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Recorded at CX Exchange for Retail, Antonio Zaccheo joins us and discusses his early days in Naples and his foray into the military as a young man. In the military his leaders taught him to be a better person. Each day he had to exercise, go to class, participate in sport, study and then go to dinner in that order. If you missed something- you missed it- so he learned accountability. He studied economics at a top school in Italy where he learned he wasn’t a visionary but a operator which led him to investment banking. He eventually he brought his to investment banking mind to retail. At Luxxotica, his fellow Italian CEO told Antonio to go to the US to fix issues with a business unit. He utilized his experience in dealing with high caliber leaders in the finance world in dealing with his retail compatriots…and he continues that today.

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.

On his way to Keynote CEM Asia 2017, Frank Eliason joins us state side and takes us through his thinking about how global society is behaving currently and what that means for customer experience. As he says, he’s been watching customer experience since before they called it customer experience. He notes that globally, we’re creating these big CX fiefdoms but we then retract quickly because CX isn’t delivering quickly enough. Frank shares that he should have paid more attention in psychology class. His thought is that in addition to paying attention to the customer’s experience, organizations should be paying attention to the employee’s experience. Frank adds that when you newly focus on customer experience as a deliverable, you’re going against the grain of not only your customers but your employees as well.

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. Leslie notes that the forecast is for automation to go quickly, but historically as each wave of technology scales up, industry consistently runs into similar issues each time- and that’s the current phase. 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.

Recorded at SSOW Manchester, Gary Carter joins us and discusses his role at Credit Suisse being responsible for the offshoring program- supporting internal businesses as they look to move functions from the core business centers to the developed established offshore locations. He spends a lot of time discussing with businesses what they need, with cost, of course, being a core part of the conversation. But Gary and his team feel that if you talk about offshoring and the only thing one has to say is “we’ll save you money,” that’s a dead conversation. That’s what the past decade plus was all about. There has to be something else- like focusing on talent or operational resiliency from cohabiting functions for example as the beginning of a more comprehensive conversation around what offshoring means for your enterprise.

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.

Lee Coulter returns, and shares that IEEE automation standards were born out of a serious frustration that a lot of folks were having but that Lee was having at a chronic, nearly medical level. The IEEE Guide to Terms and Concepts on Intelligent Process Automation provides the industry with a lexicon which allows executives to have an intelligent conversation around intelligent automation. For example, RPA is server based batched unattended automation. RDA is interactive automation that runs concurrently with other desktop executables allowing the automation to pause for cognitive input or contribution by the operator and then continue on it’s automation journey. These are two simple distinctions which help set the course for a true understanding of automation and it’s affect on global corporate enterprise.

Former marketer and current creative director for Cirque du Soleil, Jean Guilbert joins us from C2 and shares that he’s just finished a tremendous amount of work- the opening ceremony of the pan american games and the Cirque's Volta who’s production process took a full two years. The first phase of production went pretty fast. The story, the pillars of creation of the show- what they wanted to try- was born in the first month. The practical means and how to articulate the vision artistically is what took more time. Cirque is extremely data savvy with a large research department which tracks appreciation, NPS, seating, parking, ticket price, etc. And so on the business side, adjustments are made based on direct customer experience feedback. That said, they never create based on customer research but they polish with consumer data.