Bank of America has gone massively digital and it is now powering their growth. “We had a billion and a half logins to our apps last quarter,” says Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. “This is not theoretical. We are one of the largest digital companies. We are also one of the largest physical companies. It takes both high-touch and high-tech.”
On the consumer side, they have a branch in their pocket. Anything you can do at a branch, in the traditional banking sense, or over the phone, you can do in your app. There are 36 million digital users, 26 million mobile users who are not digital users growing at 10-15 percent a year. Sales are at the 20 percent level and 25 percent of all sales are digital. Our digital mortgage product is growing. Our digital auto product is growing. What you can do is do everything.
Half of the checks we have are deposited at the ATM and a little over 25 percent of deposits are by people taking pictures of them with their phone. It’s the exact same activity but you don’t have to go anywhere. You can do everything.
Then you have Erica. We have five million Erica users and it only started a little over a year ago. That’s where people can just talk and ask questions and it learns about you. It’s artificial intelligence voice recognition program. When you pay your bills you just say, “I need to pay X.” It will say, “You want to pay X, here is the amount.” Think about how easy it is versus writing out checks or even going into digital bill payment. The technology enables consumers to do more faster and easier.
Apps on the Institutional Side Getting Interesting Too
The applications on the institutional side are getting interesting too. Believe it or not, corporate treasurers want mobile capabilities also. With Cashpro Mobile they can initiate a $5 million wire on a mobile device while sitting in a meeting with all the controls around it and all of the foreign currency features.
To me, it was… really? But absolutely, that’s the way they want to do it because that’s the way they are used to operating.
It Takes Both High-Touch and High-Tech
We had a billion and a half logins to our apps last quarter. This is not theoretical. We are one of the largest digital companies. We are also one of the largest physical companies. It takes both high-touch and high-tech.
What have we learned? We are always a curious company and always out their learning. When we go and talk to fintech companies or observe what they are doing, more importantly, we’re trying to learn what does the customer see in that activity that they don’t see in our activity? Then we look at how we can adapt to that.
Are we interested in acquiring fintech companies? There will be no acquisitions, we just work.
Small Business Still Very Optimistic About the Economy
We do more small business than most of the people in the world. When you think about small business, what’s interesting is that the business community in the United States is very optimistic still. Even though they are not as optimistic as they were at the highest point they’re still very optimistic on a relative basis.
In our small business surveys late last Fall they are saying, “We’re going to invest more. We’re going to hire more. We can’t get people.” Those are the common themes.
I think it is a good year for investment as long as we solve a couple of key issues. We have to get the sutdown done. The incremental impact of the workers is important but it’s also just the process of getting approvals and stuff is being held up. Then ultimately the trade situation has to be solved. I’m not giving you any news, everybody says that, but it’s time to get some of this stuff done.
The CEO of Cisco says that last year they blocked seven trillion cybersecurity threats or about 20 billion per day. He says that by and large cybersecurity organizations inside of their customers are very good. But they only have to be right once, so it’s a constant ongoing battle.
Last Year We Blocked 7 Trillion Cybersecurity Threats
Last year we blocked seven trillion threats on behalf of our customers. That’s 20 billion a day. The problem is the adversary only has to be right once. We have to be right all the time. It’s the only part of our business where we have to think about an active adversary. That’s not how we think about other parts of our business.
By and large, when you look at the cybersecurity organizations inside of our customers they’re very good. But again, they only have to be right once, so it’s just a constant ongoing battle.
Solving Security Issues Deep Within Network Infrastructure
Our growth is primarily driven by organic growth. We are in a unique position as a company that’s been around for 34 years. Our core franchises are actually growth engines for the company. Whereas a lot of companies of our age they would be looking at their core franchises as the profit pools that you would invest in other businesses.
We have done some of that but we are seeing strong growth in the core franchises that we build. This is because in order to solve the security issues you have to do it deep within the network infrastructure. We are rebuilding and rearchitecting networks for customers all around the world in order to do this.
Technology is at the Heart of What Every Entity is Doing
The things that we do are the digital nervous system for the economy. Companies today realize that technology is actually defining their future strategies. Technology is not an optional cost center anymore. It really is at the heart of what every entity is doing around the world.
Technology is at a different place today relative to the strategic value to our customers. It’s been strategic, but it literally is at the heart of everything they are trying to drive now.
Technology That We’ve Build Has Created a Flat World
What we do is create this flat world that we live in. Fundamentally the technology that we’ve built over the last 30 years has created a flat world. Now we find ourselves with lots of conflicts around the world. The geopolitical dynamics are clearly complicated for all of us. Countries are just trying to find out how to deal with this technology change that is occurring so rapidly.
Frankly, it’s very difficult because governments around the world don’t have the expertise necessarily inside the government to even be able to regulate or determine what they should do. What that leads us to are very binary decisions. It’s difficult to understand how to do it surgically so I have to do it with brute force.
5G Buildout is Critical to Every Countries Future
Regarding the China trade issue, there are aspects of intellectual property. There are aspects of trade deficits. There are aspects of the view that this 5G buildout is critical to every countries future and there is this competitive race going on around the world. I this it is a bit of all of that.
My hope is we can get to a place where we can all move forward in a way that lifts the global economy again and actually allows us to begin to take advantage of some of the technology. What it can do, not only for business but candidly we are at a point in time where technology can help solve some of the biggest problems in the world. That’s what we need to be focused on.
Educating Governments on How to Regulate Technology
Our business in China is a relatively small percentage of our business still. The impact (from tariffs) has been quite minimal. What we do is just be a part of the discussion. We try to bring some logic as to what needs to be done.
We are trying to help educate governments around the world as to how should they think about regulating this technology. How should they think about data privacy? What can we do to help alleviate some of the concerns and help them achieve what they are trying to achieve while not destroying the global benefit of connectivity?
Kroger and all retailers are fast becoming tech companies and thus have the difficult task of competing with companies like Facebook for top tech talent. According to Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, one of their secrets to recruiting software engineers is the promise of more responsibility quicker than anywhere else.
In terms of the number of employees, I think you will have the same number but the skillsets will be a lot different. If you look at digital, for example, we have 500 people in our digital team. Within 2-3 years we will have a thousand. With software engineers, it is a completely different type of talent. Yes, we compete with (Facebook). It’s kind of fascinating.
It’s important for people to eat. It’s important for people to eat things they like. If you come to Kroger you are able to help people get exactly what they want when they want it. You get immediate feedback on something that is incredibly important. If the customer likes it you see it immediately. If they don’t like it you see it immediately. So you get great feedback.
More Responsibility Quicker Than Anywhere Else
I always tell people when we are recruiting them, I guarantee you that you will have more responsibility quicker than anywhere else. We have 25-year-old and 30-year-old people running $100 million and $200 million businesses.
On a couple of tests that we have going on right now, we have two interns that actually did the software work to get it in place. When their internship finished they went back to college and kept working with us to finish the project they worked on. It’s one of those things that you get a tremendous amount of responsibility incredibly fast.
The Future of Retail
I think the store will be multi-purpose. I think about one of our bigger stores. It wouldn’t surprise me if you had a small warehouse in the back of that store. You will use the same footprint, but half of it may be a physical store that is an experience space, half of it will be more warehouse efficiency space.
This is the year that many of the technological innovations that Ford has been working on will start to come out. That’s the message that Ford CEO Jim Hackett is telling the media at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit which started today. Hackett says that the vehicles of the future will be so intelligent that they could drive themselves.
Hackett indicated that many of the innovations that will start to appear in Ford vehicles will related to the Internet of Things. IoT features would allow cars to be connected with other intelligent cars on the road which would ultimately make autonomous driving a much safer feature. They could also connect to intelligent cities of the future via the cloud to improve traffic flow.
Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford, talks about technological innovations that Ford will be announcing in 2019 with Fox Business:
Ford Working on Vehicles of the Future
It’s my history to take some time, not too much time, to be very thoughtful about a very powerful way that Ford’s going to win. We are through that phase. This is the year that we start execution.
A series of announcements are staged in time for when they need to come out. That together forms what we believe are the vehicles of the future. They will be ever more intelligent and ever more fun to drive. They are so intelligent that could drive themselves.
They relate to a world that in itself has gotten even more intelligent. For the listeners, it’s called Edge Computing. For others, it’s called the Internet of Things. All it means is your vehicle and the things it has to interact with will suddenly be talking to each other through vehicle connectivity, the cloud, and the brains that are inside the vehicle itself.
This is the Year of Intelligent Vehicles
There’s a period where all this is evolving and people are going to wonder if we are getting out of the car business. Not at all. It’s just the adoption of all this kind of performance changes what the vehicles can do. We’ve been hard at work mapping all that out and thinking all that through. This year you are starting to see some pieces of that come forth.
New Ford Investors Focused on New Technology
The market has begun to see these new technologies as attracting outside investors. There’s news in the last three days of people buying into artificial intelligence drive systems and of people putting money inside other car companies. It’s all about them investing in this new technology.
Ford is probably even more attractive to people like that because of how run the company is and how well architected the vehicles are. There’s not as much risk in that part.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg says that 5G is much more than just your typical mobile network speed improvement. 5G is a transformative technology that will power the Fourth Industrial Revolution and dramatically change society in the process. Like the three Industrial Revolution’s before this one, the innovations that are enabled by 5G are what will define this technology advancement.
Last year Verizon launched the first 5G network with 5G Home. There is so much to come from 5G this year and the years to come. 5G will change everything. The pace of technology change that we have seen in the last decade has been fast. The only thing we know for sure is that the pace of change is going to be faster in the future. We are going to see technology changes that are going to transform people, businesses, and society.
We are facing multiple challenges on this earth, our daily work life, things around us, climate change, and we are heading into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Think about all of these challenges and the Fourth Industrial Revolution together with 5G. Together with all the new technology acronyms like VR, AR, AI, and more. All of that together is really what we are talking about when it comes to the technology change that is inevitable that we are going to see in the future.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution Will Be Built on 5G
For us here we are on the cloud. It’s really to see that we are using this change and shape it in a direction that is actually transforming and doing good. The next area of technology advancement is going to be built on 5G. Most importantly, this is a different industrial revolution. The first one was the steam engine. The second one was electricity and the third one was digitization. All of them have a general purpose technology as a base. Then you innovated tremendously on it.
The steam engine, of course, on steamboats connecting continents, trade resulting. Electricity changed everything. Then of course, with digitalization that brought out all the PC computers, the internet and all of that. These were enormous transformations. The general technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is actually the total connectivity that 5G can bring. That’s what I see as a huge opportunity for all of us and our society to use in the next era of technology transformation.
5G is a Quantum Leap Compared to 4G
So what is 5G? 5G is a promise of so much than just an increase in wireless technology. From the beginning we had the 1G, the 2G, the 3G, and then the 4G. They were sort of leaps of differences when it comes to speed and throughput. When we think about 5G we think about 10 gigabits per second for throughput. We think about 10x improvement in latency. We think about 1,000 times more data volume to the network. It’s just radically different. It’s a quantum leap compared to 4G.
We have already done some real type of examples. We had an Indianapolis 500 driver that had blacked out windows driving extremely fast with 5G. Latency was so low you could actually drive it.
https://youtu.be/Dw2GT95Vyxc
Those type of things require innovation. Innovation requires a lot of different people and constituencies working with us. When I think about technology I also think a lot about how that can do good for our society. We are entering an era of more challenging things around the world and technology is one of the most important things that can transform it and make it sustainable. At Verizon, we call that human ability. We coined that word because we think about the human in the middle of technology to do right.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
When I think about 5G one of the big differences when we started developing 5G it was thought about giving a new type of solution for industry and for society. Ultimately consumers will have it. The capabilities of earlier wireless technology usually have speed and throughput assets as a different capability. We have eight capabilities in 5G. I call them the eight currencies.
The Eight Currencies of 5G
With the eight currencies of 5G you can do a service on them, you can monetize on them, you can build on them. This is very different than any previous wireless technology. There’s the Peak Data Rate and Mobile Data Volume, but it’s also the Mobility. It’s also how many Connected Devices that you can have. It’s Energy Efficiency and Service Deployment. And then, of course, it’s Reliability and Latency. There are eight currencies that 5G can give to the user. Whether it’s a device, a person, or an industry, that depends on how we are going to innovate on that.
It’s important that we have already started on a journey. Verizon started years ago to start building a network because you need a lot of fiber and you need a lot of dense networks to build these eight currencies. You need real estate to do mobile edge compute. Not only that you need spectrum. In some cases you need millimeter wave spectrum that is giving you enormous throughput and bandwidth.
Peak Rate and Thoughput
What I’m excited about is what innovation can we do on this currency? Let’s talk about the currencies that we have here. The Peak Rate and the Throughput are extremely important when it comes to doing things with speed. The first thing that comes to mind is how quickly can you download a movie on 5G. Today on 4G it takes 3 to 4 minutes with a 90-minute movie. It’s going to take you 10 seconds when you have ultra-wideband. So that’s a use case, but that’s really to limit yourself with what you can do with it.
There’s so much more that you can do when you have that type of Speed and Throughput. It’s a quantum leap compared to what we have today. It’s about rethinking how you can use the increased speed and throughput when you talk about speed at 10 gigabits per second and throughput probably 1000 times more than today. I’m excited about those two currencies, but there are other currencies.
Mobility and Connected Devices
Two other currencies are Mobility and Connected Devices. Mobility or mobile connections, that’s how it’s actually measured in speed. In a 4G network today you can basically capture a radio signal up to 350 kilometers per hour. In 5G it’s roughly 500 kilometers per hour. Why does that matter? Think about high speed trains. Think about things that are going to move extremely fast in the future that are going to bring efficient transportation. With 5G you can captures that.
When it comes to IoT and Connected Devices, one of the limitations of wireless technology today is that you can roughly connect 100,000 devices per square kilometer with 4G. With 5G you can do 1 million. Suddenly you can have massive IoT in order to transform big cities, industry, or behaviours where we need to address challenges that we have today. These two currencies are also very different and address different business cases.
Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency
Let’s talk about two other currencies or capabilities, Service Deployment and Energy Efficiency. Service Deployment is a little hard to explain, but what it’s really about if flexible service deployment where you can match your software with specific customer needs. Think about if you want to do a virtual classroom with five different cities and you want them to have the same software. Today on the 4G network that would take me weeks or even months.
The promise of 5G is that can go down to minutes where we can spin the new service based on the software demands of the customer. These are enormous changes. We just need to think how can we innovate on that?
Now there is of course Energy Efficiency. Here the world is facing the challenges of climate change and our industry needs to think about all of the equipment we are using and that everything we are using is improving how much CO2 we are doing. There are a lot of things coming out but we just need to continue and we need to do that collectively.
5G is promising to reduce up to 90 percent of the power usage that we have with 4G. This is about making the Fourth Industrial Revolution a positive change. The first and second industrial revolutions produced a lot of CO2 emissions because they were the steam engines and electricity. Here we have a chance together to actually power and uniquely address those two as well.
Latency and Reliability
The last two currencies are Latency and Reliability. On the latency side today in the mobile networks we can get to 100 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds. In 5G we will go down to 10 milliseconds. Why is that important? Everything realtime, AR, VR, needs to come down to at least 20 milliseconds in order to avoid delays. There are so many other use cases you can do as well.
Latency and Reliability are very important in the network. It comes down to how we can innovate. It’s just so dramatic how much difference with what you can do things with 5G than with the previous technology cycles.
AT&T CEO John Donovan slapped down recent 5G criticism by Verizon and T-Mobile at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Those companies and some others have criticized them saying AT&T is “slapping 5G stickers” on upgraded 4G phones. They say it is misleading and confusing to consumers and is damaging to 5G in the long run. Donovan says that is really just not the case.
John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, discussed criticisms related to 5G marketing and how 5G is going to radically reshape technology in the future in an interview by CNBC at CES in Las Vegas:
They Are a Little Wounded by Our Success Last Month
The fact that we have beachfront property inside their heads makes me smile. But that’s really just not the case. If you think about the history of our industry, the top part of that phone has always given an indication of the network information. In the early days, the number of bars told you where you were coverage wise.
Then when you were paying per megabyte you’d look to see where to get a Wi-Fi network. That’s always been the information that was available to customers about what’s going to be available and what can they do.
For us, it was a natural evolution. We announced two years ago at this show, actually in 2017, that we were going to do this. The fact that we did it and then all of a sudden our competitors have decided that they’re upset by it, I think that they’re wounded a little by our success last month.
AT&T Bringing 5G to Dallas Cowboys AT&T Stadium
In December, just last month, we launched the first 5G mobile version that’s standards-based, you can buy a device and you can get on the network for 12 cities. The first part of this year we’re going to roll out in another seven cities. So we’re well down the path. We’ve been announcing some of these use cases that we’re doing with businesses.
Just this morning we announced we’re going to work with the Dallas Cowboys to get 5G into AT&T Stadium and Rush Hospital in Chicago, where we’re going to try to transform healthcare inside the provider hospitals. and so we’re really excited about the opportunity to continue marching down this path.
5G is Going to Radically Reshape Technology
The 4G network itself was really the epicenter of the 4G revolution which was the device itself. As you think about how it comes together though, each of these generations, the network, the device, and then the applications, have to come together. Sometimes you get those things timed perfectly. Sometimes one is ahead of another. At the end of the day, the consumer benefits are going to arrive when all three of them come together at the same time.
What’s different about 5G is not just that the network is more powerful. We always think of it as a real-time network. It’s also that we’ve been getting calls from customers in advance that say I’m going to do a new architecture or a new design on something that you’re going to see on the CES floor.
It’s going to radically reshape the size of goggles, for instance, for virtual reality. It’s going to change how you would architect an autonomous car. So this is different because these things are going to happen and come together much more quickly than they did during the early days of the iPhone and the evolution of the 3G and the 4G network.
Asked about subsidizing phones again or subsidizing something else to help aid the 5G rollout:
Possibility of Bringing Back Phone Subsidies
That’s a TBD. I do think that when you build a long term relationship with a customer and that relationship is expanding it does give you some degrees of freedom to say we’re going to help you with the economics of this or help with the economics of that. It’s a TBD.
I’m not trying to shy away from the question. I think that there’s a possibility that you could get back into subsidies of some sort. Today, what customers appreciate with us is they have the ability to get HBO or music so that they get some added benefit with their traditional network.
“We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world,” says Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President of the SAP Cloud Platform. “We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.”
Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World
We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world. We strongly believe that hybrid clouds will play a major role in the coming years. If you also follow what the hyper scalars are doing, Amazon was the last one to announce an on-premises hybrid support model. We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.
We announced partnerships with IBM and ANSYS already and there will be more coming. We’re totally committed to the multi-cloud strategy driving the kind of choice for customers that they demand. But then what we’re more and more focusing on is business services and business capabilities. It’s about micro services as well. It’s really about business functionality that customers expect from SAP. We are an enterprise solutions company.
It’s Really About No Code and Low Code Environments
With our broad spectrum of 25 industries we support all the lines of business within a corporation from core finance to HR to procurement, you name it. We are focused on a high level of functionality that we can expose via APIs and micro services on a cloud platform to allow customers to quickly reassemble and orchestrate customer specific differentiating solutions.
There is no other company out there in the market that has the opportunity to really deliver that on a broad scale worldwide to our corporate customers.
That’s where we’re heading and that’s where we’re investing. We’re working on simplifying the consumption of all of this. It’s really about no code and low code environments. You need to be able to plug and play and not always force people to really go down into the trenches and start heavy coding.
SAP Embedding Machine Learning Into Applications
Beyond that machine learning is all over and on everybody’s mind. What we’re doing is making sure that we can embed machine learning capabilities deep into the application solutions. It can’t be that every customer needs to hire dozens and even hundreds of data scientists to figure these things out.
The very unique opportunity that SAP has is to take our knowledge in business processes, take the large data sets we have with our customers, and bring machine learning right into the application for customers to consume out of the box.
RPA is a big topic as well of course. We believe that 50 percent of ERP processes you can potentially automate to the largest part within the next few years. We are heavily investing in those areas as well.
Focused on Security, Data Protection, and Privacy
Especially if you think about the level of connectivity and companies opening up their corporate environments more and more, clouds being on everybody’s mind, and the whole idea to make access to information processes available to everybody in the company and in the larger ecosystem at any point in time from anywhere, of course, that raises the bar that security has to deliver. So it’s a top of mind topic for everybody.
There are a lot of new challenges also from an architectural perspective with how these things are built and how you communicate, We have a long-standing history as an enterprise solution provider to know exactly what’s going on there. There’s security, there are data protection and privacy that companies have to comply with these days. I think we’re well positioned to serve our customers needs there.
The average consumer is inundated with hundreds of ads every day. Advertisements have gotten so prevalent that they have become just white noise to most shoppers. This is why personalization is now more crucial than ever before. If your ad is not customized to show what a particular shopper wants, then your offer is as good as invisible.
LinkedIn intends to change all that with its Dynamic Ads.
How LinkedIn Dynamic Ads Work
Dynamic ads are essentially banners that change automatically. Also called dynamic banners or dynamic creatives, they adapt promotions and content to suit a specific user. This ensures that each user or customer sees ads that are targeted to their needs.
Numerous companies have used dynamic ads to great success. Facebook has also been pushing these ads on its platform. Now LinkedIn is also offering its clients the same.
Ayusman Sarangi, LinkedIn’s principal product manager, announced in September that Dynamic Ads will be made available through their Campaign Manager. He added that LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has also made it so that all the network’s vital advertising formats are available through self-service.
Companies can run four types of ads on LinkedIn’s Dynamic Ads campaign:
Content Ads: Helps you generate leads by prompting and encouraging users to download your content, which is only through the platform’s sales representative.
Follower Ads: Designed to encourage consumers to follow you, making it quicker to build a following on the platform.
Job Ads: These connect possible applicants to your site’s job application page.
Spotlight Ads: Used to promote events, newsletters, products, services, etc. These ads send traffic to your chosen landing page or site destination.
Once you have decided on the kind of ad you want, you can start your Dynamic Ad. First, you go to the Campaign Manager and click on the Create Campaign button. This is found on the page’s top-right corner. Next, Select the Dynamic Ads option. You can create the name of your new campaign on the following screen. Afterward, you’ll need to decide whether to place your new marketing campaign in a new group or place it in an existing one.
Select your preferred language after putting a name to your campaign and choose the format you want based on your campaign’s goal. There are preset texts available but you can opt to make a customized one. You can also choose whether to show the user’s profile image. It’s a good idea to enable this feature as the profile picture will help to grab the customer’s attention.
Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Dynamic Ads
Personalization is crucial in reaching customers, and dynamic ads are a very efficient and effective way of delivering personalized messages. Here are other ways your business can benefit from this type of ads:
Creates FOMO and Pushes for Immediate Action
Dynamic banners can give consumers real-time information. This creates a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) among shoppers and emphasizes the importance of acting immediately. Plus, showing that you understand the user’s preference proves that you know what they want. In turn, this helps pave the way to a better customer experience even before the shopper makes a purchase.
People Prefer Dynamic Content
Shoppers these days, especially the younger generation, prefer Dynamic Ads to the traditional ones. For one, people are generally more receptive to personalized messages that are tailored especially for them. Customized messages also cut down on the unwanted or intrusive ads. Sarangi says that their Dynamic Ads have resulted in twice the Click-Through-Rate of traditional ads. These ads can also help cut down on cart abandonment. The creative ad that appears could remind you of an item that you wanted to purchase previously but had forgotten about. The ads also allow businesses to improve the customer’s familiarity with the brand. This can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Saves Your Team Time and Resources
Dynamic ads are very efficient. Marketers would only need to design their creative and write their copy once. The platform automatically does the rest of the personalization for the campaign. Pre-built templates make the creative more streamline while data mapping tools provide more customization.
Easily Track Data and Results
Marketers are often concerned with the kind of data their latest campaign will acquire. But a lot of your target audience’s information is already online. Dynamic Ads, however, make it easier to monitor and track their key data. Platforms that have Dynamic Ads, like LinkedIn, also offer analytics and data mining services. The latter is essential in personalizing Dynamic ads. LinkedIn uses member’s profile photo, job title, name, company information and job title to capture the shopper’s attention.
You get more bang for your buck with Dynamic Ads. The highly personalized messages will instantly capture a consumer’s interest. It’s also more affordable and profitable than traditional ads. Brands only pay for ads that were seen.
The CEO of Walmart Doug McMillion says that the company has a lot of work going on to change the company. He says that the company is becoming more digital and is changing how they work from within to get faster, more nimble, and adapt to what’s happening in retail. McMillion is a real advocate of change within the company, pointing out that what has happened to companies like Sears can happen to us too.
Doug McMillion, CEO of Walmart, recently discussed how Walmart is becoming more digital and is adapting and changing in order to compete and improve the customer experience:
Changing How We Work to Get Faster, More Nimble and to Adapt
We’ve got a lot of work going on to change the company. The company is becoming more digital and we’re changing how we work from within to get faster, more nimble, adapting to what’s happening in retail. Those plans result in lower costs. We’ve been lowering prices for customers and we need to keep doing that. We’ve got to build this ecommerce business in a way where it delights customers all the time. We’re improving in many areas as it relates to that.
Then kind of the magic of Walmart is how we put it all together. Grocery pickup has been really great for us, we’re learning how to do deliveries. There’s a lot in front of us in terms of what we control and what we can do and that’s what we’re focused on. There’s a transition going on and change that is happening inside of all businesses and across industries. It’s certainly happening within Walmart.
We’re Learning How to Put Automation in Place
We’re learning how to put automation in-place like floor cleaners that are autonomous, and also an industrial robot with a camera on it that’s looking at the merchandise in the aisle so we know where things are. It’s learning how to communicate with a device that goes up and down the aisle that checks to make sure that things are in the right place, that they’re priced right, looking to see if we have inventory above if it needs to be pulled down, and helping us as associates do our jobs better.
I think over time automation will reduce jobs, there will be a period of disruption, but with our turnover in retail, we can manage through that. We want to train people, upskill them so that they can learn to do new things. As this change is happening now we’ve already seen new jobs like personal shoppers emerge, we’ve got about thirty thousand personal shoppers in the United States now that are picking grocery orders in the stores for pickup.
Grocery Pickup Business has Grown a Lot
One of the most popular things we’ve got right now is a grocery service where you can order on your mobile app, pick a time slot and on your way home from school with the kids swing through and we put it in your trunk and you take off. That business has grown a lot and there are people that now have new jobs creating that order for you. Folks come out to the car, put in the trunk for you, talk to you for a few minutes, and that’s gone really well.
What I really think will happen is we’re going to find new jobs, delivery jobs, and jobs related to customer service in the stores. We want to improve the environment the stores, we want our fresh food presentation to be better, we want our retail presentation to be better. We will redirect some of those positions towards that.
One Constant at Walmart is Change
The truth is after learning from so many people, a little bit from Sam Walton, David Glass, Lee Scott, Mike Duke, and the leaders at Walmart. We know that retailers come and go. Businesses grow and they don’t change enough and they decline over time. Retailers do that on a bit of a faster cycle so we got a healthy paranoia and always have.
If there were a group of Walmart associates around here right now and we asked them the only thing other than our purpose and values that are constant at Walmart they would fill in the blank with change. We adapt, we learn, we learn from competition, we focus on the customer, we’re always changing.
People Are Rethinking What Walmart is as a Business
I carry an app that’s got the top-ten retailers by decade back to 1950. There are company’s on here, TG&Y, E. J. Korvette, the rise and fall of Sears and others. It’s just a reminder that this can happen to us too. Part of what I do within the company is trying to make a case for change, point to a strategy and a vision for our associates.
We’ve got great people and they rally and move and change. It’s now happening at an accelerated rate inside the company causing people to rethink what Walmart is as a business and it’s really exciting.
Cloud adoption is just in the very early days says Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block. He says that over the last few years we’ve been in a perfect storm of cloud and mobile and data science and artificial intelligence coming together that have given companies the opportunity to reinvent themselves and reinvent their business models. Block says that this has been an incredible wave and a global phenomenon of digital transformation.
Keith Block, Salesforce co-CEO, discussed the global phenomenon of digital transformation in an interview on CNBC:
Cloud Adoption is Still in the Very Early Days
I believe we’re in early days. Salesforce will be celebrating its 20th anniversary very quickly and we’ve had a meteoric rise. We’ve been the fastest enterprise software company and in the top five software companies in terms of growth to $10 billion. We just gave our guidance to $13 billion and we’ll do $16 billion for next year. But cloud adoption is just in the very early days.
Incredible Wave, Global Phenomenon of Digital Transformation
What we’re really seeing right now is this incredible wave, this global phenomenon of digital transformation. Over the last few years, when you think about this conversion, this perfect storm of cloud and mobile and data science and artificial intelligence, these amazing technologies that have come together, it’s given companies the opportunity to reinvent themselves and reinvent their business models. I think classically of a company that is a B2B company that now wants to become a B2C company and that’s where Salesforce really plays beautifully in terms of getting closer to that customer.
MuleSoft Completes the Wave of Digital Transformation for our Customers
Specifically on MuleSoft. A great example is really having the holy grail of the 360-degree view of the customer, where you have information about the customer, where you can personalize the experience for the customer, where the customer feels like they are personally engaged with the companies that they do business with. MuleSoft is an amazing integration technology and we’re very lucky to have it. It really completes the wave of digital transformation for our customers in the sense that it’s allowing you to unlock data from any source.
Cloud Brings the Ability to be Agile, Nimble and Flexible
Think about decades of legacy data that have been built up and built up and built up and CEOs want to know how do we access that legacy data in a very agile and in a very quick fashion so we can serve it up to our systems of engagement? That’s why the marriage of Salesforce and MuleSoft has really become very compelling for CEOs all over the world. At the end of the day what the cloud brings you and what we bring at Salesforce is the ability to be agile, to be nimble, to be flexible, and actually bring something we refer to as a beginner’s mind. Completely taking a step back and saying, how do we reinvent, how do we innovate, how do we go quickly?
You can move, because of the technology that’s available today, far more quickly than you could in the age of the legacy system. It starts with that, bringing a point of view, speaking the language of the industry, understanding that talking to a bank is different than a telecommunications company. These technologies apply in different ways. Those are very fundamental than what you see with some of the legacy technology companies that are still using the same motion.
CEOs Must Commit to Digital Transformation
The second is it’s all about trust and making sure that you have a trust-based relationship with your customers. The third thing that I would tell you and I think is very very important is that we live in a world today where because of that convergence, that perfect storm of technology, we now have this global phenomenon called digital transformation. The most important aspect of that is the commitment from the CEO. The CEO has become and must be become the Chief Transformation Officer.
Digitalization is not something that’s coming, this is something that already exists, says Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. He says that 25 percent of their sales are done on digital. Moynihan says his goal is to bring the whole banking system to the digital age to make it more efficient for customers.
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America CEO, discussed the digitalization of banking and much more during an interview on CNBC:
Digitalization is a Big Boon for Everybody
Digitalization is a big boon for everybody in a sense in that you can continue to provide better service for the customer and take the cost structure down which then can pass through to the customer. The way to think of all this work on a consumer side is that we have 26 million mobile customers, 25 million digital customers, about 1.5 billion logins last quarter. This is not something that’s coming, this is something that already exists. About 25 percent of our sales are done on digital.
Digitalization Improves Service and Reduces Costs
All this is extremely important in how we run our franchise. What that has done for the customer is give them better services on their time, the way they want to do it, 24/7. At the same time, it reduced our operating costs so we can take out overdraft fees on point of sale debit, ten years ago now almost. What allowed us to afford that was to change the operating structure. That makes this very good.
Small banks and larger banks are participating in digitalization. We helped small banks to drive digital payments. The volumes are growing 100 percent per year for us with that and across the board.
Bringing the Whole Banking System to the Digital Age
The goal is to bring the whole banking system more and more to the digital age and make it more efficient for the customers. The key is that on the commercial side it also goes on. Everyone talks about consumers, but on the commercial side, the same impacts going. CashPro Mobile, a product we have, is up and operating very efficiently. When you think that a treasurer of a company would sit down at their desk to do an interface to send it, they want their mobile interface because that’s their daily life. It’s all good for all of the companies.
The digital transformation which has been powering the growth of many technology companies in the US is now starting to drive growth globally according to Box CEO Aaron Levie. He says that Box has a global opportunity where multi-national enterprises want to drive the same digital transformation that has been happening in the US.
Aaron Levie, Box CEO, discussed on CNBC how the digital transformation is key to driving Box’s growth globally.
Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth
As our business gets more seasonally loaded toward the back end of the year as we sell to larger and larger enterprises. That’s what ultimately drives a much higher billings growth outcome in Q4. We continue to move up-market serving larger enterprises like major top ten banks, pharmaceuticals, life sciences companies, as well as the federal government and global manufacturers. That’s what’s driving that surge in Q4 billings and growth rate.
We have a global opportunity where large enterprises, especially multi-national enterprises, want to drive the same digital transformation that we’ve seen in the US. That means everything from changing their business processes to collaborating and working in new ways which leads them to need platforms like Box and other technologies. We are seeing incredible growth in markets like Japan, Canada, Australia, and throughout Europe.
Our Partner Model is Critical to Our Success
We are working with major partners like IBM and other system integrators to be able to reach and enable customers. We are working with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, as well as a much broader ecosystem including companies like Slack, Okta, and others, to ensure that when customers want to modernize their IT environment Box is the system of record for the data and content that they work with.
Partners are core to our strategy both from a technology standpoint to ensure that customers have an integrated experience with their information technology investment as well as helping us actually reach those customers from a distribution and sales standpoint. Our partner model is critical to our success.
We Are Building a Fundamentally Open Platform
Our fundamental belief is that in the digital age enterprises are going to need a platform to help them secure, manage, govern, and drive the workflows around their core business information. That is what the platform is that we’re building. Whether it’s financial documents, digital assets, a pharmaceutical company with their drug trial information, or an ad company with their ad campaigns, we want to be the platform that helps them manage and secure that data.
We will have to work with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others to ensure that the technology that they’re investing in can link to the data that customers store within Box. We are building a fundamentally open platform and whether that is linking up to the artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others are building or the common applications that we use every day we want to ensure that Box can connect to all of those applications so that you can have one source of truth for your data but integrated everywhere.
Salesforce is booming and the reason is that virtually every company in the world is going through a huge digital transformation, according to Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. “The reason why is every company that we’re dealing with is going through a huge digital transformation and every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer,” says Benioff.
Marc Benioff, co-Founder, Chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently discussed the companies latest financial results and explained how the digital transformation is powering their continued massive growth in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Fastest Growing Enterprise Software Company of All Time
We see hitting our big goal which is $22 to $23 billion in revenue within two fiscal years. By fiscal year 2022. Now here we are we’re giving fiscal year 2020 guidance for the first time at $16 billion. Salesforce remains the fastest growing enterprise software company of all time and that’s incredible. I don’t think the company has ever been stronger or been in a better position.
These revenue numbers are incredible and way beyond our expectations for the quarter It’s awesome. We had a great quarter, the third quarter was phenomenal. We’re giving phenomenal guidance for the fourth quarter and certainly, we’re all praying and hoping to improve on that by the way and now we can see a strong fiscal year ahead in fiscal year 2020 as well.
Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends with the Customer
I don’t think the company has ever been stronger or been in a better position. The reason why is every company that we’re dealing with is going through a huge digital transformation and every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer.
Just look at one of the largest deals we did this quarter, it’s a nine-figure deal with one of the largest banks in the world and they’re just rebuilding how they deal with their customers. That’s an amazing story for us just to see everybody go through this transformation. It’s everything that is customer facing for one of the top five financial institutions in the world.
Another one that I can give you the actual name for that is doing something just as exciting is Citibank. Michael Corbat has done a fantastic job as CEO of Citibank. We’ve been working on the retail transformation there and this quarter they opened the door for us and now we’re doing the wealth transformation as well. We couldn’t be more excited about everything that Citibank is doing.
Every Company is Transforming Their Customer Relationship
Every company is transforming their relationship with their customer. We’re going from a world where if you don’t have a digital one-on-one relationship with your customer you’re just not going to be that successful. You can look at some of the huge successes that we’ve had in the quarter. One of the stories that I love is Uber. Uber has a tremendous need to have a relationship not only with you the consumer but also with the driver and their own internal operations. As we’ve been able to improve our relationship with Dara Khosrowshahi and other executives in the company, we’ve seen them really transform their relationships with their customers.
Apple has been a great opportunity for us, we’ve worked on that for so long. Of course, we all use our Apple products all the time at Salesforce. Now we have a strategic alliance with Apple and we’re encouraging our customers to do what we do which is take their information on the road. All of our products work natively now on iOS. We have the ability to automate every enterprise around that incredible platform and we see customers doing that.
ServiceMaster Building a 360-Degree View of the Customer
Another great story during the quarter was ServiceMaster. This is a company that has a lot of brands such as Terminix and many others. This is a huge field service operation but it’s also the integration of their call center, their contact center. They’re trying to build a 360-degree view of the customer, so of course, you’re working with their technicians in the field and they need to have a strong institutional memory of you back in headquarters. That’s a digital transformation that is so exciting for so many companies where they protect their homes.
Who’s Not Going Through a Customer Transformation?
We’re the largest and most important CRM company in the world. We’re number one in CRM by market share and revenue and by revenue growth. It’s a big industry and all the players are doing well because every company is going through this customer transformation. Who’s not going through a customer transformation? Everywhere I go in the world this is happening and it’s been going on and it’s not going to stop anytime soon.
It’s about sales, it’s about service, it’s about marketing, it’s about commerce, it’s about analytics, it’s about applications, it’s about good building community, or in the case of one of the great customers that we have, DuPont, it’s about integration. We had this fantastic acquisition this year, MuleSoft, the ability to integrate everything together. This is so important for us and so many of our customers.
The CEO of Accenture North America, Julie Sweet, says that they are still seeing a very continued big focus by companies on digital transformation. The problem is that there are not enough workers with the right skills. Sweet believes that the US should not only upskill current workers through training but should also pivot our educational system for the jobs that are going to be created in the future.
Accenture just opened a new Innovation Hub in Seattle which will create 300 highly skilled technology jobs by the end of 2020 and expanding its U.S. apprenticeship program. The apprenticeship program provides under-represented groups greater access to innovation-economy jobs. Accenture’s national program will grow to more than 150 apprentices by the end of this year, building upon the success of the company’s apprenticeship programs in other cities, including Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, and San Antonio.
“Our investment in Seattle ensures that we have the critical talent and capabilities to help our clients create, implement and scale solutions for the digital economy,” said Sweet. “We are an innovation-led company, committed to helping this important market continue to grow and flourish as a tech destination.”
Accenture’s innovation hub in Seattle is part of a network of U.S. hubs including in Boston; Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; metro Detroit; Houston; New York; metro San Francisco and metro Washington, D.C.
Julie Sweet, Accenture North America CEO, discussed the current digital transformation and the need for companies to be creative in filling the current 6 million job openings on CNBC:
We Are Still Seeing a Big Focus on Digital Transformation
Companies are spending more on cybersecurity every year and unfortunately, the breaches keep happening. We expect right now that this to be a very fruitful career for many people for a long time and we’re seeing it in our business also. We have a $2 billion business today, growing double digits. People being hired are everything from people out of high school or in two-year degrees to much more sophisticated people that are doing advanced threat intelligence.
What we are seeing is still a very continued big focus on digital transformation. Companies are saying there’s a lot going on in the market, there’s a lot of disruption and we’ve got to find the ways to cut costs in order to invest to become a digital business. If you think about it, half the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 no longer exists today and so the real way to succeed is to become a continuous innovator. They either merged or they went out of business. The key to innovation is accessibility and it’s no longer Silicon Valley, it’s around the world.
Lots of Tech Job Opportunities for Those Without 4-Year Degrees
There are also a lot of opportunities now for two-year degrees. In fact, we now have an apprenticeship program where we have a 150 professional apprentices with two years or high school degrees working in tech jobs. We’ll have 300 next year and we see that as a real opportunity for the US to do mid-career reskilling and to close the skills gap as well as bring people who’ve been left behind.
It can be a mistake to go for a four-year degree for some people. I would go back to a parents advice to their children in terms of what are the kinds of jobs that are going to be created and what are your interests?
Accenture North America CEO Julie Sweet earlier this year elaborated on what the country should do to find workers skilled in digital, cloud, and security:
There Aren’t Enough Workers with the Right Skills
It’s not so much that there aren’t enough workers, it’s that there aren’t enough workers with the right skills. If you look at unemployment today there are about 6 million jobs open and there are about 6 million people looking for jobs. They don’t have the right skills.
One of the things we’ve been focused on at Accenture is reskilling our own workforce as we have pivoted our business to where our clients need to go which is around digital, cloud, and security. There’s been a lot of industry discussion about the need to invest and really both upskill our current workers and pivot our educational system for the jobs that are going to be created in the future.
The CEO of WW (formerly Weight Watchers) described the company as a ‘technology experience company’ with an incredible human-centric overlay. In September 2018 Weight Watchers announced their rebranding to WW in order to make it clear that they are digitally relevant and focused on health and wellness, not just losing weight.
Mindy Grossman, CEO of WW, recently discussed the companies technological and brand transformation on Bloomberg (video):
We Truly Are a Technology Experience Company
What people don’t understand is that we truly are a technology experience company with this incredible human-centric overlay. If you look at our 4.2 million members, they are all engaged with the assets we have in our app. That’s nutrition, activity, mindfulness with the integration of HeadSpace, our new rewards program, and very important is our digital community which is so powerful.
What we have said is our goal especially with this move as the undisputed leader in weight loss to now wanting to become everyone’s partner in wellness. If you have Amazon for shopping, Netflix for entertainment, Spotify for music you need WW as your wellness partner. If you look at just what the tech and product teams have accomplished this year in building a true health and wellness ecosystem that people can have with them 24 hours a day, it’s been very powerful.
WW Focusing on Technology Integration
We just moved into our new offices in San Fransisco which really reflects who we are as a tech and product team. There are so many avenues of work that are happening right now. Again, if you just look at the last year. We launched FreeStyle which is the most efficacious program in the company’s history for eating. We launched FitPoints 2.0 which took the science similar to what we do in nutrition and used it for customized activities. We are Aaptiv audio fitness within our app and we also integrated Headspace for content.
We are very excited about our rewards program which has been in the works for a year. It doesn’t reward you for spending money, it rewards you for what you do on behalf of your health and nutrition. We are already seeing an increase of 20 percent of nutrition tracking and 80 percent of activity tracking.
Digital Community is the Heart and Soul of WW
Then Connect Communities just launched in Canada and is going to be rolling out to the rest of the world and that’s for people to be able to find and inform. We have a whole universe of activations that not only will be able to happen between now and the end of the year but also into 2019 when we really do the big brand relaunch.
In 2010, Freshworks started as Freshdesk with a dream to make a dent in the world of customer support. The company has grown exponentially since then, moving well beyond customer service offering products that compete directly with Salesforce and others…
By necessity, from their humble beginnings in Chennai, India eight years ago, Freshworks brought an innovative sales and marketing approach which enabled them to compete globally immediately.
Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham recently discussed in an interview on ZDNet how Freshworks disrupted the global SMB business model:
What We Really Have is a Business Model Disruption
What’s different with our approach is that you have to really understand the US model or the Silicon Valley model of scaling a SAAS business. It’s not suited to serve the long tail of the global SMB. The model is dependent on going upmarket and selling to the enterprise because when you actually have salespeople and the territories are shrinking and you want to grow in revenues you really want to go upmarket and close those million dollar deals or 350k deals.
What we really have is a business model disruption where we are able to serve the long tail of the global SMB profitably. To understand this you have to probably look at the only other company that I can think of is Atlassian, which also started off outside the valley. When that Atlassian IPO happened I’m sure you also saw along with the rest of Wall Street in Silicon Valley on how different the economics of the model was.
The Flywheel Effect
Even though Atlassian didn’t have a lot of SMB customers, their highest price point was $8,000. Even Walmart paid them their $8,000 one-time fee. I think what Atlassian shows you is a glimpse of a different model where you call it the flywheel effect, where a lot of teams just buy the software off the web and then you grow through land and expand inside these companies. That is the closest model that I can tell you.
Because we started in Chennai, India about eight years ago, we did not have any customers in Chennai and we didn’t have many customers in India for that matter, so we were actually from day one we had to go global. Our first customer came from Australia. When we had six customers we had them from four different continents. When we had 70 customers the average that a customer was paying us was $30 a month. The average revenue per customer was $30 a month in 2011.
Fundamentally a Different Business Model
We were really starting from the SMB, then we started building more products, expanding our product plans, expanding our portfolio, offering customers more features to get them to upgrade, or add more agents or try other products. I think what we had is fundamentally a different business model of acquiring customers online and selling profitably to the long tail of the global SMB.
What helped us was like the tailwind that we rode, in hindsight, I can tell you were all the SMBs actually going through this digital transformation. SMBs did not have the budget 13 years ago to go spend a hundred thousand dollars for on-premise software. Today, they can put on their credit card $100 or $200 a month and actually buy software. We were probably at the right place and at the right time in terms of bringing that software to them and being able to sell to them globally from Chennai.
Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri says that 5G is moving very fast and will have massive benefits for consumers. Suri also believes that Nokia will see benefits from the 5G rollout because of their end-to-end portfolio.
“Our strategy is to benefit from the end-to-end portfolio that we have which is going to be critical to 5G because 5G is not just a step change from 4G, it is not just a radio technology,” Suri noted. “It is a change of the end-to-end architecture.”
Rajeev Suri, Nokia President, and CEO discussed 5G and how it will impact Nokia in an interview this morning:
5G is Moving Very Fast
5G is moving very fast. It started in the U.S. in this second half. After that, we will see activity in South Korea, Japan, and China during next year, also Europe at the back end of next year, some Middle Eastern countries and also Nordic and Scandinavia is starting to happen in 2019.
Our Strength is Our End-To-End Portfolio
Our strength is that we have an end-to-end portfolio. We are the only ones that have an end-to-end portfolio at scare and are operating in all countries. We did talk about some pricing pressure in regards to some customer situations in Q2 that have already reflected in our Q3 numbers. Overall, the pricing or the competitive intensity have not worsened or changed in the last few quarters. It is somewhat stable.
Our End-To-End Portfolio is Going to be Critical to 5G
Our strategy is to benefit from the end-to-end portfolio that we have which is going to be critical to 5G because 5G is not just a step change from 4G, it is not just a radio technology. It is a change of the end-to-end architecture.
First, it’s time for us to benefit from our end-to-end portfolio after the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent. Second, we have a strong growth rival in enterprise and we’ve established a new enterprise business group and we’ve been growing at 18 percent a year in that business. Of course, with some of this software where we’ve had good growth in the quarter at 4 percent, which is a stand-alone software business at scale. For us it’s all about driving this end-to-end, benefitting from 5G as well as enterprise and software. Our distinction, first of all, is the installed base and second is this end-to-end portfolio.
5G is Going to Have Massive Benefits
5G is going to have massive benefits, is going to have a lower cost per bit, and huge capacities for consumers. It’s going to have reliability in performance to enable all kinds of enterprise users; manufacturing, ports, transportation, energy sector, and a lot more. We’ve been getting a lot of technical first in setting the pace with that which is the benefit of our end-to-end portfolio.
Cutting €700 Million in Expenses
We believe the ones that win in this industry discipline cost management is a key competitive advantage. We are trying to get ahead of the curve and we will not slow the pace of change. We haven’t talked about the magnitude of the actual headcount numbers but we have said it’s €700 million. We have to work on headcount numbers country by country. Some of it is headcount and some of it is digitalization and automation to drive productivity.
At the recent Salesforce Dreamforce conference, Salesforce announced Einstein Plus, a visually improved no-code version of their artificial intelligence platform. Prior to announcing this new product release, Ketan Karhanis, SVP & GM of Salesforce Analytics discussed why AI insights are potentially transformative to businesses who have the guts to trust them.
Ketan Karhanis, SVP & GM, Salesforce Analytics at Salesforce talks about the need for smart analytics in businesses in order to drive better actions:
Technology is Simply an Enabler
We must be clear about one thing, technology is simply an enabler. Real transformation requires trailblazers. We live in a time of tremendous technological change with lots of good stuff happening AI, AR, voice. This is not about the technology, it’s simply about you. The single biggest question is how does all this enable your success and what does this mean to you?
You all know the world of business applications, such as sales, service, marketing, you know this world very well. Then there’s the world of analytics, some call it visualizations and some call it reporting,. No matter what you call it it is important because it’s crucial to see what is happening in your business and why.
AI and Analytics Need to Come Together
Now we have AI, the game-changing power of AI insight. What does that mean? Now we can get a glimpse of the future. We get predictive and prescriptive, very exciting technology. But are you going to be swivel chairing three different boxes, three different logins, different stats for everything, one stack for ML, one stack for visualization?
That’s probably not going to be fun because here’s one simple thing we need to realize, these are not three separate boxes they are facets of the same experience. AI and analytics need to come together and they need to be infused in your business applications.
You Need Automated Discovery
What you need is not just a digital experience but an intelligent experience where analytics is built right in and if done right analytics becomes invisible but you get the benefits of it, and the benefits are pretty spectacular. We are drowning in data, lots of data everywhere. Making sense out of millions of data points in sub-second speeds to derive insights, that’s kind of hard, our brains are not really wired to do that.
You need automated discovery. Automated discovery helps you discover the story in your data and the intelligent experience comes built with automated discovery. Insights have to be outcome focused.
You Need Smart Analytics that Drive Better Actions
Of course, you need charts which tell you about the past, but you need recommendations and explanations. You probably don’t need yet another dashboard which tells you what happened. You need better outcomes for the future and you should not settle for incomplete. From visualizations to predictive to prescriptive you need it complete in one experience.
You need smart analytics. AI stands for actionable insights because an insight which does not lead to an action is just a dumb chart. That’s why connecting to the business process is key. Insights need to drive better actions.
You need to be able to leverage your existing teams and bring them to this new world of no-code AI, of a completely different way of interfacing with your insights. AI’s role is amplifying your effectiveness, it’s about augmenting your skills but how will you trust it. That’s why accountability is key, transparency is key, and you need all of this.
The CIO of Verizon Business Markets, which is Verizon’s small business segment, says that “We have to humanize technology.” What Rajeev Chandrasekharan is talking about is Verizon’s push internally to modernize the customer experience and to make it less frustrating.
The Verizon Business Markets CIO says that they are modernizing and becoming more customer-centric with the help of Salesforce CRM and other tools. Their goal is to ensure that the customer’s concerns and information follow the customer, regardless of who at Verizon the customer is speaking with.
Our industry is seeing a lot of need for transformation and if you really look at it there are three different pillars. One is we’re engineered for scale and not for speed to market. We do something well and we are big and now that whole equation is changing with needing to get to the market quickly with products. The second aspect is we’ve been around for a while and use different kinds of technologies and we need to refresh them so we need to start using some of the cooler capabilities that exist.
Lastly, there’s a lot of pressure on us with all the other industries, the digital unicorns, trying to provide this amazing customer experience and it’s not good enough now just to provide service or be a commodity. The intersection of those three needs is creating a need for a huge digital transformation.
My role here in Verizon Business Markets is while we launch new products try to build digital business and try to leverage all of this technology and customer experience while we penetrate newer customer segments.
Verizon Business Markets in the Midst of a Digital Transformation
Generally, when you do a digital transformation there’s a lot of work and a lot of investment and the question companies always have is how much is it worth to go change everything that I’ve done? Luckily for us since we have multiple business units we pick the small business unit and said we see a tremendous potential here for new products and for penetration of the market so the investment is well justified. So go, do not compromise on things, drive this digital mobile first omnichannel thinking to the extreme and build something that’s like a beacon for all the other business units to follow.
We’ve taken this to a place where revenue is going to be generated and when you have a promise of being able to grow the top-line it’s easy to justify all the work that goes into it. The other aspect is we’ve got a lot of buy-in from the top on trying to do things differently, so we’ve tried to put together a few rules of how we want to operate. We call them the big rules. Then build on that, where we’re trying to make sure the whole organization is saying, don’t fall into the trap of doing things the old way and make sure we focus on these big rules. Culturally and then opportunity wise Verizon Business Markets, the small business segment, becomes a fantastic place to try out this concept and we’re going all-out.
This is a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation
This is a customer-centric digital transformation. We started with the customer, we looked at the product research, we looked at the capabilities and then we decided what platform we wanted and what processes we can change. We also challenged ourselves by saying that we need to break our own rules and do something different. For example, if you’re going to get into a house differently and you can’t get to through the window, you can’t build another door, you can’t break in and you have got to use the key, then different about it? We challenge ourselves to break those rules.
That customer in mindset is what we are struggling with and that’s the one thing I would say that we didn’t have, the digital native aspect, the customer-centric aspect as much. We have that in our service, in our network, and in our products, we have amazing stuff. When we top it off with this we’re going to be in a good place.
We Have to Humanize Technology
I think we have amazing products and services so innovation is constantly going to happen there. The two things that I see is operations are going to become digital with artificial intelligence and those sort of new age technologies, which is very important for you to be competitive in the marketplace or you’re not going to survive against your competition. Then, the most important thing is the way you go to deliver capabilities to a customer.
We have to humanize technology. The customer is basically saying what do you think, what do you say, what do you do, and we then turn it into some garble technology talk. We need to operate as a digital entity and make the customer feel like we as a company are doing one-on-one personal services for you in think, say, and do.
We’re giving you intelligent recommendations, executing your orders, and we are communicating with you effectively. That is going to almost take you back to the olden days of manual stuff which were one-on-one but without the human and instead with technology. That is the sweet spot for us going forward.
When you think of Clorox you probably think about bleach and consumer products. However, from a business operations and marketing perspective, you might be surprised to discover that Colox itself is undergoing a multi-year transformation with the goal of becoming a digital company.
We were doing digital, but we have to go to being digital. In the past, we’ve been doing digital marketing or doing e-commerce and we realized we really need to be digital, meaning the company needs to be organized around and operating in a digital way end-to-end.
Digital is About Changing the Way We Do Business
That led us to realize is that for us digital is not just a channel and a technology, digital fundamentally is about changing the way that we do business. Digital for us is about changing the way that every function in the company operates, leveraging the possibilities of digital technology.
We have efforts across the whole value chain of the company, how we do R&D, how we do product supply, how we do marketing and sales, and a program that’s funded and built into our three-year long-range plan across every sector of the company to digitize and change how we work.
Goal of Digitizing is to Improve the Consumer Experience
We then decided we have to have a North Star, why are we doing that and to what end are we digitizing the company? For us, that end is to improve the consumer experience. Digital transformation is changing how we work across the whole company in service of improving our consumers’ experience.
What this is about at the core is about becoming more radically consumer-centric and human-centered. Companies like Clorox, most CPG companies, we are very consumer oriented, but we’ve typically been very brand-centric. We’re very organized and our thinking is very much around our brands.
What is the Goal of the Consumer?
Our brands are critical and they’re the unit of value for Clorox, but we’re trying to put the consumer much more at the center. Who is the exact consumer or the persona who we’re designing around and what is her goal?
If we take one of our brands, Renew Life, it’s a probiotic, that consumers goal is not to buy Renew Life, her goal might be to enhance her wellness. What is the consumer’s goal, what is her journey to that goal and what are the pain points or difficulties along those journeys that we can help with?
Becoming a Helpful Part of the Consumer Journey
We’re trying to shift our mindset from how do we sell our brand or product to how can our brand help the consumer along this journey. That includes products but it could include other things too. It’s about their whole end-to-end experience and moving from being product and brand centered thinking to think about an end-to-end experience along a journey to a goal. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.
I think in the next three to five years this is going to really come to fruition. What we’re going to be able to do for our consumer, to move them along their journey, to enable them to reach their goal and our ability to help them and our ability to grow our business while we’re helping them do that is really exciting.
It’s the enabler and the catalyst of change, it is the glue that binds everything together. If you look at the most constant thing in our lives it’s our mobile phones. We’re sitting on a 95% mobile penetration rate and 60% smartphone penetration, according to We Are Social.
Your Digital Transformation
You need a strategy, you need optimization, measurement, tactics and time. All of these are very important for your digital transformation. I believe that through my many years of sitting with customers, and especially with marketers, we’re losing our way a bit. We are becoming obsessed with the new and we are overwhelmed by the pace and how quickly things are moving around us.
At the same time, we’re using tactics instead of strategy. We as marketers need to go back to the basics in order to get us future fit for tomorrow’s realities.
The Rise of the Connected Marketer
It’s not anything new, you probably should know this because it’s the underlying principles of marketing. The future marketer is going to be a conductor of Technology, creating seamless experiences, really a symphony of technology and experiences for our customers. This is going to be the future.
What is a connected marketer? The more connected devices we have in our lives the more constantly connected we are. The more constant connection we have, the more we go into a state of connectedness and the more we are in a state of connectedness the more our behavior is changing. That is what we call the connected individual. They are attracted to connected brands and this leads to the rise of the connected marketer.
We’re living in the age of ubiquitous connectivity where we’re always constantly connected. This is the reality of what’s happening today. As devices inside the homes become more prevalent and we embrace IoT, the Internet of Things, this is a big drive for the connected marketer. As we go about our lives we switch seamlessly from our digital selves to the physical world that we live along with.
Call it what you want, the Internet of Things, the Internet of intelligence, the Internet of me or the internet of everything, but as IoT starts growing and advances and is evenly distributed, we are going to collect so much data.
Our Mobility is Changing the Way We Think and Act
The knowledge that you are living in a state of a constant connectivity is more important than the means of connection. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the fact that you’re constantly connected as your digital self. If we look at our young generation, the younger the consumer the more digital connections they have. But we need to understand that there is no difference for them with physical and digital.
The smartest brands in the world know this to be true. It’s so true what Mark Pritchard said, “When 5 billion customers shift their habits, you shift with them.” When our behaviors change, we need to change with our customers.
Today, we have the ability to be a shopper, connected consumer, connected patient and connected passenger.
The Connected Marketer Meets the Needs of the Connected Individual
The most important thing to remember is that the connected marketer creates, develops and maintains a brand that understands and meets the needs of the connected individual and much more.
Three are four human dimensions of a connected marketer. They merge physical, digital, emotional, and sensorial brand experiences. The first one is building understanding. As marketers we know we need to build an understanding, but most of the businesses fail because they don’t understand their customers’ needs and what needs they need to fill.
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