Welcome to Zcast everyone. I'm Zaas Kharal from ZK Research and I'm here at Extreme's AI Summit and MLB's headquarters. I'm with Paul Daugherty. You are an AI thought leader, former CIO/CTO of Accenture. How do you describe yourself?
Probably overall as a technology geek. I'll start with that. But yeah, if we could get a little bit more into the kinds of things I'm up to now. So quick background is computer engineer in university a long time ago and then spent 38 years at Accenture as global CTO of Accenture and CEO of Accenture's technology business leading all the technology efforts. Stepped down from that about a year ago and now work with TPG, a private equity firm, on their AI investments and also doing a lot of work in startup investing and advising with very early stage companies. And I wrote a book, wrote a few books along the way, one of which was Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. And this idea of how technology impacts people and how people develop technology and how we use it is really central to everything I've done in my career. And the book really talks about AI, now generative AI, and what's to come.
Yeah, and it's a fascinating topic and you gave a presentation here and I really enjoyed it. Before we get into the contents of the book and some of your thoughts, where are companies with AI right now? And you used a good baseball analogy that we're warming up.
Yeah, I'll give two answers. Let's unpack AI first. So there's generative AI which is kind of the new kid on the block and then you have machine learning, deep learning and things that have been around for a while and applied by organizations for the last couple of decades. So I think there's a lot of maturity generally with what's called now the classical AI techniques and companies doing a lot of great things with it. But in generative AI, it's a whole new game. The technology is very different. The capabilities are massively different with generative AI and companies are, you know, just not even starting the game yet, just getting on the field I would say is probably the way to think of it. Best case maybe in the first inning because of the nature of the ongoing technology maturity and the nature of how hard it is to apply the technology in business. But that said, this is the biggest technology shift that I've seen in my four decades in enterprise information technology and it's going to have a massive impact on the way we do business and the way we work and live.
Yeah, me as well. And probably the biggest one I've seen before that is just the growth of the internet. And I think this is going to dwarf that. In fact, if you remember the old Cisco ads, how it changed the way we work, live, learn, and play. I think it's going to have a similar impact where from a societal perspective everything we do will eventually be touched by AI. Would you agree?
For sure. Everything we do. And the way I talk about it in enterprise, every job is already being impacted from the CEO down to the manager to the frontline workers. So it does impact everything and I think it will be the biggest of what we've seen. As big as the internet was, as big as smartphones have been, social media, this is combining elements of all those and taking it up an order of magnitude because its ability to really do human-like capabilities means we could automate in a way you can never automate before and kind of leaves no surface untouched to really transform and do differently.
Yeah. And so the question is what do we do with that, right? And like you think of where productivity is today, we are so much more productive than we were pre-internet. And so but we automate a lot more, right? And so along the way we got smarter at automating things, we raised productivity and then, you know, I would expect that an Extreme Networks salesperson today, their goal for number of deals closed and prospects touched is a lot higher today than it would have been 20 years ago. Right? And so as companies go through the adoption of AI, you could say you're automating things, way cheaper to do the same process, but that's not the ultimate goal, right? We ultimately want to be able to be a lot more productive with the same headcount and kind of exponentially more productive if we add more people.
Yeah. I think that's right. I think with every technology, people look through the cost lens first and look at the cost reduction, those sorts of things. What I'm seeing with companies that I'm working with, both the small companies and some of the largest companies in the world, is that they're increasingly shifting to the growth focus. So, yeah, you got to drive out cost. You got to use it like any technology. Generative AI has amazing impacts on cost and ability to reduce cost in certain areas, but the real game is how do you competitively position better? How do you advance your business? How do you create more opportunity? How do you grow? And there's a marked shift in the surveys we're doing and in the studies we're doing with the work we're doing with companies to shift more to thinking about the growth area. For example, insurance companies deploying generative AI in their underwriting business, not to cut underwriters, but to increase the amount of business that underwriters can write and take share from others in the business. That's the kind of impact that I think people are shifting to as they get more mature with it.
In fact, I think about like what Amazon does with AI. They use AI to help drivers map routes and the expectation is not that you finish your route at 2:00, it's that you hit 10 more stops, right? And so that's what AI has done there. Now your book was called Human + Machine: The Missing Middle. Talk about what the book talks about and what is the missing middle.
Yeah. Well, what I always tell people is you don't need to read the book. Just look at the title and it tells everything you need to know. So the title of the book is Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI and it talks about the missing middle. So Human + Machine speaks to our belief that it's about the human plus machine coming together, not the replacement of humans. That's the key to success. Reimagining Work is what we articulate in the book as you can't just look at a job and a person. You got to look at really transforming and reimagining the work that you do. Kind of like re-engineering from a few decades ago but on steroids to drive the value. And then the Age of AI speaks to this as just different technology with more power than anything we've seen before. The missing middle construct that we talk about in the book is a way to look at where the new opportunity is because you have humans that are good at certain things. You have AI that's good at certain things and people tend to look just at those two. What we outline in the book is what's in the middle when you can combine the two to create new superpowers that combine human and machine capability.
In fact, it's whose law was that that stated the things that people are good at machines aren't and vice versa, right? Yeah. And but you're talking about really the come together of the two and so we can sit here and talk about, you know, it's going to create new jobs and things like that but it is ultimately going to get rid of a lot of jobs. It'll automate them away. So if I'm an employee today and in fact during your session Paul I asked you what are some of those new jobs and you gave the answer I thought you would. We don't know, like we didn't and you brought up Uber drivers and things like that. Who knew that that would be a thing today? And so without having a crystal ball and being able to, you know, travel forward in time and know what the future is, if you're working today in a job that's likely to be automated away, what should you be doing to keep your skill set at a point where you can drop into these future jobs?
