 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS Reinvent 2022. This is the executive summit with the center. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests coming on today, really talking about the future, the role of humans. Radically human is going to be the topic. Paul Dardi, the group chief executive, technology and CTO at Accenture, and Jim Wilson, global managing director of thought leadership and technology research center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE for this conversation around your new hit book. Radically human. Thanks John, it's great to be with you. Great to be present at Reinvent. We've been following you guys for many, many years, now over a decade. You always have the finger on the pulse. As these waves come in, it's really important to understand impact and more than ever, we're kind of in this, I call it the systems thinking revolution that's going on now where things have consequences and machines are now accelerating their role. Developers are beginning the front lines of running companies, seeing a massive shift. This new technology is transforming the business and shaping our future as humans. And so I love the book, very, very strong content, really right on point. What was the motivation for the book? And congratulations, but you know, I noticed you got the structure part one and part two. This book seems to be packing a big punch. What was the motivation and what was some of the background in putting the book together? That's a great question, John. And I'll start and then Jim, my co-author and colleague and partner on this, on the book can join in too. You know, if you step back from the book itself, we'd written a first book called Human Plus Machine, which talked about the, folks, a lot on artificial intelligence and talked about the potential and future of artificial intelligence to create a more human future for us with the Human Plus Machine pairing. And then when we started working on the next book, COVID was kind of the COVID era. COVID came online as we were writing the book. And that was causing really an interesting time in technology for a lot of companies. I mean, think back to what you were doing, you know, once COVID hit, every company became more dependent on technology. Technology was the lifeline. And so Jim and I got interested in what the impacts of that were on companies. And what was different from the first research we had done around our first book. And what we found which was super interesting is that, is that, you know, pre-pandemic, the leading companies, the digital leaders that were applying cloud data AI and related technologies were outperforming others by a factor of two X. And that was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, we redid the research and the gap wide into five X. And I think that's, and that's kind of played a lot into our book. And we talk about that in the opening of our book. And the message there is exactly what you said is technology is not just the lifeline, you know, from the pandemic, but now technology is the heart and soul of how companies are driving innovation, how they're responding to global crises around, you know, inflation, energy, supply chain crisis because of the war in Ukraine, et cetera. And companies need the technology more than ever. And that's what we're writing about in Radically Human. And we're taking a step beyond our previous book to talk about what we believe is next. And it's really cloud data and AI and the metaverse that signal out is three trends that are really driving transformative change for companies. And the first part of the book to your question on the structure talks about the roadmap to that. We talked about the ideas framework, five areas where you need to change your thinking, flip your assumptions on how to apply technology. And then the second part of the book talks about the differentiators that we believe are going to set companies apart as they look to, you know, to implement this technology and transform their companies for the future. Jay, why are you in on this flipping the script, flipping the assumptions? You used a really important word there and that is systems. I think when we think about artificial intelligence and when Paul and I have been out talking to companies, a lot of executives think of AI as kind of a point solution. They don't think about AI in terms of taking a systems approach. So we were trying to address that. All right, if you're going to build a roadmap, a technology roadmap for applying intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, how do you take a holistic systematic view? And that's really the focus of the first section of the book. And then as Paul mentioned, how do you take those systems and really differentiate using your talent, focusing on trust experiences and sustainability? You know, I like how it reads. It's almost like a masterclass book because you kind of set the table. It's like, because people right now are like in the mode of, you know, what's going on around me. Been living through three years of COVID. We're coming out the other side. The world looks radically different. Humans are much more important. Automation is great, but people are finding out that the human's key. But people are trying to figure out, where am I today? So I think the first part really to me hits home, like here's the current situation. And then part two is here's how you can get better. And it's not just about machines, machines, machines and automation, automation, automation. We're seeing examples where the role of the human, the person in society, whether it's individually or as part of a group, are really now key assets in that kind of this new workforce, this new production system or, you know, society. Yeah. And just to take a couple examples from the book and highlight that, I think you're exactly right. That's where you're radically human. You know, the title came from. And, you know, what's happening with technology is that technology itself is becoming more human-like in its capability. I mean, think about the power of the transformer technologies and other things that we're reading about a lot. And, you know, the whole hypothesis or premise of the book, I should say, is that the more human-like the technology is the more radically human, or the more radical the human potential improvement is, the bigger the opportunity, it's pairing the two together rather than, as you said, just looking at the automation or the machine side of it. That's really the radical leap. And one thing Jim and I, you know, talk about, you know, talk about in context of the book is companies really often haven't been radical enough in applying technology to really get the dramatic gains that they can get. Just a couple of examples from the ideas framework. The ideas is each of the ideas framework is the first part of the book, the five areas to flip your assumptions. The I stands for intelligence. And we're talking about more human and less artificial in terms of the intelligence techniques. Things like common sense learning and other techniques that allow you to develop more powerful ways of engaging people and engaging humans in the systems that we built using the kind of systems thinking that Jim mentioned. And you know, things like emotional AI, common sense AI, new techniques, in addition to machine, the big data-driven machine learning techniques which are essential to vision and solving big problems like that. So that's just an example of, you know, how you bring it together and enable that human potential. I love the ideas framework. Go ahead, Jim. I was going to say we've been used to adapting to technology, you know, contorting our fingers to keyboards and so on for a long time. And now we're starting to see that technology is in fact beginning to adapt to us and become more natural in many instances. One point that we make is now in the human technology nexus, in fact, the human is in the Ascended. That's one of the big ideas that we try to put out there in this book. You know, I love the idea of flipping the script, flipping the assumptions but ideas framework is interesting. I for intelligence, D for data, E for expertise, A for architecture, S for strategy. Notice the strategies last. Normally in the old school days, it's like, hey, strategy first and execution. Really kind of interesting, kind of how you guys put that together. It kind of feels like business is becoming agile and iterative in how it's going to be forming. Can you guys, I mean, that's my opinion, but I think, you know, observing how developers are becoming much more part of the app. I mean, if you take digital transformation to his conclusion, the application is the company. It's not a department serving the business. It is the business. Therefore, developers are running the business, so to speak. This is really radical. I mean, this is kind of how I'm seeing it. What's your reaction to that? Do you see similar parallels to this transformation if you take it down to a conclusion and strategy is just what you do after you get the outcomes you need. Is that, can you, what's your reaction to that? Yeah, I think one of the most lasting elements of the book might be that chapter on strategy in my opinion, because you need to think about it differently. The old way of doing strategy is dead. You can't do it the way you used to do it. And that's what we tried to, you know, to lay out with the S and ideas, you know, the strategy. And the subtitle of that chapter is we're all technology companies now. And if you're a technology-driven company, the way you need to think about and every company is becoming, that's what I hear when I talk to these weeks and CEOs and boards is everybody's recognizing the essential role that technology plays. And therefore they need to master technology. Well, you need to think about strategy differently then because of the pace of technology innovation. And so you need to throw out the old way of doing it. We suggest three new archetypes of how to do strategy that I think are really important. It's about continuous strategy in all cases. An example is one of the techniques we talked about forever beta, which is, you know, think about a Tesla or companies that, you know, it's never quite done. They're always improving. And the product is designed to be connected and improving stuff. It changes a lot, you know, the product and the strategy along how you deploy it to consumers changes as you go. And that's an example of a very different approach to strategy that we believe is essential to consider as you look at the future. You know, those multi-month strategy sessions, you know, might play out over two or three quarters are going away and strategy and execution are becoming almost simultaneous these days, as Paul was saying. It's interesting because that's the kind of the trend you're seeing with more data, more automation, but the human plays a much critical role. And just as a side of the Tesla example, you know, it's well-documented. I think I wrote about it in a post just this week that during the Model 3, Elon wanted full automation and had to actually go off script and get the humans back in charge because it wasn't working properly. Now they have a balance. But that brings up the part two, which I like, which is, you know, this human piece of it. You know, we always talk about skills gaps. There's not enough people to do this, that and the other thing. And talent was a big part of that second half, you know, trust, talent, experiences, that's the more the person's role either individually as part of a collective group. Is talent the scarce resource now where that's the goal, that's the key? Because, I mean, it all could point to that in a way. You know, skills gap kind of points to, hey, you know, humans are valuable. In fact, the value is going up if it's properly architected. What's your reactions to that, guys? Because I think, you know, that's something that's not, it's kind of a nuanced point, but it's a feature, not a bug maybe. I don't know, what's your thoughts? Yeah, it's, go ahead, Jim. I was going to say it, you know, we're dramatically underestimating the amount of focus we need to put on talent. That's why we start off that second part of the book, you know, really zooming in on talent. I think, you know, you might think that for every, you know, $100 that you put into a technology initiative, you know, you might put 50 or 75 into reskilling initiatives to really compliment that. But what we're seeing is companies need to be much more revolutionary in their focus on talent. We saw an economic analysis recently that pointed out that for every $1 you spend on technology, you're likely going to need to spend about $9 on intangible human capital. That means, you know, on talent, on getting the best talent, on reskilling, and on changing processes and work tasks. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done really that's human focus. It's not just about adopting the technology. Certainly the technology is critical, but we're underestimating the amount of focus that needs to go into the talent factors. That's a huge point. I think some of the elements of talent that become really critical that we talked about in the book are becoming a talent creator. We believe that the successful companies of the future are going to be able not just to post a job opening and hire people in because there's not going to be enough. And a lot of the jobs that companies are creating don't exist because the technology is changing so fast. So companies that succeed are going to know how to create talent, bring in people of predestines and such and shape the talent as they go. We're doing a significant amount of that in our own company. You're going to be learning-based organizations where you'll differentiate, you'll get the best employees if you provide better learning environments because that's what employees want. And then democratizing access to technology, things like Amazon's Honeycoat as an example, your low-code, no-code development, spread development to wider pools. Those types of things are really critical going forward to really unlock the talent potential. And really what you end up with is yeah, the human talent's important, but it's magnified and multiplied by the power of people, giving them essence superpowers and using technology in new ways. I think you nailed it. That's super important. That point about the force multiplier when you put things in combination with its group constructs, two pizza teams flexing, leveraging the talent. I mean, this is kind of a new configuration. You guys are nailing it there. I love that piece. And I think groups and collectives, you're going to start to see a lot more of that. But again, with talent comes trust when you start to have these kind of ephemeral and or forming groups that are forming production systems or experiences. So trust comes up a lot. You guys see the metaverse as an important part there. Obviously metaverse is a pretext to the virtual world where we're going to start to create these group experiences and create new force multipliers. How does the metaverse play into this new radically human world? And what does it mean for the future of business? I think the metaverse is radically kind of misunderstood to use a word title, word about when we're out of the title of our book. And we believe that the metaverse does have real big potential, massive potential. And I think it'll transform the way we think about digital more so than we've changed our thinking on digital in the last 10 years. So that's the potential of the metaverse, not just about the consumer things. It's about metaverse in the enterprise. It's about the new products you create using distributed ledger and other technologies. And it's about the industrial metaverse of how you bring digital twins and augmented workers online in different ways. And so I believe that it has tremendous potential. We write about that in the book and it really takes radically human to another level. And one way to think about this is cloud is really becoming the operating system of business. You have to build your enterprise around the cloud as you go forward. That's going to shape the way you do business. AI becomes the insight and intelligence of how you work infused with the human talents and such as we said. And the metaverse then reshapes the experience layers. You have cloud, AI building on top of this metaverse providing a new way to generate experiences for employees, citizens, consumers, et cetera. And that's the way it unfolds. But trust becomes more important because just as AI raise new questions around trust, every technology raises new questions around trust. The metaverse raises a whole new set of questions. And in the book, we outline a five part framework or five essential parts of the framework around how you establish trust as you implement these new technologies. Yeah, we're seeing that about three quarters of companies are really trying to figure out trust, certainly with issues like the metaverse more broadly across their IT. So they're focusing on security and privacy, transparency, especially when you're talking about AI systems, explainability. One of the more surprising things that we learned when doing the book, when we're doing the research is that we saw that increasingly consumers and employees want systems to be informed by kind of a sense of humanity. So one company that we've been looking at that's been developing autonomous vehicles, self-driving car systems, they're actually training the system by emulating human behavior. So kind of turning the cameras on test drivers to see how they learn and then train the AI, kind of using that sense of humanity because the other drivers on the road find human behavior more trustworthy. And similarly, that system is also using explainable AI to actually show which human behaviors that that AI system is learning from. But it's a really interesting innovations kind of happening in that trust space, John. Jim, I think you bring up a great point that's worth talking more about because you're talking about how human behaviors are being put into the design of new things like machines or software. And we're living in this era of cloud scale, which is compressing this transformation timeline. And we've been calling it super cloud, some call it multi-cloud, but it's really a new thing happening where you're seeing an acceleration of the transformation. We think it's going to happen much faster in the next five to 10 years. And so that means these new things are emerging, not just, hey, I'm running a virtual event with Chad and some video, you know, it's group behavior, it's groups convening, talking, getting things done, you know, debating, doing things differently. And so this idea of humans informing design decisions or software with low code, no code. This completely changes strategy. I mean, this is a big point of the book. Yeah, and I go back to, you know, one of the, the E and the ideas framework is expertise. And we talk about, you know, from machine learning to machine teaching, which is exactly that. You know, machine learning is, you know, maybe humans tag data and stuff and feed into algorithm. Machine teaching is how do you really leverage the human expertise in the systems that you develop with AI? One of the examples we give is one of the, the large consumer platforms that uses human designers to give the system a sense of aesthetic design and product design, a very difficult thing, especially with changing fashion interest and everything else to encode in algorithms and to even have AI do, even if you have fast amounts of data, but with the right human insight and human expertise injected and you can create, you know, amazing new capability that responds to consumers in a much more powerful way. And that's an example of what you just said, John, of bringing the two together. Yeah, what's interesting is I want to get your thoughts as we get wrap up here soon. How do you apply all these human-centric technologies to the future of business? As you guys talk to leaders in the enterprise of their businesses, as they look at the horizon, they see the future, they got to start thinking about things like genera of AI and how they can bring some of these technologies to the table where, you know, we were talking about if open source continues to grow the way it's going, there might not be any code to write it. It just writes itself at some point. So you got supply chain issues with security. These are new things. You guys are hitting on this in the book where these are new dynamics, new power dynamics in how things get built. So if you're a business owner and leader, this is a new opportunity, a challenge, certainly, that is an opportunity. How do you apply all this stuff for business? No, I'll go first than Jim Kanade. But the first thing I think starts with recognizing the role that technology does like and investing accordingly in it. So the right technology talent, you know, rethinking the way you do strategy as we talked about earlier and recognizing how you need to build a foundation. That's why, you know, the fact you're at re-invent is so important because companies are, you know, again, rebuilding that operating system of their business in the cloud. And you need that, you know, as the foundation to go forward to do, you know, to build the other types of capabilities. And then I think it's developing those talent systems as well. You know, do you have the right talent brand? Are you attracting the right employees? Are you developing them in the right ways that you have the right future talent going forward? And then you marry the two together and that's what gives you the radically human formula. Yeah, when, you know, when we were developing that first part of the book, Paul and I did quite a bit of research and this was just, and Paul kind of alluded to that research earlier. But one of the things that we saw in really the first year of the pandemic was that there was a lot of first time adoption of intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence. You know, one statistic is that 70% of there was a, there was a, of companies that had never tried AI before went ahead and tried it during the pandemic. So first time adoption rates were way up. But the thing is companies are not, or we're not trying to do it themselves and to, you know, to necessarily, you know, build an AI department, they were partnering. And it's really important to find a partner off of a cloud partner as a way to get started, start small scale and then scale up doing experiments. So that was one of the key insights that we had. You don't need to do it all yourself. If you see the transformation of just AWS, we're here at re-invent, just since we've been covering the events since 2013, every year there's been kind of a thematic thing. It was, you know, startups, the enterprise, now builders and now change your company. This year it's continuing that same thing where you're starting to see new things happen. It's not just lift and shift and running a SaaS application on the cloud. People are changing and refactoring and re-platforming categorical applications in for this new era. And, you know, we're calling it super cloud, super services, super apps, because they're different. They're doing different things and leveraging large scale CAPEX, large scale talent pools or talent pools in certain ways. So this is real. Something's happening here. And, you know, we've been talking about it a lot lately. So I have to ask you guys, how does the company know if they're radical enough? Like, what is radical? How can I put a pin in that? Can I take a temperature? Are we like radical enough? What some tell signs can you guys share for companies that are really leaning into this new next inflection point? Because there are new things happening. How do you know if you're pushing the envelope radical enough to take advantage? Yeah, I think, Yeah, I was going to say, one of the tests is, is, you know, the impact on your business. You have to start by looking at all this in the context of your business. It isn't really taking you to another level. You said it perfectly, John. It used to be, we used to talk about migration and workloads to the cloud and things like that. Yeah, that's still something you need to do. But now our focus, you know, with a lot of our customers is on, how do you innovate and grow your business in the cloud? What's the platform that you're using for the new digital products and services you're offering to your consumers? I mean, it is the business. And I think that's the test of what you've been radical enough, is on the one hand, is this really, are you really using the technology to drive differentiation in real growth and change in your business? And are you equipping people, your human talent with the capabilities they need to perform in very different ways? And those are the two tests that I would give. Totally agree. You know, interesting enough, we love this topic and guys, again, the book is spot on, very packs of big punch on content, but very relevant in today. And I think, you know, one of the things we were looking at is that people who do things differently, take advantage of some of these radical approaches like ideas, your framework, and understand where they are and what's available and what's coming around the corner, they stand out in the pack or create new business opportunities because the CapEx has taken care of, you know, you got your cloud, I mean, you're building clouds on top of clouds or something's happening. You can, I think you see it, like companies like Snowflake, it's a data warehouse on the cloud. What does that mean? They didn't build a cloud, they used Amazon. So you're starting to see these new things pop up. Yeah, and that's a good example. And it sounds like a simple thing, data warehouse in the cloud, but the new business capability that a technology like that allows the portability to be able to connect and use data across cloud environments and such is tremendously powerful. And I think that's why you talk about companies doing things differently. That's why it's great, again, that you're at re-invent. If you look in the index of our book, you'll see AWS mentioned a number of times because we tell a lot of customer and company stories about how they're leveraging AWS capabilities in cloud and AI to really do transformative things in their business. And I think that's what it's all about. Yeah, and one of the things too, in the book, it's great because it has kind of the systems thinking, it's got really relevant information, but you guys have seen the movie before, I think one of the wild cards in this era is global. We're a global economy, you got regions, you got data sovereignty, you're seeing all kinds of new things emerging, thoughts on the global impact because you take your book and you overlay that to business, you got to operate all over the world as a human issue, it's a geography issue. What's your guys take on the global impact? Well, that's why the kind of thing about cloud is one technology we talked about in the book and cloud is, I think a lot of people think, well, cloud, it's almost old news maybe, it's been around for a while, as you said you've been going to re-invent since 2013. Cloud is really just getting started and it's because the reasons you said, when you look at what do you need to do around sovereign cloud capability? If you're in Europe, for many companies, it's about multi-cloud capabilities that need to deploy differently in different regions and they need to, in some cases, for good reason, they have hybrid cloud capability that they match on their own and then there's the edge capability which comes into play in different ways and the architecture becomes very complex. We talk about the A and ideas as architecture, we talk about all this and how you need to move from the old conception of architecture which was more static and just modularity was kind of the key thing you thought about some more of the idea of a living system, a living architecture that's expanding and it's much more dynamic and I think that's the way you need to think about it as you manage the global environment today with the pace of technology advancement. You know, the innovation is here, it's not stopping, how do you create some de facto standards while not stunting the innovation is going to be a big discussion as these new flipped assumptions start to generate more activity. It's going to be very interesting to watch. Gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time here on theCUBE as we break down your new book, Radically Human and how business leads can flip the script on their business assumptions and put ideas and actions to work. This is a big part of the cloud show at Reinvent. Thanks so much for sharing and congratulations on a great book. You know, thanks John. And just one point I'd add is that one of the things we do talk about in talent is the need to reskill talent. You know, people who need to be relevant to the rapidly changing future. And that's one area where I think we all as institutions, as communities and individuals need to do more is to help those who need the reskilling. The final point I mentioned is that we mentioned at the end of the book that all proceeds from the book are being donated to not NGOs and nonprofits that are focused on reskilling those who need the skill refresh and light the radically human new change in technology that's happening. Great, buy the book. Proceeds go to a great cause and it's a very relevant book. If you're in the middle of this big way that's coming, this is a great book as a guidepost and also give you some great ideas to reset and re-flip the scripts, refactor, re-platform. Guys, thanks for coming on and sharing. Really appreciate it. Again, congratulations. Thanks John, great discussion. Okay, you're watching theCUBE here covering the executive forum here at AWS Reinvent 20. I'm John Furrier, your host with Accenture. Thanks for watching.