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Barbara Hodge reflects on 2019, identifying the trends that shaped the decade. Data, self-service, and automation has affected us all. A new awareness of personal data and its power—for good and for evil—came to light, for example, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the same time, all of that data that has been given and taken has made surprisingly little headway within industry, as enterprises grapple with how to funnel it into tangible action. While it's easy to sensationalize the negative, Barbara reminds us that GBS and automation has made our lives easier. Barbara explores the automation ideal: a world in which we're free to pursue our passions because the difficult work is done for us. It's easy to take progress for granted and worry about the side effects of that progress, but Barbara is hopeful that this Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead humanity into a new era of innovation and inspiration.

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.

Hendrik Boehmer is the People Experience & Operations Lead for Unilever. While such a title is a few syllables longer than its counterpart, Hendrik explains that Unilever's HR transformation involved a complete reimagination of the role. First, hand-picked roles that were once outsourced were brought back in house in order to achieve HR's new goal: more simple, more impact, and more human. What this entails is increasing automation and the role of human talent simultaneously. While it sounds contradictive, Hendrik details the logistics and execution in full. As with any digital transformation, reskilling and security must be addressed. Unilever has a system in place for both, which Hendrik describes next. Finally, Hendrik mulls over this universal truth and what it's meant for his career and enterprise at large: the only constant is change.

Martin Felder is the head process automation center at Linde Global Services. He discusses his role with Linde as well as their journey into RPA. Instead of taking the typical low-hanging-fruit approach, Martin tackled Linde's impending future when deciding where to implement RPA first. He explains the whys and hows of this, including how he got the C-suite to sign off—and fund—such a huge initiative. As Linde is a global enterprise, Michael next discusses the pain points, mistakes, and happy accidents that occurred during the pilot and roll-out of RPA solutions. Perhaps most important, Martin wraps up with his thoughts on human talent, relationships, and how to move into the future of automation by appreciating the people side of things.

In this episode, IEEE's Lee Coulter discusses the notion that the future of every successful company will depend on the transformation into a technology services business—even pizza. 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."

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.

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.

In this episode, Kai-Eberhard Lueg, Global Business Solutions expert with Siemens, discusses the future of automation. Specifically, commerce is experiencing a new type of customer expectation that involves an increase in personalization and speed. While these two concepts seem counterintuitive, digitalization and shared services make it possible. Digitization is only as effective as the foundation it was built on, however, so Mr. Lueg details the best way to move forward on firm ground. Finally, Mr. Lueg emphasizes the importance of human talent. By building a culture of curiosity and innovation, both employees and enterprise benefit from the expectation and execution of upskilling and reskilling with an emphasis on technical skills.

Dr. Ayanna Howard is a chair of the School of Interactive computing at Georgia Tech, an academic, and a startup founder. While her talents are as vast as her pursuits, she sums up their relation as interactive computing. In her words, "Interactive computing is really this theme that the human is center to everything that we do when we think about computing and artificial intelligence." Dr. Howard pursues interactive computing for the greater good, including robotics in healthcare and education. She also discusses ethics in computing, including privacy and security.

Michael Xiao starts this conversation a little off topic with Daoism. Or is it? As the conversation goes on, the philosophies behind Daoism get compared to the way humans navigate technology in an almost primal way. Programs like Facebook are designed to be addictive, giving those types of platforms a negative connotation. But at Blue Cross Blue Shield, where Michael works, their approach to AI is for the greater good. However, in order to move any legacy company in the direction of digital transformation, a mindset shift must take place. Michael details three different techniques for change management: process engineering, relationships, and changing the narrative around AI.