 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 brand-newly opened Salesforce Tower, the 33rd floor, the middle of the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub. We're excited to have our next guest who's been part of the Innovation Labs and the Innovation Hubs, and a lot of innovation at Accenture for years and years and years. We've seen him before. We were at the 30th anniversary. I think last year, all the way from Paris, he's Mark Carell-Billiard. He's a senior managing director for Accenture Labs. Mark, great to see you again. Great to see you, Jeff, again, as well. So, what do you think of the new space here? I love it. I just love it. I mean, just like, and I saw it like building and everything and now it's really, and we opened it today. I mean, it's just like amazing. The stairs. Did you see the stairs? I saw the stairs. The stairs, really amazing. Everything is good there. I mean, I think it's not an office like Paul said. Paul already said. It's really something better. It's a tool for explaining what is innovation or architecture at play. I mean, how we use it. How we connect the labs with the liquid studio, all the ventures, everything, that's great. But now it's all brought together, right? Because you had a couple of satellite locations in the period that are now all together. Yeah, and I think that was the story of putting all this stuff in one, we called the Innovation Hub. And so putting everything in the same building and have different floors where we can address different talking with our clients. Are we talking about research? Are we talking about more prototyping? Are we talking about, I mean, at the end it's all about driving innovation at scale. So we're here for the technology vision. We are. Which will be in a little bit. Paul and the team will present. You will. Five new trends for 2018. One of the ones they call this dark, D-A-R-Q. Which is distributed ledger technology, formerly known as blockchain, but we don't want to call it blockchain. AI, extended reality, which is every kind of form, extended, augmented, mix-religion, everything, and quantum computer. So from the last point of view, from an essential kind of innovation, looking forward and inventing the future, as you like to say, which I think is a great tagline. What are some of your priorities going forward now that you've got this great new space, which is one of what I think 11 in the United States, right? So my priorities are all of them. I mean, all of the above, all of the above. Because I was just like, you remember at the time, we were talking about smack, like social mobility. There was analytics and cloud. I would say that dark is the new smack. So we saw that basically that technology has evolved, you know? And like from analytics, we'd like more AI work and everything, but still combine everything. You can still think about like social media, like collaborative stuff. We're going to go through immersive reality, where we're going to continue collaborating. Think about cloud. I mean, just like cloud would bring you hide a throughput computing power through the cloud. Well, I mean, also quantum computing can give you like amazing capability in terms of computing power. So I would say like probably dark is a new smack. And so the lab has been working on it since, I would say, not since day one, but at the very beginning. And so, well, obviously distributed ledger, you know that we have a lab in Sofianity Police. They're really spending a lot of time in the blockchains. And so there's a couple of things that we're doing. I give you a couple of ideas. One is, many people talk about blockchains. And there's bunch of blockchains all over. You know, it's like blockchain for manufacturing. There's blockchain for trade finance. There's blockchain for this and that. Problem is, there's no very good interoperability between those blockchains. One thing that the lab is going to be working is that how we can interoperate between those different blockchains. So you are basically a supply chain. You want to connect particularly to a financial organization how their blockchain will connect to your blockchain. Number one. The second thing we're going to be working on is the smart contract. The lab believe the smart contract is not smart enough. So we're going to add more artificial intelligence in the smart contract to see what we could do better. Think about the smart contract as a store procedure in database. How we make the store procedure a little bit better. I mean, it's just analogy type of things. Well, I'm just thinking of the blockchain conversation. Because I think you have a demo, talking about DHL. Yeah, DHL exactly. But is that logistics and that merchandise moves through their system, as you said. There's a lot of different touch points with a lot of different systems. Well, it's not an aggregated system. It's a problem. And the other thing is you don't necessarily need all the data for each person or transaction all along the line. You're absolutely right. And I talk about interoperability between blockchains. But there's going to be also interoperability between the blockchain that you're implementing and the legacy environment that you have. And this needs to be addressed as well. So a lot of thinking about blockchains. I mean, I've always said for me that blockchain is the digital right management of your future, that kind of protocol. And we're working with companies. They're basically creating movies and stuff like that and how we leverage blockchain to exchange those movies between different parties. I mean, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that we're going to be able to do. So that's blockchain. The default distributed ledger. A, for artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence obviously is something very big in our labs. We have three labs that are dedicated to artificial intelligence. Three. Yeah. Out of seven. One here, San Francisco. The other one in Bangalore. And the third one in Dublin, Ireland. And each of them are covering a little part of the things that we want to do with artificial intelligence. It's all about accelerating the artificial intelligence. So how are we going to think about new infrastructure and new way of doing machine learning using weak labeling? It's all about explainable AI. How are you going to connect the knowledge graph with machine learning so that the probabilistic model will give you an explanation of why they have decided to select, well, this picture or this information and so forth. And then basically the other things that we're going to be working on artificial intelligence is that the human-machine interaction. And one thing that we want to address is what we call the conversational aspect of a virtual agent. If you look at virtual agents, today is voice comment about things. Right, right. You can't really engage in a conversation. I want to look at that and how they're going to understand context, how you're going to be exchanging better and how you're going to flow a better conversation with that. One thing that's going to be very important in everything that we're doing is going back to semantic network, knowledge management, knowledge graph, how we combine knowledge graph with all these machine learning capabilities. That's artificial intelligence in the lab. Then we'll just work down the list, right? Then you've got the ex-reality, right? Whatever kind of reality it is. So we're going to continue doing a lot of stuff related to ex-centered ability, immersive learning. We're going to use that. I think what's going to be important for us is that not to look at ex-centered ability just from a vision standpoint, but try to use the combinatorial effect of every immersive senses that you have. So basically, hearing, also smelling, touching the app tick, and how you combine all those senses to change completely the experience, what you really feel. In fact, if you go to this innovation hub, I don't know if you've seen that we have an... We did, I tell the 360. That's right, the 360, to try to immerse you already in some quantum computing experience. I think it's a good segue also for the quantum. So quantum is that we've been doing a lot of progress with quantum. You know, like two years ago, we started already to work with D-Wave. And then we have worked also with these companies called OneCubit. So we built a software development kit to program the quantum computer. And then we work with Biogen to do drug discovery and changing, basically, the way you do that by accelerating that through quantum computing. But we've continued. I mean, we've announced, basically, some partnership with IBM to look at their platform. We're continuing or working with other interesting platforms like Fujitsu, their Judo and Neelor, and so forth. And what we want to do is that, you know, I mean, Accenture is very very agnostic related to all those vendors. What we want to do is that we want to understand more about how you program those different architecture, how you see what type of problems they can solve, and how best you can program them. And so if we use basically an abstraction layer on top of all this hardware, and then we can program on top of that, this is really cool. This is exactly what we want to do. So how close is it? How close is it to getting the production ready? I mean, you've got it in the new vision for 2019, but, I mean, are people just playing with it, or is it ready for prime time? You know, kind of, where is it? So first of all, on the dark stuff, I mean, all the people, all of our clients that we have, I mean, quantum specifically. Okay, quantum specifically, yeah. So I think we're talking about like three to five years to start to have like real solutions. Right now we have prototype, but we're moving to more pilots, and then I think the solution will come soon. And it sounds like probably in five years time we'll start into a sense thing. Let me give you another idea. It's a matter of magnitude difference in the way that you can compute data. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's gonna change the game. And it's gonna change the game on everything. Let me give you maybe a last example that I'm sure you're gonna love. And it's all about optimization, matchmaking. You know, like our tech vision this year is all about hyper-personalization, like hyper-personalization plus on-demand delivery. And so that's how at the moment, you know, you're gonna change the game, momentary moment, how you're gonna change the reality of people. What are you gonna be able to do? I'm gonna tell you that. Where are we gonna use quantum computing? We're gonna use quantum computing to do a better matchmaking between a person who's waiting for an organ and an organ that you can transplant to this person. And the moment is the accident that happens on the street. Right, right. There is gonna be someone basically dying on the street, so someone dead, and then you need basically to get this organ. It could be a kidney, for example. Every organ has a time-lapse that you can use basically to transport that to someone else. Now the question is that you have the organ, it's in basically ice cubes environments like box. Right, right, right. And then you transplant that to someone. You have like few hours to figure out who are the best receiver. And this is hyper-personization because you need to understand the variable of all the body that is gonna receive that, but all the variables of the organ. Until now it was all mainframe to the matchmaking. Right, right. We are re-syncing that using quantum computing. It's just wild. You know, what cloud really enabled the concept, right? If you had infinite compute, infinite store, and infinite networking at basically free, right? Asymptotically approaching free, what would you build? And that's a very different way to think about problems. Not only will we build some amazing thing, but I think we would change the reality of every people. Every people will have their own reality. They could use product and service the way they want it. I mean, this would be a completely different, not a world, but like a game set that would be completely different, I think. Well, Mark, we're almost out of time and I just want to ask you about Pierre. Former CEO of Accenture passed away recently and I was really struck by the LinkedIn messages. So many people, you know, I follow you, I follow Paul, a lot of people post it. What a special man and what an impact he had. It sounds really personally with most of the leadership here at Accenture. I wonder if he could share a few thoughts. Well, obviously, I mean, everyone has been very sad that we lost Pierre. I mean, it was just an emerging person. What I said is like, he was like really a role model, not only in business, but in life. And he was so fun about, fun of innovations. He loved the labs, he loved, you know, I mean, what we could do and I think he was really thinking about like the better future for the people, better future for the world and everything and it was really amazing for that. And, you know, I mean, it's just like, everyone was struck really, I mean, to see that. But I think there was like so many testimonials pouring from our people, but what I was even more amazed is our clients. He really moved clients. And his visions, I mean, it's an amazing legacy for Accenture and we're gonna, I mean, this is so precious what he left us. And I think that I really want the lab, I mean, just like every day that we're inventing something, I'm always thinking about Pierre and what he would have thought about these things. He was always enthusiastic reading our research paper and everything, so definitely the lab's gonna continue to innovate and I hope that Pierre, wherever he is, will be watching and will be happy with that. All right, well Mark, thanks a lot for taking a few minutes and congratulations on this continual evolution of what you guys are doing with labs and the innovation centers and now the innovation hub here in downtown San Francisco. Thanks, Jeff. All right, he's Mark, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub as part of the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 presentation. Thanks for watching. See you next time.