50 MAY 2017 Consulting®
BookIt
Consulting: First off, this is a
fascinating and timely book.
Congratulations. So, why this
book and why now?
Frank: Thanks for that. And it
really is a natural extension of
Code Halos—one sort of led right
into the other. Code Halos was
about the digital transformation
and the customer touch. How did
Amazon manage to recommend
the perfect book or how does
Netflix understand your movie
tastes better than your spouse.
It was about your digital twin
and interacting with that digital
twin and that’s where the market
was at the time, but the more
the three of us spent time with
clients while running the Center
for the Future of Work, it became
clear that there was something at
the center. Once you go digital,
it’s going to end up leading you
to the same place and that same
place was artificial intelligence.
And AI is the new machine. In
Code Halos, we started looking
at Facebook, Apple, Netflix and
Google and about three years
ago all their CEOs started saying
the same things—at their core
they are all artificial intelligence
companies and AI is their future.
So, we started to look deeper and
deeper. Today, we talk about the
digital era but in five or ten years
were going to recognize this era as
when AI took off. Once we started
looking at it closely, we discovered
there probably wasn’t going to
be a job, a company structure
or industry structure that wasn’t
going to be impacted by it. So, this
is a universal story; and that’s the
genesis of the book.
Roehrig: The three of us have
been the leaders of Cognizant’s
Center for the Future of Work so
we’ve been looking at this stuff
and talking to clients about the
future well before Code Halos.
When ‘AI’ Rules the World...
The rise of artificial intelligence is the great story of our time.
Artificial intelligence has left the laboratory (and the movie lot)
and is in your building. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. It’s
pervading all the institutions that drive our global economy.
From Alexa to Nest to Siri to Uber to Waze, we are surrounded by
smart machines running on incredibly powerful and self-learn-ing software platforms. And this is just the beginning. More and
more, machines are doing more and more of the work we perform today. Those who succeed in the next phase of the digital
economy are not those who can crate the new machines, but
those who figure out what to do with them. That’s why co-authors
Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President of Cognizant Strategy,
Paul Roehrig, Vice President of Cognizant Digital Business and
Ben Pring, Vice President and Director of the Cognizant Center
for the Future of Work, essentially write the field guide for navigating this brave, new world. The three joined forces to write the
fascinating and thought-provoking “Code Halos” in 2014 and
they’re back at it again with the ultra-timely and white-knuckle
“What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead
in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots and Big Data.” Then they sat
down with Consulting Magazine to talk about it.
