New Exec Roles, Automation, Robots and More – Digital CxO Podcast EP84

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

As always, good and happy to be here. Well, as always, we have a huge list of topics to cover today, so we're gonna start with the Time that that just shows how busy you are. Yep.

So the time for a Chief Resilience officer is now according to this particular article, it says the recent CrowdStrike outage underscores a critical need in today's digital landscape. The role of a chief resilience officer, CRO as businesses increasingly rely on complex digital infrastructures, the risks of failures and the potential impact have escalated. The CrowdStrike incident is a stark reminder of why it is time for organizations to appoint A CRO.

So what are your thoughts? On the one hand, I would agree, and, uh, unless you've been hiding under a rock, you pretty much understand that the impact of this thing in terms of revenue for companies was tremendous beyond measure, as they say. Um, and I like the idea, but here's the part that I always kind of scratch my head about is I cannot tell you how many times that somebody has said this is a wake up call for X.

And then, you know, about a week later, everybody rolls over and hits the snooze button and moves on. Um, so it's not clear to me, y we don't, you know, put some sort of focus on resiliency. And I don't know if we need another chief to go do that.

It's a nice idea. It's always good that, you know, arguably somebody should be in charge of it. But we do have a lot of other C-level titles and perhaps resiliency is a thing that we should measure those titles on, including our digital CXL friends.

And, um, if the service or whatever it is we built is not resilient, then, you know, that says something about our plans and our strategy that we should go revisit. So, kind on the one hand agree, and on the other hand, I'm just kind of like, folks, maybe we just need to do a better job. Yeah, I mean, I think proper communication and occasionally testing, you know, various aspects of it to, to ensure that you're gonna be able to be resilient, Right?

And consider what happened here. I mean, it's easy to blame CrowdStrike for not testing properly, okay. But, um, all kinds of people who are CrowdStrike customers implemented this update without testing it themselves are looking at it either.

So there's plenty of blame to go around here, folks. Um, and I know it's easy to kinda point fingers, but I think maybe we should just give each other a mulligan here and kind of say, look, you know, let's make this the ultimate learning moment and we are gonna go in and not do these things and fix these things. com that's related to this where we talk about there's a cloud oligarchy these days.

We're just too dependent upon too few companies and, uh, one cascading impact and, you know, everybody's involved. So I think we need to kind of revisit the, the IT architectures that we're dependent upon as well and kind of think through what are the single points of failure, um, because we have too much confidence in things that are prone error. Yeah, I think every company is in a way responsible for themselves.

Even though you are relying on a lot of other software or tools, you still are responsible for checking them. You can't just lay all the blame on those. There you go.

So everybody take a big giant first, take a breath and then make a gut check and just go, Hey, what are we overly dependent upon that, you know, maybe I could do, uh, an exercise in what we call chaos monkeying thinking and just start randomly making things unavailable and see what happens. Don't do that in the middle of the afternoon when everybody's using those services, but you know, maybe try it on the weekends sometime. Well, moving on, now we're gonna talk about CIOs as digital CXOs.

So the role of the Chief Information officer continues to evolve as technology transitions from being a tool for conducting business to becoming the business itself. The shift places CIOs at sender stage with growing demands, requiring them to meet operational responsibilities while also driving business outcomes. So what are you hearing from business leaders?

There's, I'll say real quickly, there's another article along the lines of this and it says, adoption of AI is becoming a central focus for businesses globally with 91% of technology leaders considering AI as an important business priority. So this is even more tools coming into the business And there's even a chief AI officer now that's being kicked around. So going back to our earlier point, maybe there is one too many, three too many c-level execs being bounced around here.

Um, here's the thing, A lot of organizations appointed specifically a digital, um, transformation officer or digital chief because they felt that the IT people were not sufficiently agile enough and didn't have enough business insights to go execute a plan or something to drive the, uh, revenue goal or whatever it was. Something interesting happened, uh, along the covid near recession time that passed was the conversation shifted to operational efficiencies and it became less about let me go build some new thing that maybe drive revenue. 'cause those things take longer and are harder.

And a lot of the digital transformation initiatives, the tenor shifted to let's go in and optimize existing processes. Well, uh, yeah, that's kind of where a lot of these CIOs already live 'cause they're in charge of these platforms and an application. So I kind of hope that drove people closer together and that they're working more collaboratively.

Um, but you know, people get, uh, jealous of their prerogative, shall we say, and it sometimes it's difficult to kind of get to that level of cohesion. Um, and I wonder, um, you know, where we are on this journey, this survey on the article makes it seem like, well, I think CIOs are more business cognizant and they have been maybe five years ago. And they are in many cases, some of them have MBAs and some of them, uh, came outta business units and are just, you know, people who were not grew up in IT, but are business folks who were tech savvy or tech savvyer than they, you know, where in the past we didn't have many of those people, if you think back 10 years ago.

So the nature of the conversation is changing businesses understand they're more dependent upon it than ever. The types of CIOs who are filling those positions are, are interesting. Um, uh, chief AI officer, I'm okay with the idea maybe in the short term, but if AI is gonna be pervasive, then it's part of everybody's gigs and jobs.

And sometimes I think that, you know, too many businesses will be like, well I don't have to worry about that. 'cause the chief AI officer's taking care of that. Well, that's the wrong way to go for sure.

So I wish, um, there was an easy answer here. There's a tendency to just kind of, you know, make people in charge of something and hope for the best. But I think we need to think through whole digital IT AI thing.

It's time to maybe take a giant step back and say, Hey, what do we wanna be when we grow? Yeah, absolutely. And I think we've talked about this before, but eventually AI is just another tool and a huge toolbox of tools.

So, um, you know, separating it out maybe for the short term, but eventually, you know, it should just be in that tool mix. All right. I just don't think, um, I doubt we'll see a consolidation of titles anytime soon, but, uh, we need to find ways to make sure that all these titles are kind of linked together in a way that results in, uh, more positive outcomes, shall we say.

Definitely. So now we're gonna talk about automation. So, uh, this is on digital.

CXO. A thorough understanding of new technology enables us to use these tools to their full advantage. There is no better clue into how things will progress than looking at the trends that got us to where we are today.

We'll provide a quick history of how automation evolved in the world of business over the years and use this as a rubric to look forward to what's next. This is a really interesting article, talks about the internet and cloud and just the evolution of technology to where we are today. So I encourage everyone to read it.

It's called The Next Phase of Automation Learning from the Past and Looking to the Future. Yeah, and here's the thing, we have no shortage of automation as it is. The problem is, is we have islands of automation and all these different things are automated in slightly different ways.

And getting these automations to interoperate with one another is extraordinarily hard. And a digital process invariably touches four or five different systems, maybe as many as 20, whatever it is, and they're all automated slightly differently. That's what makes it hard to kind of connect the dots between these things.

I wonder, as we look to the future here with ai, I'm gonna ultimately normalize data so that I can train the AI model. So I'm gonna show them whether it's, um, some sort of format I created using a vector database or whatever it might be. We might be on the cusp of actually being able to use AI agents to invoke those in a way that we can orchestrate across multiple AI automated platforms that run different processes.

And the whole thing, uh, you know, right now it's not easy, but the whole thing, at the end of the day, it might become a lot easier to orchestrate these digital processes just because I'm gonna use a series of AI agents that I'm gonna manage and orchestrate that are gonna talk to each of these islands of automation in a way that makes them more cohesive. At least that's the hope and that's I think, the way Digital C Accelerator should start thinking about this stuff. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, everybody's thinking about automation and what they can automate, so it it just takes better planning. Yeah, I would obsess less about the language models which come now in t-shirt sizes of small, medium and large. But, um, I don't know if I care what the LLMI, I wanna know how it works and I want some explainability so that I'm not really dependent upon it.

But, um, those things are rapidly becoming utilities. They're gonna come and go by different capabilities and I'm gonna swap in and out. And the thing that will stay constant is this AI agent.

So maybe we should focus more on what these AI agents are doing. Mm-Hmm, Definitely. Well now we're gonna switch to robots.

I like talking about all the different things going on in the robotics world. So this one is about a new startup. A startup is taking a different route in the mobile robotics business using an AI foundation model and a low cost passive sensor rather than lidar technology, which is the backbone for most au autonomous mobile devices, including self-driving cars and buses.

7 million in seed money from Coastal Ventures and other investors. And on Tuesday they unveiled the first ever on-road delivery robot. I like robots as much as anybody else and hopefully they won't all kill us one day, but, um, I don't know what to do with all these robots that we are now seeing.

I mean, this is one of many, and it's an interesting approach, but I don't know if you're watching what's going on in the world these days, but there's a new robot being launched almost every day now. So it feels like that they're coming faster and furious and um, a lot of them are being made to look humanoid. Um, in fact, I think there was a whole thing on 60 minutes the week before last about all of this as well.

And you know, they were amazed that they could have a conversation when a robot and um, you know, it wasn't a rich conversation, shall we say, but it was, you know, mildly interesting that that could be done. Uh, they were talking about it from the perspective of robots preventing people from becoming lonely, especially in their, uh, older years. But, um, I'm just wondering, you know, how far down the path are we really in terms of using these things?

I get that I can build cars using robots and those robots are pretty much confined to a physical space. Jensen, while over and Nvidia was talking about, uh, we need to train robots to understand the laws of physics. 'cause one of the things they don't really get is, um, speed and impact and, you know, we have a, a car that's one thing, but the car doesn't really understand necessarily how much damage it's gonna do if it hits something and that can be trained.

It's, it's the next rev of these things. Um, so I like robots. I think that, you know, we're gonna have millions of, I'm just a little unsure about the timeline, but if I was building some sort of digital process that I probably was gonna roll out in the next two to three years, I'd probably include a robot.

Oh yeah. I think it depends on use cases and there's so many different types of robots. So, you know, the humanoid robots, I think we're a little ways out on, on that really being mainstream.

Uh, but you know, as far as delivery, I like this use case example as far as, you know, that last mile delivery, maybe a car or a a a vehicle can't get to it or something. Um, and they can use this robotic, uh, method of delivery. Uh, maybe it's a, uh, a little faster than, you know, if there's a weather issue or something like that.

So, um, I think it's a good use case using 'em in the delivery process. I'm for taking all the delivery trucks we can off the road. I mean, it's already congested enough out there and um, so we can find some other way to deliver that last mile, that would be fabulous.

So, uh, Yeah, absolutely. And it can open up some new jobs in the industry. Um, you know, dri you know, drivers that are kind of, uh, remote driving them, making sure they get to their destination properly and all that kind of thing.

There you go. From their handheld device in the truck, there was the main distribution center as they were kind of flying these things around. Um, outta curiosity, I dunno what you think about this, but, um, let's say I have 10 delivery companies and they're all using this capability.

Uh, what's to keep these things from knocking into each other? Yeah, that's a good question. I, I, again, I think it's, um, there's gonna be a lot of programming issues involved here and, and, you know, um, training and software that's necessary to keep that from happening And the occasional good old boy who's doing a little target practicing.

Right. And, uh, well, I would also say that I think I could see this kind of technology something similar to this if they get this down being used for more dangerous tasks like going into caves or tunnels for rescue missions and things like that. Yeah.

One of the things that they were, uh, talking about, um, on, I think it was 60 minutes, but um, they were using, um, drones and you could figure that robots sort of the next level of drones to, uh, rescue people while they were in, if they were in trouble swimming and the drone went out there and dropped the, you know, some small, um, raft type material that you can get on and kind of keep yourself floating. In other instances, they used to drone to drop a pulley rope to the person who was drowning and the people on the beach just pulled him in. That is awesome.

Yeah. And, and that's kind of cool because, you know, to the point of the, the video was like, Hey, we're now, we don't need to put rescuers in harm's way. We can other ways of doing this.

Definitely. Okay, well our, the last topic for today is AI in sales. So a global Salesforce survey of 5,500 sales professionals published finds 81% of sales teams are either experimenting with or have fully implemented ai.

And it notes that 83% of sales teams that have implemented AI saw revenue growth in the last year compared to 66% that experienced growth without using AI goes on to share some other stats. But what are your thoughts? There's a lot of interesting stats in this.

The most compelling one that I found was, um, the folks who were using AI actually expanded the size of their sales staffs because they were able to justify the return on investment to go after a larger share of the market. So rather than cutting back the number of salespeople, it was interesting to see that they were increasing the number of salespeople as they got more efficient. Um, I think here's the truth of the matter about sales, and you know, most of the salespeople that you know, kind come to meet you and selling you whatever it is they're selling do not really have a good handle on what the product does, and they don't have a good handle on what the buyer's needs really are.

They are, uh, people who are good at engaging folks and they're good at, uh, trying to convince you to do something. They have a knack for that, but they're understanding of what it is that they're actually selling and, and, and how it gets used by the customers is often limited. I think with gen ai, the ability to do the research and kinda understand what's going on in the market should be a lot better.

Uh, more salespeople should be able to manage their own marketing and not be so dependent upon a centralized marketing function. And those salespeople should be able to tweak content more easily to, uh, the needs of a specific customer. I think it will enable salespeople to be better salespeople by a wide margin.

And for that, I'm hopeful because, um, we need salespeople that it's a vital function, but, um, everybody who is a buyer of something will tell you that the the sales engagement process that they go through is less than satisfactory. Now here's an interesting thing though to think about. All right, so AI is coming to the salespeople, right?

They're gonna have agents that will help them do their job better. Well, do you not think that the buyers are gonna have their own AI agents that will help them do their jobs better? And are, are these AI agents gonna meet somewhere and the great ether and battle out the negotiation process?

Or at some point will they cancel each other out and we'll just have humans doing the same thing over again? Oh wow. That is very interesting.

What an interesting concept. Yeah, it would make sense actually. You might have an AI agent working on behalf of the buyers too.

Uh, I would certainly be able to do some quicker data analysis and, and give them some feedback. Is this a good decision or not? It's gonna be a funny old world, that's for sure.

There was some, I don't know where it was, it was on social media, but it was a really hilarious, uh, prank call. I was listening to a, uh, I guess it was last week, but it was, um, AI in customer service. They called in for some help and um, it was AI and they switched them to some AI agent and then they're like, is it okay if, um, the AI supervisor is on this call?

And so the AI agent starts helping them and then the AI supervisor gets in on it and starts reprimanding the AI agent and then they get into a big argument and the lady is really freaking out. It was so funny. But I mean, seriously, we could see things like that happening, uh, AI being incorporated in these processes And this is why we don't show people the sausage factor.

Alright, well that actually brings us to the end of our topics today. So do you have any last thoughts? I think this is an exciting time.

There's more opportunity for innovation than ever. Uh, but as always, you know, proceed with caution because, um, some of these things are, uh, shall we say, immature and, um, the worst thing you can do is don't experiment on customers. Absolutely.

You heard it here. So until next week, go through and catch up on any past podcasts you may have missed, and then share with us what articles you're most interested in on today's and let us know what do you wanna hear about in the future. Have a good day.

We'll see you next.