Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future: machine learning

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Silicon Valley Series: Cultural Impact on Digital Transformation

In this Silicon Valley Series I am honored to interview a number of very smart and experienced Silicon Valley dignitaries on a variety of important business trends, technologies and strategies. I hope you find this series of short interviews useful.

In this episode, I interview Tom Thimot, a veteran three time CEO of Silicon Valley companies, on the importance of developing the right culture in your enterprise so you can compete successfully in an age of digital transformation. Enjoy!

Silicon Valley Series: Evolution of Cloud, Analytics, AI and Human Integration

In this Silicon Valley Series I was honored to interview a number of very smart and experienced Silicon Valley dignitaries on a variety of important business trends, technologies and strategies. I hope you find this series of short interviews useful.

In this episode, I interview Silicon Valley veteran and three time CEO Tom Thimot on how artificial intelligence and automation are evolving from hybrid models to more trusted automation models.

I have had the opportunity to work for and around a good many start-ups during the course of my career. Often the start-up founders would simply define a problem, develop a solution and launch a company. The marketing department would then do their very best to identify the individuals in each target company that experienced the problem and had a budget to fix it. This was always a challenging task, but it is even harder today.

Today, start-ups must not only identify a problem that needs solved, but they must compete against "digital transformation" initiatives in both the business and IT organizations that are trying to reduce complexity through the elimination of applications, customized software solutions, IT systems, multiple instances of ERPs and vendors.

The goal of many organizations today is to simplify the IT environment, and to make business processes much faster and agile. I see many companies seeking to standardize on a handful of platforms like Salesforce.com, SAP, Adobe, Ariba, SuccessFactor, etc. Too many systems in an IT inventory, means too much complexity and the increased risk that data will be compromised, and that systems will be too expensive to maintain, secure and upgrade. In this age of fast changing digital consumer behaviors, flexibility and simplicity equal organizational speed to keep up with their markets.

What is the answer for start-ups? Start-up solutions must appeal to the digital transformation goals of their target customers. It means their solution must be cloud based and automatically upgraded to stay aligned with customer's core platforms and systems. It means offering artificial intelligence enabled robotic process automation, chatbots and machine learning that can improve predictability, simplify complexity and eliminate troublesome areas of service and performance. It must not result in any additional layers of complexity, rather new solutions need to solve big problems, while at the same time reducing complexity, and increasing agility and the operational tempo of the business.

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Kevin Benedict

President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™

Website C4DIGI.com

View my profile on LinkedIn

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***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 and Competitive Decision-Making

The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects us all. Leaders (people) must become trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions. Leaders must use the right strategies and methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things). If any component of this trinity is weak, it will be hard to compete.

In a recent survey of high tech VP level and above executives that I conducted, few companies have a formal training program in place to help develop their leaders to be skilled at digital transformation and competitive decision-making. Most enterprises are just rolling the dice on the skill levels of their leadership. Given the emerging challenges that digital transformation introduces to a complex business, I would strongly advise companies to invest in formal digital leadership development.

Some of the key goals of digital transformation are to speed up and improve interactions with digital customers, and to be able to react faster to new information. As digital technologies (things) provide more real-time data, and real-time data analysis, new strategies (ideas) for making real-time decisions must be implemented by leaders (people) or their proxies. In the future, more and more proxies involved in real-time decision-making will be in the form of robotic process automation systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Any business process where there is a documented best practice for how best to respond to various data inputs can be automated. As data inputs become more real-time, human leadership decision-making becomes the source of latency in the system. I predict that decision-making will increasingly be a source of competition, and that decisions will soon be divided into those where there is a defined best option already which allows for rapid automation, and those that have ill-defined options and require humans' capacity for creativity to solve.

My latest video from the field:

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Kevin Benedict

President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™

Website C4DIGI.com

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

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.

Brain Change and Digital Strategies

The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that people and institutions collect favorite philosophies, strategies, theories and ideologies over a period of time, and then try to align the future to fit them. The problem with this is the future is rarely like the past, and trying to fit new data into old paradigms often forces us to perform irrational mental gymnastics, which leaves us farther from the truth.

Our resistance to change and unwillingness to question our beliefs in the face of mounting evidence, leads us to analytical and execution failure. A more productive habit would be to continuously review our mental constructs to find out how to modify our interpretations to align with new evidence. This action, however, goes against our human nature that seeks stability and resists change. We see the consequences of these challenges weekly as we read about companies (especially retail) failing as a result of their resistance. In the future, developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning will have the potential to help us overcome many of our own mental weaknesses that cause us problems in our pursuit of truth.

In the digital era, our ability to change our thinking becomes even more critical as it must happen at a faster rate. I remember when updates to an enterprise’s mobile apps required all users to bring their mobile devices into the office to get them loaded and tested. This was a slow, tedious and expensive process. Today, as we all know, this can be done worldwide instantly and for very little money through cloud based app stores. Digital transformation equals speed and accelerated change.

In a world of integrated digital platforms and systems, new digital innovations can impact markets instantly and competitors must be able to react.

The bottom line - one of the biggest factors determining the digital transformation winners of tomorrow will be the brains of leaders – their mental constructs. Can executives and boards look at new evidence and innovations without biases, resistance to change and prejudices, and grasp how economies, industries, markets and competition will be impacted? Can they learn about new digital innovations, understand the breadth of the impact, and develop new business strategies based on the new realities? Can they overcome themselves?

It is quite the irony that digital winners will be not simply those with the best digital technologies, but those that can best overcome their own human brains.

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I invite you to watch my latest video on digital technology trends.

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict, connect with me on LinkedIn or read more of my articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

President, Principal Analyst, Futurist, the Center for Digital Intelligence™

Website C4DIGI.com

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Technologies

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.

Winning in Chaos - Digital Enterprise Strategies

Digital technology innovations and advancements, and our adoption of them, have changed us. We are different consumers, employers and employees. Our expectations have increased. We have become mobile, impatient and demanding. We are global. We demand immediate, accurate and real-time responses. We use our technology not just for reading historic events and news, but also for predicting our future turn while navigating at 60 MPH.

Today we want personalized and contextually relevant experiences. We want digital experiences that are beautiful, simple and elegant. We want instant access to all products, services, news, information and friends’ status. We want to share our lives instantly and globally. We want to find things, buy things, move money and complete transactions from anywhere at anytime. We want to work from anywhere and have all the information we need instantly.

Much of the world today is experiencing a digital evolution. We know when and how to reach for our second brain (smartphones) and access the information needed to both survive and thrive in the digital age. A phrase now associated with the last decade is “there’s an app for that,” but now it is Alexa, Siri or Google knows.

Last year while in Rwanda, I visited refugee camps that were operating on mobile phones. The UN, rather than delivering hundreds of truck loads of food to refugee camps every week, were experimenting with providing mobile phones to families, sending mobile payments to them, and letting them go out into the local markets to buy food, thus benefiting the local economies. Even the most challenged populations are being transformed by mobile and digital technologies.

All of these innovations and our resulting behavioral adaptions – change us, our marketplaces, industries and even economies and bring us to this tipping point - the point at which a series of small innovations or actions becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more drastic change. That drastic change today is referred to by the World Economic Forum as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Hell Creek Formation is a famous geological area in the USA spanning North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. It is filled with the bones of dinosaurs that were unable to adapt to the changes in their environment. John Boyd, a renowned military strategist, taught that life is a process of adaption, and that winners will find ways to exploit change and to adapt to it in order to win. The dinosaurs were unable to adapt, and their fossilized bones are a testament. Boyd taught that adapting and winning requires three things, 1) People, 2) Ideas, and 3) Things - in that order. To win we must be trained to think and do the right things, use the right ideas (doctrines, strategies and tactics) and then utilize the best things available (technologies, equipment, materials, design, etc.) to adapt to and exploit the changes around us.

We humans seem to prefer solving problems, and overcoming obstacles as a way to create stable, secure and predictable environments. We like to fix problems/challenges and be done with them. That desire, however does not fit with today’s reality of perpetual change. In a world of perpetual change we are bound to operate in an ambiguous environment that requires a new mindset and strategy that finds ways of winning through change. Change is not to be solved. Change is the energy that propels organizations into action, into new innovations, new business models, and new opportunities. Rarely will you find opportunities of significance where change is not required or found.

In a recent interview of 17 high tech executives, the top motivation they gave for companies engaging in digital transformation were “changing customer behaviors”. New customer behaviors introduce higher levels of ambiguity as a result of change. This change is taking place at the same time as we are exponentially increasing the amount of data we are collecting. The challenge today then is to find ways to win in the data, and in ambiguity.

As the tempo of change increases and we move beyond "human time” into “digital time” (the speed at which computers can operate) we must adopt new strategies for succeeding in ambiguity. We propose that the economic winners of tomorrow will be organizations that define processes that let them operate with agility in a fluid, ever-changing environment - always collecting and analyzing new data and perpetually adjusting to new realities utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning. They will not, as a goal, seek stability; rather they will employ strategies for succeeding inside instability. They will understand the biggest opportunities for success in the future will lie not outside, but inside of ambiguity.

I invite you to watch my latest short video on digital technology trends and strategies:

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Kevin Benedict

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

How Digital Leaders are Different

We asked 50 futurists, professionals employed to review trends and develop strategy, to identify and rank the top five ways they believe digital transformation will drive value generation between now and 2020. Here are their top five answers:

Accelerates speed to market
Strengthens competitive positioning
Boosts revenue growth
Raises employee productivity
Expands ability to acquire, engage and retain customers

These top five value generators offer significant business advantages; but if your organization can achieve them faster than your competitors, there is a bonus advantage. We call it the Ax2 phenomenon (advantages have advantages). Not only do digital leaders realize competitive advantages before others, but they also have the advantage of insights from new data, which leads to new actions and new insights not yet understood or possible for laggards.

Research In Motion (RIM), the progenitor of the Blackberry, responded slowly to Apple’s launch of the iPhone. Years passed before RIM responded with its first smartphone. During this time, Apple worked at “digital speed” to improve its iPhones and the iOS operating system, and hundreds of thousands of software applications were developed for it. Each of these versions provided additional insights into consumers and their behaviors. The Ax2 phenomenon enabled Apple to rapidly widen the gap between leader and laggard, a competitive advantage that proved impossible for RIM to overcome.

Executives must closely watch the innovation efforts of competitors, and recognize that it is not only the new products and services that are being introduced that can be differentiating but also the data they glean from new innovations that can spawn additional advantages.

Information dominance is the strategic imperative of the 21st century. The good news for executives is that investing in digital technologies to gain information dominance makes sense as the return on investment for digital technologies averages nearly 50% among survey participants, but jumps to an astounding 230% for the top 25%.

Achieving information dominance involves understanding the data required to achieve competitive advantage, and then collecting and analyzing it to glean business meaning faster than the competition. Information dominance, however, is meaningless unless it results in actionable insights, which lead to appropriate actions, at the right time and place. It’s not the ability to collect and analyze data faster; it is the ability to understand and act on it faster. Businesses that can “understand and act with speed” will dominate those that are slower.

In today’s age of hyper-digital transformation, enterprises must digitally transform and implement OILS (optimized information logistics systems) that can respond and change with self-sustaining business agility. These abilities take more than digital technologies; they require a new way of thinking, which is revealed in our data on digital leaders:

Digital leaders recognize and respond to underlying market forces, and are budgeting and planning to implement specific business strategies and digital technologies in specific sequences to maximize ROI and competitive advantage.
Digital leaders recognize the impact of digital technologies on the expectations of consumers and markets. These expectations are speeding the tempo of operations beyond human time to digital time. The demands for digital time require humans to upgrade IT environments and augment their capabilities with AI and robotic process automation (bots) to enable mass volumes of transactions to be processed in milliseconds in order to support real-time and mobile environments.
Digital leaders develop a digital doctrine and strategy to unify and guide all business and technology strategies, tactics and investments and provide a shared frame of reference across their organization.
Digital leaders are exploiting the Ax2 phenomenon. The Ax2 phenomenon enables enterprises to gain new and unique business insights earlier than their competitors, leading to competitive advantages that result from the collection and analysis of data not yet available to digital laggards.
Digital leaders identify the digital technologies they expect to have a significant impact on their businesses across the three digital transformation ages spanning 2016 to 2025. These technologies are not all created equal in their business impact, and some are still not ready for prime time, but are maturing fast. As a result, it is critical to carefully time the adoption and implementation of digital technologies in accordance with the age in which they will deliver maximum ROI and competitive advantage.

First and foremost, digital leaders understand the reality and degree of impact that digital technologies are having on their customers, and their ability to compete. They recognize the pace of change and are aligning their strategies and budgets in ways that will provide them with competitive advantage now and in the future.

Watch my latest video on digital technology trends:

Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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Merging Humans with Enterprise AI and Machine Learning Systems

Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are made up of code and algorithms, and as such, they work as fast as computers can process them. Often this means massive amounts of learning can be accomplished every second without stop 24x7x365. Code doesn't need to take weekends off, holidays, or sick time. Code doesn't get tired. It can recognize complex patterns, areas of potential improvement and problems in real-time (aka digital-time). Given these available computing capabilities and speeds, what are executives to do with AI and machine learning, when we live and operate in relatively slow human-time, and work within organizations that work at an even slower pace of organizational-time.

I believe the first step is to admit we have a problem - the problem is a difference in the speed that computers can operate and the speeds us humans can operate. The second is to understand what a solution might look like - how humans and computers can best integrate and operate together for business success, and the third is to have a strategy and plan.

Imagine a scenario where you arrive at your desk on a Monday morning and find hundreds of recommendations for business process improvements from your AI and machine learning systems. Each of the recommendations might take weeks to socialize across the organization and implement. Now, imagine that happens every day of the year. We humans would be completely overwhelmed! In this scenario, humans are the weak links in business process optimization.

How are we then to best utilize AI and machine learning in a manner that benefits humans, and human powered organizations? I propose the answer lies in developing a powerful AI and machine learning platform that understands our goals and aspirations, can filter findings, run and test simulations, and then present a few select prioritized recommendations to human decision-makers. Simply feeding leaders with unlimited numbers of recommendations may actually paralyze, rather than empower them. What are needed are systems that won’t overwhelm humans, but rather augment them.

In order for any of these AI and machine learning systems to actually work, the data that fuels these systems must first be available, accurate, normalized and timely - for many that is the essence of digital transformation. A digital transformation initiative often includes upgrading IT systems to become “optimized information logistics system” (OILS). Systems that ensure the right data is collected, available, analyzed and its meaning and context understood and utilized.

Once an organization has an OILS in place and the data available, then leaders must ensure their organizational structures and business processes are capable of responding at an operational tempo sufficient to capture the benefits and competitive advantages available from the insights derived from AI and machine learning. That is no small feat. It does no good, as we pointed out, to have recommendations that cannot be implemented.

Massive volumes of new data from sensors, mobile devices, embedded computers and online activities means there are enormous opportunities to learn and gain competitive advantages as a result of it, but only if our leaders, IT and business systems, and our organizations are capable of responding fast enough to capture the value. Understanding how to create OILS, how to utilize AI and machine learning to effectively augment our leaders, and then knowing how to create an organization able to respond fast enough to capture the competitive advantages in the data are the monumental tasks before us today.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

View my profile on LinkedIn

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Robots and I - Intelligent Process Automation, Siri and More

Today I had the privilege of interviewing two robotics and process automation experts. I learned there are many different kinds of robots including the humanoid types we see in movies, and robots made entirely out of software. In this interview we discuss Rob Brown's recent white paper titled Robots and I, the different forms of robots, and then dig deep into how software robots are transforming many industries today with expert Matt Smith. Enjoy!

Video Link: https://youtu.be/qOPFD3vshec

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Senior Analyst

Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

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Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Silicon Valley Series: Cultural Impact on Digital Transformation

Silicon Valley Series: Evolution of Cloud, Analytics, AI and Human Integration

New Rules for Start-Ups in the Age of Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation and Competitive Decision-Making

Brain Change and Digital Strategies

Winning in Chaos - Digital Enterprise Strategies

How Digital Leaders are Different

Merging Humans with Enterprise AI and Machine Learning Systems

Robots and I - Intelligent Process Automation, Siri and More

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

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