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  • We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO

    “What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI,” says Scale AI’s 22-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang. “AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars.”

    Alexandr Wang, Scale AI co-founder and CEO, discusses how his company has built the data platform for AI that enables safe and reliable autonomous vehicles. Wang was interviewed on Bloomberg Technology.

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Autonomous Vehicles

    What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI. AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars. I think it’s very exciting that all these companies have really incredible technology and it’s getting better and better every single year. We’re really getting closer and closer to solving the problem. 

    One of the big problems in machine learning is perception, being able to fully understand the environment around you using machine learning. So we process a lot of image data, LIDAR data, radar data, map data, etc. for some of these companies. Then for other companies, we process tax data or tabular data or speech data. The work we do is critical to building safe autonomous vehicles, for example, because without the data that we’re able to provide to these companies they actually wouldn’t even be able to build algorithms that could perform in any manner that is safe and reliable. 

    AI Is Really About Augmenting Humans With Technology

    AI is really about augmenting humans with technology and making them more effective and more efficient using technology. In particular, I think for a lot of the problems that we work on where AI plays a really critical role in self-driving or medical imagery, etc., you really want to make sure that humans are a part of the process to ensure that these systems are performing very safely and reliably. 

    One view that we really take in is, how do we solve this in the most tech-enabled way as possible? How do we use as much machine learning and technology on our side to make the process as efficient and high quality as possible? That’s a very differentiated view actually. Many of these other efforts are much more human-powered than technology powered.

    You Don’t Need a Degree To Be Able To Accomplish Your Goals

    I was really lucky I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but after high school, I was lucky to be able to come out here to the Valley to work as a software engineer. That really exposed me to a lot of these problems where AI and machine learning are really core. I went back to school for a year and then after that year at school, I dropped out and started this company.

    I think if you know what you want to do, more and more these days, you don’t need a degree to be able to accomplish what you need to do. I think people care a lot more about what can you accomplish and what are your skills.

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang
  • Walmart Testing Self-Driving Delivery Vans, Says Gatik AI CEO

    Walmart Testing Self-Driving Delivery Vans, Says Gatik AI CEO

    “Our partnership with Walmart is a huge validation that commercialization and scalability of autonomous vehicles will happen in the B2B short or logistic space,” says Gatik AI CEO Guatam Narang. “Our autonomous vehicles will be moving goods for Walmart from one of their dock stores to their neighborhood markets in Bentonville, Arkansas. Think of our solution as filling the gap. We call it the middle mile. It’s hugely underserved and it’s a huge business opportunity for us.”

    Guatam Narang, co-founder and CEO of Gatik AI, discusses their partnership with Walmart to test B2B self-driving delivery vans near their headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Narang was interviewed on CNBC:

    Walmart Launches Self-Driving Delivery Vans

    Our partnership with Walmart is a huge validation that commercialization and scalability of autonomous vehicles will happen in the B2B short or logistic space. That’s what Gatik focuses on. Both of the companies are very excited about this. Gatik is focusing on scaling and commercialization of the autonomous vehicle technology. Think of our solution as filling the gap. We call it the middle mile. It’s hugely underserved and it’s a huge business opportunity for us. 

    We believe that while operating the vehicles back and forth on known routes we can over-optimize our algorithms to perfect these routes. This is a much more constrained environment. The promise of autonomy can be realized sooner than B2C delivery applications or other applications of autonomous driving technology like passenger transportation. With our application, we are focusing on introducing these vehicles without safety drivers before a B2C delivery application or a passenger transportation application does the same.

    Autonomous Vehicles Moving Goods From Docks to Markets

    We are actually the first company that is working with Walmart for this particular use case. What that means is we are not delivering anything to the end consumer. Our autonomous vehicles will be moving goods for Walmart from one of their dock stores to their neighborhood markets in Bentonville, Arkansas. With some of the other companies that Walmart is working with the focus is more on B2C deliveries.

    Our focus is to move goods between businesses in an urban environment. The whole idea is let’s not try to change end consumer behavior. Let’s try to bring the promise of autonomous vehicles to businesses and help them save on operating cost in the near-term future.

    Gatik Is Focusing Their Driverless Tech On the Middle Mile

    Gatik is focusing on the middle mile. It’s filling the gap between long-haul trucking and the smaller sidewalk delivery robots. The middle mile is the most underserved segment of the whole supply chain. It is also the most expensive part of the whole supply chain. The reason to focus on this middle mile is to help our customers, which are businesses, help them save a lot on the operating cost. In addition to that, there is a huge shortage of drivers in this segment. With our solution, our customers can help fulfill. For us, it’s a huge validation. Right now all the testing and all the deployment is with the safety driver. The aim of the company is to take the driver off, scale the solution, and commercialize this technology. At scale, we are talking about saving up to 50 percent for our customers. The focus is to operate the vehicles on public roads. 

    When we talk about operating these vehicles between businesses, there are a lot of constraints that we can introduce. For example, very famously, FedEx and UPS trucks, they mostly take right turns because it’s more fuel-efficient for them. If we have something similar for our solution what that means is we wouldn’t have to worry about changing lanes. We wouldn’t have to worry about solving a very tricky situation in our space, that is unprotected left turns. As a company and as the solution we have a clear go-to-market strategy by installing or introducing some of these constraints. Not taking left turns is just one example, even though the technology stack can handle left turns, lane change, intersections, and traffic light navigation today.

    Walmart Testing Self-Driving Delivery Vans, Says Gatik AI CEO Guatam Narang
  • Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO

    “We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience,” says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch. “Instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.”

    Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia, discusses the company’s IPO and how the company uses machine learning to react to customer signals in real-time rather than after they leave an experience in an interview on CNBC:

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers

    We’re a Silicon Valley tech company. We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience. So instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.

    Anything is a signal to us, a survey, an IOT signal, a transaction, somebody buys something, they have a bad experience at the pool, or they’re on an airline and they don’t quite like the service that they’re getting, they can feed that back immediately instead of waiting until the experience is finished. We’re all about platform and signal. We’re very different from the survey companies, the feedback companies, which are the old experience economy companies. It’s the application of deep Silicon Valley technology to the problem.

    The Customer Is At the Center of Every Digital Transformation

    Customer experience has become really a major theme for every big brand in the world today. I also think that our technology is innovative and very different. The application of machine learning and the platform and just the operationalization of a private Silicon Valley company are really what I’ve done in the past. Just bringing basic blocking and tackling to go to market and marketing and building up the salesforce. So very simple and taking the story out to a bigger market.

    We actually just signed a revenue share partnership with Salesforce. We have a partnership for Marketing Cloud with Adobe. They’re great alliances for us. We can present our machine learning, our unstructured data, into their Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud. That’s brand new for us this year. It’s great to go to market with leaders like that. Both Adobe and Salesforce completely understand the customer is at the center of every digital transformation and we are at the center of that.

    It’s Not For the Faint-Hearted, But We Invested a Ton In It

    We spent more than a half a billion dollars building this plot platform. That sets us apart from the traditional simple survey vendor. We’ve spent a ton of money on the privacy layer and on the security layer. We’ve worked already for a decade with some of the biggest brands in the world whose customer information is precious. We’re HIPAA certified for healthcare as well. So we take that very seriously. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but we invested a ton in it and it’s worth it.

    Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch
  • Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI

    Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI

    “We are on the cusp of ubiquitous automation,” says ROBO Global President William Studebaker. “We have an undeniable inflection point because of the performance capabilities of computing and the cost curve declining such that these now are technologies that used to be science fiction but now have actual use applications. Fast forward six years later and we are at a launching pad in terms of the economic activity that we’re seeing and the innovations. Every sector of the economy is going to benefit from robotics and AI.”

    William Studebaker, President and Chief Investment Officer of ROBO Global, discusses how robotics and AI are at an inflection point where soon every sector of the economy is going to benefit in an interview on CNBC:

    Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI

    We were fortunate six years ago to develop an index that tracks the growth in robotics and AI because we saw these technologies changing the way we live and work. We are on the cusp of ubiquitous automation. We have an undeniable inflection point because of the performance capabilities of computing and the cost curve declining such that these now are technologies that used to be science fiction but now have actual use applications. Fast forward six years later and we are at a launching pad in terms of the economic activity that we’re seeing and the innovations. It’s being spread out to all parts of the economy. Every sector of the economy is going to benefit from robotics and AI.

    We try to identify the companies that we think have the highest revenue threshold that corresponds directly to selling the technologies. We’re looking for high revenue purity. We’re also looking for large technological mode around their business and we have an interesting lens to capture this. We actually have seven PhDs on our team. They’re really the who’s who in robotics and AI that have built technologies, built businesses, or academic researchers, etc. That gives us a great lens to see not what yesterday’s winners are but what the future winners are likely to be. That gives us an interesting lens.

    A World of Prediction, Prevention, and Individualizing Medicine

    The official fee is 95 basis points. We do rebate securities lending which is effectively their 25 basis points. So the actual costs are 70 basis point to investors. With a team of industry experts that we have tracking this, I think that we do a pretty good job. We are generally the Alpha that investors are looking for. The index is up a little over 20 percent year-to-date and the last three years is probably close to up 15 percent. We think the inflection is starting here and we’ve got years if not decades of growth ahead of us.

    Healthcare is probably one of the most exciting areas for investors to think about. Why? We’re going to a world of prediction, prevention, and individualizing medicine. Effectively, we’re going to create much healthier livelihoods for us but more pulling longer longevity. We live in a world that’s been historically sick care. We deal with the problem after it happens. We’re now going to a world of prevention, prediction, and individualizing medicine. A lot of healthcare structures tend to focus on therapies. We’re actually focused much more on the prediction and the prevention; diagnosis, medical instruments, regenerative medicine, and prevention. These are the kinds of technologies that investors need to embrace when they’re thinking about healthcare.

    Every Sector of the Economy is Going to Benefit From Robotics and AI, says ROBO Global President William Studebaker
  • Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO

    “We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month,” says Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom. “That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space.”

    Mark Okerstrom, CEO of Expedia, discusses how the online travel giant is using data and AI to power its pricing tactics in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    We’ve Always Been At the Forefront of Travel

    We’ve always been at the forefront of travel. We’ve been at this for 20 years. The one thing that has been consistent for 20 years yeah is this is an incredibly competitive industry. Despite all of the competitive forces that have acted on us, Expedia last year did a $100 billion dollars of bookings, multiples of the size of Airbnb and many of these players out there. We’ve got thousands and thousands of the top engineers and data scientists and product minds in the world focused on travel. That’s how we stay ahead.

    VRBO has been around for a very long time. If you go back in time, people used to talk about getting a VRBO for the weekend. It was the noun. s we went through and did a ton of research here in the US and also internationally about all of the different names we could call the new VRBO, VRBO was the one that actually resonated the most. So we decided to put all of our effort behind that brand. We’re pretty excited about rolling out globally in the coming years.

    M&A is always part of our playbook, so I would never say never (regarding more acquisitions). But we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got in alternative accommodations and we’re pretty excited about putting all our efforts behind VRBO.

    Global Travel Industry Generally Looks Pretty Healthy

    So far so good (regarding tariff impacts). It looks like a healthy travel environment to us. Recent research done by Expedia here in the US is 85 percent of people are planning on taking a trip this summer and 15  percent were for budget constraints. This is broadly consistent with what we’ve seen. Americans are traveling. The global travel industry generally looks pretty healthy. We’re fortunate that we are a global business.

    In good times and bad times we definitely see shifts in travel patterns but people often just take their trips. It’s like the last thing they cut. Maybe they’ll take a trip a little bit closer to home, they won’t take that trip overseas, but they travel. If you look at our results over the 2008-2009 period, for example, those were some of our strongest years.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data

    We sit on reams of data with 750 million visits to Expedia Group properties every single month. That just gives us an incredible amount of understanding around what travelers are looking for, how we can tailor our search results, how we can tailor the recommendations we give, the advertising that we show, and that’s just the beginning. We’re also using AI to help inform some of our lodging partners with pricing tactics, to help them price more effectively both in the alternative accommodation space and in the traditional lodging space. Honestly, we’re just getting started.

    We’ve been doing the one-stop shop before it was cool. We’ve been doing it for 20 years. Not only are we about search but we’re also about booking and taking care of people during the trip. No one else can do it.

    Expedia Pricing Tactics Powered By AI and Reams of Data, Says CEO Mark Okerstrom
  • There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    “There really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. “There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.”

    George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, discusses their IPO (today) and CrowdStrike’s unique position as the first cloud platform for security in an interview on CNBC:

    We Built The First Cloud Platform For Security

    We’ll let the market dictate the (stock) pricing. What we’re focused on is really building long-term value for shareholders and obviously making sure that our customers are protected. That’s the way we built the business, focusing on preventing breaches for our customers. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security.

    When you think about Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce, there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud platform for security. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security. That was one of our goals when Demetri Alperovitch and I started the company in 2011. This cloud platform has allowed us to stop breaches and to scale different modules that really hit a specific customer need. It’s been well received by our customers.

    A Big Part Of Our Platform Is Collecting Data At Scale

    CrowdStrike really runs on your endpoint or computer or your server or workload in the cloud. What we found with traditional antivirus, as an example, we do way more than that, is that signature-based technologies were just not capable of stopping breaches. So a big part of our platform is actually collecting data at scale. We collect a trillion events per week. We use that data to train our machine learning algorithms and we can identify attacks and breaches that have never been seen before at the speed of the network.

    This crowdsourcing aspect, which is the crowd in CrowdStrike, really has enabled us to identify these attacks that are causing the most damage to large and small organizations around the globe. They just haven’t been able to do that with traditional, I call fossilized, vendors that are in the market. This architecture has really changed the game for us.

    Obviously, security is an evolving area. Adversaries continue to change their tactics. The good part about AI is that you can evolve it to identify these sorts of threats no matter if it’s stealing intellectual property or credit card information or breaking in and destroying data on someone’s computer. What’s important to realize is that at cloud-scale, and the way we operate, we have the ability to take all this data, synthesize it, and provide the best protection and prevention methodologies for our customers.

    AI Is Great But It Is Not a Panacea

    It’s really all about the data. You hear a lot about AI and AI is great but it has to be used in the right ways. It’s not a panacea. So it’s easy to come up with an algorithm but it’s really hard to collect this data at scale and be able to train these AI algorithms. This is really one of the things that we spent a lot of time on, building a very scalable architecture to get this data in (into our Threat Graph), which is one of the most advanced security databases around.

    It really allows us to get better efficacy and lower false positive rates in detecting these breaches. In my view, it’s all about the data. We will continue to get more and more data. It’s that network effect. Our threat graph gets smarter the more data we actually consume.

    CrowdStrike Threat Graph

    We See The Tip of The Breach Being The Endpoint

    When we look at the threats, whether it’s a nation-state or whether it’s an e-crime group obviously, the threats are evolving and they’re rapid. There are hundreds of thousands of new pieces of malware that come out every day. It’s incumbent on companies to be able to protect themselves. It’s just been an area that’s been underserved because most of the existing technologies have focused on stopping malware instead of stopping breaches, which is again part of our core mission.

    If you look in the past, there’s been a lot of point product companies that have come out and try to solve a specific problem. But if you just step back, the problem that most companies are trying to solve is not being breached. Whether that’s network technology or endpoint technology, at the end of the day we see the tip of the breach being the endpoint. That’s where the data resides, the servers, the endpoints, the desktops, and that’s what we’re protecting.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security

    From that standpoint, if you look back in history there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud. There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s the ability to rapidly install our technology, just have it work, and be able to scale with us and use different modules with that single agent architecture. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz
  • Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    “The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer,” says David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services. “I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.”

    David Limp, SVP of Devices & Services at Amazon, discusses the future of devices and Amazon’s role in building trust and protecting privacy in an interview on CNBC at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer

    The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer. I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. It was a lot more innocent than you might make it out to be. Which is, can we invent that computer? We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.

    If you have that in your house or in your car or in your conference room, you’re going to find all sorts of things to do with it. Some, Amazon will invent and it’ll help Amazon. But much more, it’ll help developers. There are 90,000 plus skills and hundreds of thousands of developers building around Alexa right now. If you’d five years ago said there’s going to be a new developer ecosystem that’s not about an operating system and that’s not about applications, but about skills in the cloud, you would have laughed at me. But here it is sitting in front of us, all around us, right here.

    Star Trek popularized the idea of the Voice First computer. Amazon Alexa made it reality.

    Our Focus Is To Invent On Behalf Of Customers

    Our focus is to invent on behalf of customers. If we keep our focus there and build cool things that customers love to use and continue to earn their trust, which we have to do every day, then we think the outputs will speak for themselves. We focus on that. Customer trust is kind of the oil of the Amazon flywheel. We think about it every day. It’s thinking about privacy as you think about the kinds of products that we’re doing. Whether it’s a Ring doorbell or it’s an Echo sitting in your kitchen, it has to be foundational to the product. It’s not something you glom on later as an afterthought.

    We think about it at the very upfront when we’re beginning to invent the product. We’re gonna put these in our homes. What do we want to think about privacy? What do we think about trust? We build features into the products and into the services where (those concepts) are first and foremost and paramount. We’re continuing to evolve that as well. It’s not like you’re going to get everything right day one. As we learn from customers we’ll add new features and services that build on that and add more privacy and trust as we go on.

    The First Thing Is To Get Customers To Love A Product

    The first thing is to get customers to love a product. If you build a product that customers love and use then good things usually come in consumer electronics when you do that. For us, that’s the first thing that you want to do. It happened early on with Kindle. People loved it and then we figured out how to build a book business around it. Similarly, the great thing about Echo and Alexa is that customers love the product.

    I don’t think that they’re necessarily buying more yet because of that but they are doing certain things in digital that leads to buying some more things. Specifically, we’ve kind of brought music back into the home again. It had an atrophied in the home. Now music subscription services, Spotify, Amazon music, and Apple music starting last year. They’re growing on Echo and Alexa. People are listening to audiobooks. We have a business there in Audible with the subscription services. Those are the early signs where you start seeing that. In addition, people are buying more smart home products. Whether it’s a smart plug or a light bulb or a robotic vacuum, people are buying those more because it’s easier to control with a voice interface.

    Anything That Advances Privacy For Customers, I’m a Fan Of

    Anything that advances privacy for customers and gives them a more trusted environment, I’m a big fan of as a consumer. I don’t know enough about that product (announced on Monday by Apple) to weigh in on the specifics of it. As you think about Amazon and our credentials and being able to log on to Amazon, we’ve been doing that for 20 plus years. Your credit card number and your address which we ship your products to, that’s sacrosanct. We have to build trust every day. Any other company or any other person that’s furthering that I think it’s just great for the industry.

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP David Limp
  • AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    “This is next-generation sequencing,” says CareDx CEO Peter Maag. “It’s really the future in Diagnostics. We are applying this technology to match an organ with the recipient on a very granular level. We do that in organ transplantation, in bone marrow transplantation, and in transplantation overall. Now in the post-transplant area, we can actually detect the DNA of the transplanted organ in the bloodstream of the recipient. That’s a very novel technology.”

    Peter Maag, CEO of CareDx, discusses how their revolutionary AI-powered sequencing technology is extending the lives of organ transplant recipients and is the future in medical diagnostics. Maag was interviewed on Bloomberg Technology:

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    There are really two big issues in organ transplantation. On the one hand, you need to match an organ to a recipient. After transplantation, you need to care for that patient throughout the lifetime of that patient. We are applying very novel sequencing technology for matching the organ with the recipient. After that, we’re using the same sequencing technology to care for these patients detecting rejection episodes early and making sure that clinicians have the information to treat patients and to prevent rejection episodes from occurring in the past.

    This is next-generation sequencing. It’s really the future in Diagnostics. We are applying this technology to match an organ with the recipient on a very granular level. We do that in organ transplantation, in bone marrow transplantation, and in transplantation overall. Now in the post-transplant area, we can actually detect the DNA of the transplanted organ in the bloodstream of the recipient. That’s a very novel technology. The cell-free DNA technology is revolutionizing how we can care for patients because it detects rejection episodes earlier. When you add on this an artificial intelligence platform that allows clinicians to have a deeper insight in aggregating all the various data streams, it allows them to make better decisions and potentially detect issues much earlier than they can do today.

    Clear Focus To Improve Patients Lives By 3 Years

    We have a very clear focus as an organization to improve patients lives by three years. We’re very early in the ability to impact this but we are building an amazing platform at CareDX in order to do so. We can focus on immune modulation. We can focus on adherence and compliance and making sure that patients are actually taking their meds and seeing their doctors on a regular interval.

    Afterward, we also can focus on standardization and precision medicine, individualizing the care that the individual patient receives. The perfect care for that individual patient is really what we’re all about at CareDX. We’re applying precision medicine tools to the field of transplantation. We have built a tremendous platform to deliver and partner with the transplant ecosystem to make that available to transplant patients.

    A $2 Billion Market Opportunity

    This is really an amazing growth story. We have built this tremendous platform in transplant medicine. Over the last 18 months, we have already achieved five percent patient penetration in kidney transplant patients in the U.S. We see this as a $2 billion market opportunity. When we talked about this $2 billion market opportunity four or five years ago people were wondering, why is that? The reason is that these transplant patients really live for 10 to 15 years and there’s a recurring revenue opportunity for us on testing these patients throughout the lifetime of the patient.

    So CareDX has a model that follows these patients over a very long period of time, which financially is very attractive. But much more important, we are changing patients lives by making sure that we are detecting rejection episodes early. This is scientifically very interesting.

    AI Platform Will Role Out Into Many Other Areas

    You have on the one hand or transplantation is a unique opportunity in the context of being at the pinnacle of medical science. Some have called it the miracle of medicine. It truly is. If you think about it, innovation really happens at the top of the innovation curve. If you have innovation at the top of the pyramid this will allow us to learn a lot for other areas.

    We are doing now in transplantation about the top 200 medical centers in the United States that are doing transplantation. Once we have built an ecosystem that allows us to have artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence relationships with these centers and integrate into electronic medical records we can role that platform out into many other areas.

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics – Peter Maag, CEO of CareDx
  • How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    “Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement,” says McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook. “Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.”

    Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s, discusses how the company is using technology to elevate the customer experience and accelerate growth in an interview on CNBC:

    Continue To See How We Can Elevate the Customer Experience

    As we’ve executed the growth plan we’ve spent the first two years, three or four years ago, turning the business around. Now we’ve had a couple of years of growth. We’re confident now that we’re beginning to identify further opportunities to further accelerate growth. That takes a little bit of research and development cost. It means you’ve got to bring some expertise into the business to help us do that. We’re still managing to effectively run the business. G&A is staying the same and we’re putting a little bit more into innovation.

    We continue to see how can we help continue to elevate the experience for customers. With this pace of change in the world and with different technology and different innovations, whether it’s around food, technology, or design, we’re seeing opportunities that we think can either make the experience more fun and enjoyable or smoother for customers. If we can find that we’re going to go hard at it.

    We need to continue growing. If where we are investing that money is helping drive growth across 38,000 restaurants then I think the shareholders and investors would be satisfied. We want to bring our owner-operators along with us as well. They’re investing their hard-earned dollars so that always means we got a business case. The owner-operators will want to see a return on their investment just the same as a shareholder would. We’ve got a wonderful check and balance in the system to help us make sure we spend that innovative money in the right way.

    Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth

    Our acquisition of Dynamic Yield has brought us a lot of excitement. It was our first acquisition for 20 years. It was an acquisition in a way that was different from the past. It wasn’t looking at different restaurant businesses to try and expand our footprint. It’s bringing a capability, an IP and some talent, into our business that can help us accelerate the growth model. We completed the deal mid-April and within two weeks we had that technical capability in 800 drive-throughs here in the U.S. It’s a very rapid execution and implementation.

    Very simply put, in the online world when we’re shopping and we pick an item and put it into our shopping basket, any website we’re on these days will automatically suggest two or three things to go along with it. People who buy that tend to like these things as well. We’re the first business that we’re aware of that can bring that into the physical world. As customers are at the menu board, maybe they’re ordering a coffee and we can suggest a dessert or they’re ordering a quarter pounder with cheese and we can suggest making that into a meal. It’s really just taking data and machine learning and AI, all these sorts of technical capabilities.

    Mining All of the Data Will Improve the Business

    The best benefit for customers is we’re more likely to suggest things they do want and less likely to suggest things they don’t. It’ll just be a nicer experience for the customer. But yes, for the restaurant itself, because we can put our drive-thru service lines in there, for example, the technical capability by mining all of the data will be to suggest items are easier to make at our busier times. That’ll help smooth the operation as well. The immediate result will be some ticket (increases). But frankly, if the overall experience is better customers come back more often. That’s ultimately where the success will be, driving repeat visits and getting people back more often.

    Across the entire sector, traffic is tight right now and people are eating out less. They have been progressively eating out less for a number of years. Whether it’s the advent of home delivery, for example, which is something we participate in, but at the moment it’s just a little bit tight out there. It’s a fight for market share. Anyone who is getting growth, typically it’s because they’re adding new units. People are finding it hard to (increase) guest count growth. It’s something that we have stated as an ambition of ours. We think that’s a measure of the true health of the business. Last quarter, we did grow traffic and we’ve grown traffic for the last couple of years, but only modestly. We want to be stronger than that.

    How McDonald’s Is Using Data, Machine Learning, and AI to Accelerate Growth
  • Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    “Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”

    Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:

    Without Data There is No Great AI

    The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.

    It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.

    Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own

    Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.

    In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.

    Metadata Is the New OS

    Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.

    When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
  • HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray have announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash. “The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding,” Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow.”

    Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses the company’s intent to acquire  global supercomputer leader Cray, in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    I’m super excited about the announcement today. The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding. That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow. The need for high-performance computing is one element of processing that data faster. The combination of great technologies with Hewlett Packard Enterprise portfolio, which include both HPE Apollo and SGI, give us a unique set of capabilities to get us to the right business outcome from the data. What we are talking about is (improved outcomes) for machine learning, AI, as well as big data and intensive workloads. Cray brings these capabilities.

    Cray has two-thirds of its business coming from the government side and one-third from the commercial side. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the opposite with two-thirds from the commercial side and one-third from the government side. Obviously, the government has already requested for Cray to build Exascale computing. That’s on the basis of the foundation technologies that Cray has developed for some time which is what we call the interconnect fabric. For us, that level of innovation is important to scale our portfolio and continue to enter new markets like oil and gas, manufacturing, as well as academia.

    Thirteen Acquisitions Under CEO – All Very Successful

    I have done now thirteen acquisitions with this one. We have had an incredible discipline based on return on invested capital where we have acquired (important) intellectual property as well as bringing talent to the organization. Each of them has been very successful including Aruba Networks as well as what I call the SGI acquisition, Nimble Storage, and so forth. They have all been very successful.

    When you think about the type of business it has obviously been a little bit lumpy on the Cray side but that’s because it takes time to build the systems with CAPEX upfront and then acceptance for the backend to recognize revenue. We believe the combinational of Cray added to our scale which is significantly larger will smooth the transition from the revenue profit perspective. It will also limit the CAPEX investment because both companies have similar capabilities and now we can use both in a scalable way that we couldn’t do before.

    HPE CEO Antonio Neri: Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    Also Read:

    Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven, Says HPE CEO
    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO
  • Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    “Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day,” says Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley. “Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.”

    Patrick Morley, CEO of Carbon Black, discusses how their company uses AI and machine learning to analyze in real-time 500 billion security events daily in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    China is the Number One Nation Driving Cyber Attacks

    As a cybersecurity company, we have an interesting relationship with certain nations around the world. This is particularly true with those that are very active from a cyber standpoint. China, in particular, has statistically been shown to be the number one nation across the globe that is driving cyber attacks. So our relationship with China is a different relationship than many other public companies across the globe. We don’t actively sell into the market because we are helping many companies actually protect themselves from attacks that are generated out of China.

    As I tell all of our employees we are building a company for the long term. Our stock is going to be impacted by things we control and many things we don’t control. When I look at my app and I see red everywhere it’s certainly disturbing. Obviously, that will impact companies that are going to buy my product eventually. If that has an impact on other public companies and private companies, it will impact us eventually.

    Cyber is One of the Most Interesting Spaces in Tech

    We gave (investors) a consistent outlook in Q2. Analysts reacted positively which is good. Again, we are building for the long term a company that matters in cyber. I think cyber is one of the most interesting spaces in tech right now because of everything around us. We come back to cyber again and again.

    If you look at all the news about Facebook cyber is in it. If you look at some of the geopolitical issues in Europe and in the U.S., cyber comes in. It’s an important area and we are a new guard of companies helping to change it and make it better and more effective for companies. We are building value around the company.

    Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Security Events Per Day

    Some of those (competing) providers (such as Cisco and Fortinet) work in a different part of the market than we do. It’s a big market. It’s a $100 billion market that’s going through fundamental change. We do provide a platform that does compete (directly) with some of the traditional players such as Semantic and others. The way we compete is we are based on one core principle. If you look at where the long term trend of where the world is going you need to leverage the power of data in order to figure out what’s happening. We leverage data in a way that allows us to see and to stop the adversary in ways that traditional products can’t.

    Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day. Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events
  • Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    “What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from,” says John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle. “One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information.”

    John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle, discusses how technologies such as AI and blockchain are now helping companies manage huge volumes of IoT data in an interview with technology influencer Ronald van Loon:

    Companies Are Moving Toward Selling Products as a Service

    I think that (manufacturers connecting all the processes digitally) is the way that will differentiate them. It’s really the only way the companies will be able to survive into the future. There are all these business models and it has become significantly more competitive than it has been in the past. Companies have to work faster and they have to be more responsive to what their customer needs are. The only way really of doing that is to connect the various aspects of the business. They can’t work in silos anymore. That really will give you the whole value of the business.

    One area that companies are moving away from is selling products. They’re going into selling more services which we’ve actually seen for some time. But what they’re now getting into is these new models where they might be selling products as a service. If you think about how do you sell a product as a service and the ability to support that it is a lot different than it was before. Connecting to that product and being able to anticipate activities, anticipate needs, anticipate failures, and to be able to monitor how it’s performing, how the customers use it and are able to expand on that to be able to provide a better outcome for the customer are important components.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value

    What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from. One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information. You can correlate with the data that might be in your ERP and your MES and other sources of information and actually provide some real value and provide the real outcomes. It can now do some predictions where it would be actually physically impossible for people to do the same type of calculations that they’ve been doing in the past with this huge volume today.

    The second area where there seems to be a little hesitation at the moment is around blockchain. But the technology is there and people have been trying to identify how best to use it. Some of the use cases that are coming out now are going to be quite impressive. I think the little bit of a lull was deserved. People who looked at it anticipate a little bit more than what was possible and now they’re really starting to develop some good use cases. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in that area.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP John Barcus


  • How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide

    How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide

    “We open 15 to 20 buildings a month,” says WeWork CTO Shiva Rajaraman. “Anything we can use to automate or augment a person through machine learning we’re taking all that data in one central place and starting to create an engine around that. That’s key to successful scaling today. When we think about enterprise we sort of step back and say what’s our Google Analytics for commercial space?”

    Shiva Rajaraman, Chief Technology Officer of WeWork, discusses how WeWork is using technology to revolutionize office space worldwide in an interview on Bloomberg:

    How Do We Offer Space As a Service?

    There are three capabilities when we think about WeWork. One is how do we offer space as a service? If you just think about it’s really basic. Are you looking for what location do you need? Where do you need it? How long do you need it? Are there different pricing models for it? One of the things we’ve done is effectively taken all of this space and put it into a big database and we start to shape it based on what we see out there in the market. Some of that is just pricing automation at the end of the day. Some of it is how do we automate that supply chain of delivering a building?

    We open 15 to 20 buildings a month. Anything we can use to automate or augment a person through machine learning we’re taking all that data in one central place and starting to create an engine around that. That’s key to successful scaling today. The biggest technically challenging thing is operational scale. If you step back you don’t want a lot of variability. You want to step back and say, “Hey, can I deliver this building on time at quality as people need it?” That’s where you need operational technology that really works in a way that normally construction has not worked in the past.

    What’s Our Google Analytics for Commercial Space?

    One of the key things on the strategy side is that as we see this demand and we start to get critical mass in different areas can we disrupt the business model a little bit? Let me give you an example. If you take someone like GE Health in Seoul, South Korea, they had underutilized real estate. We redesigned that so they can use it in a more flexible way. We also created a new membership called the City Pass which gives all of their employee’s access to WeWork throughout Seoul. Now they can go where they’re more productive. One of the key things we’re looking at right now is what’s a density that translates to interesting memberships that allow people to be more productive?

    Let’s talk about the M&A that’s created a fabric that we can start to offer to enterprises. When we think about enterprise we sort of step back and say, “What’s our Google Analytics for commercial space?” Can we help these enterprises create a good workplace experience through things like room booking (service) all the way to understand how they use space so they can come and use WeWork on demand if they need it. We can also help them grow in the future if they’re looking at new markets to expand into.

    How WeWork is Using Technology to Revolutionize Office Space Worldwide


  • There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO

    There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO

    “There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IoT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies.”

    Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, and Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, discuss the explosion of innovation that is going on in tech in an interview on CNBC:

    There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO

    There’s this explosion of innovation that’s going on. I’ve called it the four superpowers; cloud, mobility, AI, and IOT. These are just causing so many new companies, investment of capital, major new IPOs that are going on. I think with each sort of wave of these innovative cycles there’s an explosion of new companies, but then there’s also a consolidation of existing companies. All of the layers start to reform. Up here you’ve got a whole new set of them emerging in many of these areas and in the existing areas there is some level of consolidation. I do believe there will be some because fundamentally at the infrastructure layer I believe customers want fewer more strategic vendors.

    As I talk to CIOs I say my job is every one of your engineers is looking down the stack at infrastructure I want to enable you to have them look up to the application and business differentiating services. We’re increasingly going to automate, standardized, and cloud deliver those infrastructure layers so you don’t have to do it. We’re doing it for you in an automated AI standardized way so every one of your resources gets to look up to create business differentiating services. So yes I believe both of those will be true consolidation and explosion of innovation.

    Customers Don’t Want to be Systems Integrators, Says Michael Dell

    Well, certainly the combination of Dell, EMC, VMware, and Pivotal was the biggest ones (consolidations) yet to date. That was a pretty big one and last year we added more than $11 billion in revenue so that was some additional industry consolidation there for you. I think customers to Pat’s point have told us very clearly they don’t want to be systems integrators anymore. They’re looking for fewer partners. Bringing together a broad set of capabilities across the infrastructure, security, client devices, the cloud, digital transformation, enabling all those capabilities for customers. They’d much rather work with one leading company than 20 or 30 smaller ones.

    There’s This Explosion of Innovation, Says VMware CEO


  • Automation Will Not Kill the Need for Human Skills In Manufacturing, Says Allegion CEO

    Automation Will Not Kill the Need for Human Skills In Manufacturing, Says Allegion CEO

    “Where you have a high variation you’re always going to have the need for human input,”  says Dave Petratis, CEO of Allegion. “If your manufacturing designs or products have very little labor input, let’s say like a cell phone, you can automate that. But where you add variation to the product that’s being developed or manufactured it requires labor. I can think of a variety of industries where automation will not kill the need for human skills in manufacturing globally.”

    Dave Petratis, CEO of Allegion, discusses the impact of technology and automation on manufacturing jobs in an interview on Bloomberg Markets and Finance:

    The Real Breakthrough That’s Coming is Digitization

    We see the growth in manufacturing in technical jobs where people are able to manage those automation schemes at higher levels of pay. I’ve been a part of that manufacturing story over my 38 years and have lived that. I think there’s a great underlying story. American manufacturing is doing a great job of driving productivity inside the factory. That’s why the goods and services produced have never been higher, but the skills of those jobs are at a higher level.

    That puts challenges on manufacturing like Allegion. At Allegion we have advanced the capabilities of automation in our style of product and it never ends. The real breakthrough that’s coming in the next decade is digitization. This is how we use information technology, artificial intelligence, and information to be smarter manufacturers.

    Automation Will Not Kill the Need for Human Skills In Manufacturing

    I challenge that (the assertion that technology will replace humans). Where you have a high variation you’re always going to have the need for human input. If your manufacturing designs or products have very little labor input, let’s say like a cell phone, you can automate that. But where you add variation to the product that’s being developed or manufactured it requires labor.

    An example of that would be right here in the Indianapolis where we have manufactured here for over a hundred years and shipped globally. We produce 2,200 variations of an exit device which is in the building that you occupied today. It requires human input because of the variation. I can think of a variety of industries where automation will not kill the need for human skills in manufacturing globally.


  • Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    PagerDuty began trading on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time this morning and is now trading at more than 60% above their IPO price of $24. That gives the company a market capitalization of more than $2.7 billion. PagerDuty offers a SAAS platform that monitors IT performance. The company had sales of $118 million for its last fiscal year, up close to 50% over the previous year.

    The company uses machine learning to inform companies in real-time about technical issues. “Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time,” says PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.”

    Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, discusses their IPO and how machine learning should be used to deliver great brand experiences in an interview on CNBC:

    It’s Gotten Harder for Human’s to Manage the Entire IT Ecosystem

    If you think about the world today, it’s an always-on world. We as consumers expect every experience to be perfect. Every time you wake up in the morning, you order your coffee online, you check Slack to communicate with your team, and maybe you take a Lyft into work. Sitting behind all of that is a lot of complexity, many digital and infrastructure based platforms, that don’t always work together the way you’d expect them to. As that complexity has proliferated over the years and because developers can deploy what they like and can use the tools that they want it’s gotten harder for human beings to really manage the entire ecosystem even as your demands increase.

    You want it perfect, you want it right now and you want it the way you’d like it to be. PagerDuty is the platform that brings the right problem to the right person at the right time. We use machine learning, sitting on ten years of data, data on humans behavior and data on all these signals there that are happening through the system, and it really helps the developers that sit behind these great experiences to deliver the right experience all the time.

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences

    Going public is the right time for us right now because there’s an opportunity for us to deliver the power of our platform to users all over the world. We are a small company and we weren’t as well-known as we could be and this is a great opportunity to extend our brand and help developers and employees across teams and IT security and customer support to deliver better experiences for their end customers all the time.

    At PagerDuty we take customer trust and user trust very seriously. We publish our data policy and we will not use data in a way other than what we describe online. We care deeply about the relationship between our users in our platform. Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time. PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.


  • AI: The Secret To Sustainable Supply Chains?

    AI: The Secret To Sustainable Supply Chains?

    For businesses, especially those operating heavily within E-commerce, what do truly sustainable solutions look like? From open lines of communication to central intelligence systems, as the pressure in the shipping and logistics departments mounts, retailers have more to focus on than just creating quality goods and services. Artificial intelligence is changing the game for sustainability in supply chains.

    In 2018 alone, eight out of ten customers were unlikely to shop again with a retailer after a poor delivery experience. Setting aside dissatisfaction of products, poor quality, or too high prices, consumer focus on fast and reliable delivery is quickly becoming a top priority. Between 2016 and 2017, E-commerce sales themselves grew by 16%, express shipping air freight volume grew by 9%, and US imports increased 5%. As a result, companies in the US are spending a total of $1.5 trillion on shipping and logistics, and yet, it still may not be enough.

    Amazon shipping options have undoubtedly raised the bar for both consumer expectations and E-commerce as a whole. Free two-day shipping, for its millions of customers, is well worth the yearly Prime subscription and keeps shoppers localized within Amazon’s marketplace. Yet, three in four consumers would choose another retailer over Amazon if that retailer offered better delivery options – no small feat.

    Perhaps more so than any other department, shipping and logistics come with plenty of unique complications and problematic inefficiencies. Too many inefficiencies and the consumer base is likely to notice. For late and unsatisfactory deliveries 90% of consumers expect a full refund; additionally, their expectations range from notifications, flexible delivery windows, and real-time tracking visibility. This can be tricky to manage for businesses, especially when juggling the existing inefficiencies of transportation of tools, equipment, and even people. Over 2018, empty trucks traveling accounted for 16% of total mileage used by just one US company and unscheduled vehicle or equipment repairs made up 65% of all maintenance costs.

    Businesses with huge logistical demands need better solutions than just traditional operations efficiency standards. Now that customer experience and satisfaction is tied so deeply in with shipping and delivery, new standards are required – and smart suppliers are looking to AI. A 2017 study among retailers revealed that 71% of those retailers surveyed found that sharing logistical data like shipment, order, and delivery data, among all departments, was an important step for their business.

    While AI steps into the service industry, its presence in the world of e-commerce is more symbiotic and stabilizing. With AI, retailers and manufacturers can have opportunities to aggregate data from all parts of operations, even past data, to help build better and longer lasting solutions. In more board terms, AI is able to predict market demand and shift to help recommend solutions for adjusting inventory and avoiding excess, passing efficiency on to the customer.

    When the success of a business hangs in the balance of consumer satisfaction, and consumer satisfaction lies within shipping and delivery quality, smart business leaders make proactive move to streamline operations. Learn more about how AI is making sustainability possible.

  • How IBM is Using AI to Improve Hiring and to Retain and Retrain Employees

    How IBM is Using AI to Improve Hiring and to Retain and Retrain Employees

    “We are the number one destination for Gen Z on Glassdoor,” says IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. “I get 8,000 resumes a day. I don’t make them go hunt for jobs. The AI talks to them and we ask very nicely and get permission, share this with me, share that with me, share this LinkedIn review with me, share this resume, and instead of you looking for jobs I’ll serve up jobs to you that actually match you. Our match rate of applying is 30 percent. With anybody else, it’s about nine percent.”

    Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, discusses how they are using AI to improve hiring and to retain and retrain employees in an interview on CNBC:

    AI Will Change 100 Percent of Jobs

    The original genesis of this was a belief that AI will change 100 percent of jobs. But if you’re going to really get the benefit of it you have to change how the work is done. We chose to make HR, my HR leader chose to make HR, really the role model example of that. She has done a fantastic job putting AI in end to end. She tracks (the value of this AI approach) and we have now just from the AI alone, my HR function has saved $300 million from just doing that piece of it. In part, it helps the employees, because it completely makes HR employee centric. You don’t do things to people, you do it for them. It’s consumer-centric because of how we apply the AI. The other part of it is there’s productivity on the other side. Both are important right now.

    Our experience has been and I’ll just use HR as an example. On the one hand, we were able to replace a lot of routine work. In the case of HR, our HR staffing went down by 30 percent. However, the people then doing the job of HR, they do far more non-routine work, their salaries all went up or their skills went up with it. You’re going to have this trade-off where technology will drive productivity but then it will also drive you and me to do our job different. It sits at that intersection.

    Good for the Employee and Really Good for Business

    This includes how we recruit today. We are the number one destination for Gen Z on Glassdoor. I get 8,000 resumes a day. I don’t make them go hunt for jobs. The AI talks to them and we ask very nicely and get permission, share this with me, share that with me, share this LinkedIn review with me, share this resume, and instead of you looking for jobs I’ll serve up jobs to you that actually match you. Our match rate of applying is 30 percent. With anybody else, it’s about nine percent.

    It just shows this effectiveness for using the AI for things like a manager who says I’m doing salary. We do something to be sure salaries are fair, no unconscious biases that are in there, and then as well, proactive retention. That is the ability to use many pieces of data to say this person is likely to quit in the next six months, so do something now so that never enters their mind. We’re 95 percent accurate and have saved $300 million in replacement costs from that. These are both good for the employee and it’s really good for business.

    We’ve Got to Make This Era of Technology More Inclusive

    It’s not just driven by that (job demand driven by booming economy). I think you’ve got married here this idea that technology is going to change everyone’s job. It means reskilling of your current population. This is also so they’ve got the skills that apply for the future. I think this point of the word transparency, being clear with every employee, is their skill in the market hot or not so needed (based on) demand? Also, for your strategy, is it needed or won’t be needed for the future? We update that every quarter, that matrix, and we share it with employees. They know where they are and they say yes, I’ve got to move here and we use AI to help them move to a new area.

    What’s happening in the market, whether or not there were IPOs, this would be happening anyways, this remake of skills. It means reskilling your current population. It means a strong belief that we’ve got to make this era of technology more inclusive. Six-year high schools where community colleges and high schools are combined together. We’ve been working with 500 other companies and with those schools and there’s a pipeline of 125,000 kids coming through. Now, 15 percent of our hiring was of less than 4-year college graduates. If you’re going to make this era inclusive, the technology is moving so fast, you’ve got to make it so more people can have a job in this world.

    I just shared with the CHROs, one of the number one issues we see is we as employers over-spec the jobs that we go to hire for. We write down so many credentials they should have and it’s not true. If you’re your cyber analyst, which there’s going to be two million open jobs, let me tell you how many people can actually fill that that don’t have to have all those credentials. If I just talked about making this era for this country inclusive it’s that. It’s 15 percent and particularly the middle of the country is where we’ve done that hiring.

    How IBM is Using AI to Improve Hiring and to Retain and Retrain Employees


  • China Trying to Become an Economic Hegemon for the 21st Century

    China Trying to Become an Economic Hegemon for the 21st Century

    “This is deeper than trade,” says Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist. “It’s a combination of One Belt One Road, which is this infrastructure project to unite the Eurasian landmass. It’s Made in China 2025, which is the convergence of advanced chip design, artificial intelligence, and robotics, where they will take over advanced manufacturing. Then it’s Huawei and the 5G rollout. The convergence of all three of those are trying to make China an economic hegemon for the 21st century.

    Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, discusses in an interview on CNBC the true objective of the Chinese in trying to economically dominate the world through whatever means necessary which is why current trade negotiations are so important to US prosperity going forward:

    China Trying to Become an Economic Hegemon

    I’m not so sure how close we are (in a trade deal with China). I mean CNBC’s interview with Larry Kudlow where Larry Kudlow said last week that Lighthizer had to read the riot act to some of the Chinese about some of the red lines that had come back on the turn on the documents. You’ve got the hawks in China that really hunkered down and said we don’t know if we need to deal with the Americans.

    Remember this is deeper than trade. It’s a combination of One Belt One Road, which is this infrastructure project to unite the Eurasian landmass. It’s Made in China 2025, which is the convergence of advanced chip design, artificial intelligence, and robotics, where they will take over advanced manufacturing. Then it’s Huawei and the 5G rollout. The convergence of all three of those are trying to make China an economic hegemon for the 21st century and essentially use their totalitarian mercantilist system to replace free-market capitalism of the industrial democracies.

    US Doesn’t Understand the Economic War the Chinese Are Running

    That’s why I was in Japan invited by the Liberal Democratic Party to go around Japan and give these lectures I give on China. It’s 100% they’re saying that the United States and Europe don’t quite understand yet the economic war that the Chinese are running on the West. This is not just about trade. It’s not about soybeans. That’s why Lighthizer, the senior partner of Skadden, Arps, who is President Trump’s right-hand man on this is so important.

    This is about fundamental structural changes to the core of the Chinese economy to really integrate it into the industrial democracies. I think that this thing could go on for a long time. I actually happen to think before you get to a deal I think you’re enough to put the punitive tariffs up to 25 percent to bring the Chinese really to the table to have that types of changes that President Trump has really been hammering on since the day he started.


  • Hail Damage Tech

    Hail Damage Tech

    Kentucky’s First Y Combinator Startup Wants To Streamline Hail Damage Detection And Repair

    Louisville, Kentucky startup WeatherCheck was selected from a pool of 12,000 competitors to become part of the Y Combinator’s winter 2019 startup school cohort, the first company from Kentucky to earn the distinction.

    WeatherCheck uses tech and statistical models to determine where hail damage occurred so that homeowners can start the repair process in a timely manner and insurers don’t have to rely on homeowners to discover hail damage months or even years after the fact. In 2017, 11 million properties in the United States alone were affected by hail and racked up a national bill of $1.7 billion in property damage. On a local level, some states saw more than half of their properties damaged by falling hail including Kansas at 57% and Oklahoma at 55%. Though hailstorms happen frequently, our current system of predicting risk and assessing damage falls woefully short.

    Coming in as one of TechCrunch’s favorites from Y Combinator’s 2019 Winter Demo day, WeatherCheck helps take the guesswork out of weather damage. Co-founder and CEO Demetrius Grey speaks about his business’s involvement in Y Combinator’s winter 2019 Demo Day as a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity.’ Garnering much well-deserved attention, WeatherCheck is doing what has never done before by tackling the concerns that arise from some of the most unpredictable yet destructive forces on Earth: the weather itself.

    Over the course of 2017, extreme weather caused $330 billion in global property damage and resulted in over $135 billion in insurance claims. In the last thirty years, the average number of global natural catastrophes has grown by nearly 175%, with hailstorms, in particular, hitting more frequently than ever. Compared to other types of weather damage, hail is among the most destructive, and it can also be the most challenging to predict.

    Hail can happen anywhere. Born from updrafts during thunderstorms, water droplets fuse together in the lower parts of storm clouds, held aloft and growing in size by powerful winds until the frozen droplets become too heavy and begin dropping to the ground. Falling at speeds sometimes greater than 90 miles per hour, exposed cars, unprepared roofs, and even our own heads may become victims of these pea-sized to softball-sized ice chunks. Risk increases exponentially with the size of the hailstones themselves, by the time they reach 1.5 inches or more, property damage is almost a guarantee.

    Occurring globally once every 7-9 days and amounting to thousands of instances every single year, hailstorms are among the most unforgiving of weather events and the need for insurance and reliable prediction is only growing. WeatherCheck allows insurance agencies to gather the right local data they need down to specific street addresses to assess the potential risk for hail careering out of the sky. As the Internet of Things capabilities continue to move forward, insurers can look to AI to monitor both properties and incoming storms, in turn, giving them opportunities to precisely quote for coverage and recommend best practices for homeowners living in high-risk hail areas.

    Though the weather can always turn without warning, high-tech tools to keep us safe and prepared will help us predict risk, mitigate damage when it does occur, and be ready for it in the future. Here’s how WeatherCheck is making it possible.