Robots, Sports, Digital Humans and More – Digital CxO Podcast EP90

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today is Mike Vard. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. How are you? I am doing well and we have much to cover from digital CXO.

We're gonna start with, um, an article that says, in the current age of constant tech development and software innovation, it's impossible for an organization to thrive and succeed without adopting new technologies and initiating a strategic digital transformation. With the recent boom of gen AI automation and data management software enterprises are expected to stay ahead of the curve by integrating these digital solutions into their business strategy. This, however, is much easier said than done.

So what are your thoughts? Well, one of the things that leapt out me in this story is they're citing some, uh, projections from Polaris, the research company. 7 trillion in market valuation, and that's as much as in all of it when you think about it.

Um, so it's pretty clear that the spending that's driving digital transformation is much bigger than, you know, your basic IT budget for the CIO and involves all these other business units who are allocating funding for it. But the story also makes it clear this is not an event, it's a continuous thing. You could argue that you'll never be done digitally transforming, and that as each new technology wave comes along, gen AI being the latest, um, it requires you to rethink all those digital processes.

So, uh, what I kind of like about this post is it kind of tells people that digital transformation is a state of mind. It is something that you gotta constantly be thinking about and, uh, planning for, you know, the latest and greatest thing that came out today is gonna be mainstream and available and how many months and how long before somebody we compete with starts using it. So you always have to stay ahead of the game.

Yeah, definitely. And technology is always changing and advancing and new technology is regularly coming on the market. So just staying in front of all that.

Right. And if you don't stay in front of it, your customers will notice and they'll start to think of new as being somewhat or big. And well, once you get that stench attached to your brand, it's very hard to get rid of it.

Absolutely. But as we've talked about on the show before, we also don't want business leaders just trying to jump on the technology and integrate it for no real purpose, but to say they've integrated the latest technology. No, well, AI washing is the latest example of that.

Right, Exactly. Well, moving on, this is a really cool interview that I had with Jason about digital humans. And he basically explained that with advancements in gene ai, particularly LLMs, we have these amazing revolutionized capabilities with digital humans and we can allow them to handle a wide range of interactions with minimal training.

And as they're being used, they, they become even better and they learn while being used and they're helping with all sorts of things in the workplace. So what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, we need to get used to the idea that these AI things that we're playing with are essentially gonna, as far as all intents and purposes are concerned, are digital humans that we're gonna assign tasks to.

Right? Uh, they may not, uh, have as much diversity range as we do in terms of the number of tasks that they can do. They're gonna be highly trained around a specific thing.

But what's happening is it's not just the LLMs, it's the reasoning engines that go into those LLMs and their ability to understand the semantic relationship between different terms and ideas that will enable them to um, just automate a lot more processes. They're gonna be smarter, is now it's gonna come that together. Um, today, LLMs are, uh, they're limited in scope, shall we say, and they're inclined to hallucinate.

And these digital aim in the future will be trained on a narrow set of data, maybe even using smaller LLMs, and they'll be better optimized for any number of tasks. And then the challenge then becomes how do we orchestrate all these digital humans alongside our regular humans into something that feels like a workflow? Yes.

And I can imagine eventually we'll be all used to having this little digital human assistant that we just go to for all sorts of help. And we don't have very many jobs out there for virtual assistants anymore. They'll all be, you know, AI Or we'll have one senior digital assistant who will talk to all the junior digital assistants to make things happen.

Yep. Alright, moving on. So this is an interesting article, uh, that talks about AI and how it relates to mental health.

So I'm gonna read from this one, AI driven, culturally responsive mental healthcare could soon be coming to underserved communities. A partnership between Cura Joy and user testing is designed to bring more inclusive and accessible health solutions. Harnessing AI and virtual reality, Rajoy intends to address a global shortage of behavioral health providers while improving social and mental health resources.

Inclusivity. And what are your thoughts? I'm not sure this was gonna replace the need for a therapist anytime soon, but there are lots of people out there that don't have access to anything.

And so if they can have some sort of engagement with maybe an AI therapist of some type that helps. It's a, it's a step in the right direction. I don't think it's gonna be the end all be all of those situations.

But, um, what's interesting about this too is oddly enough, some people are more comfortable telling their secrets to a machine than they are to another fellow human. And there's this thing called judgment bias that people get worried about whether, uh, you know, concerned that somehow or other the therapist or a nurse or doctor, whatever it may be, is somehow judging them. So they don't share as much of what's going on.

And unless you share the harder it is to come up with a diagnosis so it then becomes this problem that, uh, maybe gets worse over time. So, um, you know, for communities that have no access whatsoever or if the access is just beyond their means, I think this is a step in the right direction. I do too, but a few things concern me on this.

You're correct what you said, but I would be hesitant to just leave AI to help people with their mental health because I'm worried it might give bad advice or poor advice or lead them to make a decision that that might not have been the best. Because you know, just leaving AI to handle all that, it seems a little scary to me. But on the other side of that, I know some people that they don't really wanna go online to share their problems because they're worried that once it's online, it's there for everyone to see it.

It could be recorded, it could get out all around the world once it's gone digital. So I think that's another issue that they might have to tackle As opposed to what hacking into your doctor's office and stealing all your medical records, that's probably already happened. Well this is true.

I guess there's always that threat from any angle really. Mm-Hmm. So it's, it's a tough call.

I get the concern and it's legitimate and um, you know, at some point you just have to take a leap of faith and sign that user agreement and hope that the entity on the other end is handling your data responsibly. Um, if not, then you know, don't do it. Yeah, definitely.

But it's a really great use case and I'm excited to see where this goes. So moving on, data privacy, we talk about this probably every other show at least. So I'm gonna read from this article, the volume of unstructured data has exploded over the last few years.

Comprising a significant portion of the data that is generated on a daily basis with emails, social posts, images, videos and files. There is a wealth of unstructured data in any given business that data might be sensitive and it might be valuable to attackers, therefore it needs protecting. So this is an issue all business leaders have.

And what do you hear in this regard? I think this is a cultural problem, not a technical problem. And here's what the issue is in my mind.

Too many organizations and the people that work there think that the data that they are collecting is belongs to their organization. In reality, they are stewards of that data that they got from their customers or that was entrusted to them by uh, end users. And they need to think about it in those terms.

'cause if I understand that I am the steward of something and I'm being trusted with it, I need to secure it. I have assumed a responsibility. And arguably you could say that that is a sacred trust.

And once you get that mindset in place, then you start rethinking all your work falls a little bit and you start saying, Hey, what are we doing here? And how come the developers can see, you know, everybody's bank accounts if I happen to be working their financial services firm. 'cause they probably shouldn't, um, should not also have, you know, people copying and pasting things in the spreadsheets that they put on laptops they take home and attach to um, you know, consumer grade network, shall we say, that are probably insecure.

And there's all kinds of bad habits that we have allowed to happen. And then when something goes wrong, we wanna blame the IT and the cyber security people out. They look at view and they scratch their ass and they throw up their hands and say, I didn't tell you to do that with that data.

And you're the one who is responsible for the data. I think that there's just an adult conversation that's long overdue here. Yeah.

Communication is important and there's not just one department that's totally responsible for this. This, like you said, is, this is interdepartmental Right? However, I will enr you that uh, the people doing data analytics are probably the worst offenders followed closely by developers that like to copy and paste production data into test applications and then there concern of that data.

True. They're not always as focused on, you know, the the risk issues as they should be. Yeah.

We have met the cybersecurity enemy and it is us. Alright, so here's a, uh, really interesting article and it's about how sports can be digitally transformed. So I'll read a little bit from this one.

Summer Olympics aside sports attendance and viewership is eroding as it struggles to keep pace with innovation in the digital entertainment world. This begs the question, can it win back fans, especially younger one though fast adoption through fast adoption of personalized technology. In a recent survey, 79% believe personalized experiences are a top opportunity for the premium fan experience.

What are your thoughts, Emily, ever since they started bringing in FanDuel and all these other things and now I was watching football this past weekend and um, you know, even the commentators are now talking about the odds and you know, what things can be bet on and the NFL and all these leagues are embedded in it. Gambling, all those people require more data, right? They want to consume all this data while they're placed in bets.

And a lot of these bets are being placed in near real time. And um, regardless of what you think of that, I'm not a fan, but, um, it's pretty clear that more data has to be integrated into the broadcast to get these people to watch that. And they're addicted and they have money riding on the game and that's probably where the sports viewership is gonna come.

Um, the problem is the people who are surfacing up the data for these sporting contests or whenever they are, seem to be surfacing up a lot of pointless data and they're not really understanding what it is that needs to be surfaced at the time it is surfaced because, um, there's a disconnect between what's ever happening on the screen and some of the data that gets presented. And I think that that is gonna be more art than science. And I think somebody has to be able to kind of understand the flow of the game and know what data they have and kind of make, you know, some sort of compelling, uh, value added insight.

And I think that would be great. Beyond that, I mean, I don't know who else, maybe we will have virtual reality glasses and we'll be watching football and that'll make it more interesting. And I'm sure they're working on all kinds of interesting things to go with that.

But whatever it is, it's not limited to what's happening on the screen with the camera and the people talking about it and it's got be something deeper, broader. I'm sure there'll be AI involved and maybe making predictions for who's gonna do what at what level of playing field. Um, but at the end of the day, it seems to me gambling's driving all of us.

Oh yeah. It's, it's quite a big industry and everything you said about that's true. I would think another good idea for um, digitally enhancing would be some sort of, um, non gambling gamification, you know, some sort of trivia or guessing games or uh, you know, worldwide connected game going on where you're trying to guess things.

I don't know. That's just another idea. That's right.

People who a, don't like gambling or b they don't wanna be trained so they can gamble better needle lessons. Alright, so the last article, and this is super cool also, and this is a robot that is cleaning windows on sky rises. So I'll read the first part of this one.

Osmo, the world's first commercial window cleaning robot programmed in AI and lidar, again cranking two mechanical arms back and forth, soapy squeegees in hand at three times the speed of a human on a high rise on avenue of the Americas. Four sensors assisted the bot in judging the fragility of a window pane to apply the necessary pressure. A computer operator stationed on the roof supervises the bot, which hangs in a basket normally occupied by people.

I have so many amazing thoughts about how this technology can be used for other industries, but what are your thoughts on this? Um, it's not clear to me like, is this really cheaper than just hiring two guys and putting 'em on a scaffold? But okay, if it is, I'm all for it.

Every six months or so there's a, you know, story that shows up on television 'cause it has great dramatic flare where, you know, they're rescuing some poor guys that get stuck in a scaffold somewhere and hopefully they're not hanging out for dear life. But, um, you know, it puts the, not only the window watchers' lives at risk, but the fire department people that go up there, their lives are risk. And there's just a lot of bad things that could happen.

And it's not much different in my mind than we're gonna use robots to go and fight fires and things where we can just not put humans in arms' way. I'm all for that. Um, I just think, you know, make sure that we're not doing stuff for the sake of doing it and that we, we have an actual ROI that is akin to including saving lives and not just the fact that, you know, I wanted to replace a couple of guys making, you know, 20 bucks an hour.

Yes. I'm not sure that monetarily it's going to be the cheaper alternative, but what I think it is is it's a, a safety alternative. So I can see, you know, a lot of people might be upset about this taking human jobs, but as they said, there's somebody controlling these robots so it might not be taking the job just changing the job, learning different skills to control robots doing it.

Um, which is very different of course. But I think just like anything, if enough of them become in production, the price will come down, then maybe it will be the more affordable option, who knows? But I think it's more of a safety issue and as you said, using this similar technology for things like, you know, underground cave rescues or under, you know, deep water rescues.

Just any type of rescues that could be very dangerous for humans. Eliminating that danger by using robots. Yeah, I mean it's gonna happen, I think we talked about one segment not too long ago where they're using drones to drop lifelines to people who are stuck in riptides off of oceans and then, then they humans pull 'em in.

But it could just as easily be a bunch of robots, pull 'em back in. But um, I think there's gonna be all kinds of great use cases that will take people outta harm's way. Um, you know, to your point it's all but inevitable.

It's just a question of what's the cost Exactly. And do all humans wanna be taken out of harm's way? Uh, you know, again, maybe, you know, they really enjoy what they're doing so we'll just have to see how this goes.

Well, I'm pretty sure the insurance company wants to take a medical Norway. Well, no certain in that. Oh yes, yes indeed.

Well that brings us to the end of our final thoughts. Well, you know, if you look at this and as the show keeps going out and we keep talking about things, I'm just, you know, pleasantly amazed by all the things that people are doing with stuff. And I feel like, you know, when we first started talking about digital transformation in digital, CXO is always, you know, kind of these, uh, someday we'll do this kind of thing.

And every day now I look at digital CXO and I'm like, wow, look at that. We're doing that now. It's, it's all the art of the now is happening in digital CXO.

So check it out. Yes. I feel like we're definitely in a technological revolution again and things are happening very quickly.

Alright. Alright, well I wanna thank our audience for being here today. If you didn't catch last week's, it's there, go catch up and check out some of these articles that we discussed today and let us know which ones you're most interested in.

Have a great day.