Our 10 pearls of wisdom from the AIIA Podcast (ep.1-10)
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We highlight top intelligent automation insights from the first ten episodes
“Our company watches The Martian, because if he can farm on Mars, we can develop a robot on Earth.” Photo by Marc Ward/Shutterstock
As many of our readers are aware, the AI & Intelligent Automation Network releases a new podcast episode each week.
Our aim is to provide a voice for the business discipline of intelligent automation. Through personal conversation, we’ve already had the pleasure of interacting with some incredible practitioners in this field.
The first ten episodes feature case study anecdotes from Google, ANZ Bank, GM, IEEE, Citi and other leading organizations. Within each of these conversations, we’ve garnered dozens of key learning points from each executive’s personal career.
So here are our favorite pearls of insight from episodes 1-10. You can tune in to listen to the rest of the series here or subscribe on iTunes…
Lee Coulter, IEEE (ep.1)
"[If we don’t hurry] we will be disrupted completely. We will be out of business if we don’t build the foundations of automation- task, data and the introduction of intelligence. It’s a foundation that has to be built now."
Huw Pattinson, ANZ Bank (ep.2)
“User assisted automation is where you're actually helping to automate the task that the operator is completing. Rather than replacing the operator, you're making their task a Factor 10 faster."
Ted Graham, GM (ep.3)
“One of our partners, Lyft, had an interesting promotion of offering a five-dollar self-driving car ride anywhere across the city. No longer when you’re invited out by your friends to dinner could you say no. The point was ‘forget Netflix and chill’. Stop spending your life on the couch. There’s more to life.”
Cindy Gallagher, Discovery (ep.4)
“RPA can absolutely save you money, if that's where you want to go. I looked at it from a business evolution perspective. I have headcount today. If I absorb more work, I'll need more headcount. If I put RPA in, that RPA can absorb the headcount and the need, so I can get the team I have right now involved in more value-added tasks. Whether it's looking at big data, whether it's looking at customer service or whether it's understanding the strategy of the company.”
Alex Balbontin (ep.5)
“My 10 year-old son spends a lot of time on his IPad. I actually often go to him with questions about technology and computers. It’s scary, isn’t it? But it’s the way people are growing. His generation is coming with a different tool-kit – and remember – they’re going to be customers, eventually.”
Stig Pedersen, Topdanmark (ep.6)
"It’s surprising how far we’re getting with machine learning, and so fast. Our own develops discuss over lunch whether machines will kill us intentionally or not. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that – that problem’s perhaps 200 hundred years away – but that’s the way they discuss things today.”
Frank Kuenel, Google (ep.7)
"AI is a field that’s made up of small subfields. It’s an accumulation of mathematical processes and ideas that come from physics, statistics and builds on those ideas to build a common framework."
Allen Martinson, Starship Technologies (ep.8)
“You can engineer yourself out of any **** in your life – any problem. Our company watches (Matt Damon movie) The Martian, because if he can farm on Mars, we can develop a robot on Earth.”
Kelly Switt, Citi (ep.9)
"It’s amazing when you prepare people for the ‘suck factor’. When we were done with the first 12 weeks of the [project], the team was like ‘It wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be.’ Prepare people for the worst and you’re giving them the luxury upfront to expect failure, so then no one’s afraid to fail.”
Jorgen Lislerud, Circle K (ep.10)
“It’s important to have subject matter experts working with programming a robot – people who really understand what they’re doing. But we also need someone there to challenge the SMEs. That way when it’s put into the robot, we have the best possible input and optimize the process.”
