 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Wright. He is the Chief Innovation Officer at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Always a pleasure. Good to see you again, Dave. Good to see you as well. Yeah, you've been around the block. You've been on theCUBE a few times. Around the block. Bad way of putting it, but yeah. So, Chief Innovation Officer, we've had a lot of great new product launches at this show. What are you most excited about and what are you already thinking about when you go back to your office? So I think what's been interesting to me is the different way of engaging now. We've got the concept of virtual agent technology. And I don't just mean the fact we've got a virtual agent. The fact that it starts to give people alternatives and it gives people alternative ways to come into the system, whether it be through our interface or whether it be through someone else's interface. I start to wonder what'll happen going forward as we get more and more bot type technologies out there? How will you have that one interface that works with all those to get the information back of the chain? How will you almost have a single interface that allows you to connect to all these bots and solve your problems? Because the benefit's kind of twofold. One is the bot technology you get from being a customer to coming in and actually doing a request. But the other is you'll eventually be able to take that same technology and apply it to the Fulfillor user, to the Power user. Because if I'm doing something and I can have an agent that's helping me do it, almost like the agent assist concept you saw this morning. If I could take that to a next level and have AI running on top of that, then I can make work easier for the people coming in but I can actually improve the people that are in the system and make them more effective. So go ahead, yeah. Go ahead, follow up please. I know, I was just going to ask about how you get your ideas. So you're here, you're interacting with customers, you're seeing how they're using your product. So is it interviewing customers to find out their pain points? Is it really just watching? I mean, you're the chief innovation officer. How do you spark your own creativity? So it's a really weird answer. I get most of it off kids and most of it off my kids. So I can tell you a story. We were in Barnes and Noble the other week and they had albums in there, like classic 12 inch albums. They're coming back. And they cost more than they used to. Yeah, right. So I called the kids over, I said, look, let's get educated. This is what I used to use to play music on. And now we move to CDs and you guys miss CDs and this is why you guys buy music. I had a, I've got a 12 year old and a seven year old. And a 12 year old was saying, well, we don't buy music. And I said, yeah. And I thought, no, you don't, you rent music. Yeah. And then my youngest also said, why would you want to own a song forever? And I was like, oh, this is interesting. We started having a discussion. These are deep, these are deep questions. We started having a discussion. There was a load of kids over having a sleepover and they were all eating pizza. And they were talking about the concept of having a job. They said, how do you decide what you want to do for the rest of your life and how do you do that? And we were talking about how you do something, you get better, you go to another company, you get better at doing it, you go to another company. And one of them said, that sounds really boring just like doing the same thing. And then one of them had the best answer. She said, don't you think it's a waste of your time? And I was like, why is it a waste? And she said, because if you're really good at something, why should you just do it for one company? And I was like, oh, so you're going to be a contractor. But what I realized was because this whole generation don't need to own things, they just need to use things. So they don't need to know how to do something. They can just, they just know they want to do it. And they don't need to know, they don't need to own something. They just need temporary access to it. Then it got me thinking when you talk about what could work go to as to do you get a whole concept of the gig economy becoming a gig enterprise. Because we have a lot of people in work who've got all these different skills, but we force them to do one job. And it might be that, it might be that someone's doing a job but they've got skills that will be applicable outside of that job, but they never get to use them. So have we seen the first generation arrive now where they expect everything to be task-based? And then it gives you control over your own career. Because then you say, well, actually I'm not good at this but I can start to bid for low-end work. I can say to people, hey, look, I'm only a three on a skills racing but if you don't need any complex, I'll take it because I get to learn. So it's a whole new dynamic. And I think when you ask where about ideas come from, some of the first stage ideas are the first horizon. I think they come from customers. Some of the second horizon, they come from people who aren't working. It's just trying to imagine how they all develop and whereabouts that all goes. So you surround yourself with millennials? Oh, not even millennials. I mean, millennials are kind of free. Yeah, I'm looking for almost like the linksters, almost like the people who've been born connected. It's definitely a Gen Z thing, but it's beyond millennials. I think the millennials had a certain expectation around, well, it's kind of a negative connotation but before they were called millennials, people used to refer to it as the entitlement generation. And it wasn't because they were entitled. It was because they felt they just got access to everything. So, you know, it's like with my kids and they're kind of Gen Z and one of them is a linkster, but you'd never go to them and say, they don't ever come to you and say, hey, I want to watch a movie and you go, great, let's go to blockbusters, let's run it. They expect it to be just available on demand, available real time. And that was what I think the kind of millennial generation started, being entitled to access to data. Then I think you went to the unlimited generation where it was everything always connected, no concept of bandwidth. But now I think it's the real thing that's changing is the concept of ownership. And I think that's why you start to see things like, well, will the car industry ever be the same? Because if you don't need to own a car because you're not driven by the same passions that people who want cars are driven by, it's just a way of communicating. You don't need a garage on your house. You may as well just park the car somewhere else that comes when you need it. It can change the way cities are laid out. I mean, there's so many different routes you can go down with this. So how does that innovation, how does that knowledge that you gain get into ServiceNow products and services? So that all comes back then to how you, how people are going to face new management dynamics, so how people are going to manage things like IoT devices, how are people going to deal with managing work if it is a task-based economy, how are people going to start to think about not just working in a system of record and not just working in a system of engagements, but how are they going to start to build that mesh or that web that links all these different things together? I think that's where our strength comes. Our strength comes in the ability to be able to link systems or records together, to link users with those back-end systems to be able to manage those complex work processes. That's kind of the core elements of us. And I think when you look at what Fred Krasek when he built the platform and he had the whole workflow engine in there, it is that engine that's kind of the key palace of the whole company. I like the metaphor of a mesh. Sometimes we talk about a matrix of digital services that becomes ubiquitous beyond. A cloud of remote services is really transforming into this mesh of digital capabilities that are everywhere that do things that clouds don't do. They sense, they react, they respond, they read, they hear. It's an amazing time that we're entering in innovation. Andy McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson when they wrote the book, Second Machine Age, talked about, they talked about Moore's Law, powering innovation, but they also talked about the innovation curve reshaping from, going from linear Moore's Law, which we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades in this industry, reshaping to an exponential curve. And I wonder if we could get your thoughts. We've posited that it's a combination of data applying machine intelligence to that data and then leveraging cloud economics at scale is really where the innovation is going to come from in the future. What are your thoughts on that? So let me try and understand the question. So you're talking about not actually the way that you've seen the growth from a process perspective, but the way you actually see the growth from a machine learning capability being able to analyze that data. Applying that layer of machine learning, maybe use that mesh metaphor, that top level, you know you've got horizontal technology services, but then there's this new AI layer on top. And data is the fuel for that AI. Absolutely, I think people can't even imagine what they can do with that data. People can't even contemplate some of the decisions they can make. And it's when people start to look at things in completely different ways, when people start to say, well, if we applied machine learning to a user interface, for example, could we come up with a better user interface? Because now, if we understand how people interact with a system, could we actually build a better system? Or you see people starting to have this whole butterfly effect around the way that artificial intelligence works. So the best example I heard was, I was actually at a convention with a girl called Lulu Chang and she was talking to me about it. But they were speaking to hospitals and they were talking about self-drive cars and the application of machine learning to be able to help cars drive. And they were saying the interest in knock-on effect of this was a hospital saying it was going to be a real problem for them having self-drive cars. And she was like, why is it going to be a problem? And the problem was that if you look across the whole of America, you have about 20 people a day die because they can't get replacement organs. But 37% of the organs come from car crashes. So if you take car crashes out of the equation, so what they were investing in was actually looking at how they did cloning technology for organs. So no one would have ever imagined I'm building a self-drive car and this is going to improve cloning technology so much. And I think AI is in the same place. Everyone's using it in this such a small area that they don't even see the potential of what they could do with it. They don't have any concept of what they could be starting to look at and how they could start to spot trends between people. Even on a base level, I was speaking to one of our customers the other night and they've managed to put an AI system in place that when they got a call in, off the description of the call, they could work out what the customer satisfaction was going to be. And if it was going to be a bad satisfaction figure, they could preempt that and put different agents that were more skilled on that particular issue. And they said a few years ago, all they were interested in was maybe one day we'll be able to categorize something automatically. But now they can predict how well something's going to be resolved. It's very hard to predict, isn't it? I mean, who would have thought that Alexa would have emerged as one of the best, if not the best natural language processing system or that, you know, images of cats on the internet would lead to the facial recognition of technology. That one especially. I mean, it really couldn't have ever predicted that. So, but because you're such a clear thinker and a strategic thinker, I want to ask you to make some predictions. I was going to run some things by you. You've talked about autonomous vehicles for a while. Do you believe that owning in the future, you know, pick whatever timeframe you want, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception? Yeah, I think it'll probably be the people who... Well, okay, so I definitely think driving your own car will become the exception. I think some people will always want that sense of ownership until we get to a generation that doesn't. I think there'll always be a hard core of people who do want to own and do want to drive and do want that experience. But I think you've already got the issue where congestion is at such a level in most areas. Is there any enjoyment out of driving? So I love driving. I love sports cars. I collect them. But if someone said, hey, you've got two options, you can sit in a high-performance sports car, so go to LA, or you can sit in a Tesla and it will drive itself and you can read a book. I'm getting in the Tesla. All right, how about retail? Right for disruption. Do you think that large retail stores will essentially, not essentially, it's never complete, but will largely go away? I think it depends on the nature of the experience. So I think for a lot of goods that are consumable goods, I can kind of see that going away. I don't think it'll go away for luxury goods. I don't think it'll go away fully for fashion. I think people always like to look at things and understand things and check fits. But for some things that are high consumables, maybe even for electronics, I can see those going, or I can see it going for things where it's one product, so something like a shop that just sells sneakers. I could see someone could easily offer a range and say, well, look, here's what we sell. When you order something, we'll automatically ship you one size up, one size down, or two variations of color, and it'll be a free system to return the ones you don't want. I think the whole experience of ordering one thing and hoping it works out, I think that'll go away. It'll be a concept of ordering a group of things, or maybe it'll be applying artificial intelligence to say, hey, you've asked for this color, but we know that people who also ask for that color like this color as well, we're going to ship you them both. You see how it goes and send us the one back you don't want. Okay, let's see. Will machines make better diagnoses than doctors? I've got to say, I think you will get to a point where that'll happen, especially if it's things where it's image processing, where it's X-ray processing, MRI processing, where it's something like, perhaps it's mental health, then I don't know, maybe. I'd probably rather have my mental health judged by a person than a questioner, but yeah, I think for things where you're using image recognition or things where you're looking at pattern distribution or you're looking at even like virus distribution or virus structure, then I think those areas, I think you will get to a point where a diagnostic issue is better, but you look at where artificial intelligence is from diagnostics now and you go on Dr. Google and search for something, everything finishes with the bottom line or it could be cancer. Yeah, you're dead. What about will there ever be a revolt in the sense of technology is so pervasive and people just say, forget it, I'm sick of just being tracked. I just kind of wanted to have a human to human connection. Dream on. So are we done for? I think it's gone. So I was speaking to a girl who works for me, Manisha, and she was saying, we were talking on Friday and she said, hey, I was having a coffee with another girl, Kaz. And Manisha's in Seattle and Kaz is in San Francisco. And I said, oh, she and Seattle were you in San Francisco and Manisha's a lot younger than me. And she went, well, no, we weren't in the same room. We were just like doing it over video. It was like a virtual coffee. And I was like, what? So you both get coffee and sit and have a conversation. She's like, oh yeah. I was like, ah. All right, I got one more. I got one more. Okay, let's hear it, let's hear it. All right, last one is great. Thanks for playing along. I know this is fun. Financial services is an industry that really hasn't been disrupted. Do you feel like the banks will lose control, the major banks will lose control of payment systems? Well, I think there's a lot of conversations now around how much those payment systems open up. Because if you, let's say you do a transaction with Amazon or you do a transaction with Google, how hard would it be for every transaction to be done that way? So rather than if you're setting up a payment for gas bills or a car loan payments, rather than give you bank details, why not give you PayPal details or your Amazon account details or your Google details, that could reduce all the banking transactions down to one interface. I think that could happen. I think you could get, but obviously you're already seeing the rise of blockchain and I'm not a blockchain expert. I'm itching to find a use case for us with blockchain, but I can't find it yet. But for direct transactions, if both sources can trust each other, then yeah, that direct transaction between those two sources, I think that's completely possible. I think there's also areas where you've seen it happen in the past where banking faces issues from retail coming into banking. So sometimes you'll get the big supermarket chains, especially in Europe, they'd say, okay, you're going to get Sainsbury's bank or you're going to get Tesco's bank because they've got all that customer loyalty. They've got people they can give discounts to if they bank with them. So they can instantly bring, if you bought, if you said to your banking, if you said to your shopping account base, hey, if you bank with me, we'll give you $20 a week off your grocery shopping. You could probably bring 10 million customers straight away. So I think banking is challenged from other industries that want to get into it, from places where you'll actually go and do e-transactions now, and from places where you'll just go and order stuff online. You could filter all that through one place. I think there'll still always be the commercial side of banking. There's still always going to be the stocks and bonds. There's still going to be the wealth management. But perhaps for transactional banking, you could start to see a decline. Fantastic, thank you. Yeah, I love this future of stock. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. All right, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Great to see you. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 and theCUBE's live coverage just after this.