Will Over Weapons, Again

The final price tag for the 20-year war in Afghanistan seems to be around $2 trillion.  The $2 trillion did not buy a victory, freedom, human rights or a democracy, rather it bought a lesson.  A lesson that we have unfortunately already purchased several times in the past, but failed to learn.  What is this multi-trillion dollar lesson?  Will wins over weapons.

The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that the ultimate objective of a warrior is not to kill more enemy on the battlefield, but rather to create mental chaos, disorder, ambiguity, confusion, distrust and morale collapse in the mind of an enemy.  If an organization suffers from these it cannot stand or resist.

Boyd emphasized that warfare is won or lost in the mind.  The victor will be the one with a stronger will and moral position.  The weight of mental will and moral fortitude shifted to the Taliban when the US supported Afghan government failed its people and purpose by engaging in corruption and collusion.  Several decades ago Boyd prophetically wrote, "Failing to achieve moral victory may result in strategic defeat even if an army is victorious in all of their tactical, physical battles."

Many believe there are commonalities between why we failed in Vietnam, and why the nation-building mission failed in Afghanistan.  Kevin Boylan, in an article in the New York Times wrote,  "The corrupt, undemocratic and faction-riven South Vietnamese government...proved incapable of providing its people and armed forces a cause worth fighting for."  Resistance from Afghan military forces melted away just weeks after the US forces began their final draw down.  It is obvious now that despite sophisticated equipment and training the Afghan forces had little will, and found little cause (either mental or moral), worth fighting for.

Each of us are also experiencing attacks on our minds daily in our own communities.  Daily, political opponents and pundits produce outrageous conspiracies, claims, falsehoods and headlines for the purpose of creating pandemonium, chaos and disorder, while social media sites amplify confusion, distrust and mental turmoil.  We must understand what these attacks do to our collective minds, and then try to learn the multi-trillion dollar lesson this time.

I have a soft spot in my heart for those struggling mentally in these painful, lonely and challenging times.  Life is hard enough without our own communities purposely attacking our minds.

Read more here on the Future of Information, Truth and Influence.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Transparency and Swarming are Both Good and Bad for Businesses

Sleepy communities are suddenly overrun with people moving in from out of town.  Roads and traffic signals designed to accommodate low volumes of traffic are suddenly insufficient.  Hidden fishing holes are now surrounded by cars, families, dogs and campers.  Trail systems are overrun.  Birders swarm a quiet neighborhood causing traffic congestion and concern.  All of these swarming scenarios unfold so quickly they surprise us.  

What has caused these "sudden" swarms.  I am sure there are many different possibilities, but instant communication, search engines, social media, online and real-time data analytics and market transparency, plus our increasing desire for new and better experiences, wealth, and our ability to work from home anywhere all play a role.  Because of all these reasons and more we all are swarming more often.  

We swarm to new TV shows.  We swarm to new music.  We swarm to picturesque mountain villages.  We swarm to newly Instagram "discovered" trails, rivers, beaches, restaurants, mountains, neighborhoods and resorts.   Swarming can cause chaos.  It can upend communities overnight.  Housing prices can skyrocket.  Labor, materials and other resources can all suddenly become more expensive as a result of unexpectedly swarming-caused high demand.

Swarming seems to be a byproduct of the internet and social media platforms.  We are all connected on platforms that aggregate and centralize information, both true or false, at speeds never before imagined.  We swarm to grab toilet paper, some swarm to march on the capital, others swarm to a Frye Festival.

Swarming can have both good and bad effects on businesses.   If your organization represents something inspiring and positive, consumers may swarm to purchase your products leaving you without enough product.  If your company or leaders gain a reputation for mistreating humans, animals or for destructive environmental practices then customers may suddenly disappear leaving warehouses full of unsold products.

Swarming happens because of visibility to information, and in today's world nothing remains hidden for long.  We live in a transparent world where information, the internet, smartphone photos, social media and search engines, and data breaches all guarantee the "transparency effect" will also impact our world and our businesses.  Even the most secretive organizations like the NSA experience data breaches.

Transparency and swarming can cause chaos in a business.  The most well thought out plans and strategies can be turned upside down by one Twitter post showing how your supply chain includes a third tier supplier using child labor in a remote factory.  Transparency can be a very good motivator to not only promote your purpose-driven ambitions, but to actually become a practitioning purpose-driven organization.

In this article, I argue that as a result of both the "transparency effect" and the "swarming effect," companies today require a Chief Values Officer to ensure that the business and the leaders of the business follow admirable practices that align with their public statements, and that the "transparency effect" and the "swarm effects" will benefit the business, not destroy it. 

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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.

Speed and a Doctrine for the Future

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 exploration of how new technologies and trends will alter the manner in which we interact with customers and operate our businesses.

"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

Must We be Good to Have a Good Future?

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, consistent and "good" decisions, and then to execute "good" actions.  Training AI to be good and act good is a real challenge.  These kinds of philosophical, moral and inspired traits and actions are not AI's strong suite.  Now that I am writing this I realize they aren't particularly the strong suite of humans either.

I can imagine a scenario where an algorithm processes data that suggests three equally logical actions.  The final choice, however, is determined by which option is most heavily weighted to the "good."  Which one of us is going to determine the "good" weight?

The obvious problem with this scenario is us humans can't agree on what is good, or to what degree it is good.  Feeding and sheltering homeless families and giving them medical assistance is considered good by some, and bad by others.  Saving millions of lives by vaccinating people is considered good by some and bad by others.

Our artificial intelligence powered digital assistants, chatbot and robots are all awaiting their instructions about how they can help create a "good" future.  What should I tell them?  

Watch the latest on Oracle's digital assistants, chatbots and artificial intelligence here in my interview with Oracle expert Suhas Uliyar.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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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 work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Will You Trust a Robot?

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

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.  

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist at TCS

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 work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Speed and Transformational Leadership

It took Magellan’s crew three years sailing ships to circumnavigate the earth.  Today, at hypersonic speeds of 7,680 MPH, it takes just over three hours to circumnavigate the earth.  Data on the Internet, however, travels at 670 million mph, which means it only takes milliseconds to circumnavigate the earth.  In this age of digital businesses and digital interactions, companies must digitally transform to work effectively in a world where global business and information moves at these mind-blowing speeds.

It's not just IT systems that are impacted by the volume and speed of information.  The creators of business processes that were designed and developed in an analog area, simply never envisioned a business environment that would require these operational tempos.  Analog business processes were designed to have humans involved.  These dependencies were designed to slow down the process to ensure accuracy, compliance and accountability.  Today, however, operating at the slow speeds of an analog, human dependent business process, will doom your company.  Analog business processes must be quickly automated via robotic process automation using artificial intelligence and machine learning to effectively interact with impatient digital customers and B2B partners.

The Future of Managers

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 establishing trust.  

As AI becomes integrated into more and more businesses and IT systems, the role it plays will become ever more critical.  Any questions about why an AI system made a particular decision or took an action must be able to be quickly deciphered, explained and adjusted if necessary.  Having trust in the AI system is a critical first step for managers to open up and use it for an expanding list of tasks.

AI systems, implemented correctly can be a manager's right hand.  Common benefits of AI are:

• Reduced human errors
• Is available 24x7x365
• Can complete mundane, repetitive and routine administrative work without distraction
• Can scale
• Can make faster decisions, and take faster actions based upon established business processes 
• Can find solutions and innovations faster by analyzing patterns within oceans of data

In a report by HBR, it was found that 54% of a manager's time is usually spent on administrative tasks - tasks well suited for AI assistance.  If AI can take over these tasks it could free up managers to spend more time on the things humans are best at including applying their knowledge of organizational history and culture, empathy, ethical reflection, judgement, creativity, experiments, innovation, strategy, discretion, experience and improvisation. 

In the HBR report there are five pieces of advice for managers of the future:

1. Leave administration to AI
2. Focus on judgement work
3. Treat intelligent machines/agents as colleagues
4. Work like a designer
5. Develop your social skills and networks

I can imagine a scenario in the near future where there will be an organizational chart of robots, robot workers, managers and robot executives.  Each using XAI to explain how they are managing the robots, tasks and operations under their responsibility.  I guess that means we humans will need to figure that out first.

Read more on AI here:

• Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream

• The Future of AI Starts Yesterday

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.

Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream

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 land of opportunity. 

The Future of AI Starts Yesterday

"The best time to start implementing artificial intelligence in the future was yesterday." 

                ~Kevin Benedict

Artificial intelligence (narrow AI) today is beyond its proof-of-concept phase - as it is already proven and delivering tactical value in many well documented areas: 

• Reduction in human error
• Available 24x7x365
• Improved quality
• Improved productivity
• Improved efficiencies
• Able to dependably complete mundane, repetitive and routine jobs
• Makes faster decisions and taking quicker actions

Artificial intelligence, although still in its infancy, is already delivering impressive results and competitive advantages for those prepared.  The preparation, however, is not insignificant and requires much work including: