 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture TechVision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here from theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful night, but we're here for a very special occasion. It's the TechVision 2020 reveal and we are happy to have the guy that runs the whole thing. He's going to reveal on stage a little bit later, but we got him in advance. He's Paul Doherty, the Chief Technology and Information Officer for Accenture. Paul, great to see you as always. Great to see you, Jeff, too. It is a beautiful evening here, looking out over the bay. If only we could turn the cameras around, but sorry, we can't do that. All right, so you've been at this now. The TechVision's been going on for 20 years, we heard earlier today. You've been involved for almost a decade. How has this thing evolved over that time? Yeah, we've been doing the vision for 20 years and what we've been trying to do is forecast what's happening with business and technology in a way that's actionable for executives. There's lots of trend forecasts and lists and things, but if you just see a list of cloud or AI, mobile, it doesn't really help. We're trying to talk a little bit about the impact on business, the impact of the world and the decisions that you need to make. What's changed over that period of time is just the breadth of the impact that technology is having on people. So we've focused a lot of our visions on the impact on humans, on individuals, what's happening with technology, the impact on business. We can talk about that a little bit more, but business is certainly not the back-office of companies anymore. It's not just the back-office in front-office either. It's business is instrumental in the fabric of how every part of a company operates, their strategy, their operations, their products and services, et cetera. And that's really the trajectory we've seen as technology advances and we have this accelerating exponential increase in technology. The implications for executives and the stakes just get higher and higher. There's so many layers to this. One of the things we've talked about a lot is trust and you guys talk about trust a lot, but what strikes me is kind of this dichotomy is on one hand, do I trust the companies, right? Do I trust Mark Zuckerberg with my data to pick on him? He gets picked on all the time. That might be a question, but do I trust that Facebook is going to work? Absolutely. And so our reliance on the technology, our confidence in the technology are just baseline assumption that this stuff is going to work is crazy high up to and including people taking naps in their Teslas, which are not a ton of this vehicle. So it's this weird kind of split where it's definitely part of our lives, but it seems like kind of the consciousness is coming up of kind of the second order. What does this really mean to me? What does this really mean to my data? What are people actually doing with this stuff? And am I making a good value exchange? Well, that's the, we talk in the vision this year about value versus values and the question you're asking is getting right at that. The crux between value and values. Businesses have been using technology to drive value for a long time. That's how, you know, applying different types of technology in the enterprise, whether it be back to the mainframe days or ERP packages, cloud computing, et cetera, artificial intelligence. So value is one thing we're talking about in the vision. How do you drive value using the technology? And one thing we found is there's a big gap. Only 10% of organizations are really getting full value from in the way they're applying technology and those that are, are getting twice the revenue growth as companies that are in. So that's one big gap in value. And then this values point is really getting to be important which is as technology can be deployed in ways that are more pervasive and impact our experience. They're tracking our health details there. They know where we are. They know what we're doing. They're anticipating what we might do next. How does that impact the values? How are the values of companies important in other ways? The values you have around sustainability and other things are increasingly important to new generations of consumers and consumers who are thinking in new ways. This value versus values is teeing up what we call a tech clash, which isn't a tech clash just against people reacting against tech companies, as you said earlier. It's a tech clash which is the values that consumers, citizens, and people want sometimes clashing with the value and the models that companies have been using to deliver their products and services. Well, it seems like what are you optimizing for, Gabe? And it seems like it was such an extreme optimization towards profitability and shareholder value and less necessarily employees, less necessarily customers, and certainly less in terms of the social impact. So that definitely seems to be changing but is it changing fast enough? Are people really grasping it? Well, I think the data is mixed on that. I think there's a lot of mixed data on what do people really want? You know, so people say they want more privacy, they say they want access and control their data, but they still use a lot of the services that may be inconsistent with the values that they talk about and the values that come out in surveys, but that's changing. So consumers are getting more educated about how they want their data to be used. But the other thing that's happening is that companies are realizing that it's really a battle for experience, creating broader experiences, better experiences for consumers is what the battleground is. An experience, whether you travel company or a bank or a manufacturing company, whatever you might be, creating the experience requires data. And to get the data from an individual or another company, it takes trust. So this virtual circle of experience, data, and trust is something that companies are realizing is essential to their competitive advantage going forward. And we say trust is the currency of the digital and post-digital world that we're moving into. Right. It's just how explicit is that trust, right? How explicit does it need to be? And as you said, that's unclear. People can complain on one hand, but continue to use the services. So it seems to be a little bit kind of squishy. It's a sliding scale. It's really a value exchange. They have to think about it. What's the value exchange and the value that individual consumer places on, their privacy versus free access to a service? That's what's being worked out right now. Right. So I want to get you to take on another thing, which is exponential curves. And you've mentioned time and time again, right? The pace of change is only accelerating. Well, you've been saying that probably for 20 years, right? So the curve's just getting steeper. How do you see that kind of playing out over time? Do we eventually catch up? Is it just presumed that this is kind of the new normal? Or how's this going to shake out? Because people aren't great at exponential curves. It's just not really in our DNA. Yeah, I think the, but I think that's the world we're operating in now. And I think the exponential potential is going to continue. We don't see a slowdown in the exponential growth rates of technology. So artificial intelligence, we're at the early days. Cloud computing, only about 20% enterprise adoption, a lot more to go. New adoptions around the horizon, things like central bank digital currencies that we've done some research and announced some work on recently. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography for networking, et cetera. So the pace of innovation is going to accelerate. And the challenge for organizations is rationalizing that and deciding how to incorporate that into their business, change their business and change the way that they're serving, that they're leveraging their workforce and change the way that they're interacting with the consumers. And that's why what we're trying to address is the vision is provide a little bit of that roadmap into how you digest and adapt. There's also technology foundations of this. We talk about something in Accenture called living systems. Living systems as a new way of looking at the architecture of how you build your technology because you don't have static systems anymore. Your systems have to be living in biological and adapting to the new technology, adapting to the business, adapting to new data over time. So this concept of living systems is going to be really important to organizations success going forward. That's interesting. It's one of the topics is AI and me. And traditional AI was very kind of purpose built. For instance, Google Photos, can you find the cat? Can I find the kids at the beach? But you're talking about kind of models where the AI can evolve and not necessarily be quite so data-centric around a specific application, but much more evolutionary and adaptable based on how things change. Yeah, I think that's the future of AI that we see. There's been a lot of success in applying AI today. And a lot of it's been based on supervised learning, deep learning techniques that require massive amounts of data. Solving problems like machine vision requires massive amounts of data to do it right. And that'll continue. There'll continue to be problem sets that need large data. But what we're also seeing is a lot of innovation and AI techniques around small data. And we actually did some research recently and we talked about this a little bit in our vision around the future maybe being smaller data sets and more structured data and intelligence around structured data, common sense AI, and things that allow us to make breakthroughs in different ways. We look at AI and me, which is the trend around the workforce and how the workforce changes. It's those kinds of adaptations that we think are going to be really important. So another one is robotics, robots in the wild. And you made an interesting comment. Robots gone wild, robots in the wild. Well, maybe they'll go wild once they're in the wild, you never know. Once they get autonomy, not a lot of autonomy, that's probably why. But it's kind of interesting, because you talked about robots being designed to help people do a better job as opposed to carving out a specific function for the robot to do without a person. And it seems like that's a much easier route to go to set up a discrete thing that we can carve out and program the robot to do it. Probably early days of manufacturing and doing spot welding at cars, et cetera. So is it a lot harder to do it to have the robot operate with its human partner if you will, but are the benefits worth it? How do you kind of see that shake it up versus I can carve out one more function? Yeah, I think it's going to be a mix. I think there'll be, but we see a lot of application of the robots paired with people in different ways, co-bots and manufacturing being a great example and something that's really taking off in manufacturing environments. And also, but also robots of different forms that serve human needs. There's a lot of interesting things going on in healthcare right now. How can you support autistic children or adults better using human-like robots and agents that can interact in different ways? There's a lot of interesting things around Alzheimer's and dealing with cognitive impairment and such using robots and robotics. So I think the future isn't, there's a lot of robots in the wild in the form of like C3PO's and R2D2's and those types of robots. And we'll see some of those and those are being used widely in business today even in different contexts. But I think the interesting advance will be looking at robots that compliment and augment and serve human needs more effectively. Right, right. And do people do a good enough job of getting some of the case studies like you just walk through of kind of the better use cases of the more humane use cases that the kind of cool medical breakthroughs versus just continued optimization of getting me my Starbucks coupon when I walk by out front. Yeah, I'm not sure. It doesn't seem like get the pub. They just don't get the pub, I don't think. No, maybe not. Although mixology is another function that robots are getting pretty good at. But I think that's one thing we're trying to do is through the effort we do with the vision as well as our tech for good work and other things is look at how we amplify and highlight some of the great work that is happening in those areas. So you've been doing it for a decade. What struck you this year as being a little bit different, a little bit unexpected, not necessarily something you've made and anticipated? I think the thing that is maybe a tipping point that I see in this vision that I didn't anticipate is this idea that every company is really becoming a technology company. We said eight years ago every business will be a digital business. And that was, while ridiculed by some at the time, that really came true and every business and every industry really is becoming digital or has already become digital. But I think we might've gotten it slightly wrong. Digital was kind of a step, but every company is deploying technology in the way they serve their customers and the way they build their products and services. Every product and services becoming technology enabled. The ecosystem of technology providers is critical to companies in every industry. So every company is really becoming a technology company. Every company needs to be as good as a digital native company at developing products and services and operating them. And so I think this idea of every company becoming a technology company, every CEO, becoming a technology CEO and technology leader is something that I think will differentiate companies going forward as well. Well really, good work you, Michael and the team. It's fun to come here every year because you guys do a little twist. Like you said, cloud's going to be really big. Mobile's going to be really big. But a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more deep, a little bit longer kind of thought cycles on these trends. Yeah, and I think if you read through the vision, we're trying to present a complete story too. So it is this, we the post-digital people. But if you look under the vision, the eye and experience is about serving your customers differently. The dilemma of smart machines and robots in the wild is about your new products and services in the post-digital environment powered by technology. AI and me is about the new workforce and the age of, or the innovation DNAs about driving continuous innovation in your organization, your culture, as you develop your business into the future. So it really is providing a kind of a complete narrative on what we think the future looks like for executives. Right, good. Still more utopian than dystopian. I like it. More utopian than dystopian but you got to steer around the road box. All right, Paul, well thanks again and good luck tonight with the big presentation. Thanks, Jeff. All right, he's Paul. Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Reveal 2020 when we're going to know everything with the Benefit Eye Insight. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.