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Tony Saldanha is a Fortune 25 executive in the Global Business Services (GBS) and Information Technology area. During a 27-year career at Procter & Gamble, Saldanha ran IT and GBS[…]

Why Digital Transformations Fail: The Surprising Disciplines of How to Take Off and Stay Ahead

TONY SALDANHA: If there was one technology that we had to pick that was going to change the way the world operates it has got to be artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the capability that you see when you speak to Siri or Cortana. Artificial intelligence is the, you know, three line updates in real time that tell you the scores online on Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Sports. That 90 percent of those one liner updates on sports or finance are actually written by robots, not humans. That is artificial intelligence at work. Artificial intelligence is what is driving your car when you're driving a Tesla in auto mode. So artificial intelligence is all about augmenting human decision making using computers.

And by the way, when people talk to us about how artificial intelligence is going to take all of our jobs they forget the fact that artificial intelligence is already here. Artificial intelligence is a complement to what we do because that is basically what is happening with your medical devices that's scanning your x-rays and advising doctors. And so the ability for humans to use computers and knowledge in a very narrow area to augment human decision making is artificial intelligence. We know that artificial intelligence – we know that artificial intelligence has the ability to read x-rays better than most doctors today. We also know that there are artificial intelligence courts set up in Latvia and China that are actually handling small claims so you actually don't need a judge to do the things that are routine. That is how artificial intelligence is complementing normal decision making for the more routine, the more mundane type of decisions that you would otherwise use human capacity.

The other technology that I'm very excited about is robotics and drones. So robotics, the mechanical use of robots to do the work of, the mundane work of people is a very, very exciting development. As we know manufacturing as we know it is transforming because of the use of robotics.

For many years manufacturing was moved from developed countries to developing countries because it was absolutely impossible to stay competitive with the labor costs in developed countries. Today work is actually moving backwards from $5 a day pay rates in developing countries all the way back through developed. This is transformational. This has the ability to change lives of people in terms of jobs, skills, the entire economic mortals of the world. That's one of the reasons why I'm so pumped about the potential of robotics to change the way that we work.


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