Dell Technologies surveyed 3,800 business leaders from around the world to uncover their forecasts for the next decade. The research revealed a divided vision of the future but common ground on the need to transform and how.

Live from Dell Technologies World conference in May 2018, Matthew Saleski, global enterprise account executive at LinkedIn, sits down with Dell Technologies’ Stella Low, SVP of global communications, and Ari Lightman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College to discuss an overview of realizing 2030.

 

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Hi everybody, we’re live here at Dell Technologies World 2018. My name is Matthew Saleski. I’m a global account director at LinkedIn. I’m here with Stella Low, she’s the senior vice-president of Global Communications at Dell.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Hey Matt, great to see you.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Great to see you as well. And Professor Ari Lightman of Carnegie Mellon University, thank you again both for coming.

Ari Lightman, Carnegie Mellon University
Thanks for having us.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Our topic today is Realizing 2030. I’ve been seeing a lot about it, it looks really exciting, but Stella, I thought we could kick it off with you explaining to our audience exactly what it is, and what are the key takeaways.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah, so Realize 2030 is our thought-leadership program here at Dell Technologies. And we realized some time ago that a lot of our customers are very fearful of digital disruption. Around half of them are telling us that they’re worried about digital disruption, and again, nearly half are saying they don’t know what their industry is going to look like in three to five years’ time, which is quite shocking. I’ve never seen results like that. So we dug a little bit deeper and we did some research with the Institute for the Future, who really are starting to paint the picture of what the future’s going look like in ten to twelve years’ time. So really looking at 2030. So if they don’t know what their industries are going to look like and how the world is going to change, we feel as a vendor it’s our job to have a point of view and to explain that to our customers.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Isn’t the study also, obviously it talks a lot about humans and machines working together etcetera, but it seems like there’s a lot of change that’s happened, but haven’t we worked together for so many years?  What’s changed now?

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah, so the Institute for the Future’s conclusion was that human-machine partnerships were going be deeper and richer than ever before. So you could argue that we’ve been working with technology since the first man picked up the first stone and bashed it against another stone, right? But what we’re going to find is that those relationships are going to get much more profound than ever before, with humans in the center. So one of the aspects of the study is that we’re going to end up as digital conductors, conducting all of this technology around us, using AI, thought patterns and all sorts of things, so it’s fascinating stuff.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Much more of a partnership rather than a replacement.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yes, absolutely, yeah. Very much a partnership.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Great. And Ari from your perspective, how have you seen these changes at either the higher education level, or at the startup environment that you’re involved with?

Ari Lightman, Carnegie Mellon University
Yeah, so I think it should be noted that every industry’s being transformed, some are just being transformed slower than others. And we’re not immune in higher education, so higher education is being digitally transformed, there’s a variety of different online learning platforms, you could go online see 600 or so courses that are freely available on AI machine learning, humanities, those sorts of things. So we have to be cognizant of that in a university environment and look to things that we can enable when students come to our campus like experiential learning, design thinking, critical thinking skills. So I’m really interested in the non-cognitive skill sets. Great resiliency, determination, those sorts of things, and trying to enable that in a technology focused program.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Stella this study, we talked about it before this interview, it was rather polarizing the results were, and we talked about maybe it’s a difference in mindset, how people are viewing that, but talk a little bit about that if you would.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah absolutely, so the one thing they do agree on is that they need to transform. Companies agree they need to transform. And by the way, nearly 60% of companies say that they’re struggling with the pace of change, they’re really struggling. And then the other thing, as you mentioned, we’re finding that 50% for example say that they will use automation in the future and 50% say they won’t. And we’re seeing this with lots of the questions, 50% say this and 50% say that. And we looked at this, I’ve never really seen this, that deeply in research before. And the conclusion we came to is that people just don’t know. And their views are divided because they don’t know, because they cannot predict the future at this moment in time with so much disruption going on.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
We at LinkedIn talk all the time about transformation, at a corporate level but also at the personal level it’s really important. So how do you think about that, Ari, from how you’re educating the future leaders of the world?

Ari Lightman, Carnegie Mellon University
So I think in terms of transformation we have to understand that everybody changes a little bit differently. And we really have to understand human capacity for change. We work with a lot of various different companies, and we’ve seen them, I wouldn’t say fail, but be inefficient with their transformational capabilities because they really don’t understand the employees from a cognitive perspective. So what are incentives? What are motivations? How do you do view their graphic studies? How do you look at them from a longitudinal perspective to really understand adoption patterns across the enterprise? I think that’s critical if you want to have lasting sustainable change throughout the organization.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
And Stella, how has this message of transformation really resonated with your customers and key stakeholders?

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
It’s very interesting actually, we were with a customer a number of weeks ago, a healthcare customer in our executive briefing center, and our executive was talking to the CIO and his colleagues about storage and the data center and how it’s going to evolve. And the team was very engaged, but the CIO was not saying anything. So we said to the CIO, is what we’re talking about interesting to you, and he said, “not really.” He said, “I’m less interested in the feeds and speeds of my data center. What I’m interested in is how am I going to stop competitors disrupting my business. And how can I improve the outcomes of the business.” So what we’re finding is that our customers are shifting their mindset from thinking about technology, to thinking about how technology is going to be embedded into the business and what those business outcomes will be, which is quite significant.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
It is, and you mentioned that particular client was in healthcare. Are you seeing differences between different verticals, and if so, obviously it’s not one size fits all, so can you speak a little bit about that, those differences.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah, well I think everybody is struggling with it in different ways within their industries, and are tackling it in different ways. So when we talk about digital conductors for example, to the automotive industry, one particular customer completely lit up and started talking about how they see drivers in the future as the digital conductor of the technology that they’re putting in cars. And by the way, they may not even be the driver any more, but they’ll certainly be the conductor of the technology. So they’re all thinking about it in different ways, in healthcare there’s a ton of applications that are going to happen in the future. So, very different.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
It is different, and digital transformation is not without risk, I think cybersecurity comes to everybody’s mind. Ari, from your perspective, how can companies approach that security now, and into the future?

Ari Lightman, Carnegie Mellon University
Security I believe has to be baked in from the minute you start an initiative. It’s not something that can be thought of after the fact, or when things are already in play. We work with a lot of manufacturing companies that are very interested in IOT, and enabling these sensors across a plant to look at smart manufacturing, dynamic manufacturing, configurability, those sorts of things. But every time you’re passing information from a sensor to a programmable logic controller or a SCADA system, that’s data in flight, that’s data at risk, so you have to look at how you’re creating systemic and persistent threats across your organization and really bear that in mind as you’re deploying some of these transformative solutions. This is critical in all areas, especially areas such as healthcare, which have seen their fair share of security breaches.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Stella, to wrap it up, where do we go from here? You said this is 2030 but it doesn’t end here. What do you see the next steps here and really building on this partnership between humans and technology, and machines?

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah, well I certainly don’t have all the answers, I would love to have all the answers. One of the things that we’re going to do is we’re launching, in fact, Allison Dew on stage yesterday launched the Dell Technologies Institute, it’s going to be a combination of our internal intellectual property and we’re still going to do a ton of research and look to experts such as Ari to help us.  But we want to continue to explore this notion of what does 2030 look like. So we’re going to be looking at three areas: smart living; intelligent work; and the friction-free economy. So if you think of: how is it going to affect me in my lifetime; in my home, in my healthcare and so on; how is it going to affect me at work and how I work and by the way, there may not even be a workplace, but it’s how I work; and then lastly, with things like cryptocurrencies and blockchain etcetera, how’s the economy going to be affected.  So I’m really looking forward to that and again, we’re going to engage with the Institute for the Future and bring in some experts and hopefully they’ll have the answers.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Well you’re two of the experts, and I think we’re going to continue to focus in on that future, and I think we’re all conductors of our own destinies.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
Thank you very much.

Ari Lightman, Carnegie Mellon University
Thank you.

Stella Low, Dell Technologies
Thank you.

Matthew Saleski, LinkedIn
This has been a pleasure, thank you everybody.
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