Intelligent Automation Radio

The IT industry, not unlike biology, evolves at a measured pace.  Innovations perceived as great leaps forward are more often usually just novel combinations of existing capabilities repurposed for new tasks.  The wow factor generated by the latest vendor offerings is primarily due to their inventive approach to solving current problems, not the revelation of some unimaginably futuristic scientific advancement.  It therefore behooves us to consider the solutions IT automation produces in evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, terms.

One such executive taking this long view is Travis Greene, Director of Strategy for IT Operations Products at Micro Focus. As witness to a couple decades worth of progressions in IT operations, he has a clear-eyed perspective on where our industry is going, based on where we’ve been.  Travis drops in to share his insights with us, and along the way we'll learn why developers will never be able to wish IT Ops away, the future role of humans in automated enterprises, & the biggest factors in making IT automation successful.

AI’s impact on people, organizations, and countries is now so far-reaching there soon won’t be any aspect of our lives left untouched by it.  To even begin understanding how wide-ranging the effect of artificial intelligence is currently, we undertake a wide-ranging discussion with Neil Sahota, AI advisor to the United Nations.  Neil takes us on a grand tour of some really exciting ways AI’s capabilities are being used around the world today.  He also introduces us to a thinking framework he developed that can guide us on how to harness AI’s capabilities to create disruptive advances.

Along the way we'll learn what the biggest challenge is for organizations deploying artificial intelligence, the unheralded metric which best captures the impact of AI on business & IT operations, & what the biggest area of growth will be for artificial intelligence over the next 3 years.

We've all heard the term "growing the pie" in the context of enlarging an economic opportunity to enrich more people.  That kind of pie growth is visible today in the automation & AI space, where swelling revenue streams are accelerating prosperity for software vendors & service providers.  This in turn is driving the formation of an automation- & AI-centered business ecosystem which ultimately will have a significant macroeconomic impact on numerous industries.  At least that's the prediction of Jay McBain from Forrester research who, perhaps more than anyone else, has devoted himself to studying this ecosystem.

Jay's insights are highly sought after, which is why Channel Partners Magazine named him their 2021 Channel Influencer of the Year.  In this episode we catch up with Jay, who shares his vast erudition with us on the mind-boggling number of market opportunities going unmet by automation providers;  the biggest disruptions we'll see in the coming years for the automation and AI ecosystem; & why every company is becoming a tech company.

When it comes to digital transformation, as the saying goes, we may all be in the same storm, but we're not all in the same boat.  Just ask any 2 people and you'll get 3 different testimonials reflecting an incredibly broad spectrum of experiences & outcomes.  For senior IT leaders captaining their operations vessel, what should they know to best navigate the turbulence of this technology tempest and ensure their enterprise makes it to safe harbor?

For insights we turn to Isaac Sacolick, who much like a beacon guiding travelers through treacherous waters, advises CIOs on how best to avoid the unseen hazards that could sink one's digital transformation initiative.  In a wide-ranging discussion we learn what constitutes Digital Transformation 2.0, his frank advice to IT leaders on overcoming robophobia, and the people-centric direction he sees automation heading towards as the next big thing in digital transformation.

Whether undertaken by individuals, departments, or entire organizations, the automation journey is virtually certain to include a hearty mix of progress and pitfalls.  Ambitious objectives often go unrealized, but unexpected benefits frequently emerge as well.  These mixed results prompt some to pull the plug on their automation pursuits, while compelling others to double down in their quest for digital transformation.  Uncovering the causes driving these varied outcomes is one of the subjects explored by EY Partner Sandeep Parikh in his recent book "Automation Conundrum".

As EY's Leader for Intelligent Automation, Sandeep has assiduously examined why automation & AI work well for some, but less so for others.  We do a deep dive with Sandeep about his observations, and along the way learn what it takes to create a culture of automation within an organization; why the biggest automation & AI challenge facing the technology sector has nothing to do with technology; and why FTE reduction shouldn't be the metric used to judge automation's success.

It's been often remarked that the Chinese symbol for "crisis" is comprised of two other characters representing danger and opportunity.  The coronavirus pandemic has perhaps been the most dangerous global crisis since the Cold War, but for many economic sectors, it's created great opportunity.  The MSP & cloud service provider market is one such sector, which according to Steven Hall of ISG has grown an astounding 50% over the last 4 quarters.  Much of this is due to the crisis spawned by COVID-19, which accelerated adoption of both cloud and automation services, leading to enterprise digital transformation initiatives being expedited across the board.

As publisher of the ISG Index, the standard for marketplace intelligence on the global IT services industry, Steven is uniquely positioned to not only assess the current state of automation, but also peer over the horizon and see where things are heading.  In this episode we learn what Steven sees as the five major areas of automation MSP's must focus on to optimize their cost structures; why the number of bots deployed doesn't necessarily translate to fewer FTE's but still provides high value; and the many ways he sees automation affecting the business of MSP's.

In Part II of this 2-part episode, we continue our conversation with Chetan Dube, who for over 2 decades has been haunted by the seminal question Alan Turing posed in 1950 - "Can Machines Think?"  Chetan's years-long Odyssey in pursuit of an answer led him to found Amelia, one of the market leaders in enterprise AI software.

During this segment, we'll learn how the government can significantly reduce its trade deficit by leveraging AI, when the majority of the workforce will be digital (hint: it's sooner than you think), and Chetan's tips on how to "hire" the right digital employee.

Progress, in just about any endeavor, is often driven by pioneers who see pathways where others only see dead ends.  In the field of AI, one such trailblazer is Chetan Dube, whose quest to make machine intelligence approximate human intelligence led him to found IPsoft (now Amelia), the world's largest privately held AI software company.

In Part I of this 2-part episode, we speak with Chetan & learn why traditionally risk-averse industries went all in on conversational AI and the differentiating edge it provides them; which metric (other than ROI) best captures the impact of automation; and the biggest challenges organizations are experiencing in deploying automation and conversational AI.

By 2023, Gartner projects that citizen developers will outnumber professional developers more than 4-to-1 at large enterprises.  This astonishing development reflects the emergence of employees with "digital dexterity", who are comfortable using new technologies that drive "better business outcomes". One example of such technology is Tonkean’s Adaptive Business Operations Platform, a no-code/low-code automation tool that empowers citizen developers, or “makers” to optimize processes at the operations layer.

Sagi Eliyahu, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tonkean, and he’s on a mission to transform upskilled personnel into makers, who use automation to identify problems and build solutions without any programming, or the need for IT resources.  We talk with him about human-in-the-loop automation, and along the way we learn about the importance of optimizing for humans rather than data, the biggest challenges organizations are experiencing in deploying automation, and the surprisingly high percentage of IT & operations teams that have adopted or are working on adopting no-code/low-code tools.

Had the great modernist poet D. H. Lawrence lived in our time, perhaps he would've alternatively phrased this famous quote as follows - "Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with shifting technological paradigms." Today, many people realize that the shifting paradigms of AI, automation, and digital transformation will disrupt numerous human-involved processes, but few ponder how these disruptions will affect ethics and equity and principles of justice.  Fewer still contemplate how to address these technoethical challenges, and what framework should be applied in doing so.

Enter Steven Umbrello, Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.  Steven emphatically advocates for Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as a systemic approach to ensuring human values are accounted for throughout a design process. Steven joins us to discuss his research, how to incorporate VSD into AI systems, and the negative ramifications of excluding VSD from the innovation process.