 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage today of NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. Stu Miniman is my co-host for the day and we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time a couple of guests won from NetApp. My former colleague Emily Miller acting VP of brand content and influencer marketing. And one of this morning's keynote, Gerd Leonard, futurist, the CEO of the Futures Agency. I loved Gerd. I loved your keynote this morning. It was very interesting and informative. And I like how you said, you don't predict the future, you observe the future. So Emily, thinking about NetApp, its history, NetApp today and in the future, talk to us a little bit about how this brand has transformed. Not just digitally for IT, but transforming taking the feedback and the really kind of direction from your customers. So if I think about, NetApp's been around for 25 years and we've played a great role in the kind of the storage history, but over the last few years as our customers needs have changed, really having to have data as your design point, how everything is evolving, changing, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, we had to listen to that and knowing that our customers are going to places like AI and deep learning, we have to move there. And so a couple of years ago, we looked at who are we as a company and who are we going to be for the next 25 years? And our purpose now is around how we empower our customers to change the role with data because that is what they are doing. So using a lot of these technologies, some of the things that Gerard talked about this morning, you know, it is happening and so we've got some great customers we're working with where we're able to kind of see that brand promise come to life with things they're doing. And, you know, we're just excited to be able to continue to work with those companies that are pushing the edge because that helps us, you know, be better and be more proactive about the future. When you talk with customers, hashtag data-driven is all over, right? We've been hearing that for a while. What is being data-driven mean to a customer? Because as Gerard talked about on his keynote this morning, you know, there's always that conversations that we hear all the time on the hub of ethics. When you talk about enabling customers to be data-driven and developing a data strategy, how do they internalize that and actually work with NetApp to execute? So we really see it as putting data at the heart of your business. It is that, you know, that life-blood. It has to be centered around that and then thinking about, you know, data fabric. It's really the strategy and the approach. So how do you envision how data from all over, you know, all parts of your organization are able to be leveraged? You get the access and the insights and you can utilize it. You don't want it to be, you know, stagnant. You've got to be able to use it to make better decisions, to have that information, those insights at your fingertips, to do the things that have to be done in real time, you know, all the time. So, Gerd, I want to bring you into discussion here. There's certain fear from people in technology. Oh my gosh, my job's going to be replaced. I can be automated. You know, I've gone to shows, talk about, you know, oh hey, humans, you're good at getting things to 95, 96%. You know, I can get perfectly accurate if I let the robots just automate things. You write about, you know, humans versus technology. What's your take? You know, singularity is coming, you're saying. So, are we all out of a job? Well, this is, of course, what I call a reductionism, right? It's the idea that you would have a machine who would do just what I do, exactly what I do for very little money, and then you would have thousands of other machines that do thousands of other things. And the fact is that, I think McKinsey's study says only 5% of all jobs that can be automated can be fully automated. So even a pilot can be automated, but I wouldn't fly an airplane without a pilot. So we still have a pilot. And data scientists can be automated by an AI, yes, but there'll be many things that I need the data science for as a person. So if you take human skills, what I call the andro rhythms, you know, the human things. So passion, ingenuity, design, creativity, negotiation. I think computers may learn that in 100 years, but to really be compassionate, then they have to be alive. And I wouldn't want them to be alive. So I'm saying that, yes, true. I think if you only do routine, like bookkeeping, like low level financial advice, like driving a bus, or yeah, you have to train and relearn, yes. But otherwise I wouldn't be that negative. I think there's also so many new things happening. I mean, 10 years ago, we didn't have social media managers. And now we got what, 30 million. So I'm not that dark on the future there. Well, I'm glad. You actually, you gave a great quote from Albert Einstein talking about that really imagination is infinite as opposed to knowledge is kind of contained. NetApp talks a lot about being data driven. You gave the Jeff Bezos example of, I need to listen to it, but there's heart and there's kind of history. There's another great line from Jeff Bezos is, there is no compression algorithm for experience. So how do we as humans balance that, humanity and the data and the numbers? Well, the reality is, we don't live in a binary world. When we look at technology, it's always about yes, no, yes, no, zero, one. That's what machines do. We don't do that. Humans are what called multinary, which is essentially, to us, a lot more things matter than yes or no. Like it depends, it may be, it may change, and so on. So if we just look at that and say it's going to be data or humans, we have to pick one of the two. And that would be a rather strange suggestion. I think we need to say that sometimes data, sometimes human, but we have to keep the humans in the loop. That's my key phrase. And I would say, I feel like that's really our opportunity as humans is to decide where is the value, where is the layer of value that we add on. You know, again, kind of thinking back to NetApp's history, we're moving from storage to data. We are evolving, like we have to add value at a higher level for our customers. And what was something that maybe we did as humans advising like, that's automated now. Like think of the demo we saw this morning and now what is that additional layer value that you add on top? Absolutely, as you're both saying, it's not a binary thing. Andy McPhee and Eric from Johnson, from MIT, say it's tracing with the machines that humans plus machines will do way better than either humans or robots alone. I think if you're arguing that we would be in a perfect world, if the machines could run it perfectly, then I would argue that world would be a machine. So it would be perfect, but it wouldn't be human. So what are we getting? It's a bad deal. So I think we need to find a good balance between the two and also carve out things that are not about data. You know, like dating and love relationships, you know, that can be about data, like matching, right? But in the end, the relationship isn't about data. What you even said this morning, it's knowledge is not the same thing as understanding, right? And that's kind of where we are at this crossroads. Emily, let's kind of wrap up with you. You've got some interesting customer examples of how NetApp is helping customers become and live that data-driven life and embrace these emerging technologies like AI. Right, so we have a customer we're working with in Serbia and they are basically kind of digitizing a human to be able to interact from an AI standpoint in terms of having an interactive conversation. And I've seen some of this before with, you know, interviewing, you know, like your grandparents and you can store them and you can interact. And I think what's really exciting is that gives you the opportunity to do something you never could do before. I think to your points this morning, it's how do we make sure we don't lose the richness from those more kind of offline experiences so that they are complementary? You know, if we, you know, as we kind of expand and do things that, you know, we couldn't think about that, you know, that we didn't, we couldn't envision or imagine. And I think that's about being a data visionary. Like the people, the companies like Three Lateral, like we've seen today on, you know, Wushi Next Code on stage, the data visionaries are those who are saying how can data transform my, you know, not just my company, but my industry, my category and how do I really think about it completely differently? It's an exciting time, Emily Gurd. Thank you so much. I wish we had more time to chat with you guys, but we appreciate you stopping by the Cube and sharing your insights. Right, thank you. You're welcome. Insight, pun intended. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are with theCUBE live all day at NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.