 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back, everyone. We are wrapping up two days of wall-to-wall coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit. You are watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Zephyr Rizaki. He is the managing director, Digital Industry X at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thank you. And John Allen, Global Automotive Professional Services Leader at AWS. Thank you both for coming on the show. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. So first, I'm going to start with you Zephyr. I want to hear both what you do. What is Digital Industry X? It's so mysterious. So Industry X.O is a fairly new practice inside of Accenture. We focus on all things smart and connected. There's a product segment that focuses on smart and connected products specifically. And then certainly we have to think about engineering. So how do you build those products and how do you automate and make the processes for developing those products smarter? And then processes and operations. How do you actually run those types of businesses? So I'm new to the practice. I actually joined from a number of years at General Motors, where I worked on mobility and innovation there. And prior to that, spent a number of years at Google working on innovation and new products there. So happy to be at the firm and excited to think about how we bring these types of skills to the mobility industry and change automotive. So John, paint a picture for our viewers. The entire industry is being disrupted. We are changing the way we move around from city to city. We have Uber and Lyft, electric scooters, connected cars. Just paint the picture for our viewers about the disruption taking place. I mean, I'll use a line from one of our CEOs in the auto industry, Marivara, said we'll see more disruption in the next five years than we've seen in the last 25 years in the automotive industry. And it's really fascinating to see what's happening. I think the big disruption is that automotive industry and automotive makers are no longer traditional metal benders. They see themselves as mobility companies. And they see that they need to integrate with this ecosystem. It's just not about driving your car to one spot to another, but it's a full customer experience. From the moment you get into your car, you get to your location, and then how do you actually get further? Maybe you take a scooter, maybe you're not using your car or you're using Uber. So it's fascinating to see how the ecosystem is all integrated in. The auto industry also has shifted that no longer do they think or think they should just do it alone. I think we're seeing a lot of partnerships, and they're bringing in a lot of small businesses, and they're bringing in more innovation. They realize that innovation isn't just happening within their four walls, but they're using a much larger ecosystem to really change and transform mobility across the world. So maybe talk a little bit how broad this ecosystem is, right? Because maybe in the old time we had maybe sort of car manufacturers, right? And we had cities. Cities made the roads, car manufacturers built the vehicles, right? But now we've got a complicated ecosystem, right? We've got data companies that are playing a role in this, right? We've got, that are driving sort of ride hailing, et cetera. We've also got cities thinking about how they offer kind of traffic services differently. Just maybe just talk about some of the things you're seeing around the ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, certainly OEMs are reimagining their role in the ecosystem. Suppliers are also thinking about how they can start to add new value and leverage the data off of their systems. We have to talk about startups in this space as well. I mean, the ecosystem of startups is just growing rapidly. We've talked about Uber and Lyft. They've been a great model for the way a startup can come in and disrupt and grow. But across all aspects from supply chain to retail to in-vehicle technologies, there are so many new entrants. And it's exciting. And it's leading to these types of partnerships where traditionally an OEM might have said, I'm going to do it all. Now there's this comfort with, I'm going to partner with a startup. I might invest in them. I might put some project dollars into that relationship and work on co-developing a solution together. And what's amazing I think is the customer has a lot more power maybe than in the past. And so automotive makers, this unique partnership that's happening is they're really putting the customer in the center. Customers want a seamless experience. They want to be jumping between different apps or different capabilities. That's what's beautiful we're doing in AWS is we're trying to help these OEMs take that full experience and think of it as your car is a personal assistant. Think of it as it can help you get to your job. It can also help with your personal life as well. And so I think it's fascinating that they're really starting to put the customer at the center to have a better customer experience. And it's no longer just horsepower and how your car works, but it's really the connected ecosystem that extends theoretically beyond your car. So you can connect to your home. You can connect with the rest of your life through your vehicle these days and I think that's the change. So how will that work? Describe the connected car. What are we really talking about here? Wow. You want to take that one first? Sure, well let's contrast it to the non-connected car. All right, fair enough. I mean literally getting in, turning the engine on and the car was a standalone part of your daily life. But to John's point, now with it being really software driven and having data able to flow from your vehicle to your home and be able to automate turning on your thermostat as you're approaching the home. Automatically opening the garage just based on proximity, those types of things. Being able to have the convenience of your favorite playlists and your phone book, bringing that digital life into the car. Those weren't possible before the connected car and that technology architecture that we see now. But now that experience becomes much richer and much more personalized. Yeah, and I think looking at latency, looking at IoT, looking at edge. Fascinating, especially with the introduction of 5G coming up. It's going to completely be a game changer for the rest of this. So let's build on that. So the roles of the players in the ecosystem are changing, right? So the role of the car manufacturer is changing. The role of the city is changing. The role of the start-up is changing. But it seems like the kind of common theme among all of these is that they're leveraging data in different kinds of ways. And I was just wondering, so how does AWS help these kind of stakeholders be able to leverage that kind of data? So my role on professional services for AWS is we help our customers use the AWS services to make it real. Whether it's from our proof of concepts all the way to operations. So we use our wonderful partner community like Accenture and we come in together. And so for example, say a customer wants to create a personal assistant through the vehicle using Alexa, using other services, we would go in maybe with a partner. And a lot of times we love to do it with the customer, with the automaker and together build. Again, it might be a concept. There is still a long lead time to create devices to be included in the vehicle. But the great thing about now Cloud and some of the technologies, seven years was generally the design cycle for a vehicle. You can't do that anymore with new technologies, right? So we as AWS come in and really help say let's envision, let's work backwards from the customer, let's think about what we need to have, help them build and then later on actually implement and make it operational. Maybe I could just add to that real quick. I mean, one of the beauties of this partnership is that we see some of the new technologies that AWS is developing and what's in the pipeline. And our teams are actually working on building demos on top of this. So one example of that is a trip planner that we actually have on display here on the show floor where we can help a family plan a trip. What are all of the things they need to take on that trip because Alexa knows your shopping preferences. We can recommend the snacks and things that you want to take. We can recommend stops along the way. In the future where we're all driving electric vehicles, how do you plan out your charging and take the family to a restaurant while you're waiting 30 minutes for the vehicle to charge. So a lot of those things are realities that we can actually build today based on the technologies that AWS has to offer. What are some of the best in class automakers in the sense of who are really at the cutting edge in terms of working with you both Accenture and AWS in terms of really thinking innovatively and creatively. Sure. Well, I think everyone across the ecosystem is at that point in time where they recognize it's time for that transformation to happen. So I mean, you can pick any one of the major brands and look at great examples of the way they're changing the experience inside of the vehicle from the integration of different types of personalization offerings to even some of the newer entrants like a Tesla that's really building vehicles from the ground up focused on software and that customer experience. So I think it's an exciting time across the industry. Everyone's really making those changes and you guys are probably at the seat at the table in all of those conversations. Yeah, I hate to point out one specific but what I think I've seen a theme is that they recognize to draw talent they can't do the old way of doing business, right? So they're creating these joint innovation centers with AWS, they have innovation centers kind of even off campus of the main campus and they kind of have that silicon feel because it's a draw talent and they got to make it as exciting to get these new coders and developers in to want to join an automaker. They weren't necessarily seen as that but they joined an automaker and that's completely transforming especially the rise of the digital that the CTO and then the CDO, the Chief Digital Officer we're seeing that completely change in data science. These are themes maybe 10 years ago that really weren't talked about in OEMs and now they have a seat not only at the table but they're at the board level. And these are conversations at the board level now. Absolutely, yeah. So you know, one of the things we've all experienced we all spend a lot of time sitting in traffic, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how are cities getting smarter about kind of using mobility in order to kind of move people across cities and avoid kind of traffic some of the other problems we all experience. Right. Well, I think there's cities as consumers of data. So cities are now having conversations with many of the automakers about leveraging vehicle data to make better decisions about the use of their roadways or how they manage traffic light phasing. So there's a lot of interesting things happening there where manufacturers are able to share their data to cities. And their city planner teams, their, the way they're building new roadways are including a lot of that infrastructure now where you see technologies like DSRC that's able to talk to vehicles and help those traffic lights phase accordingly. I think cities are playing a really important role in making those new technologies come to bear. And I think it's amazing to see some of the investments in some of the smaller cities. So a few years ago, the Department of Transportation put out a challenge, smart city challenge and then selected a city to actually be the incubator. But that created all these other cities from Austin to Columbus to Ohio to you name it to almost have these PMOs or these centers of excellence to create smart cities. And we talked about the ecosystem at the beginning of the conversation. And it's really enabling these cities to bring in maybe big ideas that weren't able to be brought in before. The cloud and the technologies we have are really leveling the playing field and giving it access to maybe companies that didn't have that kind of compute power before. And that's where we're seeing with the smart cities initiatives. It's not so expensive anymore. And you can bring in some really brilliant ideas of a small business that is maybe a three person shop that could actually transform. But I think we do need to fix the infrastructure and we've talked about this as a nation for a while and we continue to invest their infrastructure to really enable smart cities. We've been talking about these smart cars and how they are going to serve as our personal assistance of the future. But what about safety too, as an innovative USP? In the sense of here we are using data to make these cars smarter, more connected and also safer. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of debates right now on how safe autonomous vehicle and we're learning more as we go along that. I think there's a couple of use cases that I've seen is you can sign up for apps to become a smarter driver, right? You see, you get your score with my vehicle, I get a report card every month to say how I've actually been doing. And as a parent, I can see how my kids are driving and all that. But I think at the end of the year, and it's kind of a, I'll be bold here a little bit, we really don't remember the last time there was a major commercial airline crash in the United States. It makes the six o'clock news. By the time I retire, I make a bold prediction. I can be bold here that a major car accident in the country, now I might be at a nursing home, could make the evening news. Because we could get to that level of safety in the future. Meeting car accidents are so frequent. Or accidents so rare. Could be so infrequent and rare. It would make the difference. Right, now, I'm not saying it's going to happen near turn. I do have a prediction that if, what we're trying to design today enables that for the future, I think it's pretty proud to be part of that, right? Again, I think it's, you know, years down the road I might be a shady pines retirement community at that point. But I really, I mean, you think about how we've been able to deal with the aviation industry and make it safer. Even with the challenges around that, I think in the future we could have that for safety in vehicles in my lifetime. I totally agree. And I think that's a big promise of autonomous vehicles. That's what so many people are excited about. Traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our country. So to be able to address that through technology, I think is an exciting promise. We see some of that even today with all the technology that's being built into the vehicle. There are high standards for minimizing driver distraction. And just imagine that future where you no longer have to worry about driver distraction. And now our relationship with the vehicle is one where we sit back, we live our lives. There's a statistic that we estimate people will get back 4.5 years of their life that they're not spending behind the wheel locked on the road. Those types of things are really exciting to think about. Now somebody out there will probably correct me with the numbers. I think 39,000 fatality deaths in the United States was reported by Nets. I think that's the number. But I know that the number of distracted driving is going up. Got it. And that's a problem. I mean, people are using their phones. And it's not only phones, it's drinking, it's distracted driving. So anyway, now. Distracted pedestrians. That's the thing walking around Boston. Everyone's just. That's right. Walking around here, you see people on their phones. Absolutely. And I think that we are on a, it's amazing to see the changes that have happened around this the last couple of years. And I think it's just open new opportunities for companies that could never have been really played in this space are really making a change for us. So one of the stories I love to hear about is, you know, how these kind of connected car and data capabilities are enabling us to use the kind of infrastructure we've got today better, right? I mean, we all love to jump out of line taxi and zoom over traffic, et cetera. But there's some concepts like sort of smart carpool lanes, things like that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about those and kind of how new business models are being allowed by that. Yeah, so metering is one way where it becomes a smart infrastructure where you understand the traffic patterns and it'd be each HOV or you pay for it. So you can make the decision if you want to spend $30 to try to get into the city or be stuck in traffic and take your an hour. And so it's interesting with the smart infrastructure that's actually occurring within cities right now that changes on how people will use metered lanes. And that's one thing we're seeing today. But there's also integrations of the apps that we use every day to help us give us better insights, obviously, that we all use to be able to have traffic. But it's the integration with that. Imagine having that application integrated with emergency management. So today people are hitting an app because Waze is a cop on the side of the road. Well, we have customers, one customer in particular that want to make sure that's integrated in a smart way. That if a police car is on the side of the wall, how is it really feeding the larger infrastructure? So yes, there's a whole piece on metering and smart infrastructure. But I think that some of these other businesses are finding ways to integrate things like emergency management and other pieces to really help reduce traffic flow and make it easier. Parking is another great example. Yeah, there are a number of startups out there that have created technologies to help map open parking spaces. So how do you feed that data to the end user to help them make smarter decisions? I think there's another data point that's, we spend about 30% of our time in our vehicle is spent just looking for parking, right? So how can we help to drive those things down? How can we help make it more efficient to find a parking spot, to even transact for that parking spot? And you might come to a situation where, again, when there's peak traffic, are we bidding for a parking spot? And will a parking spot go to the highest bidder? So these are all opportunities that technology really enables when we connect the vehicle and are able to feed in that type of data around parking, infrastructure, roadway usage, et cetera. Well, Zephra and John, this has been a really cool conversation. You have great jobs. It's really neat, re-imagining mobility. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. That wraps up our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit for theCUBE. Thank you so much and we'll catch you next time.