 From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture TechVision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco, 33rd floor Salesforce Tower. The brand new, just open ribbon cutting ceremony this morning of the Accenture Innovation Hub. And we're here for a very special event. It's the Accenture Technology Vision Presentation 2019. We put together four or five trends that we should look at, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's an author behind this document. He's Michael Bilts, the Managing Director of Accenture Technology Vision. Michael, great to see you again. Great to see you too. I appreciate you having me back on. It's a nice, we liked the space last year was at a little venue, but this is quite impressive. It's hard to beat the tower. You get the views and the tech folks. So let's jump into it. So you've been doing this for a couple of years now. What jumped out that was special about 2019? I mean, I think what's different about 2019 is that everybody realizes that companies are really becoming those digital companies, and so people are actually starting to ask about what's next. And I think this is really the first time that we've seen not just companies introspectively trying to figure out how to change themselves, but really looking for that next step to figure out how they change the way people work, the way people live, and even people realizing that the things that they're doing are really having an effect on society as a whole. I'm sure there's going to be some CEOs that are going to say, Michael, we're already there and we're looking at the next chapter. We're barely getting started. It seems like this thing has just got started, but already we're kind of seeing second order, third order, magnitude changes in how this digital transformation's evolving. And I think that's really a result of how effective it's been. Is that the reason everybody's so interested, the reason they're excited, and honestly even the reason why you see outcries when things go wrong is because we're changing rapidly, but it really is having big impacts on just about every aspect of our life. Right, so there's a whole lot of meat in this report. People can go online, you can download it and spend some time reading it, but I want to pick one of the topics that we have covered in depth, and that's really this kind of hyper-personalization, moving to a very different way. We've just talked about marketing to one and this and that, but it was kind of marketing talk before. Now I can actually do it. It is, and I think the reason we're seeing that happen is that we're not the only ones as companies going through this digital transformation, all of our customers, all of our workforce, they're going through that digital transformation too. And every time you're using an Uber, every time you're using social media to interact with your family and your friends in the world around you, every time you invite a smart refrigerator or a piece into your home, is that suddenly what's happening is people are cobbling together their own technology identities. And these identities are ones that we're really starting to see become powerful ways for how they connect and how they work with businesses in ways they've really never done before. So we could go for hours and hours, but we only have 10 minutes, but one of the great topics you talked about earlier today is this kind of a concept of everyone has their own reality. And I think the first time anyone saw that was maybe in a Facebook feed when I realized, wait, your Facebook feed doesn't have the same stuff as my Facebook feed, but now it's gone way beyond your Facebook feed and to have these real hyper-personalized experiences all along the way. No, I think that's right. And what we're seeing is that we're really shifting from this idea of personalizations that says, how do I get you into a better category to individualization where it says, no, no, no, I'm actually deciding things for you. I'll give you an example. Healdberg Hospital, excuse me, Healdberg Hospital in Germany is actually working on using digital twins for people. So it's essentially a digital representative of an individual, and in their case, they're using it for things like pacemakers. Everybody's heart is different. Where a doctor is going to want to plate those electrical probes on there in order to make sure you get the best benefit out of that pacemaker is going to be different for every person. And so instead of having generalized optimized rules, they actually create a digital twin to figure out what's going to be optimized for the actual person that we're doing this on. So that's really interesting, right? Because we've been hearing about digital twins forever, probably GE more than ever in terms of people I've talked to in terms of creating a digital twin for a jet engine. You can run all kinds of tests. But to do it for a person, that's pretty interesting. So are they doing that on a per patient basis for that one visit? Or are they really taking a more longitudinal look at these people in terms of managing their health care over time? Well, I think right now, they're just taking their first steps. And so they're finding key points that says, like a particular pacemaker surgery, we see companies like food manufacturers that are trying to figure out whether your genetics is going to dispose you to certain taste or certain flavors or even certain health benefits for it. But we're still in that first step. And I think what's so exciting about it is that you see the benefit that says, yeah, absolutely having a pacemaker that's built to me is going to work and it's going to be a real benefit to somebody's life. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. We start to ask the question that says, what happens when every company can do this? What happens when every aspect of my life potentially could be catered just to me? And that's when we really start thinking about the fact that we're we're headed as a society is towards these personalized realities. Right, right, which begs a really big condition, right? Which is trust, right? So I'm giving you all this data and all in my telling you that I'm going to the store and what I'm surfing on my phone, but now you know a lot more about me. And in fact, you have a digital twin of me. And yet we read every day that everybody gets hacked or data breaches. I think someone here said that the time from a breach to discovery has gone from 250 days to 150 days or something like that. So how the companies manage the trust issue because it's a tough environment out there. It really is a tough environment, but I think it's one that companies are starting to recognize is going to be part of the way they really differentiate themselves. You know, is that on one hand you've got the security piece of it that says you just want to make sure that the bad actors in the world, the people who really are actively trying to do harm aren't getting that. And that's part of it, you know. And the reality is, is the investments that we're seeing in security are raising every year. But I think the harder question that people are starting to deal with is that they're being asked and they're asking their consumers to trust them in very different ways than they have before. You know, you look at somebody like an auto manufacturer that says they've spent the last 40 years making sure that we trust that their cars are reliable. You know, that you're going to be safe inside them and that you're going to be able to drive these for a certain amount of time or maybe for an extended period, you know, over the lifespan of that vehicle. But now we're pushing people into a comfort zone they're not quite there yet for that says, well, what happens when that car does know where you are at any point in time. It knows how many passengers there. It can infer based off of what parking lot you're in, what you're doing there. And I think that companies are just now trying to recognize that that's not, it's not new. We have healthcare companies and we have financial services that have done this forever, but it's new to an auto manufacturer that says it's a new type of trust they have to build. And we're just now seeing companies realizing that they're going to go on a new journey to create that relationship with consumers to build up that trust. Right. The other thing you touched on a little bit earlier today was kind of a changing responsibility set, right? And it used to be, you know, we learned in business school you just optimized to get max shareholder value. And right, and oh yeah, you should probably take care of your customers and oh yeah, we should probably take care of our employees too. But really, you talked about it going really another step, really being involved in the community, you know, being a much more kind of active participant outside kind of the direct sphere of the theater in which you play. Well, I think we have to, you know, because we've spent, and I think a lot of companies have spent so many years just building products, you know, to do things a little bit better, but they're doing the things that we're doing today, you know, that that mode that they have is that I have a specific role and yes, I'm responsible for, you know, a good quality product, but everything else is something that's out of your purview. But what we're talking about now is having that amount of information about you means that I now have to have responsibility to protect that information and even how I share it with my partners. The suddenly, if I'm actually going to be effective in changing the longevity for how people live or how cities are designed, is that it's no longer just about whether that road worked, it's whether or not the city was going to be designed correctly and benefits everybody. And what we're, I think we're getting to that point that people are realizing that the bigger the opportunity is, is the bigger the responsibility is that goes with it. And the friction and even some of the negative press that we're seeing happen right now, you know, in the marketplace is because people hadn't realized, they saw the bigger opportunity, they hadn't quite realized that that responsibility is going to be the way that it's going to be effectively implemented. Right. Well, I wonder if you have an opinion because, you know, there's kind of a whole leadership thing and John talked earlier today when they kick off the center that he wants to help your clients be the disruptor, not the disruptee. But what happened is you kind of get these accidental, accidental people in tremendous power because of the success of their platforms. Mark Zuckerberg to pick one. Mark Benioff, you know, who built this building. Jeff Bezos. So they didn't necessarily start on that path to put in place these huge social engines that have these big impacts, but they're kind of there. They are, but when you look at any of those examples, is that what you realize is that they may not have realized the impact that they were going to have as society as a whole, but their opportunities they were chasing were huge. Is that when you look at the early pieces of Facebook, is that they were realizing very early on that they were trying to change the way that people fundamentally communicate and how they create relationships over digital media. They knew how big that opportunity was and I think that as we've seen them go through it and we're seeing the hardships that they're having now is that other people are, they're not blind to it anymore. They know that when you have that amount of opportunity, there's automatically going to be ripple effects into everything and I think what we're about to see is this next generation is not going to be able to get off the hook as easily because they can't claim ignorance because we all know these things are happening. So exciting times, great, great for you. Congratulations for getting the report out. I'm sure it was nice to hit print on that thing a couple days ago. It was wonderful to hit print, but as we all know, tomorrow is a new day and something else is going to change and then we'll be back here again next year. Right, all right, well Michael thanks again for taking a few minutes. Good luck tonight on the presentation. Always great to catch up. Appreciate it, happy to be here. All right, he's Michael, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Ascension Innovation Hub, brand new downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.