 From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE on the ground with Accenture Labs 30th anniversary celebration. Hello everyone, welcome to the special coverage of theCUBE on the ground here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The heart of Silicon Valley is the theCUBE coverage of Accenture Labs 30th year celebration. I'm here with Paul Dardi, the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Accenture Labs. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, it's great to be here. So first I want to toast you guys to 30 years from turning to an accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, to Accenture Labs, consulting. Guys are really changed. Congratulations to all your success. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks. It's been an incredible journey. If you think back in the 30 years, it's the 30th anniversary of Accenture Labs and the transformation of our company to now be an innovation led company leading in IT services and IT innovation and with the amazing innovation that are happening in technology. It's a great time to be doing what we're doing. So the theme here at the party is magic. There's a magic show going on. We can't get coverage, a little private event, probably some G rated, probably. Lots of magic. A lot of magic, but there's magic right now. We were commenting earlier before you came on about, you know, at my age, I love this innovation cycle, but if I was 20 years old, I'd really be excited. There's so much going on. It's really magical. You got the convergence of infrastructure, cloud, software. You guys have been on all sides of innovation from the mini computer boom all the way now through now where AI and software and now data science is coming together. What's the exciting thing for you right now? Because it's beyond software eating the world. It's beyond data eating software. This is real applications. Yeah, we're in an era where technology is the driving force behind every business. There was a survey recently of CEOs and they asked CEOs, how do they view their business? And 81% of CEOs, 81%, said their company's a technology company. And that was a cross-industry survey. And that's why it's an exciting time because the opportunity we have as Accenture is to work with any company and every company and help them transform, change their business and lead them through the transformation to deliver technology-enabled, digital products and services. And that's why it's an exciting time. What I find exciting about these global system integrators as they're now called is that you guys have always been a consultative organization to customers helping them through their journey of that generational shift. Now it's interesting with cloud computing, you guys are not only just advising your delivering services, a mindset transformation as well as talent, technology, process and people. How are you doing it? What's the secret formula? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we found, the reason we've driven our business model in that direction is our clients need help throughout the cycle. So we help with Accenture strategy, with advising our clients. We help with Accenture consulting on helping our clients transform Accenture digital, bringing the digital capabilities in, Accenture technology, building the solutions and Accenture operations, providing business process, infrastructure and cloud operations. So we found as our clients, they need help with it all. They want to understand where to take their business, they want to understand how to get there and they want somebody to help them manage their business as they do it. And that's why we've taken the business in that direction. Not to give you guys a lot of props, but I do want to give you guys kudos. Accenture and Accenture Labs is that a lot of folks might not know or some of your customers probably do know. You've accumulated a lot of data scientists over the year, you've got thousands of data scientists, a lot of talent coming in. Accenture Labs is a booming operation. It's not just a throwaway lip service kind of operation for customers to say, hey, we've got some smart people. You guys actually have a real organization. What are some of the cool things that you guys are doing? Can you give some examples? Yeah, I mean, just step back and talk about labs a bit and I'll give some examples. We've been at labs now for 30 years. You know, hence the celebration we're talking about. And it's thousands of patents, it's billions of dollars of impact on the revenue of our business. And really, you know, driving innovation that sets us ahead in the marketplace. And it's a fabric of global organizations. We have labs here in Silicon Valley. We have labs in Washington, D.C. that focus on security and other things. We have labs in Dublin, Ireland, in Tel Aviv, in Bangalore, India, in Beijing, in Sofia, in Tiples, in France. And it's that global infrastructure that allows us to tap into the innovation at the key hotspots where it's happening. The kinds of innovation that we've driven are, you know, think back to the early days of the cloud. We were doing R&D and patents and research in the cloud before the term cloud existed. And once the cloud phenomena took off, we had assets and architectures that we turned into the Accenture cloud platform, which has made us a leader in the multi-billion dollar, built a multi-billion dollar business in the cloud market. So that's an example of research and idea and early patents going to scale business for Accenture. And that's research to results that we talk about and what makes a difference in our business. So talk about AI. AI is a hot trend, it's a great buzzword. I love AI because it gets young people excited about software. IoT is a little bit more boring than AI, but AI is augmented intelligence, it's also a little bit of artificial intelligence. Look no further than a test load, no further than some of these cool things. How's AI impacting your world? AI is massive. I would say AI is the biggest single innovation and the most disruptive innovation of the information age to date. And it probably the biggest impact on how we work and live since the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago, that started a couple hundred years ago. So AI is a big impact and we're just at the start of it. That's kind of a paradox though because AI has been around for 60 years. The term was coined 60 years ago in 1956 at Dartmouth. And it just did it kind of slowly but now we're at the inflection point where we have the computing hardware, the data and the processing power to make it really happen. And so for the next five to 10 and 20 years, it's all about applying intelligence to augment the way we as people work and live and really create new opportunities to improve the productivity and creativity of humans. That's what we're excited about. It's the perfect innovation storm. You got great compute capability, almost unlimited capacity, software, new developer open source is booming. And now you have STEM. Well, let me, before you get to STEM, let me just make one comment on that. I think the other exciting thing about AI is we've been working with dumb technology for up until this point. Think about the way we interact with our thumbs on a mobile phone. Think about the way you use traditional software in an enterprise on your PC or your screen. We're slaves to dumb technology and the power and potential of AI is to make technology smarter and more human-like and really enhance our ability as humans to use it. That's why it's an exciting era. That's a great perspective from someone who's been in the process business. The classic example is, does the process work for you? Do you work for the process? Yeah. And technology, we don't work for technology. They should work for us. And that's what's changing. That's the inflection point. So now 30 years now, the lot's changed. Currently in Silicon Valley lately, women in the role of women in the industry is certainly important. We're going to be a grace hopper for the fourth year this year. It's part of our women in tech celebration in California this year, covering women in tech. STEM is huge, but also the gender gap is still there. You guys have a pledge to be 50% by 2025 a century as an organization. Labs in particular, getting STEM into technical roles is also a challenge. What do you guys do to address that and what's your personal philosophy? What's your comment about STEM and women in tech? Well, look, the technology industry in general has a gender diversity problem. And we believe in Accenture. We can really set the standard for how to really get to gender equality in the workforce. And that's the commitment we've got with our 50-50 gender diversity pledge by 2025. And we're well on the path to getting there. We're at about 36% or so now. And with the actions we're taking, the formula we've got, I'm confident that we'll get to the 50-50 pledge that we set out there. And it's an imperative for the technology industry, and not just for Accenture, because we won't innovate to the potential of the industry. We won't create the right opportunity if we don't have the right gender balance in the workforce. That's what will lead to the right innovations in this new era where the humanity of how we apply technology, and as you were saying earlier, the flipping the lens on a people-centric view, we need all the perspectives and an equal representation of the population going into the way we develop solutions. That's why it's a priority for us. And we think we can really set a standard for how to apply to the technology industry. It's certainly a topic near and dear to my heart, and our company's heart, want to ask one more question on that as a follow-up. Computer science was always kind of narrow. I'm not saying super narrow, but now it's broadened with analytics. The tech science side is opening up for all the reasons you were just talking about. The AI stuff, it's a broad landscape now for many diverse roles. Can you share your thoughts on where the entry points could be for women, where it's not a man-led culture or new opportunities or new areas, new opportunities to engage, learn. Certainly digital will help that in terms of acquiring knowledge, but in terms of getting into the business, what is the surface area of opportunities? The surface, it's the whole surface area. I think the wrong approach is to think that there are certain roles that are better for women or better for any group to do. There's equal opportunity in all the roles. One stat that's striking to me is the fact that when I graduated from college in 1986, 35% of the graduates were women, 35% in 1986. Today, that number is about 18%. We've gone backwards in the percentage of women graduates from computer science programs, and that's a problem that we need to address. We need to get more women into technology careers. It's about sponsorship, it's about mentorship, it's about having the right role models, and it's about painting the right picture of the opportunity in technology, and one of the organizations I'm involved with is Girls Who Code, where I'm on the board of directors because of our Accenture involvement, because I believe that we need that kind of early involvement with girls to get them on the right paths and make them aware of the right opportunities that we can get them into the pipeline earlier. Congratulations, thanks for doing that, it's great stuff. Personal question, 30 years, you've been in Accenture for a long time, 30 years in the labs now celebrating. What's the coolest thing you've done? You know, the coolest thing is building the fabric of innovation in the company, so what we've done with the labs, creating Accenture Ventures, which is our tool for investing in companies, formalizing our Accenture research capabilities that we now have an innovation fabric that goes from research to our ventures into our labs and the rest of Accenture's business, so we can take innovations like quantum computing and scale it and ramp it right into our business like we're doing today, so that's what's exciting to me is to have created a funnel that we can use to take the early stage innovations and pump them into real impact on our business. And quick, what's happening here tonight? We're here at the 30th labs, here in Silicon Valley, Computer History Museum, Historic Event, Magic, what's the show about today? Yeah, it's all about the past, the present and the future. The past is how we got here with tremendous leaders of Accenture Labs who built the organization to where it is today. The present is what I was just talking about all the opportunity we have, and the future is more exciting than it's ever been. The next 30 years, my only regret is that I'm not 20 years old right now. The next 30 years are going to be even more exciting than the 30 years that I've lived through. And we're in a great place. The Computer History Museum isn't just about the past, it's about the future. I'm on the board of trustees here at the Computer History Museum, and I love the mission of the museum and the way it brings the stories of innovation to life and sets us on the course for the future as well. Well, since you have so much influence, we're going to have to get our genes edited for sequencing so we can actually live longer because that's coming around the corner too. Cheers. I think that's a great idea. Congratulations. Cheers. More coverage here, live in the cube. Accenture Labs, 30 year anniversary. I'm John Furrier with Baldority Chief Technology and Information Officer, great work. Innovation Officer, great work. Congratulations. More coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.