 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jefferyk here with theCUBE. We're downtown San Francisco, the Hotel Niko. It's International Women's Day, March 8th. There's stuff going on all around the world. But we're excited to be here at the Accenture event, about 400 people, a lot of great panels, some familiar faces, some new faces, and one of those familiar faces joins us in the next segment. He's Mark Carell from Accenture Louds. Mark, great to see you. Great to see you too. And a new face, Mary Hamilton, Managing Director also from Accenture Louds. Mary, great to see you. Great to see you too. So first things, just kind of impressions of this event. I don't know if you did last year, we weren't here, you know, it's a lot of energy, kind of initial takeaways from some of the early panels. I mean, the energy is there. I mean, definitely last year we were here. I mean, we do that every year, for sure. And last year it was amazing as well. But I think this year is even bigger than we had last year. We have kind of a hub and spoke type of organization where we have also our top leadership to go from different cities. And then we celebrate all over the world. So this year, the hub is here. And that's the reason why there's so much buzz and so much excitement. So that's really cool. All of our leadership is here. And just phenomenal guests from, and we really aim for diversity. Even not just gender diversity, but diversity across all of our different panelists. The kind of thing they're thinking about, the way they're thinking about diversity. And for me, just some of those takeaways, Vivian Ming, her point was, when she showed up, and is there a difference between how men and women are treated when she showed up as herself, as she is today, as a woman? She said, she's never been asked a math question since. And that just blew me away, that it's so black and white. And they're really, from someone that's lived on both sides, there really is a difference. Right, right, yeah. So what are the topics, you guys are involved in labs is innovation, right? So there's digital transformation, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but really innovation is kind of a more concrete thing that people are trying to achieve. And you guys are a big part of that. At labs, diversity is a big part of being more innovative. So how do you guys see it in your customer base? And how do you see it within the work that you guys do within your own department at the labs group? Well, I'll start just, you know, if you think about innovation, innovation that taps diversity is stronger innovation. Right, our clients are delivering products and services to a diverse audience. And as we serve our clients and try to help them transform and be more digital, we have to reflect the consumers or the buyers for their products. And if we don't have that diversity, we're not going to deliver the right kinds of innovation. I think Mary's actually right. And then what's very important to us is that we absolutely demonstrate that through numbers. So, you know, we have like seven labs, two of our leaders, our women from those labs. We have five research domain out of the five research domain, three out of the five are led by women. And I think that's pretty amazing. Now you see that from an organization perspective, but I think if you look at who are the researcher, the most prolific that we have in the labs from a few hundred people that we have, they're women, hands down. And I'm going to give you some numbers, which is again, amazing. We're kind of publishing about 2,000 clothes of patents, I mean, from the labs, I mean, since we exist. More than 38% have been driven by women. And then our most prolific labor is a woman. She has delivered like 124 application and patent. How did that? I mean, it's just amazing. When it drives is such an important piece, right? Which is one of my favorite quotes. And God we trust, but everybody else better bring data. And right, so if you don't apply data, if you don't measure the data and you don't actually put in processes to specifically address the problem, it's just conversation, right? It's just interesting words. Absolutely, Jeff. And I think Mary will be shared with you. I mean, also we're putting a process and approach a culture that is really changing the mind. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we focus on programs, you know, not just at the junior level of recruiting. We do spend a lot of time and effort on getting out where women are. So, you know, we do things like Grace Hopper. We invest a lot to go to Grace Hopper and meet those technical women. We do things with women who code, with girls who code, you know, what's the pipeline going to look like? But then once we have them in, how do we retain them? And so we've created a community and a network where we do a number of things. We mentor them. We create external networks. We create internal networks. We create kind of a social space, a safe social space where you can bring up questions like, what should I wear to International Women's Day without, you know, having to feel awkward about asking those kind of things. We create a community that empowers and makes people feel comfortable. And do the clients get now that they, for whatever good, bad, or otherwise, they just need more good people? Yeah. And you just can't not pull from the greatest population of good people that she can pull from. Yeah. Absolutely, you're absolutely right. And I think that's another aspect from what I see what's happening in the lab. And I think Mary is a great example of that. We're looking at role models, like amazing women like Mary that's going to be driving, basically, striving and showing that our people that you can really have a fantastic career pass as a technology person in the lab and in the Accenture organization overall. I think that's very, very important for us. Yeah, and for me, you know, I'm not just a technologist, but I'm also a mother of three small kids. And I try to bring that to work, right? I try to show people, you know, I'm not just taking the, you know, hardcore path. You know, I'm balancing a family. I'm doing all these things that probably the rest of you are trying to do too. And I let it show, right? This is hard, you know, how can I help you? Here's what I'm going through. You know, here are the challenges I'm facing and try to bring others along too. So funny we did an interview years ago, actually at an IBM event and it was a great woman who was from an HR kind of consultative background. And she said, you know, we spent all this time trying to find these great people that have all these great attributes. And then we bring them in and then we just like, give them the compliance manual. Now you need to not be you, the mom. That's right, we gotta judge you. You just gotta be this little machine. And that's really not the way anymore, not at all. And credit to our leadership, to Mark, to Paul, Ellen, all the way up, right? There's a true support for being truly human, bringing yourself to the workplace. And they support it, they encourage it, right? And I think that that culturally seeps in to how we bring diversity to innovation too, right? It's bring your whole self to how you think about innovation. When we're hiring, I mean, I have a great example. I had a client come visit us and he's been a strong supporter of us, you know, within his client space. And he came in and we were talking about his work. And then I took him out to meet the team that was building the proof of concept for him. Some tangential areas. And he met people from not just men and women, diverse, but also different backgrounds, engineers, researchers, you know, business folks. He met people from all kinds of backgrounds around the world. And he was able to have conversations about sports science, cricket, you know, extended reality, and bring all those conversations back. And at the end of his meeting, he said, I was just floored at how many engaged conversations I was able to have with different people and the diversity of your workforce. And it's not just male, female, right? You need that broad spectrum diversity to fuel innovation, fuel new ideas. I think, go ahead, go ahead, Mark. Well, I was just going to say, so, you know, obviously it's a feel-good day today and it's a feel-good place right here. But what are some of the significant, is it just execution or are there still some big hurdles that we have to overcome? Especially, Mary, from your perspective. Mark's got it all figured out so we don't have to worry about him. Well, yeah, I mean, there absolutely are, right? There is a pipeline problem. There is a pipeline problem both from girls in STEM coming up, right? What culturally we're telling girls. And then there's a pipeline problem for, you know, we need to hire today. And I'm actually on the board of Women Who Code because I'm so passionate about their mission is, let's get women to understand that technology's approachable. That it is for all of us, right? There's so many, the spectrum of what you can do with technology is so broad. And it's so, really, if you think about it, so appealing to so many women, if you hit the right, you know, focus for them that I think we can bring more women into tech even now, right? We don't have to wait for the pipe. We have to work on the pipeline, but we don't have to wait for it. We can start now. It's great. I mean, we do stuff with Girls in Tech and Girls Who Code and obviously you're Grace Hopper too. So you saw, I'm spacing on her name, the gal that gave the keynote from the UK who was basically, you know, at her last nickel with their kids, divorced, homeless. And she learned how to code. And I don't know how old she was, but she wasn't. And we have so many, we have so many of those stories at Women Who Code. It turns their life around. And maybe the tech for good. Yeah, I think that's interesting. I mean, like also the nature of some of the project we're doing also are driving women, I mean, basically to be involved in this project. You know, the tech for good. I think I discussed that with you. I mean, for some of those interviews where we're using technology innovation to really change the world and society and everything. We really believe, and we're not the only one to believe that. You know, I mean, there was like other CEOs from other organizations that believe that like women are really attracted to build solutions or projects to be involved in projects that are really a purpose. They're meaningful to the society. And so the tech for good that we have launched, first of all, got an incredible success not only within the firm, but outside of the firm. And the second thing is that it attracted tons of woman talents. They love these kind of things. And then because they love that, they want to stick with Accenture and they're going to be striving. Yeah, I mean, you get both sides of the coin. You're doing things that are empowering women in many cases. Right, right. You know, all the projects we're doing. And then that's also attracting women because, you know, we're excited about the development of society and humanity. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I got to give a lot of credit to kind of the younger generation coming up in terms of the prioritization of purpose within their hierarchy and deciding what to do, what companies to work for, how to spend their time. You know, it's very different than when we were coming, we didn't think about purpose, trying to get a good job, right? Pay off the mortgage and get a car. They don't want a car. They don't want a mortgage. They didn't want to do the nothing. And I'll tell you something, Jeff. I mean, it's just like the tech for good. I was just discussing with Mike Sutley just before that, our chief officer for digital. And I was telling him that the tech for good, the reason why we decided to do the tech for good in the lab and talking to my leaders and everything, it's just like, because my kids come to me, it's just like, hey, dad, you have the best job in the firm now. I mean, you need to do something with it. And so obviously we had to do some tech for good things. That's it. I love it. All right, we're running out of time, so give me the last word. When we come back a year from now, I'll probably see you in a month since I see you all the time. But a year from now at International Women's Day, what are you working on? What are your priorities? How does this integrate into what you guys are doing at labs in your brand new space, by the way? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, part of the mission in that brand new space is to create these accidental collisions, right? And I think that is about. Accidental collisions. Collaborative collisions, I should say. Accidental collaborative collisions. I was like, I love that term. We're not just colliding with each other. We're collaborating in these collisions. And Adam's quiet. These big things happen, right? I'm sorry, not to train the thoughts. No, no, no, that's perfect. And I think that whole mission is about how do we create that diversity of thought? How do we bring people together that wouldn't have collaborated in the past? So my mission is we're moving into that new space is to get my labbers who are on our own little floor, doing our own little thing, to expand our horizons, right? To think about diversity across the spectrum. How are we going to work with other groups? How are we going to bring different pieces to the innovation? So I hope we can reflect that even as we come back next year to this program. Great, all right. And my job is really to, I mean, as to pile on what Mary says, like I'm going to continue stretching particularly the boundaries of our research because I think that there's nothing better than to do like hard research to solve a hard problem, to elevate our people. And to be honest, whether it's woman or man, they're all labbers, they're all part of our family and there's no better basically reward for you to see those people basically shining and explaining their passion to our clients, changing social ideas and everything. That's what we're going to do. Love the passion, Mark. Mary, it's always great to catch up. It's great to see you.