 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision 2018 event at San Francisco Media Gallery, really loud. They got autonomous jazz players in the back. But we're excited to be here with Paul Doherty, the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Accenture. And he's running this whole thing. Paul, great to see you again. Yeah, great to be here. Great to have you here at this event. This is a big event for us to talk about what we see happening with technology and where it's all going and what it means for individuals and businesses. So it's going to be a fun night. So you did the survey last year. We were here, really cool event. You did it again in 2018. What are some of the highlights? What are some of the things that jumped out to you a year later? Yeah, you know, I think the highlight in the real core of the vision theme that we have this year is around the, what we call the Intelligent Enterprise Unleashed. You know, Intelligent Enterprise Unleashed. So what we're talking about is really a fundamental different role that companies need to play as they're thinking about the next evolution of the products and services they're offering to their customers. And one thing we talk about is the fact that technology isn't just a peripheral or something people use. Technology is core to the human experience and how you and I work and how we live our lives and how every person does. And what that means is that companies have to think differently about the way they engage with customers, the way they build their technology because the trust you build with the consumers and workers and others using technology is fundamental to getting the right to deliver these profound intrinsic services that people are demanding and that companies are providing. So it's a really pivot point, I think, in terms of thinking about how companies provide technology. It's really kind of interesting this bifurcation because on one hand you want software defined data automation as much as you can. On the other hand, people have an opportunity now through social media and all these channels to have a direct engagement with a company that they never had before. Combine that with the fact that most of your interaction most of the time is through some type of technology interface whether it's a mobile app or a chat bot or whatever. So it's kind of an interesting polarization of the way people engage with companies. Yeah, it really is. And if you think about it, you know, you look at it right now and the average kid spends about eight and a half hours in front of a screen. You know, they're immersed and engaged whether it's their phone or their TV, they're immersed with the screen. You and I, you know, you look at the average population, it would say that we touch our phones 2,000 or 2,600 times a day. 2,600? 2,600. Oh, that's scary. And the phones become part of our lives. The first thing people check when they wake up in the morning, probably for most people. And that's only with a device that's been around for 10 years. Think about what's going to happen as we have ubiquitous voice communication, natural language understanding, extended reality interfaces to connect people in more rich interfaces. And that's this next generation of experience that we're moving toward. Yeah, it's interesting you said extended reality, which is one of your five kind of topics for later this evening. It's funny because everyone's talked about augmented reality, mixed reality, artificial reality. And you've really kind of rolled it up into one that it's a new way to blend data and intelligence. You talk about space with the reality that we're in right now. Yeah, exactly. We came up with the term extended reality because we believe it's about extending the experience of the individual and, you know, providing access to virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, gesture-based interface, other types of technologies. And really the power of extended reality is it's the end of distance is what we call it, the end of distance. So it's the end of distance to people, the end of distance to information, the end of distance to experiences. You can access what you want and the experience you want when you want to use it. For example, Walmart for Black Friday last year used Oculus and mixed reality to give their store managers a simulation of what could happen on Black Friday so that they were better prepared to handle the high volume, the incidents that could happen, the unexpected circumstances, so it brought that experience right to them and that's that end of experience and end of access that we're moving into. Right. The other kind of interesting thing is this whole robot and autonomous vehicle thing. By Boston Dynamics. It's like a robot jazz player. I was going to say, you got a robot jazz player in the band is working with the other players in the band and it's this interesting thing. On one hand, people are afraid of robots. They're going to take my job. They're supposed to do the menial work. On the other hand, there aren't enough people to fill the open racks and really again, it's going to be the two working together that's going to get us to a one plus one makes three. Yeah, it's exactly our belief is that we believe that the future is really about human plus machine working together. We talk about this formula. Human plus machine equals superpowers. It provides people with superpowers so they can do different jobs and do jobs more effectively. That's your point. We don't have a jobs issue right now. We have roughly as many open jobs in the US as we have unemployed. The issue is matching the people with the right skills to fill those jobs. And one thing we haven't talked about enough is the power to use technology to amplify people's capabilities so that they can fill more of those jobs. We talked about in the vision and in the new book we're working on is the real power to provide people with those capabilities. Right. So you travel a lot. If you need some great travel advice, just watch Paul's Twitter feed. And I want to talk to you about Davos and the World Economic Forum. Right. And again, everything's kind of bifurcated. There's kind of doom and gloom about fake news and tech taking over and automated fake news and what's going to happen in the job thing. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of great positive opportunities. I wonder if you could share some of your thoughts and your insights that you brought back from Davos which is not a tech conference. It's a much bigger, higher level thinking about what's happening with this technological evolution. Yeah, but the takeaway from Davos is that there's tremendous power to use technology to address some of the fundamental issues that we have in society and in the world today. So a great example was what we just talked about with Human Plus Machine. We believe that rather than the fear of machines taking over the world and machines putting everybody out of work, we don't believe that's the future. There's tremendous opportunity and there's industries we don't yet know of that are being created right now that are creating new jobs in addition to real jobs that are being created today that we can point to. And the discussion in Davos is how do we use the power of the technology to both help the people who need access to new skills and technology and prepare people for those new jobs. We also talked a lot in Davos about how to use technology to solve some of the big problems we have in the world today. One of the really exciting discussions we had was on this idea of innovation with purpose, not just innovation, but innovating to solve a problem with purpose. And a great example of that was an announcement that Accenture made with Microsoft along with their organization called ID2020 to use blockchain technology powered by the cloud with artificial intelligence to provide identity and credentials to a billion people in the world that lack identity today. So it's refugees and others who don't have documented identity and can't access the services they need. And that's an example of a multi-stakeholder community coming together in Davos. Governments, tech companies, and NGOs working together to solve a real problem using innovative technology. That's what we call innovation with purpose. Yeah, still so much opportunity. There's still so many fundamental problems. The funny thing, the job thing, I saw some treat the other day, I said, go back to 1860, how many jobs do you think you're qualified to do back then? So the jobs change, right? The market changes. Yeah, and the real issue we do have to deal with because I don't want to sound like Pollyanna in this is that there are real issues we need to deal with in terms of jobs that will be eliminated more quickly than in previous technology revolutions because the pace of this is so fast. And it really comes down to us getting a grip around how do we prepare people with the right skills? And that's why one of the things we're very focused on in our tech vision and in the other work we're doing at Accenture is the idea of how do you prepare the future workforce? And we just put out a report on this recently as well. And one of the things we found is that over half of executives believe that they're, a lot of their employees lack the skills they need for the Arab AI that's coming over half of executives. Only 3% of executives are increasing their investment in training. And that's a problem. If you believe the workforce isn't prepared, there's an obligation to be getting invested to prepare the workforce. It's something we take very seriously at Accenture, investing a billion dollars a year in training to continually rotate our people to the next thing that's ahead. We think that that's the kind of mindset around responsible investment in technology and in people and the skills that gets us this human plus machine future. Beg's a much bigger conversation around just the structure of our education system which is so front loaded to the young age. And it's just really doesn't match kind of this continuous learning that people are going to have to do at a faster rate than ever before. I think that's exactly right. We need to create lifelong learning platforms for people in our society but also in the companies that we create and it's something we're very focused on. And we do have to do a lot with K through 12 education. We do have to do a lot with higher ed. We need to do a lot more with apprenticeships and other alternative routes into the workforce as well. And you put all that together and tie it to new learning platforms for mid-career professionals and that's I think what the future workforce and education, the future workforce looks like. Right Paul, you're the master of ceremonies. You got a big presentation to do and 200 some odd people here waiting for you. So I appreciate you taking a minute. But before I let you go, you got something new that's coming out in a month or so. We got to get it out here. Yeah, the very first copy. I don't know if they can see this. The very first copy. Hold this steady. They'll zoom in on it. This is the very first copy. All right, so this is your first book? It's not your first book. It is my first book. It is your first book. Congratulations. Jim Wilson and I partnered together on this, it's Jim's second book. And it's human plus machine reimagining work in the age of artificial intelligence. We're talking about, precisely about the issues we just talked about. It's a leader's guide to how you deploy AI in a responsible fashion to retool your workforce and equip them with superpowers and really reconfigure your enterprise for what's coming with artificial intelligence. Paul, it's always great to catch up. Always love to see you're at the cutting edge. You go to so many cool events, and this is one of them. So break a leg up there in an hour and we'll see you after it's over. Not literally, but okay. Thank you. Good to see you Jeff. A theatrical kind of way. All right. Paul Dory, I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.