 From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture TechVision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the Accenture Innovation Hub downtown San Francisco, Salesforce Tower. The party is just getting started. As you can see behind us, had a ribbon cutting ceremony this morning. We're excited to be here for the Accenture Technology Vision Awards, given later today, but we're excited to have our next guest. First time on theCUBE, Ashley Miller, she's the Director of Innovation, West Region, Accenture, Ashley, welcome. Thank you so much, glad to be here. So all these toys are for you to play with. They are. There are so many interesting things to play with here. So many incredible people. It's an incredible place to be. So it's a great aggregation of kind of a bunch of satellite offices. You've got three stories of really kind of active, engaging labs. I wonder if you could say, I guess you had a soft opening a little while ago. Tonight was the hard opening. What are some of the ways that customers actually come in and use this facility? Yeah, we actually have five floors. We have the 31st through 35th floor, five entire floors, with several of those floors dedicated solely to innovating with our clients and collaborating and co-creating with our clients. So this is the official launch, the big party opening us officially with the ribbon cutting, but we did have a soft launch over the summer, and in fact, we've been hosting many clients each week. It's really incredible. The demand is quite high. People are very eager to come in and explore and learn, as well as define strategies and actually co-create solutions here with the experts. So it's exciting. So they come in small teams, big teams. They come for a day, a week. What are some of kind of the standard offerings, if you will, to come and learn about invasion? Yeah, all of the above. We host clients as well as partners in the community, students in educational groups, people who want to come in and learn about emerging technologies and their potential impact to business, to society, as well as multi-day and multi-week sessions where we're actually road mapping solutions, building new ideas together and actually co-creating prototypes and solutions to solve those challenges. Right. So Paul talked a little bit earlier about your innovation architecture. So everybody wants to know, how do I innovate, especially in a big company? It's not necessarily easy. And you guys have a bunch of assets in play. And then as I understand it, the hub is the location where you bring all those assets under one roof. That's exactly right. This hub is a flagship hub where we have every element of our innovation architecture represented. So Accenture has this architecture to help both ourselves innovate, as well as our clients and our partners. So clients and partners can come here and access the incredible breadth of our experts, designers, engineers, builders. So here in our flagship hub, we have teammates from our research organization that's offering points of view and helping others understand what does the future look like. We have teammates from our labs, our R&D organization that's actually looking at these cutting edge technologies, quantum computing, connected devices, artificial intelligence, and understanding and using these technologies, developing prototypes to test and learn and understand their potential value. Then we have teammates who can actually build prototypes and solutions, both connected digital devices as well as physical devices. We have teammates in our Ventures group who are partnering with the ecosystem of universities as well as startups, as well as big ecosystem platform partners and bringing those teammates in and using their solutions to help co-create and ideate new opportunities for our clients. And then of course, within our innovation architecture, we also have our delivery centers. So once you identify the really game-changing opportunity and you've tested it and you understand it's a viable solution, well then you can scale it more cost-efficiently through our delivery centers. Right. So I know it might be asking you like to pick your favorite kid, but share, I mean, what is one or two of your kind of favorite things that is here in this innovation hub that you just think is just cool beyond compare? It is asking me to pick my favorite kid. There's so many incredible things here, but I can tell you what we have on display tonight. We have Mary Hamilton, the head of our labs organization, along with Teresa Tong, who's a managing director within our labs, and Ruman Chowdhury, who leads a practice of ethical AI, talking about the future of human and robot interaction. What does that mean for teams when they're augmented by robots? How do you do that in a fairer way and in an ethical way so that you're using the human's potential as well as the robot's potential? We have Mike Redding, the head of our Ventures team. We have him here, along with some of our teammates from research, Justin Herzig. And they're talking about the power of blockchain to create transparency and accountability within supply chains, as well as talking about some of the power of some of the startups we're working with, like OneCubit, a quantum computing startup, which we've partnered with Biogen, the healthcare company, to actually use quantum computing to increase the speed of drug discovery. It's really incredible. It takes, on average in the industry, it takes 10 years and a billion dollars to bring an average drug to market. And they're hoping they can speed this up significantly with quantum computing. So we have stations on display where you can actually go inside a quantum computer where we'll use immersive technologies and walk you inside so you can actually understand and see what are the powers of quantum mechanics that enable quantum computing? Let's see, we have incredible leaders. So those were just two stations. You got a lot. I could keep going. I love it. And we keep hearing about the incredible technologies that you have here that's something like, I don't remember, 1,500 out of the 6,000 patents you've had are coming out of the people that work in this facility. It's unparalleled. The talent that is in this building. Sometimes when I walk around, I can almost see the quantum physics coming out of their brains. They're just incredible. The talent that is here and the talent that we have accessible to our partners, both to learn from as well as to partner with and build because these teammates, they're working on cutting edge things and they're looking for partners to explore the validity of these new concepts. So a lot of times, we're partnering with clients. We're both putting some skin in the game to test these ideas. And it's a really exciting place to be at the intersection of business and technology, ideation and building solutions. Right. And you're not just due to just for your clients too. You had city and county San Francisco represented this morning at the ribbon cutting and really she talked about and John talked about earlier, being an active participant in the community and that's a really important piece of the puzzle. It is an important piece of the puzzle and we're really passionate about being a part of the San Francisco community and helping to give back in our community as well as globally. So globally, we run a tech for good program where we're applying these emerging technologies to help benefit societies using things like blockchain to make logistics distribution better and more trustworthy for companies that are delivering food to in need populations. Things like using artificial intelligence built on top of Microsoft Cognitive Services to help the blind to see. Doing these things are actually giving back to the world's population as well as our local population. Just in the last week, we hosted a group of young elementary school students coming in to learn coding basics and we're hosting, last week we hosted 100 students from an MBA program abroad. So we're often hosting students, clients, partners, startups. A few weeks back, we hosted a large health tech challenge which was really exciting. We had C levels from some of our health companies come in to actually judge startups from the Bay Area and to explore how those startups could tweak and refine their value statement and then explore opportunities to use those startups within the judges' organizations. So it's a really exciting way that we're finding that being professionally generous, it pays. It tees up opportunities for Accenture for our partners. We learn, they learn and this hub is a powerful place of collaboration. Right, what a great asset that you have to bring to bear. It's a terrific story. Well Ashley, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. This party is a big part for you and the team so we'll let you get back to it and again, thanks for sitting down. Thank you so much. All right, she's Ashley, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at downtown San Francisco, Salesforce Tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Grand opening, thanks for watching. See you next time.