 To make the best use of our time, I will not introduce all of you, I will introduce you in the first question, okay? But we have seven people from seven different companies that will help us to understand how can technology help business to take advantage in these difficult times that we are living. Let me begin with Laura de Marcos, who works for Fujitsu. It's quite obvious that we are living very difficult times. We are living thought times that even sometimes difficult to understand the things we are doing, we are living, we are participating in. Laura, from Fujitsu, from your thought, what's your opinion on how can technology help us in managing this complexity, managing this changing environment that we are living in? Laura, I think you should open the microphone. No, my wonderful production team is telling me that there's some problem with the microphone. Now it's working. Let's go Laura. No, we don't hear you. We'll go back to you because there's some problem with the sound. I'll ask a quite similar question to Jim Weber. He works for Neo4j. I don't know if I pronounce the name of your company quite well. Hi, Jim, how are you doing? Hello, I mean, I guess in... At least your microphone is open, so we'll grab you in a while. You do hear me? Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Jim, could you explain us how in your opinion is technology helping us? Is technology helping us, helping our companies, helping our business, helping our economy to manage this complex environment we are living in? I would say that we have, in one case, perfected video conferencing, but it's clear that with Laura's situation, technology is failing us terribly in being able to even communicate over these difficulties. Definitely, definitely. So I think there's, in my mind, over the last year or so in this kind of terrible year that we've had, I've seen kind of two emergent streams. One, represented by the likes of Google and the big web companies who have been able to capitalize on existing incredible investments in technology and incredible technology leadership positions to consolidate their own businesses. We've seen the likes of Amazon and Google and so on just absolutely cruising through this last year as if it's not happening. Despite the fact, they themselves would no doubt have had tremendous business disruption. They just seem to sail through it. And then we have the rest of the kind of normal businesses. What I see there is a kind of huge dash for digital. In those businesses that are regular brick and mortar retailers with web presence and so on, those healthcare systems that are trying to keep us safe through this pandemic, they've had this huge dash for digital where they're trying to kind of mimic some of the practices that the large web properties have done, both in terms of data and what they're using their data for so that they can perhaps become more robust in the face of these very unprecedented challenging circumstances. So those are the kind of streams that I see in the larger companies. For smaller companies like me, I work for Neo4j or Neo4jata, as we seem to be known in Spain. As a small company, a small technology company, we've seen our fortunes fare reasonably well, but mostly propelled, I think, by this dash for digital. As businesses have had to upscale because of the pandemic and related economic consequences, we see people look for innovative digital tools to bring to bear quickly so they can try and shore up their defences against rather a hostile business environment. I don't know if, Alicia, I called you louder, so maybe this is the problem that the microphone didn't work because I didn't use your name properly. Alicia, how are you doing? Is your microphone working now? You're telling me. Now we can hear you. Perfect. Thank you. Alicia, in your... Yeah, maybe that was the problem. My name is Alivia. Yeah, for sure. Too many guests. And of course, my memory is not that good any longer, but I'll do my best. So sorry, Alicia. Alicia, tell us, in your opinion, in Fujitsu's opinion, how can technology help us, help our business, help companies to manage this complexity or these, let's say, strange times we are living in? Oh well, certainly everyone knows that the economy is becoming more digital and eventually people needed to work in different ways and consumers were going to buy in different ways. But the problem is that suddenly we have this window where just happening everything very quickly and it's more apparent and still unclear how much things are going to return to the way they are or have that and pivot to something new. Most of the industries were digitizing products before the pandemic, digitizing written material, documentation, music, videos, but most of the digital people were kind of in marketing, right? The core operation weren't really being touched. There was no digital adoption within the core operations and we think that coronavirus crisis is just accelerating this, the core operation digital transformation. The digital moving into business models. So what we got now is digital-enabled businesses that are doing things and performing better, less expensively and faster. And we also see now how as digital moves into business models, you got the C-level attention. So in my opinion, in Fujitsu's opinion, when you think about what life is going to be after the coronavirus, I don't think we are going back. Digital is certainly not going to be in retreat and we are not going to do things like the old way, analog way. Having said that, contrary to popular belief, digital transformation, we believe it's less about technology and more about people. So in our opinion, companies will not confront technologies problems but a growing talent problem, one that has the potential to become a static bottleneck in this horizon you ask us about. So I think we all agree that this analogic bias has accelerated this digital transformation of our companies of course, but of our lives too. I'd like to ask José Ruiz from Paradigma, your opinion on this. Paradigma has been working in data, has been working in digital transformation, but from this more data approach, I'd like to know your opinion. How the tools you have been using in the last years can help companies to understand things that are going on in this complex environment? Okay, so thank you Jaime. So here at Paradigma for 15 years we have helped those clients that are many of the most important companies here in Spain to be able to compete in a whole new world, in a world with digital giants in a very short time have aggressively competed with every company in every kind of sector. So for us, taking advantage of technology is nothing new, it's a matter of survival for our clients and this was true even before the pandemic, but this is even more of use now. So we plan on keeping helping our clients to boost their digital transformation plans and we want also to help them be more agile in their decision-making processes because they can no longer rely on past experiences because the global context is changing very rapidly and they have to be very quick testing new ideas, new products, shifting tactics according to results because the world is different. And we are also very excited in fact about the dramatic push that this crisis has done over the possibility to work in remote, that is something that has already commented. Right now it's no longer a possibility, it's a fact and in Paradigma we have been pushing remote work for years but to be honest it was not easy to have this accepted by our clients and these months we have been able to prove to them that we can work as effectively in full remote model as in person. So this opens the doors in order to bring to our teams the best professionals not only Madrid but in Spain and even in the world and it also helps our clients, those who are not physically in here. So we are so excited about how good this is going that we feel sure that the on-premise work will be something that will be a thing of the past even after the pandemic and this is a great thing for us and for our clients. So this for example is a great example of a crisis turning to an opportunity for our clients. I think it's clear that technology is playing a role in this crisis in this moment where we are living but I think it's interesting time to understand the role it will play in this new normal, in this perhaps better normal that we want to build. Ignacio Cabrera works in IBM, I would like to know in your opinion, Ignacio which is the role that the technology will play not only now but in this new normal, better normal, this future after coronavirus. What do you think, which is a role that tech is playing in this after virus work? Well, we are speaking about now one thing important to say. I think we have a problem with your microphone. It's open now so I will try to... Yeah, it's perfect now. Okay, perfect. So if we are speaking about now one thing important to say is that customers need value from the technology they have today and it's important for IBM to provide this value in this environment of multi-cloud, multi-provider, even hybrid cloud if we consider private clouds that are in place in customer nowadays. So IBM strategy around hybrid cloud and providing our data and AI capabilities anywhere is key to help customers obtain value from the technology ecosystem as is without asking them to change everything overnight. Having said that, it's important to say also that the digital transformation journey my peers said the same, it has been advancing for certain years now and this crisis has just dramatically accelerated it. Companies advanced in their digitalization and automation of processes and customer engagement already had an advantage over companies still not in this journey. So this advantage has increased during this context but once the situation returns back to normal the differentiation provided from the digital transformation will remain. There's no coming back once you successfully modernize your company because this will be one of the key competitive advantages you will have. Ignacio, Guy, how are you doing? Guy Cologne is the CTO of Incubation in Red Labs. How are you doing, Guy? Do you have the microphone open? Could you open it? Yeah. I hope it. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to hit you now. We're going to hit you now. It's amazing because the farther you are the better sound you have. So it's an amazing thing in this tech world that we are living. Guy, quite similar the question in your opinion and how do you see this role that technology will play not only in managing this complexity now but in building this new future, this new normal, this after virus world that we want to make. In your opinion, how is technology evolving with this situation we are living from these given answers to the crisis to these new opportunities after the virus? So what we see is that the process will just enhance. People expect it to happen in the corona time, right? But we see that even after the corona time it will just enhance itself. There's no turning back. The digital transformation is there and the eye is all over and everyone are now expecting to get better experience, personalized experience, instance experience. Everything has to be faster and instant. Like we see it in BI, right? People used to get in their business because they were used to run it locally or they used to manage it by their own. I don't know, nightly processes. And now they're expecting to get inputs or predictions in a minute. They click a button, they want to see what happens. They want to predict. Even in the most obvious place that is related to corona, right? The hospitals. Despite the fact that everyone were talking about healthcare before, once the corona hit these hospitals, everything enhanced. And now they expect to get these numbers, which they used to get like in days or even in months, they expect to get them in real time. Everything became more instant. And with that, the only way they can achieve it is by moving most of their business to the cloud, even traditional markets like banking or security. You see that they're moving to the cloud and trying to reduce their latency and giving more instance experience to everything. So we expect it to just continue. There is no turning back. Nobody will go back to something slower. Nobody will accept anymore waiting for hours for results. They all expect to get everything now in real time, as they used to get in this strange timing of corona when they're doing everything from home. But because they are doing everything from home, they had to get everything digitally and everything had to be renewed. So everything like enhanced and they all experienced change and they would expect to get it from now on into the future. Thank you. Pablo Carlier works in Google. Google has been present in the first presentation because Paco Nassan talked about Google. Jim, in the introduction five minutes ago, talked about Google. So everybody's talking about Google. Now it's time for Google to talk. So share with us your vision, not only in the answer that the knowledge is given now, but in this vision of how it could be the wall after this situation we are going through. I think your sound is working. Pablo, we don't have the sound. Your microphone is open because we can't hear you. Okay, okay, okay. The production team is telling that, okay, we'll be back, we'll be back to the connection. Real-time stuff, real-time stuff. So let's go to our last guest, but last but not least, from De Nodo, Jaume Brunet. Jaume, how are you doing? Fine, thanks. I hope that you can hear me. Yes, your sound is very, very good. Where are you? Are you here in Madrid or...? No, I'm in the Costa Brava. I'm in front of the sea in Planets. Much, much better, much better because De Nodo is a company from Galicia. I love Galicia. Yes. So it's a wonderful place. But you are Galicia's great. Costa Brava is not bad. So you are in an amazing place. So tell us from there in Costa Brava some specific samples, how De Nodo, how your company, how you are working with customers in these terrific times to take advantage, to make value with technology. From the procedural point of view, I have to agree with some of my colleagues previously has shared with us. But just commenting a point that I think that it is interesting. Most of the tools that we have already been using during this pandemic with this remote place of work and this remote connection to the sites to develop our job, most of the tools we are already using with customers already exist before the pandemic. It is just a point of decision and go ahead and turn the need into something that we can use. So we decided to use it because we have no option. But most of the tools we already have. So having said that, what is important is to put on the hands of our customers the technology enough to develop what they need to do. For example, in De Nodo, what we have been done from the sales perspective is executing like my colleague from Paradigma has just commented everything in remote and we are able to do it with the tools we already use. From the approach in the commercial side, let me say from De Nodo, what we agree with most of the customers is just to reduce the impact they have been suffering from the pandemic. De Nodo provides our customers about agility and this is one of the most needed features. So the possibility to go multi-cloud and to connect multi-cloud accessing a single point or the possibility to create a feature store in a virtual way, connecting several data repositories to execute artificial intelligence algorithms or deep landing harmonies or any other kind of analytics. So what we try to provide to our customers is just focusing on what we need and trying to help the companies to execute in a proper way. Most of the tools we already have been using are already in our hands and we just need the force and the opportunity and the project to execute. So this is what we have been doing in the last eight months of the pandemic. I think Pablo's sound is now a little bit better. Pablo, can you pick up? Hopefully. Okay. Is it okay now? That's great, that's great. So you're done. From the Google perspective, from your perspective, how is technology helping to respond and how will help to build the next? So I've heard many messages from Alithia, from Jose, from Jalma that actually resonate very much to what we're experiencing at Google right now because it's a very, very weird environment. Everyone is pivoting into uncharted territory with this crisis. No one is prepared for this world and user priorities have been shifting for the past months and the last year's playbook is no longer good. So every organization is trying to reshape their strategy as we go. Now, the ability to scale up or down some investments to realign the resources that everyone has in their organizations to understand what are the new needs of their users or customers. They're gonna be super important and that's where we believe that's where the critical role of technology lies in understanding that context of what the end user needs, what our processes need, how can we rebalance the priorities of what we had learned for the past 20 years and now we need to shift in 20 weeks into a new world. How can we bring here some new superpowers that can allow these organizations to align to this new reality and we believe that technology has a way more helpful through data. So in a way there's the ability to provide intelligence from data that's gonna be very helpful to create these new experiences that's gonna help these companies remain relevant for their users. Alitha said it very well, like digital marketing has been leading this technology transition, but what about IT? What about OT? We think that through more useful and assistive technology, both for the internal users and companies and also for their users, for their front-end and for their back-office, we think that we are gonna be able to provide these new experiences that are gonna help these customers. Now, these technologies need to minimize overhead. They need to maximize the resources that we have. They need to help us do more with less and also do more with less from home, which is actually like a triple challenge, right? We are serving like 30 times more video than we were used to in video conferences in January. We have over 3 billion minutes of video conferences every day serving from Google right now. So we know that traditional customer experience channels are under very much stress. There are solutions that can help companies right now understand their context of their users, understand how to map that with their internal processes and how they used to work and provide a better way of engaging with customers with city sense in the case of administrations, with their end users and with other companies as a partner to create these new solutions, these new technologies and also these new business processes and models that probably we have not discovered yet, but what we will be discovering in the near future, how to manage with this new situation. The key is to provide the organizations with the right age to take decisions quickly and to orient those resources to be able to be first in market. So thanks. You were commenting. So the user behavior has changed dramatically. You are having much more videos than ever. I think most of the companies are feeling these changes. But the thing is that companies that were prepared that have invested in technology are now much more in front of the rest. So the return on investment of the technology has been like enormous. In Ezio, from your experience in IBM do you think the users, the companies have this feeling that this moment has given reason to those companies that had invested previously in technology? Is this a change in mindset that gives the reason to these people that invested in the right moment? As I mentioned in my question, I think digital transformation is a no. So this provides a clear advantage in terms of normality, but the advantages turn dramatic in a crisis context to the extra constraint on resources and the spatial limitation in our customer interactions. All companies already prepared to establish a digital rich relation with their customers and with internal clear and digital processes have a huge advantage over companies that are forced to run that transformation within weeks in a context of crisis. Those companies being betting for digital transformation and technology in the past have at the same time been involved in a cultural change. More flexible organizations, with different and rich skill sets, information shared across the whole company, the cultural changes in companies are slow, so all organizations with this new culture already established will surely adapt much better to any changes. Also, these companies have not only invested in technology, AI analytics, but also in new skills which was mentioned before. Now those skills are more needed than ever and will be more difficult to get with the increased demand over them. But the skills will need a technology base to get the most of their value which is what we are aiming to provide in IBM. An important message for all of you, please open your microphones. The production team will close it if necessary, but keep your microphones open. I'm watching, there's like two of you that have closed the microphone. I'll go back to Paradigma because you have been explaining as previously, your experience, the company has been for more than 10 years working with customers. Do you think that these customers have this feeling that the investment they made in technology have prepared better for this situation we are living in? Do you think that this will change the mindset that will be easier investing in technology convicing the business people, the financial people that investing in technology has a return? I'm sure, I'm sure. I think most of the companies that didn't believe in technology have had a reality shock. I think it's pretty obvious that COVID has hit hardest the companies that rely on pure physical business models. We see, for example, in the textile industry sector how companies like Primark with no e-commerce, no investment almost in technology are struggling whereas others like Inditex in the same sector are writing the way much better. Of course, they have an impact but they are better prepared. Why? Because technology helps companies in this crisis context a lot in multiple ways. The main one, of course, is the ability to shift from physical business to digital business with everything that that implies, which is not only the ability to sale, to reach the end customer, but also to move all back office processes that are really the base of the iceberg that also need to be efficiently run from a digital context. We are not talking only about physical things but about time things. This is something that was discussed before. Processes that can afford to take weeks before being digital have now to be run in seconds or minutes. This is one of the most important challenges that we are seeing. Also, technology helps them to run their companies with a full remote model. This is something that has also been discussed and is very, very helpful in this situation. It also helps them to make good decisions because COVID has brought uncertainty. There are a lot of things that cannot be run as they were before because the supply chain has changed, the workforce has changed, the economic situation has changed. We do not rely anymore in empiric models but in data, in artificial intelligence. That shift to AI in day-to-day management and operation decision-making will have a competitive edge against that who don't. In summary, I think that one of the effects of the current crisis is that most companies are learning fast that technology and digital transformation are key for their survival. Many of them are dramatically accelerating these digital transformation plans. The challenge is how to accelerate fast but without having an accident. This is a big challenge because most of them start from a pretty hard scenario from an operational status in which the ecosystem is so heavy that changing it from one day to another is impossible even from one year to another. We will talk next Wednesday about real-time digital platforms and how we can address this challenge which is used. I think this is an interesting message that we are going faster than ever and we need to learn how to deal with this velocity that many times is not that easy. Alicia, going back to you, because you were introducing the role that technology was playing previously. You were talking about digitalization, about digital transformation about people and about culture but I'd like to know how this culture should change for this neuromality because probably digital transformation will not ever be the same thing. Now it's a different thing. Which is the role that you think that digital transformation, that technology will play in this new world we are trying to build? Well, it's more or less what I told you before. It's not just about technology it's also about talent and what is true is the industry that have invested the most in this digitization are not only the ones that are very facing this crisis but also the ones that are more the ones that more strain will emerge from this crisis. We are sure that many sectors will be transferred but others will disappear and technology and talent will play a principal role in every industry that survived. What do we have to do to ensure that we exist tomorrow is a fundamental question that is bringing the issue of operation and transformation to the top of the world's agenda of every company of all sizes and sectors and in my opinion the acceleration of the cooperation and the transformation is being the common effect in all industries and regions. The event is focused The event is focused in digital betting artificial intelligence I'd like to know I'd like to focus this last part of the panel in this kind of technologies in this kind of projects, in this kind of initiatives So Pablo, could you share with us some specific projects, some specific things that are going on in this artificial intelligence arena that makes sense in this environment we are living Sure, sure I was talking before about the fact that we think that this transition to technology must be more assistive and for that we think that the role that data analysis especially AI is going to play is going to be very, very important because it's going to first enable companies to simplify that data and extract insights from it and empower data scientists to do more with less but also better serve traditional users from the companies that are not necessarily specialists but for example we were talking about how the interaction with users is changing now contact center assistive technologies are going to transform the way that we engage with the companies we work with or the companies that serve us every day that's going to transform the interfaces that we use for this only canality that we are having the approach to customer care and chatbots and artificial intelligence are powering these interactions more and more and second, some of these digital processes that some industries are having to rush through right now are going to be assisted by things like document understanding and document AI we are building very much vertical tailored solutions to healthcare to banking, FSI to understand how to accelerate those processes internally by understanding documents extracting information from that corpus of that domain knowledge for those verticals and now applying it to simple to use tools that can be leveraged as other people have said with the technology you have right now but plugging in these new capabilities to that technology to enhance the way you're working and now there are some other technologies that are related to AI like AutoML for example that will allow non-technical users to amplify what they are building inside their organizations with machine learning and this is the ability to create models out of the blue with a couple clicks if you have the data that's relevant to your problem to your domain and you need machine learning to help you do better decision making technologies like AutoML powered with specific technology like our tensor processing units which is specialized circuits designed to make it cheaper and faster to run these models can basically allow you to take your data click two or three times and then get a model trained on your data leveraging the bleeding edge technology from a company like Google on solving your problem this is going to democratize tremendously the access to these tools and as Celica was saying this is exactly what we're needing because we need to transform the culture of organizations and this new reality and new normality is going to demand autonomous decision making from every unit in the companies now those more familiar with their domain and with their problems will now have autonomy to use technology applied to their data and their problem and be faster to market with solutions that will help them align better their strategy to the challenges they're facing right now Celica, thank you Jim, now for you you are working in several aspects too could you share with us some of these specific cases Celica, I'm thrilled by the idea of graphs and machine learning if I look at the stuff the kind of leading edge stuff as of Google for example a really good example the kind of merge of graphs and learning I think is technically very very interesting not just the kind of neural network stuff but things like graph embeddings to create rich models that you're going to feed into the tensor processing pipeline and so on and actually at some level I'm really confident that the technology companies can do amazing things with data, with hardware and with clever software what I'm more interested in and perhaps slightly concerned about is that it feels like AI is a gold rush moment but a whole bunch of people piling into this field who are perhaps new to the field and they are enabled, democratization was the word we used, we're able to get our hands on some very sophisticated technology without really understanding it now the IBM intro we saw talked a little bit about provenance knowing why a model has made a particular decision but that's often a very far cry from the user experience knowing why my welfare payments have been stopped as a poor user phoning a call center knowing why a diagnosis has been changed because some model created some function that doesn't fit me all of these things are actually bigger challenges I think to get AI accepted by the vast majority of the population I think this community, the people listening, the people on the panel we're actually quite a small bubble of people who slightly understand the technology understand its benefits and its limitations I think there's a real danger that we'll be in a kind of wild west of data and algorithms whereby we deploy this stuff and it causes active harm because it's immature when it's deployed to end users so I think I'd like to see the phenomenal outpouring of good technology that's happening but I'd also quite like to see that tempered with some ethics and some understanding so that we know that this stuff is being used for the public good and it isn't for example being used for nefarious purposes and indeed being used accidentally for malignant purposes I think that's a greater challenge for us because as technologists we can see the potential in being able to do this kind of processing but I think sometimes we need to stop and think how do we do this without harm and perhaps like the medics have we need some kind of guiding principle to help us decide that we'll talk a lot tomorrow about ethics we have a panel about ethics tomorrow that before we continue with the bubble that Jim was telling a guy in your experience in red slabs talk share with us tell us this is specific cases this is specific customer stories you are working in using artificial intelligence for giving business answers to this situation we are living as mentioned before AI is all over everyone wants to deploy AI now everyone wants to incorporate AI in their solutions and I think what this pandemic brought to the table or forced everyone to do at least is to move online and the first industry that had to completely move online was the e-commerce it was already there but we still saw a lot of brick and mortar store and many even big chains tried to avoid it or put it as a side business but now that everyone are moving online and that's becoming their main business so they need to provide similar experience or good experience as they used to provide like personalized experience as they used to provide in their physical store so obviously you see personalization everyone wants to do personalization they want to do recommendation they want to try to make their online experience more personalized and give better adopted experience something that maybe only the big e-commerce used to do before like Amazon or Alibaba and now everyone need to do it even the small one so they need as Google mentioned you need to democratize it so everyone need to be able to do it everyone need to be able to incorporate personalized experience but once you are doing online and most of your business is online so most of your customer service is now online so you need again to provide top notch customer service with chatbot and stuff like that so again you need to incorporate AI it needs to be an instance experience you need to be top level you cannot provide something that is not at the level that the big guys are providing and last once even if you are a single store online you need to provide an efficient business otherwise this all move this all digital experience the digital transformation will not be efficient for you you will lose money and you see many business that being forced to quickly move online are losing money so they need to improve their business need to improve their logistics and without incorporating AI and BI and predictability to their logistics they are not going to make money so I guess this is the the most common use case that we see today so thank you we will finish in Costa Brava because I can't find any better place to finish show Yama tell us your experience in Enodo with a specific example the things you are working with your customers for giving business answers to this situation first a bit comment about why my colleagues has appointed from Google to the rest of the panelist artificial intelligence or deep learning is all about data there are nothing to do without data so what we have to provide is to the ones that are able to deploy those algorithms, those training models or capabilities to deploy these technologies is the proper access to data we cannot lose let me say 50% of our time preparing the data instead of working on the proper algorithms to develop the artificial intelligence or deep learning or any technology on top of these data so that axis is what Enodo provides so here is when we can provide a simple access to several different spread platforms, considering all the data in a single point and simplifying the access and the usage for the algorithms regarding our projects and also related to an example similar like this one from a customer that was using initially Enodo just to join several sources in a single access at the beginning of the pandemic this project was executing in a normal way and the customer decides because the pandemic to stop it after a couple of weeks reshaping the situation what they decide to do is thanks to the virtualization layer move instead of a single repository several ones unified by the the data access layer that brings to this company a huge amount of savings in money because they reduce the instant data capability that they have built in turn in a big data warehouse and then increase via cloud movement a more reliable maybe not as fast as responsive for the sum of the data but as they are working in a different situation and they are working with limited resources they were able to deploy a different strategy without impacting their user so at the end this is all related to agility so the possibility from the data consumption perspective to have the ability to deploy in different physical scenarios in a multi-cloud environment maybe and to be able to resize according to a big changes on the business as we received in this in this pandemic so thank you Yama thank you the 7 our 7 guests for being here and quite complicated times and a quite complicated panel because there's a lot of people in many different places so thank you all