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Roland Haefs, with Henkel, discusses enterprise evolution and the shift from having purely transactional relationships to becoming a true business solutions provider. It takes strong leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit to pull off such a transformation, which Roland details. In order to demonstrate his point, Roland lays out Henkel's approach to the shared services process of master data management. Next, the conversation turns to RPA and AI more specifically, including its role in shared services and how to make sure it is being deployed effectively. Further, Roland discusses Henkel's four business priorities: fund growth, drive growth, excel at digitalization, and increase agility.

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.

Karen Tilstra is the co-founder of the Florida Hospital Innovation Lab. In this conversation, Karen emphasizes the intent of the Innovation Lab, which, not surprisingly, is innovation. However, the process to innovation is often overlooked. Karen describes it as a "multifaceted journey of learning, of discovery, of openness." In other words, innovation isn't instantaneous, nor does it happen in a silo. When a brand thinks they know what's best for their customers—instead of interacting with those customers—it's often the beginning of the end. Karen details Sears' downward spiral as an example. Next, Karen questions the value of the typical enterprise growth mentality. Is "grow or die" a myth or a reality? True, meaningful innovation involves the application of certain soft skills that aren't immediately apparent. Karen drives their importance home in this insightful, outside-of-the-box conversation.

Gerald Lackey, VP of Business Optimization and Agility at GAF, discusses their 18-month journey into their current transformation. Gerald is no stranger to enterprise transformations, having participated in a few himself, but he outlines a few unique strategies GAF is taking. For example, GAF is especially focused on business outcomes for their customers. That means that instead of creating a solution and selling it to customers, they are learning about the needs of their customers and creating solutions that fit those needs. Gerald describes this new strategy as a combination between the traditional top-down method and a social movement that involves everybody.

Tapping into the entire workflow through internal social media is one strategy GAF employs to create a culture of customer centricity, inclusivity, and change. Gerald dives deep on other unique transformation strategies that meet people—internally and externally—where they are, instead of attempting to force change. Corporate stumbling blocks are more often than not a cause of "people problems." Gerald wraps up this discussion by explaining how GAF's agile approach helps navigate those problems effectively.

Dmitri Popov, global service management lead for Mann + Hummel Group, joins us today to discuss scaling RPA. Dmitri himself admits that such a process is painful, in part because of the few successful enterprise examples for which to model after. Dmitri points to IBM as a company who has done it well. Next, Dmitri discusses how to leverage shared services in the most efficient way, exemplifying R&D and certain purchasing aspects. One of the most difficult components of implementing RPA across the workflow is acceptance and adherence. Dmitri doesn't mince words when it comes to what it takes in a person—not just an enterprise—to accept change, no matter how positive that change may ultimately be.

Todd Gillam joined Comcast a decade ago—when the word "Comcast" was met with severe negativity. During the first part of our conversation with Todd, he laments over those dark days and discusses the progress they made the first five years after he was hired. They cleaned up their image by addressing common complaints such as hold times and technician effectiveness. Stage two involved systematically identifying and fixing a broader range of customer pain points by utilizing NPS surveys. By combining the operation end of things with the product, Comcast is offering a single digital interface solution across its offerings. Todd gives a few clever examples of what this entails. Finally, Todd asks and answers three important questions: How does Comcast build something and make it useful to the customer? How do you make that work with the rest of the company? And finally, how does Comcast achieve a higher state of existence with respect to customer experiences that feel like a seamless part of the product?

Peter Van Den Heuval, product manager with Shell, is better known internally as Peter PI. In this conversation, he explains the origin story of his nickname, a nod to Shell's use of OSIsoft's PI System data infrastructure. Shell has been ahead of the data game since 1996, as they understood the long-term implications of real-time data and looked for a platform to store and analyze that data. PI fit the bill. Now, as technology and processing power has bumped data into the next frontier, Shell applies advanced analytics to the massive amount of data they've collected. Peter shares examples of complicated calculations they benefit from due to big data and real-time process analytics. Next, Peter explains how Shell plans to implement IoT in order to collect meaningful data for predictive analytics that leads to actionable change. Peter also explores the soft skills involved in staying passionate about data and its power. He enables Shell's workflow the ability to take action on data by simplifying the data process through PI. Ultimately, creating a safe, effective product is Peter's motivation.

On this episode of "Tomorrow Today," Barbara Hodge discusses the power of continuous education. With the turn of the decade, Barbara decided to make some changes to her own learning path. She is fully open to, and expects, new insights from her new experience to spill over into the way she works. On an enterprise level, global corporations also expect talent to continuously peruse new avenues of education. Today's ever-evolving landscape requires it. Next, Barbara discusses avalanches—both literal and metaphorical—and what they teach us about decision making and risk taking. Ultimately, Barbara's point is this: if we're open to new ideas from anywhere and everywhere and tie those ideas back to what we're doing in our day-to-day, we benefit. Driving the conversation back to AI and technology, the lesson of the day is this: Diversity of thought prevents common pitfalls such as bias and instability.

Deepak Subbaru joins us again, this time, to discuss unstructured data. The recent explosion in technology inputs has raised the bar for customer expectations. They want more, and they want it now. Requests are coming via phone calls, social media, emails, etc. The product of this feedback is unstructured data. Deepak goes in depth on three actionable steps to take in order to leverage the power of unstructured data: know your data, know the sources of your data, and prepare your data. Next, Deepak discusses the importance of defining outcomes for your data, as opposed to cramming data into an algorithm and receiving an output that has no use case. As Deepak reiterates throughout the conversation, context is key.

Uzair Rashid, with CVS Healthcare, explains the importance of structuring innovation. Uzair brings a unique perspective to CVS, a Fortune 10 healthcare innovations company, because prior to CVS, he spent many years as a consultant. He understands how to level set and create meaningful change in legacy companies. When it comes to healthcare disruption, Uzair puts it this way: "Innovation at the speed of regulation." Uzair's goal is to seek out key technology enablers that create new patient experiences, drive down cost, and take the challenge of resource contention out of the game. By leveraging technology in conjunction with traditional medical resources, the healthcare system can clean up the funnel of patients who are better served with these new innovations. First, as the patient must take priority, it is imperative we understand the narrative of what they want. Then, we can power that with data and connected devices. The more proactive and preventative healthcare becomes, the healthier people become, the better healthcare becomes. Uzair summarizes the process beautifully with this simple phrase. "[With technology], you think about routing people appropriately to care."