IBM THINK 2020 Digital Experience: Day 1 Review

Today we're talking about IBM Think, the digital experience, the first day of the digital experience. Uh in contrast to previous years when uh a whole bunch of us, around 40,000 of us converged on either Las Vegas or San Francisco this year, for obvious reasons we didn't go anywhere. Uh the event is structured a lot more like uh it's a hybrid combination of in-person well, live uh keynotes and then a whole bunch of on-demand sessions, which actually I think turned works out really well because the on-demand stuff you can log into any time and and watch and download slide decks and stuff, and the live keynotes and stuff are of course fun. Some of the big highlights from day one, I think. Uh, there was the premiere of AIOps, which is the use of artificial intelligence to manage your IT infrastructure.

And this is when you're using things like anomaly detection, breakout detection, trend detection, to identify and fix failures in your technology infrastructure before they become bigger problems. As someone who used to run a data center, uh, this would have been very nice to have had. Um it's uh some of the problems that we had way back in the day were easily preventable if we had the time and resources to uh go after it. And a lot of uh the Watson AI ops tools that were unveiled yesterday will help address a lot of that. The second thing that was a useful takeaway uh was actually from the opening keynote with uh Arvind Krishna, who is the the new CEO of IBM, and that is the concept that IBM has been pushing hybrid cloud, which is where you have services that are in the public cloud, public facing web-based services, and then there's the private cloud, which is uh your servers and things that are may not be physically hosted on site, but they're they're databases and and systems that you don't want the public accessing.

And then there's your on premise hardware, if there's things like you know, even your laptop, and there's historically been no way to coordinate the resources well. But one of the things that he said that was really interesting was that hybrid cloud as a concept is how you manage your data supply chain. And in a world where COVID 19 has proven that our supply chains are brittle and uh easily disrupted, starting to think about what your data supply chain looks like is really important. Uh he said the quote from yesterday. Where your data lives physically in the world matters because if you have a disruption, say on a server farm in in I don't know, uh Crimea uh or the Adriatic Sea, you run the same risks of essentially having your your operations disrupted as you do if you know somebody just walked into your server and poured water all over your service.

And so a strategy that allows you to have robust failover and the ability to move your data from place to place as as you need it is important. When you think about this in the marketing context, how many of us are solely reliant, solely reliant on a service like Google Analytics, which is technically public cloud? You have no control over it. Now you're not paying any money for it unless you're paying for Google Analytics 360, but for the vast majority of us are not paying for it, and so we have no control over it. If it is disrupted in some way, our data supply chain vanishes, right?

A major source of data vanishes, which is one of the reasons why you have to think about uh potentially a private cloud option, something like Matomo, which is an open source uh product you can run in your own private cloud, gathering the exact same data that Google Analytics does and and giving you backup options. And then you need obviously the hybrid cloud strategy to do to reconcile your Google Analytics data with your Matomo data and figure out how the two integrate. But it's a really important concept that I know for sure marketing technologists do not get because marketing tech is about 15 years behind IT information technology. Marketing tech is just discovering a lot of the issues that IT solved decades ago. And it's really there, the the nice thing is there are opportunities now for marketing technologists to crib from the lessons of IT and use modern day services, you know, you know, IBM and all of its competitors, to leap ahead to avoid having to make those 15 years of mistakes in order to get to productivity.

A couple of the things that were useful from yesterday's sessions, uh, IBM has an AI for kids lab, which I thought was really nice. Uh certain going to be making my kids do some of it. Uh the a lot of the keynote speakers were talking about some of the more complex issues around AI, such as bias uh and diversity and inclusion within technology as a whole, but in particular artificial intelligence. Uh Will I Will I Am had a an interesting quote yesterday. He said he was investing in an AI startup and was able to raise funding for it and and get everything running, and then simultaneously was trying to get funding for a school.

And he said, Why is it that we are it is so easy to invest in artificial intelligence, but so hard to get people to invest in human intelligence? He said, where you put your money now is the world you'll get tomorrow. So where do you want your money to go? Uh what do you kind of world you want to live in? I thought it was a useful uh point of view because yeah, it is easier to get dollars for a piece of technology because the return on investment is the horizon is a much shorter horizon.

Uh you can get, you know, invest in and flip a company like a piece of real estate in a few years, couple of years, two or three years. Human beings have a much longer investment timescale, but where is the equivalent of the investing in education like savings bonds? People save people will save money in a in a 30-year uh savings bond. Why do we not have that level of financial instrument in investment for uh companies and and for uh social good projects? Something to think about.

Finally, uh in a Reddit AMA with uh Rob Thomas, not the singer, uh it was open questions about uh the different IBM technology portfolios. And we'll I asked one about a more consumer equivalent of Watson Studios Auto AI. So auto AI, you've heard me talk about a number of times, is a really useful tool for data scientists to accelerate the modeling and understanding of uh a data set. You put it in, it runs all the algorithm tests, spits back some results, and you look at it, and you interpret it. It is not in any way, shape, or form friendly to the layperson.

You still have to understand things like what an RMSE score is, what a uh area under uh the curve is. And I asked a long time ago, five years ago, IBM had a product called Watson Analytics, which is their attempt to make a more consumer friendly version of uh what was effectively IBM Cognos. I said, will we get something that is that style of thing, but for auto AI? And he said, if you'd like to be a trial user, let us know. All right, sign me up.

Uh because that would be interesting to see how you can not water down or or dumbed down, but how do you make the technology more accessible for common use cases so that somebody doesn't need to know what an RMSE score is in order to get a reasonably viable model? It's a big challenge because there's so many things that can go wrong in that type of uh artificial intelligence and that type of machine learning. So that was day one. Now, again, this is a virtual event. A lot of things that are different.

I do miss being able to hang out, you know, the ask a data scientist uh booth and just pepper them with questions all day. I do not miss San Francisco during conference season with $900 hotel rooms uh and things like that. So I'm gonna jump into day two today to see what uh is on tap and dig into some of the more uh technical sessions and see uh what's under the hood there. But a good first day and I think for the foreseeable near term future, this is the way conferences will go. So I would encourage everyone to go ahead and sign up for it.

It's free and see if you can get some value out of it. Because if you can, then you'll be well prepared for dealing with how conferences are going to be for the at least probably the next year. Uh if you can't, leave a note in the comments or join uh my Slack group, Analytics for Marketers. If you go to trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers, leave some thoughts about what it would take for you to get value out of a virtual event when the physical event simply isn't available. As always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

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