 Live from Miami, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM's data in AI Forum, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering the IBM data and AI Forum. Mike Gilfix is here. He's the Vice President of Digital Business Automation at IBM. Mike, good to see you again. Good to see you. So your question, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Digital business is one that gets digital software scale. So as opposed to traditional business, you know, very manual, very rote. If you want to get software like scale, you need to digitize. Okay, that's important. So now follow-up question. You hear, I don't know, I think Benioff said every company's a software company or a SaaS company. Does every company have to be a digital business? Else, they're toast? I think it's a competitive pressure. I think every business today is looking to get more and more leverage to stay ahead of their competition. And they're looking to technology to do that. That's actually where we come in, because we bring to them automation technology. Automation technology, they can apply to their business operations that will help them to get that scale. Mike, you guys got some hard news. Let's get right into it. What are you announcing today? Sure, so we're announcing a new critical capability. It's part of our cloud pack for automation. It's IBM Automation Digital Workers. The idea is that you can leverage a digital workforce. You can manage them like people. They can work alongside your people. And they can help to free up your people to be that much more productive. They can spend their time on creative things. They can get assistance where they need it. All integrated as part of this digital workforce. All right, a lot of questions. So what's a digital worker? Well, it kind of works just like a person does. It can do critical tasks that they need to do, like sift through documents to find out what to take action on, help with decision-making processes, figure out when to act, how to prioritize work, and it can integrate into those people's workflow. So they can offload, say, mundane tasks to even more complex tasks where it works alongside them, helps them be more productive. I mean, it sounds a little bit like a software robot. Is it? I mean, is it? It is a form of software robot. You know, the way that we've approached the problem though is we've really approached it from the human aspect. We've looked at the set of things where people spend their time, where they're doing things that they're really not good at. For example, many organizations, actually probably think about even your own job, we spend tons of time sifting through emails, business documents to figure out how to turn something into action. It's boring, it's tedious, we're frankly overwhelmed with it. We can use a digital worker to go through those documents, figure out then what to do, and then take action on it. Simple example, let's say someone's doing contract analysis. Think about all the time spent going through a contract to figure out what's in it, the decision-making process to figure out is it a valid contract, and then determining who should I get involved when there's a situation, so you can bring the right expert to the right job. So is this a pre-integrated package, or do I have to sort of roll my own? How do I consume it? Well, that comes as part of our cloud pack, but it comes with a set of tools that you can adapt to your given job roles. So you can describe, for example, what's my compliance officer do? What are the set of tasks they do in their day? For example, checking those contracts, and then you can use that to do automation and augmentation, where it integrates into the person's workflow, and you can manage them just like people. It'll tell you what work they did, and very importantly, we have an element of business controls so that you can trust the work that gets turned over, and it'll determine when you have to stage intervention and get a human involved to complete some form of task. So it still sounds a little bit like RPA, but maybe more focused or more specific to certain use cases or tasks? Well, if you really look at where RPA is making its strides today, it's making its strides in data entry and automation of input and data. A lot of back off of stuff. But what it doesn't do really well is, for example, complex decision-making. So consider that compliance officer. Checking whether something is compliant requires more than simple decision-making. It's not excelling today in the area of dealing with unstructured data or figuring out how to integrate into workflows directly. And we've approached this problem from the perspective of the job role. Tell me about the person, not the point thing that I want to get involved. So it's something that can integrate with RPA, it'll extend RPA, but it'll really allow you to create a digital worker as in a hybrid workforce management experience. Okay, that's starting to make sense now because you're right, RPA is basically take this mundane work process that's very well understood and automated. Sometimes I call it paving the cow path. But to me, the future of RPA is being able to cross that chasm and going into these fuzzy areas that you're describing, embedding into workflows, maybe allowing humans to come into the equation, maybe calling other automations to act on my behalf. That's where I think we partner with RPA vendors. We can supply that brain, if you will, that manages the digital worker brain and we can seamlessly integrate it into business processes, many of which actually run on our technology. And so the marriage of those things is effectively really what we've heard clients want, but today struggle to achieve. Well, it's interesting because it makes, so you're not trying to replicate RPA, there's enough vendors out there doing that. You're trying to add value to that and other, I'm sure there are other areas that you can add value to. And are you partnering specifically with RPA vendors? We do, we have close partnerships with RPA vendors. One that we've worked very closely with is automation anywhere, but we interoperate and we work with all the top RPA vendors. So when you think about digital workers, what's the critical issue for customers in terms of enabling them? Well, first a few things. There's a set of trust. If I'm going to turn over work to this digital worker, how do I know that, for example, I don't care what it comes up with, it's not going to sell inappropriate goods to miners as an example, because it doesn't know, it hasn't been taught those things. So we put some business controls in place that you can specify in natural language so you understand exactly what your digital worker does. And it knows then when to get a human involved. Kind of second component is I think today, people want those to be integrated into their workflow. They want to know that it gets you involved with the right person at the right time to take action and we can integrate that seamlessly into workflow. So that way it's not an isolated thing that just runs as automation. It's truly a synergistic collaboration between both humans and the digital worker. So what is the cloud pack for automation? We've been talking about the cloud pack for data. What is the cloud pack for automation? So it's a set of technologies that digitize what you do in a line of business. So all the technologies in it have a direct analogy to what people do in their workplace. It digitizes your workflow, meaning it coordinates the activities. It digitizes the business data and documents around it and all of the who can see it, what's the life cycle, enables collaboration around those documents. It digitizes decision making, processing of unstructured data. So really if you think about going to someone who works in a line of business, say they work in supplier onboarding and you ask them what they do, they'll probably describe their day and those kinds of elements and we can digitize that, run it, manage it and then give you visibility into its operations. How do you go from what's in the domain expert's head to codifying it? Is that a methodology process? Is that services? Do you have tooling to do that? Well, yeah, so one of the key ideas behind the technology is it's low code or model driven. So what the thing does is what you see. And that's really important because you can explain to a non-technical user essentially what the system is doing so they can check it with you along the way. And we have this methodology that we call playbacks and the idea is is you kind of elicit requirements from your business user, you put it in the technology, at any given point you can click play, step through your solution, your business user can kind of watch it even if it's incomplete and say oh yeah, that's what I had in mind that isn't what I had in mind. So that's a very powerful technology for doing sort of interactive development between business and IT. So it's an iterative process. Yes. Where you kind of record the user activity and then show it back, play it back to the user and say oh, close but make this alteration. And once you've digitized your operations on it, the automation play is you can integrate things like digital workers or we actually allow it to use the data from your operations to find ways to scale your workforce. So IBM is obviously in addition to a technology company or a world class services organization, one of the largest and most capable SIs in the world, global scale. With a lot of domain expertise by it, pick an industry, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, name it, IBM's got domain expertise there. Are you able to tap that domain expertise to drive your business? Sure, so first I'm in the software part of IBM so I support a broad ecosystem which is inclusive of partners. Specific to IBM global services, we actually have an IBM automation practice that has expertise specifically in the area of how to apply automation technology to business operations. Okay, so I love that answer because basically I'll translate, you said I'm an arms dealer. I'll sell software to my colleagues within IBM but I love all my partners just as well. A little more benign than an arms dealer but yes, yes, nonetheless. But the point is your goal is to scale your software across as many as clients as possible if they want to use a competitor of IBM global services and that's fine with you, obviously. They can, yeah. And so what's that ecosystem look like? I mean you've got it as a software company, you've got to develop that ecosystem. Yeah, we have a massive business partner ecosystem. Everything from large SIs of course as you mentioned but we have lots of regional SIs. We have a lot of people that have created vertical solutions around our technology. In fact that's one of the key ways in which we go to market where they've developed something that's specific say to accounts payable or loan processing or healthcare claims and so on. And so that allows us to extend our reach to niches and it gives them an opportunity to add value at. Okay, I'm going to ask you some thoughts on automation in general. We've seen a lot of tech spending but we haven't seen a productivity boost as a result in the last several years. Except for this, I guess first quarter of 2019 which is the latest data we saw, a big uptick. And so a lot of people think we're on the cusp of a productivity boom. That obviously is your business. What are your thoughts? What's your point of view on all that? Well, so we think of ourselves as our mission in life is to bring digital scale to knowledge workers and let me explain why that's so important. This industry's been talking about digital transformation for a really long time. And we've actually been quite successful in digitizing, we're not done, but we've been quite successful in digitizing a huge portion of our business. But the side effect of digitization is that we've generated all of this work. You expect that digital business to serve twice as many customers or be that much more responsive. And people can't keep up. And what it's done is it's fueled this growth of knowledge work. Where today we're not doing manual things the way that they were before they were digitized, but instead we're doing them in software. So how do we help people to keep pace? And that's the goal of automation technology. And there's this explosion of knowledge work. To some extent organizations far and wider figure out, okay, how do I get productivity in this new era? That's where we come in. We can help them get that productivity and we really are in the cusp of people using those techniques now to get that next level of productivity gain. So I've been saying for a while that I feel like there's this huge wave coming in productivity as a result of things like automation. People don't like to talk about it in the technology community, because the sellers especially, but I think it clearly has to have an impact on jobs. Maybe people don't get fired, but you might hire less people, but that's not really the point I want to make and ask you about it. The types of jobs that are going to become valuable will shift to these higher value activities. If you're filling out a form, that's going to be less valuable than some of these other more creative, more strategic types of things. What's your point of view on that? So first off, I don't think there's any human that can keep pace with the growth of knowledge work that's getting generated now. So they're going to need help. There's no lack of things to do. So that's kind of my first thought. I would say my second thought in that is, what if you could use your time differently? I would ask that question to anybody. If you could use your time differently, think about all the value you could go and create, but if you're spending time doing administration, is that really the best use of your time? It's clearly not. And so that's where the technology comes into play. The productivity gain is because you're going to be able to do things that matter the most, or unleash the creativity of your people. And my experience in working with organizations is exactly that. They leverage automation technology. Now they can do the missions they always wanted to do, but never got to in their backlog. Yeah, so I guess my take on that, I love your thoughts is, I mean, take existing jobs and put a brick wall around them. Those existing jobs are going to change. And I think he's going to have a negative, you're going to have a job loss. There's no question. But then other jobs are going to be created. My rap on this, people who want to protect the past from the future is, we basically have 0% unemployment right now. Even in an economic, a dramatic economic downturn, we have what, 10% unemployment. So if you're 90% of the people out there, you're going to be able to get a job. Now, nobody likes the economic downturn, but the point is to be competitive as a nation, as a society, you've got to innovate, and automation is part of that innovation. Look, I think, if you think about the jobs that people want to do, they're probably not the jobs that are going to be affected by this. And that's what I mean by the evolution. So people can now spend their time on those higher value things. People don't want to do those sets of tasks. Or if you really ask them, think about what they put on the resume. No one puts on their resume today, I'm a great data entry expert. They want to talk about their time with clients, relationship management, making a difference for the business. That's the potential of this technology. Yeah, but there was a time people would put that on their resume. Punch card, you know, operator, right? So, and we're still thriving. We're still around. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was a great conversation. Thank you, thanks for hosting me. Pleasure. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back to wrap the IBM data and AI form from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. We're right back.