Insight Intelligent Technology Report 2023: Insights from the C-Suite

[Music] thank you [Music] welcome to the first Insight intelligent technology report executive Roundtable this report is insight's annual survey to uncover how the global economy and other events are influencing the challenges priorities and progress Business Leaders are experiencing across Industries and countries I'm Jillian Viner I'll be your host today and joining me today in the studio is our very own Joyce Mullen president and CEO of insight Summa nalapati CIO of insight Mike gomand our senior vice president of strategy and joining us all the way from UK virtually is Adrian Gregory president of insight emiya welcome thank you thanks for having us so this report just has a wealth of information we're not going to get through all of it today but we'll do our best so first just kind of overview of some of the highlights we asked Business Leaders the greatest threats facing their organization over the next 12 months and they consistently rank cyber security as a top concern followed by business resiliency no surprise there but what may be surprising 82 percent of survey respondents agree that they must invest in digital transformation over the next 12 months or be left behind in fact 49 nearly half said the third biggest challenge facing their organization was their own ability to keep up with Technology Innovation above their competitors so in other words the future success of their organization hinges on their own ability to do something faster better than their neighbors now at the same time fifty percent of respondents said that technology including Legacy technology complexity incompatibility and operability has an outsized negative influence on their organization and yet 44 their organization's digital spend will be unchanged over the next 12 months while only about one-third will either increase their spending compared to what they originally had planned to do there's so much to unpack there and I'd love to hear from all of you just on some of these core facts Mike I'd like to start with you because I know you're having daily conversations with many of our clients what's happening in the minds of Business Leaders today well I think you touched on it a lot of companies view Innovation as a competitive imperative and the I.T organization is being asked to enable that innovation to drive profitable market share growth now the Dilemma they face is what you raise is that they have flatish budgets so how do I invest in digital Innovation when my budget's flat so what I see is clients really focusing on two things the ROI and the optimization so the ROI and what we frequently do is help clients think through what's the return on this investment for you if you're going to drive Revenue growth is it going to help you drive share of wallet with your existing clients is it going to enable you to attract new clients can you enter a new market segment you don't participate in today can you create a new digital offering that's a fundamentally new Revenue stream for the company but absent that Roi the decisions don't move forward the projects don't move forward then comes the funding part which is the optimization so today with flattish budgets the companies typically have to cut somewhere else in order to fund The Innovation and one of the areas I think is a great opportunity is is cloud spend so IDC actually released some really interesting data recently that says 30 percent of total spend is total I.T spend is now going to cloud and they estimate that clients on average are overspending by 10 to 25 percent somebody put that in context think of a billion dollar Revenue company on average they might spend five percent of their revenue on iot so that's 50 million dollars a year if 30 percent of that is cloud spend that's 15 million dollars a year if we can hit the middle range of those IDC overspending for them that's two to three million dollars a year of annual savings that can be used to fund The Innovation and you're achieving those savings without firing people and without killing a pet project so it's truly this how do I optimize to innovate play the the that the clients are looking for yeah and it's such a priority right figuring out how to do exactly what you're talking about I also think that we're seeing some really tremendous advances in terms of productivity improvements with generative AI we've been talking about it now for maybe two three months in Earnest we've been working on it for maybe a year I guess internally but there we're asking and Zuma's knows this too we're asking RIT team to figure out how to do more work with less money and that's going to be kind of the state of play for a really long time I think and Adrian I don't know what you think but I feel like that's the same across the world we're seeing the same exact uh focus in emea right they yeah no for sure and you know some examples I'm saying with with customers as well is that they're really focused on what does their technology organization look like in order to take advantage of some of the efficiency savings but also check themselves so they can innovate I mean what manufacturers working with uh in Continental Europe has created an organization called Advanced Digital Solutions and it's more than just a technology provision into the organization it looks at um customer experience ux design data science agile methodologies all wraps up in the technology organization and their job is to work with the lines of business and that manufacturer to deliver Innovation as well so yes they've got the efficiency piece but they've turned themselves into how do I get to be a digital business and engage in a different way with my lines of business to achieve that are you feeling all this pressure but in a good way right it's a it's an opportunity in my mind the opportunities that we face at Insight at the same opportunities that our clients are facing right so we're able to talk the same language if you will I think um you know Mike said Joyce said it right how do we deduce the cognitive loads on our teams while improving efficiencies while increasing our optimization and being able to create a reference architecture reducing the technology debt and bringing in new technologies as we speak creating that solid foundation is so critical where we can build upon that foundation and use emerging Technologies like gen AI in a way which is uh very responsible so that we are reducing the tech debt and looking at optimization with the same lens and balancing both we're going to talk about generative AI in just a moment but it sounds like essentially we all agree with 82 of our survey respondents that digital transformation is absolutely essential but it's really not just about going digital right our survey also showed that by 2024 that's less than a year away delivering impactful Roi through digital transformation is really the business expectation for 61 of businesses doesn't seem like that unreasonable of an expectation but certainly a big ask so against present market conditions tighter budgets investment plans we're finding that c-suite leaders are really looking at these digital Investments with much greater scrutiny and particularly for Joyce and Adrian I imagine you've got great empathy with Business Leaders today so when 55 of our survey respondents say that metrics require stronger rationale for inclusion 51 say Roi metrics must be more specific in granular there's really a burden on Innovation Champions to prove out that Roi so how do you do this how do you confidently invest in new innovation well I think the the magic there is that all the savings if you're if we're asking Suma to help us modernize our I.T environment the benefits are not going to necessarily accrue to it Opex the benefits are going to accrue to our ability to grow faster or like Mike said I mean our ability to change the customer experience or create a new Revenue stream or something like that so I think first of all it requires a really tight leadership team that understands how to pull together the capabilities of the organization deliver results and recognize those results financially in maybe a different part of the business so that's one thing and then I also think it just means you got to be tight on the follow-up and the measurement of the process and make sure we're getting it getting it done so we've invested for example pretty significantly in the last few years in our Ecom capability and that only is useful if our clients use it so we are all about adoption now and that's where the ROI comes comes from but it's not necessarily immediate and it's not necessarily in the I.T budget I think

that's the that's the critical thing Adrian I don't know different view from Amia yeah now what what I'm saying is a lot of businesses as well thinking about how to measure Innovation how to measure investment so mainly a couple of stats I'll pull for organization I mean most organizations are becoming digital businesses now some it's very apparents some are on the journey there but if you look at the number of code releases per year a high quartile business will be in the sort of 1500 per year range of of code releases very low end business will be in the in the region of seven per year now if we just think back in time um every code release for a new cert features and functions to to customers would be the subject of a very big um kind of investment Roi decision and you know deciding what goes in what doesn't go in and when to do the draw either held it impacts operations Etc that's just completely changed so lying now talking to businesses who are more thinking about a level of Opex that they can spend per quarter and then working on a back clock uh that they've none of them deciding with the business what to prioritize in that backlog so they can release it to customers now that requires a different Roi model and a different level of innovation a different way of thinking about it some businesses are quite at the top end of that curve you know if you take a Netflix or a or an Amazon that they've been worked in that mode for a very long time other businesses do not work that way but they need to and they're trying to get used to that so that's something we can help with as insight as well is helping them to compare and contrast about physical business models and how to think about Innovation and investment differently mentioned over and over again the name of the game is optimized to innovate and lots of priorities on the plates of Business Leaders across the business organizations are organizational leaders are juggling a lot and over the next 12 months leaders are prioritizing four things above all else now we know things are changing fast so maybe this is different today but at the time of this survey the number one objective was to increase Revenue that's 38 percent of our respondents followed by driving Innovation 35 percent improving sustainability 30 percent really closely followed by improving operational efficiency now even though we're in this period of of cost conservation reducing costs was sixth on that longer list of priorities and it was interesting to see improving improving sustainability so high up there so when you're talking to clients and Business Leaders about their key objectives over the next 12 months we're talking about cost reduction optimization are you surprised that sustainability is so high on that list why is that a Focus right now you know I'm not surprised I think um I think those things go really close close together I mean hand in hand so sustainability is consistent with reducing costs is consistent with improving teammate retention it is consistent with making sure you can sort of bid on contracts and win contracts I mean it's becoming a it's an imperative and meant for many many customers that that we have effective sustainability programs and that's the same for our clients as well so um I think it's not surprising to me at all I think it's a little bit you know it's hard to rank those things operational efficient efficiency for me as a euphemism for cost reduction um and so I think you know it's a little bit sort of how you categorize your priorities but those top four improving Revenue which really has a lot to do with customer satisfaction and customer experience improving the cost structure improving sustainability is I mean those are pretty key to any business today and and growth right now in a market that in some parts of our business business is growing pretty effectively like software and some parts of services are growing pretty pretty effectively but then there's also parts of our business like device hardware for example which is declining so you always got to be looking for those next growth vectors so I'm not surprised at all by those by those rankings and those priorities so sustainability is really not just a ballot Squad and plant some trees it's at the bottom line good and healthy for the business yeah reducing power consumption reducing the impact on the planet re helping clients get more out of their assets or recycling Etc all of those are good good initiatives now sustainability and ESG ranked as a top driver influencing digital transformation across the globe but this was especially true for European businesses 26 percent of U.S leaders say that using digital Technologies to reach ESG goals is a main reason to invest in digital transformation but 31 of European leaders thought so Adrian again why are we seeing just not a huge discrepancy but it definitely seems to be a higher priority for European Business Leaders yeah I mean look there's Joyce said there's the whole piece around it just being the right thing to do but I think in addition to that the regulatory framework in Europe is as really uh you know come to the fall now so for example um you've got a call Pro uh sustainability reporting directive and European reporting standards so businesses have culture conform to this something it's it's not a sort of uh yeah it's a nice to have and we yeah I think this is the right thing to do it's necessary uh to do business in Europe you think government requirements as well so in the UK uh to bid on government contracts which is a huge spend uh there's something called the social value legislation so you have to demonstrate how you're supporting the government's 25-year plan for sustainability and if you don't have good answers to that you will not win the business you've then got a whole piece around green Finance uh strategy as well and then EU called the European green deal um and that is all about how her the work in order to get Net Zero by 2050 how that's funded and making sure the privately funded Investments come from Green initiatives so this is this stuff is not just a nice to have or a you know we should do because it's the right thing to do it's in legislation so we have to do it and that's probably why it's all at the Forefront of the minds of European Business Leaders so our survey this year really specifically spoke to Business Leaders we wanted to find out from the units of different parts of the business what was what was challenging what was top of mind for them so not So Much from the I.T side but every other line of business and we asked our survey respondents how they saw technology helping them to overcome their key challenges and interestingly using technology to optimize costs received the lowest response rate of just 15 percent globally and I see you smirking at that does that surprise you is that just because of where they're coming from or well I think they I think a lot of business Executives feel like they've done a lot of cost optimization that's traditionally how technology has been used so it's not the top of the of the pipe for them if you're running a business you're more interested in in am I going to deliver a better experience for my customers that allows me to grow the business am I going to introduce some Innovative products that allows us to differentiate from our competition am I going to deliver a differentiated experience to employees that allows me to attract and retain the right kind of talent yes we all have to manage costs but I don't think it's the top thing when you're running a business that you that you worry about you can't cut costs you can't cut your way to success fair enough and perhaps that's why our respondents largely believe that technology will help them solve other challenges such as optimizing flexible working models which maybe we thought we already had that figured out but it's clearly still a challenge creating better or new experiences for their end users and this is referring to customers not their employees and then improving productivity that seems to always be a top thing So based on that Summa and Joyce do you feel like this is this is a great use of technology is there may be a missed opportunity or misalignment between what it knows can be done through technology and what business hopes to achieve through technology I believe personally in a business-led technology right there is the challenges that our business partners face that technology is an enabler of so I don't see it as if and it needs to be in conjunction right they're together solving for complex problems and technology is absolutely an enabler but I don't think we can do it independently and you know business has an outcome that's different from the the technology outcome they go hand in hand totally I totally agree and I think that's that's back to that teamwork trying to figure out where are we making the Investments and where will we see the returns and you got to be really tightly aligned on that and because I cannot stop talking about generative AI I have to say that I do feel like there is a really significant opportunity to basically build on what Adrian was talking about if somebody's got a budget and they say they're working through their backlog and trying to figure out how to make enhancements to their internal environments or their customer experience applications or whatever we're going to be able to do that faster and I think it's actually already happening so I have a son I'm not going to talk about what company he works for but he he does a whole bunch of work now through chat GPT or through Bard he checks his own code and he is basically reducing the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot um any kind of code that he he builds and when I say okay well what are you doing with the extra time he says oh well I'm going on a bike ride or I'm uh I'm I'm rock climbing and I'm thinking okay well then we as leaders have an obligation to raise the bar on productivity expectations and enable the adoption of those tools because it's in our clients interest to get through those backlogs faster because that's going to drive the next wave of Technology adoption and that's true of us internally as well so I feel like there's an enormous opportunity I don't think we quite have it all figured out because it's pretty new still but I think there's an enormous opportunity to get our teammates out of soul sucking work I mean who wants to check lines of code for for I did that Joyce when I was a programmer and I'm like where was Chennai when I was doing that I would miss a semicolon in 400 lines of code and had to go line by line and like where is Chad GPT right so I'm so happy for your son exactly except I would like him to work during those extra 10 hours instead of rock one but but I think that soul-sucking work can go and I think it unleashes the potential of all of our teammates and all of our customers teammates and I think that's a huge huge opportunity that we haven't really figured out how to manage yet and we're all or legislate to Adrian's Point again Europe is way far ahead on legislation around how to keep gen AI safe um but but I mean this is gonna this is gonna change our work um to only a seminal moment right the internet the iPhone and now Jenny and it's just going to change productivity I think 10x is for programmers that's what they're saying and and inside we are so lucky that we've been able to follow as Joyce you mentioned last year into this and we have a policy and I'm responsible use and we are able to take that to our customers and have this very thoughtful conversation about how is it that they're incorporating that into their workloads uh it's it's amazing what's happening right now agreed agreed let's talk about generative AI a little bit more we're so excited so this wasn't going away yeah well as you mentioned we're watching generative AI just take off at Breakneck speed and just recently on behalf of insight the Harris poll conducted a survey of 405 U.S based employees of a director level or above all about generative AI it was a short survey and I say recently because it was just a couple weeks ago but the way that General AI is taking off I mean it's like you're out of date the next day so at the time of that survey one of the questions that we asked were their top three concerns about implementing generative AI at their organization and the things that Rose to the top were quality control at 51 percent closely followed by Safety and Security risks at 49 percent and then ranked third was 39 a fear of limiting human innovation what do you get out of those insights do you guys want to go first I'll go for all day well I think you know the the we talked about the legislative environment that's going to impact AI there's there's a corporate policy environment that has to deal with some of the safety and privacy so there's both the accuracy and the and the privacy concerns so we know that while chat GPT and co-pilot can come up with some amazing things they can come up with some pretty wrong things too so there's still a human element that looks at it and says it's 80 percent there what you know if I'm doing software development the code's 80 there but I'm going to look at it as a software development professional and and take it to the last the last 20 percent so I think and then there's the safe or the Privacy issue of what do you put in a private implementation versus a public implementation of of generative Ai and where does that data end up we've seen things in the media with you know people who've made mistakes with that already so I think those are legitimate concerns I think you know they'll be solved I think most companies like we're taking a very thoughtful approach to what our policies should be to protect this um so you know I think it's it's all there I'd be interested in other thoughts on you know how this limits human Innovation I think it augments it right um you know there's no replacement for human cognition I think that's that's what created Janae and everything else so but it's definitely going to augment it increase productivity like 10x if you do it right there is also a consideration for me in terms of polymorphic software viruses that can be introduced with Gen AI because then it evades detection then it evades all kinds of protocols with polymorphic software virus so it morphs into a place and then you know all of this compute that goes with you know trying to get through those tons of data it's going to be very interesting on how it's going to evolve over a period of time but nothing I think is going to beat human cognition it's going to be just like automation right it's going to augment it it's going to make it complete and we'll we'll be able to create opportunities like that we haven't even imagined yet so I couldn't agree more I think the um it's it I think the this notion of augmenting innovation is really really important and if so my husband is a historian many of you know this but anyway he has asked these questions of Bard and chat GPT and he basically says you know they get a b-plus they no matter what question I ask are they get a B plus but who wants a B plus we don't want to be plus I mean it's going to be required that we figure out how to innovate on top of it to actually distinguish ourselves whether that's creating a marketing campaign or writing a press release or writing a 10K or recruiting great candidates it doesn't matter how we're using it we have to augment that with our own Innovation and I think otherwise we're all going to be just like collapse to a median level that is going to be unsatisfactory and uninteresting to our customers or our teammates so I think the the idea of as I said earlier getting rid of the soul sucking work and then unlocking the potential of our teammates this is what our purpose is all about it inside anyway so that they can do really meaningful work and then doing the same with our clients is really magical just building on that right the soul sucking work is not conducive to Innovation so if you can take away some of the soul sucking work and let people free up to think and be creative which by the way might happen when they're right in their bike yeah um okay but maybe not for 10 hours a week well it's a light week tapering for an event no but seriously right let people uh step back and think and and be creative and be Innovative and collaborate with each other instead of chasing down an email chain and that's what we do for our clients right Mike in terms of you know if there's a hospital that's our client then we are going to use generative AI to do more prescriptive medication type of systems right and more of the interoperability that you mentioned early on with electronic health records and electronic medical records because there's so much opportunity out there so the possibilities are endless within with that kind of innovation when you take away that soul-sucking work but Adrian I think Amia has generally been at the Forefront of trying to figure out how to manage these environments so if I think about gdpr or I think about gen AI Now new legislation that I know is not sort of through the European Parliament but I mean it seems like Europe is really trying to think about how to make this productive and how to keep people safe yeah no that I think that's right and and one aspect of Jen Isabela I think which is making a difference is that it's democratized the ability to use technology so that helps Innovation whereas in this domain it would have been really uh you know the domain of technical experts you know so in the past uh programmers then the people that could use data science tools and have that kind of background um and thought process uh now with interfaces like chat GPC and Bard it's really democratized it so you know more and more people can use this technology and as that ability uh to use this technology really expands you start to see The Innovation the uses of technology so whilst that's exponentially growing uh it does require rules around how to use it how to make sure it's not biased how to check for Quality and how to make sure that the intent is a good intent and we don't get um yeah card over population by Bad actors using this technology for um you know for the wrong purposes so yeah it's and we're seeing this all over so Europe and Parliament the EU have come out uh with a very strong view upon and trying to get to these rules and get to an agreement and put the legislation in place and I'm sure globally this this will follow too and I think the best analogy I've heard is we have to treat these tools like their junior Associates they're like a brand new kid just graduating from college joining joining us and writing code or doing something they need coaching they need training they need oversight they need intervention and I think if we think about that as that's how we think about our tools and every developer thinks about it that way and every marketer thinks about it that way and every HR professional thinks about it that way every lawyer thinks about it that way then I think it will augment our productivity and allow us to do more with less and the responsibility aspect of it yes absolutely oh go ahead sorry I was talking to a client last night about this and you know in addition it may you know augment some jobs it's creating whole new job categories like there's a discussion now of prompt Engineers yeah and prompt engineer is someone who constructs the best questions in the right format to ask chat gbt or co-pilot the question it goes to your point it's like talking to a 10 year old if you don't ask exactly the right question you get a garbage answer so there's going to be new jobs and new categories created as well well and someone's going to have to figure out what polyformic whatever that was was and it is going to happen with the cyber security we talked as one of the top priorities and the more AI is introduced by hackers into the code it's going to be again new job categories right exactly yeah it's yeah and we can't be Pollyanna about it because that is a very real risk I mean disinformation misinformation what do you what do you call it when you imitate someone's voice and you can yeah yeah yeah I mean that's real that is those are real issues some of those are frightening very frightening pretty good yeah yeah frightening and how realistic they are yeah did you hear that song by Dre you know maybe if you did a few bucks well y'all beat me to the punch but that's okay I'm gonna ask you this question anyway because again in our survey one of the questions that we did ask about their concerns uh job replacement was on that list but it ranked very very low like to the bottom of the list however for one to four professionals it is on their mind and overwhelmingly 90 percent of those individuals see very specific roles in the organization as a sort of at risk to be replaced or reduced by generative AI Technologies and I love that your son has a great example of this because some of the roles that were mentioned were data analysis and data scientists software developers software testers Financial operations and Communications roles so I mean I think a lot of a lot of folks want to know like are jobs at risk so I mean we've heard this before you heard it when like the automobile was introduced you hear when the mobile phone was introduced you heard I am not worried about that at all I think as Mike said there's going to be a whole bunch of new jobs so I think a data scientist will probably become a prompt engineer or I think Communications people are going to say wow I can do even better work because I get a whole lot of support for the soul sucking piece so again not to be Pollyanna but sure there are jobs that are gonna there's gonna be far fewer people doing QA testing potentially because I think a whole bunch of that work can be done but the AIS have to be supervised they have to be managed they have to be trained they have to be coached they have to be moderated and we have to make sure that we're dealing with making sure that the answers are responsible and right so work will change but um I think that's a good thing I'm going to quote our CTO who said your job's not going to be replaced by AI your job is going to be replaced by somebody who uses AI better than you do right so it's learn how to to Adrian's point the tools have been democratized that's what generative AI did so it's your responsibility as an employee of a company to learn how to use those tools to be better at your work and if you don't someone else probably will and creating that culture of learning right because we we are so excited about this there's so many like there's an EBC that's going on right now for teammates to learn more from the experts and from for them to learn from us right so creating that kind of a cultural environment of learning is what's going to make the jobs different like to Joyce's point but more enriching if I'm a business leader today how quickly do I need to move on this and does it matter what industry I'm in you needed to move yesterday yeah is it too late what's the first step that you make I mean I think suma's really helped us her assume and team have really helped us figure out how to identify how we can use it safely because as Mike said there have already been some pretty public issues with people's code getting or cust you know companies code getting out in the wild and that's not what we want so I think understanding how to use it safely training teammates on how to use it safely and then encouraging them to drive adoption by the way a whole bunch of our teammates are not waiting for us they're doing it anyway so we're trying to figure out how to make sure if before we unlock access to our data we have a safe way to do it and suma's team has put that process in place and you know I think that's that's step one but I think you gotta also get everybody excited about the growth mindset as we call it but I mean you really got to be excited about learning it and understanding what it can do for you and your team and I think let your employees figure out where the best place to use it is yeah or it's not like some Central team is going to say these are the three things we should do they'll they'll come up with things that we would never think of I do think there has to be a forcing function though and I think that forcing function is largely around driving some kind of budgetary targets or something so that we uh we force the adoption because it is it can be too easy to just say wait a second I'm not going to change a thing and that is not how you transform your business and it's not how you stay competitive yeah okay great closing thoughts thank you all for your insights today and thank you for joining us if you'd like to learn any more information about the reports that we discussed today you can find links in the information below thank you all so much for your insights today it was a great conversation thank you very much thanks for joining us thanks Adrian thank you [Music]

2023-07-08 11:19

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