 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm excited to introduce our next segment. We're going to dig into the intersection of machines and humans and the changing nature of work, worker productivity and the potential of humans. With me is Glenn Finch, who's the Global Managing Partner for Data and AI at IBM. Glenn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Dave, good to be with you. Always a lot of fun to chat. So I'm interested in this concept that you've been working on about amplifying worker potential. You got humans, you got digital workers coming together. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing at that intersection. You know, it's interesting for most of my career. I've always thought about amplifying human worker potential. And, you know, I would say over the last five years, you know, we start to think about this concept of digital workers and amplifying their potential so that human potential can extend even further. What's cool is when we get them both to work together, amplifying digital worker potential, amplifying human worker potential to radically change how service is experienced by an end consumer. I mean, that's really the winner is when you start seeing the end consumer, the end user fundamentally feeling the difference in the experience. I mean, a lot of the, you see a lot of the trade press and the journalists, they like to focus on sort of the negative of automation. But when you talk to people who have implemented things, they take it for example, RPA, they're so happy that they're not have to do these menial tasks anymore. And then it's sort of the interesting discussion is, okay, well, what are you doing with your free time? What are you doing with your weekends? So how should we be thinking about that what you called amplifying human worker potential? What has to occur for that outcome? You know, all my life I've spent time making money for people, right? And this last year I was involved in a project where it fundamentally changed and it's tied to answer that exact question. You know, the servicemen and women in America who are willing to risk their lives for our country, they file claims for medical benefits. And on average, it would take 15 days to get a response. We actually for about 70 or 80% of them, we've taken that down to like 15 minutes. And to do that, you can't just drop in a RPA, you can't just drop in AI. It's not one thing, right? It's this seamless interaction between digital workers and human workers, right? So that a lot of the more routine mundane tasks can be done by AI and robotics, but all of the really hard complex cases that only a human being can adjudicate, that's what the folks that we're doing the more mundane work can go focus on. So I mean, God, that's what makes me come to work every day is if I can change the life of a servicemen or woman that was willing to risk their lives for our country. So that's the concept. Now, the critical piece of what I said, it's not about implementing AI and robotics anymore because a lot of that started to get very rote, but picking up on, okay, we've liberated this block of human capability. How do we reposition it? How do we reskill it? How do we get them to focus on new things? That's just as important. The human change aspect incredibly important. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting because you're right. I mean, the downside you mentioned RPA, a lot of it is paving the cow path and the human in the loop piece has been missing and that's obviously changing, but what about the flip side of that equation where you ask the question, okay, what can humans do that machines can't do that equation continues to evolve? But maybe you could talk about where you've amplified the digital worker potential. Yeah, so one of our clients is Anthem and they've been on a variety of programs with us to talk about this, but we just recorded another session with them for Think where the chief technology officer came and talked about how they wanted to radically change their member experience. And when you think about the last year, I mean, I don't know, Dave, I know you travel a lot because I see you in all the places that I'm in, right? But I don't remember like 15 months ago, if you had to wait on the phone for two minutes, you thought it was an eternity, right? You're like, what's the matter with me? I'm a frequent flier. I deserve a better service on this. And then as COVID started to roll around, those wait times are two hours, and then 30 days into COVID, if you got a callback within two days or two weeks, it was a blessing, right? So all of our expectations changed in an instant, right? So I have to say over the last 12 to 15 months, that's where we've been spending a lot of our time in all of those human contact, human touch places to radically transition the ability to be responsive, to touch people with the same experience that we had 15 months ago to get an answer back in two minutes. You can't get enough people right now to do that. And so we're forced to make sure that the digital experience is what that needs to be. So the digital worker has to be up and on and extending the brand experience in the same way that the human worker was back when everybody could be at a call center. Does that make sense, Dave? Yeah, I mean, I think I like about this conversation, Glenn, is it's not an either or it's not a zero some game, which it kind of, it sort of used to be. I mean, we've talked about this before humans, machines have always replaced humans with certain tasks, but never really a cognitive task. And that's why I think there's a lot of fear out there. But what you're talking about is the potential to amplify both human and digital capabilities. And I think people might look at that and say, well, wait a minute, isn't it a zero some game, but it's not, explain why. Yeah, so we're never finding the zero some game because there is always something for people to do. And so, I talked about the one amplification of digital worker at Anthem. Let me switch to an amplification of a human worker, right? So state of Rhode Island, we had the great honor to work with their governor and their department of health and human services around, again, around the whole COVID thing. We started out just answering basic questions and helping with contact tracing. And then from there, we moved into helping them with their data in AI, being able to answer questions. Why are there hotspots? Why should I shut this portion of the city down? Should I shut bars down? Should I do this? And the governor and the health and human services director were constantly saying on press briefings in the morning, well, we learned from our partners IBM that we want to consider this, right? And we did pinpoint vaccinations and other things like that. To me, that's that whole continuum. So we liberated some people from one spot, they went to work in another spot, all human beings guided by AI. So I think this is all about, for the first time in our lives, being able to realize sort of the vaulted member experience or client experience that everybody's already talked about using a blend of digital workers and human workers. It's just, it's all about the experience, I think. I mean, you're laying out some really good outcomes. You mentioned some of the folks in the military, the healthcare examples. And I'm struck because if you think about, look at the numbers, I mean, the productivity gains over the last 20 years, particularly in US and Europe doesn't, it's not the case for China, I guess the productivity is exploding, but it's gone down. And so when you think about the big problems that we face in society, climate change, income inequality, I mean, these are big, chewy problems that are kind of humans. You just can't throw humans at the problem. That's been proven. And I'm curious as to how you see it in terms of some of those other outcomes of the potential that is there. And can you give us a glimpse as to what tech is involved underneath all this? Sure. So the first one outcomes, that whole picture changes with the business cycle. I'd love to tell you that it's always these three outcomes, but during downturns in business cycles, cost-based outcomes are paramount, because people are thinking about survival. In upticks, people are worried about converting new business growth. They're worried about net promoter score. They're worried about experience score. And then over the last 12 to 18 months, we've seen this whole concept of carbon footprint and sustainability all tied into the outcomes. So, hey, did you realize that shifting these 22 legacy applications from here to the cloud would reduce your carbon footprint by 3%? No, right? And so the big hitters are always the cost metric, the sort of time to value or the whole cycle time of the process and net promoter score. Those are generally in all of the plays. Obviously the bookends around what's happening with the economy, what's happening with carbon, what's happening with sustainability are always in there. Now the technology side, boy, that's the cool part about working for IBM, right? Is that there's a new thing that shows up on my door every two weeks from either the math and science labs or from a new ecosystem partner, right? And that's one of the things that I will say about, over the last 12 to 15 months, you've seen this massive shift from IBM to go away from pure blue to embrace the whole ecosystem. So, Dave, the stuff I work with every day is AI, computer vision, blockchain, automation, quantum, connected operations, not just software robots, but now human robots, digital twin, all these things where we are digitally rendering what used to be a very paper-based legacy, right? So boy, I couldn't be more excited to be a part of that. And then now with the opening up to all the hyperscalers, the Microsoft, the Google, the Amazon, the Salesforce, Adobe, all those folks, it's like a candy store. And quite honestly, my single greatest challenge is to kind of bring all of that together and point it at a series of three or four buyers at a chief marketing officer, experience officer for the whole customer piece, at a chief human resource officer around the talent piece and at a CFO or a chief procurement officer for finance and supply chain. I'm sorry to answer so long-winded, but it's awesome out there. It was a great answer. And I think I joked the other day, Glenn, that Milton Friedman must be turning over his grave because he said the only job of a company is to make profits for shareholders and increase shareholder value. But ironically, things like ESG, sustainability, climate change, they actually make business sense. So it's really not antithetical to Friedman economics necessarily, but it's good business. And I think the other thing that I'm excited about is that there is some deep tech. We're seeing an explosion of something as fundamental as processing power like we've never seen before when he talks about Moore's law being dead. Well, okay, with the doubling of processor performance every 24 months, we're now at a quadrupling when you include GPUs and NPUs and accelerators and all, I mean, that is going to power the next wave of machine intelligence. And that really is exciting. Yeah, I feel blessed every day to come to work that I can amass all these technologies and change how human beings experience service. I mean, that's, man, that whole service experience, that's what I've lived for for two and a half decades in my career is to not just to make and deploy stuff that's cool technically, but to change people's lives. I mean, that's it for me. That's the way that I want to ride. So I couldn't be more excited to do that stuff. Well, Glenn, thanks so much for coming on and your passion shows right through the camera and hopefully we're face to face, sometimes soon, maybe later on this year, but for sure, Lockwood 2022. All right, hey, great to see you. Thank you so much. Dave, same to you. Thanks, have a great rest of the day. All right, thank you. And thanks for following along with our continuing broadcast of IBM Think 2021. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back.