 Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata Possible. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Streche. We are joined by Steve McMillan. He is the president and CEO of Teradata. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Steve. It's great to be here. It's a pleasure to talk with you this afternoon. A really exciting event for us. Yeah, no, it's a really, there's a lot of great energy here. So we want to get your thoughts on every conversation that's happening here at this conference, but of course the big topic of the day is generative AI. The technology landscape is in constant flux and one of our guests said, and he wasn't the first person to say it, but when it comes to AI every day, it's like a year in terms of the innovation and then the pace of change. What do you see as the most sort of significant trend happening right now? So I think the marketplace is super interesting. I joined Teradata three years ago and one of the reasons I joined is because the data and analytics marketplace is so exciting. If you think about it, an area of IT to be in just now, data and analytics is right at the core. The epicenter of so much that's going on. I think there's a recent survey that showed if you look at the top three areas of investment for any CIO is cybersecurity, probably not a surprise, data and analytics and cloud. And when you put all of those three things together, I think you get some fantastic solutions, fantastic use cases that a lot of our customers here are starting to deploy. And certainly since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, that site is at a real accelerant in terms of putting a real focus. I don't think there's a board in the world that isn't challenging a leadership team about what are you doing with GNEI, what are you doing with ChatGPT? And that real interest in that technology is driving a lot of the conversations that we're seeing here over the course of the last few days. I could imagine and I would say that you probably talk to a lot of different companies and they get to have insight. And what I've liked about the team here and the Teradata team is really we're going to start with the business use case and work back. What are you telling to those companies that you're having those conversations with about where they should start with GNEI? I think the important thing is to look at it from a proof of concept perspective. There's lots and lots of different areas where GNEI can impact your organization. And I think thinking about it from three tiers is super important. So the first tier is, how can I transform my customer operations? GNEI can transform how a sales team is working, how marketing operates, how R&D works, product engineering. We're seeing it to help us make our engineers more effective in terms of developing the Teradata platform. But I think that's the kind of level one. Level two is then, how do you embed GNEI into your products and services so that you can make a difference to your customers? And how do you reinvent the product set that you're delivering, utilizing some of these really innovative technologies? But I think it starts to really kick in when we think about how GNEI can transform entire industries. And so I talked about an interesting case study during my keynote this morning, which was Adobe. Adobe, the general thought on the street was that Adobe was going to be disrupted by GNEI developing images. Who's going to need that suite of products to do that? They pivoted super fast over the course of a couple of months to actually say, no, we're going to take advantage of this. I think Firefly is their GNEI solution that utilizes all of their digital imagery, completely transformed their company. And again, catapulted them as they helped transform that entire industry around imaging. And I think every industry has the opportunity to transform some of the industries that we are really thinking about and say, Teradata are healthcare. We love the opportunity to work with healthcare organizations to really transform how data impacts people on a day-to-day basis. Well, with opportunities come a lot of challenges. So can you talk about how you are helping customers think through the challenges that they're facing when it comes to GNEI and how they can think about overcoming them? Because I imagine that it also seems quite daunting. As exciting as this is, it's also quite scary and intimidating. Yeah, it's a healthy dose of fear and excitement generating some adrenaline in the ecosystem just now. If I could put one word at the core of the challenge, I think it's data. In order for these solutions to work and be effective, they have to be utilizing a data structure that can be relied upon and trusted. Yeah, and what we see inside organizations, we've done a number of studies across a lot of different areas. Less than 25% of organizations think they've got the right data culture. Think they've got the right data capabilities. And even less than 25%, I think it's around 21%, don't think they've got the right structure in place to ensure the ethical and responsible use of data within their organization. And so that's something that Teradata tries to help with all the time. Unpicking some of these challenges with some of our partners to tie together the right solutions to address those challenges. I think that's been a very strong message throughout today has been around. You're not trying to go out alone. You have an ecosystem around you and I think actually exposing it to a broader audience has been great. And I think one of the places where you've always been strong and it's one of these that I don't think you get enough credit for is really data management. I mean, data management and being a data management company has been all the rage for like the last three years. How is it that you're really bringing that to bear and how it's leading to better AI for that matter? Yeah, we think about it in terms of how do we harmonize data and say to an organization? And what we mean by harmonize is essentially ensure there's data alignment. And it's something that Teradata has been really good at. You could say that Teradata invented the enterprise data warehousing to allow organizations to have data cross silos, harmonize that data and get insights. The ethos that we have now and say Teradata is much different. And I think there's a lot of excitement here as we talk about that new approach where don't move the data around the organization. Rain in the data sprawl by having the right query technology and query capability right next to your data. So you don't need to duplicate it. You don't need to worry about keeping consistency between different copies of the data. You can essentially have a very flexible ecosystem that crosses clouds, that goes back into on-prem and it enables you to ensure that you've got the right quality of data that you can operate against. So super exciting times from a Teradata perspective is we've brought out new technologies that enables this. Yeah, the call out for that is, and we had Hillary on a little, actually just before, and I'm a big data geek as it would be, or at least what my wife would say about me. And from that, it's the feature catalog and the data feature catalog that you have there. And not, hey, you don't have to rebuild it to your point, you have that there. And it's like, here's the definition of this type of data. And I think that's fantastic. Yeah, and being able to do that autonomously. So when we think about autonomous semantic mapping, that's a super geeky, so it doesn't depend on metadata. It actually looks at what's included inside that data set and says, oh, that looks like an address. And there's an address here. We can deduplicate that data. So a super interest in advanced use case in terms of getting hands around the data and then say to an organization. One of the things that we've also been hearing a lot from folks on the queue, but also in the keynotes, is just the power of the proof of concept. And I know that you talked a lot about some of these in your keynote. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about some of the most exciting use cases and proof of concepts that you've seen using the Teradata architecture and tools? Yeah, I think it's super interesting you. Laurie Beer, who's the CTO for JPMC, stood up and declared an objective at the start of 2023 that they would get a billion dollars in the bank from a business value associated with advanced analytics and AI. In May of this year, she actually said, we're going to up that objective. We're going to deliver one and a half billion dollars of business value. And I think it really has a testament to some of the transformative examples. And some of the examples are customers that are actually deploying on the Teradata platform now. So there's a large CPG organization that's using large language models to completely transform the supply chain. So if you think about their truck drivers are delivering different goods to stores. The truck driver can have an interactive conversation and say, oh, tell me what store should I go to next? What should I deliver to that store? He can be in the store and say, oh, they seem to be running low on a particular product. How much more product should I fulfill and put on the shelf? And it completely transforms that supply chain. Another really interesting example, which is actually in Israel, and it's something that personally I would really appreciate if it was in the US, is you've heard of smart carts from an electronic shopping experience and with Amazon recommending things. But they are actually working on physical carts in the grocery store with GPS, looking at what your trends have been in terms of purchasing, knowing where you are, recommending products that are in the aisle, a totally transformative customer experience. And then we heard on stage today some work that our customers are doing in terms of utilizing it to give nudges to doctors. There's so much information coming out from a medical science perspective now, really difficult for doctors to keep on top of it. So not taking the human out of that medical process, I think a lot of us would like to have a human still engaged from a doctor perspective, but just having them give that nudge in terms of, well, this is what their body of work is saying, this is what the recommendation would look like. Do you want to accept that recommendation or not? So super interest across a whole range of industries in terms of that use case. So you're the CEO of a major technology organization. How do you think about AI and jobs? Because there's a lot of scaremongering about what AI and the job dislocation that will come of it. You just gave a couple of examples of a doctor getting more information to make her analysis, a truck driver hearing, making his or her job easier to do and maybe more satisfying and not wasting as much time at some of the things we all hate about our jobs. So how do you think about it and how do you pitch it almost to the workforce? Yeah, so, I mean, if I just think about it inside Teradata, I know how much I'm going to spend on R&D. I'm not going to reduce my R&D. The R&D in innovation is the lifeblood of my company, especially as a tech company. And I think all organizations across the world are seeing the value of data as being, you know, you could data the new oil, data is the lifeblood of an organization. And I think these analytic capabilities, AI, ML and Gen AI are just enabling people to unlock more value. You know, if I'm a coder and I'm using an AI tool to develop more code and making me more effective, more efficient, I can move to higher order problems, right? I can look at, you know, what are the extra 10 features that we want to deliver and deploy? And from my perspective as the CEO, it gives us a much better competitive position in the marketplace. And I think that's how a lot of industries are looking at that. They're not necessarily thinking about it as a pure cost saving play. I think it's going to drive innovation, drive speed to market, and drive real, great business outcomes for our customers around the world. Well, Steve McMillan, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Robstretch.ai. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata Possible.