 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Imagine, nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront, actually, in Seattle, Washington. It's an absolutely gorgeous August day. We're here for the AWS Imagine nonprofit event. It's the fourth year they've had it. It's the first year it's been kind of open to the public. It was invitation only, and we're excited to be here for our first time. Our guest is here for his first time too, and we're excited to sit down with Said Elnaj. He is the vice president of IT and CIO for the National Council on Aging. Said, great to see you. Thank you, great to see you. Yeah, so first off, just kind of impressions on the event so far. Really good keynotes this morning, and they got a full two days planned for you. Yes, it was an excellent keynote speech this morning, and started off talking about impact and how nonprofit organizations make a difference in the world. Right, so National Council of Aging. The population is aging more every day. They keep sending me my card in the mail. I keep pretending I'm not old enough to get, but the population- We all try to pretend, right? Exactly, the AR, double ARP. Thank you very much for the card. But there's a lot of unique challenges as the population continues to get olding. What are some of your organization's priorities? How do you address this kind of growing population in our society? So I'll share with you some statistics on aging. So there are about 72 million 60 and older adults in the US. 70 million in the US out of a population of 350. And it's growing. And it's growing. It will be 92 million in 2030. So it's a growing larger segment of the population. People are living longer, saving less, about half of those who are 60 plus have a saving of about $30,000. About 80% of 60 plus have about maybe two chronic disease conditions. So people are living longer, saving less money. And obviously with that, there are a lot of challenges. And this is where we step in. So we step in. Our mission is to help people age healthier and wealthier, try to make sure that they plan correctly for their savings. And they plan correctly also for managing their chronic diseases and managing their health in general. And so for that, we have a lot of digital products actually that help older adults figuring out how to live an older and healthier life. One of them is our flagship product, helping people get access to federal, state and local government benefits. It's called Benefits Checkup. It's the largest system, decision support system in the country that helps older adults figuring out what benefits they qualify for and how to apply. And we walk them through that whole process. So it's also not necessarily the most technically astute population either, especially today's seniors who didn't grow up as digital natives like a lot of the kids are today. And as you said, your guys objective number one is economic security. Maybe not necessarily number one, but top of the list and then healthy living. And they don't have the benefit of time for their 401ks and stuff to grow. So these are pretty unique challenges. How are you helping them? And then we're here at AWS. What role has AWS played in helping you reach your constituents? Okay, you're asking a lot of questions in one. So let me try and answer them one by one. Yes, yes. So let's take a look at the aging population, especially the older adults, 70 plus those who actually don't have, don't know they're not necessarily technology savvy, but they have cell phones over 73% of them have cell phones and some have smartphones. So we looked at the different ways of trying to reach out to them. And one of the things that we experimented with is looking at an SMS texting pilot. So we actually started that pilot and was very successful and now we're rolling out into a full production system. It's a, we found out that it's a great channel. It's very simple, asking simple questions. Did you apply yes or no? Just answer us. If you were to do one or two, so tell us, give us a very simple answer. And we found that the engagement rates are way above the average industry. People tend to respond to text messages far better than actually telling them, hey, there's a mobile app, go download my mobile app, et cetera. So that's one aspect of it. On the AWS side of it, so when I joined the NCOA about a year and a half ago, we were in private cloud. And in that situation, we had a lot of single point of failures and disaster recovery was in bad shape. And so we realized that we needed to move into a new and more robust environment, one that would solve the single, all the risks that we had from disaster recovery, single point of failures, to also being able to innovate quickly and fast. And so we looked at, we started a migration process to the cloud and we ended up on AWS back in February of this year. We moved 95% of our assets to the cloud, to AWS cloud, and we mitigated the two major risks, the single point of failures, disaster recovery and so on. And with that, we also have a lot of other tools that are out of the box that we're using right now with the AWS platform. That's great. So I want to back up to the SMS comic because that's really interesting to me. So how do you find your customers? How do you, how do people get engaged? Obviously, ARP sends you the card in the mail. You know, there's a lot of organizations that we get involved with. How do you directly engage with your clients? So we do a lot of digital marketing, believe it or not. So we spend a lot of time, money and energy into digital marketing on Facebook. So a good number of older adults are on Facebook. There's also a good percentage of them that are on YouTube. Unfortunately, older adults spend about 46 hours watching either TV or videos on the web, those who have access to the web. So that's one way we're trying to reach them. So these are our sort of marketing funnels. In addition to that, we have about close to a hundred centers around the US where older adults can actually go in and be helped and go walk through the process of applying for federal, state and local government benefits. And so we have their called benefit centers. And so those centers are open to the public. We also try to, we collaborate with different, with different organizations around the country through whom we get older adults to engage with us and join the benefits checkup program. And with that, we ask people to opt in. So we take a very cautious and very respectful approach to data and privacy. So we ask people to opt in and we tell them about how we're using their data. We encrypt their data at rest. We take very good care of it. We don't share it outside of our organization. So we have our own internal data privacy principles. So we take this matter very seriously. Again, our objective is always to help older adults live a better, healthier and wealthier life. Right. I just love that the older people are now using Facebook and SMS like the kids did 15 years ago. They moved on to other platforms. But thank goodness for the old folks keeping Facebook and SMS up. So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about your transformation and your movement to the cloud. How big of an effort was that? How long did it take? And has it really opened up the innovation? Because there's clearly cost savings. And as you talked about, single point of failure and kind of mitigating the negatives. But as we've seen over and over again, really the benefits from cloud are really about innovation and delivering services faster. So how's your experience been so far? That's exactly right. So let me talk a little bit about our digital transformation. So about, I would say, over a year ago, we started our digital transformation initiative. It's really focused on our customers. We call it knowing our customers as individuals with individual needs. Traditionally, organizations like ours looked at older adults in the perspective of percentages, averages. On average, this is how old they are. On average, this is their income. On average, this is their health. But in reality, every older adult is an individual that has specific and individual needs. And we need to really take a look at that and cater to those very specific needs that they actually change over time. So our digital transformation, to really enable it, we needed to move to a cloud where we can have products immediately that we can spin off and use AI, machine learning products, and so on. And so I'm going to go back and talking more about our digital transformation and the perspectives of it. So our objective long term is to build what we're calling the aging well AI engine. It's basically imagine an older adult waking up in the morning and trying to decide what are the top best three things for me to do, top three actions for me to do to improve my life. And we want to help that older adult make those decisions easily and quickly through frictionless interactions, frictionless conversational AI, speaking to an Alexa-like voice enabled smart speaker, asking Alexa, what should I do today? Alexa would respond, the weather is nice out there, call your friend, go for a walk, call your doctor, get the lab results and so on. And check your benefits on benefits checkup and figure out and improve your life. So the idea is to really get the person to actively and actively using technology in simple frictionless way to be able to make those decisions that improve their lives. So for us to do this kind of work, to build the aging well AI engine, it is impossible without being on a cloud like AWS cloud. Right, interesting. So first time I've heard about Alexa since we've been here, a lot of talk about Alexa at the education conference a couple of weeks back. So is Alexa a pretty key piece of your strategy going forward? Do you really see voice as a different type of communication you mentioned SMS, which is kind of old but really effective? How do you see Alexa playing? So absolutely, so voice enabled communication channel. So we look at it as actually, we look at our communication with older adults, we look at it as an omnichannel communication. Every person have their own preference of the way they interact with technology. Some people prefer SMS, others like to speak to Alexa, others like to go through the web and so on. Some are on Facebook or on YouTube, et cetera. So each we have our own choices and that's exactly why we need to look at the older adults as individuals with their individual needs and then our job is to deliver those, to deliver our products through those different channels individually, so delivering the right product to the right customer at the right time and through the right channel. So Alexa is one of the channels. It is not the only channel or the voice channel I would call it, it's not the only channels. What we found out is that older adults find Alexa is very engaging, it reduces social isolation, it helps with the many other tasks especially for those who are visually impaired. The complexity, the challenge for older adults is setting it up. So that's where we're trying to look at ways of trying to package it or prepackage it so that it is possible for the older adult to plug it in and be able to use it. The other thing that we discovered we probably need to look at family caregivers as the customer segment or the customer target that we would work with to really enable Alexa. Interesting, it seems like a natural fit once you get kind of the tone and the comfort worked out and I would imagine you're writing all types of specific things for it to do and types of activities for Alexa to do for the specific needs of the solar generation. So yeah, so we started a very small proof of concept project with Alexa and trying to engage and experiment. For me, everything that we do has to bring in value and I need to also make sure that we are, when we deliver a product to our customers that product actually delivers that value and engages the customer. So we know that there is the value in there. We're also working with partners on delivering this force channel. So I know that we have as a nonprofit organization with our limited resources and so we look at partners as a way to enable those force channels on the different channels that we have. Well exciting times and I look forward to watching that innovation roll out at a high rate of speed. So thanks for taking a few minutes and safe travels home. Okay, thank you very much. All right, he's Said, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube Word AWS Imagine in Seattle. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.