The digital transformation which has been powering the growth of many technology companies in the US is now starting to drive growth globally according to Box CEO Aaron Levie. He says that Box has a global opportunity where multi-national enterprises want to drive the same digital transformation that has been happening in the US.
Aaron Levie, Box CEO, discussed on CNBC how the digital transformation is key to driving Box’s growth globally.
Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth
As our business gets more seasonally loaded toward the back end of the year as we sell to larger and larger enterprises. That’s what ultimately drives a much higher billings growth outcome in Q4. We continue to move up-market serving larger enterprises like major top ten banks, pharmaceuticals, life sciences companies, as well as the federal government and global manufacturers. That’s what’s driving that surge in Q4 billings and growth rate.
We have a global opportunity where large enterprises, especially multi-national enterprises, want to drive the same digital transformation that we’ve seen in the US. That means everything from changing their business processes to collaborating and working in new ways which leads them to need platforms like Box and other technologies. We are seeing incredible growth in markets like Japan, Canada, Australia, and throughout Europe.
Our Partner Model is Critical to Our Success
We are working with major partners like IBM and other system integrators to be able to reach and enable customers. We are working with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, as well as a much broader ecosystem including companies like Slack, Okta, and others, to ensure that when customers want to modernize their IT environment Box is the system of record for the data and content that they work with.
Partners are core to our strategy both from a technology standpoint to ensure that customers have an integrated experience with their information technology investment as well as helping us actually reach those customers from a distribution and sales standpoint. Our partner model is critical to our success.
We Are Building a Fundamentally Open Platform
Our fundamental belief is that in the digital age enterprises are going to need a platform to help them secure, manage, govern, and drive the workflows around their core business information. That is what the platform is that we’re building. Whether it’s financial documents, digital assets, a pharmaceutical company with their drug trial information, or an ad company with their ad campaigns, we want to be the platform that helps them manage and secure that data.
We will have to work with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others to ensure that the technology that they’re investing in can link to the data that customers store within Box. We are building a fundamentally open platform and whether that is linking up to the artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others are building or the common applications that we use every day we want to ensure that Box can connect to all of those applications so that you can have one source of truth for your data but integrated everywhere.
DiDi will be one of the frontrunners in autonomous vehicle technology development says Henry Liu, VP and Chief Scientist for DiDi Smart Transportation Initiatives. Liu says DiDi is unique in that it is not just an Internet company and not just an AI company but also is a transportation company.
The CEO of DiDi has long had a high-level focus on autonomous driving technology. “Autonomous driving and artificial intelligence are the future of mobility,” noted Cheng Wei, Founder, and CEO of DiDi. “Vehicles might be the first generation of robots with massive AI technology application.”
Henry Liu, VP and Chief Scientist for DiDi Smart Transportation Initiatives, discussed DiDi’s extensive focus on autonomous vehicles in an interview on CNBC International:
We Are a Frontrunner in Autonomous Vehicle Technology
We have developed this autonomous vehicle technology roughly three years ago and we have development teams in both the US as well as China. We have 40 autonomous vehicles being encrypted with our sensors and we have licenses in both Mountain View, California as well as Beijing, China. We are on our way to developing autonomous vehicles and we also think we will be one of the frontrunners in terms of autonomous vehicle technology development.
DiDi Has a Lot of Advantages in Autonomous Vehicle Development
We’ll start with small areas in terms of testing. DiDi has a lot of advantages in autonomous vehicle development because we have this transportation network and we know where the origin and the destination is and we know if this area is suitable for autonomous vehicle operation as well. If it’s suitable we can send an autonomous vehicle to serve for this trip or otherwise we can send a human-driven vehicle.
An Internet Company, AI Company, and Transportation Company
We are not only an Internet company and we’re not only an AI company, but we also are a transportation company which runs for people from origin to destination. That’s a lot of responsibility and we need to make this safely and efficiently. As a service provider, we utilize our technology conscientiously while we use this AI technology. We also cooperate with the government because our service actually complements public transportation systems.
It’s been a busy week for Microsoft. The company launched an open source system for designing virtual assistants and also revealed several updates to its conversational AI solutions.
Microsoft showed several realistic ways that customers can use artificial intelligence in a just-concluded event in San Francisco. The company also spoke about how brands should integrate AI into their business processes and touched on the obstacles that come with adopting AI technology. Citing aGartner report, the Redmond-based company pointed out that only four percent of CIOs are using AI technology while 70 percent of businesses lack the skills and support to do so.
In order to make AI accessible and easier to use, Microsoft has launched its virtual assistant accelerator onGithub. This is basically a template with integrated pre-made skills that can be utilized to answer basic questions or locate local services by using conversational AI and the Microsoft Bot framework. The solutions accelerator also comes with a calendar, linked accounts, a to-do skill, and points of interest feature.
In ablog post, Lili Cheng, Corporate VP of AI, explained that the company believes that their “virtual assistant solution accelerator simplifies the creation of your own assistant enabling you to get started in minutes.” Cheng also emphasized the control their customers will have and how even the VA’s “name, voice, and personality can be changed to suit the organization’s needs.”
Cheng also admitted in aninterview that the company has “reworked a lot of the tooling” to provide companies with better solutions and support. To that end, Microsoft has upgraded the Translator API and Azure Cognitive Services‘ text-to-speech synthesis. It has also rolled out container support for the latter, which will enable developers to add capabilities like object detection and language understanding in their applications even without having any data science skills.
Microsoft also announced its acquisition of Botkit creator XOXCO and an Azure Machine Learning Integration for the Power BI software.
Raycatch Founder Michael Goldstein says that his VC backed software startup is using artificial intelligence to bring significant efficiencies to solar projects all over the world. Their DeepSolar solution captures data, does an AI-powered analysis, and then provides action items to large solar panel users so that they can improve energy yield and reduce costs.
Michael Goldstein, Chairman, and Founder Of Raycatch discussed their breakthrough technology on ILTV ISRAEL DAILY:
Raycatch Uses Data Analytics to Manage Solar Panels
Raycatch is a solar company that does data analytics for solar owners and solar maintenance people. What happened in the whole energy system is that there was a main revolution where the cost of panels went dramatically down in the last ten years. That caused a large number of new installations all over the world, either on roof mounting or ground where you saw more and more solar projects all over the world. The only thing that did not change, besides the reduction, of course, was the fact that owning and maintaining those projects did not improve.
Improves Solar Panel Efficiency with Artificial Intelligence
So that’s exactly where we come in. We’re trying to improve ownership and maintenance by using AI, artificial intelligence, to better run those assets. We are a VC backed 15 person startup based in Tel Aviv operating with projects all over the world, currently in Israel and Europe. We have prominent customers and we are already running over 100 different projects in those countries. We will eventually be in the United States as well.
Improves Solar Yield by 5 Percent, Operational Costs by 20 Percent
People that are using our software are able to increase the yield by 5 percent. They can reduce the cost of operation by 20 percent and they have better transparency about the value of their assets they’re running. Bear in mind that it’s not only residential installations but imagine all those large installations over the ground, utility-scale, utility companies, that are using solar panels today.
We are targeting mainly the large-scale installations because it’s more efficient for us business-wise but in principle were relevant for both small and large installations. They can be residential, they could be on a commercial roof or on the ground.
How DeepSolar Works:
About Raycatch:
Based in Israel, Raycatch was founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs and solar experts. Raycatch is an AI diagnostics technology for solar energy, on a mission to revolutionize the manual PV monitoring market by enabling automated, insight-driven management of solar assets. By deciphering existing solar energy data, Raycatch transforms PV Operation and Maintenance (O&M) tasks from traditional manual scheduled operations to on-demand automatic management. No hardware or software installation or site visits are needed.
The result is maximized performance and maintenance of solar assets, leading to increased yield, decreased operational costs and the acceleration of solar energy penetration in the global energy market.
The Co-Founder & former CEO of Siri, Dag Kittlaus, says that he “would have liked to see Siri evolve to doing more things, greater capabilities to become a bigger part of your life.” Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010.
In 2012 Kittlaus co-founded another AI company, Viv, an artificial intelligence platform that enables developers to create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything. Viv was acquired by Samsung in 2016.
On the positive side, it’s gotten a lot faster, the speech recognition got a lot better. I would have liked to see Siri evolve to doing more things, greater capabilities to become a bigger part of your life merely because it’s doing so many more things for you.
That was really the idea for the next company that we started, was how do we make it go from, not a novelty, but from a basic utility in your life to something much bigger, a paradigm in itself that you are really relying on in your everyday world.
Why Hasn’t Apple Gotten There and is it Apples Fault?
To some extent, but I just think they had a different focus from where we started it originally. I would have liked to see Apple open up to a third party ecosystem much earlier. That’s something that we are doing now. We think that is the big missing piece.
The Apple app store is actually a perfect metaphor for this. The iPhone actually launched in 2007 with just a few Apple apps on it, weather and some very basic things. When the app store opened and unleashed the creativity of the developers around the world that changed the world.
About Viv from the Original Announcement:
For consumers, Viv is going to be the intelligent interface to everything you’re going to be talking to all different kinds of things it’s going to be doing all sorts of things for you. For developers, Viv is going to be the next great marketplace. You’ve got app stores today but the thing that comes after app stores is this new type of marketplace. This is a marketplace that works for all the different kinds of devices that the Internet of Things will in use cases that they’ll generate and a marketplace that will become the next big area.
Etsy CEO Josh Silverman says that “machine learning is opening up a whole new opportunity” for the company to organize 50 million items into a discovery platform that makes buying an enjoyable experience and also is profitable for sellers.
Our mission is keeping commerce human. It’s really about in a world where automation is changing the nature of work and we’re all buying more and more commoditized things from the same few fulfillment centers. Allowing someone to harness their creative energy and turn that creativity into a business and then connect with someone in the other part of the country or in another part of the world, that’s really special. We think there’s an ever-increasing need for that in this world.
It’s about value. We’ve been really focused on delivering more value for our makers. Etsy really is a platform that brings buyers to sellers and that’s very valuable. We raised our commission from 3.5 to 5 percent commission which was I think is fair value for our sellers, particularly because we’re reinvesting 80 percent of that into the growth of the platform.
Free shipping is pretty much table stakes today. Yet only about 20 percent of items have free shipping. About half of all the items on Etsy buyers say have shipping prices that are too high and yet we grew GMS at 20 percent last quarter.
Machine Learning is Opening Up a Whole New Opportunity
Machine learning is opening up a whole new opportunity for us to take 50 million items from two million makers and make sense of that for people. We have 37 million active buyers now and many of them come just for discovery, just to see what they can find, and that is exactly the right thing for someone out there. Our job is to create that love connection. Etsy over the past 14 years, with a large team effort, has I think done a great job.
One thing I want to emphasize is the quality and the craftsmanship with so many of the products on Etsy. That’s something that has been such a delight for me. People like Kringle Workshops that make these incredible products. What we have been doing a better job and need to continue to do a better job of really surfacing the beautiful artisanally crafted products that are available at a really fair price. You’re not having to pay for warehousing, you’re not having to pay for all the other things that mass-produce things have to pay for, you’re buying directly from the person who made it. So it can be both beautiful, handcrafted, and well priced.
There are 2 million sellers, 87 percent of them are women, over 90 percent are working from home or are businesses of one, who can create a global business from their garage or their living room. Etsy does provide a real sense of community for them and that’s really powerful.
Amazon May Open New HQ in Queens Near Etsy
We feel great about our employee value proposition and come what may. Here’s what we have going for us. We think we’ve got the best team, certainly in tech companies on the eastern seaboard. We think ours is the best and we continue to attract great talent. The reason is, first and foremost, our mission is really a meaningful important mission and that matters. Great people want to work in a place with a great mission.
Second, our technology challenges are interesting. For example, search and using machine learning to make sense of 50 million items that don’t map to a catalog. Third, our culture is really special. We have been a company that’s authentically cared about diversity from the beginning. Over 50 percent of our executive staff are women, we have a balanced board, 50 percent male and female, and 32 percent of our engineers are female, which is twice the industry average. People who care about diversity and inclusion really want to come to work at Etsy. All of that is going for us and we’re happy to compete with whoever we need to.
Earnings Call Comments by Etsy CEO:
Active Buyers Grew 17 Percent
Etsy’s growth accelerated again in the third quarter to nearly 21% on a constant-currency basis. Revenue growth exceeded 41%, fueled by the launch of our new pricing structure, and our adjusted EBITDA margins grew to nearly 23%, while we also increased our investments in the business.
Active buyers grew 17% to 37 million worldwide. This is the fourth consecutive quarter that GMS has grown faster than active buyers, evidence that we are seeing increased buyer activity on the platform, which is a key proxy for improvement in frequency. We grew the number of active sellers by 8% and GMS per active seller is also increasing.
Two principal levers contributed to our progress this past quarter. The first is our continued product investment, focused on improving the shopping experience on Etsy. By making it easier to find and buy the great products available for sale on Etsy, we’re doing a better job converting visits into purchases. The second lever was our new pricing structure, which enabled us to ramp up investments in marketing, shipping improvements and customer support.
Successful Cloud Migration
We achieved a significant milestone in our cloud migration this quarter, successfully migrating our marketplace, Etsy.com, and our mobile applications to the Google Cloud with minimal disruption to buyers and sellers. This increases our confidence that the migration will be complete by the end of 2019.
Once fully migrated, we expect to dramatically increase the velocity of experiments and product development to iterate faster and leverage more complex search and machine learning models with the goal of rapidly innovating, improving search and ultimately driving GMS growth.
In fact, we’re beginning to see some of those benefits today based on the systems we’ve already migrated. I’d like to thank our engineering team for their incredible work to get this – get us to this point.
The co-founder & CEO of augmented reality platform company Blippar, Ambarish Mitra, told an audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal that within 5-7 years AR will be as ubiquitous as the Internet itself.
When you see the world with your eyes and through the eyes of a camera and something is recognized for the camera and you see some content that appears in the field of view, that is augmented reality. It is the enhancement of reality. Do not confuse it with virtual reality. Virtual reality has almost nothing to do with your immediate reality, it’s almost like escaping from reality.
It’s important to note why this industry is really relevant. Computers themselves are continuously evolving. You can see in the very early days it was all about the touchpad and the keyboard and it wasn’t a very natural behavior. Then the whole AI wave came along. What’s the role of AI? Besides artificial intelligence, I always call it IA, which is intelligent assistance. It’s here to serve us. We are not here to serve the AI.
Then touch, which is a very human function, touch computing came into play. In 2010 we saw the first birth of natural language processing. We humans talk and we want the computers to talk back at us. Then the final frontier which is vision. Vision is very important because vision is a large part of what makes us human. A lot of our cognition growing up comes from this sense which we call eyesight. Computers will one day, and beginning to already, will see and understand the world. Computer vision is very relevant.
AI and AR are Deeply Linked
We are already starting to see how computers are beginning to understand. It’s a very important branch of artificial intelligence and in a way augmented reality and AI has been positioned as very separate industries, but they’re very deeply linked. Augmented reality cannot scale until computers understand reality. It’s not just about gimmicky dinosaurs walking down a path. At one point we will see almost the entire Internet transform into an AR medium where everything in the field of view could come to life. It’s very relevant. You may not realize that even though the history of the Internet has been very words driven where you type some words and you get a response, but there are so many so many things in your everyday life which you cannot describe with words.
The next generation of computing is massively going to be vision based. AR promises to be a very lucrative industry because it is connected to the world we see and also a lot more possibilities with devices. Almost everybody has some form of an AR device because you have a camera on your phone. VR is an incredible and equally promising industry but still is a slightly niche utility because of how it moves you away from scaling or moving around the wider world.
This is the famous Gartner hype cycle which it has been applied to augmented reality as well. We started Blippar literally when it was in the very very earth early stages innovation trigger. We’ve actually been through the whole peak of inflicted expectations. We’ve raised a bunch of money and now it’s reaching a point where AR is under the scrutiny of whether it is going to deliver on its true potential.
AR Will Be as Ubiquitous as the Internet
The timing is great, five of the world’s biggest companies, not just in tech but the most valuable companies have invested in augmented reality. We are predicting that from five to seven years down the line it is really ready to be comparable and as ubiquitous as the Internet is today.
Facebook has launched an ad-based platform on AR. Snapchat has the famous face filters and of course, now Google with ARCore and Apple with ARKit are supporting the medium and making their phones compatible with it. So we believe AR is already having a positive impact.
About Blippar
Blippar is a seven-year-old British company operating out of Silicon Valley, New York, and London. Our mission was to create this ubiquitous AR platform which works on any camera device and brings the world to life. It’s been incredible the last two years with several large players coming into AR. It’s really validated the space.
Tinder Co-Founder Sean Rad, in an interview on stage at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, said that he thinks that as the technology of AI advances that Siri might become a matchmaker soon:
I think the future looks nothing like what you see right now. A lot of people talk about AI and its ability to create new insights and new data, but I actually like to think about AI and its ability to create better user experiences. I’ll give you a simple picture of what I where I think not just Tinder is headed but a lot of different applications are headed. I think Siri might become a matchmaker soon.
Tinder has made it being exceptionally simpler and easier to connect with people. This is partially because it introduces a new way to double opt-in and partially because behind the scenes there’s a lot that we’re doing with AI in ensuring that we show you the best possible matches, but you could see how it could get even easier.
One day because the system is so smart in knowing the users and knowing what you want, one day Siri might say… hey Sean, there’s someone a mile away who you find attractive and we were pretty sure she finds you attractive and you both happen to like Coldplay and they’re playing in town next week. Do you want to get a coffee and if you like each other go? Siri might then create that transaction or might actually make that introduction like a traditional matchmaker.
You sort of see that as technology gets better, technology starts to disappear in our lives and starts to become a little more fluid with our daily behaviors and that creates exciting new possibilities.
What About AI-Powered Bots Making Matches?I hope not, I think that’s a scary existence. You don’t want to take the humanity out of technology.
Given the dynamic nature of the internet, it’s not surprising to also see frequent changes in consumer buying behavior, which online retailers try to predict and cater to on various digital platforms. Convenience and revenue growth of eCommerce businesses, however, come with a price in the form of fraud.
Sales transactions from online merchants are on an uptrend, but attacks on eCommerce businesses have alarmingly increased as well. Based on the first-quarter report by ThreatMetrix, 210 million cyber attacks were prevented in real time from January to March 2018 – up by62 percent from prior year. Some of these attacks have cost the eCommerce industry a whopping$58 billion in losses in 2017, according to the Global Fraud Report done by PYMNTS and Signifyd.
With the upcoming holiday season, incidents of digital fraud are expected to further rise in the eCommerce industry. Avoid the pitfalls of fraud by proactively taking steps to detect its forms and prevent them from hurting your bottom line, which can be significant for some eCommerce businesses. Fraudulent purchases can translate to chargebacks from affected online retailers, resulting in financial losses.
Pay particular attention to these three kinds of eCommerce fraud:
Types of eCommerce Fraud
1. Identity Theft
Among the most common type of fraud, identity theft has been a long-running scheme of cybercriminals. Identities, along with credit card information and addresses, are stolen using the latest techniques on data hacking, malware, and theft of mobile devices, which are then used to purchase from online merchants. Aside from stolen identities of actual individuals, fraudsters can also fabricate fictitious or manipulated personalities and use these instead during transactions.
2. Friendly Fraud
Sometimes called “chargeback fraud,” friendly fraud happens when customers call their credit card issuer and dispute the charge. While some fraud incidents are due to misunderstanding, others are done with malicious intent. Dishonest consumers will claim that they never received the item, heavily damaged, or not as described, requesting refunds from the online retailer after getting the package.
3. Phishing
This type of fraud is rampant and requires technical capability, as fraudsters pretend to be a company or eCommerce platform to trick customers into typing in personal information on a rigged form. Phishing emails often contain a warning to customers that their accounts have been compromised and need to input details like user ID, password, and personal information as proof of their identity. Armed with an individual’s stolen details, fraudsters can use these to make online purchases or transfer money to another account.
How Online Merchants Can Protect Against Fraud
To minimize the increasing risk for eCommerce fraud, there are a few things that you, as a business owner, can do. A proactive approach, rather than a reactive one, is more effective in preventing fraud from happening and taking a cut of your profits, especially during the holiday rush.
1. Have a good fraud protection system in place.
Before the buying frenzy of the holidays begins, ensure that your business has fraud prevention and chargeback protection systems set up. There are numerous tools available on the market, so choose one that fits your business needs. It’s a cost-effective solution that’s well worth the investment in the long run.
2. Use a prevention system that combines human and artificial intelligence.
While machine learning can effectively analyze patterns of fraud based on millions of transactional data, it still takes human intelligence to know something is off with a transaction.
3. Take advantage of the verification process as well.
To mitigate eCommerce fraud, make use of a good address verification system. This will confirm whether the bill-to and ship-to addresses are similar, along with email address and location as part of a customer’s identity verification when the transaction happened. An extra layer of protection helps by employing the card verification value to ensure that the customer holds or has access to the actual credit card.
Even though email fraud is a far-too-common occurrence, you still need a good authentication system for your business. Authentication systems with Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance will give you a heads up if an email contains dubious links or potential threats. Aside from protecting your eCommerce business against fraud, email authentication assures your customers that what you send is trustworthy.
5. Determine transaction origins.
Each electronic device has a particular fraud profile and depending on what was used for the transaction, you can gauge and screen for potential eCommerce fraud. Device assessment assists online merchants in identifying transactions made by bots, flagging anomalous purchases through account takeovers, and highlighting malicious intents.
When consumer spending picks up during the holiday season, it is expected that eCommerce fraud will gain momentum as well. Ensure that your business is not losing money from fraudulent transactions by beefing up your prevention and authentication systems and keeping them updated with the latest patches.
Adobe’s Scott Belsky says that augmented reality will be as big or bigger than the Web itself. “Augmented reality, to me, is the next major medium,” says Belsky. “I actually would go on the record saying that I think someday AR will be as big, if not bigger, than the Web because it will literally be everywhere.”
Scott Belsky was recently interviewed on CXOTalk with Michael Krigsman about AI and AR and how it will impact the customer experience (video below):
The Age of Artificial Intelligence
This is probably the most exciting part of my job is thinking about these future mediums. Everyone is going to have to take them into consideration. If those terms sounded new to any of your viewers, it’s a problem, and for a few reasons.
On the AI side, every company has a lot of data on its customers that they need to use to make the customer experience better. Customers are going to stop being forgiving of presumptuous defaults that don’t work for them, of questions that they should know the answer to already.
In the Age of AI, Customers Will Expect Personalization
Customers are going to expect a personalized experience because we’re in the age of AI. That starts with instrumenting your services and products to start collecting the right data. Then it means hiring a team that can understand and starts to extrapolate some lessons from that data. Then it also means designing products to take it into account, which is personalization.
It’s a real vector of the future. I think that companies are going to start competing on the data that they have to enable a better customer experience for their customers. I think that every company, especially big ones if they don’t start to leverage their understanding of their customers, they will be trampled by those that can. We can talk more about that.
Augmented Reality Will Be Bigger than the Web
Augmented reality, to me, is the next major medium. I actually would go on the record saying that I think someday AR will be as big, if not bigger, than the Web because it will literally be everywhere. It will be a layer on everything we see. We will walk down the street, and we will know who we know was everywhere and what their ratings were. Yelp will come alive to us, right? Directions will be transformed. There will be LinkedIn bubbles over everyone’s heads. You’ll have this amazing amount of knowledge and insight about everyone in every room you enter.
Then, if you take those glasses off or whatever you’re looking through, you’ll feel somewhat dumb. You’re like be like, “Oh, my goodness. I don’t know my connections to anyone around here. I don’t know. There’s nothing left for me here. There are no remnants from when I was here last and my old notes.” You’ll want to put it back on. That is this future world.
At Adobe, we think about the fact that that world will be very dry if it isn’t rich with creativity and content. That’s why we’re very focused on the future of augmented reality from the creative tooling and marketing analytics perspective.
Expectation That We Can Talk to Any App or Device
Let’s talk about Voice for a moment. I think we’re going to have an expectation that we can talk to any application or device that is in our lives and ask simple questions and get very, very quick answers. Look no further than anyone who has young kids. They can’t necessarily navigate to a song on Spotify on a phone or whatever, but they can ask for the song from Alexa, and they can use that all day. It’s very, very, very powerful. [There’s] a lot of design implications for voice interfaces as well, and that’s why these new mediums are super exciting, ripe with challenges, but everyone has to start thinking about them.
Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at 2018 International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels last night and gave a bold and possibly controversial privacy speech. Cook directly challenged Facebook, and tech companies in general, to change their perspective on privacy. He also said that Apple is fully supportive of ‘a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States.’
Below is the full text of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s speech followed by the full video embed:
Apple CEO Tim Cook – The Privacy Speech
It is an honor to be here with you today in this grand hall, a room that represents what is possible when people of different backgrounds, histories, and philosophies come together to build something bigger than themselves. I am deeply grateful to our hosts. I want to recognize Ventsislav Karadjov for his service and leadership. And it’s a true privilege to be introduced by his co-host, a statesman I admire greatly, Giovanni Butarelli.
Now Italy has produced more than its fair share of great leaders and public servants. Machiavelli taught us how leaders can get away with evil deeds, and Dante showed us what happens when they get caught.
You Set an Example for the World
Giovanni has done something very different. Through his values, his dedication, his thoughtful work, Giovanni, his predecessor Peter Hustinx, and all of you have set an example for the world. We are deeply grateful.
We need you to keep making progress, now more than ever. Because these are transformative times. Around the world, from Copenhagen to Chennai to Cupertino, new technologies are driving breakthroughs in humanity’s greatest common projects. From preventing and fighting disease, to curbing the effects of climate change, to ensuring every person has access to information and economic opportunity.
We See Vividly, Painfully, How Technology Can Harm Rather Than Help
At the same time, we see vividly, painfully, how technology can harm rather than help. Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies. Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false.
This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy. And those of us who believe in technology’s potential for good must not shrink from this moment. Now, more than ever, as leaders of governments, as decision-makers in business, and as citizens, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in? I’m here today because we hope to work with you as partners in answering this question.
Technology Doesn’t Want To Do Great Things – That Part Takes Us
At Apple, we are optimistic about technology’s awesome potential for good. But we know that it won’t happen on its own. Every day, we work to infuse the devices we make with the humanity that makes us. As I’ve said before, technology is capable of doing great things, but it doesn’t want to do great things. It doesn’t want anything. That part takes all of us.
That’s why I believe that our missions are so closely aligned. As Giovanni puts it, “We must act to ensure that technology is designed and developed to serve humankind and not the other way around.”
Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right
We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. But we also recognize that not everyone sees it that way. In a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.
As far back as 1890, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis published an article in the Harvard Law Review making the case for a “Right to Privacy” in the United States. He warned, “Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade.”
Our Own Information is Being Weaponized Against Us
Today that trade has exploded into a data industrial complex. Our own information, from the every day to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Every day, billions of dollars change hands, and countless decisions are made, on the basis of our likes and dislikes, our friends and families, our relationships and conversations, our wishes and fears, our hopes and dreams.
These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know YOU better than YOU may know yourself.
We Shouldn’t Sugarcoat the Consequences… This is Surveillance
Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions. If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles or watching a lot of videos about the insidious threat from people who like orange.
In the news, almost every day, we bear witness to the harmful, even deadly, effects of these narrowed worldviews. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us. And it illustrates the importance of our shared work and the challenges still ahead of us.
We Support a Comprehensive Federal Privacy Law in the US
Fortunately, this year, you’ve shown the world that good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of everyone. We should celebrate the transformative work of the European institutions tasked with the successful implementation of the GDPR. We also celebrate the new steps taken, not only here in Europe, but around the world. In Singapore, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, and many more nations, regulators are asking tough questions and crafting effective reforms.
It is time for the rest of the world, including my home country, to follow your lead. We at Apple are in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States. There and everywhere, it should be rooted in four essential rights.
First, the right to have personal data minimized. Companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data, or not to collect it in the first place. Second, the right to knowledge. Users should always know what data is being collected and what it is being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.
Third, the right to access. Companies should recognize that data belongs to users, and we should all make it easy for users to get a copy of, correct, and delete their personal data. And fourth, the right to security. Security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights.
There Are Those Who Would Prefer I Hadn’t Said All of That
Now, there are those who would prefer I hadn’t said all of that. Some oppose any form of privacy legislation. Others will endorse reform in public and then resist and undermine it behind closed doors. They may say to you, ‘our companies will never achieve technology’s true potential if they are constrained with privacy regulation.’ But this notion isn’t just wrong, it is destructive.
Technology’s potential is, and always must be, rooted in the faith people have in it, in the optimism and creativity that it stirs in the hearts of individuals, and in its promise and capacity to make the world a better place. It’s time to face facts. We will never achieve technology’s true potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.
At Apple, Respect for Privacy and Suspicion of Authority Are in Our Blood
At Apple, respect for privacy and a healthy suspicion of authority have always been in our bloodstream. Our first computers were built by misfits, tinkerers, and rebels, not in a laboratory or a boardroom, but in a suburban garage. We introduced the Macintosh with a famous TV ad channeling George Orwell’s 1984, a warning of what can happen when technology becomes a tool of power and loses touch with humanity.
And way back in 2010, Steve Jobs said in no uncertain terms, “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain language, and repeatedly. It’s worth remembering the foresight and courage it took to make that statement.
When we designed this device we knew it could put more personal data in your pocket than most of us keep in our homes. And there was enormous pressure on Steve and Apple to bend our values and to freely share the information. But we refused to compromise.
In fact, we’ve only deepened our commitment in the decade since. From hardware breakthroughs that encrypt fingerprints and faces securely and only on your device to simple and powerful notifications that make clear to every user precisely what they’re sharing and when they are sharing it. We aren’t absolutists, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. Instead, we always try to return to that simple question: What kind of world do we want to live in?
At every stage of the creative process, then and now, we engage in an open, honest, and robust ethical debate about the products we make and the impact they will have. That’s just a part of our culture. We don’t do it because we have to, we do it because we ought to. The values behind our products are as important to us as any feature.
The Dangers Are Real From Cyber-Criminals to Rogue Nation States
We understand that the dangers are real from cyber-criminals to rogue nation states. We’re not willing to leave our users to fend for themselves. And, we’ve shown, we’ll defend them, we will defend our principles when challenged.
Those values, that commitment to thoughtful debate and transparency, they’re only going to get more important. As progress speeds up, these things should continue to ground us and connect us, first and foremost, to the people we serve.
For AI to be Truly Smart, It Must Respect Human Values
Artificial Intelligence is one area I think a lot about. Clearly, it’s on the minds of many of my peers as well. At its core, this technology promises to learn from people individually to benefit us all. Yet advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency. For Artificial Intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy.
If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound. We can achieve both great Artificial Intelligence and great privacy standards. It’s not only a possibility, it is a responsibility. In the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we should not sacrifice the humanity, creativity, and ingenuity that define our human intelligence. And at Apple, we never will.
In the mid-19th Century, the great American writer Henry David Thoreau found himself so fed up with the pace and change of Industrial society that he moved to a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond. Call it the first digital cleanse.
Yet even there, where he hoped to find a bit of peace, he could hear a distant clatter and whistle of a steam engine passing by. “We do not ride on the railroad,” he said. “It rides upon us.”
Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in technology have an enormous responsibility. It is not to please every grumpy Thoreau out there. That’s an unreasonable standard, and we’ll never meet it. We are responsible, however, for recognizing that the devices we make and the platforms we build have real lasting, even permanent effects, on the individuals and communities who use them.
What Kind of World Do We Want to Live In?
We must never stop asking ourselves, what kind of world do we want to live in? The answer to that question must not be an afterthought, it should be our primary concern. We at Apple can, and do, provide the very best to our users while treating their most personal data like the precious cargo that it is. And if we can do it, then everyone can do it.
Fortunately, we have your example before us. Thank you for your work, for your commitment to the possibility of human-centered technology, and for your firm belief that our best days are still ahead of us.
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.
Drive.AI has launched a free self-driving car service in Arlington, Texas. “In Arlington, we are launching three different services,” said Drive.AI CEO Bijit Halde. “One for the game day, one for lunchtime service, and one that connects the Convention Center to Texas Live, the entertainment part of the city.”
“Today, we started with three cars with the potential to expand as the need of the community grows,” noted Halde.
Halde says that “they will be the same type of cars we had in Frisco, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” He noted that it’s just a beginning and that the small size of the launch is only one way of looking at it. “We want to be very careful and deliberate because safety is of utmost concern. Also, user acceptability is a core concern. We start small and grow fast.”
Riders will pay nothing Halde says and anyone in that area can access this service. Halde added, “In Frisco, we only had a mobile app. In Arlington, we have a mobile app and walk up kiosks where you can type in your name and phone number to get picked up.”
Halde explained that the company feels there are three factors to success with launching a self-driving ride-hailing service. One, can we safely deploy? But driving is not just one problem. The other factors are driving in the city and driving on the freeways. Drive.AI considers those as two distinct problems.
“We want to make sure that we take a small problem and solve it and then grow from there,” said Halde. “We don’t want to push the technology when the people aren’t ready.”
Christie’s announced that it is going to auction for the first time art that has been generated via an artificial intelligence algorithm. The art was created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier using AI software.
Richard Lloyd, Christie’s International head of Prints & Multiples discussed AI art in an interview on CBS:
AI Art Used Software Called the GAN Algorithm
Obvious used a nifty piece of software called the GAN algorithm. What they did is uploaded thousands of images to a computer and that point it actually splits itself in two. One half is called the Generator and that analyzes those thousands of portraits and learns what a portrait is. It sort of parses through all those and then thinks now I am going to start creating my own versions of those.
The second half of the computer, the Discriminator, tries to spot that. Everytime the title is run, if the Discriminator is able to say that a portrait is created by a computer the Generator runs it again. The cycle finishes when the Discriminator says I give up, I can’t tell the difference between the computer generated version and the human-generated version and that’s what pops out.
AI Art to Sell for $10K
We’ve estimated that it will sell for $7,000 to $10,000. We put a lot of thought into the estimate because if we put a huge amount people would say what are you basing that valuation on because this is the first.
But also we thought that it was the right sweet spot where people would respect it as a work of art because the creators certainly think of it as that.
Who is the Creator of AI Art?
Who created the art? Is it the person who wrote the algorithm? Is it a combination of the artwork that was uploaded? Is it the people that tweaked the software? This is why this is inspiring and interesting because we’ve never really had to ask those questions before.
I remember reading years ago that when TV news started, print journalists thought well that’s it, who’s going to read a newspaper? Everybody is just going to watch it. But in fact, both exist side by side. So I think that in the future in five to fifteen years time there will be parallel tracks. There will be human art and artificial intelligence art.
AI Human Hybrid Art is the Future
There will also be a hybrid which I think is coming down the pike in the near future. Artists have always been great early adopters. Warhol adapted screen printing which came from commercial packaging.
Photographers took the camera and thought we can do weird and wonderful things with this. I think human artists will be working side by side with this algorithm to create hybrid art. It’s just the beginning and is so fascinating in what is going to be created.
Just Don’t Call AI Art a Masterpiece
I’ve done a lot of research into AI art and there is something about using human-centric words like masterpiece. You just kind of stop short. I think a great work of art is a link to another person. You think of Vango and what he was going through to create that. But this is an algorithm so…
Domino’s Pizza continues to implement innovative technology to maintain it’s competitive edge in the pizza business. Domino’s ran ads over the summer promoting Hotspots where you could have pizza delivered to over 150,000 locations.
The company has also been on the cutting edge of technology in its use of autonomous vehicles that are actually delivering pizza in Las Vegas. You can watch a video from a customer of a Domino’s driverless car delivering a pizza below. Domino’s is also testing AI natural voice systems in some of its corporate stores and just recently rolled out a voice inventory app.
Ritch Allison, CEO of Domino’s, recently discussed their strategy of innovation and technology with CNBC’s Jim Cramer:
Pizza is a really fragmented category. We’re the market share leader in pizza but we still only sell about one out of every six pizzas in the US. We’re staying focused on our strategy, and our execution and not really on the short-term up and downs of any one particular competitor (such as Papa John’s). If we stay focused on the things that we’ve been doing then we’re going to continue to take share from competitors small and large across the industry.
The Hotspot ads we ran this summer were terrific. It’s just another great way that we’re engaging our customers. A lot of restaurant players and a lot of players in pizza our constant members in the product of the month club and we got out of that club a long time ago and started focusing on things that were interesting and innovative that we could do to engage our customers.
Hotspots is another one of those because it shows our customers we’re so crazy about pizza that we’re going to take their pizza to them any time, any place, they want to get it.
We’re working on a lot of things, autonomous vehicles are certainly one thing that we’ve been working on. We’ve talked about DOM, our artificial intelligence natural voice system. We’re still piloting that in some of our corporate stores. It’s learning, it’s growing, it’s getting better.
We just recently rolled out within our stores a voice inventory app that our team members can use for one of the most unpleasant tasks they have which are at the end of a shift they’ve got to go count the food that we have in the walk-in cooler and this makes that job easier and faster for them well.
Companies that are planning to use artificial intelligence for recruitment should think twice before doing that. A new report revealed that Amazon’s AI machine learned gender bias and weeded out women as potential job candidates. The machine even downgraded applicants based on the school they attended.
A growing number of employers are using AI to boost the efficiency of their hiring process. The machine can be utilized to evaluate resumes, narrow down a list of applicants, and recommend candidates for the right post within a company. It can then pass on its findings to its live counterpart for human assessment. While AI is an effective tool for screening resumes, it has been shown to develop bias, as proven by Amazon’s experiment.
Reuters reported that the retail giant spent several years developing an AI that would vet job applicants. The machine was trained to look at the resumes that the company received for the past ten years. But as most of these applications were from male applicants, the patterns the AI identified were strongly oriented to that sex. In short, Amazon’s AI learned gender bias.
For instance, the AI developed a preference for terms like “captured” or “executed,” which were words commonly used by male engineers. The machine also began to penalize applications that included the word “women” or “women’s.” So describing yourself as the head of the “women’s physics club” was a strike against you.
Amazon had to ditch its AI recruitment system because it was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way. https://t.co/JWhbBNOl0Vpic.twitter.com/sy512kwcNt
A source familiar with Amazon’s AI program also admitted that the machine even downgraded applicants who graduated from two all-women’s universities. The names of the universities were not specified in the report.
The bias shown by the AI’s algorithm became noticeable a year after the project started, and Amazon admittedly tried to correct its AI. The company’s engineers initially edited the system to make it neutral to these specific words. However, there was no way of proving that the machine would not learn another way to sort candidates in a discriminatory manner.
Theproject was eventually shelved in 2017 because company executives lost confidence in it. The AI also reportedly failed at providing choices for strong and effective job candidates.
Fortunately for Amazon, the AI hiring experiment was just a trial run. The machine was never utilized by a larger group and was never used as the main recruiting agent. Nevertheless, the possibility is high that a qualified applicant was weeded out simply because she was a woman and did not think to use a masculine term like “capture.”
Intel recently released the Intel Next 50 Study which surveyed people on what they think technology will look like in the next 50 years. David Shaw, in Developer Relations at Intel and is part of the Intel Delta Force team explains:
What do you think technology will look like in the next 50 years? Maybe we’ll all be driving flying cars. Maybe there’ll be sentient robots. Okay, That might sound a little bit out there, but Intel recently conducted a study to find out what people are most excited about regarding the future of technology.
Intel’s Next 50 project aims to help researchers understand current attitudes towards technology and its role in day-to-day activities. It tries to paint a cohesive picture of what people think about technology and to identify key areas of excitement and concern.
For starters, over 80 percent of people believe that smartphones NPCs will continue to be important in 50 years:
But we can’t agree on everything. People are split on whether technology will bring them closer together or further apart from friends and family:
People also have mixed views of artificial intelligence. Over one-third of those surveyed don’t believe they use AI today. This might sound a little uncertain but research has shown that there’s still a great deal of excitement around the future:
According to the study, people express the most excitement towards familiar established technologies like computers and smartphones. The excitement even carried over to things like smart homes of which AI is a key building block:
In particular, parents tend to be more excited about AI research which shows that this group is more likely than consumers overall to look to AI to increase their quality of life by automating everyday tasks:
It doesn’t stop there either. Interestingly, they are also more trustful of artificial intelligence devices and according to the study tend to look forward to technologies predicting their needs:
The study gives good insight into how people feel towards technology and it might give you the lead on what to create next, with Intel technology, of course.
Last week, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced that the companies were merging to “create the world’s leading next-generation data platform provider, spanning multi-cloud, on-premises, and the Edge.” Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly says that providing technology to help manage the huge volume of data generated from the Internet of Things is where “Cloudera is going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future. “
Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed the Hortonworks merger and how they plan to become the next Oracle type company in an interview with Jim Cramer on Mad Money:
This is a Wonderful Merger
This is a wonderful merger. Basically, by bringing these two companies together we are creating immense shareholder value. Our plans are that by 2020, just around the corner, our combined company Cloudera plus Hortonworks will be greater than a billion dollars in annual revenues, will be greater than 20 percent year-over-year growth, and will have greater than 15% operating cash flow margins. The amount of shareholder value we will create by bringing us together is immense.
Profitability of the combined company is our goal. This has been a rivalry that’s going on for nearly 10 years. We have been going at it really hard against each other and that has made us both better. Competition is wonderful, but now there’s a new set of competitors that we can combine ourselves to be a much stronger company at greater scale and we can take on a new set of competitors, and a lot of it are these cloud guys, where we are extremely well positioned to win in a different market.
What Does Cloudera Do?
Samsung Electronics, like all other manufacturers, are instrumenting and connecting the devices they create to the Internet. It’s called the Internet of Things. Every car, every cell phone, everything through a supply chain is being instrumented including autonomous vehicles. We sell technology for our customers to collect all that data and use machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand better how products are being used and to make them more efficient or to build autonomous vehicles. This is what we do. Cloudera and Hortonworks allow us to deliver an enterprise data cloud from the Edge where data comes from all the way to AI, getting insight out of that data.
Merger is a Win-Win for Everyone
This merger is a win-win for everyone. All of our customers are happy, all of our partners are happy, and yes our partner systems is going to get larger because Cloudera has some unique partnerships and relationships as does Hortonworks. Regarding our IBM partnership, Hortonworks and IBM have had a wonderful strategic partnership.
The new Cloudera is going to embrace that partnership much like we Cloudera have had a wonderful relationship with Intel. Now we’re going to bring in the Hortonworks customer base and they’re going to get the benefits of our relationship with Intel. We intend this to be a win-win not only for our shareholders, our partners, our customers, and all of our employees.
How We Become the Next Oracle
A lot of the excitement about this merger is people expect us to be the next Oracle. That doesn’t mean we’re replacing Oracle legacy business or their traditional business. No, the world is changing with this Internet of Things. Data is of much more volume and people want to do artificial intelligence machine learning against that data. That’s where we’re going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future.
The fact of the matter is Oracle is a good partner of ours. Oracle has resold Qatar our software for a long time and we’re excited about what Oracle is doing in the cloud and we intend to work with them there. Cloudera plus Hortonworks working together will be the only provider delivering our software across all the major cloud guys. We work on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the IBM cloud and that’s our value proposition, enterprises they can work across all the cloud providers.
Historian and futurist George Gilder says that Google Marxism just repeats Karl Marx’s error with their technology. Because of this Gilder says that Google is delusional and is “having a nervous breakdown.”
Vin Cerf, co-inventor of TCP-IP now at Google, is a defender of the existing Internet architecture, a porous and perforated structure that allows all the money and power to be sucked up to the top where Google rules. That’s why I wrote Life After Google. He should read it.
George Gilder, author of Life After Google, discussed Google and technology with Peter Robinson on ‘Uncommon Knowledge’, an interview show by Stanford’s Hoover Institution:
A lot of people don’t really understand what Marxism was. The key error of Marxism was Karl Marx’s belief that the industrial revolution of the 19th century was the final human attainment, a kind of eschaton that the problem of productivity and wealth creation had been solved forever.
From then on, the only challenge would be how to distribute wealth, rather than how to create it. Well, Google Marxism just repeats Karl Marx’s error with the new technology. Google believes that their AI artificial intelligence, their machine learning, their robotics, their algorithmic biology, their search, and their solutions constitute a new eschaton, a new final achievement of human beings that’s even more grandiose than Karl’s original vision and that the Google people imagine a singularity where the machines will eclipse human minds and allow all of the rest of us to retire on beaches and collect a guaranteed annual income, the new fashion in silicon valley while Brin and Page fly off with Elon Musk to some remote planet in a winner-take-all universe.
I just think this is delusional. Google faces impossible business problems, contradictions in their strategy, flaws in their technology, misunderstandings of the very computer science that underlie all their technology. I think Google is having a nervous breakdown.
They dominated this era. This is the Google era. We live in it, but the next step is to upload your mind into the Google Cloud. I said I balk at this next step in the Google system of the world.
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.
DiDi Has a Lot of Advantages in Autonomous Vehicle Development
Improves Solar Yield by 5 Percent, Operational Costs by 20 Percent
About Raycatch:
AR Will Be as Ubiquitous as the Internet 
