 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alum. Dominique Dubois joins me. She's the Global Strategy and Offerings Executive in the Business Transformation Services of IBM. Dominique, it's great to talk to you again. Hi, Lisa, great to be with you today. So where did we talk about the theme of this interview? It's going to be the ROI of AI for Business. We've been talking about AI emerging technologies for a long time now. We've also seen a massive change in the world. So I'd love to talk to you about how organizations are adopting these emerging technologies to really help transform their businesses. And one of the things that you've talked about in the past is that there's these different elements of AI for Business. One of them is trust, right? The second is ease of use. And then there's this importance of data and all of these important emerging technologies that require so much data. How do those elements of AI come together to help IBM's clients be able to deliver the products and services that their customers are depending on? Yeah, thank you, Lisa. So when we look at AI and AI solutions with their clients, I think, how that comes together is in the way in which we don't look at AI or an application solution independently. We're looking at it and we're applying it within our customers' operations with respect to the work that it's going to do, with respect to the part of the operations and the workflow and the function that it sits in. So the idea around trust and ease of use and the data that can be leveraged in order to create that AI and allow that AI to be self-learning and continue to add value really is fundamental around how we design and how we implement it within the workflow itself and how we are working with the employees, with the actual humans that are going to be touching that AI, right? To help them with new skills that are required to work with AI, to help them with what we call the new ways of working. Because it's that adoption that really is critical to get the use of AI and enterprises at scale. The adoption that you just mentioned, that's critical. That can be kind of table stakes. But what we've seen in the last year is that we've all had to pivot multiple times and be reactionary or reactive to so many things out of our control. I'm curious what you've seen in the last year in terms of the appetite for adoption and on the employee's front, are they more willing to go, all right, we've got to change the way we do things and it's probably going to be, some of these are going to be permanent. Yeah, Lisa, we've absolutely seen a huge rise in the adoption, right? Or in the openness, the mindset, let's just call it the mindset, right? It's more of an open mindset around the use of technology, the use of technology that might be AI-backed or AI-based. And the willingness to, and I was at the willingness to try is really then what starts that journey of trust, right? And we're seeing that open up in space. That is absolutely critical, is just the willingness being open-minded enough to go, all right, we've got to do this, so we've got to think about this. We don't really have any other choices here, that things are changing pretty quickly. So talk to me in this last year of change, we've seen massive disruptions and some silver linings for sure, but I'd love to know what IBM and the state of Rhode Island have done together in this challenging time. Yeah, so really interesting partnership that we started with the state of Rhode Island. Obviously, I think this year, there's been lots of things, one of them has been speed. So everything that we had to do has been with haste, right? With urgency, and that's no different than what we did with the state of Rhode Island. You know, the governor there, Gina Romondo, she took very swift action, right? When the pandemic started and started, and one of the actions she took was to partner with private firms, such as IBM and others, to really help get her economy back open. And that required a lot of things. One of them, as you mentioned, trust, right? Was a major part of what the governor there needed with her citizens, excuse me, in order to be able to open back up the economy, right? And so a key pillar of her program and with our partnership was around the AI-backed solutions that we brought to the state of Rhode Island. So inclusive of contact tracing, inclusive of work that we had provided around AI-based analytics that allowed really the governor to speak to citizens with hard facts quickly, almost real-time, right? And start to build that trust, but also confidence. And confidence was one of the main things that was required during this pandemic time. And so through the AI-based solutions that we provided, which were there were many pillars, we were able to help Rhode Island not only open their economy, but they were one of the only states that had their schools open in the fall. And as a parent, I always see that as a litmus, if you will, of how a state is doing, right? And so they opened in the fall and they, as far as I know, have stayed open. And I think part of that was from the AI-based contact tracing, the AI-backed virtual, sorry, AI analytics, the analytics suite around infections and predictions and what we were able to provide the governor in order to make swift decisions and take action. That's really impressive. That's one of the challenges I've had living in California is if you're going to say you're going to be data-driven then actually be data-driven. But the technology, living in Silicon Valley, the technology is there to be able to facilitate that, yet there was such a disconnect. And I think that's, you bring up the word confidence and customers need confidence, citizens need confidence, knowing that what we've seen in the last year has shown in a lot of examples that real time isn't nice to have anymore. It's a requirement. I mean, this is clearly life and death situations. That's a great example of how a state came to IBM to partner and say, how can we actually leverage emerging technologies like AI to really and truly make real time data-driven decisions that affect every single person in our state? Absolutely, absolutely. Really, really, I think a great example of the public-private partnerships that are really popping up now more and more so because of that sense of urgency and that need to build greater ecosystems to create better solutions. So that's a great example in healthcare, one that I earned government and public health that I think everybody will resonate with everybody here. But you've also done some really interesting work that I want to talk about with AI-driven insights into supply chain. We've also seen massive changes to supply chain and so many organizations having to figure out whether they were brick and mortar only changing that or really leveraging technology to figure out where do we need to be distributing products and services? Where do we need to be investing? Talk to me about bestseller India and what it is that you guys have done there with intelligent workflows to really help them transform their supply chain. Yeah, bestseller India, really great, hugely successful fashion forward company in India and that term fashion forward always is mind boggling to me because basically these are clothing retailers who go from runway to store within a matter of days, a couple of weeks which always, you know, it's just hugely impressive, right, just what goes into that. And when you think about what happens in a supply chain to be able to do that, the requirements around demand forecasting, you know, what quantities of what style, what design to what stores. And you think about the India market which is notoriously a difficult market, lots of micro segments. And so, you know, very difficult to serve. And then you couple that with, you know, what's been happening from an environmental sustainability perspective, right? I think every industry has been looking more about how they can be more environmentally sustainable and the clothing industry is no different. And there's a lot of impact, right? So a stat that really has hit home with me, right? 20% of all the clothes that are made globally goes unsalted. That's a lot of clothing, that's a lot of material and that's a lot of environmental product that goes into creating it. And so, you know, bestseller India really took it to heart to become not only more environmentally sustainable but to help itself and be digitally ready for things like the pandemic that ultimately hit and they were in a really good position. And we worked with them to create something called Fabric AI. So Fabric AI is India's only, first and only, AI-based platform that drives their supply chain. So it drives not only decisions on what design should they manufacture but it also helps to improve the entire workflow of what we call design to store. And the AI-based solution is really revolutionary, right? Within India, but I think it's pretty revolutionary globally, right, globally as well. And it delivered really big impact. So reductions in the cost, right? 15 plus reduction in cost, it helped their top line. So they saw a 5% plus top line but it also reduced their unsold inventory by 5% and more, right? They're continuing to focus on that environmental sustainability that I think is a really important part of their DNA, right? The bestseller India's DNA. And it's one that so many companies and other industries can learn from. I was reading in that case study on bestseller India on the IBM website that I think it was 40 liters of water to make a cotton shirt. And to your point about the percentage of clothing that actually goes unsold and ends up in landfills, you see there the opportunity for AI to unlock the visibility that companies and any industry need to determine what is the demand that we should be filling? Where should it be distributed? Where should we not be distributing things? And so I think it was an interesting kind of impetus that bestseller India had about one of their retail lines or brands was dropping in revenue. But they'd been able to apply this technology to other areas of the business and make a pretty big impact. Yeah, absolutely. So they had been very fortunate to have 11 years of growth in all of their brands. And then one of their brands kind of hit headwinds. But the CIO and head of supply chain at that time really had the foresight to be able to say, you know what, we're hitting a problem, one of our brands, but this really is indicative of a more systemic problem. And that problem was lack of transparency, lack of data-driven, predictive and automation to be able to drive a more effective and efficient kind of supply chain to end. So really had the forethought to dive into that and fix it. Yeah, and now talk to me about IBM GarageBand and how did that help in this particular case? Yeah, so in order to do this, they had no use of AI, no use of automation at the time that we started this. And so to really not only design and build and execute on Fabric AI, but to actually focus on the adoption of AI within the business, we really needed to bring together the leaders across many lines of businesses, IT and HR. And when you think about pulling all of these different units together, we used our IBM Garage approach, which really is, there are many attributes and many facets of the IBM Garage, but I think one of the great results of using our IBM Garage approach is being able to pull from across all those different businesses, all of which may have some different objectives, they're coming from a different lens, from a different space and pulling them together around one focus mission, which for here was Fabric AI. And we were able to actually design and build this in less than six months, which I think is pretty dramatic and pretty incredible from a speed and acceleration perspective. But I think even more so was the adoption, was the way in which we had, through all of it already been working with the employees, because it's really touched almost every part of bestseller India, so really being able to work with them and all the employees to make sure that they were ready for these new ways of working, that they had the right skills, that they had the right perspective and that it was going to be adopted. That, if we unpack that, if we had time, that could be a whole separate conversation because the most important thing about adoption is the cultures of these different business units have to come together. You said you rolled this out on a very short period of time, but you also were taking the focus on the employees. They need to understand the value in it, why they should be adopting it and changing that culture. That's a whole other separate conversation, but that's a very interesting and very challenging thing to do. I wish we had more time to talk about that one. Yeah, it really isn't. The approach of bringing everyone together it makes it just very dynamic, which is what's needed when you have all of those different lenses coming together, so yeah. It is, because you get a little bit of thought diversity as well, what we're using. Well Dominic, thank you for joining me today. Talk to me about what you guys are doing with many different types of customers, how you're helping them to integrate emerging technologies to really transform the business and their culture. We appreciate your time. Well, thank you, Lisa. Thanks. For Dominique du Bois, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Keeps coverage of IBM Think, the digital event.