 Hello and welcome back to theCUBE, live at Google Next 2023. Excited to be here. It's really been a great week. We're just getting started. It feels like we've been here for an entire week already, but it's just been the quality of the guests that we keep getting on here. Not going to stop now. We got some great guests in here. We're continuing to talk to the ecosystem around GCP and Google, and this is really a lot of fun. I'm here with Dustin, the two analysts on here to talk with Slalom. And we're going to talk to Tony Koh, who is the managing director of data and AI business at Slalom. And we're also here with Cameron Curtis, who is the leader of Global Google Center of Excellence for Slalom. Hopefully I got that right. We're off on a good foot already. Well done. Yes. I think both of us know your company and have been around this market for quite a while. Myself, when I was in the first party data business and we built some things with you and on top of BigQuery. So kind of help us understand what really the impact has been of generative AI, the data business, and how this is really focusing on your partnership with Google and how that's really helping. Wow, where do we start? It's been a wild ride this year. So generative AI has just taken everyone by storm and we're no different. We've been in consulting, Slalom has been in consulting for a few decades and we've always focused on high impact which is enterprise-wide transformation. What generative AI has done for us is transitioned us from large transformations to exponential transitions. And what I mean by that is there's three things that's generally different about generative AI. One, the pace of advancement and progress in this space is something that we've never seen before. Two, we're accustomed to seeing technology as something that is in exact science and this is not. AI recognized patterns and now generative AI is generating patterns so it's very probabilistic so it's really hard to gauge the ambiguity of it. And the last is unfettered access. Pretty much anyone can download a trial and start playing around and creating use cases around it. So for all of those reasons we shifted away from large big enterprise transformations to more agile, more dynamic pathing of how enterprises continue to advance their businesses and their industries. Specific to Rob, specific to Google, how that shows up is once we realize the ubiquitous nature of how much LMs are gonna be present in our lives and for our people's lives and for our clients' lives, we've made a pretty huge focus on that as a what can we do to help our clients in a what we call human or fiercely human way. Applied to Google, we're not, we're the smallest of the big firms or the biggest of the small but with the generative of gen AI space we're a top three kind of go to market with them and we're in a top three of like educating and training our people. So it's, we're seeing that payoff for our clients but more importantly for the people, the humans in our system, right? Talk about the ecosystem. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I think that when you start to look about AI and these projects, there has to be an ROI and a business value. And I think I was at a customer panel a little bit earlier and they were talking about that, how they were putting almost data product managers or AI product managers and business owners with those different product projects. I think one of the big themes that, when I've talked with your teams before has been around productivity and how do you help raise the bar on productivity and have a way through, what are you seeing from a productivity perspective with your customers? Yeah, so we generally think about three different layers or three horizons of how Jenny AI is going to transform everyone's business in different transitions. So number one is productivity, gaining efficiency. We're seeing a lot of, you know, anywhere from 30 to 60% efficiency or productivity gains regardless of domain function, engineering process, whatever it may be. The second horizon that we'll get into later a little bit more is how you start to channel that excess capacity to challenge conventional constraints that employees have typically worked within. And then the last horizon is really getting into the changing of the essence of the entire company, why that company exists and really understanding how to disrupt it. So that first horizon is where we see a lot of people taking that first step, which is very logical. How do you do coding faster? How do you automate processes without having to manually code in everything into the entire process? And we have some really great examples that Cameron could share that we've done in partnership with Google. The duet announcement today, right, kind of finally, it's been in the wings and waiting for some time now. Cody, those personal, right, personal productivity enhancements, now that they're coming live and being applied, we're showing those up for our people and for our clients as well. We have an example, like, I would say that the majority of development backlogs are now generated, start with the generative AI, a bit of work, right, because it's just easier and it takes them, that's like super common. We're taking our clients through it as well. That's just productivity, right? So from the backlog perspective, how, because I'm trying to piece it all together with duet and then the Vertex AI with the connectors into Jira and Confluence where with Cody in particular, because I don't know Cody that well. How does that apply to their backlog? How are they using that to build out a backlog? Duet can help you, it's not, it's not necessarily Cody. Yeah, it's one for the other, where you can create the backlog using, you can use Bard, you can use, you're right, it helps you, Duet will help you do it in the workspace. Cody then helps you actually write the code and like, proof the code. And so as a one-two punch, Google's been very thoughtful about how they are bringing these pieces together to enable the people that they're trying to enable. I think it puts them in a really strong competitive position. And this is something you're helping your clients both do themselves as well as you and your team using, so it's feeding off on one another. You can think about how impactful this is going to be to the consulting field, right? We have to be aggressively there first and the pivots that we've done are showing up that we are. And this is across industries at this point, you're seeing it just, because everybody needs productivity, especially in this kind of a market where they're looking to do more with less, they can't hire as fast, maybe they don't even have the skill sets and I think that's where a slalom comes in, right? That's right, yeah, absolutely. Going back to the cross industry comments, you think about the different modalities that are being offered, right? Whether it's text and processing text strings, or lines of code, or video, or images, and soon getting into multi-modal. So some of our more advanced clients are talking about how do you take a speech to text to code to machine commands? And now you're controlling a robotic arm with your natural language just by talking to. Now that starts to get into physical security in addition to information security, so there's a lot of considerations around it, but the use case is that this presents across all of the different industries, whether it's legal document processing, clinical trial protocols, to any sort of video and metadata management, it just cuts across the board. That really hits that, what he was talking about earlier about the second horizon, right, the first one's productivity, the second one is changing the nature of your business. What he's describing is, whomever is using the robot is still manufacturing something, but the way in which they're doing it is radically changed. We have a client right now that we're helping understand, they have a great ability to respond to emails to the CEO. Dear CEO, I've got a problem, I didn't get my thing, whatever, right? What they don't have, and it's a large company, it's very complicated, right? What they don't have is a way to then make that problem be permanently fixed. So what happens is they get another email or another phone call a month later for the same problem. Using generative AI, we're able to analyze the entire breadth of the problem and have a prescriptive recommendation of what to do about it. So it's an exciting time of changing how they do their business that then makes it easier for their customer's experience and makes them a better firm. And so are those customers using that as a differentiation or as differentiating factors for their own industry? Absolutely, absolutely. What it shows up, you think about how the generative AI, that user experience or the experience, it may be transparent to you, Dustin, but it sure feels a lot better than an email to a CEO that just goes into the, you know, every hair from, right? Now, to answer that question on the flip side, because there are companies that are looking at how do we, how do we differentiate customer experience, employee experience, et cetera, et cetera. Some, a lot of the companies we also see, you know, that excess capacity being used to do more of the same work, which is a missed opportunity. That excess capacity and institutional knowledge put together really puts them in a really great position to challenge, again, that conventional constraints that the organizations have been working under and how do you break through that? So that's the real push where it gets really interesting and really fun for us. That would seem to be, is that lead you to that next horizon, that third horizon and what's that? Yeah, so third horizon is really changing that essence of the company. So if, imagine you spend sufficient time in horizon too, you develop that critical thinking muscle to challenge all the constraints. And so I'll take, I'll give you an example. The travel industry, we see and rely on travel industries to help manage our individual travel itineraries. And they could differentiate themselves in horizon too by providing each individual their own concierge service through general AI. Now think about horizon three. Imagine if you could give your priorities based on where you are with your family, with your community, with the people that you want to stay in contact with and say for the next five years, I want to make the world smaller for these group of people and have them help you manage that itinerary together. That is changing how we would view that specific industry. And that's what we're trying to push for and materialize into reality as we explore this exciting space. It's only going to be like 1% of the companies out in the universe are going to make that pivot to a radical transformation of the business, right? Most, but the ones that don't try are the ones that are very much going to suffer in the years to come. And in trying, they get themselves to what we call the second horizon. That we are looking for ourselves and for the companies that we support to do that, to aim themselves to aim high like that and we're hoping them to do that. So I'd like to tell you how that shows up, right? It's starting with kind of the open engagement of and we've done several hundred like workshops, right? What we do is consulting firms to help clients understand what it is that they want to engage in and where to go from there. It's the going from there that is unique and special to every firm. One little follow up on that. How have you seen sort of the zeitgeist change from outbound, you telling your customers, hey, this AI wave is coming to inbound, oh my God, Slalom, help me get on this train. That's a great question. It's a great question. I mean, for the past three or four years, a lot more people have been paying attention to the AI space, but mostly pushing down into the technical leaders and executives and their teams to figure out how it impacts their organization. Now, since November of last year, we're seeing a lot of non-technical executives and users, I mean, a 13 year old student or my retired post office worker mom, they're all coming up with use cases and using this, so which also presents a little bit of a challenge because the gap between everyone's expectations and their understanding is huge. And that could be a significant drop off that really turns people off. So this is a really great opportunity for probably everybody at this conference to capture this moment of attention and mind share, and not squander it. It really helped educate everybody so that everybody leans in. It's a fantastic point. Yeah, and it would seem like being able to get specific language models, SLMs or segmented language models built. Hey, maybe they're off a base that was in, inside of Vertex AI, and you went to the model garden, you prune one or whatever you call it when you take one out of there. I like that. Yeah, you prune it from the garden and then you ground it, right? It's like replanting it, and you make it specific to your, I would assume that's a big piece of your relationship with Google is helping people understand, to your point, it's a skill set thing. That's right, yeah. And it's about where the data is too, and you guys go beyond just Google so you can help bring the right data to bear in that. Absolutely. The way Google is approaching a incredible diversity of SLMs that then can be frozen and then get localized to your specific cases is really an intelligent way to bring that specificity at speed and also, without, you don't have to go by your own, right? They're very expensive models. So I'm pretty excited about how that enables back to like individual humans, right? To be able to do it themselves and have it be meaningful, right? And that piece of like how we help the humans, that's what we're all here for. It's not technology for technology's sake, it's really about AI helping humans be better humans. Yeah, so with the last few minutes we have here, looks kicking to you first Cameron, any closing comments? How new is the center of excellence? How's it been going, the relationship? Where do you see it going? So we're two years in and so, and seeing the fastest growth across, of a large partner, right, that we have going in the company. And we see the velocity continuing. Google has differentiated and continues to differentiate themselves in how they're approaching the market. We're seeing the pull across the breadth of our clients in a moment of change. So it's a wild ride, I'm having the time of my life. I can't see myself doing anything else. And Tony, how do you see the, how do we ensure positive outcomes for clients here? Well, I go back to the accessibility. Everybody has access. Before Generative AI, we always thought about how do we make sure we have the right people so that they have a seat at the table and a voice to whatever is being created by AI products. Well, now we have that. Before it was really hard to get people to actually sit at that seat because they're like, AI. Right. You guys take care of it. I don't know the technology. Help us please. So it's really paying attention, making sure that we take the time to educate every single one of the people who are leaning in and experimenting with this and really hearing them out. It's going to be painful to educate everybody. You think about the layers of education, whether you're prompt engineering in the actual UI or you're building pipelines to help with prompt engineering or you're getting into fine tuning. There's going to be a lot of things that we have to check off the list in terms of like how we bring people along without losing them. Right. I think that's going to be the most important part. Make sure you educate your peers, your family members, your teammates, your colleagues, everybody in anyway. Well, I really thank you guys for coming on board. It's always great to talk to Slalom and, you know, Tony and Cameron, you just, I think you hit it on the head, the nail on the head with the, it is about a process that brings them along to these different horizons and really helps them through. And I really want to thank you for joining us here on theCUBE. We're at Google Next 2023, Rob Streche with Dustin Kirkland, Lisa Martin and that other guy, John Furrier is around here somewhere. We're going to be back. We have a lot more to come. Just a full day. We're going late, late into the evening. So stay tuned to theCUBE for all of the news that we're going to unpack the signal from the noise. Stay here.