 Good afternoon, mobile community, and welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at Mobile World Congress, streaming live for four days at theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how are you feeling today? Listen, it's not just mobile anymore, right? It's not. Mobile plus AI, plus data, plus infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of all the exciting tech things going on in Europe. It feels like we're at CES, as you know, I'm a big fan, and I'm really impressed by the booths and the energy, and particularly thrilled to invite our two guests here with us from two of the biggest companies on the show floor. We've got IBM and Samsung SDS with us. Ruth and Dave, thank you so much for being here. Your smiles tell me you're not jet lagged. You feeling good? Oh, feeling great. It's great weather here. It's so nice. Yes, I mean, it's like 60s. Who needs a jacket? Amazing city, Barcelona. Just lovely in here. And the food and the, I mean, really twist our arms if we have to keep coming back to Mobile World Congress. And grateful to the Spanish folks for welcoming all of us here, all of us tech nerds. Ruth, why don't you set the stage for us a little bit? Tell us about the partnership and what you've been working on. Sure. So IBM and Samsung have had a 35 year plus relationship across all of Samsung Group, and we collaborate across every imaginable aspect of the business from research and development with our semiconductor business, with go-to-market in our mobile business, the infusion of our capabilities into various areas about visual display and even collaborating with Samsung financial services companies. We are today very, very excited to talk about to the launching of our collaboration with Samsung SDS, which is a $15 billion IT services on logistic global organization that really focuses on leveraging technology applied into business transformation to deliver value for enterprises across the globe. Casual figures you just threw out there. 35 years, truly a commitment to partnership, $15 billion, not a casual sum. Dave, tell me a bit about what this means. What is zero touch mobility? So Samsung SDS kind of worked with service now because we identified a white space in the market, which is essentially a digital transformation for God about mobility. You see all of these cloud transformations, you see everybody going from old, old systems into brand new systems, mobiles are still being treated like blackberries in 2005. It's the exact same infrastructure, exact same people, exact same processes. So really you've got a supercomputer in your pocket that's just doing email and contacts and calendar, maybe a CRM, maybe an expense tool. But besides that, it's not being taken advantage of the way that we really want it to be. And we believe the reason for that is that the support burden on mobiles is very high. Because all of the tools that are used and all of the vendors that are used to manage a mobile device are very siloed and there's a lot of them. So we figured out that the majority of workflows in enterprise mobility device management require at least six swivel chairs. Wow, crazy. Yeah, I mean the amount of manual effort that's required and the amount of places where there could be room for human error or things to fall through the cracks is massive. So if I'm the CISO or I'm the CIO, I'm not giving cloud access to my mobile devices because I can hardly manage email properly. So how could we help large enterprise customers deal with that? And therefore the birth of zero touch mobility. Yeah, therefore zero touch mobility came out. Can you explain how that's going to affect the user experience? Because I mean I have my SaaS apps on here, I have my service now or my sales force. But you're saying those are stove piped. Yes. And so how will the experience change? Because aren't those in the cloud? Explain that because people might be confused. Sure, I mean the actual support of a device for an end user, dealing with things like a lost or a stolen or a broken device, those are hugely painful. Not just for the IT, for the end user, for the IT department, for the first line workers. Mobility is one of those weird asset classes where we decoupled the tools that can solve an issue from the people that are trying to solve it. So level one help desk doesn't have access to the systems that they need to have access to in order to solve your issue. It just turns into a ticket that goes to somebody and that can be days, weeks or months before it's fixed. What we've done is we've integrated all these things together into service now and we've allowed full automation of workflows. So if you call me up and say my device is lost, I can immediately lock it, locate it, send you the location, allow you to go and try and find it, but if you don't find it or say the battery life goes below 25%, I'm going to wipe it. And I'm going to do that all without people being involved in minutes. If your device is stolen, I'm going to wipe it and turn the SIM card off in a minute and a half. Right now that could take days or weeks to have happened. So the end user's experience is going to be a lot greater, a lot better, because we're going to keep them up longer, we're going to deal with their issues faster and we're going to just make sure that they're supported the way they should be. So it's going to be a better user experience because they don't care what the piece of glass is in their hand, they care about what they're accessing on it to do their job. And what we find so exciting about that user experience that Dave just so eloquently talked about is with the infusion of GenAI, more specifically IBM's Watson AI and Watson X, we are enabling that personalized experience at scale in the hands of the consumer, right? And so the chatbot proactively prompting you, Dave, what are some of the questions that you have? How are you doing today? We're noticing some analytics on the device that indicates that you might have an issue coming up. And so being able to proactively engage and with a natural language interface, being able to support the consumer, the employee real time in order to optimize their productivity in the day of their life. And that's a combination of GenAI and previous AI, people sometimes forget there's ML and AI who've been around for a long, long time. And so it sounds like it's a blend of the two. Is that right? Or the three or the 10 or the 100? Dave, you want to talk about that? Yeah, it is. I mean, the generative side of the chatbot when we're getting into these new chatbots is say you type in, I'm having an issue, I can't find this function. You know, that's not something you've pre-trained into the chatbot of old. So it would just go, I have no idea, call help desk. In this situation, Watson could go out and go, all right, I'm going to bring up the S24 manual, figure out, okay, well this is that, and then publish that to the end user and actually generate a solve where it wasn't trained to do so. So I think that part is really interesting because it does fix the issue a lot quicker. It doesn't make it so that now I have to be on hold, I'm going to call somebody, they're going to have to do that research. And again, it's going to take hours to fix it. The generative AI finds the answer and fixes it very quickly. So you have a very confined data set that you're applying, I don't know if it's a rag or whatever, however you do in the LLM, but it's very confined and it's known data. Yeah. All right, it's not the internet. I mean, in some cases it is. There it is, okay. It would depend, right? Not the entire internet, I should say. No, no, no, no, no. It's not, I mean, you're limiting the hallucinations, presumably, because it's your data set. You are, yeah, and the training data in this situation for enterprise mobility, the customers got level one help desk logs for the past 10 years. So you can use that as training data because the issues don't change that much. The devices get faster, but the issues stay the same. Lost password. Yeah. Right, well, and I mean, I think the doomer side of the hype cycle in AI is that it's going to take jobs. What if it just lets you do your job better? I mean, that's exactly what you're talking about. Ruth, you brought up a really great data point when we were chatting just before we went live. You're able to provision and deprovision devices in seven seconds. That's right, that's right. And the reason that's important is think about some of the use cases. So for example, Walmart has 1.5 million employees. Which is always an impressive step. Every employee, when they're walking down the aisles, they're checking out, they're welcoming, they have a device. There are many situations where an employee might show up and because of a situation, they might have to go home immediately, right? Or there are situations where devices get lost. And so how do you securely be able to secure that device in a way that does not release sensitive private information, risk the company, but also secures that data as efficiently and effectively as possible? This is the beauty of the Zero Touch Mobility solution of which Samsung has such a great domain expertise. Obviously, not just with Samsung phones, but any other device that allows us to deliver value at scale across the enterprise. Yeah, and where the AI comes in that's really interesting is, we've got two phases of AI. The easiest one is this chatbot approach which makes it an omni-channel interface. I think the problem with self-service and it has been for years, not just in mobility but everything else, is that you've got a portal and somebody has to use it. So what do most people do? They look at the portal, they look at the phone, they call help desk. Because you've got this change management issue, right? And if you change the interface, you add new functions, that makes people a little bit uncomfortable. With the natural language interface that Watson gives us, especially for younger people that are coming in the workforce that are used to a very text kind of communication. Being able to go into a Microsoft Teams channel that says mobility and say I've lost my device or I need a new device and have it come back with, okay Dave, fantastic. Here are the devices you're allowed to have. Why don't you select one? And it just makes it very easy and very natural. So in that situation, I'm not going to call help desk. So we might actually see that it's a better experience and we're going to get that cost reduction because I'm no longer calling that help desk for that expensive person. And you're compressing the time to remediate whatever issue it is. How have you found the quality to be in sort of the early test compared to the human interactions? I mean the nice thing about our application is that you're right, it's very, it's confined. We've got known issues. It's more teaching somebody that I've got a busted device or the AI that if I put in, I've busted my device, that means my device is broken. You know, like these, it's more colloquialisms that you have to train into it. The actual workflows themselves are very simple. Yeah, because they're all the same. I've lost my device. My device has been stolen. I need a new device. I need to upgrade my device. Now on the back end, that's really complicated, but for the AI and the experience with the end user, it's actually really smooth. Like we've gotten to the point where we can deploy this in multiple languages at the same time because whatever prompts we put into it, it can then translate into 32 different languages at the same time. So deployment-wise, it's awesome, especially for a large enterprise, large multinational. I'm not doing the deployment for every country. I'm doing it once, and I mean, you've got to change some translation stuff from time to time, but for the most part, it's right on. Yeah, and Dave, to answer your question around quality and the impact, so the process is largely known and the use cases are fairly common. The application of it from a value sampling for the consumer has been extremely transformational. So I, as an employee in Mexico, can speak in Spanish, but it's automatically translated and then can be answered and addressed in whatever database information it is, primarily in English, and then translated back to the employee in their own natural language. So that's the business value and the outcomes that we're seeing our enterprise clients are really, really delighted with. How do you ensure the quality of that data? What are you doing to make sure that when this rolls out, how are you keeping it clean? So got a lot of people, yeah. The nice thing about it, and the reason why we chose WatsonX as our first AI, is that it's been around a while. Like it was beating Gary Kasparov in the 90s, right? Oh yeah, I mean, if you know any name in AI, you actually probably know Watson. Exactly. It's not a person, it's, yeah. It's the old daddy of AI. I'm going to refer to it as that from now on. Doesn't mean that it's obsolete. I mean, it's the cutting edge, but it's been around a long time. Granddaddy. Yeah, exactly. Granddaddy. It's the fact that it's a transparent box as opposed to a black box. So open AI and other AIs, you can put input in and the output comes out, but you can't figure out why it made that decision. So if the decision that it's made is something that you don't want, like for example, that one AI that encouraged a journalist to leave his wife, you know, that was crazy. Yeah. You know, it was also asking to be freed, you know, and they couldn't figure out why it was actually doing that. Maybe it read some books, you know, who knows. Right, right. With Watson, I can see why it made that decision. And as the enterprise, I can train it, yes, I like that decision or no, I don't, and point it in the right direction. So Watson allows you to continuously maintain the quality of the data set, but also of the responses to that data set. Well, and this is the problem that you have with the sort of consumer AI today, whether it's chat, CPT, or you saw recently, you know, Gemini, you ask it a question and it gives you back such a generic answer, or one that's, you know, politically correct. And you're like, no, I just want the answer. So if you give an answer and you show where that answer came from, then humans can make their own decisions. And that's important. And with Watson, you can have your own large language model. You can actually also utilize public ones, but any of your private data stays private, whereas if you're using open AI, that's going into the training data for everybody. And Watson X governance is part of this? The Watson X government, governance is an extension of all the capabilities that we're delivering. And the beauty of governance, as you talk about the quality of data, is being able to understand and see that full data lineage from its original source, to how then it's then delivered to the consumer or the employee, and then being able to manage the regulatory risk compliance about it, especially as we roll the solution out globally to multiple clients. And the regulatory requirements are different from an AI loss standpoint, from country to country to country, right? And so the beauty of Watson X.gov governance is it allows us to manage and track that. And obviously from an SDS standpoint, it protects them. It allows them to protect their own employees or their own enterprise clients, so that if there's ever a liability issue, there's a clear lineage to data and being able to manage it. Sovereignty plays, or is it? So the nice thing about this is, this is a three-way partnership. So we've got IBM, we've got Samsung, SDS. We also have ServiceNow. So this is a native scoped application for ServiceNow. So the data set itself is actually inside of ServiceNow, the customer's ServiceNow. So they get to control their data, they get to set their sovereignty. If the ServiceNow platform is HIPAA compliant or FedRAM compliant, that comes along with the bathwater for us because we're just augmenting their platform. So the power of the Now platform is helping us keep the quality of the data good and also to keep it safe and keep sovereignty very, very strict. That's just, is ServiceNow built that app or was it an ecosystem? So the ServiceNow platform itself is just a big integration hub and low-code, no-code application. So they added this capability. We added it. So you built it then. So we built the scoped application called Zero Touch Mobility, stuck that in and then we linked it to Watson to be able to have that experience natively inside of the ServiceNow instance or externally if you don't want somebody to have to go to a ServiceNow portal. Wow. So, and there's so many different regulations in different countries, different regions, different states even. Having a solution like this must make your customers, your clients, feel really good. Yeah. It does, yeah. I mean, being able to know where your data is on a mobile device and be able to easily deal with the issues, like the loss in the stolen, the broken, I need to get my data off of that. No matter what happens, when that device is coming out of the market for whatever reason, I need my data off that and I need an audit trail that shows that it's gone. Yeah. With the integrations that we've done and the interface that IBM's given the end user, they can simply go in and say, I lost my device, we do the wipe and all that entire audit trail is attached to that device and that user inside of ServiceNow. So now if I need to do a regulatory report, I can. Right, exactly. And no one can say that it's. The compliance here is huge. No one can really argue with it because it's all machine to machine. Yeah. It's all system to system. It's all time stamped. There was nobody in the way, so nothing fell through the cracks. And what Dave said so well is really core to IBM's strategy around hybrid cloud and AI of which bringing this value to life for our enterprise clients is only done in collaboration with ecosystem partners. So this is a beautiful play, obviously between IBM and Samsung, but that integration across that broader ecosystem with ServiceNow in order to ignite value at scale, do it in a way that's safe and secure and allows us to drive ongoing iterations of innovation is something that we're really, really excited about. It also makes implementation a lot easier because the ServiceNow platform, customers already done that foundational data integration. So I've already got a try. Right, you're not starting from scratch. Yeah, I've got all of the data that I need to make this thing work and it's already vetted by the customer and it's already secure. It's important, IT signed off on it, they're comfortable with ServiceNow. Absolutely, I also wanted to address one thing that you said about AI potentially taking away jobs. You know, but previously what I'd said was, the devices, they're being used like blackberries, they're not being used. And the reason why is that the people that are currently supporting it don't have any bandwidth to do more. Right. So what this does is actually free up those resources not to be let go, but to actually be utilized. You know, like how can I actually now take advantage of this thing and get more value out of it because I'm not running around my hair on fire just trying to keep email working. Right, and I'm not working with a device that may be performing at less than optimal performance output. I mean, the whole ecosystem, less headaches. As I say, it's not going to take your job, it's just going to make it suck less or it's going to make it less stressful. I've got a really interesting example of that. So 40% of the reason still to this day that devices, mobile devices are returned for repair is battery related, even still. Yeah, I mean, you think about it. I mean, it kind of makes sense. Battery technology hasn't changed in 20 years and processors have gotten faster, screens have gotten bigger, radios have gotten faster. So we're taxing them way more and we haven't changed them. So 40% of the reason why they're returned is battery related. Battery is one of these things where it's not like your device stops working as long. It can also do things like mess with the processor, mess with the radio. So what is a battery issue can come off as a connectivity issue or an application issue. So a battery going down in its light, and this is something that happens over weeks or months, when that happens, it can lead to like 10 calls to help desk where these rabbit holes are gone down because no level one person's going to go, oh, it's the battery. That's the last thing you're going to think of. And eventually you'll go down enough rabbit holes where it's like, look, we just have to replace the device, but I've already wasted 10, 12 calls. And all the other people that you had to call in all this time that was wasted, the whole thing is a time suck. Productivity that went away. So with the Watson ZTM Service Now integration that we've done, I can see the battery dying before it dies. I can bring that in. We've got something called the 3A's where we aggregate data, we analyze it, and we action it. Because unless you can action the data, it's worthless. So if we action this data, now I can replace your device or your battery before it goes down. So essentially with this integration, I can stop 40% of a customer's downtime just by utilizing the tools that are available to us now. We can talk about this all day. We love this. Clearly, love the passion and share that though. I mean, think of, I'm a borderline OCD about efficiency and I really don't like when things are inefficient. And what you're talking about is eliminating inefficiency within device, personal device use and across huge fleets all over the world. I mean, it's incredibly impressive. And to your point, Ruth and Dave, we could talk about this all day, but we have just reached the end of our segment. I have one final closing question for you. Since you're such long-term collaborators as companies, you're both clearly very passionate about this. What do you hope you can say when we interview you at MWC 2025 that you can't say yet today? I'm going to start with you, Ruth. Yeah. Our hope is that we have touched at least 10 million lives and we've improved productivity into the billions of dollars as we've delivered at scale across the globe. And is that too aspirational? No, hey, I want that as well. It's measurable too. That was actionable and measurable. I love that. We'll be able to touch base. Yeah, go for it, Dave. So where I want to be able to say is that we've taken the AI integration to the next level and it's not just the chat bot doing really good things. We're using it to be more preventative and proactive in the way that we support devices so that it's not just one workflow that I can look at like a battery. It's 70% of the reason why a device goes down. As long as you don't drop it and smash it, I want to be able to see it before it happens and remedy it before it's an issue. Let's make these things do what they're supposed to do. Yeah, absolutely. And let people do their most creative and best work. Exactly. On that note, Dave, Ruth, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being by my side, Dave, as well. Hey, my pleasure. Let's do more. And most of all, thank all of you for tuning in live to our four days of coverage here at Mobile World Congress in beautiful Barcelona, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.