Every business has been disrupted by the digital transformation, says Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri. With that disruption is an explosion of valuable data. “That data has value,” says Neri. “Enterprises are looking to extract that value much faster than ever before because people who can get inside faster will win. We see that as a massive opportunity.”
Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discussed how the explosion of data, especially with the advent of 5G, is causing companies to invest in new technologies like AI and machine learning in order to extract maximum value from their data. Neri was interviewed by Fox Business at Davos 2019:
Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity
We live in an incredible time. Every business has been disrupted by the digital transformation. Occuring with that disruption is the explosion of the data we are creating. You just made a comment that data is the new oil. We say that data is the new currency. That data has value. Enterprises are looking to extract that value much faster than ever before because people who can get inside faster will win. We see that as a massive opportunity.
We are coming out of 2018 which was very strong. We saw an increase in spend in IT which was driven by security, more compute capacity, as well as storage capacity around this data. Also, we see the spend moving in a different direction. For example, new technologies like AI and machine learning to extract the value of the data. We see good momentum. Obviously, we see some signals for a little bit of slowdown. However, a little bit of slowdown doesn’t mean everything is going to stop. It’s actually still very strong.
Companies Are Digitizing Their Enterprises
I see companies putting more money into deploying new architectures like cloud and mobility. We live in a mobile-first approach. Companies are digitizing their enterprises making their enterprises much more efficient with this new technology.
Basically, they are moving faster than ever before. So we are actually very optimistic about the future. That data will continue to outpace the compute power which means that money will be spent in catching up with that need to process all of that data in real-time.
5G Accelerating the Digital Transformation of Every Industry
There’s obviously going to be a big investment in the telecommunications space to lay all this infrastructure. 5G actually favors the movement of data which means it is going to accelerate this transition and digital transformation of every industry. Last year at this event we talked about the Industrial Revolution 4.0. 5G will enable that because everything will be connected, everything will ingest data, and everything will process data.
We are very optimistic about the future of spending and the transformation of the business using this new technology. We think we are well positioned for the future and I think we have the portfolio to compete and win.
Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says HPE President
Dr. Rand Hindi says that without emotional intelligence machines will never be able to obtain human-like artificial intelligence. Reminiscent of Data on Star Trek Next Generation, Hindi says that despite the impressive ability of machines to learn from other machines and to solve logic problems better than humans, most decisions humans make are actually emotionally driven and machines simply don’t have an emotional IQ.
I want to talk to you about the reason why I believe that human-like artificial intelligence is never going to exist and what that means for the future of work. Artificial intelligence is the ability to reproduce human behavior in a machine. That’s it. Take what a human can do intelligently, put it in a machine and you’ve got artificial intelligence.
Within AI you’ve got one type of way to achieve this which is called machine learning. The idea of machine learning is that you’re effectively teaching machines to reproduce the behavior by giving it examples. It’s a little bit like a kids book where you have pictures of animals and the name of the animal is written and then after seeing a few pictures of horses your kids know how to recognize horses. It’s exactly the same thing in machines.
Machine Learning is a Very Big Deal
Machine learning is a very big deal because up until now when you wanted to automate something a human had to first understand what was going on, then sit down and program a machine to do that. Automation was limited to what humans were able to understand. With machine learning all you need is data collected from what you’re trying to automate and the machine does everything else. You no longer need a human expert in the loop.
Within machine learning there is one type of algorithm that’s called deep learning. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning which is a branch of artificial intelligence and you could consider all three to be interchangeable today, but that’s going to change in the future. I don’t believe that word artificial intelligence is actually going to be used in marketing in the next few years.
Deep Learning Has Been a Huge Revolution
How have we been using deep learning? Deep learning has been a huge revolution. We see it happening for self-driving cars. We see it happening for medicine. Medicine is a very important use case for artificial intelligence because we have today AI that can diagnose x-rays or MRIs better than humans can.
You’ve probably heard about Alexa, the voice assistant from Amazon. This is one of the fastest growing consumer products ever. Rumors are that one in six Americans uses that. This was not possible before because deep learning was not enabling us to talk to machines as naturally speaking.
Is AI Getting Out of Control?
Let me tell you about the world champion playing against Google’s artificial intelligence at the game of Go. The game of Go was considered to be extremely complicated for an AI to beat because the number of different combinations meant that the only way for a machine to beat a human is to actually learn how to play the game. We thought this was still ten years in the future. The way that they made this work was really interesting.
They took one artificial intelligence and they made it play against another one. So one was playing the white side, one was playing the black side, but the trick is that every time one of the AI played a move the other one gave it feedback on that move. By mutually reinforcing each other by playing millions and millions of games, eventually they learned how to play the game better than any human.
At the time, when they played against a world champion the world champion won one out of five games so this was amazing. But people felt a little bit reassured, they were like a 20 percent chance of surviving AI that’s still not bad! However, the same AI kept on learning. Today, not a single human can beat that AI at a single game. But there is more, there is a new version of this AI that beats that AI that beats every human at every game.
When I saw that I was like, oh my god, this is just getting out of control, this is getting out of our hands. But what you need to understand is that everything I just talked about, however impressive it is, is still something that is called narrow artificial intelligence. Effectively, those machines are able to do one thing, perhaps do it better than a human, but they’re only doing this one specific thing. The AI that played the game of Go that was a breakthrough, but it doesn’t know how to do anything but play the game of Go.
Machines Will Never Have Emotional Intelligence
Now people are working on something that’s called general artificial intelligence. This idea that a machine could solve any logical task, that it could reason, that it could transfer the learning it had from something to something else. This is major because if you can have a general form of intelligence and reasoning then potentially machines could do anything that seems like intelligence.
But this is still not what you see in movies. What you see in movies is a very human-like artificial intelligence. It’s not just reasoning and logic, it also includes the ability to emotionally connect with humans. So artificial human intelligence is really this combination of logical intelligence and emotional intelligence. It’s IQ plus EQ. If you only take IQ into the equation you don’t end up having human intelligence.
Why is emotional intelligence important? It’s a way that as humans we can solve paradoxes. A paradox is a mathematical problem for which there is no logical solution. If a machine is not able to have emotional intelligence it will never be able to solve logical traps, which means as humans we can use our EQ to find traps for machines that have very high IQ.
You might be thinking that machines are building emotional intelligence as well. We see all those amazing robots, people develop feelings for those robots as well. However, I believe that you will never have true emotional intelligence in machines.
EQ First Requires Artificial Consciousness.
Emotional intelligence first requires artificial consciousness. They will also need to feel emotions. This is very different than pretending to have emotions. It’s very easy for me to learn that when someone is smiling that person is probably happy and it’s very easy for me to smile back. But hey, I can be smiling but it doesn’t mean I feel happy right now. There’s a big difference between perception of emotion, between display of emotion and feeling emotions.
We know that humans who don’t feel emotions are incapable of making decisions on a daily basis. They can do math, they can solve mathematical puzzles, so they have very high IQ potentially. But if you ask them what they would like for lunch they cannot answer because there is no algorithm to answer that question. Given that as humans most of our decisions are emotionally driven. Let’s be honest, we use the data to back it up but we make emotional decisions mostly. A machine that doesn’t have an emotional intelligence will never be seen as a human-like type of intelligence.
What I’m trying to get to here is that yes, you will have an AI that has an IQ of five billion and yes every logical task is potentially doable by a machine, but humans will have the monopoly on emotional intelligence. Humans alone will be able to do emotionally driven tasks and so rather than think about machines replacing humans we really have to start thinking about humans and machines working together.
How can we leverage the horizontal emotional intelligence of humans with the powerful mechanical logical intelligence of machines? Rather than try to build an AI that replaces humans completely, why don’t we start building an AI that actually works with a human in a very natural and very intuitive way.
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.
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.
SAP CEO Bill McDermott, in a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg talked about enterprises moving to the cloud, competing with Oracle’s new autonomous database, competing with Salesforce, and its huge business in China:
SAP Has Taken Over the Enterprise Database Market
Do you have a major move to the cloud? If legacy companies haven’t fully invested themselves in the cloud where they’ve converted their revenue streams more to cloud than on-premise I think you will see them make bold moves to get cloud-ready. No choice, that’s where the customer wants us.
We obviously have taken over the enterprise database market with HANA. HANA has many of the characteristics that you mentioned (referencing Oracle). HANA can take data from any source, everything that is either structured or unstructured and data from any source in the enterprise. HANA is running the biggest enterprises in the world now with 25,000 customers at mass scale. We like our HANA database very much.
It’s All About the Customer Experience
We see a fourth-generation of CRM where we go beyond the current market participants. Basically, they focus on sales, marketing campaigns, things that essentially take money out of the customers pocket. What we want to do is focus on an omnichannel ecommerce world where we connect the demand chain because our customers are social, mobile and on the run. They shop in every channel, direct to consumer, wholesale, retail. We want to connect that demand chain to the supply chain so that we have a complete end-to-end business.
Why is this so important? We are not just talking about CRM, we are talking about customer experience. The way CEOs think about their brand, their products, their human capital, their customers. All of the people inside of the company have to be completely committed to the customers outside the company. This is what we call fourth-generation CRM. It’s all about the customer experience.
We’d Like to See China and the US Cooperate
The most important thing is that we get paid to run businesses and work in an environment where we let government do what government does. All government leaders have to do what’s best for their country and best for their constituents. These tariffs are obviously a serious situation. You have the two largest economies in the world with $30 trillion in combined economic firepower that right now are at a little bit at odds with each other.
It’s good, as we saw in today’s tweet, it was stated that at the G20 President Xi and President Trump will sit down and talk. That’s very encouraging to the market. Markets like certainty. So certainly we would like to see China and the US cooperate. It’s good for supply chain, it’s good for business.
China is Regarded as SAP’s Second Home
Germain engineering is highly regarding in China, as it is in the United States and around the world, but we do particularly well in China. China is our fastest growing market. We think that China is easily regarded as SAP’s second home in terms of market receptivity, ecosystem growth in China, and our long-term prospects. We think China will end up being the biggest market in the world soon.
We have the most sophisticated data privacy in the world. We acquired a company called Gigya where we have billions and billions of customer records. We protect your privacy, we don’t let customers actually engage you unless you agree that you want to opt-in on various offerings from our customers and they serve their customers. We follow the same reference architecture, the same high-security standards and cloud standards in China that we do in Europe, the United States, and every other theater in the world.
We are very confident in China in the way enterprises can serve their customers in China with high-security standards. We recently announced a very important partnership with Alibaba and that is a cloud partnership that will not only impact our growth in one of the fastest growing regions in the world.
We Are Very Diverse and Highly Inclusive
We actually have appointed in the last 12 months two women to our Executive Board, not just because they are women, but because they are great leaders. That would be Adaire Fox-Martin and Jennifer Morgan. If you look at our company we have a third of our workforce that is female and we also have a third of our leaders that are female.
We are very diverse and highly inclusive. One of the things we really enjoy is what we have done with Autism at Work and now we have dedicated one percent of our hiring to autistic folks, at least on the spectrum somewhere, to help our workforce be highly productive and diverse. That extends also to the solutions that we have. If you look at success factors, the number one human capital solution in the world, we have a business without bias mentality.
Computers don’t have bias. In the way we build the algorithms in the software they eliminate bias from the hiring process. The computer doesn’t have a bias. It looks for the best candidates and it fills an algorithm or model that the company is trying to get at. If you want 40 percent of your workforce to be diverse and inclusive, the model is built to do that for you. You don’t leave it up to humans, you let the software do the work and then the human judgment comes in at the final phase of hiring. It’s changing companies everywhere.
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.
Putting on an event, marketing an event and more importantly, measuring the impact of your event has never been easy. Enter Bizzabo, a company that is working to become the Salesforce of Events.
Recently, Tom Shelly, Product Marketing Director at Bizzabo, discussed how their cloud-based solution is disrupting the event industry:
Bizzabo Event Cloud Empowers the Marketer
Bizzabo is a cloud-based service, the same as Salesforce which invented the Sales Cloud and then we had Marketo that invented the Marketing Cloud, we came and said there needs to be an Events Cloud. Our audience is the event marketer and essentially we’re empowering that marketer to create events that are actually rewarding and impactful for the audiences.
Bizzabo is an all-in-one platform that they use in order to manage the event, in order to promote the event, and in order to execute it. But the secret sauce and the wisdom behind the platform is the fact that it allows the marketer to measure the impact of the events and that’s something that sounds standard, but no one can actually measure.
Before Bizzabo Measuring Event Success Was Impossible
We know that 24 percent of the marketing budget is invested in events, but they can’t measure it. They literally cannot tell if the event was successful. Were they able to retain customers, acquire customers, and was it because of that event? The platform provides them with a lot of analytics and statistics and insights and recommendations to become better at what they’re doing and grow their business through events that they’re hosting.
Bizzabo Software Using Artificial Intelligence
We’re providing them those recommendations and we’re at the point right now of incorporating AI and machine learning and the best technologies out there to provide all the knowledge that they need automatically so that they don’t need to do much.
It’s already a very profitable engine for many companies all over the world. We have HubSpot as a customer and WeWork and many others.
Veeva Systems offers pharmaceutical and other highly regulated chemical manufacturers a cloud-based solution to make their employees and companies be more efficient and in compliance with the vast array of regulations these industries face. Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner modestly says that “we are just helping people to be more efficient.”
Peter Gassner, CEO and co-founder of Veeva Systems recently discussed how the company is growing by “reinventing” itself:
Veeva On Target To Be a Billion Dollar Company
We laid out a goal to be a billion dollar revenue company in 2015, saying we will get there in 2020 sometime. In our recent analyst day, we let people know we are actually a year ahead of schedule. I’m really proud of our Veeva team that executed so well on our long-term plan.
Reinvention Makes a Great Company
If you step back to when we went public about five years ago and if you look at our progress we’ve almost tripled the number of products we have, revenue is up four times, and profits are up six times. What makes a great company is people that can reinvent themselves, a team that can create new products, keep customers happy, and uses success to grow the business. Veeva has done that. Certainly, Adobe and Salesforce have done that as well.
Life science is a serious business. It’s a big business, a $1.6 trillion business. It’s doing some amazing things to improve and extend human life and we are proud to be part of that. When you are dealing with human lives, there are certain regulations and process and procedures mainly to do with safety for the patient.
We Are Just Helping People to Be More Efficient
You have to follow those things and some of those procedures, unfortunately, have been on paper until Veeva got in there with the right cloud software. We are just helping people be more efficient. The people inside those life sciences companies I think are doing their jobs slightly better because they get to use this modern software technology to help them do what they love to do which is making medicine for patients.
This Veeva team can accomplish so much. We started out in the commercial side of life sciences and then we moved into the R&D, the clinical trial area. That was our second big act with our Veeva Vault and has been huge for Veeva. Now we are going outside of life sciences with a product called Quality One.
A New Big Frontier for Veeva
You have to be careful when you are manufacturing and distributing a chemical, cosmetics, consumer packaged goods, and laundry detergent. You have to be very careful about that type of stuff and they have been burdened with client-server processes and paper processes. We want to come in and modernize that and help people do better work in those industries. That is a big frontier for Veeva.
Sometimes in these industries, you will be doing a very complex manufacturing process and you when you want to change that process, a lot of that is done on paper and spreadsheets still. They haven’t automated it because there hasn’t been a good cloud-based system so that’s what we are helping them with.
No one understands startups and how to make them grow at lightning speed better than Reid Hoffman. The businessman was an executive at PayPal when it first started out and then went on to start LinkedIn. Hoffman has since invested in several quick-growing companies through his Greylock Partners.
Hoffman’s success has earned him the moniker “startup whisperer of Silicon Valley.” He also coined the term “blitzscaling,” a groundbreaking concept that allows entrepreneurs to quickly grow their companies and stay ahead of their rivals.
What is Blitzscaling?
A blitz is defined as a sudden attack or a concerted effort, and it’s those ideas that are behind the principle of blitzscaling. Blitzscaling is the concept of building a company quickly in order to serve a large market, usually a global one.
Hoffman describes blitzscaling as a form of high-impact entrepreneurship, the kind that generates a lot of jobs and affects other industries.
One of the best examples of blitzscaling is Amazon. In 1996, Jeff Bezos only had 151 employees and a revenue of about $5.1 million. Three years later, the company had 7,600 people and generated a profit of $1.64 billion. Despite criticisms and people advising against it, Bezos pushed for concepts like one-day deliveries and cloud storage and invested on these ideas. The company’s profits are not what stakeholders expected at times, but there’s no denying that the company has basically defined eCommerce.
How Dangerous Is Blitzscaling?
There are untold rewards in blitzscaling, but there’s also alot of danger and challenges. To a lot of people, blitzscaling seems to be the opposite of everything that’s taught in business school. Hoffman actually likened the strategy to the blitzkrieg campaigns of World War II. Soldiers carry only what they need, they move quickly, surprise their enemies, and emerge victorious.
Similarly, startups utilizing this strategy have to move swiftly. Therefore, they take on more risks, like getting the right people for the job. The talent or skill set a company requires changes as it grows. Employers need to pick the people who are ideal for the moment, and not someone they necessarily think will be effective once things settle down.
The need for speed also means that companies have to be willing and prepared to launch a product even if it’s not perfect yet. The goal is to be the first to stake your claim and get immediate feedback that will be used to make improvements. Business would also have to neglect certain aspects of the business. Hoffman admitted that as PayPal was growing, they ignored customer complaints and just concentrated on improving their product.
Another challenge is implementation. A big company like Microsoft can easily finance its growth, but startups have to convince investors to put money on them. Unfortunately, it’s easier to sweet talk investors if they know their gamble will pay off, and that’s not something that blitzscaling can guarantee. Blitzscaling also requires more money, and the company has to place some of its capital in reserve so they can recover from the mistakes made.
Why Do Entrepreneurs Blitzscale?
As an entrepreneur, you want tocorner the market. Blitzscaling is a great way for doing this. Being the first in the niche to scale means your company will have a “first-scaler advantage.” Other networks or companies would recognize you as the leader. Once you have established that, getting the talent and investors you need becomes easier.
Blitzscaling also gives entrepreneurs the element of surprise. By scaling at lightning speed, a brand can bypass exclusive niches and create breakout opportunities. Take into account Slack’s impressive growth. The company took bigger companies like Microsoft and Salesforce by surprise. It also gave Slack the chance to set the pace and force its rivals to try and catch up with it, which resulted in its competitors having less time to develop and implement a counter-attack.
The goal of blitzscaling is to hit the market as hard as you can and make enough buzz to draw the attention of talented people and interested investors. However, the strategy brings with it great risks so make sure you weigh that against what you hope to achieve.
Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Healthcare, says “It’s a historic time right now with whole health industry moving to the cloud.”
Peter Lee and Aneesh Chopra, former Chief Technology Officer of CareJourney, discussed how the healthcare industry and all of the cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle are in agreement on data standards that are making this move to the cloud possible.
It’s a historic time right now with the whole health industry moving to the cloud. We now have viable new standards for health data and there’s some pretty smart policy that you had a direct hand in creating. It all seems to be coming together right now. – Peter Lee
A Wonderful Opportunity to Show Leadership
The consumer right to access their health information and to make sure it’s available when and where it’s needed is really a bedrock principle that’s having an impact in all aspects of this. Physicians, health plans, and health systems are all trying to figure out how to communicate to consumers and how to use that infrastructure to better serve them through care teams and others. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to show some leadership. – Aneesh Chopra
All of the Major Cloud Providers Came Together
It was a pretty high point in my career to be on stage holding hands with my counterparts from Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle. It was pretty awesome. The idea is can we intervene in just the right way so that when health data moves to the cloud we will be in a more interoperable place. – Peter Lee
Embracing a Common Language and Architecture
The fact that we are not going to be Betamax versus VHS, that we preemptively said that the industry when it makes this move is going to embrace a common language and common architecture. I think that’s kind of a big deal. The more important thing is that none of this is going to happen on its own. We are going to have to have people participate.- Aneesh Chopra
Health Responders Currently Can’t Access Health Data
We heard some amazing stories, even from Seema Verma, the CMS Administrator, about what danger we put ourselves in when we get ill or something happens and the people who respond and try to help us can’t access health data. It doesn’t flow and it’s not liberative. It’s just something that we need to work together to fix. – Peter Lee
This is a Unique Moment
Everyone’s known this has been a challenge and it’s been a challenge for decades but the moment seems to be right. There is this transition to the cloud, there’s a regulatory clarity from both political parties that says with one voice we want open API’s with no special effort.
Frankly, a commitment from the major EHR vendors as well as the health systems and other stakeholders should say we’re willing to participate and we’re willing to work together. That’s a unique moment that we’ve got to take advantage of for the industry.- Aneesh Chopra
There is Some Marketing But It’s Also Authentic for Microsoft
The HR vendors, that whole industry, has done an amazing job over the last 15 years getting everything to be digital. Now that that’s been accomplished, an amazing accomplishment that was, we now need to get the value out of that data. Really open it up, really enable it to be the thing improves costs and improves outcomes.
For us, it’s also just a chance for Microsoft to play a positive role in all of this. Sure, there are big business opportunities, but when you think about Microsoft today and how open it is, the ethos to empower people and organizations, there is some marketing there but it’s also an authentic real thing for us. – Peter Lee
The Time is Now
The fact that there is a table that’s been set with all the key players including the EHR vendors and the cloud providers and even organizations like Apple saying let’s all agree that this is a path let’s start to get to work on, setting up clinical notes and all the other data that has not yet been run through a standards process.
That’s why I think the opportunity for everyone to participate is now. If you have use cases if you have an opportunity to know how to move your data to a more open environment the window of opportunity is today.- Aneesh Chopra
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.
The Salesforce AppExchange is where companies can find third-party applications that run on and integrate with the Salesforce platform. David Schmaier, CEO and Founder of Vlocity, a Forbes Cloud 100 Company, says that Vlocity is the fastest company ever built on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce platform.
Companies leverage Vlocity Industry Cloud apps to extend the power of the Salesforce platform.
Vlocity Has 5 Industry Verticals Built on Top of Salesforce
Vlocity is the single fastest company ever built on the Salesforce AppExchange and the Salesforce platform. The app exchange has 4,000 companies that do basically everything you can do possibly with the world’s number one CRM platform and cloud platform Salesforce. What we do is we build five industry verticals on top of the Salesforce platform; communications and media, insurance, healthcare, government, and our newest addition is the energy business. We take what our regulated businesses and we make them digital.
I came to my first Dreamforce in 2013 and I was looking around for opportunities. Some friends had built a company called Veeva, which is the biggest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and they do pharmaceutical and life sciences CRM. I came to Dreamforce to find the next Veeva and when I found was astonishing. Back then there were around 2,700 companies on the AppExchange and I saw CPQ, CGI, Middleware and Document Management, but no other industry vertical applications.
There was only one back then and yet it was the largest company ever built on the Salesforce platform and the only one to go public. You didn’t need to be a Ph.D. in computer science to figure out that there was an opportunity to build another Veeva, a bigger Veeva, which we call Vlocity.
Vlocity Transforms Industries to be Modern, Digital, and Customer Centric
We named the company Vlocity because we’re fast, but we try and we’re trying to improve the agility of our customers. A good example of this is last night we were with New York Life Insurance which has rolled out about 18,000 users of Salesforce and Vlocity in about a year and they do it all in a mobile-first way.
Before they would go in and talk to you about life insurance in your kitchen with pen and paper and now they just tap on their phone to sell life insurance. We’ve taken the whole process and made it mobile first and made it digital so they can connect with their customers in a whole new way. That’s the kind of capabilities that we provide for people. We call it digital, we call it agile and it’s all available now on the mobile device.
Vlocity Announces New Mobile Products
We’re announcing two new mobile products. The first is a visual studio where I can point and click and drag and drop and I can put in a companies logo and I can build high fidelity rich mobile apps and I can deploy them really really fast versus having to custom build them. We simplify the development process and allow you to point-and-click and put your colors and your branding and your logo and roll out very high fidelity mobile apps.
The second part is we’re coming up out with a new app for consumers so that when I want to browse my bill or look at my usage or add devices or buy the new iPhones that just came out I can do that all from a branded consumer mobile app that’s that comes out of the box and ready for use. We’re doing a lot of things in the mobile-first area.
Vlocity Integrates AI and Siri
I’m excited about Salesforce’s big announcement this week where Einstein and Siri are now best friends. We were in parallel working on these mobile apps and because our software’s all built 100% native and additive on the Salesforce platform all that great work Salesforce is doing with Einstein and Siri we get for free.
Now we can ask Siri questions about paying the bill or understanding usage or adding the new iPhone and I can do that all through the voice capabilities that Salesforce has added to the platform. The platform keeps getting better with analytics, with Einstein, now Einstein meets Siri, and we’re just thrilled to be part of this great ecosystem.
Digital marketing is changing and adidas is working to make it integral in connecting with their customers and to really change their lives in a positive way. Joseph Godsey, Head of Digital Brand Commerce at addidas, says that “The beauty is with digital is we can create relationships at scale.”
The company is reaching out and connecting with customers in a personalized way via their app that they launched last year and have recently announced major new features.
Joseph Godsey, Head of Digital Brand Commerce at adidas discusses the company’s new digital marketing strategy at Dreamforce:
Digital Brings the addidas Core Principals to Life
We spend a lot of time really listening to consumers in focus groups and through lots of studies in order to really understand what their needs are and how we can serve them better, particularly using our digital channel. It started really with our core belief as a company that through sport we have the power to change lives.
Then we asked ourselves the question if digital is a focus and clear priority for us how does digital actually bring that core to belief to life? The beauty is with digital we can create relationships at scale. We can really connect with the consumer and match their needs using digital in a way that we could never do before.
Creating a Digital Experience That’s Premium, Connected, and Personalized
When we talk about interacting with the consumer we look at how we can make a difference in their game, in their life, and in their world. We look at how we can hit home on all of those fears and then ultimately in digital create an experience that’s premium, connected, and personalized.
Premium is about inspiring love for the brand and desire for the products. Connected is about taking all the touch points that they can interact with us in a physical or in an online environment, and there are a lot, that we’re actually seamless and really interacting with them in a consistent way. Personalized, because in our brand there are so many sports to talk about, but I need to talk with you about what’s relevant for you, not what’s relevant for someone else.
I can’t just blast out a communication anymore and hope that it’s interesting for you. I need to respect the interactions we’ve had together across any touch point and make sure I bring what’s relevant to you in that particular context but also what’s interesting in terms of your profile. We really want to create that relationship that creates value and meaning that hits home on what’s most interesting for the consumer.
Announcing the Launch of a New addidas Membership Program
We have some exciting news that we’ll talk about during Dreamforce this week which is about a new membership program that we’re launching in the US and then later will expand that in other countries. It gives us the ability to really engage and hit home on what’s most interesting for a consumer. They might be looking for value, they might be looking for experiences, or they might look to actually give back and be part of broader causes. Depending on what’s most interesting to them we can expose that in our ecosystem and reward them for those interactions but also give them the chance to interact as well.
I think to be relevant in today’s world with the proliferation of brands and experiences that are out there we have to have something that’s really meaningful that consumers will come back to again and again. They have to also see how we are represented as a brand and have a way to interact and connect with that as well. We’re looking across all the experience to have something that’s sticky and makes it seamless and easy to use. If you want to buy something you can do it quickly and easily but we also make the experience a positive one.
The App Changed the Paradigm
We launched the app last year and we’ve now rolled it out in 18 countries which is a very small space of time for a massive global rollout but also expanding the features and the capabilities in the app. It’s a great example where we really tried to change the paradigm and how we develop things because when we initially launched the app we put out there a starting point, we had a very clear strategy how the app would enable us to create a connection with the consumer to be even more personalized. For instance, with the newsfeed, they can really surface what’s personally relevant for that consumer where we can talk with them about new releases and new things that are coming.
At the same time, we only launched it as a starting point, so almost like we put out the very first version of a car. We wanted consumers to give us feedback in mass. We did consumer testing to build the app extensively but when you really get it out there and people start using it they tell you what’s really interesting and what they want more of. Through that experience we realized some of the things that we might prioritize in our backlog, actually, we need to elevate some other topics that are more important to the consumer.
The adidas Digital Strategy for the Future
I think for us ultimately with our digital strategy the first part is how do we create that ever-tightening relationship that has meaning and value from a consumer perspective and really hits home on those three pillars of premium, connected, and personalized. How do you really surface that in a meaningful way?
Take something like a product description. How do we really have the product descriptions and offerings so that if you’re interested in sports we will help you find exactly the product that you need for the sport that you’re interested in? We will also educate you and bring you back at different points in time to help you find out what you need when you need it, or with an engagement program. Ultimately, like the membership program, that it has something that’s sticky, that you can give back to something, even more, you can participate in events and experiences.
For us, a lot of it’s really deepening those experiences but also exploring new technologies and new areas. Omnichannel was kind of the original wave which happened and I said it was the freight train that came past us a couple of years ago. Now we’re also looking at what those next freight trains are, whether it’s technologies like blockchain or experiencing picking up a new channel. For example, we’re working extensively with Salesforce on automation, how we can automate consumer experiences. Take something as simple as a consumer service interaction. How do I make it so easy for you, no matter if you talk with us via Messenger, WhatsApp, online, or in the app itself, that we can respond to those questions fast and easy but not have to have thousands of agents all the time on the call?
I would say the interesting complexity but also the opportunity comes from that connected sphere. How do you connect all of those different things that are relevant? If you participate in one of our communities how do we also reward that interaction through a membership program? How do we build that seamlessly into a sales or commercial experience as well? That’s really part of that opportunity and that multi-year journey that we’re on and really expanding.
Steve Stone, former CIO of L Brands and Lowes, recently discussed how retailers can use data to serve their customers better and become incredibly customer-centric:
Retail Grew Up Differently
When you think about retail, retail grew up differently. We started with stores and then we eventually added e-commerce. We were also very much notorious best-of-breed in the way we build our applications. Over time, you’ve got this technical debt where information about the customer and information about the product is stored in many different places.
When you’re trying to build an integrated seamless frictionless customer experience it’s very hard to do that if your information is disjointed. One of my favorite sayings is if the plumbing isn’t right it doesn’t matter how nice the experience is it just isn’t going to work. This is a huge challenge for retailers and it’s where technology really has to play a role, not only to combine the information but to find ways to add speed and agility to the entire process.
Data Key to Meaningful Customer Experiences
I’ve always said data governance isn’t exactly sexy but it’s it’s what really drives the ability to deliver those types of meaningful customer experiences. With the focus now today on the customer experience with the Internet of Things and with all these new technologies coming at us and especially with the advent of AI and machine learning, we now see that data has to be right, the hygiene has to be great. Suddenly, master data has become a vogue term in retail and in consumer products.
I think the biggest problem a lot of companies find is they’ve got to find a place to start. You’ve got to get that starting point. Picking an experience, an experience that you want for the customer, and then flowing back through, where are all the interaction points of data, where does it originate, and where is it getting corrupt? Cleansing that and building that one experience we’ll start you on your journey.
Be Customer Centric, Not Product Centric
After that, it’s really getting into the plumbing and understanding your data and understanding the customer. It’s always amazing when we build these great customer experiences, but they’re built more for us and not for the customer. At L Brands we always put the customer first. Be customer centric, not product-centric. How do we integrate, how do we become customer first in everything that we do?
We’re really at the point now where the technology exists to do this right. The integration platforms such as MuleSoft are really strong now that allows you to stitch together your applications plus build an extensible layer where applications can change quickly. That experience becomes one where if I’m a customer and I walk into a store and you don’t have the product I want there’s no problem. The product will still be at my doorstep the next day or hopefully that day.
Knowing Your Customer
I’m online and I want this product and I don’t want to have to wait for it to come from your distribution center in Detroit or Wisconsin. I want it and I’m in California and I get it in a couple of hours because the retailers are able to use the inventory in those local stores.
As a customer, you know me regardless of the channel, whether I came to you via the call center or whether I came to you in a store or online. You know me and that’s to me where retailers have to be. I don’t think that’s differentiating as much anymore, instead, I think that’s becoming the table stakes.
You can’t compete against the past, you’ve got to compete against what the future is going to be. I see retail changing so much from inventory, from the customer, and even the whole level of personalization that we’re trying to offer to the customer now. The customer is going to be asking for things that we would never have dreamed possible and yet in a few years we’re going to be delivering it.
The Best Retailers Cater to Their Customers
Retailers that I really admire are Costco, Lilly Pulitzer, Ulta Beauty, Tractor Supply, they have a really great connection with their customer. They cater to that customer and they’re building out technology capabilities that really allow that customer to operate on their terms, not on the retailer’s terms, and I just think that’s so powerful.
Is artificial intelligence going to replace our jobs? That’s the question a panel of experts discussed at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference. James Manyika, Director of the McKinsey Global Institute, says that about half of all job tasks and activities are going to be replaced by AI. Are we facing a jobless future?
When we think about AI, first it’s important to recognize that this is actually an extraordinary time and we’ve made so much progress in AI in the last five years or 10 years, much more than the last 50 years. Of course, these questions about work become very important to us. Rather than start with jobs, we should think about activities and tasks because what we all do is actually composed of tasks and activities. In fact, if we take any of our occupations they’re made up of a variety of tasks that we do every day and AI and other automation technologies are starting to be able to automate those tasks.
We’ve looked at something like over 2000 activities and tasks that make up what people do in the economy and you look at what’s now possible to automate based on AI and automation technologies, you very quickly come to the conclusion that it looks like it’s going to be possible to automate close to about half the tasks that people do. That’s a lot, but it’s important to recognize these are tasks, not jobs because any job also constituent activities.
If you then take this task view and then you try and map it back into occupations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks about 828 occupation categories. If you map these back to those occupations, you suddenly realize that about 10 percent of occupations look like they have nearly 100 percent of their tasks that can be automated. Approximately 60 percent of occupations have about a third of their constituent activities that can be automated. That means that many more occupations are going to be augmented by technology than will be automated away.
It’s natural to wonder, so are we facing a jobless future? We concluded with the research that we’ve done that yes, of course, there will be jobs lost, but there will also be jobs gained, and also jobs changed. In some ways, the jobs that are going to be gained and changed are probably a much larger number. So do I worry about a jobless future, I actually don’t. That’s actually the least of my worries.
Salesforce Co-founder & CEO Marc Benioff announced at the Dreamforce conference a new partnership with Marriott that is going to bring the power of artificial intelligence into the hotel room via a phone app. This new Marriott app will connect directly with a Salesforce Einstein powered customer database that knows the customer’s preferences and will be accessible via Siri and other voice recognition platforms.
Marriott Using Salesforce Technology to Reinvent the Hotel Experience
Every company has to rethink who they are in the fourth industrial revolution. This includes Marriott, that’s why Arne Sorenson is here, the CEO of Marriott, and you are going to see in the keynote a whole new vision for the future of Marriott. All the technology, everything they need to do to connect with their customer in a whole new way via Salesforce.
That includes the ability to check into a Marriott with your digital key right on your phone, and then the ability to talk to Siri and order your favorite sandwich. In the Salesforce customer database, we will know you want a turkey sandwich and we are going to bring it to your room. Then if you tell Siri to lower the lights and put the room temperature to 67 degrees the lights go down and the temperature adjusts.
Salesforce Einstein Radically Empowering the Customer
How does it know, where does it get all the data, how does it have the customer background, it comes from Salesforce, we’re the backend. This is what the conference is about, helping these incredible people, our trailblazers, know how to build these systems. We had to build something amazing first. This isn’t voice recognition that we did. We had to build something called Salesforce Einstein, the number one artificial intelligence platform in enterprise applications. We now are doing billions of Einstein transactions every day giving the ability for our customers to radically use artificial intelligence to make them more productive and smarter about their customers.
We are connecting Einstein to Siri or Einstein to any other voice platform, then we take that voice recognition and we are able to move it to the database. Don’t forget, when I say I want my favorite sandwich, Siri knows what I’m saying with my voice, but then we have to take that and retrieve it or insert into the customer database. That’s the magic, that’s Einstein Voice, it is the glue, the middleware that links all the voice systems that you are using in your home and your phone with the number one CRM in the world Salesforce.
Marc Benioff Say the Economy is Ripping
The economy is ripping. There is incredible demand from customers to rebuild their systems, they’re benefitting from the tax breaks, they are benefitting from a huge economy that is growing at rates they’ve never seen before. Even here in San Francisco, our unemployment now is below 3 percent. That’s amazing!
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.
Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, recently discussed on CNBC about how Adobe is working to actually create a brand new industry focused on digital engagement and customer experience management. I thought this was interesting in that this makes Adobe a CRM company competing with the likes of Salesforce, rather than what most people think when they hear the name Adobe, a company providing creative, marketing and document solutions.
Much of this new focus will rely on their AI solution, platform Adobe Sensei, which you can read more about here.
Narayen’s expands on Adobe’s intent to be a CRM leader in the excerpts below:
We really believe that what’s happening is that every enterprise wants to in real time engage with customers. When you think about what CRM used to be, CRM was more about a record that was in a relational database. That is not as important as what you do with that customer information and how you make action out of it.
That’s where the Adobe and Microsoft partnership is so valuable because together with what they have done with Azure and the ability for people to process the data at the pace at which they want and what Adobe has done. We enable people to attract customers to your platform. We allow you to engage it. We think we’re actually creating a brand new category and industry which is all about digital engagement and customer experience management, far more critical than what a record might store.
We continue to think that content and data and how content and data come together is really where this magic happens. You’ve walked into a retail store you’re accessing an application on a mobile device and it’s all about what’s the right content that’s being delivered based on the intelligence.
I think it’s a dramatically different approach that Adobe has pioneered and I think it’s companies like Adobe and Microsoft and SAP who actually see this vision for what’s happening in the world.
Entrepreneurs today are busier than ever, working even when they’re away from the office. A good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program goes a long way in helping to keep track of client information, manage data on deals (both past and present) while still giving access to all the tools they require to stay productive.
But with more business professionals on the go, there is a growing need for comprehensive mobile CRM apps that will give them a competitive edge. Here’s a list of the top five:
1. Agile
This CRM platform can easily automate your company’s marketing, sales, and customer service. The Agile mobile app also lets users get a real-time idea of your business process, track deals and manage relevant milestones. Managing tasks becomes simpler as the app allows users to check pending items, create new tasks, manage and respond to social media mentions, start email campaigns, place calls to customers and jot down notes minutes before a meeting. This CRM app is available for both Android and iOS. While it’s free for up to 10 users, you’ll need to sign up for the Premium plan if you want more people to use the app. Price: Starts at $8.99/month/user (also offers free service)
2. amoCRM
This cloud-based CRM solution assists users in managing their sales pipeline. They can receive reports and feedback regarding the performance of other people on the team, sales analytics, email integration, and lead scoring. AmoCRM also lets users organize their contacts and deals using unique tags and customized fields. Existing customer details are also uploaded from databases like Gmail and Outlook. The app can be downloaded on any Android or iOS device. Price: Starts a $15/month/user
3. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot initially made its mark developing marketing automation tools. Now the company has brought its expertise to customer management with Hubspot CRM, widely considered one of the best free CRM apps today. Get the information you need about a client or company by simply adding a contact’s name and email address or a company’s domain name. You can also customize fields by dragging and dropping them in the order you want. Use Hubspot CRM alone or alongside the company’s premier marketing services. Price: Starts at $50/month (also offers free service)
4. Pipedrive
Sales teams will undoubtedly find Pipedrive a godsend. The CRM platform is designed around activity-based selling. The app’s primary interface allows users to stay organized and in total control of the sales process. With the Pipedrive app, you can arrange and manage your contacts and to-do lists via a simple search. Get access to your deal history, create new tasks and take down notes wherever and whenever. What’s more, any changes made using the mobile app is immediately synced to the Pipedrive web platform. The program runs on both iOS and Android systems. Price: Start at $15/month
5. Salesforce
Salesforce is the largest CRM platform out on the market today. And now the company is extending its features to mobile. Take advantage of its easy to assemble custom apps and create features that are perfectly aligned with you and your client’s requirements. The app also allows you to easily access crucial CRM information, productivity tools, and customizations anywhere. Your dashboards and reports are also on-hand whenever you need them, thus ensuring that you have everything you need to make an informed decision. Salesforce is available for both iOS and Android systems. Price: Starts at $25/month
A mobile CRM app can do wonders for your company’s productivity and sales pipeline. While the five mobile apps we listed above work well for most entrepreneurs, there are dozens of CRM systems on the market to choose from. Depending on what you need to track and how you manage your team, you may find other apps that suit you better. So do your due diligence and carefully research your options before choosing.
Cloud computing company Salesforce is reportedly working on a blockchain product. If all goes well, the San Francisco-based company might even announce the newest addition to its services during Dreamforce, Salesforce’s yearly customer conference.
The alleged blockchain product was revealed during an interview conducted by Business Insider’s Julie Bort with both of Salesforce’s co-founders Parker Harris and Marc Benioff. The interview touched on various topics before touching on the company’s foray into blockchain technology.
According to Benioff, thedecision to tap into blockchain technology was due to serendipity. The 53-year-old Benioff recounted how he was at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland when he got to talk with a participant from a crypto conference that was being held at the same time. The fortuitous conversation soon led to Benioff thinking about Salesforce’s stand on blockchain and its “strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things.”
Benioff said that the more he thought about the technology, the more it cemented his belief that Salesforce can utilize blockchain. A sudden epiphany had him realizing a way toput blockchain and cryptocurrencies to work in the company.
“A lot [these ideas] comes from paying attention, listening,” Benioff said. “There’s new ideas coming all the time.”
Salesforce’s chief is hoping that they will be able to roll out a “blockchain and cryptocurrency solution” by Dreamforce. The company’s yearly customer conference is set to be held in the City by the Bay from September 25 to 28.
Blockchain is an electronic ledger that is utilized to track digital currencies like Bitcoin. However, it can also be used in a more general role. The technology, which is becoming increasingly popular, can also track anything of value and record transactions in an irrefutable way. A lot of states are already legitimizing blockchain technology. Arizona, for instance, has amended a bill that validates data stored and shared on blockchain.
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