Every industry, including the quick service restaurant (QSR) market, plans to transform its business with artificial intelligence (AI). Several years ago, Wendy's embarked on its AI journey, leveraging cloud services and generative AI to enhance employee and customer experiences. The drive-thru experience presents numerous challenges for QSR restaurants due to the complexities of menu options, limited-time offers, special requests, and ambient noise. 

Wendy's chose to tackle the drive-thru experience with AI because 75 to 80 percent of Wendy's customers choose the drive-thru as their preferred ordering channel. The company saw a tremendous opportunity to improve the customer experience by creating a seamless ordering experience using AI automation in the drive-thru. 

In an interview with Lopez Research, Wendy's CIO Matt Spessard shared how its AI program had advanced over the past year and shared advice for other leaders looking to tackle AI within their business.

At Amazon Re:Invent, Maribel Lopez met with several industry analysts to discuss their perspectives on what happened at one of the industry's premier cloud computing and AI trade shows.

https://reinvent.awsevents.com/  

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Dell’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer John Roese about Dell’s enterprise AI technologies from their development to their future. Roese explains how the initial magical thinking around artificial intelligence has shifted into a more practical approach that aims to maximize the benefits of each implementation. He also discusses the emerging trends and ideas that he is seeing in the AI space.

Key Themes:
Maribel and John start by delving into enterprise AI and AI markets in general. John explains the types of AI markets and how enterprise AI differs from other applications. The conversation then moves into the challenges of AI and the steps that Dell is taking to address them. 

Next, John and Maribel reflect on the near-universal reactive approach that companies took to AI two years ago and how parts of that approach backfired or fizzled out. While this technology could have been approached better, its widespread use has provided companies with a real world understanding of LLMs and their applications. Now, companies take a more practical approach to AI while continuing to innovate. 

The key innovation that Roese highlights is agentic architecture. This technology differs from previous generative AI applications because it can operate autonomously and is highly specialized. Individual “agents” can have job descriptions that they are trained for much like a human being, and they can interact with each other as a human team would. 

For detailed show notes, navigate the episode using the time stamps below:

[1:26] Maribel introduces the guest of the episode, John Roese. Roese is the CTO and Chief AI Officer at Dell Technologies. 

[1:59] The AI market is not a singular market – there is a traditional market, a training market, and an enterprise market. The enterprise market is very pragmatic in its applications. 

[4:10] Maribel asks about the challenges businesses see in enterprise adoption. Early discussions of new AI technology treated it like magic. Now that we have real world use cases and a better understanding of the technology, Dell is able to have grounded conversations about AI applications with real impacts. 

[7:48] Roesch explains the challenges that Dell is facing with AI. One of the challenges was determining where to prioritize as a company. Another is the process by which you develop application ideas. Dell had this issue when bringing ideas that were not fully formed to their legal team. 

[11:44] No one got AI perfectly right. Almost universally, companies reacted at the technical level before looking at business priorities. Roese encourages companies to move toward a more thoughtful approach to AI technology.

[13:36] Dell learned that its goal was to add in the minimum sufficient AI structure to address the maximum use cases. In Dell’s case, half of their use cases were related to converting proprietary data into generative outcomes. Creating one model to handle all of these cases is the most efficient approach. 

[15:05] Maribel asks Roese about the trends Dell is seeing in AI. Roese points to the emergence of agentic architecture. The idea behind agentic architecture is that they are autonomously performing agents with very specialized purposes. They can be combined much like a team of human beings. 

Follow John Roese: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnroese/ 

Learn more about Dell’s AI solutions: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/sc/artificial-intelligence 

Follow Maribel Lopez on X/Twitter: https://x.com/maribellopez 

Subscribe to Maribel Lopez on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MaribelLopezResearch 

Follow Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ 

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Google Cloud Product Manager Bobby Allen about the current benefits and future possibilities of artificial intelligence in the context of Google’s AI services. They explore the flexibility of Googles services that sets them apart, the environmental impacts of LLMs in comparison with their predecessor NLMs, and how companies can take a human approach to AI to make peoples lives better.

Key Themes:
Maribel and Bobby begin by discussing Google’s AI services. Allen explains the wide variety of AI services offered by Google, which fall into three main categories: building AI, building with AI, and using AI. Most organizations are currently interested in using AI, and they have seen tangible benefits from doing so.

Bobby refers to these benefits as the “four I’s”: insight, increase, improvement, and innovation. Companies that adopt AI can see increases in productivity, gain insights into large documents through AI summarization, and more. Ai also has growing applications in compliance and query creation to analyze large datasets.

Last, Maribel and Bobby discuss the future of AI. Bobby points to a human-first future with a focus on the impacts of AI applications, including sustainability and marginalization. He believes that AI should solve real problems and male peoples lives better.

Follow Bobby Allen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ballen-clt/

Learn more about AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/

Visit Maribel Lopez’s Website: https://www.lopezresearch.com/

Follow Maribel Lopez on X/Twitter: https://x.com/maribellopez

Subscribe to Maribel Lopez on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MaribelLopezResearch

Follow Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ 

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Qventus co-founder and CEO Mudit Garg. Mudit explains how automation can help patients receive efficient care and hospitals maximize their performance. Learn how Qventus is helping hospital systems cut down their “excess days,” why efficiency is essential to care, and Mudit’s predictions for the future of AI in healthcare.

Key Themes:
Maribel begins the episode by speaking with Mudit about how Qventus is changing the hospital system for the better. Mudit explains that AI can be extremely helpful for hospital coordination. There are many cases in healthcare where the patient and the hospital system are aligned in their goals, like booking a surgery for a patient, but administrative complexities make those goals difficult to accomplish. 

Qventus bases its system on two crucial components – behavioral science and machine learning. Machine learning is a great tool for determining patterns for coordination and scheduling, but factoring human behavior is crucial to create a model that actually works. Mudit credits the success of Qventus to the combination of these factors. 

Maribel and Mudit also discuss the future of artificial intelligence in hospitals. Many industries are adopting AI in a wide range of applications, but Mudit suggests that healthcare systems should focus in on perfecting technology that benefits both patients and hospitals. He also notes his interest in Ai’s potential for data siloing, which would cut down administrative work. 
 
Follow Mudit Garg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gargmudit/ 

Learn more about Qventus: https://qventus.com/ 

Visit the 3Blue1Brown YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown 

Visit Maribel Lopez’s Website: https://www.lopezresearch.com/ 

Follow Maribel Lopez on X/Twitter: https://x.com/maribellopez 

Subscribe to Maribel Lopez on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MaribelLopezResearch 

Follow Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ 

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez speaks with Roni Jamesmeyer about the changing role of AI in healthcare. Roni Jamesmeyer, the the Senior Healthcare Marketing Manager for Five9, has over twenty years of experience in IT sales, giving her an understanding of the complexity of healthcare delivery. She focuses on Five9's healthcare strategy to help health systems, payers, and life sciences move their contact centers to the cloud and close the gaps in patient communications. Maribel and Roni discuss technological advancements in AI, different uses of AI in healthcare, and Roni’s research findings.

Key Themes:
Maribel and Roni open the episode by discussing the healthcare industry’s past attempts to improve the patient experience and how its goals have shifted. Currently, Roni is seeing healthcare companies working toward an omnichannel experience for their customers – meaning that they can interact over many communication channels. 

AI is helping the industry move forward. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) improve operations in four major ways: security, patient experience, revenue generation, and reduced administrative backend work. Different companies may focus more on some of these categories than others, but all four functions are extremely important to the healthcare industry. 

Roni also discusses her AI research findings. She found that AI tuning is crucial to improvement, allowing models to pick up and retain information. As these models are used, they become more personalized and more intelligent and can take on more work as a result. She also found that AI agents open up phone lines, allowing previously missed calls to be answered. 

Visit Maribel Lopez’s Website: https://www.lopezresearch.com/
 
Follow Maribel Lopez on X/Twitter: https://x.com/maribellopez 

Subscribe to Maribel Lopez on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MaribelLopezResearch 

Follow Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ 

Learn More About Five9: https://www.five9.com/ 

Download AI in Healthcare: How AI Drives Value for Five9 Customers: https://www.five9.com/resources/ebook/how-ai-drives-value-healthcare-customers#:~:text=Partners-,AI%20in%20Healthcare%3A%20How%20AI%20Drives%20Value%20For%20Five9%20Healthcare,customer%20surveys%2C%20and%20analyst%20insight. 

Attend Roni’s Webinar with Exact Sciences: https://www.five9.com/registration/2024/exact-sciences-webinar 

Follow Roni Jamesmeyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roni-jamesmeyer-5733461/ 

Episode Summary:
In this episode, Maribel Lopez discusses generative AI with Dr. Sherry Marcus, the Director of Generative AI Sciences at Amazon Web Services. Her insights into the artificial intelligence needs of businesses gives her a unique perspective on the future of generative AI. Learn about the concept of agents in AI, why customers are moving toward the use of multiple models, and the ways AI might evolve in the future.

Key Themes:
Maribel and Sherry begin their conversation by discussing Amazon Bedrock, which is Amazon’s AI building service. The technology allows AWS customers to create their own AI models by offering choices of foundational models that can be customized.

Next, Sherry and Maribel discuss AI agents. In AI, Agents can retrieve real-time data to assist LLMs in providing information they cannot access in their training data. They also discuss how customers are currently using artificial intelligence, and why there is a shift away from specific modes and toward using multiple models for different use cases.

Dr. Sherry Marcus also explains how customers have historically used RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to answer questions, and how that technology is evolving. Last, she explains why companies are using synthetic data to train their models, her predictions for the future of AI, and her favorite primer on AI.

Read What Is Chat GPT Doing… and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfham: https://www.amazon.com/What-ChatGPT-Doing-Does-Work/dp/1579550819 

Follow Dr. Sherry Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sherry-marcus-ph-d-4a4110/ 

Learn more about AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/ 

Visit Maribel Lopez’s Website: https://www.lopezresearch.com/ 

Follow Maribel Lopez on X/Twitter: https://x.com/maribellopez 

Subscribe to Maribel Lopez on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MaribelLopezResearch 

Follow Maribel Lopez on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/maribellopez/ 

In this episode, I interview Kevin McCartan, Senior IT Delivery Engineer at Musgrave, about how he leverages AI (Open AI's ChatGPT and Juniper Mist AI) to streamline network operations.
You can find a copy of the video here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ZoMXn6c6M

Case studies here
Musgrave Stores Undergoes Transformation with AI-Native Network Enhancements
https://www.juniper.net/us/en/the-fee...

Three Steps on the AI Path to Retail Operational Zen
https://blogs.juniper.net/en-us/ai-na...