintuitively, labels legacy financial operations who’ve jumped on board with Industry 4.0 as FinTechs, while the up-and-comers are TechFins. Of course data and security is a big part of the conversation as well. Balancing the convenience of turning over one’s data with the risk of data breaches and/or privacy concerns is on the forefront of every financial institution’s mind. Kenneth discusses additional pain points to the future of banking, both for the client and corporation, and potential solutions for those pain points.
Rida Moustafa is an experienced data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the retail industry. Rida covers a lot of ground in this concise, informative conversation. He shares his story with us, beginning in 1995 with the big data mining movement. Walking us through the way data mining has evolved, Rida hits on neural networks, deep learning, and expert systems. Today, however, AI technology has evolved enough to render some of these old processes moot. Of course, new obstacles present themselves, such as AI’s black box and its influence over regulatory decisions and prediction models. The last half of the conversation is reserved for Rida’s involvement with Walmart and the work he is doing with AI to automate processes and generally improve Walmart’s workflow and profits.
David Orban, founder of Network Society Ventures, discusses the rapid acceleration of technology and its consequences. How we live, work, organize, and grow a business has changed. Decentralization is now a common path forward. David gives examples, including solar energy, digital manufacturing, personalized health, and peer-to-peer learning. Next, David discusses the volatility of Bitcoin and why that’s to be expected: we don’t yet fully understand its potential. David exemplifies the past while offering solutions for the future. The rest of the conversation focuses on blockchain more generally, including future applications and implications. David’s technologically futuristic views don’t seem all that outlandish after this conversation. In fact, his optimism is contagious.
Dr. Timothy Renick with Georgia State joins us to talk about his implementation of predictive analytics within the university, including an AI enhanced chatbot. Since the deployment of these technologies, Georgia State is graduating 3,000 more students a year than it did seven years ago. Dr. Renick explains the university’s approach to finding solutions for problems over innovation for innovation’s sake. With a change in demographics, including a larger low-income population, the university felt it necessary to increase access to support and identify issues before students found themselves in dire straits. Dr. Renick discusses the process of finding a vendor to help them identify and build the perfect solution. It’s working, as shown by the examples he discusses during the rest of the conversation.
Dario Izzo joins us from the World Summit AI to talk space. As the scientific coordinator the Advanced Concepts Team out of the European Space Agency, Dario is tasked with some serious undertakings. First, Dario summarizes ESA’s mission for us. He humbly describes some of his accomplishments since 2003—such as swarming missions—but, as Dario says, his goal is to stay focused on the future. Currently, energy efficiency is a major area of focus for Dario. He also discusses asteroid deflectors and cube satellites. The remainder of this sci-fi-meets-reality conversation covers AI’s contribution to space endeavors and why they’re worth our time, money, and cooperation.
Maneesh Kumar Verma is the team leader and head of operations at Lunar Zebro. He’s also a lead robotics at Stellar Space Industries. In this conversation, Maneesh talks about the future of space exploration. In order to thoroughly explore places like Mars, a high level of autonomy must be given to the devices sent there. On top of that, the devices must be agile, plentiful, and inexpensive—compared to a Rover, for example. Maneesh calls these futuristic devices "artificial ants." He then gets into the nitty-gritty of the moon’s role as home base in the future of space exploration, diagnostic technologies, and pilot programs for future missions.
The CIO of Amsterdam’s Spectral, Stephen Donnelly, joins us to talk energy. Spectral is “on the bleeding edge of the energy transition” as a tech developer and systems integrator. Steven outlines the pros and cons of each renewable energy resource and also discusses smart cars and smart cities. He then offers solutions to these problems using AI. Before Spectral, Stephen was with the European Commission at the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators. He describes what that level of upper bureaucracy is like.
Dan Jeavons, general manager of Shell’s advanced analytics CoE, discusses the inevitability of digital transformation. To stay ahead of the curve, Shell created a team specifically for their digital strategy. First, they needed a plan. They listed their priorities, including their customer, using data as an asset, and making sure any changes are for the sake of the business—not for the sake of change. Dan discusses Shell’s digital transformation in depth and gives a real example involving predictive analytics. Wrapping up with Shell’s hand in renewable resources, Dan drives home how important leveraging AI technology is to succeed.
Chief Analytics Officer for ING, Görkem Köseoğlu, talks data during this panel discussion. While modeling and analytics is not new in the banking sector, AI and machine learning has reinvented it. Görkem discusses his inspiration, motivation, and role in transforming ING—including a pivotal trip to Silicon Valley—and why now is the time. He doesn’t tread lightly when it comes to the ethics and regulations involved and offers advice on how to transform the right way. Learn what Görkem means when he says he applies a “yin and yang” strategy to scalability.
Digital transformation and its global impact is the topic at hand for this panel discussion. Dr Hamed Al Hashemi, Director, Strategy & Corporate Performance Division Department of Health – Abu Dhabi; Dr. Ismahane Elouafi, Director General of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai; and Khaled El Shabrawy, Government Solutions Executive with Microsoft UAE discuss how AI can be used as a power for good. They get granular about how AI can assist with sustainable agriculture and poverty, global warming, and healthcare. As Dr. Hamed puts it, “What we want to do is really to make sense of all of this data available so that it help us to address some of the key challenges that we facing within the sector.”
Edda Blumenstein is a Ph.D. researcher at Leeds University. In this episode, she discusses her efforts to "Identify how honest retailers are supposed to survive in this dynamic environment that is constantly changing at a speed never seen before. I'm looking at how they can actually develop capabilities to do that.” Edda zeroes in on big data’s role in the transformational process. Today’s buyers expect an experience and a relationship from the brands they choose to do business with. Edda explains why businesses need to implement educated decision making in order to stay competitive prepare for an unpredictable future.
The marketplace for third-party AI vendors is huge, but what is the right solution for your enterprise? Anshuman Das, the director of robotics and testing at Warner Bros., discusses the compay’s implementation of some of his favorite tools and the changes they’ve brought. From the OCR reader Textract to UiPath for RPA, Das lets us in on a little secret about intelligent automation. “RPA is the way to go, and the best part of RPA is it can very well go hand in hand with any digital transformation process. Whether you're going to cloud or you're going into IOT or you're going to any of the areas of digital transformation, it is that catalyst which can achieve your digital transformation journey much faster in a much better way.”
It may sound simple, but the first step to implementing AI in your enterprise is to know what it does. In this episode, Vivek Wadhwa, entrepreneur and Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon, unlocks the black box of AI, including what is needed to build a proper AI foundation. Hint: it’s more than just data. Wadhwa goes on to bust myths about machine learning and the overinflated claims some vendors make regarding the utilization of ML and AI. By taking an academic, honest—sometimes brutally so—and deep look at corporate AI, Wadhwa helps enterprises avoid the pitfalls of AI’s oversell in the corporate market.
Jack Cheng covered a lot of ground in this interview. He described NIO, the company he co-founded, as “an EV provider, a mobility company, but [ultimately a] user enterprise engaged with the use of directory.” From swappable batteries to vehicle “living rooms,” Cheng takes a visionary approach to everything he does. His views on globalism are just as unique. He discussed with us the dangers of indoctrination and group think. He gave us his optimistic insight on the tension between China and the U.S. He even shared some ideas on how we can bridge the generation gap at a fundamental level.
We spoke to Henrik Hanasand, with Seniorrådgiver, a shared service center for payroll and accountants. Hanasand discussed his enterprise’s robotic evolution starting with a proof of concept, consulting, and implementation. Still, finding the right RPA solution involved some trial and error. After relying too heavily on consultants, Hanasand decided to search internally for talent. It worked. Their new approach to a holistic IT solution has given them the flexibility to look at AI more broadly and futureproof their organization. Seniorrådgiver has made a concerted effort to continue the path forward technologically, and it’s paying off.
Brian Mikkelsen, the CEO of the Danish Chamber of Commerce, talks with us during the Intelligent Automation Nordics in Copenhagen. He discusses the launch of the Digital Growth Strategy for Denmark and how it has kept Denmark’s economy competitive. Training the workforce of tomorrow through a focus on STEM education affords Denmark the opportunity to grow its economy locally. Further, the government has established a digital hub, where small companies can have knowledge about AI, big data, and other new tech for free. Brian concludes the discussion with his thoughts on wealth disparity in Denmark—or lack thereof—and its high quality of living.
Alexander Hubel joins us again to discuss his RPA and automation journey with Ericsson. He fills us in the last two years and their evolution toward a center of excellence. Change management, communications, and automation communities are focusing their efforts on automation and business adoption. Alexander describes the difference between tribes and communities within the organization and what their roles entail. As far as machine learning is concerned, Alexander says, “I think from an Ericsson perspective, we’re quite far ahead, and I think that relates to us being a tech company.” This hasn’t come without its challenges, though, which Alexander also delves into.
In this episode, Vartul Mittal discusses his RP agenda across industries and geographies. He also shares with us his favorite third-party software and other tips and tricks to convert big data into something usable.
Avi Bhagtani from Automation Anywhere joins us to talk about the impact of AI in driving end-to-end business transformation.
Deepak Subbarao then joins us and shares why what he does inspires him, "I have this fascinating job of trying to understand how you add value to the business, but at the same time help them jump into the next wave of technologies. So what does it mean practically, right? So we've already gone through let's say restructuring, or let's say we've gone through a lot of changes."
Pfizer’s Anil Bhavnani discusses the future benefits of digital transformation and intelligent automation. Within the medical and pharmaceutical industry, there are a lot of moving parts and little room for error. Technology and automation is saving lives through the accuracy and timesaving processes it deploys. Bhavnadi walks us through what has changed throughout his career, and what he believes the future holds. “At one point in time, we were just kind of doing a very rule-set based kind of process. And here we are changing the entire process. We are automating it. So obviously a lot of people get impacted. You have to work with multiple stakeholders to be able to manage that change. I think that's where the challenge is.”
Pelle Braengaard is the CTO at uPort, which is working on the world’s first self-sovereign identity platform. It is commonly accepted that controlling our own identity—including data—is good for us as individuals, but is it also good for business? Currently, our personal data is stored in silos. Facebook has one set of information on us, while the IRS has another. But, as Braengaard puts it, “...if the user actually has access and has a right to their own data, they can also share it.” Is data property? Do we have a right to our own data? While the answers are complicated, Braengaard gets to the heart of the questions in this eye-opening episode.
Clara Durodié, AI technology strategist, discusses major technological trends taking place within the corporate landscape. Durodié was able to spot the importance of AI when the technology was bleeding edge, way back in 2011, thanks in part to her background in economics and neuroscience. With the volume and velocity of data available today, AI is becoming necessary to operate a successful and profitable business, but how can this technology be utilized responsibly? Are humans really going to be replaced by machines? Durodié touches on these points and more, concluding, “My hope rests on one crucial assumption, which is there will be strong systems in place to ensure that ethical AI is deployed.”
In this episode, Chris Gunning discusses his personal history with shared services as well as its evolution over the nearly 20 years he’s been in the industry. “We're now seen as a strategic asset for the business; an enabler to help drive value for the business; to be an incubator for technology, for reporting, for analytics, for business insights, so a lot of the things that we were talking about back in the day—centralization, standardization, definitely table stakes, process improvement that have to be there—and we're still talking about some of those things. It's nice to see that we as a shared services organization [have] moved up the value chain to add value for the business.
Siemens’ Alexander Thielmann discusses the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its effect on the corporate landscape. The transformation Siemens has embarked on, aptly named Vision 2020 Plus, is a cultural one as much as it is a technology one. With a company as large as Siemens, Thielmann describes this sea change as navigating a fleet of ships. “...with this new change of these fleet of ships, the expectation of the board is also that the ships, or the companies, make more profit... Which also means now they are looking a bit more outside the box.”
Caroline Basyn, Global CIO and GBS Officer at Mondelēz International, discusses the importance of setting a solid foundation before planning and executing a digital transformation. With an influx of data comes new problems to be solved. Instilling a cloud and data strategy, setting up a consumer-centric framework, and building innovation teams out of siloed departments are some of the solutions Basyn touches on. Once the foundation is set, deploying corporate culture changes, Agile workplaces, and AI and ML technology gets done quicker, cheaper, and with more longevity than a quick-fix solution. “I used to say quality is not the enemy of speed, but in a certain sense, you need to be able to marry both.”
Andrew Parris, director of performance improvement at CRH, focuses his efforts on improving corporate functions across the board, including finance, IT, procurement, and HR. How does he do it? Data-backed benchmarking, implementation planning, and change management. Additionally, intelligent automation is taking a front seat. “We're starting to bring some AI into play. Our approach has always been, it's not just about the bot, it's about the right solution for the right problem.
Fernando Nunes, senior process automation architect at MAN Energy solutions, discusses his unique approach to IT and business. By leveraging RPA, AI, and BPA tools, Nunes works to empower the business line and decrease IT bottlenecks through process automation. He further explains the Center of Excellence concept using an apt airport metaphor. “Our philosophy was always about enabling our line of business to do large things themselves, and we, of course, would have to provide an architecture, a governance, an infrastructure, and we see it more like we provide the airport. Then the line of business will make the flights; the planes to fly.”
In the second part of our discussion with Manik Patil, we pick back up on enhancing the risk-adjusted return on investment for an intelligent automation portfolio. Patil defines and details his “blitz scaling” tenants: having an exponential organization, time-to-value, running intelligent automation as a business, and think big; start small. To sum it up, Patil quotes Zuckerberg: "Giving people the tools to be able to get that data without having to argue whether their ideas are good, through the layers of management before testing something, frees people up to move quicker. This will help you achieve your massively transformative purpose."
Manik Patil joins us and shares the theory behind Technology Business Management: " The connection of your financial data all the way up to your initiative data allows you to manage your portfolio really well. So think of it as a management mechanism or a management science and art in order to have your technology portfolio in a very efficient way and a transparent manner because of which your whole company can drum to the same beat and make sure everything is coherent."
Manish Jain joins us and shares information on RBCs new Silent Listener Chat Bot: "We are building a silent listener chat bot, which will listen to the conversation when an agent and a client are having those discussions. While those discussions are happening, the chat bot or the silent listener is going to understand the intent of the conversation, what the client is talking about, getting the client, IDs. In the meanwhile while the discussion is happening in goes in the background, brings in all policies and procedures, client, all information ready on the agent's screen. Agent without putting the client on hold is having a continuous discussion"
Ravi Rao joins us and shares how automation can not hurt, but help business processes as well as it's employees: "We're trying to figure out ways that the things that don't really require humans, things that are just repetitive data transfer tasks can be done by machines which are better at doing that, but the creative innovative service, interactive pieces, robots cannot do any of that. That's why humans still have a huge role to play in business and the more that they can recognize how to work with each other in exemplary ways, that's what will eventually lead the business. "
"Every big company on the planet nowadays has an imperative at the board level to really reinvent itself, partly because the market's shifting faster than it's ever done in the past. I think intellectually and philosophically, leadership teams around the world understand why they need to change because they don't want to end up like Kodak or Blockbuster or name your favorite example of a company that went under, but where you most get stuck is one what does that mean for them and how do you do it."
Xavier Rodriguez joins us and shares the importance of good leadership: "sometimes, you're not the best one on the technical side, but if you are a good leader, you will manage your team."
Cindy Gallagher joins us and shares the importance of building personal time into your schedule: "I have surrounded myself with the right people who know how to handle situations. Not only that, but I set myself up properly as well before I went away, saying I was going to be gone, structuring the calendar appropriately, telling people when I was going to be on and off. As a CEO and as anyone who's excelled in their profession, you do have to be careful about where the line is, but you do have to draw that line for yourself."
Lee Coulter joins us and shares the end game in implementing new automated processes: "the reality is that you're not going to want to build heavy IT integration between all these systems. You're always going to be looking for something to stitch these things together in ways that are important to the business that drive some sort of material outcome."
Tony Saldanha joins us and shares the careful steps that need to be taken in order to implement automation and improve processes: "I think you almost have to have a parallel strategy of automate and transform or disrupt. Because when you kind of look at things like data and AI, I think that's your disruptive part. And you have to be able to walk and chew gum, which is operate and automate and disrupt at the same time."
Kamila Grembowicz joins us and shares her experience in implementing Global Business Strategy at Adidas: " I think every company has a different culture, a different structure, and then every GBS looks different. If you have a company where GBS concept is really not liked by the people, they didn't adapt to change, they maybe went too aggressive in the cuts straight away without the quality. You can have different reasons why you go back to functional model."
Steven Jo joins us and shares the complexity of digital transformation: " We looked at those two, I guess you could call it value chains, within this organization and decided those are what we're going to go after. That's like the open heart surgery. You're taking out your arteries, your main organs, upgrading them with digital technology, new operating models. We're revamping our loan originations platform. All this is going on at the same time. So it's super, super complicated work."
Viral Chhaya joins us and shares the importance of recognizing your company's strengths as well as it's weaknesses: "The one interesting new thing we are doing is, we do callbacks not only for our detractors, low scores, we also do callbacks for our promoters. To also try and understand what is it that we are doing right, because as an organization we believe in the philosophy of strength finders, and therefore we want to capitalize on them and do more of it so that the hope is that we don't have as many detractors. "
Nadia de Villa joins us and shares how financial service providers like Manulife have to adapt in an ever changing environment: "The way customers interact with a company has changed, and therefore, we need to be there and think differently and think beyond our financial services walls. So in terms of digital transformation, what that means to us, it's truly how do we interact with our customers through any digital channel that they want to interact with us with."
Derek Reisinger joins us and shares how workspace environments have changed and how it affects employees: "We come from a culture of which many employees had offices. We're transitioning that. We're in a collaborative workspace now. That means glass offices if you have one, workstations otherwise. We're very, very big on that collaborative space."
Ali Bouhouch joins us and shares the importance the customer in technology: "They understand that technology is a key component of that equation and they understand that at the end of the day, we can only succeed when we keep the customer at the center of all the things we do, everything from the technologies we select to how we design and how we deliver those solutions.
Bob Kupershoek joins us and shares how NBC Universal is always looking to the future: "Innovation is actually going to be very important for us in the future and I think that technology, finance, IT is growing closer and closer together in the end. We're expected to more with less amount of people, we gotta be more effective and to be able to achieve that, you probably need technology to help you out there. "
Will Swanson joins us and shares how shared services and continuous improvement can be crucial to processes in HR development: "Although I may not have known it at the time, we started to talk about what was involved and I realized that this was just really the operational backbone of human resources and a lot of the things that I had employed in the business space, I could employ here too."
Matt Gustitus joins us and explains the benefits of shared business learnings:"What my team has been doing is really helping out some of these other teams that are looking at opportunities in their area. And I think that's what's exciting to me, is saying, "Hey, we can share all of our shared learnings with those areas and kinda bring them in and get them up to speed as quickly as possible."
The Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania joins us and shares insight into the city and country's open data policy: "We are the most radical open data policy in Europe. Nobody has challenged me so far because it's very difficult to measure. Because we have this no excuse, open data policy, and with this for example, we've got very nice new inventions for smart cities, for mobility, for education."
Justin Reilly joins us and shares insight into decision making for companies large and small: when you're starting companies you have the problem of, I don't have enough money to do this, so I need to focus on the most valuable, most tangible problem that I can solve with the talent that I can get. When you're at a big company you have the opposite problem, which is I have all the money and people in the world. Even when people feel like they're on budgets, they still have more budget than the guy that's trying to start the company to solve the same problem."
Einar Michaelson joins us and shares insight to the initial limitations of implementing RPA: "You should have good control of your processes and systems and the user interfaces. Are they changing every other week or every three months? Those kind of things play a part in what you choose to automate and how you go about it."
Meltem Ballan joins us and shares how certain implementations in the auto industry effect consumer expectations: "one of the aspects we're asking is, "Are these helping the drivers?" If they are helping the drivers, how we can facilitate that those are positive impacts instead of the negative impacts? So, some of those automated features that we started to use are becoming part of our life, and we cannot go back."
Sai Giridhar Ramasamy joins us and shares his unique approach to implementing AI: "We don't go to our traditional IT and get any results out of them or try and get results out of them, but then we have our own machine learning team, which we call the machine intelligence program, under which we have various intelligence automation, robotic process automation labs, that we try and think and come up with new ways of doing things, and we have the flexibility to test it."
Kate Levchuk joins us and shares her perspective on transhumanism and what may or may not be relevant in the tech space: "Transhumanism is the ideology that says that we as human beings, as human species, have the right and even the obligation to improve ourselves."
James Potter joins us and shares insight on the misunderstanding of RPA implementation: "We're trying to explain what RPA is, what the capabilities are and aren't, One of the big challenges is the expectation of senior management and staff. It will improve processes or it'll improve speed and delivery of process, but it won't fix a broken process."
Anders Emil Balk-Møller Joins us and shares the importance of maintaining quality control while simultaneously implementing robotics: "We still need to make sure that we have quality, and that we ensure being a regulated industry, that we're not just letting loose and forget about compliance and regulations. Because business sometimes tends to do that."
Jon Therekauf and Lee Coulter share AI's hand in convergence of availability to the consumer: "It is nimble. It has different capabilities than the things that we've seen before. You have low/no-code type technologies available that we've not had at our disposal which infers speed of deployment being measured in weeks, not years. And that changes everything."
Delphine Bernard shares the importance of diversity on multiple levels: "The key is to build a different type of talent that you need, depending the function of what you're building. You're going to have a mix and I think being sure that you're diverse. Diverse from every aspect, but really coming from different background, different race, different gender. Different types of companies ... we need to have a different flavor and input, because I think we have a lot of brain when we bring more diversity and that's really crucial."
Jaime Bolivar joins us and shares some insight on how to adapt to new technology: "You are going to have to work on agility. The last years, the agile methodologies have been working on technology has been really successful and how many of these big entities that didn't want to talk about this six or seven years ago, now they are all adapting this way and working."
Brian Waites joins us and shares how he approaches change when working with optimized legacy systems: " Having a good platform to move on, whether it's structured BPM, processes, and those things, I think are very important starting points. Having some senior buy in and tech buy in to what you're trying to do."
Jamie Campbell shares Bud's approach to handling customer data: "We're really passionate about building our own kind of aggregation service and we knew we wanted to control our own security protocols wanted to be the data owner of all of that information because we knew that we were going to be accountable and we were the responsible ones in this equation. And we wanted to be the responsible ones in that equation."
Beju Shah joins us and shares insight on designing the most efficient FTE possible: So right now it's about the money for me because then you can prove to say, “Well, look, by doing this, we've saved X amount of money or we did that way, that didn't work. We tried it again and it helped us save money here. But more importantly, we want to mature.
Sinead Divine shares her insight in creative thinking: "It's that creativity of thinking of, "Well, if I had it in a dashboard or is the data correct, is what I'm sending them ... Yes, they see a report and they know I'm doing my job, but could I send them something different? Could I send them somewhere else? Could I develop it in a different way that actually makes their life better versus they receive it on a monthly basis and they file it?"
Ale Marvaldi on making progress within UX: "If we know that people have an objective and are committed against it, they look for the path of least resistance. And UX designer job is to make sure that the path of least resistance is exactly the one that we design. So we create a single road from A to B."
Roxana Lungu sheds light on the potential of change within an organization: "I see change in terms of evolution, and I see what is in constant is the way we get there. The minds that we have to evolve and look at things differently and adapt very quickly for whatever is coming in that will stay but what will come along the line. We don't know, and that's why we love it. Its exciting and challenging."
P&G's John Barraclough hones in on the effectiveness of customer focused processes: "What we want to do is before we do anything, we need to make sure that we develop a relevant business process. We think the only way to get relevance is to understand the customer and the users because fundamentally, if they're bought in and they've got clear requirements, then what we create will be relevant and will achieve what we want to do."
Michael Baldauf shares Raiffeisen's stance on culture between departments and with the customer: "The culture for us, the center of what we do, is personal interaction. We're a cooperative company so we always have to talk to each other and compromise. We decided not to use Chat bots because our clients wouldn't like to talk to a machine rather than us. So the thing is again we need to talk to each other, we need to cross business, cross IT, cross functionality, cross compliance legal people.
Martin Ruane discusses the benefits of implementing RPA into workforce processes: "You have a flip train work and the age old issue of, for an operational person, is how do you try and reconcile those and keep absolutely up to date. That's what we're seeing. So we're seeing as we reduce these more menial type work, routine type tasks that are sometimes high volume type work. Less mistakes, dealing with these fluctuating demands, but also allowing the people to work on more interesting, more higher value type work and that is a very common theme."
Chris Gilmore highlights how robotics and automation can positively effect multiple systems simultaneously: "Up scaling is a good example. What's nice about the Medicare organization is that Medicare is growing tremendously. One of the challenges they presented to us is that we can't hire people fast enough to do this work. So, by being able to automate it, we can actually slow down the hiring rate."
Ricardo Badillo shares insight on the customization of implementing RPA: "There's no one size fits all or recipe to implement RPA Center of Excellence. Especially because it needs to be customized to your organization culture and organization structure, but there are definitely some things that are standard or some components that need to be in place. Based on the journey that we've completed so far, that is around two to three years in implementing RPA, one of the main lessons learned was information security."
South African rock climber, mountaineer, author and motivational speaker Cathy O'dowd joins us and touches on the importance of weighing risk in decision making: "It's like, should we give up or should we try again? That was interesting because you can say, well, five people just died. What do you mean you're going to try again? But Everest always was dangerous. You need to understand the risk before you go."
Siemens, Tobias Unger on Confidence Bias: "Well, on a proof of concept basis, we have done a lot with, chatbots that can help you get information out of information at Siemens. So, basically, simple use cases, like, "Okay, where is my invoice?" The question, "Where is my invoice?", for a company like Siemens, implies that you know which documents you are talking about, because you could end up in any of our 53 URP systems, so there has to be some intelligence in the process on the side of this bot. You first have to find out, which document are you are talking about, and where do I have to go, in order to find it? This implies that you have a structured conversation. I' really going on a development level, that means that you have to think the conversation very well through, because you have to structure it in a way that bot always gets ... that the user somehow is also guided. It's not that you can expect any information from the person that is requesting the information, but you really have to try to guide this person to the point that you're actionable. And this requires a lot of nudging in the process, while you chat protocol, in order to really ensure that the bot doesn't come to a point where it just doesn't know what to do next."
Sebastian Zeiss joins us and shares his epiphany and ensuing action:
We actually start noticing the moment we're doing more and more, I would call it hybrid solutions, because in the beginning IT was really closed off. They wouldn't let us talk to the actual developers. Now, we're actually talking to the developers, and sometimes, you know, "why the heck did you build a bot for this? We have an API. Why don't you just use it?" That's really good stuff because it increases stability, it makes us more efficient, and the IT guys are not afraid anymore, which is the benefit. They'd say we don't have an API, of course, why don't you use a bot? But if we have one, please, please, use the API. So, in that sense, I would say that having internal competition to our IT, really was beneficial for the company because it really made everyone rethink how to approach things.
Deepak Subbarao joins us and shares why what he does inspires him, "I have this fascinating job of trying to understand how you add value to the business, but at the same time help them jump into the next wave of technologies. So what does it mean practically, right? So we've already gone through let's say restructuring, or let's say we've gone through a lot of changes."
On transformation, Pfizer's Anil Bhavanani, "digital is different in a way that you're focusing more on how you can leverage technology. And it is the same in a way that ultimately you have to focus on the process. So even when you are doing integrations, typically you are focusing on the process because you're kind of integrating onto one ERP. So you know, it is driven by technology, so even integrations typically would be driven because you're kind of bringing all work onto one single ERP. The opportunities of optimizing the process and as a result of that you can give back synergy back to the company. So digital is a little bit different because the focus is more in terms of how you can automate and how you can transform the process the way it's being done today."
On treating the partner selection like the make or break decision that it is, Moh Al Ghadban, "we partnered with our internal teams to actually have a framework, have the criteria about our partner selection. Because for us selecting a partner is going through a journey. You have a vision of where you want to go with this partner- actually finding the partner that fits to go through this journey with you."
Jerry Wagner joins us and immediately shares distinctions of what to expect from 'robotics,' "if you're dealing with pen and paper, then there's no way you can actually get into automation unless you actually want to go build the robot and have it actually doing the stuff for you." Meaning you have to actually be a digital enterprise before you can have intelligent automation. At that point, you can dive into what you're trying to solve. "The type of platform that I work with is to come up with those use cases and see if we can actually build some bots to go and do that activity as well as actually educating others within the business so that they way they could potentially build these bots themselves and get into more of a self-service model." From there, Jerry explains how he and the organization are actually dashboarding value to the organization.
Manulife's Global Head of Business Process Architecture, Transition and Solutions, Nadia deVilla joins us and discusses how she kept calm and developed a plan of action in the face of the 'shiny new toy' of robotics. She utilized transparency in leading her team and also in reporting to management. She utilized transparency in leading her teams and reporting to management. She shares the automation journey from PoC to transformation. And so, Nadia and the team attacked automation with transformation in mind. This was not a short-term win, box-checking, FTE-saving technology. This technology was recognized for what it is and approache with the appropriate question: How can we change the services we provide to customers?
The GM of Commercial GE Operations, Chris Bevacqua joins us and shares that originally he was a sales guy who was asking a lot of questions about shared services. So many in fact, that he was put in charge. From there he dove in on intelligent automation. Realizing that a client was on-boarded over 400 times, he and the team chose on-boarding for a first project. They automated 80% of process saving FTE’s who have been up-skilled to high-end triage. Mark him down for not only cutting cost but adding value to the organization as well as the customer.
The Vice President of Finance Systems for the CEO Office at Oracle, Loren Mahon joins us and shares that she’s chartered with internal business transformation internally at Oracle, particularly around things that impact financial systems and processes- which she points out- for any enterprise sized company- is almost anything. But particularly- the internal cloud strategy, looking at enterprise reporting strategy, data governance, M&A integration, etc and how that all links back to what’s being done from a systems, process and shared services perspective. Overall Loren and her team have four steps for business transformation- simplify, standardize, centralize and automate.
Bridging a divide, which in the future must be seamless- Kristina, from the business side is making her way into IT and Pranav, from the business side is making his way into business. Each highlights hurdles and pitfalls along the way. But the consensus is what's stated above: Moving forward, there cannot be daylight between business and IT. The two groups- no matter the enterprise- must work seamlessly as one.
Mark Beaumont, record-breaking cyclist who peddled his way around the world in less than 80 days joins us to discuss perseverance- among other things. He notes in passing, early on in the conversation that he had broken bones for most of the trip. But his focus in the interview- as it was then- was to accomplish the ultimate goal. And the ultimate goal was accomplished by achieving the daily goal every day. His focus was on cycling an average of 240 miles each day. He shattered his original record by 44 days, meaning the ultimate goal wasn't about beating the number- it was optimizing his human output.
On the focus of the organization and what kind of talent for which they’re, Executive Director of Macquarie Group, Glen Skarrot is focused on finding “efficiency through relentless automation [which] should see us achieve some really hefty goals in relation to providing the business at the right price.” He notes that there will be changes in the talent for the enterprise and that the organization wants "people that are happy and looking for change. We want people that are asking questions and are curious. We don’t want people coming in and just doing a process.” And the company is open-minded itself, “we're very focused on diversity. Not only our gender diversity, but also diversity of the skill sets that our people have. So, actually bringing in people with IT skills, into finance, bringing in people with certain data skills, data scientists, mathematicians, those different skill sets also bring in a different way of looking at things, which is really helpful when we're coming to think about problems that we have."
With a goal of leveraging the innovation that takes place in Silicon Valley by collaborating with them when a new product is taking shape, Nissan’s manager of data initiatives, Najam Baig joins us. He shares that company makes cars not AI so his job is to bring in experts. He’s an expert in understanding the tools that he has and employing the right tool at the right time for the job at hand. His intent is to be as pragmatic as possible. That said he’s focused on the internal data that he’s got at his finger tips like supply chain information and couples that with external data such as social listening to inform the enterprise.
Thomas Birr joins us and shares how innogy’s innovation hub came into existence. As the SVP of Innovation and Transformation, Thomas’ goal is to ensure that he’s on top of new technologies that are coming to market as well as whatever is “behind the horizon” as he says. His centers of operations are within geographies traditionally associated with technology innovation- Silicon Valley, Berlin, Tel Aviv and London. Along with energy and mobility Thomas and his team are focused on the "human machine interaction of the future.”
In an effort to uncover potential areas of innovation within the industry, Aimee Wynesberghe joins us to discuss ethics and governance in AI & Intelligent Automation. She's the President and Co-Founder of The Foundation for Responsible Robotics and we discuss how good ethics and governance can result in good business.
A true roundtable discussion of six sigma in AIIA. A few key quotes:
"Very early stages, we tried to roll out Kaizen ahead of the robotics piece, so there were two separate things that then we pulled together. The biggest challenge is getting peoples' time. So, trying to do the sales pitch to very resource squeezed operational areas, say "Give me your people to come in and talk to me about prices improvement," and drive their own prices improvement rather than answer a phone call when we're under immense pressure. That is the main challenge, so embedding it is the kicker."
"I have a Six Sigma background, but at the moment, we're working to embed that within the organization I'm in, and also work at embedding RPA as well, so we've embedded RPA for probably about the last 18 months, so we're doing a bit of backtrack in terms of we've done some RPA stuff, now let's put some Lean and CI side of it in, and how do we make sure that we're not automating rubbish."
"It's amazing. We've got so much sponsorship it's incredible. What we don't have is all the peripheral processes that are needed, Lean enough, to actually go."
"If you're going to put in a rapid or a streamlined development, it's going to cost you between 30 and 50 thousand pounds. You need two people straight away. When you got 350 processes or 340 processes, it makes it harder, so you're naturally, you think you got 340 processes to go after, but when look at all of the transformational road maps that are going on and already looking at driving out opportunities and value, it makes it really hard to go after certain things."
"What you should be looking to do is standardize your processes, digitize them where you can, put your continuous improvement lens on it, and then we'll automate what's left. The people who are going, while they're under significant cross-challenges, they're going straight to the automate the hell out of my process."
The inimitable Tony Saldanha who might be best known as Procter & Gamble’s VP of IT & Global Business Services joins us and shares that his job title means that he’s the leader of next generation services. His goal is to come up with disruptive information technology products that will be used by global GBS units beyond P&G. He works with large IT companies, venture capitalists and startups. Tony notes that we’re in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and that digital transformation should be your business strategy.
On change management, Lee Coulter returns, "over the last couple of years, we have been making a real study of where is the barrier and where are we receiving passive-aggressive behavior as opposed to outright rejection behavior. What should not be a surprise or fascinating, but is both surprising and fascinating is all the basic tenets of change management, guess what? They apply here."
Anthony Ryan joins us to give us the state of affairs: "Our company is going through a planned transformation where all those systems that are being re-keyed are going to be amalgamated and there's a new sort of N10 strategy and a lot of companies are going through these big transformations, but it's 18 months away, it's 20 months away, it's two years away. In the meantime, there's armies of people re-keying data, making mistakes every day, and just doing what I typically called the grunt work to keep the business going. So they're prime candidates for RPA because you spin a robot up in the devil's always in the details, but on average we're talking six to eight weeks."
On succeeding and failing quickly, Martin Ruane, "I think it's all the intelligence and experience that you gather over time, often by sometimes making the wrong direction and making some mistakes, learning from them and doing things differently. Or sometimes doing the right thing, and actually it's been reinforced by the results that you get. I think it's a range of things but it's all that really. I think if you think about collateral, it could be our training collateral that we've got so we're self-sufficient in terms of what we do. It can be all our standard operating procedures that actually give instructions of how we do stuff. But it's more than that, it's everything, it's the experience, it's everything. It's all-encompassing."
Camilla Kwong joins us and discusses her thoughts on technology, "Sometimes, when they talk about technology, even I feel a little bit behind nowadays. When I play on my iPhone and stuff, they'll show me new tricks and new apps and they're just so innovative nowadays. We love graduates, we love young people, we love fresh thinking and with a strong IT background, it also makes it work really well because they can actually understand a lot of the technology side of robotics."
Richard Frost joins us and shares what he’s looking for in automation. "I’m looking for three things, really. We've got to be able to afford the technology, so it could be the best in the world, but if we can't afford it ultimately ... So a lot of vendors come in cheap and then start ramping up. So we got down to some really hard negotiations on that one. Secondly, are they a match for us, are they ten times our size and then they will just walk all over us? When we want to start working with them, will they send in the B team once the sale has been made? So we found that Colfax are large, they're larger than us, but we've worked with them on other technologies for a few years now and we've had a fairly good relationship with them so felt that they would be a good match for us as a smaller bank in the U.K. And then finally, the functionality. They have the robotic process automation, they've got the BPM technology as well and some of the stuff around the side in terms of scanning, which is where they came from, working with paper electronically and electronic signature. They've got that as well. So it kind of made sense as a good fit for us."
Tyrone Grandison joins us and shares that you need to focus on the customer and that your business is an IT business. First, "You need to be focused acutely on your customer, your client. So, I run the technology department, so my customer is everyone that is at IHME, and the 3,000 collaborators that depend upon us, right? Plus everyone that actually uses our results, etc, etc, etc. My thing is, how do I actually make them efficient, make them happy, and make sure that whatever I do fits within their workflow? Creating a separate entity to actually do that." And second, "IT is a business driver, IT should be at the table when you actually make decisions. All decisions should be about what the core mission is, which is completely ... Well, not completely different, but a different way of thinking about it. But, if you don't believe that IT is going to actually help you be more efficient, is going to support your task, is going to drive you to actually more profit, more growth, more impact."
From Google, Yuval Dvir joins us and notes that beyond the scope of his job, he's interested in things that are happening out there. He’s interested in discussing how executives are implementing AI solutions. He’s also interested in learning about the challenges of the different industries and the segments where he does see similarities: "On the one hand, everyone is facing, in a way, the same thing, which is how we deal with the avalanche of technology. On the other hand, there's the nuances and the slight differences actually where everything matters. Taking an off-the-shelf product that works beautifully in one company and trying to implement it in another company won't work. You need to be very, very aware of those subtle differences in the specific DNA of each organization."
From Coca Cola Refreshments Richie Dangle joins us and shares how the organizations business transformation has led to the opportunity for intelligent automation. He notes that “you need the process subject matter experts to help you define the processes, help you test the processes once they've been developed. This re-franchising effort has really consumed a lot of that critical resource.” Understanding their mainframe application Richie and his team had to take into account some of what the target systems were automating and which software vendors could accommodate those target systems and that were good at automation. Moving forward the team wanted to maintain tight control over the development standards, and the delivery methodology. "We wanted to get that done right, stood upright to begin with before we started to federate."
Roberto Mancone joins us and shares that as the global head of disruptive technologies his background is not in digital, it’s not in IT. He comes to the position with 25 years of corporate banking and corporate finance. And he’s done just that for major Fortune 500 companies. He went through the banking consolidation of trying to combine several assets in one location. He’s been on all sides of the table. And so when it comes to automation he sees it as simply leveraging a tool to understand how to use that tool to develop different and better processes.
The Director Operations & Continuous Improvement at Campbell Soup Company, Brandon Halbert joins us and shares that he always knew that he had a process mindset. He was very interested in Six Sigma and Lean and he found the points on his career trajectory showcasing process improvement. He found himself consistently asking what are we doing, how are we doing it and what are the processes needed to get it done. Due to that, he notes that most of his jobs have been colleagues saying “let’s get Brandon to do this” which has served him well over his 18 year career at Campbell’s. On top of all this, with a computer science focus in college, technology makes sense to him which combined with process improvement has him perfectly suited for Intelligent Automation.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation with clicking and clacking behind us, Sreeharsha Upadhyayula begins by quoting William Gibson, the science fiction writer, with “the future is here, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed." As the world wide web and new media went from being bright shiny objects to simply part of the way we do business, Sree notes that, that’s precisely where we are with intelligent automation. Rather than a bright shiny object, businesses are now asking how does this make me smarter about my business, how does this get me closer to the customer, how does this truly help me solve a customers problem? These next few years as Sree sees it are about test and learn.
Marek Sowa is a techie. He’s not ops, he’s not financial services. That said, he’s not a traditional programmer. So he see’s it as he creates ideas and delivers results. He wants to make sense in that he’s speaking the same language as everyone with whom he’s working. So he’s taught himself how to program so that he can communicate at the deepest level with the front lines of that aspect of the team. His quest is to understand how technology will disrupt customers, current operations and how those very technologies can be embedded in said operations. What can be done and how far can he and the team push the boundaries to meet the customer where they are- no matter the time, place or service desire. Marek is engaging in ai through voice recognition with results and he shares examples of those results with us.
With 30 years and change of experience in financial services Nigel Trout feels that he must have learned something. He notes the fact that the bigger banks continue to try to find solutions in technology while the upstart fintech’s continue to search for scope and scale. While working at HSBC the focus was on the cost reduction side so Nigel and the team had to really streamline operations which led him to a focus on the technologies which could most readily accomplish that goal. He's looked at disruptive and exponential technologies including machine learning which showcases the opportunity to offer better service to the customer.
Akiko Fukuda joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where she introduces us to Cotoha the AI agent. Cotoha stands for communication happiness. The organization has launched commercial customers and they’ve got a lot of positive feedback. Customers have the option of choosing a human agent or the ai bot and they are choosing the bot. Akiko explains that the younger generation in Japan doesn’t like human interaction within this service reality. She further explains that humans don’t mind asking bots questions they feel might be stupid whereas they might be reticent to do so with a human agent.
Utilize RPA, reach for AI, focus on automation- no matter what you’re talking about, according to Bart van de Sande the Head of Operations Transaction Banking for ABN Amro, it’s all just transformation. Bart notes that these are all just new tools on the transformation journey, just as lean management and all of the tools before and after. At the core he notes, do you love your clients? Do you have passion for your clients? Do you want to go the extra mile? Do you know what drives them? How are you going to help them to fulfill their dreams or maybe sometimes help them to get out of their worst nightmares? But that, Bart says, is the core of transformation. Not the tools that you use to answer those very questions.
Recently retired EVP & CFO of Revlon Inc, Juan Figuereo joins us and notes that with RPA there’s a new world of opportunity to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and improve capabilities. Juan shares that typically, the Fortune 500 tend to be more progressive, they’re more focused on cost efficiency and looking forward- so they’re ready for automation. In his opinion processes do not need to be optimized in order to automate. But that comes hand in hand with outsourcing those processes for automation. Regarding his CFO role, it was aspects of the strategic agenda that kept him up at night. Back office only came into his mind if he was concerned with something…if something was going wrong.
Martin Ax joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit to urge his colleagues not to get too caught up in how many bots are working. He feels that the focus should be on how good you are at developing automation, how much benefit are you receiving and ensuring its part of an overall strategy. Automation can be a journey to the front of the customer experience. Once you’re overtly effective at automation development, no process should be too small for those lean and six sigma minded folks. Executing automation in a financial services environment forces you to be as precise as everyone should be based on the highly regulatory nature of the industry.
Vice President IT, for DVB Bank, Ingo Zimny joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit where he shares that providing solutions is not the only thing that his group does. They design those solutions and design the processes behind the solutions. Ingo and the team like to challenge the way things are done. They try to streamline processes to set the base for more efficient work throughout the bank generally. As he and the team add more services as they get deeper into the bank they’re finding that automation and machine learning are tools that meet their demands as they’ve got a fair amount of unstructured data. When sourcing cognitive solutions, Ingo’s concern, which he admittedly needs to validate, is that the cost benefit of the solution is based on the scope and scale of the client in question.
Charles Mulinder joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where he shares that he’s originally South African, spent a good portion of his life in the UK and currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s worked within the financial services industry for 20 years and he notes that it turns out that while there are many people in the industry, counterintuitively, it’s a small circle and a relatively compact network. Charles brings the straightforward perspective that European banks all have significant cost targets. There are inefficiencies and legacy costs which need to be pared down. Unfortunately a lot of that cost is with people so the number of people engaged in banking services must go down. Of course, one of the levers that you use to achieve that is automation.
Program Manager for the Robotics Centre of Excellence at Danske Bank, Nick Burgess joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London. He shares that he’s been in the space for 10 years. Back in the day it wasn’t called robotics as Nick says that’s a term that’s been coined only over the past few years. He notes that it’s been fascinating to see the growth in the marketplace and the interest and the results that are being delivered by organizations globally. The opportunities for robotics relate to continuous improvement as Nick’s background is in Lean and Six Sigma. The initial name was agile automation which stuck until the term robotics arrived.
Joining us from OPEX Summit in San Diego, Cyndi Creamer shares what she’s doing in Business Transformation on the Robotics team for Swiss Re. She notes that there’s a fair amount of hype around robotics and we all need to remember that it is in fact a tool. She goes further in saying that it works for some whereas it doesn’t work for others. Cyndi dives in saying that there’s a whole tool box and robotics is just one of the tools in that box. So if you’ve been piece-mealing your system together for years and you realize that you’ve got a lot of gaps... is it wise to keep filling in those gaps with robotics now or do you need to look at your entire platform first.
Patty Hatter joins us from OPEX Summit San Diego where she shares her experience as a CIO buying, as a GM building and as an executive leading transformation at sizable organizations. Patty says that it’s a lot of fun when you’re able to move through the transformation change, figuring out how to put the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense for your team, for the organization and moves the business forward. A key tool for Patty during any transformation is "radical transparency.” She coined the term to combat and debunk any distrust or misunderstanding between IT and everyone else in the organization.
The Director of Digital Operations for Western Union Processing in Lithuania, Vytis Ciemnolonskis joins us from the BFSI RPA & AI Summit in London where he shares that thinking, planning and evaluating are important but it’s just as important to get started. He and his team were lucky in having a true executive sponsor. They did a quick proof of concept- took a vendor, a developer, an SME and got a result that in fact proved that the process in question could be automated. The robot could do a sequence of activities and provide a tangible result. From there they went through a selection process to find an impactful process for the pilot. Vytis found that at the pilot phase, the team was excited by the actual deliverables being undertaken by the bot. And from there they were off and running.
CFO/CAO BNP Paribas Poland Operations Marcin Nowakowski joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit where he shares that as a CFO he of course hears from executives during the budget process, throughout execution and specifically during process improvement projects like automation. In the grand scheme of things and based on a career in finance, he notes that if an executive ever presents him with a story without numbers it’s simply a dream- it’s not a business case. While 10 year timeline projects do still occur, average projects are timed out in two to three year segments meaning- it’s by then that the organization must be paid back. This is the case as it’s so difficult to foresee the actual future 3 years hence with technological advancements like RPA & AI happening at warp speed.
Susanne Skaarup joins and and shares that she got the title as Head of robotics at Danske Bank when the company established a center of excellence in February of 2016. The bank realized that they needed to invest in RPA in autumn of 2015. They could see huge potential in the new technology and that they could do process improvements in areas where normally one would say that there was no business case to do traditional IT. Whereas six weeks is the going prognostication for bot implementation, Suzanne and her team are seeing that adoption more at 10 to 12 weeks which is still far faster of course than past projects. Regarding program governance, Suzanne discusses the benefits of a centralized model versus decentralized model vs. something in between…which is what she’s got.
Alexander Hubel joins us from the Nordic RPA & AI Summit and shares that automation at Ericsson was born out of a digital strategy project where they were looking for opportunities. Within that timeframe, Alexander saw a demo of RPA in action and he says he’s lucky because his background is in the outsourcing industry and so he knew the type of work that’s traditionally offshored and outsourced- and so in the demo- he saw familiar work being done. In terms of experience, Alexander was also a part of the largest ever M&A project in the Nordics. During the project he realized the importance of investing in systems and resource integration.
Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit, Chris Wolff joins us and shares his experience with RPA through a project where he and the team had to reduce department backlog within 4 months. They thought about how to help folks not work 10-12 hours each day…and the answer was RPA. They did in fact finish in time- but understand that it was 4 years of backlog that was reduced in those 4 months. It turns out that Chris’ old manager had brought up RPA’s virtues in the past and was promoted to run the group which had that backlog. And so he called Chris and said “we need you’re help.” Chris and his team went out to the vendor community, shortlisted to what he calls a beauty contest- chose a vendor, focused on the process to automate with the vendor and executed.
The global head of AI for Prudential Michael Natusch joins us from the Nordic RPA & AI Summit and shares his thoughts on the profound myths that abound and affect the way that global corporate executives think about AI. Michael sees the major advances in AI which will change not just what we do in 2017 but how we think about doing business in future years. But we’ve set enormous expectations for achievements to occur right here right now. Michael notes that AI fits the idiom "innovation is overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.” That thinking extends to the technology itself. Whereas executives in the space are drawn to the concept of custom designing automation solutions- an alternative is redefining process to meet technology where it is now.
Recorded at SSOW Canada, Mathieu Rebeiro joins us and shares that as a six sigma black belt, he’s often asked- isn’t lean six sigma old or something that’s passed? He’ll be presented with the fact that the new methodology is Agile or Waterfall or Design Thinking or RPA. He offers it’s not wrong to think that way…but it’s not right either. All of those are complimentary methodologies. And the challenge to the executive in question is are you ready willing and or able to explain how they all compliment each other? Rather than find what divides us Mathew contents, find the commonalities and work together on the job at hand. He tries very hard to ensure that everyone understands that it’s not an "either or"…it’s an "and" conversation.
Just under two years into automation, Jon Theurekauf joins us from Intelligent Automation Chicago 2017 to take us through the persona around the initiative which as you might guess is Alex- a tip of the hat to BNY founder Alexander Hamilton- meaning all of the bots are called Alex with their own subsequent bot id code. The institution is a large global enterprise and searched for a partner that would suit an intelligent automation ecosystem of that size and scope. Jon says that the enterprise doesn’t really have processes running on a desktop by desktop basis and while he and the team continue to re-enineer and standardize processes, they know what’s what within each process... Which is why when they dove into automation, they did so at the enterprise level.
Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit in Stockholm, London School of Economics Professor Leslie Wilcox joins us and shares that through an early career in IT consultancy in the 1970’s, he and his clients learned a lot about getting IT into the business- so much so that he simply sees the onset of Robotic Process Automation and Cognitive Automation as simply a follow-on from each wave after wave of technology that global corporate business has been through. He feels that the transition process will be longer and more challenging than people think which is why he’s focused his most recent book on Risk Mitigation in RPA & AI.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Julie Lotzer joins us as a team lead in RPA for a large enterprise. As the team makes their way into scaling RPA Julie shares that on the way in to automation, it was a top down initiative, but as they move across the organization, education needs to occur to ensure that stakeholders are comfortable with what’s happening. Julie has done IT audit work in the past with Deloitte so she’s able to marry her business mind and IT understanding in her RPA role. And with Deloitte she learned how to sell, skills on which she’s drawing to draw the enterprise together through automation.
Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit, Mattias Fras joins us and shares that when Nordea was looking at internal BPO- at the time they were performing a pre study and identifying a pilot- robotics came on the radar. They looked at it, did a few proof of concepts and realized that the scope was more or less 100% overlapping with what they wanted to do. The cost was a tenth or less and it only took 5 weeks to get a low risk robot running. He spent the next few weeks talking with different colleagues in different industries as well as a few consultants- asking if those metrics were true. His conclusion was of course, yes. His goal now is to build skills in his own people in this new technology- he wants to build the capability internally. And in achieving that goal, the first order of business is to achieve scale.
Recorded at SSOW Manchester, Tobias Unger joins us and shares that his old job title of Head of Organizational Development and Strategic Projects is a working title for Head of Innovation & Digitalization & Benchmarking. He didn’t like the word Strategy in his job title. He sees himself as a down to earth guy- and he’s interested in discussing his colleagues' problems and what stresses them. That, he says, is where automation is needed and will be most effective. Strategy he feels has a not-down-to earth vibe. He wants to ensure his colleagues understand that finding solutions to their actual issues is what creates the strategy- not the other way around. On life lessons, Tobias says that while every situation is different, you can deal with each situation as long as you adapt.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago which is his hometown. Henry Lyles joins us as the Director of Global Business Services in Continuous Improvement, Data Excellence & Automation for McDonald’s. He was originally an accountant by trade but based on the monotony, Henry found a new love in programming. Recognizing his accounting mind and technical acumen, he’s been and still is a liaison between the business and IT. Which is of course a perfect background for intelligent automation. On RPA, a little while back his boss asked him to figure out how the technology could work for shared services. And he’s been working on it ever since with results and benefit to the enterprise.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Seth Fargen joins us and shares that directly after 9/11, the TSA was created from scratch and Seth and his team, as an existing shared service center, were asked to come in and set up TSA's financial systems and processes. And now his Coast Guard team is on an automation journey to optimize their 1,300 internal processes that make up a day’s work. Seth feels that simply through efficiencies, the US government spending deficit could be totally eliminated. His commercial colleagues tell him they're seeing 30-70% savings through automation. So in 2016 the Federal government brought in 3.3T but spent 3.9- a difference of $587B. Apply the automation audit to spending and you’ve got yourself a surplus.
Mads Andersen joins us and takes us through the fact that folks see Denmark as ahead in terms of digitalization. However as the Head of RPA for the City of Copenhagen he knows that there are silos in the public sectors legacy systems. His job is to ensure that the data is found in each silo and combined to expedite horizontal integration as well as engage RPA as the next tool in the box to be more digitized than today…to become more efficient and create more value out of the work which the City of Copenhagen does. When the City began the automation journey at the end of 2015- they didn’t have anything in place- they started from scratch. As a municipality, Mads understands a key benefit of RPA being its cost. He says that he and his team can fail fast and of course succeed quickly.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago, the Director of Royalties and content operations for Microsoft, Rohit Amberker joins us and shares that it’s his team that pays the royalties on any intellectual property that’s licensed or sold by the company which is about $4B per year. He came to royalties from cloud and before that he was in the online services business. Based on his 10 years of experience at the organization, he notes that the focus of the company is productivity which allows for the aperture of the mission to be wide. It’s that mindset he brings to automation. And so he shares the happy path which he’s discovering.
Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit in Stockholm, Jorgen Lislerud joins us and takes us through the Circle K rebrand making them a global organization representing convenience delivering great customer experience. Jorgen runs shared services for Circle K out of Riga, Latvia and Warsaw, Poland. Infrastructure, development, and the IT service desk is out of Warsaw. Riga has financial services, accounting, HR, fuel distribution planning and customer service. Jorgen is working on RPA with a program up and running in customer service, finance, fuel and HR operations. The program began under the radar but after experiencing key wins, the program was rolled out in multiple functions.
Recorded at Intelligent Automation in Chicago, Kelly Switt joins us as a native Chicagoan who was always a bit of an activist. She’s been told that her nickname is Mako Shark due to the fact that she’s always moving. Kelly was running the six sigma lean group for Citi of course consistently looking at how to improve operations. She had done some automation work at both Bank of America and HSBC and she's spent the past 4 years selling automation as a concept internally. The team began by focusing on data quality and analytics in order to drive more process improvement. That gave the team runway for management to have buy in. And finally last year, with no stones left unturned, Kelly and the team dove in on true intelligent automation.
Allan Martinson joins us and discusses customer driven robotics. Originally submitted into a NASA contest, a former Skype co-founder and a team of Estonian engineers built the original technology. After some initial trepidation, Allen, a venture capitalist at the time, came on to advise the project as he bought into the moonshot business plan based on the technologically advanced team. Allan describes autonomous delivery as a solution to the biggest waste of time in human history. He describes the product as a mobile phone on wheels. Now in 60 cities and 15 countries, Starship is delivering goods to customers all over the world. After 4M human encounters the team is realizing that customers intuitively understand how to interact with the robot.
Frank Kuenel joins us and recalls his move from Germany to the US. His only knowledge of the US was from movies and television- In his words- Kojak for the east coast, John Wayne for everything in between and Streets of San Francisco for the west. He excelled in science and mathematics early on in his life which made his path very clear to him. But his take was that there was a deeper mystery to the universe and the the language with which to discover that deeper mystery was mathematics. And so he landed at NASA just after school and helped land a rover on Mars through computer vision AI. Which eventually led Frank to Google. He discusses the fact society needs understand how to educate youth to be prepared with curiosity and give them tools to learn and be curious forever.
Stig Peterson joins us and shares what he’s doing with automation. He notes that he started as most do- with a proof of concept. He took the initiative to do it and tested technology to understand how it could work in Topdanmark’s environment. Stig quickly saw success, so much so that he established a team which is now working permanently with RPA. The first bot rollout was a year-and-a-half before this interview was recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit in Stockholm. And there was a fair amount of preparation that needed to happen prior to getting a decision from the Board to actually move forward and then secure funding. Stig notes that it’s difficult to move fast in process excellence and RPA was a fast track to cost reduction.
With a specialty in Business Process Re-egineering Alex Balbontin joins us from OPEX Financial Services. He notes that these are exciting times as myriad new technologies are introduced to support operational excellence moving to the next level. A GE alum, Alex became a master blackbelt in six sigma in the mid 90s. Based in Mexico, he applied lean principles to new business development which ensured that he was utilizing metrics in a new and different way. He needed to then learn new tools and methodologies when he moved over into financial services. Moving from Mexico to the US to the UK and back, Alex picked up relationships which opened doors along the way.
Cindy Gallagher joins us and shares that when she joined Discovery she immediately focused on the low hanging fruit. Based on how rapidly the brand had grown, Cindy was able to come in and look at the underlying foundation of the enterprise. She realized that trust needed to be built internally to ensure that end customers were appropriately serviced. She began by asking why. Why did internal customers feel the way that they did about shared services? And from there she could focus on adding technology and ultimately through metrics giving those internal clients a dashboard filled with value for them. She gained visibility into the organization and the organization gained trust in the shared services enterprise.
Ted Graham joins us from C2 to discuss doing new and different things as it relates to the company, the industry, the brand and general society. Regarding self driving- hands off the wheel or assisted driving experiences are on the table for 2017. Full automation will be here sooner than you think in Ted’s words. He’s interested in Explainable AI which ensures that the work of any machine or deep learning is shown- or is explainable to humans. Ted is focused on creating a more immersive and complete experience for the consumer- which includes his automotive company being a part of your human experience beyond the car. It begs the question, how does your internal automation redefine what your brand does and who your brand serves?
Huw Pattinson joins us and shares that RPA is in fact truly accessible. It’s not as expensive or disruptive as you may think. When Huw launched into RPA his team was already doing basic functions to that effect. He immediately separated robotic process automation from robotic assisted automation. This ensured and ensures that not only in practice but in theory the operator doesn’t feel as though he or she will be replaced, the job just gets done faster by a factor of 10x plus. When searching for an RPA vendor Huw’s history came in handy as he had both experience doing the function that was to be automated as well as personal front-end customer interaction experience.
Lee Coulter joins us and discusses what he’s doing in regards to machine learning, what he’s doing in regards to standards around intelligent automation and what you might want to think about on your own automation journey as you go from RPA- or as Lee says, task automation- to more cognitive based solutions for your enterprise. The average decently sized corporation is somewhere in the first 24 months of automation. And so, Lee’s experience with a brick and mortar retailer engaged in machine learning, sheds light on where you might be many moons from now when you find yourself two years into your own machine learning, but more importantly Lee sheds light on what you need to be thinking and doing now in order to get to the starting line successfully.