The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

Today I’m interviewing David Mathison to discuss the future of big data. David is the CEO of the CDO Summit & CDO Club for Chief Digital Officers and Chief Data Officers.

He is the world’s leading authority on CDOs, having been quoted by CNBC, Computerworld, Deloitte, Financial Times, Forbes, Guardian, McKinsey, MIT Sloan Management Review, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, and ZDNet, among others.

From 1999-2002 he was founder and CEO of the Kinecta Corporation where he raised $30 million in under 2 years. The Kinecta Corporation is now part of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).

From 1994-1999 David was VP with Reuters, where he pioneered online content syndication, years before RSS was invented.

the future of big data

David has more than 30 years experience in the hi-tech, information, publishing, software, and events industries.
Continuous leadership and success in the strategic planning, rapid growth and management of multi-million-dollar global business operations.

Today we are talking the future of big data, the future of the world with big data and this kind of stuff! So I hope you enjoy it!

Please review and feel free to share this episode with your friends and subscribe wherever you feel comfortable.

Lovely to speak with you again David, we had the pleasure of working together a couple of times. We went to Las Vegas with IBM, when I also learnt a lot about the future of big data and when Will Smith was speaking we did laugh…

David
I was on the floor right in front of him. It’s great to be with you again, Nathaniel. We go way back. One of the things before we get into IBM I really appreciate what you did!

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

One of the first times we worked together was in 2014. It was at the BBC and it was our first ever London CDO Summit. It was sponsored by Accenture Digital and I’ll never forget it because you helped us to trend on Twitter. It was the first time we ever trended on Twitter and even ahead of the Mayor of London at the time so I appreciate all your work and hello to all your fans and followers out there very delighted to be on the show with you today!

the future of big data is people

Yes we were both recently at the IBM think conference and I was a Watson influencer. I’m going to the San Francisco event coming up in February and Will Smith was certainly unbelievable. He was so powerful in his presentation and just came off really, really nicely and had some really great appropriate jokes as I recall to about data and all the digital people in the room. They always get great guests. Oh, it was absolutely phenomenal. I just couldn’t stop laughing.

Nathaniel
He just took the Mickey, in England we say take the Mickey out of people and and is the polite way to put it and he took the Mickey out of the guy from Titan watches, the guy was from from India and will said he needed a spokesperson and how he wanted the job and this kind of stuff you know and I think it was just really quite on point actually, he was just so on the ball with the influencer marketing trend that is happening right now.  There’s so much that we could talk about and I’m sure we’re going to talk some more on future shows.

We were just briefly talking about in 10 years time what the world is actually going to look like and I learned so much from attending your your CDO Summits and it was absolutely incredible when I went to the first one, learning so much about the future of big data.

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

It was just amazing and in fact, the second event that I attended I really learned a massive amount about the future of retail. Actually, this is bricks and mortar retail we’re talking about and what I found was amazing, was actually what the New York government we’re doing in New York with Data.

I think that’s just so interesting and the future of big data is so exciting. Say you want to have a business and wonder where is the best location for my new coffee shop, they actually analyse that data for you.

Then they say, well, your best bet is to have a shop here on 23rd street because you’ve got the amount of traffic that you need, and then the right demographics and…

David
It’s all a database and the future of big data. Once they get in the store, they use everything from, you know, collated weather data to traffic data to find out if you know, it’s going to be raining tomorrow.

Then Deciding on the actions for the shop

big data

Should we put the umbrellas on the end cap for example?

When people first walk in the store and put a sale up or put you know rain jackets and things like that out.

So I think most companies have got not only really intelligent about actively using data when the store is in place. But as you rightly point out, even before the location is decided, they’re using data to figure out where the next physical location should be. So it’s amazing, but you know, not unusual. I mean, we’re seeing the growth of the action around the future of big data.

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

I think when we talked about where do we see the world in 5 years time or 10 years; this real time use of data to make the right decisions and be more predictive and prescriptive about business is really taking over and some of the best programmers we’re seeing are from the UK and from the US and I would say also China.

Some of the best programming is coming out of out of China these days.

We can expect even more tremendous growth in the next few years around the future of big data.

Nathaniel
I’ve actually heard I’ve heard a lot about China, China seems to be really catching up on that front. I mean, I did find it quite funny as I saw one of those pictures, from up in the air like, I can’t remember how many million pixels or something.

I had a look and there were probably about four people on their mobile phones, then I went back a few years and looked at one in London one of these pictures. I had a look okay so this is really quite dirty looking city right, because London’s quite a bit like New York and, you know, Sydney or whatever and I think the Chinese government had actually just sort of probably doctored their picture! 

Certainly the future of big data in China is pretty scary!

This picture which I did find quite quite amusing but you know I think I think people are going to start using their phones a lot less. I think like Elon Musk was saying you know we’re gonna we’re going to kind of become more at one with our machines.

I don’t have an I watch yet, I don’t do the IoT sensor thing on my on my wrist but I think you know we get to probably have a chip in our arm we’re going we’re going to probably have the contact lenses with with particular screens on or glasses and this sort of stuff, I mean what’s your what’s your sort of view on on all of that kind of nascent new tech?

gigapixl
Checkout their site, it is far too big to embed here!

David

Well, yes the photo it is exactly a 24.9 billion pixel camera that they createdin China. billion pixels I think 24.9 billion. And it’s basically a panorama. Anyone can search on this. It’s an excellent, actually a fascinating exercise. Just search, link is here 🙂

http://www.bigpixel.cn/t/5834170785f26b37002af46d

Actually, the best way to search. This one would be, it was, yeah, 24.9 billion pixel. Yhe result of it was a 195 Gigapixel photo that’s the panorama from China. You can literally make out individual blades of grass. There’s people all over this city.

You can zoom in and see people’s facial expressions from you know, really almost a quarter of a mile up into the sky. I mean, so the, the kinds of it just imagine when this is commercialised and just about you know, we look at the capabilities of our cameras on our phones now and think oh my you know, within three to five years, this kind of capability could be mass mass produced for a low cost increase.

Nathaniel
It could be. I mean, what’s really interesting, my Dad was actually talking to me about his time in the Korean War. Because he’s from from America and he actually was in was in the Air Force and he was an intelligence.

He bought a million lenses for reconnaissance. He was actually up in an air- plane, I believe, over a quarter of a mile up in the air.

He could read a newspaper back in those days. Right from that on that and from from an air-plane.

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

Education overload is real! Data Overload! 

That’s in essence what we’re what we’re talking about and I mean it’s just so vast.

I think that’s the that’s the problem is people they’ve almost become apathetic because in activity has been caused because of too much information.

The future of big data is so exciting!

But data privacy concerns are huge and the future of big data is not just a few buzzwords! 

David

The so the the irony of that photo you’re you’re pointing out almost all of the challenges of data in the future, it relates to privacy and security, basically privacy of the individual.

Do you really want your image, you know, anywhere you walk in a city if you can be captured by 195 megapixel camera, you know, you could be photographed by corporate, you know, not just government agencies. But corporations, individuals or, you know, blackmailers.

You know you name it. I mean, there’s all kinds of possible outcomes.

The future of big data is so exciting! The abilities with the future of big data and technology. So the irony of that photo, though, is it was commissioned by the government in Shanghai. And of course, anyone who’s been to China knows when you take a picture, even one picture, for example of the Forbidden City, you know, you get up on the hill in the Park and take this panoramic shot of the Forbidden City, just to the right of the Forbidden City is the Chinese equivalent of 10 Downing Street or the White House where, you know you cannot photograph that area, you can’t go inside, you can take an aerial photograph.

But they let people go to the top of that park and take photos of the Forbidden City, you’re in effect, taking photos of, you know, a banned site. The same thing is true in China. When you do any kind of communications.

The great firewall of China is for real!

It’s almost impossible when you’re behind the Great Firewall of China. They banned anything Google so you can’t use YouTube or Gmail or Google calendar or even Google search and you certainly can’t use Twitter or Facebook. Almost everybody over there uses we-chat so the again going back to the irony of this photo.

On the one hand, you’ve got this big pixel company headquartered in China. On the other hand, China doesn’t want their citizens taking photos like this. Also the government, of course sensors a lot of the websites and a lot of photos like this in and of themselves.

So it all wraps up into that big challenge in the future of  technology is how much do how much does technology help us; how much does it hurt us?

Do we want our private lives to be able to be spied on by just about anyone with one of these gigapixel cameras and their phone or a government agent spying on each other?

Nathaniel

It really goes into all of those issues that that privacy plus security plus, you know, high technology. I suppose it’s just sort of how, how private do you want to be?

I know people have changed their names because they became really successful to become more anonymous, you know, and more anonymous.

David
I worked with Reuters from 94 to 98. Back in those days, the Reuters photographers are all over the world, you know, and they’ll take a bullet to get a story. I mean, whether it’s in Northern Ireland are covering the drug wars in Colombia…You, you know, these guys are serious. They go out there with no protection. No, no guns, no ammunition, just a camera and put themselves in the line of fire to get it to get a great shot.

Well, you know, at the same time, back in those days, I remember, you know, mid 90s when I first started working for them, you needed to go out and get permission, you needed to have a permission sheet where people would sign it saying that they waive their rights, you know, to the photos so that Reuters could use it commercially and market it and put it up in newspapers and stuff.

Nobody does that today. People take photos of each other and post them up on Facebook, never thinking of, you know, going out and getting a release form.

We don’t even think about that these days. But there are still old school people who say that, you know, I’m not going to put up a photo and promiscuously tag people that I may or may not know, because, you know, that’s an invasion of their privacy. But I think most millennials growing up, they don’t even think that way. You know, they’ve just immediately posting, tagging and they don’t consider the consequences of the privacy of the person that they’re tagging.

I sound like an old man. Hey, you kids get off my lawn. Yeah! 🙂

I think back just how much things have changed in just 15 or 20 years from from something where, you know, the privacy of the individual was held up to the highest standards.

Now people give away privacy and our rights to Facebook and to Google and to everybody else. Instagram and so this take a mega-pixel camera, I guess is the next step and that evolution of the evolution of our proverbial privacy.

Nat
With the privacy stuff, I mean, it’s such big business, technology, the future of big data is a conversation on it’s own; it’s it’s a whole conversation that could just could last a whole episode really, couldn’t it!

But I think the future looks quite bright actually. I mean in terms of in terms of providing solutions for hunger, getting maximum nutrition into food, yeah, maximum you know, water and not too much water wastage. 

I think there are some very bright things around the corner. I can’t actually talk about what I spoke to someone about today, but I think they’re in that space of, of actually growing crops.

It’s going to be quite exciting. Actually. I’ve got a podcast coming out in about a week and a half, with something ground breaking. It’s coming out and it’s going to be pretty amazing innovation wise! He’s actually getting some advertising I think it’s Is it the Super Bowl in a couple of weeks?

David
Yes. Correct.

Nat
So he’s getting some advertising on there. So that’ll be coming out then I can talk about it, but can’t talk about it until then. I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

Back to Blockchain and AI

So let’s say but but in so in terms of like security, right, and internet security and Blockchain and AI. It’s all a bit like a hyperbole for for a lot of people like they just lost in this kind of world of techno speak and jargon is just what techies use and how do you think like Blockchain can can actually assist us with with security.

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

David
The wonderful thing about distributed ledger ledger technologies. Blockchain included, I would also expand beyond the open source Blockchain to things that are more private but have higher transactions such as you know, Hedera their transactions are fast!  https://www.hedera.com/  hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Whereas with Blockchain it’s it’s still very slow, you know, just a few transactions per second. So, widespread use of Blockchain. The real big use case or best use cases everybody knows has been cyber, you know, crypto currencies such as Bitcoin on top of the Blockchain, the LT but I certainly think the to simplify and summarize the importance of Blockchain going forward.

To me, it’s as simple as looking at 1994 to 1995, you know, 1994 you had all these heterogeneous, you know, completely spread out systems if you wanted to get your continent to AOL. Yeah. The right Blackbird if you want to get into MSN for Microsoft network.

Generating Rain Man. Fortunately, everything standardised over HTML over HTTP and we had a standard protocol and the standard markup language so that anybody with a browser could look the web.

Now, Blockchain takes that a step further and the wonderful thing about it is that in for me, because I come from a media background and you know, I published a book called be the media https://www.amazon.com/Be-Media-David-Mathison/dp/0976081458 which was really looking at the renaissance of any author, musician, filmmaker, journalist, photographer could really take advantage of the internet and not have to sign that onerous publishing contract or soon distribution arrangement or, you know, music label agreement so that they move away from these indentured servitude, you know, programs where they don’t get 15% or 7% to 15% of the royalties from their work.

Now, they could actually get self publishing a higher percentage of royalties. Well, the challenge with all that what it was or it still is, is that there wasn’t really a mechanism let’s say you put a photo up on Facebook.

It wasn’t really a mechanism to track the intellectual property of where does that photo go? Does somebody use that photo and post it into a marketing brochure where they’re making money off of your work?

Well, the wonderful thing about Blockchain is you can track the intellectual property of anything that you put out on the internet. This is the future of big data and full traceability off all your assets!

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit

You could also include, for example, smart payments where if somebody uses it, you know your photo for a wedding, you know, album or for a print publication or a marketing brochure. Everything is delineated in the smart contract and you get paid the originator of that content gets paid as a micro transaction or a fee for each one of the uses of their work. Well, this is to sum up the Blockchain for at least for independent artists, and for anyone doing authentication. You know, big financial service firms, insurance agencies, anyone doing a lot of work with crypto currencies and central banks.

Blockchain right now is as big as 1994/95 was for the internet, it is going to not only dramatically change and shift the playing field, but it’s also going to disrupt a lot of disruptors.

You know, not only is it disrupting incumbents, and you got to be a lot of big financial services firms and insurance companies and others taking Blockchain very seriously. But it’s also going to disrupt Pandora and YouTube and Spotify and others where they’re aggregating both, you know, music and listeners, but there’s really no way for the musician to make any money from that Spotify or Pandora model, they’ve got to get millions and millions of spins just to make pennies.

So what I thought you know, when I published my book. The media was going to be a renaissance of creativity and the ability for artists to fund their work through their fans never materialized. We saw things like Indiegogo and Kickstarter help with the onboarding process of getting not no need to get a label contract just to get an advance that’s what the Indiegogo and Kickstarter help with. You no longer need to get an advance because you have your funds your fans from the project, but there was no real ongoing method of tracking and getting paid for the work as this stuff goes out across the internet.

Well, you know, Blockchain does that and much, much more. So I think from both the perspective of big corporations needing to get involved with Blockchain and also young, independent artists. It’s a great way of monetizing content and being able to track the origination and distribution of that content. But you know, there’s a lot of interpretations in different fields on how this is best views. But coming from my perspective, I see those as some pretty big use cases.

Nat
I mean engagements I mean, gaming is huge, I just avoid that myself. But I think in terms of in terms of kind of like traceability of ROI on marketing, like Blockchain if we can, you know, in five years time, the traceability on marketing. You know, when one of these people how many years ago said, you know, out of 100% they spend on marketing, they don’t know where 50% has gotten right.

David
I think so, Blockchain potentially has the power to actually slap the the social media and Google and all these other people into into check and say well actually, you know the infrastructure here could be could be much better and and you know products are being developed all the time to target people you know I mean I did an episode with Billee Howard who’s in New York as well.

We talked about this this new marketing technology that those guys are pioneering and it’s and it’s basically about storytelling and how to tell your story better to get a brand message right so that people buy your stuff and tell other people to buy your stuff. So everything’s going to become a lot more targeted.

Doing all this kind of all this stuff with Facebook and you know how they persuaded all these people to do things they didn’t want them to do and all this lost data and all this other stuff, right?

GDPR has made advertising actually more focused and more targeted on people. Because action, those people will buy the product, they will enjoy the marketing messaging because that marketing messaging is targeted towards them. So that so actually GDPR has done the marketing world a favor because it’s actually good to improve ROI based upon that and reduce spam, right.

We all hate spam! I’ve heard a lot about AI within security and how how, you know, AI is going to really improve security but but I think with the chief Chief Digital Officers, which is your your specialty.

What amazing things have some of these people done? David that you know about that you think is going to get better in the next sort of five years?

David
Yes. Well, it’s funny, you know, when we were chatting earlier, you mentioned you learned a lot from the 2014 London CEO Summit!

CDO Club the future of big data

So, you know, for your listeners, I’m the founder of the CDO club. We are a membership organization, founded in 2011 for Chief Digital Chief Data, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Information Security Officers.

We started running summits in 2013. And by 2014, we had done our first event in London at the BBC. You know, just thinking about some of the talent that was there. I mean, that was an incredible event we had so just some of the big organizations that were represented included like you know, Mark Dearnley https://www.gov.uk/government/people/mark-dearnley at the time was Chief Digital and Information Officer HMRC I mean to think about, you know digitizing the tax process.

Then also, in the States, the HMRC for listeners here, it is the equivalent of the IRS. It’s a massive, massive project.
Mark had a huge brief.

We also had Mark Read https://www.wpp.com/about/our-leadership/mark-read at the time was CDO of WPP digital and now since then he’s become CEO, about a month ago he became CEO of WPP. That is the world’s largest ad agency and Mark Read started as a CDO.

We had Charlie Redmayne https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/corporate/about-us/executive-committee/ who was originally CDO at Harper Collins, and he became CEO at Harper Collins.

Because anyone doing the job of digital if you’re if you’re the one who’s led the organisation and lead that company from an analogue to digital company, it’s likely that you’re going to be running the show and you know, Charlie’s been there since 2013. He’s been CEO of Harper Collins for four years.

We also had Mike Bracken, you know, who at the time was incredible. He was executive director of the government digital service and that was a massive project for Mike we made him CDO of the year. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/author/mike-bracken/

That year we had Amanda Hill who is chief brand officer at the BBC http://cdosummit.co.uk/speakers/amanda-hill/
and Ralph Rivera, who is the director of the digital transformation at the BBC :-
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/10/26/nba-hires-bbc-eurosport-alum-ralph-rivera-oversee-europe-and-middle-east-expansion

Now for these people who are so accomplished in their fields for, you know, the last decade, whatever the things are looking at, I can tell you the main projects that if you put it to three broad categories.

  1. Digital transformation never seems to end. I mean, did HMRC has now been through, they now have a new Chief Digital Officer, so the goals that they had for Mark Dearnley and his team you know, they went through all those goals and now they have new strategic goal that they need to hit because there’s a new disruption does your you know as blockchain comes out, etc, etc. Digital transformation really never seems to end you know, because of the disruptions are coming fast, fast and furious.
  2. Data is driving everything you know data literally is driving all decisions real time data to be more predictive and prescriptive with your analysis on anything from you know retail outlets to you know weather affecting traffic patterns and not only physically in on the roads and in the streets but also in stores. After data and within data with bundle you know pretty much AI- DL deep learning, machine learning, cognitive you know both bundle at all in under under data.
  3. Security
cyber security

Lastly being cyber security which is an ongoing issue we just had yet another massive breach of this time the Marriott where not only were passwords and home addresses stolen but also people’s passport numbers. So after the Yahoo breach You know, this is the second largest breach in the world and it continues on and on so how to countries companies, individuals, you know how to individuals protect their privacy, but also how to companies and government organizations get enough information from these people from from us so that they can continue to, to to do business and to provide government services for us in an efficient way without encroaching on our guard, increasing need for privacy and security.

These are the balances and those three things data, digital transformation and cybersecurity are really our focus. And in 2010 or 2011, when we first started doing this, we kind of made a bet that this was all going to be important.

We’ve gone we’re now in just about every country, we’re just starting to dip our toes in the water of China, it’s huge.

The opportunity there, especially with AI and with security, and we don’t see this going away anytime soon. Especially the data side, which is just way overshadowing the Chief Digital Officer side we’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in the new hires of Chief Data Officers and Chief Digital Officers.

Big Data Should Underpin the Entire Business Economy!

Nat
It’s it is absolutely massive. It’s it’s becoming the actual, well the underpinning of all business enterprises, without those three things and actually keeping an eye on it though there are going to be many more businesses just disappearing and folding.

Because they’re not going to allocate resources enough you know to to the right areas of the business they’re not going to be able to keep up with demand they get a they get a basically just keep purchasing stuff that they just don’t need at the wrong prices and their competitors are going to put them out business.

David
I mean, I hate to say that exactly. Yeah, no, it’s been happening for the last 10 years and now it’s happening even too. So now we’re at the point where the disruptors are getting disrupted. And by that I mean to the hundred years for Craigslist to put the classifieds out of business and the newspapers basically undercut the entire business model of in an entire industry, newspapers and books.

This shoot shortly thereafter you saw things like especially they got more nuanced by that. I mean not just classifieds like personals but if you think about personal as well Craigslist then got disrupted by by you know plenty of fish and by match.com so that took only 10 years and now you’re seeing like match.com got disrupted by Tinder and Grindr you know we’re all it is it’s swipe right, swipe left.

Yes we are still being disrupted!

I mean, how much simpler Can you be for user interface right now the disruptors are disrupting the disruptors in a timeframe that’s more aggressive doesn’t take 10 years to disrupt the company anymore now It only takes a year or two so you know what’s next? Can personals be disrupted further absolutely think about you know virtual reality you know where you can meet people in a VR world or you know wearables where my T shirt Can you know like your T shirt and our T shirts can go out on the date I mean you know like they’re all kinds of possibilities were even personals will be disrupted. And you can think well, you know, swipe right swipe left…

User Interface doesn’t get more simple than that, well, maybe it does. Maybe we don’t even need to swipe. Maybe it’s, you know, it already knows our preferences. It looks for people who are in line with the people that we want to meet, either professionally or personally, these are the kinds of things where I said before, that data is getting more predictive and prescriptive, that, you know, I don’t need to physically be in a location to meet somebody, you know, and our AI robots can do the work for us, you know, large majority of the vetting process of doing personal So, you know, you could think that across any field, the fact is disrupting is coming faster and faster and furious or and even the disruptors are getting disrupted at this point with a very low at a very low cost. That’s the big key is you don’t need to have these giant server farms anymore. Just plug everything into AWS and you’re up and running.

Nat
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I had a vision I saw that Mercedes a few years ago you know the self driving Mercedes where you know, did you see the saloon?

The future of big data and transportation and technology is totally amazing. You could sit there and, and literally on the roof that was your internet, your roof that was your screen.

Just sit back and you could, you could just look, let it drive you to your meeting and then it would arrange a meeting for you with someone else in your company or a customer along your route. If traffic was delaying the journey, it would work out for you using the future of big data tools (that haven’t been invented yet) and then change it change your route and change your destination along the way.

So you could have a business meeting wherever you wanted to or wherever the thought was, was apt you know, but I’ve seen in in terms of like Amazon and the bricks and mortar retail outlets, they’re launching.

I think there’s a lot more that we haven’t seen yet. I mean, it’s it’s just moving fast and the future of big data has not yet been invented yet!

The future of big data is in customer service chatbots!

Customer Service Chatbots are moving ahead rapidly!

I think the major issue is, is actually working out what what to do with that data, isn’t it? And then and then actually, you know what tools you’re going to use. I mean, I went to Wimbledon and spoke to Watson, which was huge. Interesting and I think the databases of chat for Chatbot chat is becoming it will become huge within five years time..

The people who actually do want to speak to someone on the telephone are going to make it, to actually find it a lot easier to speak to a computer generated AI person, if you like.

chatbot

On the phone or on the Chatbot and actually that is fed by the same database of information. I’ve been doing a little bit of digging into that and the future of big data with Chatbots.

I think that yes, there are going to be people who want to speak to a real human, no problem. But that’s even going to become easier because people have had enough of, of not having access to the right information.

They’re very impatient and they will they will change, you know, right. Well, you see the benefit of that, let’s just tackle the Chatbot or also known as conversational interfaces, but widely known as Chatbots, that the, you know, people are always lamenting the fact that will AI is going to steal our jobs and take our jobs and make things less efficient.

If you think about just scheduling right or we did. We scheduled an appointment today for this interview. Imagine if you’re a recruiter or your car or a talent manager at a large organization like Accenture hires 40,000 people a year scheduling interviews like just one person usually has to interview with five or six people to get a job at the organization. Well that need that can instead of having a person who only knows English or only knows you know, Mandarin, and only works from nine to five Monday to Friday.

What we’re seeing that is being replaced by Chatbots because Chatbots that have don’t take lunch, they don’t go, they work 24 hours a day, they speak 120 different languages. And then a large majority of scheduling, sending out the invitation finding availability on five different people’s calendars now that and multiply that by 30,000, 40,000 new employees per per year who have to meet with six or seven people at your organization that becomes a massive, massive problem. Ripe for not only disruption but also for Improvement and Innovation.

Chatbots in HR

So we’re seeing things like chatbots and the future of big data take over in areas like that where it’s just the way of doing that we currently do business makes no sense at all. When you realize that you can do things you can automate things in a way that that makes it more efficient for everyone so now a person who’s coming in from Mexico who may not know English can chat with a Chatbot in Spanish 24/7 and schedule interview.

Not even know by the way that they’re not talking to a human and this is the future of big data. To them, they’re getting an email, that email is coming from an email address. Most people just assume it’s the human sending out the email. But increasingly, it’s being sent out all the invitations, all the scheduling, all of that is being done by Chatbots.

I think it takes away all that low level work and craziness of hiring people just to do scheduling when all that could be automated. So I think there are places where automation makes a tonne of sense. The jobs that are being displaced really shouldn’t be there in the first place. So just a legacy of the inertia of the old ways of doing business.

Nat
There are other places where I’m a little bit more fearful, you know, I am a little bit fearful about AI and bots in certain other areas where, you know, we really do need human oversight, but that’s probably topic for a whole other show or a week’s worth of content on the future of AI. Well, we could Yeah, we could talk about that. Most certainly. I think it’s a very interesting topic there. There’s just so much going on that actually it is it is quite amazing.

Wimbledon and media companies owning their own broadcasting service!

I think also in broadcasting like if you think Wimbledon’s taken on their own broadcasting.

The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit
nat schooler learning about the future of big data!

Read my blog from 2018 here

It really does excite me and the future of big data is so interesting.

With the IBM partnership they run the media at their event. So that’s going to happen throughout the world. Big, big sporting events. Big, big events are just going to take that broadcasting away from Sky away from people like the BBC.

But they will sell them a license. So it’s almost like they’re just putting a person in between there’s like an in between kind of distributor if you like, you know, who’s going to sell the rights to the highest bidder. So that’s that’s another thing that it’s it’s huge, exciting as well.

We can talk on another show about about this kind of stuff. I’ll go out there and do a bit more research and have a think about it and we’ll let will see.

David
I’d love to introduce you to some people, I don’t know if you know about team human. But Douglas Rushkoff is very much proponent of you know, keeping the humanity and technology and he’s just written a book called team human and there were other people have written eloquently on both sides.

There’s also a great Chinese author who’s written about AI and the future of AI. Maybe we could pull together a great panel or a couple guests who have, you know, some who lean towards the technology side and others who are leading towards humanity into we could find something in the middle.

Nat
That’s a really that’s a really great idea. There are loads There are just so many directions that you can sort of take this conversation and you know that it’s a huge, huge conversation really.

People just becoming lazy as well. You know, they just don’t, they just don’t don’t exercise. They’re going to put these virtual headsets on and just won’t be going anywhere. They’re just like, waste away much like some of these films. What was that film with the blue alien? You remember that film?

David
Was it with Scarlett Johansson? Yeah yeah that was a crazy!

You know, but it’s like the imagination. Like if you if you look back to the, to the, to the video of those three robots and one of them one of them actually it was like 30+ years ago you were there and they and they actually had like tank wheels and stuff. Johnny five that was the robots name I can’t remember the name of the film but but Johnny five was the robot and he actually reprogrammed the other two robots and basically he became a person and like that’s something else that we are going through isn’t it right now.

Short circuit was the film!

David
Right cognition, certainly as we head towards the singularity you know these are the big issues in Kurzweil over at Google is written pretty eloquently about both of the positives and the negatives about this but you know to sum up and in where we started and so to circle back to how we started your big question was wow we’ve seen incredible things in the 2014 event and then Chief Digital and Data and also in Cyber Security.

The Future of Big Data has not Been Created

So now knowing that the last five years have seen these incredible changes, what are the predictions going forward? What will we look like in 5 years, 10 years with Blockchain and some of these new things coming out.

I mean, it really is hard to predict. You know, it’s just as challenging to predict, you know, if you were in 1994, 1995 and looking out to 2000, I don’t think anybody could have predicted it, the way things laid out.

Now, of course, you’ve got other countries in the world innovation is no longer limited to Silicon Valley.

You’ve got Tech UK and you’ve got Shoreditch and everything going on the East End.

Now it’s really ever even in the financial institutions. You’re seeing innovation in FinTech and in London, it’s everywhere. It’s in China, it’s in Japan, it’s in Tel Aviv.

More on innovation here!

Innovation can come from anywhere. So the ability to make predictions going forward is getting increasingly challenging, but I would say if you if you stick your bets on any organizations that are, you know, at the forefront of digital transformation or at the forefront of data driven culture or really concerned about Cybersecurity, I think you and Blockchain I think you’ve made, you know, three or four pretty good bets.

The question is how does this all layout and I think it’s a positive vision for the future for humanity. I really do think you know, these driverless cars, as you point out be nice to sit in a Mercedes and, you know, not have to do any physical driving.

I think it’s smart move by Google and Apple and others because, you know, basically cars turn into a mobile office, they turn into a mobile living room where you know, kids don’t have to focus on driving, you’re basically enjoying each other’s company as you’re getting from point A to point B. It’s not wasted time anymore. It’s actually productive time instead of time just being spent stuck in a car.

We Signed up for Great Things from the Industrial Revolution??

Nat
Oh yeah, I think we should get what they promised us which was reduced working hours better lifestyle right? That’s what they are supposed to be doing for us!

But the challenges is that there’s so much information out there that unless we have almost a guide that helps us to learn more and to get the job done right like to get the CDO job done. 

Or to get your your job done as an entrepreneur, you need advice and you need knowledge from people that know an earth what they’re doing, they know how to save you time and effort, right.

If we can leverage the future of big data plus we can keep the global consumerisation going. We can actually launch an also a minimum Basic Income or alternative, like in the second Machine Age, which is a book that I love! I think that we’ve got a really great place to be and to live if we can actually first of all fix the fix the the hunger problem and the accommodation and fix the fix the global crisis with with with with the environment right if we can do all of that then you know life’s gonna be absolutely brilliant…

The future isn’t written yet! But believe me the future of big data will lead it in healthcare, life food and everything in fact! future episodes to come!!

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Read my old post about the future of AI https://www.natschooler.com/the-rise-of-ai-first-businesses/