This is a special episode, featuring a wrap up of insights from top data leaders across industries, about one of the worlds biggest questions: what is the future of AI?
This is a special episode, featuring a wrap up of insights from top data leaders across industries, about one of the worlds biggest questions: what is the future of AI?
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Ben: Hello and welcome to Rise of the Data Cloud.
This is a special episode, featuring a wrap up of insights from top data leaders across industries, about one of the worlds biggest questions: what is the future of AI?
Stay tuned to find out.
Warren Breakstone: There's a great quote that I very much like. It goes something like this: a machine will always beat a person, but a person with a machine will always beat a machine. And I think that is really the essence of where we are heading the ability to help our clients unlock the benefit of technology combined with our own data and analytics to help make better decisions quicker and with conviction.
Ben: That was Warren Breakstone, Managing Director and Chief Product Officer at S&P Global, and he just spelled out one of the top priorities for AI industry leaders: empowering your customers to make better, data informed decisions.
But figuring out how to approach incorporating AI and the cloud into our businesses can be a daunting task. Frank Farrall, AI Ecosystems and Snowflake Alliance Leader at Deloitte explains how it's one worth taking on.
Frank Farrall: I think that people tend to jump in shadows around how AI is going to be disruptive to employment and it's going to take people's jobs. And actually there were predictions about that in the 1950s that proved not to be true.
And so what I actually think is likely to happen is that a lot of the rote repetitive tasks are going to be automated away. And the result of the work will be as good as it currently is or better. And what it's actually going to do is free up people to do less repetitive, less roadwork and more creative, more satisfying work.
And I think, you know, as we transitioned from industrial revolution and people working in mass and factories, and then you saw automation, you didn't actually see a net reduction in employment. Well, you didn't have people doing very rote and repetitive tasks anymore and things. And so I have to say five years, which isn't really that far out in the scheme of things, I think that that's going to be, you know, real impact.
And then if you think about the capability that your phone has now that it didn't have five years ago, whether it’s entertainment or support for how you want to operate as a person. I think there's going to be a lot of value add that's going to come through. I think fundamentally how people operate at work in their personal life will be pretty dramatically impacted by AI. Well, I'm more of an optimist. I think that's going to be for the better
Ben: It does feel like we're in a time full of transition for including AI more in our day-to-day lives. Which, like Frank said, can be an exciting possibility.
But with the technological advances that are being made comes the sometimes messy world of data privacy and governance. Mark Stange-Tregear, Vice President of Analytics at Rakuten Rewards spoke about the role companies have in protecting their customers.
Mark Stange-Tregear: The big thing I see coming, and I think, with the release of the GDPR laws in Europe, with CCPA coming out to California, Brazil just enacted new laws.
I think the notion of data governance and really focusing on what is the balance between the collection of law and use of large amounts of data on water, the consumers rights around that data. It's still an area that's relatively difficult to manage.
I know that we have put a lot of time and effort, especially around CCPA. Cause we've got a big presence in California to make sure that we're looking at the spirit of that law. Not just the letter of the law and thinking about what that means for us in the long term.
And I do think that there is another wave of innovation that is likely to happen. Helping companies to really make that shift from store everything and maybe use about what you need when you need it to store what makes sense and be able to do it in a way that works for the consumers and isn't overly invasive and isn't overly problematic and doesn't allow for sort of unmitigated use in situations that weren't intended by the consumer.
Ben: Controlling your own data is something that most of us prioritize. But we've seen that with the growth of AI, the uses of your data can be extended to really exciting places.
Ari Margalit, Global Vice President of Architecture & Data, Solutions at Anheuser-Busch talked about some of those possibilities.
Ari Margalit: First of all, the amount of data that was generated in the world in the last three years is bigger than what we have gathered in the history of mankind. We're in the middle of like an analytics, transformation of the world, right?
In every field everybody feels that and that was expedited with the COVID-19 crisis. So seeing the whole world moving to work remote, seeing the health industry changing and expediting to become a remote lab. Right?
Something that I think it expedited in 10, 15 years to where we're doing the COVID and everything is led by data.
So, of course the world is changing. I think it's changing for the good, in that sense.
I believe in every topic we're going to have AIs in every stream of our life. We will start to evolve. We're going to have IOT sensor, internet of things sensors that transfer live data. And AI models being built on top of that data that has been brought to such data platform.
So I will give you examples. Today everybody has the smartwatch, right? And he collects only your heart rate, and maybe calories and steps and things like that. This is going to be evolved to fasten together all the data from your body, and then it will be sent to your doctor and you'll be able to give life decisions.
You will have to go to the doctor. We will be able to prevent diseases like that. We will be able to detect advanced problems, right? We'll be able to detect problems with our children.
So I think, In some sense, the world is going to be a better place to live in, in some sense, it's a, it's a bit scary.
Ben: Not everything will be as dramatic and envelope-pushing as sensors that can analyze your health. Some things will still be revolutionary, but will impact our day-to-day in a more logistical sense.
Dan Wright, President and Chief Operating Officer of DataRobot, talks about the impact some of those smaller changes might bring.
Dan Wright: I think that there's a, for whatever reason, maybe it's some of the movies that have come out, but there does seem to be a fear of AI and machine learning, in places and that can actually slow people down when it comes to adopting the technology.
But what we've seen is that there's just tremendous value if you leverage the best of machine intelligence and combine it with the best of human intelligence. It really pushes the boundary of what's possible. And the applications again are across every industry they're truly global.
There's things that AI can do that frankly people don't want to do and aren’t best positioned to do. And we can automate a lot of that. And then what it enables and empowers people to do is things that humans are a) better at and b) they enjoy doing more.
So I think if you can do that, it really paints a picture of a bright future in front of us.
Ben: Having that optimism for the future of AI is reassuring, because it can be a bit scary of a subject. But most of our experts agree that the positive possibilities far outweigh the negative.
Randy Wigginton, Senior Director of Platform Infrastructure Engineering at Square, talked about how AI could help create a more just society.
Randy Wigginton: I think that AI is eventually going to be our greatest friend and a greatest advocate because see the machines have no reason to help one person over another. Talk about, you know, lack of racism, lack of ageism, genderism, sexism, any of those things. Machines are completely impartial across all those things.
I don't see them taking our jobs. I see them giving us new opportunities, new jobs to do. I'm actually very bullish on the prospects for the human race.
Ben: This future that Randy is describing is hopefully sooner opposed to later. And many companies are working to get there. Scott Holden, CMO of ThoughtSpot talked about how they're hoping to use AI to enhance marketing decisions.
Scott Holden: Our founder often likes to say that we're just 2% done and we'll always be 2% done. And it's one of the fun things about working in this industry is that, you know, data and analytics has so much potential. But we've really just scratched the surface and everything, despite all the progress we've made over the last, 30, 40 years that analytics has existed, we're really just getting started.
And so that vision of being able to have an alert on your phone tell me that the campaign I just launched yesterday is performing better in this region than planned because of these factors, whether it's by channel, or by the type of company that's responding or the seniority of the title that's responding. These are things that typically marketers today can spend months analyzing post facto. I envision a world where the day after you launch, you're getting updates on those things and you're not asking anyone to do it. The system's proactively serving that up to you and it's pulling those insights from all kinds of different data systems.
So, you know, I think the last frontier for marketers is that it's historically been really hard to get data out of the advertising platforms and to be able to pair it with all of the internal systems you have for launching campaigns and tracking sales opportunities.
And so that I think is going to be, popped open and likely brought into a centralized data warehouse like Snowflake.
And, you know, if you can have a UX experience like ThoughtSpot, where you can, as a business person can either ask a question over Siri or Alexa, and just get served up. Cause a push alert on your phone. it just changes the game radically for business people.
Ben: And it's not just marketing and business people who will benefit from the cloud. The advances made through infrastructure will trickle down to every industry. Dustin Pearce, Vice President of Infrastructure at Instacart, talks about how we've already made incredible developments in recent years.
Dustin Pearce: As you look forward, I think that It wasn't that long ago we were standing in a data center and we were pulling cable and we were ripping out drives and replacing them. And we all said, you know, the cloud's cool, but like, no, one's going to use that for real work.
And I think the same thing is somewhat true now in infrastructure where you look at managed services and people will look at a managed database or a managed kind of streaming process. And they'll say, I mean, That's great. And all for people who don't know what they're doing.
And I think the question will continually escalate to like, what's the value in you doing it yourself? And I think the answer to that is increasingly going to be more and more kind of subscriptions or cloud managed services for things that are not differentiating to your business. And I don't think that concept is new. Like buy versus build has been around forever. Forever. But I do believe in today's time the average software company has something like 300 SAS subscriptions, right? So this is accelerating and having the glue and the engineering teams internally to transform all of these tools into a cohesive experience is going to be the next big kind of breakthrough for tech.
Ben: All of these breakthroughs are exciting for companies, but what about us? In our normal, day-to-day, non-work lives, how will these advances help us? Well, an industry that is working on these advances and directly impacts a lot of our day-to-days is streaming services. Jaya Kolhatkar, Chief Data Officer of Hulu, talks about the future successes of these platforms and how it's linked to their understanding of our data.
Jaya Kolhatkar: You know, the streaming business is in a period of great change and I think one of the things that will determine who is successful is the streaming service that understands its customers really well and figures out how to build content that really resonates with them. And for that I think we're really going to need to have the underlying infrastructure for them to be able to leverage this understanding of the data and of the content and how it interconnects across the product and tech. And that's something that I predict over the next five years you will see. You will see it in the newspapers, you're going to see more about content producers and content and things like that. The apparent fights will be over that. But, I think the battle will be won or lost by the streaming company that really understands the customer needs and provides solutions for those needs.
Ben: Understanding data has become an important skill for all of us to learn. Especially recently. Jennifer Belissent, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research talks about how data is informing almost all of our decisions throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.
Jennifer Belissent: I think that just living through the pandemic and the exposure to the data and the stats about the pandemic. How many cases are there? How many active cases? How many critical cases? You know that kind of data that people are hearing about all the time.
I think that that's going to raise the awareness of the need for data literacy is because we've seen so many misinterpretations of the data. So I think that that's one of the changes that we'll see is, is really the increased, Awareness of the data that's around us, hopefully that awareness will lead us to raise the level of understanding of what data is and how to use it.
Ben: As we learn to make more data informed decisions as consumers, we're better equipped to make data informed decisions at work. Our friend Sunny Bedi, CIO and CDO at Snowflake, talked about what some of those decisions will lead to.
Sunny Bedi: That will be an extreme migration to the cloud by the whole industry. I think COVID has been the forcing function now to accelerate that cloud migration even faster than what we had all anticipated. And I would say there will be an acceleration of SAS providers and companies doing their own AI ML.
If you think about how many workloads do you actually use AI ML today? Now that number would be very small in the majority of the companies. In fact, all the companies I would say that looking five years forward, there will be an increased amount of workloads that will be powered through AI and ML, where you're not dependent upon humans to do that, you know, in a sensible manner.
And then finally, third, I would say is that to make those first and second things enable, organizations are gonna have to rethink of the processes, the tools, the personnel, the employees that they have to have the expertise that's needed, that they can handle these two major transitions that are in front of us.
Ben: There are a lot of data based transitions coming up but hopefully after listening to this episode you feel a little better equipped to handle them.
We hope you enjoyed this part highlight reel part crystal ball reading episode of Rise of the Data Cloud.