 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back, everyone, to Seattle, Washington. We are here at Smartsheet Engaged 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are here with a CUBE alum, a CUBE veteran, Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research at Washington DC. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. Absolutely, thanks for having me. So we're here to talk with you about the future of work, which is a huge topic, but a fascinating one. Oh, absolutely. I want you to start by giving sort of a broad brush of what you see are the biggest changes right now happening in the workforce, driven by the rise of digital technologies. Sure, I mean, well, digital is infusing everything in the workplace these days, right? And so, you know, we've had the past waves of productivity tools and then mobile devices came through and then eventually augmented reality and virtual reality are going to literally change how we perceive the workplace. And then we have just, you know, everyday trends like remote working. And now people can work from anywhere, right? It's fantastic. And that's really revolutionized a lot of things. Things in 2% of the workforce per year is becoming a remote workforce. Companies like ADP have a quarter of their workforce working from home, right? Accenture, same thing, they get rid of office space and they work out of their house unless there's, you know, on a client's side. And because you can kind of create the experience that you want and one of the really big trends is this trend towards being able to shape the employee experience the way that you want to using the tools that you prefer. And so, people call this shadow IT, other people call it innovation, right? And so, that's one of the big changes. And then we have things like the gig economy which is allowing people to build the lifestyles they want, doing any kind of work they want when they want to, when they feel like it on their own terms. And that's really quite exciting too. So all these confluence of forces are enabled and driven by technology but it's also leading to a lot of what we call cognitive overload. Workers who are not, you know, lifelong learners are feeling overwhelmed by this and that's another big challenge. But you also get this tools proliferation which they're just not word and excel anymore but you've got a tab open with Salesforce, you've got a tab open with Slack, you've got Gmail open, you've got Docs open, you've got Smartsheet open, you might have Jira open. I mean, so how is that going to sort itself out as we just kind of keep adding new tabs of apps that we have to keep an eye on? And we need all this technology to do better work. I mean, these apps provide value except that it's increasing the onboarding time for workers. It's making it hard for us to train people. In some companies it's hard to attain people because they feel like they have to go to work and there's this onslaught of technologies, they have to have 30 tabs open to get their jobs done and they do. And so we're seeing things like, you know, we're at the Smartsheet conference where, you know, how can we centralize work a little bit better, streamline it by integrating the tools and creating more focus on what we're doing and that's a very big trend. So in my latest digital workplace trends report, we say this, we're seeing these hubs form, you know, like Slack is another work hub that's become very popular inside of organizations. They have over 1,100 application integrations that allow people to spend their time in one place and kind of work through all these other systems from one hub. So, you know, we're dealing with this complexity, you know, starting to be able to do this now, but it's early days, still a big challenge. So what are you seeing now? So what is the answer then? I mean, we have, you've just described all of these trends that are taking place that are making the work, modern workplace so much more complex, dealing with workers they're dealing with cognitive overload, leaders who want more with less. What are some of the answers? What are some of the most exciting tools that you're seeing right now? Boy, we talked already about Smartsheet and Slack. We see new digital experience platforms are emerging and low code and no code is also becoming popular to be able to take the pieces of the applications you want and create more streamlined experiences. So the CIO of Accenture, Andrew Wilson, you know, saw this problem right away, their knowledge workers were just being choked by all of these tools, but yet we need the value they provide. So he began to divide up the employee experience of the 100 top moments. And then he built experiences that enabled, you know, project management and onboarding and all these key activities to be friction free built out of their existing applications but streamlined to just what they needed to do. And he views this as his top priority as a digital leader is to say we've got to take as much complexity away so we can get at the values with streamlining the simplification. And we now have tools that allow that shaping to happen very quickly. It almost reminds me of kind of the competition for devs, right, now it's the competition for employees. And we've talked a lot about the consumerization of no IT and mobile devices for the customer experience, but there hasn't been as much talk about leveraging that same, you know, kind of expected behavior, right, or expected inner engagement and interaction with the apps on the actual employee engagement side, which is probably as fierce of a battle as it is to get customers, because I think there's a lot more than 2% customers out available, but yeah, we've only got 2% unemployment in the Bay area now. It's crazy. It's effectively negative unemployment, right? Right, right. Anything under 3%. Yeah, so, you know, this is the challenges. Employee experience is usually low on the priority list for CIOs. They usually have analytics and cloud and cyber security and all these things that they have to get done that are higher priority. Yet, customer experience is one of those priorities, but how does an employee give a good customer experience when they have a poor experience to do it, deliver it with, right? The worst thing you can do with talented people is expect them to do a great job and then give them a bunch of hard to use tools, right, which is what's happening. So we are now finally seeing that prioritization go up a little bit because employee experience is part of delivering great customer experience and it's how you create that experience to begin with. So, small progress. And leaders are seeing that as a priority of retaining their top people because they understand that their workers need to feel satisfied with their work life. Yeah, and now we have data on a lot of these things we didn't have before. You know, and I'm sure you've seen the numbers, most employees are disengaged at work, the majority, right, between 50 and 60% depending on whose data you're looking at. That's an enormous, untapped investment that workers are not performing the way that they could if they had better employee experiences. And what's disengaging is, as I mentioned, giving a talented person lousy tools or a lousy experience and expecting them to do great. It doesn't happen. How much do you think AI and machine learning will be able to offload enough of the mundane to flip the bit on how engaged they are in their job? Yeah, it's interesting because there's two sides to a coin there. Some people like a job that they can just kind of phone in and it's kind of rote and they can come in, they don't have to think too hard and then they can go home to their family. Some people are hired on that basis, right? Because that's the challenge. AI and machine learning will absolutely automate most rote work. If you look at like Adobe Sensei, I was at the Adobe conference and they were talking about how all of these creative types that have all these mundane tasks automated for them and I could see everybody looking at each other going, I could pay to do that. I could pay the creative rate to do the mundane. Yeah, right, right. So you see things like robotic process, automation is working. I mean, I hear anecdotes all the time from CIOs how they cut like 25% out of their call center because they handed it over to the box, right? You know, it's bill processing. That's one of the, you know, and sorting. I'm matching bills to invoices. It's a manual job even in today's world until very recently. So we are seeing that happening but at the most rote level. But it's just going to climb up from there. What do you see down the road though? I mean, in terms of those employees who are raising their hand saying, wait, I kind of want that job. Are you seeing what's going to happen to those people? Are they going to have to learn new skills? Are they going to be invested in by their companies? We hope so. You know, it's interesting we see that all the big vendors now have these big education programs. Salesforce has Trailhead, SAP just announced open SAP where they give away massively open online courses. And, you know, Microsoft has done this with Microsoft Developers Network way back in the day trying to educate people. I mean, you can get reskilled for nothing for free now if you want to do it. But this is the challenge is even though every technological revolution in the past and it looks like this one too has, you know, utterly changed the employment picture, by and large it creates more jobs than we lose. And that looks like it's going to happen here but the people who lose the jobs are not the ones that tend to gain the jobs. They get the new jobs, right? Yeah, they often know it's hard to take somebody who's sorting bills and say, I need you to develop a new AI algorithm. Because that's where the next strategic jobs are going to be directing the AI to do all these things, right? And so I think the short term is going to be dislocation and it's happening so fast that unless society, government and enterprises really intervene to upscale these folks, we are going to have a challenge. We're in this really weird time too in between. I mean, the classic one is long haul trucking, right? Which is perfect for autonomous vehicles, you know, to carry a lot of that freight and everyone pretty much agrees that's going to happen. At the same time, there's a huge shortage of available truck drivers today, like there never has been. So it's weird and it's probably not the best for a young kid to get into, right? Because it doesn't have a great long term future. Right, right. Well, and you look at Uber and their state of direction is they want to get rid of all these drivers, right? They want self-driving taxis. And, you know, we're getting close to where that might actually happen, right? And so the unskilled labor is going to be hit by far the worst. You have to become skilled labor in the digital economy. And so a big part of the future of work is going to be finding ways to get the skills into people's hands. You know, like Facebook and other large organizations don't even require a college degree. What they want people is the people that can deliver. They can take these things and create the, you know, the great products of the future. And so, you know, everyone has to become a knowledge worker. And as Laird Hamilton said on the main stage today, it's the formula of learning to really understand when you're starting from a point of, wow, I don't know much about that. I guess I'd better learn about it and then learning about it along the way. We all have to be able to adapt and adopt those new. No, absolutely. No, the, and so we see upskilling and cross-skilling becoming more transdisciplinary. So business people are becoming IT folks now and IT folks are becoming business people. You know, we've had this business IT divide for a long time. It cracks me up. I still go to big companies and the IT department is usually in its own building, right? But those days are going away. And I've seen, you know, now there's IT people over on the business side that live there now, right? You know, so we're seeing this kind of, this blending where digital is infusing everything. And so you have to become digitally competent. And this is where we have to make that simpler. This is going back to the, you know, the digital workplace. The average user has had the number of applications they have to learn double or triple in just the last five years, right? So it's a big challenge. So what should kids be majoring in today? What's your... Oh, game design. You know, the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry by a large, large margin, right? And that's where all the experience of these immersive experiences and virtual reality and augmented reality is going to come from. And then you can go into business, right? You know. Even sociology majors can design games. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's just get, like you said, it's the poor tweeners, right? That get bumped on the old and aren't necessarily in a position to take care of the new. I'll have to take care of an, unfortunately, not a lot of great record of retraining to date, but maybe that's going to have to be a much more significant investment because there just aren't the people to fill those positions, period. Yeah, well, and there's these big marketplaces now. You can build the career of your dreams. You go to Upwork or Gigster. I mean, these are big job markets where you can go and find work and do it from anywhere using a tablet you bought for $50 off of Amazon, right? Right. You know, it just, most of you aren't even aware that they can do that. Right, right. So it's, you know, it's a fast-changing world. Put a few bucks away for insurance and you put a few bucks away in your 401k and you, you know, not just living off the cash plus a little bit to cover your costs, which, unfortunately, a lot of the Uber drivers and the Lyft drivers are anyway. You know, they're not really banking that thing for building a career. Well, I've crawled through those platforms and it's interesting, entrepreneurial activity is very common in places like Asia, right? Where, you know, they come here, they build businesses right away, right? And they're used to that. So, and we lost some of that, but I think we're, now the economy is giving a lot of that back to us. We have to relearn it again, you know? Right, great. Well, Dionne, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Absolutely. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned to more of theCUBE's live coverage of Engage 2019.