What’s the BUZZ? — AI in Business

Intelligent Automation (Guest: Olivier Gomez)

April 21, 2022 Andreas Welsch Season 1 Episode 1
What’s the BUZZ? — AI in Business
Intelligent Automation (Guest: Olivier Gomez)
What’s the BUZZ? — AI in Business
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Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Olivier Gomez (CEO & Co-Founder of Intelligent Automation Corp.) and Andreas Welsch discuss the top trends in intelligent automation. Olivier shares his insights on the shift towards outcome-based contracts and provides valuable advice for listeners looking to reduce the risk of their automation program.

Key topics:
- New operating models for intelligent automation
- Re-balancing project risk
- The next trends for AI & automation

Listen to the full episode to hear how you can:
- Re-balance project risks with outcome-based contracts
- Establish an equal partnership between your service provider and your organization
- Strengthen the collaboration between CIO and CFO organizations

Watch this episode on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/LbweeZB44jA

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Disclaimer: Views are the participants’ own and do not represent those of any participant’s past, present, or future employers. Participation in this event is independent of any potential business relationship (past, present, or future) between the participants or between their employers.


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Andreas Welsch:

Welcome to the Intelligence Briefing Live. What's the BUZZ? Where leaders hands-on experts share how they have turned hype into outcome. Today, we'll talk about intelligent automation and who better to talk about it than the real authority on this topic. Olivier Gomez. Hey Olivier. Thanks for joining.

Oliver Gomez:

Hey, thanks for your time. Thanks Andreas for setting that up.

Andreas Welsch:

Hey, why don't you tell our folks in the audience a little bit more about yourself who you are Sure. And what you do.

Oliver Gomez:

Sure. So my name is Olivier Gomez based in France. People call me OG, have been in that market for many years. What I do is help clients automate using a combination of technology and more importantly, achieve, result and outcome. So I typically look at the automation from a business angle, from a return investment standpoint rather than just looking at tools and.

Andreas Welsch:

That's awesome. That's fantastic. Did you take this holistic view and especially take that business perspective really into it? I think that's really key. A lot of times we just talk about tech and that just cuts it short. So for those of you who are just joining our stream, please drop a comment in the chat where joining us from would really love to see how global our audience is today. So what do you say? Should we play a little game to kick things? Sure, let's do that. Perfect. So let's see. This game is called In your own words. So when I hit the buzzer, the wheels will start spinning and when they stop, you'll see a sentence I'd like you to answer with the first thing that comes to mind and why, in your own words. So to make it a little more interesting I'll only give you 60 seconds for your answer before you'll start. Countdown. And so again, for those of you watching live, feel free to drop your answer in your why in the chat as well. So are you ready for, what's the buzz?

Oliver Gomez:

Yes, a hundred percent. Ready, go ahead.

Andreas Welsch:

Perfect. So let's see. If AI were a car, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock. Go.

Oliver Gomez:

Whoa. If hey, I wait call, what would it be? That's an easy one. I think it's an easy one. Remember long time ago TV show called Knight Rider. I don't know if you guys remember that. And the car was called K.I.T.T. And at the time the car had amazing capability. Could drive, could speak, it, could think, right? And I think this is the perfect I think the perfect, call because it can drive, it can think, now we have Tesla, they can drive by themself, but just add a bit of ai, bit of brain, and that would be kit, right? So hopefully in 5, 10, 20 years we're gonna have a real K.I.T.T. out there. Awesome. I think that was my, my, my answer.

Andreas Welsch:

Yeah. Perfect. Hey within time as well. So let me ask you this then. Know with K.I.T.T. and all the stunts and things they were doing already in, in the eighties, one thing is that it's taking what, 30, 40 years for this to really materialize and for us to see these kinds of cars. On the street or slowly getting on the street right now. But I would say there's also some kind of risk in involved, right? When you do pull these stunts they don't work all the time. And so I know you talk about risk a lot of the time in helping to de-risk the client. So I'm curious, can you talk a little bit more about what de-risking the client means to you?

Oliver Gomez:

Yes, thanks. This is a very important point. I think it's becoming a key topic on the market and this de-risking is actually a good news conversation for the client, right? So we talk about risk. People are concerned, this is a bad side of technology. On the contrary here, I think we are reaching a point where the industry is mature enough. So that we can start sharing the risk and de-risking the clients by having providers, software providers, service provider, starting to take a bit more risk. And I think, this is going to be a much more balanced situation moving forward. We see that already today in other industry where. Because we have done it before, because we are starting to have a bunch of use cases because we start to understand how the technology works. We as service provider, whether you push software, you push services can start, de-risking the client a bit so they don't have to basically, Put a lot of money up upfront or commit to a large amount of monthly dollars and, not really being sure of the result. So that's really all about that is the maturity of the market is going to push a rebalancing of the risk between the provider and the customer.

Andreas Welsch:

So how do you facilitate that and help to rebalance that? What's an active role that that someone can take in doing?

Oliver Gomez:

I think it's really easy to set up this type of let's say agreement, right? So all we need to understand is the expected outcome, which is. nowadays, more and more obvious at the beginning when we were playing with technology, when we were doing proof of concept, we were just happy with technology, doing what it's supposed to do. You know, not full of bugs really delivering, the features that it was meant to deliver. I think now we are reaching a point where we start to understand clearly the expected business outcome. We can frame the business outcome, we can baseline, and then we can see how we are moving the needle on that baseline, it is as simple as accepting that. If you are not able as a provider to move that baseline for the client, then you know you are going to share let's say the lack of results. You are going to basically take some of the risk yourself, as simple as that.

Andreas Welsch:

That makes sense. Yeah. And I heard you say what providers can do, and if I put my old IT hat back on in good IT fashion, I see many people think about sort build by partner kind of thing here again, when it comes to AI and automation. So where are you seeing that go? Especially when there's more of a risk sharing model that we're moving towards?

Oliver Gomez:

Yes, so there's been some study around that and typically the, given the situation, right? So we know that if you are going to do all the work insource, you're gonna have a set of issues. Typically you are struggling to identify and retain Talent and retain skills right in-house. The market is really difficult today. If you go all the way and only rely on a partner, you are going to lose control. You are potentially going to allow the partner to build some stickiness which is not what you want. So the typical model is a 50 50 model where you have the best of both world, where you can have. In-house resources. So you keep control of your own destiny, but you also rely on outside resources so they can bring the skill you don't have, they can bring the bandwidth you don't have, and they can bring the ex the expertise that maybe you don't have yet. So again we are in a very complex multi-vendor, large ecosystem. Lots of tools and I think it is important that we are able to come up with something. Simple and something that is balanced. So again, I see it as a, 50 50 between in-house and external help. I also I also believe that there is a need to manage the number of partner that you have. You don't want too many, so it's not too distributed. You want to have a bit of a consolidation point so that you don't have, complexity to manage all those different moving.

Andreas Welsch:

Perfect. I think that makes sense. Keep keep a good overview and also see what skills you have and you need in-house and where you can augment that with additional experts or additional help. Maybe going a bit more in that direction. On one hand, certainly you can build the bots yourself, or you can ask your your service provider to build bots in, in AI and automation kind of things for you. But I see there's also a trend more towards outcome-based. Contracts be between customers and providers or, may, maybe it goes even further. What are you seeing? Whereas West End moving in terms of commercial.

Oliver Gomez:

So where the market is moving this is a very, yeah, this is a very very interesting point, right? So we've seen the market. So first of all, the nature of the market has evolved a lot a while back. All we were looking at when looking at automation and intelligent automation was to build some bots and it was all focused on building and building. I think the market has now evolved into a larger life cycle. So the full cycle now is more around. Help me understand my opportunity, help me build a blueprint of my a digital blueprint of my environment so I can discover opportunity and manage and prioritize priority opportunity. Help me build and deploy. And also more importantly, help me run and maintain my environment. Because we know that as you build a digital workforce and you start having. A lot more digital workforce in your environment that digital workforce requires hR type of department, which means, running and maintaining those digital worker the same way you would have a need for HR and management to run a human operation team, right? So first of all, the nature is really changing. And then I would say we are going to reach a very similar situation as we had many years ago when we decided to outsource a whole bunch of activity that was not core to our business. So this is going to also be, a very critical time where on one side you have critical IP, critical piece of content, critical logic that is running your business, that is embedded in the technology that you want to manage. You want to go, you govern, you want this central point of control that remains in-house so you don't lose control. But at the same time, you will want to basically out task and outsource some of the things that is not called to your business that you know you want someone else to handle typically. What we call the automation operation, which is to run and maintain all those robots that are out there. This is, probably going to be a situation where we are going to see instead of outsourcing an out tasking human work, we are going to outsource and out task I think botworks to partners.

Andreas Welsch:

I think that's a really interesting perspective and thanks for sharing that with us here. to me that also shows how the market is maturing, how organizations are maturing. It, it really shows that, hey, there's this automation, whether it's RPA, whether it's the early stages of AI in everything in between, right? In intelligent automation that is really maturing. It's coming out of these emerging tech departments that are doing some technology scouting and figuring out where can we use and how can we. Especially when you talk about this notion of governance and models between your internal teams and your service providers. It's really great to see that. I'm personally really excited about this and where this whole thing is going and how it's shaped up over the last couple of years.

Oliver Gomez:

Yes. And if I may add something here again the level of complexity of that ecosystem is going to grow exponentially. We are going to have a lot more let's say type of tools on top of RPA, on top of IDP, on top of chatbot, on top of AI algorithm. We're gonna have. Very large, very complex ecosystem of technology to manage that will become more and more critical to the business model of pretty much every industry out there. So we are going to need to get help from the outside. And, we used to say long time ago back to this analogy you know about the outsourcing. We used to say your mess for less. I I'm starting to ear your mess for more, meaning, it's going to be so difficult to manage that. So difficult to find the resources that will actually have the knowledge to manage all that, that we will be looking for partner that have the knowledge and the expertise to manage that because it's so critical, right? So again, expect this your mess for more type of situation to happen because it'll be so critical that you will want someone that, that is really capable to handle all that for you.

Andreas Welsch:

Yeah. And what type of skills do you see on the internal side, right? That people should be building or need to build to have an effective conversation and effective partnership with a provider. Yes.

Oliver Gomez:

I think this is probably the biggest point here. I think more important than knowing the tools more important than understanding the technology. I think a understanding the business and the data around the business is going to be the key asset for the in-house team. Being able to gather collect, clean and make the data liquid so you can use it, is going to be an extremely important skill that only the in-house people will be able to do. Because you need to understand the business and you need to be able to be close to, the action and the clients to understand that. So for me you can rely on an external partner to configure a very specific tool, but you have to have control over your business. You have to have control over your data. You need to understand exactly, how to utilize this. So you can pinpoint the opportunity and know where to apply the intelligent automation ecosystem.

Andreas Welsch:

Sounds great. Yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit. I know you've been in this space obviously for quite some time and I'm sure you've seen a thing or two, right? You already speak from experience here. But what would you say has been the most significant evolution in this AI automation space in the last five years? And where is seeing things go in the next five? What will be significant then? Yes.

Oliver Gomez:

What we've seen over the last five years is we went from, I'm playing with technology. I'm happy if it works to, I'm taking it very seriously and it's part of my core business strategy. There's enough technology, there's enough Proofpoint, there's enough use cases for this New market segment cuz it's a new market segment to be correctly utilized and to be correctly embedded in the company strategy. If you don't do it, you will probably not survive, in, in the next five to 10 years. So that's, that is a given. What will happen moving forward is that again, we are going to move away from this technology-centric type of conversation, and we are going to move into a business-centric type of conversation. We are going to see, the very famous coupled cio, cfo the dynamic between the two is going to evolve. We are going to see the CFO get getting a lot more involved because, It is now a ma ama set of technology, and we're expecting, a distant return on those technology, on those investments, and we are going to see, a lot more interesting conversation that are business model related rather than just, POC or new shiny object type of conversation. Right.

Andreas Welsch:

Perfect. And so when you say it's a duo right between the CIO the CFO. Would you say that's the main center of gravity? Are there others that, that play in, in that space as well that, that have an interest to either see, things become more efficient or cheaper or better to use the broad cliche terms that we associate with this.

Oliver Gomez:

So yes. We'll, we need around the table. So obviously everyone here, is going to be deeply involved because you are going to benefit from those technologies. So if you're running an HR department, if you are running a operation obviously if you're running an, I don't know, finance department, if you're in charge of supply chain, if you are sales all of. Department are going to need to rely on those technology to be more efficient to improve, not just by the way, the cost structure, but also everything else. The quality, the speed the, so the customer satisfaction, even the employee to improve, retention. Cause the attrition is going through the roof, right? But still when we are going to need to get the approval for a large program, the CFO will be, The gatekeeper and when we are going to go into lot of technology conversation, typically the cio, right? The technology is going to become a lot more platform type of technology. It's going to be a lot closer to the cio. It's going to be a lot less, point technology that are deployed outside the IT departments. So for me, the CFO and the CIO will be the tool gatekeeper of all those programs moving.

Andreas Welsch:

That's very encouraging, seeing how the two play together and both from the platform, but also the business side to, to align these outcomes and drive them. So then let me maybe summarize real quick the three points that, that we touched on. One. As a customer, as a company, right? Don't assume all the risk yourself when you work with a service provider. Look for a balance of risk sharing here. Number two if you're building, buying, partnering, right? All of that can really take new forms in it, it can become an equal partnership in that sense. And the last one. What I heard you just say on one hand, it's really just the beginning of the journey. We've already come quite far over the last couple years, but it will be a very strong partnership that you need within your business, and especially between the IT and the finance function. So I think that's three excellent points that you made here. Perfect. So folks we're getting close to the end of the show today. Olivier, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your expertise and for those of you on livestream for being excited and learning with us here. So see you next time for another round of the Intelligence Briefing Live. What's the BUZZ?