Intelligent Automation Radio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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