 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM World of Watson 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for theCUBE as part of the World of Watson coverage. Just looking at angle media, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're pleased to have two super influencers, VIP influencers here on theCUBE. Tamara McLeary is the CEO of Thelium. Thelium. I'm a geek, right? So it's Thulium. It's on the periodic table of ours. Thulium with my eyes checked there. And Chris Penn, VP of Marketing Technology at Shift Communications. Both have great backgrounds. Chris, we knew each other when you started pod camp. I would do pod tech and the podcasting days kind of evolved, but you've been on the social side really from day one on the ground floor President of Creation. Now you're starting to see a whole other thing going on. Tamara, you have a variety of diverse experience. Being a geek, being in healthcare, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. So as part of the VIP influencer program, you guys get flown in by IBM and you're on your own. So you're out there to obviously high profiles on social. So you have a lot of audience following you guys. But your job is really to align with IBM but amplify what you see. Not being directed, what to say, but to what you guys see. And that's a real positive thing. And so first question is for both of you guys is, what are you seeing? I mean obviously the evolution of IBM and seeing where they've come from. Chris, you've also been part of the practitioner analytics group with Watson from the day one. World's changing. What are you guys seeing? What's happening on the floors? So what we're seeing now is an evolution from, think about companies having a sort of five part structure, right? At the bottom, they're data resistant. No, no data. Just do things we've always done it. And then they become data aware. Hey, there's this thing called data. Then it becomes sort of data curious. What does it mean? What happened? They become data guided. Like, okay, why did those things happen? What insights can we gather? And eventually they become data driven. They become a data driven company where we say, you don't show up at this meeting unless you bring coffee, donuts, and data. And what's happening at IBM World of Watson is that these companies who are now data aware and maybe data curious are express elevated up the hierarchy because of tools like Watson Analytics that give you the ability to give analysis skills to non-analysts. People who, like you say to somebody, hey, would you go over at lunch? Can you just go run a quick analysis of variance on this thing? Most people are going to go, nope. I'm going to do that. Too much time, hassle. Yeah. My data guy's on vacation. Don't know how to do it. Yeah, they'll say, what are you talking about? So we're seeing that evolution happen with analytics, but what's even more impressive that we've been seeing on the floor is IBM is making it easier for companies to actually work with the data itself without a huge IT and data science team. I just sat through a session on Bluemix Connect and the ability to just pick up entire data sets, move them, clean them in transit, and then drop them off on the user's lap will completely change how we manage data because right now, think about social media, right? How much is there in the Twitter API that's about 250 fields in the API I'd give or take? That's a pain to clean. And yes, the distant tools can do it, but if you now have these tools that can clean it, scrub it, get it ready for you, and it just shows up on your desk in a pre-contained format, why wouldn't you do that all day every day? Yeah, it can manipulate. It becomes part of the code. It's part of the programming, part of the execution. It's beyond code. That's the thing that's important is it's beyond the technical users. Now to the business user, you have this thing. John, you don't need to write code to have this thing. You can have that visualization on your desk in the morning. And they tell that citizen analyst is the buzzword that they use, but basically it's push-button-like reporting with all this intelligence. And Watson brings this automation, and I don't want to say AI, it's not true AI, but it's a vector to AI. Tamara, you're seeing that, right? I mean, you're seeing what it could be even early days now, but it's still good now compared to what it was a year ago. I think to Chris's point, what I think is exciting this year is we're seeing a lot of practical applications versus talking about cognitive. How long have we been talking about cognitive computing but not seeing the actual use cases, the practical use? And to your point, Chris, is you have marketers who now have to be technologists or at least tech savvy, and then you have the IT department that's trying to keep up with being consumer-centric. And now we have things through the conversational pieces where you don't have to be a technologist to write code to use that interface. So that conversational interface is pretty exciting because I think from the IT standpoint in an organization is you can hand it back to marketing and go, okay, you fill in all the blanks and then you can hand it back so that my team is strapped doing everything. I didn't get some dings on the marketplace on Watson not being ready. And when they showed it initially, and they were clear about that. They weren't saying that, and it did get a little bit hype, it did win Jeopardy, so there was a buzz there, but they were very clear like, look it, we know there's a lot of work to do and they knew they had to do more work. It's gotten better, so I think this year my takeaway from what you guys are seeing as well is it's real this year. So the reality of what's real is the practical use cases. What are some examples? What are you saying? Well I'm seeing really exciting things in the healthcare arena, such as the partnership with Watson and the Jefferson healthcare system. And it goes beyond looking at cancer patients and Watson being brilliant at figuring out treatment modalities that are very specific to the genomic sequence of a tumor. Instead of like Jefferson healthcare system, what's really cool is Watson taking a very human component and actually being there in a patient's room so that a patient can talk, ask questions, and be answered by Watson. A patient can ask about visiting hours, what time is lunch served to tell me about my doctor. And if you ever are in a patient's room as a guest or a family member or a patient yourself, what you find is that you're in a very vulnerable position. It's incredibly scary. You're not at the hospital because things are great. But to have that human piece, that component that Watson brings through that conversational interface and that dialogue, a chatbot essentially within the patient room, it's I think it's transforming care. Well that's interesting. So in April we had put a post out there about just a story that came out of the woodwork. Watson correctly diagnoses woman's cancer after doctors were stoned. It's got 10,000 shares on Reddit. It's going, went super viral. But that really is the awakening moment, so to speak, where oh my God, this is a real life example of value. I mean you can't get any more valuable than life. I mean, come on. Right. So in this example, Watson is in the room or at least accessible to a patient or a patient's family. So I can ask any question, because you're right. When the doctor's in there firing, you get the fire hose of stuff, you wonder later, did he or she mean this or do they mean this or what exactly did they say? And you try to guess. And what is accomplishing is you're really ministering to that individual to support them and have them feel cared for. But you're also decreasing a lot of load on your staff. So usually they're interrupted to answer these questions or to change the TV channel or do the things that they don't necessarily need to be doing as healthcare professionals, right? So you're also decreasing the load on staff by having Watson present in that way. And John, to your point with that case of the woman, I think that Watson is democratizing healthcare across the entire population so that you no longer is your level of care or treatment plan going to be dependent on your socioeconomic status and whether or not you could hire the best doctor or go to the best hospital. With Watson, Watson would be able to figure out your best treatment plan that your physician can carry out and it won't matter. You have the best of the best and it's not dependent on your financial status. Well also on that socioeconomically, that's a huge deal and I'll tell you that one thing is you could put Watson out in the field as close to the edge as possible to augment maybe potentially the talent level of the doctor. Or where there aren't doctors at all. That's the key is for low income areas. You will have places where Watson can be that first line of defense. Like hey, the other thing that's interesting kind of goes back to the self-driving cars yesterday. When a human makes a mistake, that human learns from it, right? That's great. When Watson makes a mistake, every instance of Watson now knows how to fix that. So, Tamara may be seeing a doctor of an instance of Watson, it misdiagnoses something, but if I have the same thing, it has learned from the mistake and the whole system becomes smarter so it will very rapidly be the smartest doctor on the planet. So, you're an RN. Yes. So I want to go back to this other example of Watson as sort of this in-room assistant. There's also, there's another side to that, which is sometimes you would ask the nurse, like what's really going on? Exactly. What really are my chances? Okay, so can I filter Watson? I mean, what are the ethics of how you communicate to patients? Because a lot of times doctors are told and nurses are told, don't really tell them what the real chances are, just be positive. So how does that all work? I mean, I think that's a great point, Dave, and I think Watson is going to be best harnessed and utilized to take care of the conversations that a patient needs to have that don't require a medical professional. I still think those conversations about what do you think my prognosis is? Am I going to die? Am I okay? Probabilities, I mean, that's what Watson's good at. But that needs to come, that's where that human piece, that's where I think that Watson is there to support and augment physicians and nurses, but not replace them, because we do need that human piece. You need, I mean, Chris, you need someone to talk to you about that piece and not just get it. I trust Watson more. Well, the state of the art today is. You're getting the information from Watson, but Watson, then you're taking it and communicating it human to human with the good data and information that you get from Watson. Right. What other industries, there's a chat going on with the IBM mobile team right now, and the question I'll ask you guys since we're going on social interaction here, it's on crowd chat, what industries do you think would be most impacted by cognitive and how? Anything. And I'll live into it. So think about, you have routine and non-routine tasks, so your routine task, empty this trash can. You also have cognitive and non-cognitive tasks, non-cognitive, empty this trash can. It doesn't require a lot of creativity to do that. What's happening is that these AIs are becoming cognitive so they can create it. There's a great demo here of Watson music, right? And you can put in a few notes and it will infer and interpolate a new song out of that. Where we're going with this is that the machines can already do routine. The machines can already do non-cognitive. Watson has proved we can do cognitive and now Watson is proving we can do non-routine, which means that we have to seriously think about in the next five, 10, 20 years, what are the roles of people doing work? You will still need that doctor to deliver the news, but you may not actually need the doctor to do the diagnosis because the machine can do it better, faster, more accurately, and project better outcomes. All these people here who are doing things like cleaning and emptying trash cans and stuff like that, we may or may not- They're also live streaming, too, on Facebook and live Reparoscopy. Exactly. We may not necessarily need as many of them. Yesterday was a landmark day. Budweiser had moved 45,000 cans of beer from their distribution facility, from their manufacturing plant in Colorado to their distribution facility. Self-guided truck. No human driver. Okay. No drinking and driving. It's Budweiser's first ship, and I couldn't resist that comment. That was the joke last night. No over-containers, bless your Texas. So what can humans do that machines can't? Nothing. In the next five to 10 years. In the next five to 10 years, we will still have creativity. The curiosity. Conversation with each other. We will still, we still need to relate to each other, but when you look much further out, are you familiar with the works of Frederick Engels, kind of going back to the 19th century? A lot of the ideas of things like original socialism was to say, we can get now machines to create this bounty so we can focus on things like art and music and finding out what we're really good at. If you wanted to become a Buddhist monk, it's economically kind of tough to do that these days, but if the machines provide big... It frees you up from the routine stuff that you can focus your creativity and energy on. And this brings up the question I wanted to get in on about the impact to the mobile experience, because now, if you take the connected cars and go back to the connected humans, hence more automation to free up our creativity, what's the impact to the mobile experience? Mobile is, I would say, mobile is the second platform, right? Desktop was the first, mobile's the second. The third one really is augmented reality, and we're seeing that here. Terrible was talking earlier about healthcare examples of where all of these machines are coming together, but that is the third wave. That's a different experience. There's a great booth here, the Watson Analytics booth team has virtual analytics so you can actually step inside your data, wander around and go, I want to see more of that chart. And that's a different experience than mobile itself. Right, and I agree. I think it's moving beyond mobile and into augmented reality. I wonder even if in five years from now we're talking about mobile, I don't know. We may not be. We may have components that we're aware that are inside of us. There's a great exhibit in the real-time streaming of a cardiogram that is connected to a sensor inside a patient. And Watson can say, that is an abnormal heartbeat. And we'll notify the doctor, hey, go check on this patient. Or it might just be, Chris, that you had five cups of coffee, that's entirely possible. The personalization is just incredible. I mean, just the user interface is augmented, certainly virtual reality is going to change in what immersion means, right? You can immerse yourself into any experience. Okay, what's the coolest thing you guys have seen? So you've been, I know you've been, I've been watching the Twitter feed, you guys have been out on the self-driving track out there, a lot of things. There's been all kinds of stuff happening. What's the most exciting things you've seen? The coolest thing. Chris just named the one, which is the embedded sensor into a human being that could actually be life-saving. And it completely cuts out having to do a battery of tests that happen to be randomly on the wrong day and you didn't have that irregular heartbeat and it is VTAC and it will kill you. But because of a sensor now, it's picked up and you stay alive. And I think that's, how much more cool can it get than that? That's cool. I mean, this is the future we're living into. It's like we're living into a science fiction novel and all of us get to play in this space and I just, I'm wild about saving lives, human lives and making human beings in a better place. Can't say that because you already said that, but give me another one. The coolest thing so far has been the integration of Bluemix Data Connect with Watson Analytics. We have all of this data, right? It's everywhere. These tools can now gather it up for us, clean it for us and get it ready for us so it expands the capability of people to make good decisions. Like business analytics is cool, but the ultimate goal is make better decisions. And now what we're seeing are these tools that make it so easy that we should see significantly better decision making by any company that embraces this stuff. So we had Eric Hunter on yesterday, Michelle Palusa, the CMO was on earlier and it was interesting, we were kind of riffing on like, you know, what's going on. And Eric uses this example of it's a two-dimensional world and now a three-dimensional creature comes in, sees different things that changes what people now look at, changes the observation. And this is now bringing into the dimension. So it used to be like we go to the shows, hey, technology intersects with business value outcomes. That's kind of a boring concept now. When you add in social impact and social justice, you now have a third dimension of where this is going to your point. So there's a really important point there. There's a story by ProPublica recently about an algorithm that the police developed for predictive criminality that was heavily biased against African-Americans and completely wrong. It was 20% accurate. So one of the things that the citizen analyst has to be very vigilant about is that we have to watch our machines. We have to know how they're thinking. We have to provide checks and balances to say, hey, you know, this, Katarma, we don't like people who are, you know, wear red scarves. So we're going to bias the machinery against people wearing red scarves. So we need, that's the flip side of this. We've actually been out of theCUBE at Big Data SV, our other event we do in conjunction with Strata is that you need algorithms for algorithms. So there's the QA and the human role part of it. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Good to see you. I would like you guys to suspend a minute each just to kind of describe what you're working on. I know you guys are out. You have your VIP influencers here, but you've got, you're doing all, both doing some work out on your own. Should take a minute to share what you were going to start with you. What are you working on? What's getting you excited these days out in the wild? What's getting me excited is harnessing the power of cognitive computing in the social marketing space. So with social media account-based marketing and learning the patterns and behaviors in that B2B enterprise space when you're looking at selling difficult solutions, how do you reach the right people at the right time on the right channel? And so right now working with cognitive on a better way to do that. Awesome. Chris, what are you working on these days? This is exciting. At Shift Communications, one of the things we're working on is understanding influencers better. So we are using cognitive computing entity and topic, keyword modeling, personality insights, everything that's inside Watson to understand why is an influencer an influencer. So if you look at Tamara, we published a tweet earlier of a network graph. Why is she influencer and who does she influence? These are really important questions and this is not theoretical. This is in production now. Yeah, it's not just the old model of, hey, she's got a lot of followers. It's what's the impact? What's the network effect? What's the interest in the fact? Who influences her? Who exactly? So this is all data driven. Yes. It is. And I think what's nice about that is to your point is that it's actually giving validity to what we're doing. So it's no more vanity metrics. Here's the proof. And it's giving us a more powerful seed at the table. Well, the ROI has always been elusive in socials. It's always gone from that blue sky period of, it's pioneering, but now as it crosses the chasm, it's all about data, value, relevance, context. Yes. The context. ROI is only elusive if you can't measure things. Chris and Tamara, thanks for coming on. Big fans of you guys, great VIP influencer program. Of course theCUBE. We're doing our share to pump out as much content as possible and influence to you guys out there. Go to ibmgo.com to check out all the code. That's our new site. And also go to silkenangle.com and youtube.com slash silkenangle for all the videos. Of course, we're live here in Mandalay Bay. Be right back after this short break.