Explore every episode of the podcast The AI Network Podcast

The entertaining Genworth Financial team joins us from OPEX Week 2020 to tell us their enterprise’s transformation story—or journey, more accurately. Kathleen starts off by explaining her view of the company 15 years ago: “It was a very siloed organization. It was very much command and control; very hierarchical. We were focused very much on our processes, like manufacturing, because we came from GE.” Sometimes, as Martijn is quick to interject, they were focusing on the wrong processes. Their new goal was to focus on the customer and increase associate empathy. The leadership team achieved this with some creative physical props that mimic certain hardships their clients experience. However, leading by fear negatively impacts the service a customer receives as well, so Genworth devised a new workforce strategy. “If you really truly believe that the customer is the most important person--because he or she pays your salary--then the front line employees are the most important people, and therefore, your team leaders are the most important leaders. Most people leave their leader. They don't leave the organization.” The team details how they achieved this monumental task.

McDonald’s senior director of innovation, Deena John, joins us to talk about digital transformation. While definitions vary, Deena describes digital transformation as “transforming through integration of technology” with the goal of generating maximum value for the customer. End-to-end disruption means looking into the future and creating a transformation road map that leads to a new operating model. Deena discusses the differences and similarities between agile and lean, and the iterative process that makes scaling sustainable. Deena frames her key points with specific examples. Next, she asks and answers the question, “In an innovation culture what’s the importance of failing fast?” Ultimately, this insightful conversation with Deena focuses on the future of the enterprise and what needs to happen now to ensure corporations can keep up with the ever-changing landscape that technology brings to business.

Malta, a small European island, is quickly becoming a blockchain hub, and thus, accurately nicknamed “Blockchain Island.” This panel discussion delves into blockchain developments, standards, and laws. Malta’s progressive, global view of blockchain implications has allowed Blockchain Island to progress in a healthy, robust, safe way, complete with governance and legislation. The panel shares the infrastructure that has led to its success in the hope that others will implement a similar solution. With an end goal of international blockchain standards, a panelist sums up this discussion nicely: “We anticipated the need to regulate blockchain technologies, and that was while everyone else was focusing on the cryptocurrency aspect.” “The ISO standard is starting. So, the ISO standard is anticipating other jurisdictions, and it's starting to look into what it means to regulate blockchain technologies or standardize blockchain technologies.”

Anthony Ryan joins us to give us the state of affairs: "Our company is going through a planned transformation where all those systems that are being re-keyed are going to be amalgamated and there's a new sort of N10 strategy and a lot of companies are going through these big transformations, but it's 18 months away, it's 20 months away, it's two years away. In the meantime, there's armies of people re-keying data, making mistakes every day, and just doing what I typically called the grunt work to keep the business going. So they're prime candidates for RPA because you spin a robot up in the devil's always in the details, but on average we're talking six to eight weeks."

On succeeding and failing quickly, Martin Ruane, "I think it's all the intelligence and experience that you gather over time, often by sometimes making the wrong direction and making some mistakes, learning from them and doing things differently. Or sometimes doing the right thing, and actually it's been reinforced by the results that you get. I think it's a range of things but it's all that really. I think if you think about collateral, it could be our training collateral that we've got so we're self-sufficient in terms of what we do. It can be all our standard operating procedures that actually give instructions of how we do stuff. But it's more than that, it's everything, it's the experience, it's everything. It's all-encompassing."

From Google, Yuval Dvir joins us and notes that beyond the scope of his job, he's interested in things that are happening out there. He’s interested in discussing how executives are implementing AI solutions. He’s also interested in learning about the challenges of the different industries and the segments where he does see similarities: "On the one hand, everyone is facing, in a way, the same thing, which is how we deal with the avalanche of technology. On the other hand, there's the nuances and the slight differences actually where everything matters. Taking an off-the-shelf product that works beautifully in one company and trying to implement it in another company won't work. You need to be very, very aware of those subtle differences in the specific DNA of each organization."

Roberto Mancone joins us and shares that as the global head of disruptive technologies his background is not in digital, it’s not in IT. He comes to the position with 25 years of corporate banking and corporate finance. And he’s done just that for major Fortune 500 companies. He went through the banking consolidation of trying to combine several assets in one location. He’s been on all sides of the table. And so when it comes to automation he sees it as simply leveraging a tool to understand how to use that tool to develop different and better processes.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation with clicking and clacking behind us, Sreeharsha Upadhyayula begins by quoting William Gibson, the science fiction writer, with “the future is here, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed." As the world wide web and new media went from being bright shiny objects to simply part of the way we do business, Sree notes that, that’s precisely where we are with intelligent automation. Rather than a bright shiny object, businesses are now asking how does this make me smarter about my business, how does this get me closer to the customer, how does this truly help me solve a customers problem? These next few years as Sree sees it are about test and learn.

Tom Trowbridge is the former president and one of the founders of Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology. He is also an avid investor and advisor in the technology space. Hedera’s governing council consists of companies like Nomura, Deutsche Telecom, IBM, Boeing, and Swisscom. Tom notes that Hedera met with the Facebook Cayenne team in 2018—they did not join. A year later, Facebook announced the digital currency Libra and its accompanying—but separate—digital wallet, Calibra. Tom has studied and followed the digital currency phenomena in great depth and puts blockchain technologies in perspective—including the strategy Facebook may deploy in order to get users on board with its digital currency. Will the Zuckerberg Reserve give the Federal Reserve a run for its money? Tom has thoughts on that as well.

Marek Sowa is a techie. He’s not ops, he’s not financial services. That said, he’s not a traditional programmer. So he see’s it as he creates ideas and delivers results. He wants to make sense in that he’s speaking the same language as everyone with whom he’s working. So he’s taught himself how to program so that he can communicate at the deepest level with the front lines of that aspect of the team. His quest is to understand how technology will disrupt customers, current operations and how those very technologies can be embedded in said operations. What can be done and how far can he and the team push the boundaries to meet the customer where they are- no matter the time, place or service desire. Marek is engaging in ai through voice recognition with results and he shares examples of those results with us.

With 30 years and change of experience in financial services Nigel Trout feels that he must have learned something. He notes the fact that the bigger banks continue to try to find solutions in technology while the upstart fintech’s continue to search for scope and scale. While working at HSBC the focus was on the cost reduction side so Nigel and the team had to really streamline operations which led him to a focus on the technologies which could most readily accomplish that goal. He's looked at disruptive and exponential technologies including machine learning which showcases the opportunity to offer better service to the customer.

Akiko Fukuda joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where she introduces us to Cotoha the AI agent. Cotoha stands for communication happiness. The organization has launched commercial customers and they’ve got a lot of positive feedback. Customers have the option of choosing a human agent or the ai bot and they are choosing the bot. Akiko explains that the younger generation in Japan doesn’t like human interaction within this service reality. She further explains that humans don’t mind asking bots questions they feel might be stupid whereas they might be reticent to do so with a human agent.

Utilize RPA, reach for AI, focus on automation- no matter what you’re talking about, according to Bart van de Sande the Head of Operations Transaction Banking for ABN Amro, it’s all just transformation. Bart notes that these are all just new tools on the transformation journey, just as lean management and all of the tools before and after. At the core he notes, do you love your clients? Do you have passion for your clients? Do you want to go the extra mile? Do you know what drives them? How are you going to help them to fulfill their dreams or maybe sometimes help them to get out of their worst nightmares? But that, Bart says, is the core of transformation. Not the tools that you use to answer those very questions.

Recently retired EVP & CFO of Revlon Inc, Juan Figuereo joins us and notes that with RPA there’s a new world of opportunity to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and improve capabilities. Juan shares that typically, the Fortune 500 tend to be more progressive, they’re more focused on cost efficiency and looking forward- so they’re ready for automation. In his opinion processes do not need to be optimized in order to automate. But that comes hand in hand with outsourcing those processes for automation. Regarding his CFO role, it was aspects of the strategic agenda that kept him up at night. Back office only came into his mind if he was concerned with something…if something was going wrong.

Martin Ax joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit to urge his colleagues not to get too caught up in how many bots are working. He feels that the focus should be on how good you are at developing automation, how much benefit are you receiving and ensuring its part of an overall strategy. Automation can be a journey to the front of the customer experience. Once you’re overtly effective at automation development, no process should be too small for those lean and six sigma minded folks. Executing automation in a financial services environment forces you to be as precise as everyone should be based on the highly regulatory nature of the industry.

Vice President IT, for DVB Bank, Ingo Zimny joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit where he shares that providing solutions is not the only thing that his group does. They design those solutions and design the processes behind the solutions. Ingo and the team like to challenge the way things are done. They try to streamline processes to set the base for more efficient work throughout the bank generally. As he and the team add more services as they get deeper into the bank they’re finding that automation and machine learning are tools that meet their demands as they’ve got a fair amount of unstructured data. When sourcing cognitive solutions, Ingo’s concern, which he admittedly needs to validate, is that the cost benefit of the solution is based on the scope and scale of the client in question.

Charles Mulinder joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where he shares that he’s originally South African, spent a good portion of his life in the UK and currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s worked within the financial services industry for 20 years and he notes that it turns out that while there are many people in the industry, counterintuitively, it’s a small circle and a relatively compact network. Charles brings the straightforward perspective that European banks all have significant cost targets. There are inefficiencies and legacy costs which need to be pared down. Unfortunately a lot of that cost is with people so the number of people engaged in banking services must go down. Of course, one of the levers that you use to achieve that is automation.

Program Manager for the Robotics Centre of Excellence at Danske Bank, Nick Burgess joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London. He shares that he’s been in the space for 10 years. Back in the day it wasn’t called robotics as Nick says that’s a term that’s been coined only over the past few years. He notes that it’s been fascinating to see the growth in the marketplace and the interest and the results that are being delivered by organizations globally. The opportunities for robotics relate to continuous improvement as Nick’s background is in Lean and Six Sigma. The initial name was agile automation which stuck until the term robotics arrived.

Joining us from OPEX Summit in San Diego, Cyndi Creamer shares what she’s doing in Business Transformation on the Robotics team for Swiss Re. She notes that there’s a fair amount of hype around robotics and we all need to remember that it is in fact a tool. She goes further in saying that it works for some whereas it doesn’t work for others. Cyndi dives in saying that there’s a whole tool box and robotics is just one of the tools in that box. So if you’ve been piece-mealing your system together for years and you realize that you’ve got a lot of gaps... is it wise to keep filling in those gaps with robotics now or do you need to look at your entire platform first.

Kexin Xie is a data scientist for Salesforce. Among other things, Kexin is responsible for building the engineering infrastructure, services, and frameworks that makes the Salesforce marketing cloud so powerful. In this conversation, Kexin discusses how the power of predictive analytics is leveraged in businesses for “next-best-action” interactions. While these tools drive more engagement and revenue from the customer side, which Kexin touches on, he dives deep on how data science makes this possible. Kexin makes the intangibles tangible by describing the process by which algorithms are designed—including some pitfalls to be aware of—and recognizing “valuable noise.” Kexin is a realist, though, saying, “There's the use case part, there's the data part, and we're trying to build a bridge between the end solution and how we get there from the initial raw form. Eventually, we’ll start to understand the raw data more and start to build even more pipelines and then see how they connect with each other; their commonalities. And eventually, I think the bridge will be formed, and then building new things will be much easier than the initial use case.”

Patty Hatter joins us from OPEX Summit San Diego where she shares her experience as a CIO buying, as a GM building and as an executive leading transformation at sizable organizations. Patty says that it’s a lot of fun when you’re able to move through the transformation change, figuring out how to put the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense for your team, for the organization and moves the business forward. A key tool for Patty during any transformation is "radical transparency.” She coined the term to combat and debunk any distrust or misunderstanding between IT and everyone else in the organization.

The Director of Digital Operations for Western Union Processing in Lithuania, Vytis Ciemnolonskis joins us from the BFSI RPA & AI Summit in London where he shares that thinking, planning and evaluating are important but it’s just as important to get started. He and his team were lucky in having a true executive sponsor. They did a quick proof of concept- took a vendor, a developer, an SME and got a result that in fact proved that the process in question could be automated. The robot could do a sequence of activities and provide a tangible result. From there they went through a selection process to find an impactful process for the pilot. Vytis found that at the pilot phase, the team was excited by the actual deliverables being undertaken by the bot. And from there they were off and running.

CFO/CAO BNP Paribas Poland Operations Marcin Nowakowski joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit where he shares that as a CFO he of course hears from executives during the budget process, throughout execution and specifically during process improvement projects like automation. In the grand scheme of things and based on a career in finance, he notes that if an executive ever presents him with a story without numbers it’s simply a dream- it’s not a business case. While 10 year timeline projects do still occur, average projects are timed out in two to three year segments meaning- it’s by then that the organization must be paid back. This is the case as it’s so difficult to foresee the actual future 3 years hence with technological advancements like RPA & AI happening at warp speed.

Susanne Skaarup joins and and shares that she got the title as Head of robotics at Danske Bank when the company established a center of excellence in February of 2016. The bank realized that they needed to invest in RPA in autumn of 2015. They could see huge potential in the new technology and that they could do process improvements in areas where normally one would say that there was no business case to do traditional IT. Whereas six weeks is the going prognostication for bot implementation, Suzanne and her team are seeing that adoption more at 10 to 12 weeks which is still far faster of course than past projects. Regarding program governance, Suzanne discusses the benefits of a centralized model versus decentralized model vs. something in between…which is what she’s got.

Alexander Hubel joins us from the Nordic RPA & AI Summit and shares that automation at Ericsson was born out of a digital strategy project where they were looking for opportunities. Within that timeframe, Alexander saw a demo of RPA in action and he says he’s lucky because his background is in the outsourcing industry and so he knew the type of work that’s traditionally offshored and outsourced- and so in the demo- he saw familiar work being done. In terms of experience, Alexander was also a part of the largest ever M&A project in the Nordics. During the project he realized the importance of investing in systems and resource integration.

The global head of AI for Prudential Michael Natusch joins us from the Nordic RPA & AI Summit and shares his thoughts on the profound myths that abound and affect the way that global corporate executives think about AI. Michael sees the major advances in AI which will change not just what we do in 2017 but how we think about doing business in future years. But we’ve set enormous expectations for achievements to occur right here right now. Michael notes that AI fits the idiom "innovation is overestimated in the short-term and underestimated in the long-term.” That thinking extends to the technology itself. Whereas executives in the space are drawn to the concept of custom designing automation solutions- an alternative is redefining process to meet technology where it is now.

Recorded at SSOW Canada, Mathieu Rebeiro joins us and shares that as a six sigma black belt, he’s often asked- isn’t lean six sigma old or something that’s passed? He’ll be presented with the fact that the new methodology is Agile or Waterfall or Design Thinking or RPA. He offers it’s not wrong to think that way…but it’s not right either. All of those are complimentary methodologies. And the challenge to the executive in question is are you ready willing and or able to explain how they all compliment each other? Rather than find what divides us Mathew contents, find the commonalities and work together on the job at hand. He tries very hard to ensure that everyone understands that it’s not an "either or"…it’s an "and" conversation.

Just under two years into automation, Jon Theurekauf joins us from Intelligent Automation Chicago 2017 to take us through the persona around the initiative which as you might guess is Alex- a tip of the hat to BNY founder Alexander Hamilton- meaning all of the bots are called Alex with their own subsequent bot id code. The institution is a large global enterprise and searched for a partner that would suit an intelligent automation ecosystem of that size and scope. Jon says that the enterprise doesn’t really have processes running on a desktop by desktop basis and while he and the team continue to re-enineer and standardize processes, they know what’s what within each process... Which is why when they dove into automation, they did so at the enterprise level.

Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit in Stockholm, London School of Economics Professor Leslie Wilcox joins us and shares that through an early career in IT consultancy in the 1970’s, he and his clients learned a lot about getting IT into the business- so much so that he simply sees the onset of Robotic Process Automation and Cognitive Automation as simply a follow-on from each wave after wave of technology that global corporate business has been through. He feels that the transition process will be longer and more challenging than people think which is why he’s focused his most recent book on Risk Mitigation in RPA & AI.

Kenneth Farrugia is the chief business development officer with the Bank of Valletta. Kenneth starts this conversation off with a bang, making the case that if banks don’t stay on top of the technological revolution, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. Next, Kenneth, perhaps counterintuitively, labels legacy financial operations who’ve jumped on board with Industry 4.0 as FinTechs, while the up-and-comers are TechFins. Of course data and security is a big part of the conversation as well. Balancing the convenience of turning over one’s data with the risk of data breaches and/or privacy concerns is on the forefront of every financial institution’s mind. Kenneth discusses additional pain points to the future of banking, both for the client and corporation, and potential solutions for those pain points.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Julie Lotzer joins us as a team lead in RPA for a large enterprise. As the team makes their way into scaling RPA Julie shares that on the way in to automation, it was a top down initiative, but as they move across the organization, education needs to occur to ensure that stakeholders are comfortable with what’s happening.  Julie has done IT audit work in the past with Deloitte so she’s able to marry her business mind and IT understanding in her RPA role. And with Deloitte she learned how to sell, skills on which she’s drawing to draw the enterprise together through automation.

Recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit, Mattias Fras joins us and shares that when Nordea was looking at internal BPO- at the time they were performing a pre study and identifying a pilot- robotics came on the radar. They looked at it, did a few proof of concepts and realized that the scope was more or less 100% overlapping with what they wanted to do. The cost was a tenth or less and it only took 5 weeks to get a low risk robot running. He spent the next few weeks talking with different colleagues in different industries as well as a few consultants- asking if those metrics were true. His conclusion was of course, yes. His goal now is to build skills in his own people in this new technology- he wants to build the capability internally. And in achieving that goal, the first order of business is to achieve scale.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago which is his hometown. Henry Lyles joins us as the Director of Global Business Services in Continuous Improvement, Data Excellence & Automation for McDonald’s. He was originally an accountant by trade but based on the monotony, Henry found a new love in programming. Recognizing his accounting mind and technical acumen, he’s been and still is a liaison between the business and IT. Which is of course a perfect background for intelligent automation. On RPA, a little while back his boss asked him to figure out how the technology could work for shared services. And he’s been working on it ever since with results and benefit to the enterprise. 

Recorded at Intelligent Automation 2017, Seth Fargen joins us and shares that directly after 9/11, the TSA was created from scratch and Seth and his team, as an existing shared service center, were asked to come in and set up TSA's financial systems and processes. And now his Coast Guard team is on an automation journey to optimize their 1,300 internal processes that make up a day’s work. Seth feels that simply through efficiencies, the US government spending deficit could be totally eliminated. His commercial colleagues tell him they're seeing 30-70% savings through automation. So in 2016 the Federal government brought in 3.3T but spent 3.9- a difference of $587B. Apply the automation audit to spending and you’ve got yourself a surplus.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation Chicago, the Director of Royalties and content operations for Microsoft, Rohit Amberker joins us and shares that it’s his team that pays the royalties on any intellectual property that’s licensed or sold by the company which is about $4B per year. He came to royalties from cloud and before that he was in the online services business. Based on his 10 years of experience at the organization, he notes that the focus of the company is productivity which allows for the aperture of the mission to be wide. It’s that mindset he brings to automation. And so he shares the happy path which he’s discovering.

Recorded at Intelligent Automation in Chicago, Kelly Switt joins us as a native Chicagoan who was always a bit of an activist. She’s been told that her nickname is Mako Shark due to the fact that she’s always moving. Kelly was running the six sigma lean group for Citi of course consistently looking at how to improve operations. She had done some automation work at both Bank of America and HSBC and she's spent the past 4 years selling automation as a concept internally. The team began by focusing on data quality and analytics in order to drive more process improvement. That gave the team runway for management to have buy in. And finally last year, with no stones left unturned, Kelly and the team dove in on true intelligent automation.

Allan Martinson joins us and discusses customer driven robotics. Originally submitted into a NASA contest, a former Skype co-founder and a team of Estonian engineers built the original technology. After some initial trepidation, Allen, a venture capitalist at the time, came on to advise the project as he bought into the moonshot business plan based on the technologically advanced team. Allan describes autonomous delivery as a solution to the biggest waste of time in human history. He describes the product as a mobile phone on wheels. Now in 60 cities and 15 countries, Starship is delivering goods to customers all over the world. After 4M human encounters the team is realizing that customers intuitively understand how to interact with the robot.

Rida Moustafa is an experienced data scientist with a demonstrated history of working in the retail industry. Rida covers a lot of ground in this concise, informative conversation. He shares his story with us, beginning in 1995 with the big data mining movement. Walking us through the way data mining has evolved, Rida hits on neural networks, deep learning, and expert systems. Today, however, AI technology has evolved enough to render some of these old processes moot. Of course, new obstacles present themselves, such as AI’s black box and its influence over regulatory decisions and prediction models. The last half of the conversation is reserved for Rida’s involvement with Walmart and the work he is doing with AI to automate processes and generally improve Walmart’s workflow and profits.

Frank Kuenel joins us and recalls his move from Germany to the US. His only knowledge of the US was from movies and television- In his words- Kojak for the east coast, John Wayne for everything in between and Streets of San Francisco for the west. He excelled in science and mathematics early on in his life which made his path very clear to him. But his take was that there was a deeper mystery to the universe and the the language with which to discover that deeper mystery was mathematics. And so he landed at NASA just after school and helped land a rover on Mars through computer vision AI. Which eventually led Frank to Google. He discusses the fact society needs understand how to educate youth to be prepared with curiosity and give them tools to learn and be curious forever.

Stig Peterson joins us and shares what he’s doing with automation. He notes that he started as most do- with a proof of concept. He took the initiative to do it and tested technology to understand how it could work in Topdanmark’s environment. Stig quickly saw success, so much so that he established a team which is now working permanently with RPA. The first bot rollout was a year-and-a-half before this interview was recorded at the Nordic RPA & AI Summit in Stockholm. And there was a fair amount of preparation that needed to happen prior to getting a decision from the Board to actually move forward and then secure funding. Stig notes that it’s difficult to move fast in process excellence and RPA was a fast track to cost reduction.