How CXOs Can Navigate the Heady Mix of AI, Crypto, Cloud...

Photo Imaging by Sanjay Gupta

If the recent hype around ChatGPT is anything to go by, the world seems to be reaching an inflection point in artificial intelligence (AI) and associated tools. (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a large language model for generating text using deep learning.)

But AI is just one of several pathbreaking tech tools that CX and IT decision makers have at their disposal today to take their businesses to even higher levels of efficiency and agility. What will the future hold for contactless commerce and how is the customer experience being shaped and reshaped in retail? Should they experiment with the metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and if so, how? What caveats lie ahead in a world pummeled by privacy challenges and user-trust issues?

Thankfully, insights from Harvard Business Review are at hand for CXOs to navigate the present with an eye on the future—in the form of a slim yet powerful guide of a book titled The Year in Tech 2023.

The book is neatly arranged into four sections with a view to providing some holistic crystal-gazing across a chosen set of emerging and mature technologies. The sections are named perceptively: The New Fundamentals (covering the metaverse, NFTs, stablecoins, contactless commerce, and the talent question); Fresh Takes on Mature Tech (the cloud, cookies, and ransomware); AI for the Rest of Us (data quality, no-code platforms, warehouse automation); and Trust Me (digital design choices and variation of digital trust around the world).

One of the best things about HBR’s content is its clarity and simplicity, and the same is reflected in this book—something that should be appreciated by the ever-pressed-for-time decision makers. And if they want to go in-depth into any topic that particularly interests them, there’s a ton of information on the web already.

Another highlight of the book is that it often seeks to present scenarios with an ethical lens. Socially responsible and forward-thinking enterprises will be able to benefit from such treatment.

Let me now give you a sampling of the insights gleaned from it.

One of my favorite passages is how the nature and function of the retail store will change dramatically in a contactless world [not fully contactless, I believe, but a mix determined by caution and convenience]. “It will become a space festooned with interactive displays and kiosks, virtual reality zones, and an array of robotic helpers, with fulfillment done from off-site warehouses or direct to the customer.”

A key factor in capitalizing on the opportunities and mitigating the risks, according to the book, will be the extent to which retailers can create “immersive, content-rich experiences that are highly personalized” for individual consumers.

Creating such personalized customer experiences will, of course, rely on the growing capabilities of AI tools. And while we are nowhere near generating $13 trillion of value each year (by 2030) predicted by the McKinsey Global Institute, the renewed interest in AI ever since ChatGPT broke onto the scene will only accelerate the competition among providers and the adoption among users.

Businesses of all sizes will play a role in such an accelerated adoption—and not just the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks, and Microsofts of the world who wield enormous compute and data power in their sprawling server farms.

The question is, How?

An interesting answer is given by Andrew Ng (of Baidu, Coursera, and Google Brain fame) in the chapter AI Doesn’t Have to be Too Expensive or Complicated. He posits that for far too long, much of the AI research was driven by software-centric development (also called model-centric development). In this model, the data is fixed and teams aim to optimize or invent new programs to learn well from the available data. Companies, especially tech giants, with large data sets used it to drive innovation. At AI’s current sophistication levels, however, argues Andrew, the bottleneck for many applications is getting the right data to feed to the software. In this context, it may be more fruitful to make sure companies have “good data” and not just “big data.”

This shift in approach implies that the data should be reasonably comprehensive in its coverage of important cases and labeled consistently. “Data is food for AI, and modern AI systems need not only calories, but also high-quality nutrition,” he writes. He calls the new model “data-centric AI development.”

To extend the benefit of AI to small and midsize businesses, no-code platforms that have been gaining traction of late will become increasingly important, the book notes in another chapter in the same section: “Where a team of engineers was once required to build a piece of software, now users with a web browser and an idea have the power to bring that idea to life themselves.” Most importantly, low-code platforms are making it possible to deploy AI without hiring “an army of expensive developers and data scientists.” (So ‘data scientist’ may not continue to be the sexiest job of the century after all!)

Among the mature technologies, the cloud will become even more compelling to business leaders in terms of embracing it for more workloads and use cases. The book cites how the cloud enabled the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccine for Moderna, a relatively small firm compared to the pharma giants. Thanks to the flexibility and power of the cloud, Moderna was able to build and scale its operations on the cloud, and was able to “deliver its first clinical batch to the National Institutes of Health for phase one trial only 42 days after initial sequencing” of the virus.

Let’s switch back to an emerging star that continues to bewilder and bemuse CXOs across industries: the metaverse. For one, the book offers a relatively clearer definition of the metaverse: any digital experience on the internet that is persistent, immersive, three-dimensional, and virtual. Metaverse experiences enable people to play, work, connect, or buy (while the experiences are virtual, the things bought can be virtual or real).

Beyond the obvious use cases of gaming, virtual showrooms, and fashion shows, the book urges leaders to “look for applications” in less explored areas. “Almost every chief marketing officer already has made, or will soon make, a public commitment to sustainability-related environmental, social, and governance goals, and they will soon be measurable. What can you pilot in the metaverse that allows you to test more sustainable approaches to serving your customers?”

Such questioning by various stakeholders can open up the floodgates to innovative use cases of the metaverse and NFTs. The latter, driven by blockchain technology, have enabled a whole new range of ownership and trading activities in the digital realm.

Last but not the least, the book’s section on building and promoting digital trust, Trust Me, not only looks at interesting data on consumer attitudes and behaviors on digital trust around the globe, it stresses on the need for brands to make their design choices more carefully.

“When making design choices on a platform, managers should step back from short-term and narrow metrics like conversions and think through the broader questions about the value they create for their stakeholders,” it says. To get going, there are five questions brands must consider:

1. Are you transparent about prices and fees?
2. Do you make it easy to cancel your service?
3. Do you use default settings in a way that is genuinely helpful for customers?
4. Do you frame choices in a misleading way?
5. Do you create content that is addictive? [especially social media and video]

Most of the big tech platforms are routinely scrutinized and censured these days by regulators around the world for engaging in practices for short-term commercial gains that are harmful to consumers in the long term. We constantly hear of lawsuits, fines, and penalties.

However, businesses and brands that care for the long-term value they give to customers don’t have to wait for regulation to catch up—and make a fresh start themselves by following the best practices in developing digital trust and wellbeing. They can answer the above five questions honestly and take more proactive steps to protect consumers as well as their own reputation, and build lasting value for multiple stakeholders.

Thank you for reading and wish you all the best in treading the tech path in 2023 and beyond with caution, care, and accomplishment!

(Note: This post was first published on www.freshworks.com under a different headline and cover image.)

How CXOs are Learning to Tackle the Challenges of Multiple Clouds

Five years ago, when messaging and voice communication services provider Solutions Infini Inc. moved its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure to the cloud, the company’s executives believed they would save on operational costs. Chief technology officer (CTO) Ashish Agarwal soon realized that such was not the case. Just two years after the company moved to the cloud, he discovered that “the amount of money we were paying to the cloud providers was quite high for us, as we operate on very slim margins”.

This called for remedial action, following which the company decided to invest in a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system and host these machines at independent data centres.

While a converged infrastructure integrates the computing, storage, networking and server virtualization aspects of a data centre, HCI integrates some additional technologies with the help of software. Agarwal chose Nutanix as the HCI vendor. Other companies that offer HCI systems include Dell Technologies Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Oracle Corp.

Agarwal reasoned that, “using the front-end of Nutanix’s HCI solution, which is quite simple, we could replicate or mirror our cloud environment with simple clicks”. Solutions Infini now uses a blend of cloud services and the HCI systems hosted at third-party data centres for its application delivery needs.

Solutions Infini’s example is simply a case in point. The fact is that chief information officers (CIOs), CTOs, and other technology decision makers in India are facing challenges related to dealing with multiple cloud computing facilities of companies such as Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Google Inc.

Industry experts and analysts are of the view that as more investments pour into cloud data centres, which provide computing, storage and other information technology (IT) infrastructure and services on a pay-per-use basis, CIOs will have to learn how to manage what they say is an “increasingly hybrid” set-up.

There are three models under cloud computing: in public cloud, business applications run completely in a third-party data centre; in private cloud, individual companies operate their own data centres; and in hybrid cloud, they use a mix of the two. Research firm Gartner, Inc. estimates that the public cloud services market in India, which stood at $1.35 billion in 2016, will grow to $1.93 billion by 2017 and further to $4.28 billion by the end of 2020.

According to the firm, hybrid cloud solutions are driving overall cloud adoption in India.

“Cloud adoption is growing strongly in the region, albeit from a low base. Enterprises are adopting both cloud-enabled managed hosting and public cloud services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, typically for different use cases,” said D.D. Mishra, research director, Gartner India. “It is getting increasingly common for enterprises to have multiple cloud environments, often operated and supported separately.”

The main issues faced by companies and CIOs, according to Mishra, include “lack of expertise around key areas of hybrid cloud enablement—virtualization, standardization, automation and instrumentation.”

According to Mishra, there is a “lack of guidance” on the technology prerequisites needed to “fully leverage hybrid cloud capabilities”.

He added that the capabilities required typically involve use of “automation and monitoring tools... to not only detect user-impacting problems, but also proactively identify when the service is degrading”.

The growth of virtualization—one of the building blocks of cloud computing—has also given rise to the phrase “software-defined” (software-defined storage, software-defined networking, even software-defined data centre). Virtualization allows a computer to be split into multiple virtual machines (VMs) for running different applications through the use of a sophisticated software called ‘hypervisor’. Companies that provide hypervisor solutions include VMware Inc., Microsoft, Red Hat, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc. and Nutanix.

“Gradually, it has to be software-defined everything and one operating system (OS) will subsume everything else,” said Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, Nutanix, in an interview recently.

“You can get rid of a lot of people in the data centre and optimize your costs when software starts to do a lot of things automatically,” he explained.

He added that the concept that everything is an app is “being replicated into the bowels of the data centre”.

The service delivery model in cloud computing has evolved from companies having their own data centres to hosting their servers in outside facilities, to plain-vanilla or bare-metal infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to software-as-a-service (SaaS), according to Sunil Gupta, executive director and president of Netmagic—an NTT Communications Corp. company that operates a number of cloud data centres across India.

Netmagic, according to Gupta, has integrated multiple cloud offerings from different companies into “a unified managed cloud service”. Towards this purpose, it has developed an “orchestration layer or a cloud management platform” internally over the past couple of years. Moving to the cloud, Gupta said, is not a “zero-to-one story”. It is a “gradual, lengthy journey” and CIOs must keep that in mind.

“The challenge for them is how to migrate their applications smoothly to the cloud with zero or negligible downtime. Then, they also have to tackle what is called ‘shadow IT’ wherein departments other than IT purchased certain cloud applications without even informing the CIO,” Gupta cautioned.

CIOs, according to Gupta, are increasingly moving applications to the cloud—not just email and productivity apps that they began with but also critical ones such as payroll and human resource management apps. Hence, they should plan their cloud migration well in advance. And while planning must be done in a comprehensive way—taking into account storage and other infrastructure requirements—execution should be “gradual”.

According to Gupta, IT heads should also invest in skills for cloud computing such as how to configure and manage hypervisors and hire people who have experience in procuring cloud. “One challenge CIOs face is that different cloud computing companies have different parameters and models for pricing cloud resources, so it makes sense to have technically savvy people in the infrastructure procurement or purchase department who can understand the complexities involved,” he explained.

Mishra of Gartner believes that taking a “consultative approach” is often “a good way to go about implementing one’s cloud strategy.”

CIOs should also look at developing or hiring talent in the areas of automation tools, agile development and cognitive domains, he said.

(This article first appeared on www.livemint.com. Image Credit: Pixabay.com)

It's a SMAC, SMAC World

Crazy as it may sound, the entire world is going to be SMAC'ed.

Now, now, I'm not a futurist, not even a technologist. But as one who often writes and talks about tech trends that affect enterprises big time, I can bet a few shirts on this: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud will shake things up like hell. (Or heaven, if you are on top of the stuff.)

It is hard to pinpoint when these four potent forces began to coalesce but, according to an article on Forbes.com, it was Cognizant Technology Solutions researchers who coined the term “SMAC” as recently as 2013. But let's not confuse terminology with technology (I remember one firm had coined a similar but rather ugly “SoMoClo,” for Social, Mobile and Cloud; and there are others who use “Nexus of Forces” and “the 3rd Platform” for similar concepts).

Irrespective of the term, the four mega trends are transforming how technology is developed, purchased, deployed and used. And how employees, partners, clients, customers and other stakeholders behave. It is the combined behavior that is slated to make the most impact—which is why it is difficult to put a dollar value to it and why impact estimates vary so much. To cite but one figure, a Reuters.com report quoting Nasscom director Rajat Tandon says that the value of outsourcing contracts for SMAC is set to soar from $164 billion last year to $287 billion by 2016.

No matter how you cut it, SMAC technologies are slated to leave a lasting impression. A Cognizant report, titled “The Value of Signal (and the Cost of Noise): The New Economics of Meaning-Making,” summarizes the situation neatly. “Nearly every aspect of our daily lives generates a digital footprint. From mobile phones and social media to inventory look-ups and online purchases, we collect more data about processes, people and things than ever before. Winning companies are able to create business value by building a richer understanding of customers, products, employees and partners—extracting business meaning from this torrent of data. The business stakes of “meaning-making” simply could not be higher,” it says.

I often hear murmurs of dissent: “There is more hype than substance to SMAC.” Or, “Big data (or cloud or mobility or social media) is not for us.”

It is possible that one of the big social platforms as we know it ceases to exist one day. Or some term other than SMAC will prevail (like cloud prevailed over service-oriented architecture). But does anyone seriously think people won’t be more mobile going forward? Or the human instinct to extend their socializing to new, emerging media will lose steam? Or, for that matter, we will stop analyzing this and that and what not, for business and for pleasure?

Crazy as it may sound…