Intelligent Automation Radio

Bain & Company, one of the world's three largest strategy consulting firms, has been at the forefront of digital transformation for many years now.  Leading global organizations retain Bain’s services both to keep pace with technology advances, as well as gain competitive advantage in their markets.  It’s not a bad place to be employed either, as evidenced by Glassdoor ranking Bain #1 on their list of Best Places to Work (four times!).  No wonder then that Bain attracts the best, both customers and employees, which in turn leads to some of the best insights available on the state of automation.

We take a peek inside this prestigious firm by interviewing Michael Heric, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, and the executive in charge of their Automation Center of Excellence.  In his 20 years at Bain, Michael’s seen a lot, and he shares with us why automation is increasingly sitting outside of IT’s jurisdiction; how Bain took a disappointing automation program that yielded only a few million dollars in savings to one generating savings of over a hundred million dollars a year; and why it’s unlikely there will ever be a single platform delivering all of an organization’s automation needs.

Longtime Harvard professor Theodore Levitt once said “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things”.  By that measure, ServiceNow must be among the most creative AND innovative organizations in the world. The disruptive product stream they've introduced to the ITSM market just in the last decade alone has propelled their growth into a $100 Billion software leviathan. They don't appear to be slowing down either.  Accordingly, much of the IT world wants to know - can they maintain the same level of entrepreneurial creativity & innovation necessary to sustain that blistering pace?

For insight, we speak with ServiceNow’s Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright, the man in charge of nurturing his company’s innovative results & ensuring its market dominance.  Along the way, we learn about the three different vectors ServiceNow uses to measure the maturity & effectiveness of everything from digital transformation to hyper automation; some of the most innovative automation use cases ServiceNow witnessed due to the pandemic; and the one really important skill IT professionals must have in order for them & their organizations to succeed.

If you've already started & led the intelligent automation practice for McKinsey & Company, one of the world's three largest strategy consulting firms, and prior to that you did the same for Ernst & Young, one of the "Big Four" accounting firms, where do you go next?  If you're Pascal Bornet, you and your co-authors publish a book that instantly becomes the standard reference work on intelligent automation.  In this opus, you collectively distill all the valuable experience & insights gained over the years working on some of the world's biggest & most complicated automation projects. By doing so, you not only illuminate and dispel much of the mystery surrounding automation, AI, and digital transformation, but you advance its democratization for the masses.  And you title it, what else, “Intelligent Automation”.

We speak with Pascal about the monumental work he and his co-writers recently completed.  Our discussion ends up revealing how automation raises the importance of the employee experience to the same level as the client experience, the key to getting middle management on board supporting a digital transformation, and the three most important metrics which best capture the effectiveness of automation to an enterprise.

Bots.  They're everywhere, proliferating fast, and evolving their capabilities.  Most of us are familiar with them in the form of chatbots, crawlers, and of course RPA bots, but what about an emerging class of autonomous software programs called Digital Coworkers?  They’re not just next.  They’re now, and are already impacting the future of work in verticals such as the insurance industry.

To learn more about Digital Coworkers and how they’ll interact with their human colleagues, we talk with Chaz Perera of Roots Automation.  As the former Chief Transformation Officer of AIG (America’s 4th largest insurer by assets, as of 2019), he sought a better way to deploy robotic automation in enterprise operations.  Chaz explains to us why Digital Coworkers succeeded where other bots failed.  Along the way we'll learn what the magic number is of automatable processes organizations need to have in order to justify establishing their own Center of Excellence, why a bot's greatest value might be freeing up staff so they can spend more time with customers, and what a future with Digital Coworkers might look like.

The Great British Bake Off is a popular BBC reality TV series showcasing contestants' baking skills as they advance through a series of challenge rounds.  The final baker remaining after weeks of elimination stages is declared the winner.  It's a grueling competition requiring culinary dexterity that encompasses numerous skills & techniques.  It's also a microcosm for the future of work.  In the 4th Industrial Revolution, professionals (like bakers) will need to expand their repertoire of expertise in order to acquire the digital dexterity enterprises will need to compete & win globally.

London-based Kieran Gilmurray is an internationally recognized intelligent automation expert.  He's been preaching the gospel of digital dexterity for some time, and has some dire predictions for organizations failing to heed his advice.  He joins us to share his insights, and along the way we learn why implementing a Center of Excellence is Automation 101, what the minimum ROI percentage should be to justify automating a process, and what some of the biggest disruptions will be due to digital transformation over the next few years.

Wikipedia defines Customer success as "...the business method ensuring customers achieve success, their desired outcomes while using your product or service."  If automation is your product/service, what are the keys to ensuring it succeeds for your internal and/or external customers? When digital transformation projects have a documented failure rate as high as 84%, how should you approach implementation of automation to be part of the 16% that succeed?

For answers we turn to Balaji Uppili, Chief Customer Success Officer at GAVS Technologies, one of the leading global IT service providers for midsize enterprises.  As the man tasked with assuring GAVS clients get the desired outcomes they demand, he's developed critical insights on how to increase their odds of success.  He shares some of his accumulated wisdom with us, including why cost reduction shouldn't be your most important measurement of success.

Is conversational AI all it's cracked up to be, or is hype eclipsing hope when it comes to deliverables?  Has the gap between expectations and reality grown so wide that disappointment is inevitable, both for end-users and enterprise decision-makers?  Or have the majority of chatbot vendors simply been targeting the wrong use cases, inadvertently leading their customers to insurmountable dead ends?

One man with a clear-eyed vision of the market opportunity uncluttered by misconceptions about the technology's potential is Kevin Collins, Founder & CEO of Charli.ai.  Following GE Digital's acquisition of his IoT company Bit Stew, Kevin set out to build a personal AI Chief-of-Staff front-ended by a chatbot.  With Charli.ai recently emerging from stealth mode, Kevin joins us on the podcast to explain why despite expert predictions falling short about conversational AI's advances he's still enthusiastic about the technology; why front-end conversational interactions must never exceed back-end automation capabilities; and how CIO's should approach conversational AI implementations.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has divided AI's evolution into 3 distinct waves.  Currently, we find ourselves in the 2nd wave, dominated by machine learning and big data.  The 3rd wave however, is nearly upon us, and will allow AI to go from learning and perceiving to reasoning and possibly even generalizing.  The ability to generalize is AI’s holy grail.  Though rarely mentioned by its name – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – it’s often depicted in SciFi movies and books.  DARPA predicts that next-generation methods will be required in order to achieve AGI.

Peter Voss is the man who coined the term AGI and is one of the field’s foremost thought leaders.  Peter joins us on this episode to discuss cognitive architecture, a theory of computational structure he advocates for, and which he believes is our best path to an AGI future.  We chat about a number of interesting subjects, and along the way learn why the very nature of cognitive architecture may eliminate the problem of bias in AI, why conversational AI is the killer app for cognitive architecture, and why the Turing Test isn't very useful for appraising a machine's intelligence.

Some of you were introduced to automation in school, or at work, or perhaps even by a family member or friend.  Our guest on this episode began his automation journey in the US Marine Corps.  Corporal Dwayne White's first automation project involved "digitally transforming" a manual process done on a Xerox typewriter into a far more efficient solution done on a PC. From there, he progressed through successive levels of technical & executive responsibility, until reaching his current position as VP of Technology Automation at LPL Financial Services.

As the largest independent broker dealer in the country supporting nearly 17,000 financial advisors, technology plays an outsized role in LPL Financial's success.  Dwayne was instrumental in leveraging automation to power LPL's growth, both as a hands-on techie and as a manager.  He shares some key insights with us in this episode, and we learn how automation mitigates risk for LPL Financial, the specific kinds of processes LPL automates, and why you shouldn't look at automation as a replacement for your staff.

Perhaps you've heard the famous African Proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go with others". Our guest on this episode has gone far, but he's also gone pretty fast. Yousuf Khan has been CIO for a number of high-profile startups, a couple of them quite notable in the automation space.  His talent and vision led him to those roles, but his networking and outreach allowed him to excel.  Now as Partner with an early stage venture capital fund, he advises both CIOs and startups on how they can work together to bring next generation innovations to market.

We learn quite a few insights from Yousuf in this discussion, including when it's better to use artificial intelligence versus automation, how IT executives can prepare themselves to become CIOs, and why the CIO Group Therapy Dinners he started have not only led to better CIO decision-making, but better features in technology products.