Maturation of Tech – Frank Diana, Tata Consultancy Services

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another tech strung TV interview here working from home. I've been recently recovered from covid.

I'm happy to have is my first guests. It's coming back Frank Diana who's also a recent covid recovery. So thank God we're both well and you're able to do this.

Hey Frank, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you and Mission USB recovery.

Yes, that's you as well things like you're doing great Frank. Why don't you know, not everyone in our office are in our audience is gonna know who you are. Why don't you give him a little background of you and your company?

Sure. So as you mentioned frankly and I am a futurist and as you might imagine it's a fascinating time to be one and I am the primary futurist here at Tata consultancy Services, which is a large Services firm one of the largest in the world over 620,000 employees, very very big brand in the space and my time spent mostly advising leaders around the world in terms of where the future is going and what it might mean to them and again fascinating conversations. Absolutely, you know look for those of you out there who are saying, how do I get to be a future if it sounds like a cool job Frank, what would you tell people it was funny?

I get that question all the time. Oh sure and and some people follow an education path, you know take the courses that allowing is really focus here, whether it's an apology or political science or history a number of different things that you could do education wise and some people like myself don't belong to it. I mean if you have an ability to think at a systems level think broadly about the world and it is something that involves economics and politics and all kinds of things.

So that breath is important then then you could be a futurist. It's just the function of of your mental makeup, but I think people can also train for it. Absolutely.

So Frank, I mean we could probably do a whole interview on and how one goes about being a Futures in the various aspects of being a futurist and specializations and so forth. Unfortunately, we only have 15 minutes there. We have to talk about something else and that is digital twins.

and a lot of people in our audience may be familiar with the term. I begin there's a lot of people who have heard the term but aren't really sure about what it means. So before we dive into kind of you know, what is the future around digital Twins and so forth.

Let's talk about what do we mean when we say digital twins? So in effect, the digital twin is a digital replication, I manifestation of the physical world and that could be an asset that could be a person. It's just that we're digitally representing that and although we've we've been in this digital space for quite some time that notion of a Tipping Point for digital twins is emerging because we can really capture digitally a lot more impressively than we could in the past that physical world and a number of different Technologies are converging in ways that allow this whether it's the sensors in the world, whether it's artificial intelligence in the models, we can create there's just a number of things converging that make this a fascinating time to think about how to leverage digital twins.

absolutely and You know over the last well, certainly since covid right talking about that earlier. We we've seen the digital twinning really starting to Manifest itself, right it would as we move to digital so many organizations digitally transform. You know, you have your your real world versus your digital world if you will.

Yes analog to it. Are we reaching you're the future is tell us, you know talk to us. Are we reaching a Tipping Point here?

What does it mean? If we're reaching the Tipping Point, what does it mean to our audience? Well at any point in the sense that the applications of digital Twins and its uses is exploding.

So the number of use cases that we can imagine that is expanding and and applying them then allows us to do a number of things one is to experiment in ways that we couldn't before too is to accelerate Innovation, which is critically important to anybody out there today and three in the context of being a futurist it actually helps us from a foresight perspective thinking about this future in a ways in a way that allows us to act on it in some capacity. So I think the Tipping Point reflects the fact that it has gotten to a place where it's it's use as expanded and will continue and expand an accelerating pace. Absolutely.

But what does that mean? What does that mean for the people watching this? Right?

How's it going to make an impact in their lives? Yeah. So let's think it through some scenarios.

So one that we're actually experimenting with here at TCS is is its application to the food space. So think about the food scenario in the next several years and just just waste in and of itself is a problem in that space. And so what if a digital twin of food could allow us to understand spoilage much quicker and to avoid that spoilage in ways that eliminates weight.

So for example something we call it digital banana has allowed us to actually model what causes a banana at the ripen and if you take that model and apply in a digital twin in this case of banana and then apply that in the real world, you can start to understand what's happening to food in a place that allows us to act on that right proactively avoid food wastage and spoilage just one one example another good scenario as it applies to the human body. Which is fascinating and actually was used in the covid vaccine context where the digital twin used to understand the impact. They might have on the body is something that for example another example TCS digital skin where we've created a digital twin of our skin which allows us to understand how drugs may affect the skin and be absorbed through the epidural layer.

There's two simple examples and there's so many more that we can talk through so I'll stop there but happy to dive into several others if we want to It's fascinating, but let's dive into these two. Right, you can't eat digital food, right? But but yeah and You know, I happen to be reading this morning.

Like I'm sure many of my our audiences. War in Russia and Ukraine and and Ukrainian crane shipments. You know beginning to be felt in the World Market that the grain is making its way out.

Whether it's going to Europe or the third world depends who you believe I guess. you know, how does Digital twinning let's say help with an increased. an increase in A emphasis on trying to feed the Never Growing population here.

And that's a great great example of technology evolve into a place where we can solve some of the greatest challenges we have so for example, in terms of food scarcity, which many believe is coming and getting worse on the back of climate change and other phenomena if we could grow our Foods in our city Center's vertical farming being a really good example that where we're growing our foods and buildings using Robotics and AI to do that in a very optimal Manner and that's an example of a digital twin where we can use the science behind all this to optimize food capacity. Right? So we're optimizing yield we're doing it in ways that minimizes the use of water and fertilizers, which is obviously climate impact and that could all be facilitated by simulating these things through these digital twins.

Just one example, there's a great examples of how we're doing that in the fields in the forms of the world or Precision agriculture is being used to do the same kinds of things. The water consumption reduce the use of fertilizers optimize yields or machines are actually using sensors to feed these digital twins real-time information, right? So great example and graduate board up in terms of the World Challenge and a growing World Challenge and how these emerging Technologies can be leveraged to actually solve them.

Absolutely, you know you mentioned the other example and that was but digital skin. And that one I think is probably a little easier for people to get their heads around right if you could reproduce a digital version of your skin and see how certain medications or treatments are. Altered sound ultraviolet.

I mean, you know how these things interact with that. It's a much cheaper way of doing medical research obviously and I would imagine we could probably extend that to digital organs. And I mean, I think this is already a pretty well kind of grounded technology in terms of like folding proteins and you know how we developed again going back to covid how he developed the covid vaccines and stuff a lot of that was done.

using digital technology, you know whether with DNA manipulation in a digital realm before it, you know went went to the real world. Yeah, great examples and we already have a digital heart a digital twin of the heart and to the point as we do these things we start to assess how things impact the heart and we do that in a way that doesn't evolve humans and clinical trials doesn't involve animals through animal testing, which is another good in positive impact in the use of these Technologies and what if we could do a digital brain and eventually we'll get there as well and understand the implications of drugs to the brain and impact of any vaccine as an emerges as these extreme events that we believe will continue to happen Force us to quickly understand the impact of those events and I think digital twin and me AI technologies that are evolving we'll do that for us. A great a great so those are two I think concrete examples.

this other examples though Frank that kind of maybe a little bit further out there off world economy stops and and things like that. There you know where we take I think people understand now what we're talking about but here's some Far reaching implications. Why don't you kind of clue Us in on that if you don't mind?

Well, yeah, I mean you mentioned off Planet economies and that really in a nutshell is just about doing more and more in space whether it's growing our foods and space back to that scarcity issue and you might do that. So think about a digital twin that tries to simulate the growth of food in space or if we mind asteroids to avoid the resource scarcity than anybody who's coming how could you model you know digital twin of an asteroid that helps us understand that and if we do have any aspirations to live on Mars somewhere down the road a digital twin of the Mars environment would be another good example how we might explore that and those are you know further off into the future. But if we were a little bit closer, you know, the metaverse is obviously a Hot Topic and and in effect is a bunch of digital twins that start to simulate reality and so a digital twin of the city A digital twin of the the road infrastructure of Any Given city and what if that digital twin saw a pothole emerging before anybody else saw it and then proactively gets people to address that that pothole so an example a little further out but not that far out where we can't see and envision the benefits of those kinds of things and then I believe that some of the challenges that these future scenarios pose.

Let's think in the context of EVs and the concern that lithium and Cobalt and nickel or it's just not going to be enough of that. Material Sciences is one answer to those problems where we find new materials that actually solve these problems and I believe digital twins will accelerate the path and Material Sciences and ways that we apply those materials and solve other challenges as we do so, right so there's just a number of the scenarios emerging that are fascinating and think about and not really science fiction. I mean, I believe a lot of people still have the science fiction feel to this, but it's it's happening.

You know, we we've been looking about. So we put on a lot of events, right? We split on in-person events obviously during covid.

We shifted to Virtual events. The fact is people are getting bored with virtual events, right? They're tired of just logging in and watching some talking head in the slideshow and we've been looking here at Tech Sean at You know digital metaverse kind of Technologies where we can kind of.

better duplicate that in person experience On in a digital environment like that. The problem we run into Frank is you know without actually going out and getting everyone in Oculus or something like that. It the state of the technology today is such as that we we can't bring them into that matter verse we can't bring them into that digital environment without some today expensive.

Kind of Technology. What do you see? I mean do we get to the point where Oculus is, you know ante up to to experience?

A lot of this digital stuff or is there another technology maybe that just enables this to go? Broad, you know really mainstream. Yeah, you know at this age, I think we're creating two title linkage between the virtual reality domain and the metaverse Because if you think about the gaming ecosystem that's been in place for quite some time.

Now, it is really the underpinning of the metaphors at the end of the day so you could create a gaming kind of environment or a metaverse. If you will to do the things you talked about more realism to the kinds of meetings and interviews that we're doing right now in a gaming kind of context 3D oriented you could you could scan yourself for example and plop yourself right into that that metaverse environment and assets artifacts can be scanned sculptures. Just think about the possibilities that go forward but it doesn't necessarily have to rely on an Oculus or virtual reality component to it.

I think that evolves much more rapidly in the back of the pandemic that it might have otherwise, but it's not the critical piece of the story if you want to exploit The Meta person and there's so much Which I have there is such a big buzzword these days that honestly who knows where this stuff will actually eventually go right? But I do think you could accomplish what you're talking to in more of a gaming context than a virtual reality context. A great anyway, hey, we're about at a time of Franklin fascinating stuff.

What a what a great job to have right from all the people out there wondering I want that job. I'd love to have you back up. Maybe you can come on one of our virtual events where we're talking about the future and and that will dive deeper into this what I want to thank you.

Thank you for people who may be one of follow you or find out more about what content's doing, especially around digital twinning and so forth. net. So a couple of the resources there for anybody that's interested.

Fantastic. Hey Frank. Thanks so much for joining us.

We're going to take a break here on techstruck TV. We'll be right back.