What I'd like to do now is to welcome another leader in the in the technology space to have
a conversation about what all this means and where it's going and so with that I'd like to
welcome Judson Althoff who is the chief commercial
officer of Microsoft to engage in a little bit of a conversation on these topics,
please welcome Judson.
So Judson, we've been collaborating for a while. Now, I think about the
co-innovation summit that we attended Trine Rockwell and Microsoft a few years ago
when we really, you know, put into high gear our journey to
developing capabilities for cloud native applications and more recently. I know ever
said your your event in May where we talked a lot about the industrial metaverse, and now,
you know things just Speeding up we're talking a lot about AI in
generative Ai and the ability to add capabilities and
functionality and impact really to that whole metaverse concept. You know, what are you
seeing out there as you know kind of the evolution of this what's that Arc of the
metaverse and you know that capability. Well, first of all, thank you for having me here
and good morning to everyone. We've had a fantastic partnership with was
Rockwell and the industrial metaverse
is frankly a space where We've Come Together jointly to frankly do everything from coined.
The term itself to have real-world impact on
automation projects that help people build better products better
processes more effectively and more efficiently than ever before
just for the court of quick term definition. So we're all speaking the same language. The
industrial metal barriers is is basically the culmination of iot
capabilities Cloud scale data stores artificial.
Gents mixed reality visualization capabilities and 3D digital
twins
that allow you to effectively simulate any type of manufacturing environment supply
chain and Logistics Network to help Drive efficiencies across the same
and Rockwell and Microsoft have been working together in a deep deep partnership through
collaboration and co-innovation to help customers across many Industries get benefits
from these types of solutions whether it be in consumer goods light and heavy
Manufacturing. ring or the energy sector we see massive massive gains using the
technology
because if you think about it, if you make anything or you move anything you create a
carbon footprint if we can simulate that
infinitely in the cloud before you make it before you move it we can help you build a
better product more effectively more efficiently and more sustainably
than ever before the gains are massive and and they're also
fast hitting and I think that the biggest thing to take away with, you
know, sort of Is all of this is it just another hype cycle
of technology or their or their real pragmatic things to be gained from artificial
intelligence and digital twins in the industrial metal bursts is that the
real-world impacts are there and they're fast in a 13-week engagement. We can move
into a factory environment. That's a mixture of brown field Technologies in Greenfield
Technologies and help customers understand how to drive Energy savings water reduction
in their processes drivelogix. More efficiencies and do it
with a cleaner footprint than ever before. So we see massive massive gains happening with
the customers that we're working with and so it's a
it's a Here and Now thing it's not a just a hype cycle that you'll read about and hope
that somehow 10 years from now is I'm going to you should be seeing gains from this if
you're not engaging in these types of projects now,
you're probably falling behind your industry peers. Yeah,
and so as we're, you know, getting our heads around this concept of the industrial
metaverse Here Comes General T of artificial intelligence right to
add things that you know, a lot of people have said, you know, this is bigger than the
internet and it changes everything you mean just in
technology know what changes everything in the specific area of you know development
of automation projects. We're going to be demonstrating
over the next couple of days, you know some
early co-innovation with Microsoft to add a
co-pilot. Islet to the front end of our most advanced configuration tools, but that's just
one example. So, you know, what do you seeing in terms of the overall, you know scope and
impact of generative Ai and kind of the development process. Sure. I think it would
be I wish I would have done this a year ago sort of installed a time-lapse camera
in our executive briefing centers in Seattle because a year ago customers would come to
see us we talk about artificial intelligence and
And most customers were be like, okay black magic never really going to amount to
anything. It's a bunch of hogwash. If you would have fast-forwarded the camera
about three or four months. Everybody was coming to Seattle going on. Ah, the AI robots
are going to come kill us. And so we went from sort of complete disbelief to like fear
of sort of AI taking over the world fast forward to today and customers are
showing up with
100 big ideas of what they can do with generative Ai and their business or if
they've paid a management consultancy firm or advisory firm
25 million dollars. Now, they have 400 ideas of what they think they can do with
generative AI so it's an education process right? Because
as you point out General AI has the opportunity to impact
a lot of different ways in which people work from Individual productivity to
democratizing experiences accelerating learning curves and driving more
inclusive collaboration. So we're kind of taking this three-pronged
approach. We're infusing generative AI into every product we build at Microsoft.
I would say that we're even using generative AI to help build. Generally. I capabilities
the GitHub copilot asset that we have is actually responsible for writing 30% of
the code and all of our other co-pilots. So it's what has given us a time to Market
advantage and delivering a lot of capabilities
across our portfolio, but you kind of kind of sort of think about
it in three layers. H we want to First bring
a i to our portfolio and first party assets, we're using this copilot metaphor because we
think having a human in the loop is critical the model should teach the people and the
people should teach the model and a digital feedback loop.
We see huge gains from that second is to open up that
ecosystem in platform to help Partners
like the relationship. We have developed co-pilots of their own in areas
where we would never do so Shelves and then to do deep co-innovation at the face
of the customer to help them unlock the potential of AI
but you can think about the impact on the outcomes in the following ways
first the idea of introducing natural language to any business environment
allows for a Level Playing Field. It democratizes the experiences from the front
line to the Board Room if everybody is chatting with their business through a common
Universal frame, it accelerates progress to individual productivity and efficiency
gains you You've built it into factorytalk Design Studio yourselves so that people can
help build these systems faster. No one joins this field to learn syntax.
No one. So if you could take that out of the loop and say Here's what I'm trying to build.
Please code that for me. I don't want to take the time to learn the esoteric syntax go
you not only make that individual more productive. You actually unlock a heck of a
lot of joy in the work that they do and but I think we're really going to see a world
where people put these Kinds of skills on their resumes. Hey,
I've been an environment where I've used a i to make myself more productive and also
they're probably not going to join companies where they have to do it the old-fashioned
way anymore. And then the third big piece is this notion
of inclusive collaboration that I mentioned. You have these AI personas you can have the
Rockwell copilot join a teams meeting. And so we're doing a design review rather than you
know, having people show up and throw up with lump sum large PowerPoint presentation or
big, you know white paper that everybody has to read and get smart and talk about it. You
can actually invite the Persona to the meeting and query the system itself. So that
people can inclusively work in the environment and accelerate progress. So just
a couple of examples of how we see the unlock and what we're trying to do is create an
ecosystem of these co-pilots and an unlock new levels of AI
Innovation across Industries, you know, you touched on the again the
intensely human element, you know of these
processes and I think you use the term of democratizing it and I
think it helps to address, you know, the area of
being able to have a more and you said this as well Rusev environment
where people of all different backgrounds can interact with the technology
without being limited because you know, they didn't go through, you know, all of the
man years of you know effort to have to learn some Arcane
syntax, right? I mean relay ladder logic, you know, the language
that's been the standard for programmable control for decades
is, you know, very helpful in terms of M. Lighting, you know, the old
hardwired real a lot or ladder logic, but there's
not so many people coming out of school today who want to learn that and so being able to
have Jen AI, you know a co-pilot front end to be
able to generate that code is something that's going to allow more people to
consider, you know, this line of work, whereas otherwise it might have been a
showstopper to say, you know, I didn't learn that
in school. And so I think There's that opportunity
to be more inclusive in terms of creating a more
attractive career path for a broader group of people, which is really
important as a talked about a few minutes ago. You know that skills Gap is showing up
on the critical path of projects in some cases. What are some other ways that you see
we're able to, you know widen the aperture to be able to attract more people into these
into these fields that You know previously required, you know, a
more specific set of let's say experiences. Yeah, I think the unlock is in sort of the
power of the prompt if you will and you know Frontline workers, I think are are
just they just hold such a wealth of golden expertise about how things
actually get done. I mean we can sit around and boardrunner means and philosophize about
how we think things get done and then you show up in the factory and you see how things
really get done. Yet somehow we've sort of tried to continue
to put complexity into the lives of Frontline workers to get them to try to
leverage data and tools to make their work more efficient and effective
The Prompt changes everything instead of trying to teach them some Arcane
syntax or you know, Microsoft's pushing technology down to them into some device
literally pull out your mobile device take a picture of a process and type in this doesn't
work. Yeah. And have that then go into a recursive
knowledge base and use everything from
computer vision Technologies to predictive
next best actions to then troubleshoot and environment on the spot.
The power of that is enormous. I think the opportunity to even reshape
how people think about work on. The front lines
is also enormous because you think about the amount of time that's
been put into Ux design, right.
I will tell you it's been a hundred million dollars on new ux for an environment
and think you have it perfect and intelligent prompt will outpace anything you've done and
your graphical environment. Why because people can
communicate in a language they know best about the problems, they're experiencing
and ask for help and get better answers faster. So
look, I think there's a massive opportunity like this this push for Democratization this
push for inclusivity bottom line is none of us are a smart smart as all of us
right and see if you can figure out how to aggregate the intelligence of the
entirety of your business and move the company forward.
There's huge opportunity there. Yeah, you know I mentioned when I first came
out that this is somewhat of a milestone for automation fair for Rockwell on
our journey and I think with some of the things that we've been Just talking about
really an inflection point in you know,
the whole industry with these with these Technologies. Is there
one specific thing that kind of stands out as you know, you're talking that gives you the
most excitement about where we're going. Yeah, it's always hard right? It's sort of
like picnic picking your favorite technology was like sort of like, which is your favorite
child at the holiday season is it's a sort of a dangerous thing, but
I think if I had to sort of put kind of an umbrella over it I would say get ready. Ready
for AI transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation
over the last decade many many companies have benefited from the
digitization of their businesses. I think covid-19 lesson for us all
it proved that no business was 100% resilient. But those that were fortified with
some digital capability would be more resilient than others and I think you saw
that in sort of the individual results and standard deviation or performance of
companies that kind of looped through the pandemic era. I think AI transformation Is
the new call to action for everyone and everybody should be thinking well, how
can generative a I change my employee experiences. How can they change how I engage
with customers? How can it reshape business processes? And how can it bend the curve on
Innovation? And those are four questions that we ask every single customer now that we
engage with on this intelligent Frontier, but I mean just to give an example we we use
these things inside of Microsoft as well. We were
big Believers in drinking your own champagne.
And if I sort of just walk everybody on a bit of a journey of what AI transformation has
been like inside of our company you rewind back about a year ago
things weren't so pretty in the technology industry
certainly not very pretty for a hyperscale cloud vendor. I think everybody was waking up
trying to figure out how to spend less in the cloud and optimize their Cloud spent.
I think people went home for Christmas last year and
turned their Cloud off. I didn't turn it on again until they came
back in the new year. So we did a lot of our own belt-tightening at
the time a lot of our own efficiency and optimization gains and part of what we
decided to do at that time was say We'll look if we believe in AI
let's use AI to make our own business more efficient. So
like take my customer support Organization, for example, so I have
roughly 40,000 people in Microsoft customer support that
handle 75 million incidents a year. On average and so what we've used
a i to do is we've taken our expert resources and we put them on the front lines of
answering the most complicated questions. We get from customers that fees in AI knowledge
base that's common for even our early in career people and our lower cost resources
that are around the world serving customers and the copilot then that they
use has the same intelligence that my expert resource is have have are using
and so As a result of that I was able to take a hundred million dollars of expense out of
my support organization and at the same time customer satisfaction is going up because I'm
providing better answers faster using the copilot capabilities. So it's just one
example, if you look at the customer engagement pillar of a itrakkinetix
scheanette this this inflection point as you called it,
you need to be taking action in your business to say, how is it going to change? How is AI
going to change customer? Judgement for my company, how is it going to
change my employee experience? How is it going to change the processes that we have
inside the company and how can I bend the curve on Innovation? Those are for righteous
questions to ask in this era of a itrakkinetix.
As we go through this journey, so, it's Judson. Thank you so much Mike. Thank you
very much. Thank you.