 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Gene Resnick, the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Gene. My pleasure, Rebecca. So Accenture is calling this period of time that we are all living through, a period of epic disruption. Define what that means for us. Sure, sure. So, well, I think we're living in a very disruptive age right now, but again, I think we believe over the next 10 years it's going to become even more epic. And I think what's driving that, some things are geopolitical in nature, right? You know, sort of, you know, everything between US and China relations, what's happening in Europe, all of that. Of course, there's technological dynamics around artificial intelligence. Of course, there's data, there's privacy, there's security, and all that really compounding on each other. We believe it's creating an environment where it's just going to be very challenging for people, but also for companies to navigate. And I think leadership and big organizations and their teams have to be very thoughtful on how they navigate this time. And I think there's going to be some big winners and I think there's going to be some big losers. And I think we see companies today that have been around for hundreds of years challenged to really adapt, adjust, and transform, to really be prepared for this next wave of change. So as you said, it's a very restive time, politically, technologically, business-wise. How are companies approaching this? I mean, as you said, you have to be very thoughtful. You have to have a real strategy in terms of how you're going to approach this and approach innovation. What, how would you say companies are, do give them a report card right now in terms of how industry is responding? Yeah, well I think the first thing we would sort of say, and we've done quite a bit of analysis and study on this through Accenture Research. And as you'd expect, different industries are under different amounts of pressure and disruption. Some, like music, the industry, and book publishing and currently retail are under tremendous pressure. And many have not responded well, they were too slow, they saw the digital natives just really take away their businesses. Others are better protected. So we really have gone through and analyzed industry by industry, how they are prepared for today and really what they need to do going forward. And I guess our assessment is it's very, very difficult as you would expect to take a big organization and transform it. And the issue is again, while a lot of it is technology, the people side, the culture side, the organizational side, the incumbency dimension, the shareholders, all those things that make change very difficult are at the core of the transformation agenda. And innovation is really sort of the answer to it all because it went to you're more innovative than you are going to ride this wave of epic disruption. So first of all, how would you, so many companies are saying we want to be more innovative. How, what's the answer to that? I mean, how do you, what does that mean to be more innovative? Yeah, it's a good point. So we have, so Accenture has looked at this, we sort of codified something that we call the wise pivot, which is how should an organization really pivot to transform their business? And it's got elements we believe strongly that you have to transform the core. Innovation can't be on the edge. At some point you have to transform the core, which usually gets at cost reduction, using automation to transform the business, transform the core economics. Then you have to grow the core. And that's really, I think the hard part, which is gaining market share in the core business, we believe, whether it's an automotive business, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in retail, you have to grow the core. Because ultimately that gives you the investment capacity to scale the new. So how to orchestrate that journey in a methodical way, again, keeping in mind the organization and what it delivers today, and not leaving different parts of the organization behind is what we work with our clients on. And what separates the winners from the losers? So the companies that are doing this well, how are they focusing on their core? And the core competencies. Right. We believe investing is a very big thing, right? So the hardest part of all of this, in terms of economically, I mean, there's a lot of difficult dimensions, but economically, as the pressure mounts, the ability to invest diminishes for most companies. And they don't have the room to invest in the business that their future depends on. And really freeing up that room and making the difficult decisions, you may have seen there were some announcements of mass layoffs even today, right? It's some of the biggest companies in the world. They're trying to create the room to invest in their next generation business that will take them into the future. And I think that's really the hardest part. How do you ultimately create the capacity to invest? And how do you make those investments? Again, because there's also a lot of other examples of companies that have invested in the wrong way or in the wrong thing that ultimately then lead them to the future. So those two elements, creating the room to invest and then investing it in the right things in the right ways, what we find is key. So you're talking, of course, about GM, which announced today that it was laying off about 15,000 white color and blue color jobs. And the reason they're doing this is because they're saying there's no longer any room for six passenger cars in this market. We want to focus on self-driving vehicles. Is that a good move? I mean, I know you're not a GM analyst here, but at the same time, it sounds as though that is smart. As you said, it's making room for investing in the future. Yeah, and I think so GM is clearly seeing autonomous cars coming, certain form factors, everything that they're doing. And again, I don't have any particular insight into GM's case, but again, you read it that way. You look at General Electric. They're restructuring their entire company to better compete in the new. You look at IBM. IBM's acquiring Red Hat to have the kind of assets to compete in the new. So I think the biggest companies in the world are really trying to sort of say, with the next 10 years, what is their business going to be? And then how do they take what got them here, which for many of them have been 50 to 100 year journeys and really figure out how to restructure that to give them the room to invest and to build a new business. And really, that takes tremendous leadership by the CEO, the board, the entire executive team and the people, the people have to commit to go along for that ride and endure some of the pain for the greater good. So it's really a change management issue here. But in terms of, you talked about leadership, it also takes the foresight to actually know what your business is in the future. So GM is saying autonomous vehicles, which an average layman could say, yeah, that looks as though that's where the car industry is going, but how does a company even begin to imagine its future at this time where there are new technologies being invented every day, which are disruptive, as we started talking about in the early years. Yeah, I think that's a very good question. Because also if you look at where's the money going, the money is going to the disruptors, right? You know, if you look at, you know, the top five, the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, let's put Microsoft in there, combined last year, they invested over $70 billion and that's about 15% of all of the fortune of the global 1000. So the capital as measured by, you know, what the companies are expending, what, you know, the startup, the startup VCs are at an all-time high, $155 billion invested last year, double what it was in 2001. The IPO market is at an all-time high, right? And then you have these things like division fund, which is a whole other investment vehicle to fuel technology. So the reality is there's never been more money going in to create the next wave of disruption, which is why we believe many of the existing companies really need to create those partnerships where they benefit from that. They can't compete with it, they can't out-guess it, right? They need to be making ecosystems that ultimately enable them to leverage those investments to really help power their next generation business. So it's an ecosystem-driven world. Where is Accenture doing this kind of work? Yeah, so the good news for Accenture is, you know, we built our business, built, you know, services in an ecosystem kind of model. Initially it was with SAP, with Oracle, with Salesforce, and now it's, you know, with companies like Amazon and AWS. And I think, you know, our view and what we try to work with our clients on is really to create the construct. And by the way, a lot of these constructs are just now being formed. Like what is partnering with an AWS to create your next generation digital business? What does that look like? And there's some models emerging in terms of co-innovation. You know, I would tell you what Amazon, what has done with Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase is an example of partnering to transform healthcare. Interesting way to do that. You look at something, another Seattle company, Starbucks, partnering with Alibaba to basically power their entire business in China. So you're starting to see different constructs where big companies are really coming together in different ways. And then again, those partnership constructs, incentives, business models around that, I think that's really where the innovation is going to take place. How do you do that? How do you align your incentives and how do you jointly benefit from that partnership? So you announced something today with your Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle, Washington. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. Well, I mean, I think we look, first of all, we look at AWS and we say, I mean, clearly this is a company that is really important to- Doing something right. Doing a lot of things right. It's doing a lot of things right. And I think a lot of our clients are looking at them or leveraging them. So we, you know, it's our responsibility then as really a services organization to build up capabilities and skills and make their, and enable our clients to really tap into this tremendous innovation. So we, yeah, we did announce an Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle. It'll be one of many centers across the United States and globally with a simple premise of building skills, building proof of concepts, building use cases, building MVPs through really around different industries and different solution sets to again reimagine business processes, catalyze transformation and really make it something that our clients can tap into. You are the chief strategy officer. What is your piece of advice for companies out there at AWS at Reinvent here? What's sort of your one piece of strategy advice in this period of Epic disruption and this cloud world? Yeah, I would say that I'm burdening ourselves from the day to day and really immersing ourselves in this amazing environment, learning, really understanding what makes one of these, you know, probably one of the greatest companies in the world, TIC, understanding how they do things, not only, and as you know, there's more to Amazon than just technology. Right, there's a very strong culture. There's a very strong customer centricity and really sort of understanding that and really trying to apply it to our respective businesses and seeing how it could really be, you know, make the pivot to the digital more effective and that's what I would sort of say. Come with an open mind, learn a lot and take it forward. Great, well Jean Resnick, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun. My pleasure, thank you, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit in just a little bit.