 From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture TechVision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Salesforce Tower, 33rd floor, brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. Five stories here in the building. Did the ribbon cutting this morning and we're really excited to have our next guest. It's been on many times. I think the first time in 2013, fresh off the plane from Davos, Paul, they're already great to see you. It's great to be here, Jeff, and thanks for joining us at this event. It's a really big day for us. Absolutely, and I didn't get your title and I get chief technology and innovation officer. You're really at kind of the forefront. So let's jump into the tech vision. This is something you guys do every year. You pick five kind of big trends that we should be taking a look at. There's a lot of detail people can take their time to read through it. But I just want to touch on some of the highlights. What are some of the big changes from when we sat down a year ago? We have five trends this year. The number of trends varies a little bit, but I think the one key takeaway and highlight from the vision this year is this idea, the big idea, that we're entering the post-digital era. And I think many people will be surprised by that. What do you mean? When you said that earlier, it sounded like post or just right in the middle of it, aren't we? Right, but just to contextualize that a little bit, last year, companies spent $1.1 trillion on digital transformation. 94% of companies are doing some stage of digital transformation. 68% of them said they're pretty well set with their digital transformation. They said they're set? They're in good shape. Now, you can question me. Is that surprising? Yes, it's surprising. Okay. And we're not sure that that's entirely representative. But nonetheless, what is true is that every organization is adopting digital. And the question we're asking in the vision is if everybody's doing digital, what's going to differentiate you? And we believe that that's the characteristic of the post-digital environment where what you did leading up to now isn't going to be enough to differentiate you and lead to success in the future. In the post-digital era, it's about some new business concepts about how you shape your business and new technologies and some new corporate obligations that are going to be instrumental in your success as an organization. Right. I want to dig into that a little bit because I think it's a really interesting conversation. At the ribbon cutting this morning, we had representatives from City County, San Francisco, representative from, I think, San Francisco State Academic Institution. And you said in some earlier remarks today that the responsibility for the company has moved beyond stewardship for their customers, stewardship for their employees and their shareholders, but really they got to be active contributors to the community. And that's been called out over the last couple of years, especially in the tech industry, that hey, you can't just do this stuff willy-nilly. You got to take responsibility for what you can do. Yeah, well put. And that's one of the key things that we've been talking about in prior visions, if you recall. This year it's a big theme. The importance of this is it's not just because it feels good. It's not just because you want to create good headlines. It's instrumental to your business success, to be responsible, to create trust with your workers, employees, consumers, and citizens, and people in the communities you live in. And I'll explain why. What's happening is we're creating increasingly intimate technology enabled experiences for consumers. Think about implantable medical devices to prevent epileptic seizures. Think about the monitoring devices we use. Think about the information that's collected on us. There's people swipe on Tinder 1.1 million times per second. 3.7 million Google searches per second. 178 million emails per second. 266,000 hours of Netflix tracking every pause, play, fast forward, yeah, per second. 266,000 hours. There's so much information collected on us out there. Our information is being used in so many different ways. And the technology is enabling companies to create individualized services for you that are great for consumers, but they're only going to be great if companies build a trust with their customers to get that data from them. And if they honor the boundaries of responsibility to make sure they can sustain those products and services. But Paul, you scare me to death because every day we hear this breach, that breach, this breach, that breach. So it's almost now. 3 billion identities in 2018 alone. So that's half the world, right? Yeah. So it's almost like, okay, that's going to happen. And now that you're getting all this additional information, now you can tie the information from my phone that I'm taking eight trips to 7-Eleven a day and spending way too much time on my couch, not moving around, and how those things are going to tie together. One, for kind of the ethics of how the information is used when they have it. And two, it is probably going to get breached. And then, an amazing concept you talked about earlier today, you know, a digital twin. We hear about it from GE all the time for a jet engine, but they have a digital twin of me in some database. That's, you know, it's with everything, right? There's a good side and a scary side. There is, but I think this is where the idea of trust becomes, you know, becomes very important. And we need to think about, companies need to think about these services and their consumers in different ways. A lot of people, including myself in the past, have used phrases like, data is the new oil. Data is the gold of, you know, artificial intelligence, this digital age we're living in. I think that's dead wrong. And we've got to change the mindset. Data isn't fuel or gold. Each piece of data is a fragment of a person and represents a part of a person's activity and identity. And I think if you change your thinking that way, and if you take a view that it's not all about, you know, optimizing the use of data, but it's about carefully using data in the right way that builds trust and provides value for the consumer, and you get that equitable exchange of value, that's what the future's all about. Right. So one of the topics, and again, we don't have time to go through all of them here, and you're going to give a presentation later, is kind of just the whole machine and human interaction and how that's evolving. And specifically I want to ask in terms of the work world, we hear about RPA and everybody should have their own bots and you know, you can have bionic legs so that you don't hurt your back if you're doing lifting. So as you guys kind of look at how these things are melding, it's going to be an interesting combination of people with machines that are going to enable this kind of next gen of work. Yeah, no, it'll be interesting, I think the important thing that we need to really think about is that like anything else, all these technologies are being designed by us, and we're deciding how to use them, we're deciding the principles around it. So this is about how do we design the world we want, which it gets back to the theme around responsibility and such, and if you look at it, we find that workers are actually optimistic about the technology, two thirds of workers are positive and optimistic about how all this technology is going to improve their job and increase career prospects, but only half of those workers believe that their companies are going to provide them with the right training and learning. And what we're talking about in the human plus trend in here, the human plus worker trend is that it's not a nice to have for companies to provide learning platforms and train their employees, it's critical to their success because the jobs are changing so fast, roles are changing so fast, that if you as a company don't invest in a learning platform to continuously advance your people to fill the new jobs as they're being redefined every day, you as a company are going to get left behind and that's what we're talking about in the human plus trend of the vision. Right. Another thing we hear all the time in terms of how technology's advancing on accelerating curves and people aren't so good at accelerating curves, but very specifically how no one person in one particular industry really has visibility as to what's happening in all these tangential, you know, what's happening in healthcare, what's happening in drugs, what's happening in logistics, you know, I'm in the media business, I don't know, you guys are really sitting in an interesting cappard seat because you can see the transformation and the impacts of technology across this huge front and it's that movement across that front which is really accelerating. It is. It's saying way faster than people realize I think. Yeah it is and it's a great position to be able to look across like that and the thing I'd say though is that unlike other areas of technology earlier, we're seeing remarkably broad industry adoption of these concepts, it's a little different in each industry as you just said, but every industry is looking at this and the interesting thing to me is one of the most common requests that I get from CEOs and from the C-suite is, you know, they want to pull together a workshop and they want to talk about their strategy where they're going and very often, more often than not now, they're saying and I want to hear from people outside my industry, I want to hear what's happening over there and if I'm in insurance, I want to hear what's happening in retail or, you know, they want to hear about different industries because they understand that the change is happening differently. They want to make sure they're not missing a pattern that they could apply in their own industry. Right, so last question before I let you go, you're speaking all the time, you're talking to customers, you go to cool shows like Davos, what does the innovation hub and these resources enable you to do with the clients that you couldn't do as we sit here in this beautiful new facility? Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we've worked on really hard over the last four or five years, it's creating what we call our innovation architecture and it's, we think a unique way of putting together capability from research and thought leadership to our Accenture Ventures, which is our venture capital investing arm, to Accenture Labs, which is our R&D and inventors, to our studios where we co-create with clients, to our industry professionals, the 2,000 people here in Northern California that are working with our clients every day and we can put all that together to turn the idea, you know, the research into results very quickly for our clients and I don't think anybody can do it in the same way we can by collocating all this and by the sheer investment we put into this. We invest over 800 million dollars a year in research and development, over a billion dollars a year in training for our people and that results in things like 6,500, 6,500 patents that we generate more than anybody else in our sector and 1,400 of those come from our people right here in the San Francisco Innovation Hub so it's an amazing place for innovation right here. All right, well Paul, thanks again for taking a few minutes, I know it's a busy day, you're getting ready to go present the findings for people, where should they go to to learn more about the tech vision? Go to Accenture.com, Accenture.com slash tech vision I think at midnight tonight Pacific time it'll be out there but by the time they see this they'll probably have access to it, thanks. All right, well Paul, thanks for taking a minute and good luck tonight. Always fun, thanks Paul. He's Paul, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE with the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watching.