 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 with the Salesforce Tower. We're on the 33rd floor with the grand opening of the Accenture Innovation Hub. It's five stories inside of the Salesforce Tower. It's pretty amazing. A couple of work floors and then kind of the labs and cool things. Tonight, they introduced the technology vision. We've been coming for a couple of years. Paul Dordian team introduced that later, but we're excited to have a couple of the core team from the Innovation Hub. And we're joined by Mary Hamilton. She's a managing director of Accenture Labs. Great to see you, Mary. Nice to see you too. And Teresa Tung, also managing director of Accenture Labs. Welcome. Thank you. So it's been quite a day starting with the ribbon cutting and the tours. This is quite a facility. So what does it mean having kind of this type of an asset at your disposal and your client engagements, training your old people. Pretty cool spot. Yeah, I think it's actually something that's, I mean, these Innovation Hubs are something that we're growing in the US and around the world. But I think here in San Francisco, we have a really unique space and really unique team and opportunity where we're actually bringing together all of our innovation capabilities. We have all of them centered here. And with the staircase that connects everyone, we can now serve clients by bringing the best of the best to put together the best solutions that have open innovation and research and co-creation and innovation all in one. Right, and you've had a soft opening how many months ago? So you've actually been running clients through here for a number of months, right? So we've been working here probably about six months in the work spaces. We've been bringing clients through, kind of breaking in the space. But just over the holidays, we opened sort of all the specialty spaces. So the e-glue, the immersive experience. We've got a make shop. And those all started to open up so our employees can take advantage and our clients can come in, yeah. So one of the things that comes up over and over, I think in every other interview that we've had today is the rock stars that are available here to help your clients. And Teresa, I got to brag on you. You're one of the rock stars. Also, we hear about as most patents of any services for most patents from this office of all the other offices in the center. And you're probably the person. So congratulations. Talk about, you know, your work. It's funny, it's some research. You have an interview from a long time ago. You didn't even think you wanted to get in tech. Now you're kicking out more patents at anybody a century, which has like 600,000 people. Pretty great accomplishment. No, I think it's a great story how a lot of people think about technology as a geek sort of thing. And they don't actually picture themselves in that role. But really, technology is about imagining the future and then being able to make it happen. You can imagine an idea and using cloud and AI, VR, it's also accessible today. You could buy a 3D printer and just print your own idea. And that's so much different than I think it was even 10, 20 years ago. And so when you think about tech, it's much more about making something happen instead of just, again, coding and math. Those are enablers, but that's not the outcome. Right, right. So what type of, is there specialty in terms of the type of patent work that you've done? I've done them all. So I started with cloud computing, doing a lot of APIs and AI. Most recently, doing a lot of work on robotics and that's the next generation. Right. So one of the cool things here, right, is software is obvious, right? You do software development, but there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of tangible stuff. You talk about robotics as a robotics lab, fancy 3D printing lab. There's like this, I don't know, the Maker Lab, I guess you'd call it. That's right. And so I don't know that most people would think of a center maybe as being so engaged in co-creation of physical things beyond kind of software innovation. So I've been going on for a long time that relatively new and how's it playing in the marketplace? Yeah, so there's a few things we've been doing. So some of it is the acquisitions we've made. So MindTri, Pillar, Matter, that really have that expertise in industrial design and physical products. So we're getting to that space. And then I'm also, as a researcher standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the area that you'd never think Accenture would play in around material science. So if you start to combine material science plus artificial intelligence, you start to have smart materials for smart products. And that's where we see the future going, is what are all the kinds of products and services that we might provide with new materials, right? And new ways to use those materials. Right. My original background, my degree is in material science. So I feel like I've kind of kind of full circle in exactly what Theresa is saying is, how can you design things and come up with new things? But now we're bringing it from a technology perspective. Gotta get that graphene water filtration system. Solve the water problem in California. That's another topic I want to say. But I think one of the cool things is really the integration of the physical and the software. I think it's a really kind of under reported impact of what we're seeing today are connected devices. Not that they're just connected to do things, but they phone home at the end of the day and really enable the people that develop their products to actually know how they're being used and to actually, and then the other thing I think is so powerful is you can get shared learning. I think that's one of the cool thing about autonomous cars and Waymo, right? If there's an accident, it's not just the people involved in the accident, the insurance adjuster that learned what not to do, but you can actually integrate that learning now into the broader system. Everyone learns from one incident and that is so, so different than what it was before. Yeah, I mean, it really points to a type of shared pursuits of larger business outcomes, right? So by yourself, a company might see their customer and impact their business and their product. But if you think about the outcome for the customer, it's around taking an ecosystem approach. It might be your car, your insurance company, you as an individual, and maybe you might be a hobbyist with the car, your mechanic. Like this ecosystem that I just described here, it's the same across all the different types of verticals. People need to come together to share data to pursue these bigger outcomes. Right, yeah, well I was just saying, and along those lines, if you're sharing data, those insights go across the ecosystem, but then they can get plugged back in to thinking about the design. We're looking at something called generative design, where if you have that data, you can start to actually give the designer new creative solutions that they may not have thought about. So you can kind of say, hey, based on these parameters of the data we've received back about this product, here are all the permutations of design that you might want to consider. And here's all the levers you can pull, and then the designer can go in and say, okay, this makes sense, this doesn't, but it gives them the set of here are all the options based on the data. And I think that's incredibly brilliant. It's kind of the human plus machine coming together to be more intelligent. So human plus machine, great segue, right? We just got out of the presentation, and one of the guys said, there's three shortages coming up, right? There's food, water, and people. And that the whole kind of automation and machines taking jobs is not the right conversation at all, that we desperately need machines and technology to take many of the tasks away, because there aren't enough people to do all the tasks that are required. I mean, think about it as a good thing. As a human, the human plus workers really enabling your job to be easier, more efficient, more effective, safer. So any task that's dull, dirty, dangerous, those are things that we don't want to do as humans. We shouldn't be doing those as humans. That's a great place for the robotics and the machine to really pair with us. Or AI, AI could do a lot of those jobs that scale that, again, as a human, we shouldn't be doing, it's boring. Now you have human plus machine, whether it's robotics or AI, to actually make the human a higher level worker. I love the 3Ds there. Gotta add the 4D drudgery. It's great, you know, talking about automation, right? It's like drudgery, nobody wants to do drudgery work. But unfortunately, we still do. I mean, I'm ready for some more automation in my daily task for sure. Okay, so before we wrap up, kind of what are you looking forward to? We got the ribbon cutting. Are there some things coming in the short term that people should know about that you're excited that you're either doing here or some of your kind of research directives? Now that we got the big five from Paul and team, what are you doing in the next little while you can share? Well, I'm excited to have clients coming in. So a lot of the innovations that we have, like quantum computing, this is a big bet for Accenture. At the moment, at the time we started quantum computing, our clients weren't begging for it yet. We made that market. We went out and took a bet. We saw how the technology was changing. We saw the investments in quantum. We made the relationships with OneCubit, with IBM. And through that, now we're able to find this client opportunity with Biogen. And that's the story that we published a drug discovery method that is actually much better than what happened before. Right, yeah, very. For me, it's about, it's also the clients. And it's thinking about it from a co-research and co-innovation standpoint. So how do we establish strategic multi-year, long-term relationships with our clients where we're doing joint research together and we're leveraging everything that's in this amazing center to bring the best and to kind of have this ongoing cycle of what's the next thing? How are we going to innovate together and how are we going to transform them? You know, talk about a product somebody from building physical products to building a set of services. Right, right. And I think that's just taking advantage of this to make that transformation with our clients is so exciting to me. Well, what a great space, what great energy and clearly you guys look like you're ready to go. There we are. So congrats again on the event. Thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing this terrific space with us. Thank you. Thank you. All right, she's Teresa, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from San Francisco, the Ascension Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.