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Showing posts with the label automation

AI, Eldercare and Innovation with TCS Expert Ved Sen

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In this episode, my long time friend Ved Sen joins to talk about AI, the future of jobs, robots and Eldercare, building organizational innovation, AI’s impact on software development lifecycles, and much more.   Ved is the Head of Innovation, TCS UK & Ireland, and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the show today!  Enjoy! *I use generative AI to assist in all my work. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Futurist at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mastering the Art of Decision-Making:Navigating Complexity and Speed in Modern Leadership

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In today's rapidly changing leadership landscape, the ability to understand and execute good decisions quickly has evolved from a skill to a critical necessity. Leaders are now compelled to adopt a formalized approach to decision-making, anchored in an efficiently optimized information logistics system. This system is essential for the swift flow of vital information - encompassing its capture, transmission, analysis, and reporting. Any hindrance in this flow can significantly impede a leader's ability to make timely decisions and act effectively, crucial components of the decision-action loop. The core of decision-making is a three-step process: comprehending the situation, making an informed decision, and executing an action that leads to the desired outcome. The emphasis on "effect" here is crucial. It signifies the variety of tactics that can achieve the same goal. For example, in home security, a dog's bark might be as effective as its bite in warding off int

Transferring Human Vulnerabilities to Artificial Intelligence

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I have written a  series of articles about the future of information, truth and influence.  These articles explore the human vulnerabilities that are exploited in social media, and in combination with other traditional forms of media. I also explore the concept of social engineering and information operations where professional marketers, military and political strategist use the way our brain works to influence us.  In this article we explore how our brains and their instinctual and learned biases can cause us problems when combined with artificial intelligence and automation. In the revealing new book, The Loop , by NBC News technology correspondent, Jacob Ward, he shares how we can cause ourselves harm by letting our unconscious, evolutionary instincts and biases shape our automated future.  He warns that the real danger of artificial intelligence is that it is informed by and learns from how our human brains work, and our human brains are constantly making instant and unthinking de

The Next Big Think Podcast: Why Industry 4.0 is About Industrial Automation

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Our guest in today's podcast is Daniel Raj David.  He figured out as a student engineer in university that asset monitoring and maintenance, especially in legacy-led industries like oil and gas, was complicated. So, he and a bunch of friends devised a plan to make it simpler. Daniel Raj David is the co-founder and CEO of startup Detect Technologies , a company that is part of TCS' COIN™ Accelerator program. Detect Technologies focuses on industrial AI and SaaS, and is reimagining global industrial productivity. In this episode of The Next Big Think!, we delve into Industry 4.0. Daniel demystifies legacy transformation in industries like oil and energy, construction, and manufacturing. The conversation also explores how technology’s primary role is to digitize, de-risk, and automate business. Listen in to know more about how AI, IoT, drones, and ML are freeing up human capital to think, ideate, and design, and why ‘the next big think’ is industrial automation. ****************

Speed and a Doctrine for the Future

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Throughout my career in the high tech industry I have often heard the business maxim, “First, develop a business strategy and then find the technology to support it.” My experience over the years, however, has led me to believe this maxim is misguided.   Let me explain by asking several questions. What came first digital commerce or the Internet?  Mobile payments or wireless networks?  Commercial airline travel or the airplane, knights in shiny armour being used as shock troops, or stirrups?  Trivia answer: Stirrups!  Technology has a long history of appearing first, and then strategies are formed later. What we are learning is if our outdated business strategies are dictating the speed of our technology adoptions, then we are in big trouble! The world is moving much too fast and we must align the tempo of our business strategy evolution with the pace of technology innovations and our customer adoptions of those technologies.  We need to invest in future oriented thinking and the explo

Must We be Good to Have a Good Future?

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The renowned Futurist Gerd Leonhard, in this short and impactful  video , says in order to create a good future - we must be good.  He suggests four focus areas for the future: people, prosperity, purpose and planet.  If you agree with Gerd, then the first question is "What is good?  Secondly, "How do we become good?"  And, thirdly, "How do we use that good to create the future we all want?" A satisfying definition of "good" for me is something that promotes happiness, community well-being, is loving, pleasing, admirable, kind, desirable and virtuous.  Once we figure out how to become these things ourselves, we must embed them in our technology in the form of AI, to help us shape a "good" future. As more of our daily activities and interactions involve artificial intelligence, we will want our interfaces and communications with AI (digital assistants, chatbots and robots) to feel and be "good."  We will want AI to make accurate, co

Will You Trust a Robot?

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Jeff Bezos and team launched 66.5 miles into suborbital space on a rocket ship with no pilot this week.  The rocket ship operated autonomously using sensors and artificial intelligence.  That takes trust. They had to believe in the science and that the AI system would get them safely there and back.  They had to have trust in the scientists, programmers, engineers, physicists and chemists.  They had to have trust in the math and physics.  They had to trust the coding and formulas used in the algorithms.  They had to trust in the data coming from the sensors.  Although there were likely many failures along the way, they trusted the process - the scientific method.

The Latest Developments in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Assistants at Oracle

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My brilliant friend Suhas Uliyar is Oracle's VP of Digital Assistants, AI & Integration.  We connected on Zoom last week where he shared the latest developments in AI, and the progress his team is making in creating digital assistants that understand sentiment, swear words and soon have reasoning powers.   ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Partner | Futurist at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Future of Managers

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Managers must explain a lot of things.  Early in my career I managed a team of six IT experts responsible for EDI and other forms of business-to-business data exchanges with suppliers.  Our data, from planning and manufacturing systems, was shared with our suppliers' to support the just-in-time manufacturing of electronics.  Our senior leadership would often ask us to defend our data, yet we often struggled to explain where it originated from or how the numbers were generated.  The data we were using came from a figurative "black box."  We received it without explanation.  That of course was an untenable position for a manager. In the near future managers will increasingly depend on artificial intelligence for assistance, and hopefully it will be explainable AI to avoid the challenges I faced.  Explainable AI (XAI) is artificial intelligence in which the results, and the logic and data used, can be understood by humans.  Understanding how the system works is critical to e

Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream

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The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States - a set of ideals which includes the opportunity for prosperity, success and access to upward social mobility for individuals and their families.  The last thing any of us want is to invent and deploy technologies that are barriers to this dream. Artificial intelligence (AI), configured wrongly, can become a barrier.  Many companies today are now using AI to interview candidates, interpret their potential, and rank them from best to worst.  How emotive a person's face muscles are, their use of the english language, and the sophistication of their vocabulary are now all being used to select or reject job candidates. One can only imagine how difficult AI interviews are for immigrants and refugees looking for their first big opportunity.  Facial expressions are often influenced by culture.  English being a second, third or fourth language could present all kinds of barriers to getting past the AI gatekeepers and into the la

Future of Warfare and Its Gamification

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Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before - or to self destruct. ~ Future of Life Institute  In the future, warfare will be fought increasingly by engineers, software developers, scientists, accountants and politicians, which is a historical anomaly and worth some consideration. Historically war was conducted to compel a positive political outcome for the victor.  This was accomplished by diminishing an adversaries will, or resolve to fight by making them suffer.  Once an adversary suffered enough and they lost their will to continue - peace was achieved on the terms of the victor.  Here is where the entire twisted logic of war and violence breaks down.  In the future, warfare is likely to be increasingly fought between machines that don't suffer.  They just do it - as Nike advocated.

Robots that Create Jobs and Construct Apartment Buildings

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An Idaho company, Autovol Volumetric Modular , is building apartments inside a Nampa, Idaho factory and shipping the modular components to the San Jose, CA area for installation.  In a 400,000 square foot manufacturing space they are maximizing the use of robots and automation to do the heavy lifting and to ensure precision manufacturing.  The value  according to CEO Rick Murdock , is saving 20% on costs and 40% on time.  "We’ll build it here (in Idaho), ship it and save the project about $100 a square foot.” What a great story!  Idaho, known worldwide for their farming of "famous potatoes," is innovating and shipping their finished products to Silicon Valley, and none too soon.  The oldest archaeological evidence of house construction is estimated to be around 1.8 million years old.  It's about time for innovation!  How do they designate what work the humans do, and what work the robots do?  Robots are used to build walls, floors and ceilings and to assemble the mod

Facebook's Infodemic on the Pandemic

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I am a long-time technology enthusiast, analyst and futurist, and love to discuss and write about the positive impact emerging technologies offer humanity.  That said, we can’t be blind to the negative impacts as well.  Facebook’s algorithms are increasingly showing up as the source and amplifer of many false and misleading postings that are widely distributed and promoted causing serious consequences for us all.  The sheer volume of false information being distributed today by Facebook algorithms is overwhelming the truth. A recent research paper by the organization Avaaz titled Facebook's Algorithm: A Major Threat to Public Health , found that health misinformation spreading networks on Facebook appear to have outpaced authoritative health websites, despite the platform’s declared aggressive efforts to moderate and downgrade health misinformation and boost authoritative sources.  This finding suggests that "Facebook’s moderation tactics are not keeping up with the amplificat

Digital Anthropology, Covid-19 and the Future of Work

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In this interview we discuss Covid-19's impact on businesses, digital transformation, the impact of automation on humans and the second digital revolution with entrepreneur and future of work expert, Richard Skellett.  Richard is opinionated and calls the displacement of humans with robots and automation immoral.  Join us for a thought provoking exploration of the future of work. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Digital Transformation for the Greater Good

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Adam Smith wrote about rational self-interest, which posits we work for the greater good when it benefits ourselves.  But what is the greater good, and how does digital transformation impact it? I believe most of us would agree that replacing large numbers of humans with machines that result in wide scale unemployment and suffering is not in our rational self-interest or the greater good. Having massive numbers of jobs terminated by the Terminator does not result in a safer, healthier, happier civilization or vibrant economy.  So what is the greater good that we, out of rational self-interest, can strive for? Just because something is possible, and VCs will fund it, does not mean it supports the greater good. Technology that takes all meaningful jobs away from humans resulting in their suffering will soon become a target for their wrath.  I can already imagine brands placing badges on their products that certify "Human-Made" to gain a competitive advantage over machine-

A Digital Leader's Playbook

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Digital Strategies Winners know how to win. When competition, data and/or rules change, so do their game plans.  Recently while watching NFL football, I was intrigued by a discussion between analyst about how the best coaches can change their strategies mid-game based on new and different data.  Some coaches are able to pivot, others can't.   What follows is a list of key strategies, concepts and mindsets that will help your enterprise win:

Hiding from Karma in an AI World

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Recently an artificial intelligence system in China successfully passed a medical exam for the first time.  This is a significant advance in healthcare.  Potentially AI can soon provide high quality medical diagnoses remotely anywhere around the world.   Another significant step in AI and robotics happen a couple of years ago in Saudi Arabia where they granted citizenship to a robot named Sophia.  I wonder if that robot will be forced to wear a burka?  With all these rapid advancements, I think it is time we explore the spiritual life of robots and artificial intelligence. Up until recently, human programmers coded and configured algorithms, AI, automation and machine learning system and took personal responsibility for all of their own code.  Today, however, AI has escaped the confines of human oversight and has been empowered and employed to self-program, self-optimize, self-test, self-configure and self-learn.  David Gunning writes, "Continued advances [in AI] promise to pr

A Deep Dive into the State of Video and Web Conferencing with Zoom President Dave Berman

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In this episode we review the history of web and video conferencing with the president of Zoom, Dave Berman.  We explore how the new generation impacts management, sales, marketing, internal and external communications, and why it should be an important component of every company’s digital transformation strategy. ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict SVP Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc. Website Regalix Inc. View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Insights and Strategy from SAP's VP of Web Marketing Gail Moody-Byrd

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Kevin Benedict and Gail Moody-Byrd Kevin: Thanks for joining us today Gail!  Let’s talk about your title, Vice President and Head of Web Marketing at SAP.  What do you get to do in this role? Gail: It’s really an interesting new role. It was created to do a couple of things. SAP.com, the website, is going through a transformation and we are moving from a site that largely generated awareness and shared information, to a site that drives business value. The team that works for me does a couple of things. We manage the web pages for products and industries, and now we are responsible for the performance of the website. How are the pages performing? How are they connecting with our visitors? We are making sure that every interaction is a good one. We are giving website visitors a lot of opportunities, through chat and other things, to engage with the site.  We are also making sure that the hand-off from the website to the sales team is clean, clear and effective, and the leads the

Digital and Marketing Leadership Series: Efrat Ravid, CMO ContentSquare

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In this episode we dig deep into website analytics and customer journeys with digital marketing expert and CMO Efrat Ravid.  We explore the topics of romance in France, website habits in Germany, how to use activity-based analytics to help businesses understand exactly what content is working and effective, plus much more. This interview is valuable to any digital/website marketing leader or practitioner.  Enjoy! ************************************************************************ Kevin Benedict Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc. Website Regalix Inc. View my profile on LinkedIn Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies ***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.