Digital Jerry (DJ) is back for a very special episode announcing The Art of Automation Book. 

Book link: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/art-of-automation.  
Send feedback to: [email protected].  

Cover Art arrangement by human Jerry Cuomo.

Jerry is joined by IBM Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect of the IBM Automation Foundation, Pratik Gupta. They discuss what automation is made of and how the blueprint of automation can be broken down into "Discover, Decide, Act, and Optimize." Pratik shares an example of how automation has evolved in manufacturing cars, from the Ford Model T to the Tesla Model Y. He ties this back to enterprise automation with a use case from the information technology space, where decisions are constantly being made, for hundreds of thousands of people, automatically - or as Pratik puts it - "Planet-Scale AI-Powered Automation."  

Art by Caroline Scholer and Jerry Cuomo.

Jerry is joined by Chief Information Officer at The Co-operators Group, Carol Poulsen. They discuss the important role automation is playing in the insurance industry and how companies are moving from standard risk mitigation to AI-powered risk prevention. Carol describes how automation is allowing insurance to put customers at the center, instead of at the end of a process. She also shares what innovations AI could bring to insurance in the coming years and how those innovations could shift risk and save you money.  

Art by Danielle Elchik.

Jerry is joined by IBM Distinguished Engineer, Master Inventor, and CTO for APIs and Integration, Rob Nicholson. They discuss the relationship between APIs, Integration, and Automation and why "you can't automate an enterprise, unless that enterprise is programmable through APIs." Rob describes how, in order for an enterprise to go faster, it needs quick and easy access to all relevant data and events, and how the best way to do this is to make APIs ubiquitous across the company. He also shares examples of how AI can be used as your "wingperson" in tough integration problems.  

Art by Adaoha Onyekwelu.

Jerry is joined by Vice President and "a founding father" of IBM Automation, Mike Gilfix. They discuss how AI-powered automation technology gives businesses back "the gift of time," allowing people to spend their days on the things that matter. Mike shares and an analogy of how we spend our time during the day to a resume - we want to include the business value we delivered, not that we got all our expense reports done on time. He drives home his point with an example of intelligent automation that shrunk a claims process from weeks to minutes.  

Art by Danielle Elchik.

Jerry is joined by CEO of Instana, Mirko Novakovic. They discuss how the increasing complexity of AI and cloud environments can lead to the creation of an enterprise black box, where no one knows exactly how an application works or how AI models make decisions. Mirko describes how Application Performance Monitoring and Observability play a critical role in tackling this problem for an enterprise by helping them "turn on the lights." He also introduces "Stan" (The Robot) to discuss the future of automation in observability.  

Art by Adaoha Onyekwelu.

Jerry is joined by IBM Fellow and VP/CTO of IBM Edge Computing, Rob High. They discuss how edge computing keeps businesses relevant in the "digital NOW age," by lowering latency in decision making & data processing, reducing bandwidth, and protecting sensitive information. Rob describes what it means to bring automation out to where the data is collected ("the edge"), such as machines on a factory floor, and why doing so can be massively beneficial for an enterprise.  

Art by Danielle Elchik. 

Jerry is joined by IBM Director of Digital Business Automation and Intelligent Document Services, Eileen Lowry. They discuss why document processing is so manually intensive and what makes it so difficult to automate. Eileen describes how AI/Deep Learning can mimick the human brain to understand the unstructured information found in an enterprise's wide variety of documents. She shares an example from the insurance industry that shows the enormous business value of Intelligent Document Automation.  

Art by Caroline Scholer.

To kick off the new year, Jerry Cuomo is interviewed by his digital twin (DJ) and shares 5 key trends in Automation that are uniquely using AI to expand the scope of what can be automated in the enterprise. These trends include the “Union of APIs and Automation”, “Digital Employees”, “Predictive AIOps”, “AI for Code”, and “Multi-org Automation”. Human Jerry notes that there are billions of hours spent each year on mundane tasks. He predicts that in 2021, enterprises will shift these hours towards higher value work by using AI-powered Automation. 2021 is poised to be the Year of Automation!  

Cover Art arrangement by human Jerry Cuomo.

Jerry is joined by IBM Fellow, Chief Scientist of IBM Research, and one of the architects behind Watson (of Jeopardy! fame), Dr. Ruchir Puri. They discuss why it's important to "teach machines their own language" and what automating the creation of software and IT processes can mean for an enterprise with millions of lines of code. Ruchir elaborates on the daily benefits this automation has for developers, from code search to code translation to modernizing legacy code.  

Art by April Monson.  

More on ML for Code: https://ml4code.github.io; more on modernizing legacy code: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/ibm-ai-watson-modernize-legacy-code.