 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Technician 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high at Top San Francisco, the 33rd floor of the Salesforce building. This is the San Francisco Accenture Innovation Hub. And we're really excited to have our next guest. She runs all the Innovation Hubs and all the Americas. It's Mary Hamilton, the Managing Director of Accenture Labs for Accenture. Great to see you. We saw you last year. Great to see you, yes. It's great to be back. But now you've had this place open for a year. It wasn't the grand, last year was the grand opening, are they? It was, it was. And now we're doing all kinds of crazy new things here in our labs and in the hub. Yeah, that's great. So we talked before that, you know, Paul and Mike and the team, they put together this great vision document. It's very provocative and forward-looking and I think it is actually really thought-provoking. That's great. And we're going to have a nice party here and they're going to present. But how do we get this from this pretty piece of paper into my company or into your clients' companies? How do you and the Innovation Hub help them execute? Yeah, it is my job to bring this to life, right? So it's all about how do I do applied research and how do I do that for our clients in a real way with new and emerging technologies. And so we take all of this vision and say, you know, what are the next round of technologies and how do we think about them in new and different ways and how do we do that? Kind of a sustained, ongoing innovation direction. Right, right. So you guys work with giant companies. They have millions if not billions of R&D budgets. Where do you fit and how do you augment that? What's kind of the value add that your special asset brings to this huge investment that they're already making? Absolutely. So I think what we bring is the combination of everything that's here in this hub. So we've got business research, you know, what are the paradigms and the trends that we're seeing that are shifting society, politics, economics and technology. We've got the technologists that are partnering with universities, partnering with startups, you know, thinking about how we do open innovation. And then how do we actually build that for real? And how do we do it that industry lens? We're so fortunate that, you know, out of the 500,000 people we have here, we have deep, deep industry expertise. So it's really about bringing all those pieces together. And then working with those clients to say, how do we augment? How do we shape your future? How do we figure out what direction to go in, create that roadmap and then together start to turn the crank on innovation from ideation all the way up through scale. And I think that's something pretty unique that we do really well. Right. And is it driven kind of top down from a CEO who says I have an innovation kind of prerogative, go forth and innovate? Or do you see it more kind of with product groups that are trying to potentially go a slightly different direction or incorporate some new technology? How does it actually work? Or what are some of the models that you see that are successful, I guess? Yeah, and I would say yes. All of those. Of course. We do some big strategic things that our CEO and our client CEO come together and say, we're rethinking mobility. We're rethinking how we're going to shape our future. What are extended businesses that we've never thought of before? How do we go from a product to a services company? So there's the big CEO visions that trickle down. We help them through strategy, through innovation, through the technology pieces to deliver that. And then there's also sort of that grassroots lab to lab pairing up and saying, okay, let's create a partnership that you bring kind of the industry lab piece and we'll bring our technology labs and the work that we do and come together to create that relationship. So we've done both. They're getting ready to start their program if you can tell. I got to get a couple more questions. So there's a lot of different types of technology labs that you guys have in here. You've got really cool quantum computing thing upstairs. You've got VR and AR and all these different things. But I know your passion, you talk about it every time I see you, is material science. And I don't think people, because it's kind of under the covers, if you will, really appreciate the science advancements that are happening with material. So when you think of kind of material science, how it's moving and the opportunities that that's opening up, just in the technology of the materials themselves, what gets you excited? What are some of the things that people should know about that maybe they're not paying attention to? Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm excited about it because that was my degree in college and I never thought I would use it here at Accenture. Good lesson for those watching at home. So I used to work in a wet lab and build hydrogels and all kinds of cool. So this has been a journey for me, but what I'm really excited is this is a space that you wouldn't think of Accenture playing in normally. You wouldn't think of us having this expertise, but when you think about the proliferation of sensors that we think about today, material science allows you to start to do some of the same things that we see with sensors and even actuators, but at the molecular level. And we can start to do it at a different scale than what's available today, whether it's at a really small scale or really big scale with coatings, right? Or even paint that start to create really truly interactive connected spaces. So we all talk about IoT and connected spaces and connected buildings and that's great, but imagine if everything is connected, that the walls, the floor, your clothing, and you can start to almost and we have a conversation with the space, right? Have an interaction that's super personalized based on everything that's happening. The environment understands everything that's going on and ideally if we start to apply our research with AI, can start to understand, well, what's your intent? What's the context? And then how do you actually shape and create a super, super personalized experience? So just so people understand what you just said, what makes right understand, that you're talking about like in a coating, so instead of a sensor or mini sensors, the actual coating say inside of a pipe that you're trying to keep track of, the whole coating becomes one big sensor. Exactly. Yeah, that's a pretty big game changer. Yep, yep. And are you seeing the implementation? I mean, what are some of the ones that are actually out in the field today that people probably are rolling over, walking by, touching and have no clue that they're really interacting with material science as opposed to electronics, for instance. It's still pretty early days. So this is why it's in our incubation stage and we're playing with things like skin tattoos, right? You probably, I don't know if you've seen Beyonce's, had those gold leaf tattoos. We can do those same cool tattoos, but make them controllers for your space. Or the Levi's jacket that has the jacquard. We actually now have in-house one of the teams that worked on that. And so we're starting to see in actual clothing, the ability to use that material science conductive thread to create a whole new wave interacting. Just really, really cool. And then we're thinking about, how do you create those advances? If you can use a stretchy polymer that understands when it's being stretched, you can start to apply that to maybe an armband or an elbow brace that for physical therapy understands how much you're bending your arm and are you doing your physical therapy in the right way. So instead of once or twice going into a doctor and checking how are things going, they can have real-time constant updates in a pretty lo-fi way, but it's through these new smart materials. Such cool stuff. Look at the smile. You love this stuff. All right, we got to let you go because they're getting ready to kick off the big day. And I don't want you to get to the kick. So thank you for taking a few minutes and thanks for having us back and congrats to you and the team. Thank you. It's super fun. Thanks for having me. All right, she's Mary. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE the Accenture Tech Innovation 2020 launch. Check it out online. They'll have all the stuff. It'll make you think and thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.