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BitCherry's Paul Bao explains the blockchain process behind the platform's commercial applications. Working similar to Amazon's eCommerce model, BitCherry will offer a platform to buy, sell, and network goods using digital currency. Regulatory roadblocks make penetration in the U.S. difficult, but BitCherry has over 2 million members and 120,000 active daily users. Currently, these users simply buy and sell digital currency in anticipation for BitCherry's retail applications. Bao expects the retail platform to go live in Q1 of 2020. Next, he details the brainstorming process behind BitCherry's unique independent investor philosophy and marvels over the future implications of blockchain. While he may be a little ahead of his time, BitCherry's users prove that there is a lot of faith in the future of eCommerce and digital currency.

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."

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.

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."

Max Just is accompanied by a special guest on this episode of Future of Work. Julie Seitz is an expert on all things workspace, which makes her the perfect partner for the topic of—you guessed it—the future of workspaces. While she notes that an enterprise can't necessarily futureproof themselves in this regard, she encourages them to get out of their insular spaces for the sake of spotting trends in how people are working in universities, airports, etc. Flexibility and simplicity in a workspace make more practical investments than technological ones that will become outdated. Julie also reflects on the evolution of the public school classroom and how examining that process helps illustrate how different generations work differently. Max jumps in with the ah-hah moments he had while working with Julie, including the importance of providing collaborative workspaces for collaborative work. Ultimately, Max and Julie agree: workspaces matter.

NASA's Pam Wolfe joins us to discuss their RPA journey, which started over two years ago in their Shared Services Center. Establishing RPA governance across NASA has taken time, strategy, and strong support across the agency. In many ways, NASA's move to RPA is very similar to the typical enterprise, but let's not forget—NASA sends people to space. In fact, a recent decision was made to send astronauts to the moon and Mars by 2024. In order to reach their goals, NASA went through a cultural and digital transformation shift that received a high level of support from the top—which Pam defines as a necessity. Naturally, governance and security is of the utmost importance during this transformation. Pam shares some astonishing numbers in regard to their progress while laying out a path for the lay-enterprise, if you will, to accomplish similar workflow evolutions.

In this episode, IEEE's Lee Coulter discusses the notion that the future of every successful company will depend on its transformation into a technology services business—even the local pizza joint. This far-reaching conversation covers the entirety of the current "data chasm." Lee kicks the discussion off by justifying his aversion to the term RPA. He notes that organizations start with task automation before moving onto intelligent automation, a process that gets lost in the blanket term RPA. Lee says, "Where we are today and what's now happening is that the tool makers and the advanced practitioners are beginning to interact with unstructured data and expanding the use case to now include unstructured data. There's several different specific scenarios in which that occurs. Service initiation almost always begins with unstructured requests, like to a call center or chatbot."

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.

Juan Araya discusses structuring for scale from the eyes of the disruptor and disruptee—both of which Juan knows well. Juan reminds us that before making any actionable change, an end goal must be set. Next, Juan discusses the role speed plays in structuring for scale. Some industries need to move faster than others, which affects their decision making. In the case of Uber, Juan understood that transformative technology supported the speed of change Uber strived for, even more than the other scaling components: people and process. On the flipside, scaling legacy organizations quickly and through technology-first means isn't conducive to success. His new role with Stryker moves slower and with an enterprise-wide intention different than Uber's, which Juan details well. Finally, Juan paints a metaphor between scaling and art.

Robert Welborn joins us again for the second part of autonomous vehicle myths. During this discussion, Robert compares the vast and critical differences between the capabilities of today's math and the necessity of developing tomorrow's math before fully autonomous vehicles are a safe, mainstream option. He parses out the weakness in today's autonomous vehicles. For example, converting visual information into digital information and then trying to extract features from that before making a decision off of those inputs. As one could imagine, and as Robert so vividly depicts, there are issues—namely safety—in expecting a computing system to respond quickly and correctly to the infinite numbers of inputs it may receive. Robert closes the discussion with a few viable ways of progressing the technology.