World 2024 Keynote - Saurabh Abhyankar, Chief Product Officer

Welcome to MicroStrategy World 2024. This is actually our second live event in person post-COVID, so it's nice to see all your faces and get together. It's not quite the same over Zoom or Teams or these kinds of things. As some of you might know, last year we introduced this fun little robot called Hackathon, and Hackathon was actually symbolic of our transformation as a company, a company that's more nimble, innovative, fun. And actually, it kind of goes back: it's called Hackathon because we're all engineers at heart, and we want to build great software, we want to move really fast. And as you've probably already seen in the hallways and outside this room, there's a new member of the family this year that we're introducing you to today, and that new member is Auto. Auto quite literally represents the transformation of our product, and so that's really what I'm here to talk to you about today. But it's funny, isn't it? It's sort of ironic that Fong was here for the last half hour talking about looking up and getting out of screens and being more human and interacting at the front line, but I'm here talking about robots and AI and machines and things like this. It seems a bit contradictory, but actually it's not that contradictory if you think about who we are as humans. We are tool builders. For 250,000 years we've been building tools and inventing things to amplify our human abilities, and this is what's allowed us to live longer, connect better around the world, travel globally, trade globally with currency and money. So it's really up to all of us, and that's why I hope you're all here, to take that technology and these brand new innovations like AI and help better humanity and better our frontline workers and our employees along the way. So we've got all this tech, but this is not working. We really need to start with the end user and work our way back to the tech. Steve Jobs said this about a quarter century ago, which is a long time ago, and I think if we're honest with ourselves, in our personal lives things have gotten much more convenient for end users. In the personal world, you can click a button and grab an Uber, click a button and order something, click a button and stream video, click a button and fly to Tokyo later today if that's what you want to do. So our lives have definitely gotten easier and have improved in the personal world, but in the enterprise space we're still struggling, aren't we? I mean, it takes me longer to book travel or do expenses in my enterprise life than it is in my personal life. So we have a long ways to go, and the question then becomes: what's the problem? Why have we not solved this in the enterprise world? We've done a pretty good job of solving this in our personal lives, and it all really comes down to friction. We've got data silos, data in multiple places. We've got users, and I got to tell you, users don't want to learn new tools, they don't want another dashboard, they don't want another thing. And all of this stuff requires maintenance and cost that gets harder and harder for us to deal with. Going back to Fong's keynote about the lifeblood, it's sort of like we've got cholesterol clogging our arteries and things are just not flowing the way that they should. So now we need to figure out how to solve this problem. The truth is we've been trying to solve this problem for the last 20 years, and the current way, by the way, I think is the hard way. The current way is to build new infrastructure, it's like digging up the roads and putting in new pipes and those kinds of things, new data warehouses, new ERP systems. The truth is these are long projects. I was talking to a customer just yesterday, and I won't mention names, and it made me kind of smile. I was like, 'Ah, I can say that in my keynote.' They were talking about how they were consolidating 13 different ERP systems. I said, 'Well, how long have you been doing that?' And they said, 'Three years.' I'm like, 'Wow, that's a long time.' They're like, 'Oh no, we're not done yet.' But that's the reality of trying to bring all this stuff together. So we're here to basically tell you that we think there's a better way. A better way is to actually let your data be where it is, let your applications be where they are. Of course you'll still do digital transformation, you will buy new ERP systems, that's all good. But in addition to doing that, the better way is to kind of fly above and not have to dig. What that means is we believe that you should be able to connect the dots between those applications, leave the apps where they are, let the people do what they want to do, and inject intelligence across those applications, embed it, and connect the dots between the data that you have. In other words, stop digging. So that's what MicroStrategy ONE is really all about. We engineered it to get you there fast. This is why it's cloud native, it is AI first. There's three product pillars on which we've built MicroStrategy ONE: convenience, reliability, and flexibility. So let's have a look at each of those things. What is convenience all about? Convenience is about letting your users work the way they want to work. We put this funny little picture up here because honestly, it's hard enough to get people to even come to the office nowadays, let alone change their behavior and get them to adopt new tools. So let them use the apps that they use, let them use the data that they already have, let them use the devices that they have, and by the way, let them work where they currently work. So that's really what convenience is all about, and we'll show you some things that we're doing in that area. The second is reliability. Fong mentioned a quote from Michael Saylor from 1998, I think it was, about information flowing like water. In fact, fun fact: internally at MicroStrategy, our internal BI system we actually call it Aqueduct. So it's like this strong, reliable way to flow information from one place to another, and hopefully it'll stand the test of time for 2,000 years. But reliability is really about that. If you think about water, imagine going home today, turning on the faucet, and the water not coming out. It would scare you because we're not used to that. Information needs to be just as reliable. If you don't have reliable information, you don't have reliable water, you don't have reliable currency, you don't have reliable energy, then society starts to get a little bit tricky. We believe that information and data is just as critical as any of those other pieces. So we've been doing a lot to make sure that your data is trustworthy, that it can scale. We're not trying to give clean water to just the kings anymore, we're trying to give clean water to everybody and clean data to everybody, so it has to scale. Finally, flexibility. Flexibility is all about your ability to change. If you think about your organizations today, you have whatever number of apps that you have. Maybe you have an Azure strategy or an AWS strategy or a Google strategy, maybe you have an on-premise strategy. But the reality is these things change all the time. A new executive comes along and says, 'Hey, let's go that way.' A new technology gets invented and everyone's like, 'Let's go that way.' So what we really want you to do is to be able to use MicroStrategy in any of these scenarios, to be flexible, to go between our partners, to work across our partners. That's really what MicroStrategy ONE is all about. Over the past year, we've taken what was the potential of GenAI, and I use that word precisely because a year ago GenAI was really just potential. We took the potential of GenAI, brought it into MicroStrategy ONE, and we turned it into reality. Then we wanted to personify that. So today I'm proud to introduce Auto. Auto makes BI human. For the first time ever, we're able to use generative AI to give Auto linguistic skills so it can understand you, and not just understand you in English and in French and in Spanish, understand you in pretty much any language. And it knows who you are because the MicroStrategy side of things knows who you are as a user, knows what data you have access to, knows what context you're in. Auto becomes that good buddy, that little friend that's with you all the time, and it's always there by your side. You all will have a chance to get a physical version of Auto, and then you'll all have a chance to build a digital version of Auto. We designed it physically to be the sidekick of Hackathon, but really we envision it as being your sidekick to help you build dashboards faster, get answers to questions faster, enable your frontline workers better. So that's really what Auto is all about. It infuses AI across every experience in MicroStrategy ONE. So now let's have a look at some of the things that we've built and where we're going next.