AI Impacts Multiple Industries – Digital CxO Podcast EP79

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today is Mike Fazar. Good morning.

How are you? I'm good. Uh, assuming that it's morning by the time anybody listens to this, but sounds good.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be. Exactly. Well, we have lots of topics today.

We're gonna start with the Augmented World Expo, which your brother Frank Fazar wrote about. Um, there was some interesting news coming out of this conference, uh, the big one being that Apple Pro Apple is gonna stop developing the Apple Pro headset because they're gonna focus on something a little bit lighter weight and cheaper. It apparently just didn't have the appeal that they expected it to have.

And then we also have Snapchat offering AI assistance to create 3D images. And Microsoft shared an AI tool for creating realistic avatars from photos. And then the coolest one, I like this one a lot.

The Siteful, the company Siteful introduced Space Top, which is essentially a mobile big screen glasses with um, a 50% field or a diagonal field of view of 50. And uh, they say it's like you have a laptop, but that you can walk around and wear the glasses and get that field of view. So that's pretty neat.

Yeah, I feel like this whole space is kinda starting to feel like primordial soup, right? I got all these augmented reality technologies and I got all this AI stuff and I feel like we're still waiting on a catalyst to get it right. Uh, even Apple, which is known for its, uh, design efforts, uh, had to essentially, you know, go back to the drawing board a little bit, right?

The, the original machine that they created was a little too heavy, a little too clunky, and certainly too expensive for mere ws. Uh, so hopefully there's been advances in silicon that will let them kind of build something that will be a little more practical for a lot of folks. Um, it may not always be for everybody because as long as there are glasses involved, not everybody may, uh, like augmented reality, but other people may love it.

And, um, who knows, maybe we'll all be on airplanes someday with our augmented reality glasses playing some sort of video game or engaged in some sort of conference somewhere that is gonna become part of our everyday lifestyle. I just don't know when, and I don't know how smart these things are and I feel for everybody who's been kind of building stuff in this space. 'cause every time it seems like they get started, somebody pulls the rug out from underneath them.

Yeah, well this last one, the space top, I find that interesting from a business point of view because, you know, I know there's lots of times we're sitting, sitting in airports and we're trying to work and sometimes I worry about the privacy of anybody being able to see my laptop. So, you know, to just have glasses on and be able to see and interact, uh, it's a little bit more private. So I could see a lot of business professionals utilizing this in the future.

Yeah, I'm just hoping that, you know, the glasses are no bigger than the ones I'm wearing right now. Yeah, exactly. Which I haven't seen on my, I should look up some pictures 'cause I find that fascinating.

Um, you can find more about what was at the Augmented World Expo by looking on digital CXO. So moving on, we have our newest writer, John Swartz. He has an article about, uh, artificial intelligence adoption and growth hastening and deepening and alarming trend over the past few decades, which is that more the wealth is being concentrated among fewer people accelerating income inequality.

So what are your thoughts about this one? Yeah, I think the inequality issue's always been there. What kind of struck me about this piece though was how much of, so many of the technology advances that we are touting in places like the Valley or is somewhat, um, premature.

And, uh, there's a lot of companies getting rich off this, no doubt. Uh, but, you know, let's say I'm in Peoria. Am I really experiencing all the things that the, that folks in the Valley are talking about and all those awesome things?

Uh, probably not. And as a result, there is this kinda divide starting to emerge. And some of it is folks who are kinda, uh, shall we say, enjoying the benefits of a bubble.

Uh, not sure if that bubble is gonna burst, but when they enjoy those benefits of a bubble, they put a lot of stress on their local communities that they don't realize because, um, those communities are not, uh, benefiting, shall we say, equally well. And trickle down economics doesn't always work so well. And so I think you see this, uh, dichotomy that exists.

Uh, and it's not just gonna be within the valley. I think there's gonna be a, a dichotomy in places like what you might experience living in Georgia versus what you're gonna see in New York or San Francisco. And I think we just gotta figure out how to kinda, uh, get these advances out faster to more of the population so that we can equally take advantage of these things and maybe share the wealth a little bit better.

Um, otherwise there's gonna be, you know, a reaction and, uh, things, uh, generally speaking, reactionary forces are never a good thing. So, um, I just hope we kinda take a breath for a minute and think this through a little bit. 'cause um, I think it was, uh, William Johnson or somebody like that who said, uh, you know, the future's here, it's just unevenly distributed, which is true.

But when it's unevenly distributed, it's also creates, uh, shall we say, tensions in the system that, um, ultimately are not health. Yes. Well, you know, from my experience, I feel like it's always been the case that the trendy things, the new innovative things always seem to hit the coast areas first or, or New York, California.

And it takes a little while to integrate in the middle. And I think that's everywhere, you know, things hit bigger cities of course more often and it just takes a while to get wide spread. Yeah.

But even in those big cities that everybody benefits equally well. So the, you know, it's the nature capitalism, I get that. But, um, there are advances that come along once a decade like AI that, and maybe we need to think it through a little bit more because the traditional methods for distributing emerging and new technologies may not work as well for this one.

Yeah, absolutely. So moving on, I had a recent interview with Anup, reggae of Zar and he was talking about customer service and implementing technology and he says, um, uh, when it comes to technology implementation to improve service, companies need to break down silos and be able to embrace change and be adaptable. It's a, an issue he sees business leaders dealing with.

And then he talked about their approach to AI as part of a buddy system where AI helps individuals with their tasks, helps them perform their jobs. And then he also talked about the triple E approach, bringing together experience engineering and engagement, integrating core capabilities for seamless data feedback, essentially, again, breaking down silos. And we talk about this a lot.

So what are your thoughts? Here's the thing. People, despite all our advances in digital transformation, AI and bots and all these other technologies, people still remark and talk to each other when they had a great customer service experience.

It's actually something they will share and talk to their friends about. The fact that that exists tells you how bad customer service really is because the fact that anybody had to like call it out for a minute, there was, as a unique experience, tells me that the bulk of the experiences are either somewhere between mediocre and horrible. And I think we're better than that.

And it's kind of sad that after all these years that we're still not really move the needle here. And, uh, turnover rates in customer service organizations are as high, maybe even higher than ever, uh, expectations of what the value proposition of those things was. Like someday customer service people would be able, able to upsell customers on new capabilities because they provided a great customer experience.

Well, nobody's having a great customer experience. It's really hard to upsell somebody when they're still mad about something. Um, I just feel like this whole space is not left them to our expectations and is one of those areas where maybe we should double down a little bit.

'cause it it's, it's one of the core promises of technology and has been forever. And I think a lot of people, especially outside of tech, are a little like, you know what? You guys are kind of making stuff up.

Well and you know, we talk about utilizing data, uh, to understand and improve customer service, but honestly it's behind the scenes. The company culture, company staffing issues, business processes all play a big part of being able to offer good customer service. And like you said, customers also are just expecting a lot more these days.

And so, uh, you know, their expectations levels are higher in general. I just want a simple thing, right? If I send you an email about something, it doesn't necessarily always mean I want an email back to discuss it.

It may be that you should call me and you have all that stuff and you have this multi-channel, omni-channel reach and you sure as heck know how to use it when you wanna reach me. But, you know, somehow or other, when it comes to customer service and that issue, you can't figure out how to navigate these multiple mediums that, you know, you've seen me engage you with before. Whether it's on my phone, text, email, whatever it may be, or, you know, if you wanna invite me to a video conference, that might be awesome.

But instead, you know, it's just a hodgepodge of, you know, the outbound stuff is highly orchestrated and anything that involves inbound is a mess. Now is that because you're not really invested in customer service because you view it as a cost? Probably.

If that's your business model, then you know, people are gonna figure that out soon and go somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, no matter how much you implement technology, that human interaction is still key. And I know I don't like when I have a problem trying a call and I just wanna talk to somebody in person really quick about it and I have to go through 50 million buttons and choices and get fielded 3 million times before I can talk to somebody.

Yeah. Did you get the feeling if somebody was deliberately putting up a bunch of gates hoping you go away? Yes, exactly.

Yeah. So, uh, it's still an issue to be worked out. Mm-Hmm.

Uh, moving on. So, um, you shared an article about the trouble with internet, uh, recent survey of 300 and T 310 IT or digital business leaders published by Catchpoint finds 43% have experienced internet performance degradations, which has resulted in revenue losses exceeding $1 million. So yeah, in some, in some cases for I think 9% or something like that, it was, you know, well over $1 million.

I think this is a flaw in the system. We are building all these wonderful digital services and the reliability of the transport mechanism that we're using to deliver these things is still shaky and people, uh, are running constantly running into issues. Why, just before you and I got on this podcast though, a wireless network kicked out for the three seconds and we had to start over again.

That isn't a material financial loss. But if you're building a digital service and it's dependent upon the internet connectivity being there, well, it turns out that most of that connectivity is based on network, upon network, upon network service that have tons of dependencies on each other. And the probability that all of those services are optimally running, if even available, is low.

And it gets lower still in places where, you know, there's not a lot of people living. So, uh, the experience you may have is in Mississippi may be dramatically different than what you're gonna see in California or New York. And these things need to be addressed 'cause uh, we can't build the next era of an AI and driven and augmented reality on shaky internet.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, um, I, I don't know exactly what the solution is, but I will say, uh, we were recently on a, a cruise and I had fantastic internet. I was worried about it, but I paid for the internet package and they were utilizing the starlink satellite internet and I had no trouble at all.

All right, well that's Elon Musk and his cruise, so maybe that's just it. We just need new carriers because, uh, the existing carriers, maybe they just got too much junk in the network and they, you know, all these overlays on top of virtual overlays is just killing them. Yep.

So work in progress there as well. Moving on, we have, uh, this is an article about, uh, from Christopher Laughlin about the idea of future proofing being outdated. Um, he says it's outdated.

Um, the problem with the process is treated as tweaking a technology or an approach until it reaches an ideal state. But simply put, it doesn't work because the future is too unpredictable. It's always changing.

Future readiness, however, is fluid, continual driven and intentional. It's a willingness to take a skeptical position on trends and uh, be a little bit more prepared. Yeah, I mean I really like this article.

Um, and the reason I like it is it is more about a philosophy as much as it is anything else in terms of hardcore technical advice, but it's just something that business leaders and IT leaders need to have a chat about it. It's kinda like, um, you know, so much of what we're now currently doing for our previous conversation, but it also applies to compute infrastructure and uh, everything else that we're doing is not designed to run the next greatest thing that we're building and yet we go out and we build these next greatest things and then the performance isn't what we thought it was gonna be largely because we're trying to run it on old hardware. Um, sometimes, you know, the cloud service providers probably do a better job of continually upgrading the experience and there's a, a benefit there, but that will come at a cost.

And, but so much of what we have on premises stuff that somebody bought under a capital expense budget three years ago and now they're still trying to sweat, meanwhile Joe Developer is out there trying to build this awesome microservice based application that has like all kinds of interesting dependencies that hopefully will make that application more resilient on top of stuff that, you know, just is it up to the task. So I think we need to have a real conversation about that, what we're giving folks, what the expectations are and how we're gonna actually make the infrastructure available to people building the next great thing. 'cause right now it's not there.

Yeah. And as we've seen, technology is constantly evolving and, and as you said, it's a philosophy in general. You, everything is always changing.

You have to realize that and be prepared. Yeah, I I think we have some sort of 1980s notion of infrastructure that we're trying to apply to a modern era. We're just outdated.

Absolutely. And last on our list, uh, but not least is a store about manufacturing over on digital CXO. Uh, this is from George Holm and he says, um, unlike other industry verticals such as finance, retail and technology, which have historically been more effectively used data and data analyst analytics to optimize their businesses, manufacturing has traditionally been a laggard in this area.

However, a recently released survey shows that could change manufacturers are awash in an abundance of data. Yeah, I think they're starting to figure it out. Um, they have all the right data and most of those systems that they're using are, shall we say, closed loop, which makes it easier to have a a an understanding of how to automate them.

I mean, they're not perfect exceptions happen and there's a lot of effort to try to, uh, mass customize manufacturing for different products and use cases. But this is one industry where uh, they're probably in a better position to take advantage of the next great AI capabilities because, uh, they may not have all their data in order, but they have a better handle of what data they have and, and how it relates to each other than most, uh, maybe not every manufacturing company, but certainly the big ones and anybody using robotics is probably pretty far down the path. So I think we're gonna see some awesome things in the manufacturing front in the near future because of advances in big data and AI and all this other stuff.

And we may get to the point where, um, ultimately today a lot of manufacturing happens halfway around the globe from where the point of consumption of the thing being manufactured is, well, let's start thinking that through for a minute. Can we get to the point now where the cost of building a plant somewhere closer to the point where the thing being built is actually gonna be consumed so I can reduce the, uh, transportation costs of the thing that I have to bring halfway around the world becomes an interesting conversation. So I think this data to conversation is the beginning of something.

And so, uh, it's hardening to see in George's story here that, uh, you know, there people are finally thinking about it at least. Yes. And as you mentioned too, with, um, utilizing AI to, you know, analyze all that data so much faster, it's really gonna help Right?

And beyond that gets us outta this problem we are seeing with, you know, political climate. It's around the world that are impacting businesses. Um, if, you know, if there's tensions between governments, suddenly, you know, my manufacturing line is at risk over, you know, somebody having an argument about something that hasn't nothing to do with me per se.

I just happen to be in that country as a business. Um, businesses theoretically should have a lot more flexibility and um, as circumstances change, they should be able to move manufacturing more jointly to ensure that whatever it is they're doing is not disrupted by some argument that again, they didn't start. Absolutely.

Well that brings us to the end of our list today. com. Do you have any final thoughts?

Yeah, this is probably one of the greatest times for tech ever in my memory. I mean, there's more awesome stuff floating around than I can think about and, uh, there's no shortage of things to innovate and digital CXOs have all kinds of opportunities, um, but there's always like some little hidden thing that's holding something up. And so digital c XOs gotta have a keen understanding of where the dependencies are because the, those issues ultimately will determine, you know, what winds up being just a science project versus something that actually delivers a result for the Business.

Yes, there's a lot more involved these days in the role of digital CXO. There you go there. Cool job.

Alright, well thank you to our audience for watching this episode. If you missed last week, it's there for you to catch up and go check out any of the articles that were of interest and you can read all the information there and have a great day. We'll see you next time.