Realities Remixed

We’re back and Season 6 of Realities Remixed starts now! After a summer packed with new ideas, major industry shifts and relentless innovation, Realities Remixed returns with fresh perspectives on the forces transforming business, technology and society.

In this season-opening episode, Dave and Rob dive headfirst into the biggest opportunities, toughest challenges and emerging realities facing leaders today. From AI and digital disruption to leadership and the future of work, they set the agenda for a season filled with bold conversations, powerful insights and remarkable guests.
 
TLDR
00:22 – We are back after the summer break!
03:00 – Hang out: Dave is confused and favorite summer cocktail
11:03 – Before we begin, let's review a few important safety considerations
13:27 – Dig in: The Trends
13:55 – The AI Economy and model behind it
19:37 – Adoption lag
26:22  – The technology stack is being reset again
34:50  – Cybersecurity, sovereignty and trust become strategic priorities
39:20 – Summary Part 1
41:17 – Part 2, The Human experience 
47:39 – Society is rebalancing after digital saturation 
56:42 – Leadership responsibilities are expanding 
59:54 – The next frontier is already emerging

Hosts
Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/
Rob Kernahan:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/
 
Production
Marcel van der Burg:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/
Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/
 
Sound
Ben Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/
Louis Corbett:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/
 
'Realities Remixed' is an original podcast from Capgemini
realitiesremixed@capgemini.com

Creators and Guests

Host
Dave Chapman
Chief Cloud Evangelist with nearly 30 years of global experience in strategic development, transformation, program delivery, and operations, I bring a wealth of expertise to the world of cloud innovation. In addition to my professional expertise, I’m the creator and main host of the Cloud Realities podcast, where we explore the transformative power of cloud technology.
Host
Rob Kernahan
VP Chief Architect for Cloud and Cloud Realities podcast host, drives digital transformation by combining deep technical expertise with exceptional client engagement. Passionate about high-performance cultures, he leverages cloud and modern operating models to create low-friction, high-velocity environments that fuel business growth and empower people to thrive.
Producer
Marcel van der Burg
VP Global Marketing and producer of the Cloud Realities podcast, is a strategic marketing leader with 33+ years of experience. He drives global cloud marketing strategies, leveraging creativity, multi-channel expertise, and problem-solving to deliver impactful business growth in complex environments.

What is Realities Remixed?

From the award‑winning team behind Cloud Realities, Realities Remixed explores what happens when people, culture, industry, and technology collide, because real breakthroughs rarely come from technology alone.
In each episode, hosts Dave Chapman and Rob Kernahan dig beneath the surface of innovation to understand what’s truly shifting. They speak with leaders, practitioners, vendors and thinkers across industries to explore how technology reshapes human behaviour, organisational culture, and society, for better and sometimes for worse.

Web - https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/cloud-realities-podcast/
Email - realitiesremixed@capgemini.com

Speaker 1:

So instead of whiskey, I drank a lot of rum this weekend. Yeah. Rum of fish. Isn't that isn't

Speaker 2:

that fighting oil in Dutch?

Speaker 3:

I'm Dave Chapman. I'm Rob Kernahan. And this is Realities Remixed, an original podcast from Capgemini. And I nearly forgot the name of the show that it's been so long. Welcome back after the summer.

Speaker 3:

We are back for a new season. Robert, how are you doing?

Speaker 2:

I am well. I have enjoyed the summer break, but keen to get back into the pods and the evolution of it in season six.

Speaker 3:

The evolution. So we're gonna talk about some of the big themes that we are seeing happening at the moment and what we think might inform this season. But, you know, let's let's see how well we do there. Now one big change that we need to immediately address is Esmee is no longer on the show, we said goodbye to her and miss her a lot. We said goodbye to her at the end of last season And so it's Rob and I.

Speaker 3:

Now, what we decided to do with this is that over the course of the show, over the last few years, we've had a number of repeating friends join us for varying different things. So what we thought we'd do is have a rotating third chair for a period of time and see how that goes. So watch this space. You'll start to see some of our familiar faces pop back up and join us in different conversations. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Voices, faces, you know, it's a I keep forgetting we're not on video yet. Yeah. So watch out for that. Now the other thing we've decided to do this season because we actually, well, we're over the summer break, we talk about the show and where it might go and you know, what might happen and one of the things we used to do on the show was talk about a confusing thing each week. But what we think is that the and and hopefully, as you'll see throughout this episode is that things just feel more confusing than ever, don't they?

Speaker 2:

Oh, 100%. I mean, the last eighteen months have been a whirlwind in the technology, and I think the the next eighteen are gonna be even worse. So I think confusion is on the rise, and there's a lot of stuff we have to discuss and unpick. So it feels like a a good timely return of that section.

Speaker 3:

So it it might be a time to think about that as not only an element of the show, but actually a general thread of what we're talking about, which is leading through confusion and ever more tight complex decision making that you know, leaders and all of us and engineers and everybody that are involved in this this world of tech driven transformation deal with. So we will return to that each week. I have got to kick us up Robert. A confusion.

Speaker 2:

Really? You're confused.

Speaker 3:

Exactly. I'm confused about something.

Speaker 2:

You're normally very certain.

Speaker 3:

Normally I look at something and I'm like, I can make sense of it. Saw something just this week that I'm like, come on. If that was on a film, you'd think it was a joke, which is, does a toothbrush need a camera? That's the question I'm asking you. Does a toothbrush need a camera?

Speaker 2:

Is this like the internet enabled toaster conversation that it's The just come to toothbrushes

Speaker 3:

justification of a camera on a toothbrush is that it sends it can see slash sense or whatever when there is a gap between your teeth and it will burst a jet of water into that gap and therefore floss your teeth as you're brushing your teeth. And I'm here to say, he's that one step too far, lads.

Speaker 2:

Well, this is this is it's a bit of a double edged sword to say. Because every time you go down the hygienist or the dentist, they say, yeah, it's alright. We should floss more. It's that classic. It's probably the line the the the dentist says the most, don't forget to floss.

Speaker 2:

And what we've got here is the invention that is trying to auto do it for you. So it's taken away a bit of pain, and it's a bit of me when I saw it. I I saw I saw the funny videos of it squirting in people's faces and things. Is this getting it wrong? I mean, it's like, it seems like it might be a clunky implementation of might actually be a good idea.

Speaker 2:

The cameras there might help, but the the it's quite a large device, isn't it? It's not really travel friendly. Conflicted by it, Dave. I'm conf because I like the idea. I just maybe don't like the implementation.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I I'm I'm desperately I'm des I should have really thought about this and prepared maybe, but the but I wouldn't wanna break the habit of a lifetime.

Speaker 2:

It's not like you, is it?

Speaker 3:

No? No. No. Same day. So there so I something there must be another first generation technology where you look at it and go, I mean, come on.

Speaker 3:

What are you doing with that?

Speaker 2:

You know what? Ten days time, we're all gonna have auto flossing toothbrushes.

Speaker 3:

That's what

Speaker 2:

this is

Speaker 3:

gonna go that

Speaker 2:

way to me.

Speaker 3:

Or is it gonna

Speaker 2:

be one of those things

Speaker 3:

that everyone goes, nah, that was too much?

Speaker 2:

No. It's it's flossing's an irksome job and some engineers gone, oh, we can fit that on the toothbrush and kill two birds with one stone. I think I think I see the vision. I see the vision, Dave. I just saw the implementation.

Speaker 2:

I went, that needs a couple of years of refinement, but it needs early adopters to try it to allow the model to keep going. But I'm like, I think that could be a thing, you know. I think we'll all have auto flossing toothbrushes soon.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I'm I'm surprised you'll come out of it here.

Speaker 2:

But it'll be AI enabled and it'll have a chat with you while you're brushing your teeth.

Speaker 3:

And it already is. The the the camera uses AI to sense the gap between your teeth and stuff.

Speaker 2:

So not only are the robots gonna rise against us, but it's gonna be your toothbrush surprise you from behind. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I'm not going there Rob. I'm not going there. Anyway, here's the big question. What was your favorite cocktail of the summer?

Speaker 2:

It never changed David. It's remaining the Long Island iced tea. I sent you the video I sent you the video online about the guy saying about anybody who drinks a Long Island iced tea. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

He's a psychopath. It's it's not gonna weigh. It's a it's a staple for me. It's the it's the just my cocktail.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It's bonkers. It's bonkers talk,

Speaker 1:

isn't it?

Speaker 2:

I did send you the recipe for the marmalade old fashioned. I don't know if you saw that, but the the poster on the wall which bar that did the variation on it. But because that's your go to, isn't it?

Speaker 3:

I like an old fashioned. I do yeah. Do like an old fashioned. Like, you know, when you get the right one in the right mood. I haven't been that that much of a in a decent cocktail vibe this summer disappointingly.

Speaker 2:

You know, you can't I did I did I haven't had a margarita in a long time, and I had one the other day. And I was looking forward to it, and they'd done a twist, and it made the margarita overly sweet. And you know when you're just really disappointed? Because you know I

Speaker 3:

don't like like sweet. Always go to sweet.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's the dis it's the disgrace of it's like well, not Simon or tomato. I'm not I'm not going there, David. You're gonna you're gonna get me off on a rant, and I'm not gonna stop. So I'm I'm I'm closing that down right now.

Speaker 1:

But but I was really surprised that I I like whiskey really a lot, but I was really surprised. I like the the rum so much. And there was always a discussion on what was first, whiskey or rum. But, yeah, the rum, it's it's it's not that sharp sometimes. It's really nice and it must not be too sweet.

Speaker 3:

Whiskey, I think, is probably the superior drunk head drink. I think it's the king, but, you know, you underestimate rum at your peril.

Speaker 2:

I mean, if if you're in a bind and it's the only thing available then I've been quite enjoying beer

Speaker 3:

this summer. Like I I haven't had a beer like I don't really I have the odd beer when I go out to the pub, don't really have that much beer generally. And like normally when I'm on holiday with like Tam and Co, who obviously aren't sitting around drinking beer, don't drink a beer at all. This year though, they've had few beers, quite nice.

Speaker 2:

The one the one I discovered, and I actually found it in The UK, was a Sardinian beer called Ichnusa, and it's unfiltered, and it's absolutely gorgeous.

Speaker 3:

Is it cloudy?

Speaker 2:

Mhmm. Yeah. Do you not like cloudy beers? They make you nervous.

Speaker 3:

They make me a bit nervous.

Speaker 2:

You don't know what's lurking within.

Speaker 3:

You're like, I would see through

Speaker 2:

your alcohol so you know there's nothing untoward in there.

Speaker 3:

Exactly. Like when you're in the sea. Is it like a IPA type thing or is it

Speaker 2:

like a lager? It's a lager. I it's on the it's on like a refreshing lager that you drink good in the sun, but it's unfiltered. So it's not like an IPA. It's not an ale.

Speaker 2:

It's a lager.

Speaker 1:

We drink a lot of I'm still bright, so it's a it's a really bright yellow beer, but sitting in the sunset and then drinking that beer. It's like corona. But then

Speaker 2:

Bon Air, you can only buy Dutch beer in Bon Air.

Speaker 3:

No. If you sit in a sunset, you drink any old shit, it's gonna taste nice, isn't

Speaker 2:

Yeah. In a sunset next to the sea with palm trees, you are correct, any

Speaker 3:

beer will do. Any beer. I'd I'd even have a parete in that sort of situation.

Speaker 2:

Was that just a marketing ruse to get confused drunk people to think it was Moretti?

Speaker 3:

I cannot tell you how much those may I I will not name any others, but those made up beers that were brewed in Slough they've got either a Spanish name or an Italian name or a Mexican name or something like that. And they've they've never been connected to other countries. There's no heritage. They're just purely made up. I can't stand them.

Speaker 3:

And they seem to be everywhere at the moment. I don't get it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. But they're easy because they're they're cheap to buy, they're stable, they're middle of the road, and it's that, yeah, alright, that'll do. It's the that'll do pint as opposed to the, that's really nice pint. Because if you put a load of that on and you go for a bit on the edge of the taste spectrum, then you end up with things that maybe people don't want. You've always got to put your stable maple on the bar, haven't you, which is the carling, the marjorie, the peretti, the, you know, the ones that are are inoffensive.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1:

Isn't isn't that a real Italian beer? Isn't that?

Speaker 2:

Peretti? I thought

Speaker 1:

it it yeah.

Speaker 3:

You're thinking of Peretti. You're thinking of Peretti.

Speaker 2:

It's not Peretti. Peretti. Peretti. Peretti. Peretti.

Speaker 2:

Peretti.

Speaker 3:

Real. Peretti. Peretti.

Speaker 2:

Made up. It's it's a mix between Do see what they did there? And Moretti. Somebody in the marketing team has been 05:30 on a Friday, and they've gone, hey, guys. Guys, you know what we should This is it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. We've been working for all week on trying to get to a name. Let's just take the first letter of that and the rest of that word.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Alright. Shall we talk about some trends?

Speaker 2:

Go on then.

Speaker 3:

Alright. Now, before we get into the trends, it's worth, I think, just recognising something that's been almost live breaking news in the last couple of weeks in the world of AI that is just worth touching on. So first of all, a chap called Jacob Coxen, who is a researcher within the various different frontier AI companies, issued some stuff on social media around concerns he had around safety. A few days after that, Dario Amodi published a paper that was called we must pace the frontier and it was effectively about safety concerns and responding to the sorts of things that Jacob was raising. Now, as you might expect, as there always is in this world, there is a big conversation going on around.

Speaker 3:

What's going on there? What are the motivations? What's happening with that? But Rob, fundamentally, I think it's safe to say that a lot of the themes in the Emodie paper are things that we're pretty much aligned to. Right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So what is the impact actually gonna be? Let's think about the human in all of this. And it's a it's a classic time where engineers are ahead of science in about how the LLMs are operating and that's always an interesting place to be. And the rate of pace has been so amazing.

Speaker 2:

We maybe need to stop and have a bit of a conversation. What I find very interesting is the way different parts of the world are dealing with it, the sort of big frontier organisations are saying, we'll be able to control it. Don't worry. We've got The US and the China superpowers saying, probably don't need so much regulation. Then you've got the EU in the middle saying, we probably do need to regulate.

Speaker 2:

So we need to have this global conversation because it has to be globally synchronized because this isn't a thing that any nation state can tackle with. And so, hopefully, though, we'll be able to get through the season, work out what's going on, and AI won't have ended us before then. So let's see what happens. Well,

Speaker 3:

let's keep tracking that. So yeah, we so we will keep an eye on that conversation as it develops. But as we get into the trends, you know, things like safety, the macroeconomic position and regulation all of those sorts of things are pretty much themes that we see happening anyway. It's just worth touching on that because it's such a live conversation. But we'll return to that as the as the season develops.

Speaker 3:

That being said, let's get into the trends. As we enter into a new season and a and a new year of the show, just take a moment to gears a little bit on the situation we're in at the moment and what might happen, you know, over the course of this upcoming weeks and months. And obviously, as usual, sort of tracking broadly where we're up to in terms of the world of AI and and tech consumption. I think it's probably worth starting with the economy around AI. Oh yes.

Speaker 3:

And by that we mean, what is going on on the market itself. So I'm sure everybody listening and everybody has seen at some point the interrelationship in the market on the in on the macro investments that have been made in in AI. The second aspect of it is the cost to an individual organization to adopt that AI at a scale that's appropriate to what it needs to do beyond a proof of concept, but has value returned to it and is consuming the bigger macro picture of AI and the the world investment in AI in a way that ultimately the whole thing might pay back. I guess to sort of start with probably the most macro question we've got in technology at the moment Rob is, are we seeing that line up? First of all, do you recognize the picture that I paint?

Speaker 3:

And then secondly, are you seeing sort of consumption in the right place from a sort of sort of financial and commercial perspective? We'll we'll we'll come later on to, like, the actual adoption of the functional technology.

Speaker 2:

So I think Sam Altman said it the other day that the route to monetization for AI has taken a lot longer than he ever expected.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what that tells you is that enterprises and the wider social sphere that might use it are struggling to understand what the economic model is and how it does something useful for them. So when you look at it, you go AI is probably never gonna be cheaper than it is now because it's heavily subsidized by all the investment that's going on. The capital markets believe there's something there. But is it actually doing things that are tangibly different and tangibly better and create I'll use the word value for people. Well, yes, it's definitely helped me in my job.

Speaker 2:

It's definitely helped me in my personal life. I'm using it a lot more. So definitely, I'm I'm consuming it, but I'm pretty confident I'm not paying the full price of the actual cost it's burning behind the scenes. And so it is almost a race, isn't there? Which is, do we get to a point where there is some incredible unlock and the economic model happens, or do we end up with a bit of a bubble that happened with the .com boom that when it was over invested, it yo yoed back and then it it took years to come back in.

Speaker 2:

There's no doubt the technology will be useful and will change the way we live. Yeah. But it's just how and when and why and I think we're

Speaker 3:

at that How fast do we get to that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're you're almost in a race to say, if you don't get to that value point where it does something really dramatic and it's worth it, then there's this sort of investment thing that's building up behind it. You can feel the pressure and the amount of money that's gone into the system.

Speaker 3:

I don't think it's rocket science to to point at the dot dot com situation and try and learn some lessons from it, is it? We're probably not the first people to point that out for sure. But I think but I think it's true in the sense of you have this huge amount of investment in something that's clearly got potential, but just don't really know what it is yet. It's the the classic like problem looking for an answer. With things like .com, well, what what was required there was whole supply chains to be reengineered, a massive shift in where money and how money was spent, you know, unfortunately in a lot of ways, but not today's discussion, like away from the high street in a lot of ways and into into digital commerce.

Speaker 3:

And then the experience of consuming digital commerce to get to a point where it felt great to do it. And but and let me give you an the easiest example in the world I think is like how fast it gets to you now and how easy it is to return something. Like in the early days of the likes of boo.com and stuff, they focused a lot on things like the interface but then it might take days to get to you. It's a real pain to return. All that kind of And that took what decades develop that level of precision in how the services are created.

Speaker 3:

I mean do we think in this case we are looking at like decades of adoption learning or do we think we might get that? Like everything about AI so far has been accelerated. So is there a chance that we might get to an accelerated position that might kind of avoid some of the things that we saw in the earlier periods of .com?

Speaker 2:

Well, always think about the concept of a general purpose tool, that when you create something that does something for you, it's the traditional thinking is ten years before it can embed itself in day to day. I'm not saying that AI is a general purpose tool, but you there there are parallels to it's changed the way you work. You have to introduce it. You have to think differently. All those sorts of things still still apply.

Speaker 2:

And I'm wondering if actually the visionaries see it, but I think you've played it well, which is the rest of the system has to catch up, and that isn't a system that moves at the same pace that, you know, the technology companies want us to move at. So it's always that thing about I have a vision, you can see it, but the whole world just needs to catch up a little bit. Meanwhile, around the world, issues like sovereignty and the focus on resilience and such like is starting to drive a different conversation and the balance around the use of best in class tech and the sort of do I have enough control. I don't think that's helping the adoption at all. I think it's making people think twice before they might make a decision.

Speaker 2:

So the conditions around it aren't ideal and maybe tech companies are moving a bit too fast for the wider world.

Speaker 3:

Well, let's actually use that as a bridge into another trend, which is something we have talked about on the show a lot and I and I think is a natural bridge from here, which is the adoption lag itself. So the way that we've described it historically on the show, if you haven't listened to it before is that, you know, in the the rate of technology innovation, if anything is increased. It was always ahead of adoption but it's it is increased because of the levels of investment that we've just been talking about that has gone into this new technology and that meant that a consuming organization has to make sense of it, make investment for it, create action around it, and then understand how it's going to do something to its organization whatever that thing is to then to then correctly adopt it. Now in a world where actually you assume that a lot of organizations have even taken on cloud native and digital native thinking and say DevOps thinking, but that's not the case is it Rob? Like the the organizations actually are taking a much more moderate way through a lot of the modernisation that the tech organ tech world talks about.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. When I when I think about this, you think about the cycle time of companies, and you know that old phrase too big to fail. Well, I think we're getting to a point where AI is going to show us companies that are too big to succeed, that the system is so complicated, the decision making process is so slow that they can't operate fast enough, and the new rise fast. So we see on the West Coast people creating agentic only organisations. They suspect the first unicorn will appear this year where it's got a billion market cap, which means they've done something radically different.

Speaker 2:

And so I'm wondering if this era, which isn't where work gets done, but it's how work gets done, which is the big different part, you'll see a load of slingshot companies appear, and then you'll see others struggle to keep up. And then they'll they'll might wither a bit. And you've got to really look long and hard about what your company is and how it does it because somebody else out there, literally in a bedroom, as long as they've got enough capital and enough compute, they can create a business that could challenge yours. And so that whole too big to succeed, too big to change might be the thing that we start to talk about a bit more, which is essentially caused by the inability of the company to adopt and hence the adoption lag.

Speaker 3:

Well we saw a lot of like adoption lag thinking kind of emerging on the main stages of last year's sort of tech conferences. So as we go into new conference season back end of November, December, it'll be interesting to see how how the focus is. So like whether the focus is on you know way more adoption than technology and over the course of the last two or three years it's been much more technology than adoption. So I think we are probably are moving into a into a period where this is becoming front and center. And you talked about Altman's comments earlier in the show today and you're right.

Speaker 3:

Altman's actively acknowledged that they were over optimistic in terms of the speed of adoption.

Speaker 2:

The human system can't cope. We've just come out of digital transformation. People are still adopting DevOps, and suddenly you've just landed AI on their lap and you just go, oh, wow. That's it. What I will say though is, if I look at how I operate in my day to day job, sort of eighteen months ago to now, I turn to AI first, whether it be personal life or corporate life.

Speaker 2:

I am using it an awful lot more and I do find it extremely useful. It takes hours and hours and hours out of my week and has made me so much more productive. So there is definitely absolutely no doubt there is something there and it is significant and I am just but one human.

Speaker 3:

My example of that over the summer just this year, like like everybody, I use it as shortcut searches and blah blah blah. But you know, fortunately in in my family there's been a few health incidents over the summer. And the ability to quickly research a situation in a contextual way cannot be underestimated. Like it was it is so infinitely better just in that very very very very basic use case than you could ever do. So like you literally you get to doctor level diagnosis of situations.

Speaker 3:

You can be ultra specific in your prompting and by that I mean age, gender, geographic location, work histories, know those sorts of things and it will give you like you know kind of a study the nuanced set of answers which you can then rank and then do treatment paths. It was incredible. So I agree with what you're saying like we often you know bring a skeptical view to some of this stuff but actually the reality is it's extremely strong in the right context, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what you've just said there is you've got to be specific. You've got to give it the context. You've got to take time to feed the information into the system to get the quality of the information out. If it was a human doctor you were having that conversation with, you would be feeding it all that context and having a ten, fifteen minute conversation before they would reason on it. What I still find is people approach AI and they put in this terrible prompt and then they don't get the great result and then they walk away and you go, no.

Speaker 2:

No. No. If this was a human, how much time would you invest right? Try and invest the same and see what result you get and it can be radically different. So the way we approach technology probably has to change as well.

Speaker 3:

Agreed. A natural point because I was going to bring up that I think one of the things that we need to do now as an industry in dealing with adoption lag and the threats that might occur around that, which are bigger than the technology industry, is to actually talk about organizational reality and what needs to happen within organization. So let's let's forget about false reality of like, you know, flying cars for the time being and just go like, well, these are the real challenges of adopting this stuff at scale.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And it it it like I just said, you have to think differently about how you use a tool, and that takes time. You're talking about muscle memory in humans where they've done a job for years and then suddenly you have to think differently. I think that's the hardest part. Fundamentally, leadership and the people doing the work and everything else just have to reset how you might be able to achieve the outcome.

Speaker 2:

Just because you've done it for twenty years in that way doesn't mean it can't be different. But when we don't we hang on to memories of the past and all of that, and it makes us comfortable, and we like it because it's simple and it doesn't stretch us. I think the biggest challenge is that human element which says, if we don't do it though, somebody elsewhere will say, get out of the way, I've got a better answer, and everybody's gonna buy it because it's cheaper, faster, whatever.

Speaker 3:

Let's then talk about what the new basics might be. So if if we're in a world now, and let let's think about from a tech just from a technology stack perspective, before we even get to, like, more complex notions of what goes on organizationally and financially, you you know, as as an as an IT organization or as a tech organization, one of the things that you you used to manage is your infrastructure. It was on premise, you had a bordered perimeter, you had everything under your control. It made

Speaker 2:

you feel safe Dave, does it make you feel safe?

Speaker 3:

Huddling inside the perimeter, always.

Speaker 2:

You can touch the technology that's powering your business.

Speaker 3:

The the smaller the space around me, the better. Of course, that's we've had to let that go over the course of the last fifteen years. And that was a journey, right? Like Yeah. You know, for security professionals, for you know, your profession of architects to kind of rethink how these things need to work and the amount of investment that needed to go into that.

Speaker 3:

So when you talk about, like, moving to the cloud, it wasn't just moving your kit into a different data center or your apps onto a different platform. It was a complete reengineering about how the function worked, the how IT itself thought about technology. And you know, so so where I'm getting to with that is the basics that we held as critical and important ten years ago what are different today. And I think what we're talking about isn't it that we're on the verge of that changing again.

Speaker 2:

The the bit I find a little bit funny not funny about this is the you've just stood back. You've modernized your technology landscape. You've invested heavily in cloud native and all the right things, and it's congratulations. That new technology stack is now your legacy. Move along now.

Speaker 2:

AI has to enter the arena.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

But it is that serious, is there are some things you can save and keep, there's a lot of ways of working changes that still apply. But AI is smashing the cycle time for building these types of things. Is changing the way engineering operates just for the tech companies, and then you you wind it onto the pharmaceuticals, changing the way research and development's done, manufacturing the way they embrace digital twins and things like this. It's all different. And so you've just spent fifteen years getting to grips with that, and now it's gone, surprise, it all got to change again.

Speaker 2:

And it doesn't look like the old, and it doesn't look like the one you just built. It looks different again.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And you you go go back to the point about the adoption lag. There must the people are exhausted. There's the CEO that says, took this company through digital transformation. I do not have the energy nor the will to deal with the AI one. Somebody else has to step in and do it.

Speaker 2:

Because it's companies now just have to be high energy around technology all the time. Otherwise, they're a little bit nobbled.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And the and if you think about the sort of stack shift over say the last three generations where the on prem stack where you had, you know, networks, data centers, it was all very physical. Then you had your apps layer and then you probably had something like workplace or, you know, whatever you were calling your fleet of laptops. And then you would have like down the side, you'd have like security on one side, which would have like your identity infrastructure in and things like that. And then we moved into the cloud and a lot of the bottom of that stack came under tremendous change.

Speaker 3:

And now people would just show that as a box that says cloud or something. And you know, they're not managing wide area networks in the way that they traditionally manage, they're not managing data centers in the way traditionally manage. The investment cycles and ways of buying those technologies has changed in many in many places, and that required financial models to change, investment models to change, capability to change. And then of course the upward the upward changes to that stack were around the proliferation of the front end, you know, from from just purely having PCs and laptops into having all sorts of different devices including operational technology. And then now we move into this new stack and the stack is reset again.

Speaker 3:

So Rob just we talked about it on the show before, just set out what we think back the layers of the stack are.

Speaker 2:

So you've still got these sort of bits at the bottom where you need fundamental compute. So that doesn't massively change. Big debate going on about on prem or cloud, whatever, but you have this horsepower. But the big thing that focuses is going to come in, if you want to have agentic futures, there's this idea that, like you would understand how a company operates, what a field means, what this function does, you now need to describe that so the AI can understand it too. Like you'd train a human, you need to train an AI.

Speaker 2:

So we need to create a semantic layer, which basically gives the corporate meaning so that when we inspect these systems and data, we can understand the context, the metadata around it. Then above that, you've got a whole new set of tools around implementing AIs and models. That's new. The way you feed them in, way the inference runs, the way you get an output. Then above that, you've got an experience layer and a way for a human to interact with that system.

Speaker 2:

And then down down the side or cutting through it, a backplane, however you want to describe it, you've got this idea of governance and guardrails. So you used to be able to write a policy for a human and say, this is the way you should do your job. This is what you're allowed to do. This is what you're not allowed to do. Same thing, and AI needs it.

Speaker 2:

You now codify it, obviously. You need to be carefully watching it. And then you need this integration part as well that feeds through it that allows all these little bits to come together to be able to achieve an outcome. So in a human system, you've got a telephone, you've got instant messaging, you've got email, you communicate, you get in a room. Agents still fundamentally need to work with each other, and therefore, you need digital version of that so they can work at machine speed.

Speaker 2:

And so individual components survive, but the way you wire them together and the new tooling you put over the top and the new way you describe things and the new way you think about bringing it all to life is very different. And that's fundamentally for me the tech stack reset, which is, you know, you might recognize bits of the past, but they they don't they don't come together in the same way.

Speaker 3:

I think one of the areas of the way we used to think about things, which is I think unquestionably changing is that of resilience and security. Oh yeah. So I mean we you know sat at this this notion of everything moving from perimeterized to completely open and needed to come to terms with that. But in the world of AI, like machine speed vulnerability finding and machine speed vulnerability response is a wholly different world, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So the models mythos being the most famous one that happened was it was finding security vulnerabilities that humans couldn't. So when AI unleashed it now, it was controlled and people took social responsibility around it, but that's not to say another organisation will take the same route. And these AIs are now very capable of finding vulnerabilities and exploiting them quickly before we see them, and that's the fear. And you saw Google announcing the other day that big organisations need to take this very seriously because your cybersecurity will become a massive issue.

Speaker 2:

It was always a boardroom conversation. Are we secure? But it was a little bit like we can maybe deal with that a bit slower. Now it might be you you might think you have the latest, greatest patch from the best security vendor, but it gets exploited in a moment, and the machine's in and it it's done. That's the the dark side of AI, which is you can use it for nefarious means, but it's already been proven to be highly effective in these arenas.

Speaker 2:

So you've got that. And then you've got the second part, which is I'm using all this on demand compute that's everywhere. The economics of it are variable, which is a problem. There have been major stories in the press about big cost issues with large organisations. Some people are starting to move this capability back on prem because they can fix costs associated with it and bound the compute.

Speaker 2:

So you see some that did use OpEx based models, but they're so variable and so spiky that maybe a little bit of CapEx investment upfront and then continuity is is is now an area that's rising.

Speaker 3:

And you know, it's not the only reason that people are moving things back on prem or back within borders at the moment of course because if we if we explore, I think two other areas that sit within security these days, one has to be trust and then and resilience and sitting at the heart of a lot of that is the the sovereign story. So the the change in nature of sovereign over again over the course of the last few years very accelerated by our geopolitical landscape is that how much how much can I trust the services that I'm getting in my digital supply chain? So that opens up whole other levels, doesn't it, of worrying about what your underlying infrastructures need to look like in future.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I think the way I think about sovereignty is it's not about isolation. It's not about lifting up the drawbridge. It's not about denying you access to best in class technology that can create wonderful things. What it is about is understanding what that technology does for you, your reliance on that technology, and do you have appropriate control over it.

Speaker 2:

So what what I really think is when we think about sovereignty, it's not about bunkering it again in your perimeter where everyone's huddled. It's about understanding the level of control you can exert over the things that do something

Speaker 3:

important I mean, contradicts for your presentation I saw you give the other way called bunker mentality.

Speaker 2:

Bunker mentality, it's the future. But it's that it's that which is the the the simplification of the understanding of sovereignty is a problem because people think I have to have it back to the world I used to know. It's in fact some of this modern technology for some organisations has been the saviour. So cloud, for example, when we use Ukraine as the example, they used clouds to flex their systems, move a load of stuff out, and protect their sovereignty by maintaining digital capability in another way. So sovereignty isn't this sort of thing where you pull everything closer.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes sovereignty can be pushing it away so you can keep control. We need to think a bit differently about it. And the oversimplification of sovereignty is a big issue because it causes people to think in a particular way and you think, hang on. This is much more nuanced than this. There's a there's a there's a you need to maybe work through a couple of these things and think about it a bit more practically.

Speaker 2:

Underpinning it though is the word you used, trust. That is the core of it. And with no trust, it brings uncertainty and then we make different decisions.

Speaker 3:

And then when you bring scaled AI and trust together, especially around data and data sources, there's a whole other layer of new things to consider there.

Speaker 2:

If you're the CIO, I always say the CIO is the hardest job in any organization. You just go, it's just getting worse, isn't it? It's just like

Speaker 3:

It just get hard.

Speaker 2:

Get up in the morning and go, oh, that just happened did it? Now I need to deal with that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. The rules around the rules around data you can consume and ensuring that the sources of data that you're using are trusted and in a lot of ways things like you know copyrights in the right place and ability to reuse that data that's been repositioned by your co pilot is gonna be a bigger and bigger problem and of course you know, first instinct a lot of organizations have had and completely understandably is to go like, oh, let's use the corporate one. It's gonna be a fascinating thing to watch, let's call it the data industry for want of a better term, mature over the course of the next eighteen months to twenty four months because the opportunity there is huge actually.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. But you just said a very interesting point, copyright.

Speaker 3:

I, you know, every now and again, Robert.

Speaker 2:

Every now Every now and again. But this is this is a really interesting so having a conversation with companies in Europe who want to train models and want to train to, you know, frontier, want to catch up type thing. We want to have our own. And they're actually saying because the copyright law in The US is different, they can take a much more blase way over training the model than they can in Europe because it's a bit stricter. Therefore, you're more likely to end up in legal hot water.

Speaker 2:

So, actually, that's a very good example of a simple condition that makes it much easier to create this technology that puts another barrier in the way. And I'm not saying we should change copyright law. Right? I'm not I'm not suggesting that we suddenly vary something as serious as that. But it it is an interesting point.

Speaker 2:

It is a barrier to technology creation that somebody else might not have in the same way, and so they they they, you know, they can run away with it a little bit more.

Speaker 3:

So look, there's a lot in that first section. We've talked through

Speaker 2:

Heavy days. It's heavy, isn't it?

Speaker 3:

It it it I mean it it sort of is. There's a lot of big things coming together in that. You know, talked about the economics both at macro level and how that relates down to you know individual organizational investment speed and there's an absolute tension and relationship between those two things. We and and we related that directly to trend two, which is the adoption lag I think now becoming a mainstream conversation. And I'm expecting to see more focus on how to close that down for sure over the course of the next twelve months or so.

Speaker 3:

Kinda because we have to, you know, kinda.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. There's somebody somewhere sat on a yacht and they're gonna have to buy a slightly cheaper bottle of champagne next week, Dave, unless it happens.

Speaker 3:

It's gonna have to yeah. So it's gonna have to speed up. Then we talked about the what that means from a new basics perspective like we've got to stop thinking about some of the layers as being like optional or whatever. There is absolutely a stack shift that has happened and that stack shift is as fundamental as the move to digital native stacks and and within that this whole new world of machine speed, cyber, trust and resilience that need to be to be thought through in the geopolitical world that we're we're in at the moment. So yeah I mean a lot there is a lot in all of that actually.

Speaker 2:

It's all horribly interconnected as well isn't it? It's just like.

Speaker 3:

I know. It's there's a there's a ever tightening hairball there that I think actually the the way that that gets fixed is we do have to sort of pull it apart, like parse it out and just start taking some steps forward. Now, we're gonna go on to next is the sort of thing that Es would have kind of eaten up, but Rob and I will have a I'll have a shot at it. Which is the, where's the human in all of this then? And the So experience that's yeah and to a certain extent that you know, the technology advancement moves forward, forgets about organizational complexity, investment cycles that happen in the real world and the humans that then inherit the experience.

Speaker 3:

And Rob and I were having a chat the other day about trying to buy concert tickets look we all we all know that's absolutely farcical. And what dawned on us in that conversation is is the way that the experience has been replicated digitally, but actually the psychology of it has been massively under thought. And where we were going with this was, if I wanted to get tickets to go and see Taylor Swift, I might decide that I'm gonna go to the stadium or the box office a week before and queue up for those tickets. And the psychology of that is I am in control of when I put my time into it and I'm gonna go and sit down. It might cost me a week, but I know I'm definitely gonna get tickets because I'm absolutely objectively at the front of the queue.

Speaker 3:

So then what happens is organizations come forward and they replicate the queuing process but it's robbed you of agency. You have no ability to influence where you are in that queue And therefore you feel cheated almost when you get to you're like well I sat online for eight hours and I got on there and like either they were all too expensive or I didn't get tickets. So you so the queuing is there but your ability to influence the outcome's gone, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's worse than that. They put algorithms in place that mean you might join at the minute it opens, but somebody else joins ten minutes later and they zip them in front of you because of a digital profile they have or something like that. So it's like this this they've used digital algorithms to actually manipulate the queue. So imagine you're stood outside the queue for a week, and then suddenly, ten minutes before the box office opens, all the people just charge in and around you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or or worse, they open the phone lines early or something like that. And they don't even bother opening the shutter.

Speaker 3:

And then when they do open the shutter, they're like, oh, yeah. Sorry. The only ones we've got left there, like, right at the back in the top left hand corner.

Speaker 2:

And and what they've not done is read it because what what makes sense in my head is you could enter into a much more relaxed process where you say you're interested in going to a concert. They email you and say, in between this time window, you can log in and you can select your ticket. And then they can do it in, a lot a lottery based process. There's not this rush and this mad panic and then this eight hours. So I give a simple notification.

Speaker 2:

I'd like to buy a ticket. They say you've been selected. Here's your ten minute window. Off you go. And then I you know, we can control that a bit more, can't we?

Speaker 2:

But what they've done is and the word is in shitification. They've taken something we had control in, like you said, and they've just messed it up and made it incredibly stressful. After the Oasis concert tickets, the amount of online rage that came out after people's and then digital fails in the middle and the transaction drops and your network connection goes.

Speaker 3:

There was questions asked asked in parliament in The UK about how poor the situation was. And of course that's before you even get to that crazy charging mechanism and all of those sorts of things. So it does feel like a classic case of they've digitized something that worked before where the human had agency in it. Yes. They digitized that and either intentionally or unintentionally left you with the pain but removed your agency.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So you feel you bet you're fundamentally frustrated. You haven't got agency. You've lost control. You want to get hold of an experience.

Speaker 2:

It's very personal to you. They've made everything much worse in that because they've not thought differently, and we talk about this is what I got. But we've not thought differently. And then you've got this. Now when everybody goes to buy a concert ticket, they're gonna tell their agent to do it for them, aren't they?

Speaker 2:

So what you're have is a load of agentic AI, clawed bots and chat GPT bots in control of your Chrome browser smashing the system. So now if you are a human in that loop, you've now got to beat the machine speed agent who can click faster and react faster. It's like it's it's getting harder.

Speaker 3:

I I and I think where we're getting to is is what you just touched on there, which is to to think differently about it. So what is very clear when you bring in something like the new tech stack and you bring AI at the level of its ability into your organization. There's no point in doing the same things, just having AI in place. Like I guess the more sort of business orientated version of the queuing paradox is ERP software. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

When ERP software came in in globalized organizations, all the market units in that global in that globalized business had to change aspects of what they did to create this kind of global views, global reporting, you know, all of those sorts of the vision of ERP. And the reality is a lot of it digitized rather than digitalized what was going on, and that's that's why digital organizations could then come along and steal a march on a lot of the traditional organizations, because they just thought differently from the outset. I think agent first organisations, there is a parallel, isn't there, between bricks and mortar versus digital versus agent first?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. I think those it goes back to the unicorn idea that if you don't think in the right way, somebody's gonna turn up and slingshot past you with your business because they can do it better than you. And I think we see companies able to scale out globally so much faster, and the market capitalisation of those companies is is really straightforward now for a lot of them where they get the money upfront and it's it's just a matter of time. And I think there's this threshold we're gonna hit where we're gonna see this start to happen in in certain industries, it'll shift fast.

Speaker 3:

One of the other aspects of human experience that I I wanted to touch on it, again, is something we've touched on the show. We touched on it last year when we had Tim Curry on the show, and it was then it was the the notion of remote work, hybrid work, all of those sorts of things. And one of the things I think that's that's an interesting emergent conversation at the moment, and this has got little to do in my mind with sort of workplace productivity though there's there is a conversation there and I think we've had that on the show before. I I was thinking about it and we were chatting the other day about it from another dimension which is, you know, like life experience aspect of going out and engaging with other humans and talking to other humans and how the younger generations are actually suffering at the moment as a result of it. I saw something online just actually trying to draw a correlation between the employment of young engineers in technology, which has dropped in the last few years, might actually correlate closer to homeworking than, say, it does to the introduction of AI into the into the dev into the dev chain, which is always kind of I don't know whether it was right or not, but it was an interesting correlation.

Speaker 3:

It was it was by an independent, not necessarily by tech organization, I hasten to add. And then when you add into that interesting trends that are going on in the younger generations, particularly in Gen Z with this, you know, kind of I think they refer to as the analog revival, which has been visible, the IRL thing has been visible for a while in massive, you know, kind of massive kind of over, what's the right, over demand for kind of rock concerts and you know, things of those need because people are yearning for kind of real life experience. But it's also visible in things like, you know, physical media and you know, every old dead format from vinyl through to cassette tapes to DATs and are all all seem to be going through some form of kind of revival that's going on. Must be something going on in there, Robert. What's your what's your thinking?

Speaker 3:

Now, David,

Speaker 2:

maybe because we are of a particular age. But he must say you. Yeah. Well, I might be the youngest here now that Es is not on, so I'll take that and I will ride it.

Speaker 3:

That's That is a low blow, Robert. That is a low on the first episode of this season. Jesus.

Speaker 2:

God do it, Dave. God do it. I'm gonna that's gonna be a common theme. Don't you worry. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Get you. As the youngster of the group no. The the but the we it's that classic.

Speaker 3:

Would like it on record that Robert is firmly Gen X.

Speaker 2:

I'm actually a Xennial, I'll have you know, which is a microgeneration.

Speaker 3:

You make you have made that up and you know it.

Speaker 2:

No. Xennial is a thing. Right? So there's this there's this generation at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the millennial, which is bridged the gap and went through education when digital came alive. And it's a it's a term, it's a micro generation, it's used.

Speaker 3:

Have you seen that that little reel online of Robert Patterson trying to claim that he's gen zed? Yeah. Yeah. And like and I think Jennifer somebody or other was talking to me and she's like, you're not gen zed, you're definitely millennial. And he's like, no no, I'm gen zed.

Speaker 3:

That's what you sound like. You sound like Patson trying to be not millennial.

Speaker 2:

No. No. Anyway, David, that aside, me trying to recapture my youth and make me sound younger than I am, I think we have a load of experiences in our brains that we did before all this occurred that we remember what it's like. And I think what's happening is Gen Z are discovering that we had a different life before digital, and they're maybe liking some of it, maybe not all of it. But, you know, I think, like, the physical media, the touching and holding of records before you play them, that that tactile thing.

Speaker 2:

I I think it's, like, it's human nature that we enjoy it. So Yeah. What I find interesting is stuff that we just grew up with is becoming popular again because it's different, and it breaks you away from this sort of digital realm that can be quite consuming at times. And you get all the, all the press at the moment about social media and the governments, you know, taking action against them about the lock in and the infinite scroll and all this sort of stuff. So there is a bit of a backlash going on, but it's not always in a bad way.

Speaker 2:

It's kinda like maybe recovering things that were lost. Yeah. That's me being nostalgic and rose tinted about my childhood. But even if

Speaker 3:

if even if it's just time being clawed back, our attention. Yeah. So like, I mean, I I again, I don't know whether this is old man rants at moon stuff, so forgive us if it is. But one of the things I discovered on my phone recently is the ability to block notifications. I've switched that on on a twenty four hour loop at this point.

Speaker 3:

Like I've got, I don't know, 5% of the notifications I used to get. And it and it and my and my head feels better for it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And I'm sure and it's the the one that really winds me up is that because we're so connected to the second screen, big organisations like Netflix or Apple are making TV shows so that people consume them while they're on the phone, which means you don't get the same quality of drama and entertainment because they've dumbed it down slightly and reexplained things. And if you watch season one of Stranger Things and then you watch season six, it's written that was like a eight year period or something. You see you see a dramatic way in the way the dialogue's written and they overexplain the situation again. So people who might have been on their phone can can get it and you're like, it's making my entertainment worse because people are distracting.

Speaker 2:

You go,

Speaker 3:

That it is atrocious and I think this theme for us this year has got has got so many dimensions I think in terms of what needs to be thought about in in experience design. I think there is an absolute accountability that people who are designing digital services need to think of think about them in a wholly different way. Your employees at different organizations, the experience they're gonna have at work, I think needs to be a little bit more nuanced and sophisticated than home versus office. You know, it's like it's all a bit too blocky that.

Speaker 2:

It's too easy. Mean, it's binary. It's like, oh, that's dead easy. It's simple for somebody to write a policy. The whole point is the human experience is very nuanced and you need to think about it quite hard and

Speaker 3:

It's it's, you know, it's it's it's shifted to my when when you think about remote work with with this more dimensional view attached to it, like the more societal aspect of it attached to it, it is it has actually shifted some of my beliefs on it. Like I I was definitely in the camp of, well I can be more productive at home, you know, like I you know, if I've got a day of teams calls, I what you know, I can whiz through them, I can do 10 in a day because my train rides are now not wasted time, I can use them productively and all that kind of stuff. But actually I think that maybe that misses something. Know, I think it misses this aspect of human interaction not from a point of view of driving up productivity of a particular organization, though that may or may not be an upside, but just purely from a societal perspective.

Speaker 2:

And and that's it. So during COVID, I couldn't put my finger on it what was wrong, but there was definitely a massive effect towards the end of lockdown on me. And I worked it out the first time I went to an airport, and it was like I've missed being around large crowds of people, not even people I know, just being in a crowd of people, being at a stadium, things like this.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And then I suddenly realized I actually got a a sort of relief state from being at a train station with other humans, and it's like that. You can't go without that in life, I don't think. And so there is a balance to be struck.

Speaker 3:

Is has this led to you repeatedly getting lost in train stations?

Speaker 2:

I mean, I it's just because I want to be around humans for

Speaker 3:

longer. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

But it's it was it was I remember. I remember so vividly going back and just going, oh my god. It was simply I miss large crowds of people.

Speaker 3:

Isn't it strange? And and and that's before you even get to other aspects of this, which we haven't got time for today, which is the nature of dating apps. And dating apps are not for people to find the love of their life. They're to return you to the dating app.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's designed to keep you in the ecosystem. It's like,

Speaker 3:

Something in that.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's the it mean, you know, I go on about this, but it's a classic example of where capitalism has wrecked everything. So it's like, how do I make more money? Let's ruin the human experience.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Well taking the more positive spin on that just to bring this this theme to a close. The design and thinking about holistically the role of humans whether it be organizational like I was saying, whether it be the experience that you're creating with the app that you're creating or the agent interface that you're creating. I think we need to think about that with more of a priority and more holistically than we perhaps have. Now Yeah.

Speaker 3:

That brings us on to our second to last trend, which is the leadership responsibility that the humans have now. So like turning the tables a little bit on the on what's going on in Digitland and and what situation do we find ourselves in. So technology leaders, and and we'll let's just keep it there for now. When you look at all of the things you just talked about, which is the financial shift that's happening as a result of AI, we're either at macro or within your organization. Whether it's about the tech stack shift that's absolutely happening, the the the around ethics and cyber and trust and resilience, or whether it's about the creation of working environments for other humans, it feels like our, you know, our role as technology leaders has never been more front and center in the in the world, and then you that's before you get to the geopolitically driven shift towards re sovereign, you know, sovereign around digital supply chains and those sorts of things.

Speaker 3:

So like how we we talked with Dex Hunter Toric last season and and he was talking about the responsibility the tech organizations have, and and I agree with that. We might hopefully will have Dex on again this season. But it's not just tech organizations, is it? It's all it's all of us that are doing tech. We've got to think about the speed of adoption because there's a whole industry of of investment attached to some of the decisions we might make.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. So what I'd like to just pause there, Dave, and say well done on including us in the technology leadership camp. I like that, the way you did that as we as technology I'm like, yes, I see what you did there.

Speaker 3:

What what I meant was you, Rob. What I meant was you, not me and Marcel.

Speaker 2:

It's like if I'm an investment fund, what do I invest in? Where do I put my money? That drives the system. If I'm a political leader, how do I legislate? If I'm a tech owner, how do I do this morally and responsibly?

Speaker 2:

Just, you know, the the tech is running away with it. We've got to a point where engineering is doing something that science can't explain in LLMs fully. You know? This is this is weird times we're in. At the same time, you've got AI fundamentally rewriting the way we think about things.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, it's a collective responsibility to say we will do this in the right way, but it's everybody has a role to play. It it's like the consumer thing. If you're a consumer and you use it, they'll make more of it. If you don't think we should be having it, then don't use it. The best thing a consumer can do is vote with their feet and not engage with it, and then it'll very quickly disappear.

Speaker 2:

And, you know, everybody has a role to play, and just because you think, well, you're just a a citizen on the street with your phone, doesn't mean you don't have an opinion that might add up with others. And I think what we tend to do is try and push this responsibility to a small group of people, and I don't think we can discharge it like that. I think as a society, whilst we face this big change that could be amazing, we make sure that we don't balls it up.

Speaker 3:

So I think that gets us through the majority of State of the Nation stuff and lots of threads in that hopefully that we will pick up some or all of them as we go through the season. But let's just step outside that a little bit and look at other aspects of what's going on on the frontier here that are not, you know, maybe feel slightly bigger and further out than some of the stuff we're talking about. But I actually saw for example, I don't know whether this is like I was whizzing through a feed, so I might have just picked up misinformation here. But I did read that Tesla are thinking about Optimus launching next year. So there's this whole other frontier of things like physical AI and the endbotification of the world and you know that the risk that that brings but also the or the opportunity that brings.

Speaker 3:

So I did see a little video of a robot that was in a shop and it was a shop assistant robot.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah. And

Speaker 3:

somebody had I think taken a item of clothing down off the shelf and the robot decides to deploy kung fu moves on the on the customer. And it it prompted the question why does a robot in a shop Why

Speaker 2:

does the robot know kung

Speaker 3:

need to understand kung fu.

Speaker 2:

I mean, Dave, this is like the film where the eyes turn red in the robot and a gun comes out of the leg. I mean, that is literally it. Activate order 91 or whatever. I mean, it's like it's a it's a bit weird that, you know, it's a bit of legacy code that they've just deployed, going, it'll be easy to deploy the whole lot. It's simpler, and it actually turns out it's also a murder bot.

Speaker 3:

Well, let let's let's pause the dystopian fear for a second and let's just tick off a few things that are definitely emerging. So so physical AI, whether it's 2027, the Optimus launches, I don't know. But imminently coming. Imminently coming both in our private lives and in our professional lives, if not

Speaker 2:

What I'm excited about Dave is I might actually get my robot butler, which I keep banging on about on this podcast that I was promised in the sixties and I never got.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I think I think I think you're odds on to get that before the end of the decade, Robert.

Speaker 2:

All the stuff you see the robots are able to do dance and you walk over uneven ground and, you know, move stuff and, you know, they're using LLMs to train the robots to know what to do. So it's not precise coding anymore. The robots can sort of almost semi reason with what's going on. Mean, it's amazing.

Speaker 3:

They just become an agent. You know, like, a robot's a physical manifestation of an agent. So when you put an agent infrastructure, agent control plane into your organization, you're done.

Speaker 2:

Well, there's if if that happens and the physical AI goes on, I mean, it's you're just then edging up a level of sophistication before they can do jobs that you know, delivery drivers as an example, things like this, food drive, you know, there's loads of jobs that need a human body to be able to control everything and deal with it that could easily be replaced with physical AI.

Speaker 3:

Earlier on, when we talked about the the new stack and the new basics, those new basics are putting in place technology that will be able to control, you know, robotic fleets.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. And it's that it's that the you can move from the digital to the physical, back to the digital, back to the physical, and that's what the human's always done. And it's coming. It's it. I mean, you see, I it is it's accelerating fast because everybody's worked out that once the sort of digital AI is working well, the next frontier that is gonna be able to add value is that robotic.

Speaker 2:

Sneaking up on us, Dave, It's sneaking up on us. It's

Speaker 3:

gonna It's surprise gonna feel like a snap when it happens. Yeah. Right. There's a couple of the things that we maybe don't have the time to properly open up today, but worth calling out for completion energy and energy requirements and the way that our our requirement to consume energy, at least using the current technology set and the current chipsets, current processes. Way outstrips a lot of a lot of countries ability to create energy.

Speaker 3:

We we talked on the show like in the very early days about like those nuclear nuclear reactors in containers that could drive data centers. So an eye on energy and and a focus on energy, I think this coming season is needed. We've touched on quantum quite a bit.

Speaker 2:

Oh. Stat. Fifty fifty that quantum gets sophisticated enough in the next year to crack encryption, traditional encryption. Fifty fifty.

Speaker 3:

Well, add add that to some of the already machine speed concerns around Oh, yeah. Cyber, and you you were in a different world, like overnight with that stuff for sure. And then Rob wrote this on the production sheet because he always likes to, which is the commercialization of space and creating new infrastructure. What could you possibly be pushing out there, Robert?

Speaker 2:

Now, David, my job, I'm waiting for the the website so I can click the link for data center manager in space. Is me, I am going into space and I'm going to have a very quiet life in space managing my data center.

Speaker 3:

I imagine you like, have you seen that film Silent Running?

Speaker 2:

Which one's that one remind me?

Speaker 3:

It's the it's the nineteen seventies. I think it might, I wanna say John Carpenter, I don't think it is John Carpenter. But it's basically a guy alone on a spaceship drifting through space with only a couple of robots to keep him company. Oh. I think that sounds like a perfect environment for you.

Speaker 2:

I mean, it's the classic sort of opening film where I'm in the data center in space. I wake up, I have my eggs for breakfast, look out the window, and the earth gone or something. And I'm like, oh, what do I do now?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Or it could be like Moon. Like spoilers for Moon, if you haven't seen the film Moon, spoilers for Moon in comments, I'll skip forward a couple of minutes. But it could be like that thing where you know he's working on the moon and he thinks he's like there by himself but he's just one in a series of hundreds of clones.

Speaker 2:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's I don't think they wanna clap. Wait.

Speaker 2:

Wait. Where are you going with the cloning of me? I mean So like you you just

Speaker 3:

like keep waking up but actually you realize that your last clone was like crushed under a a cabin of falling off or something like that. But then it just be so it could be like that. Is that what you've got in mind when you think about being the data center manager?

Speaker 2:

No no no. I was thinking about a four a four hour day being able to be with my own thoughts, not be pestered by other people and look out the window at the universe.

Speaker 3:

With my own thoughts. What's that euphemism for Robert?

Speaker 2:

Just thinking about how we might improve adoption of technology, who knows?

Speaker 3:

All the thoughts. That's it. And then of course, as well as all of those huge threads and trends there's going to be multiple other smaller but still significant innovations that are happening in the world of networking or in the world of processing or in the world of experience design or organizational design that we'll track over the coming season.

Speaker 2:

Do you know any interesting things we should do, Dave, is sort of go back in time to our past selves recording episode three, four, and five of this podcast, play forward the conversation we've just had, and you go, did you ever think any of that would happen? Because it feels like when we started out, if you'd asked us to track what was going on, we might not have got to this I don't think we would have because it's been such a dramatic turn of events in the last two, three years.

Speaker 3:

I mean I think you're right. This show which is only three and a half years old predated GPT three.

Speaker 2:

Agenic didn't exist back then, the word wasn't used.

Speaker 3:

Agenic wasn't a word. I think social media was an emergent concern at that point. Yeah. Maybe some of the kind of much more mainstream conversation around the impact it's having and things like that. I don't think we were on we were really fresh out of COVID, so we hadn't really got our heads around hybrid, and we weren't in the geopolitical landscape at the moment.

Speaker 3:

And this notion of as a result of that interconnectedness of all of the concerns, whether it be the human experience or whether it be the your geo landscape or you know, countless other things. It feels increasingly complex. Maybe that's the the thread or maybe it's increasingly confusing. And the notion of confusion and how you actually parse things apart and get used to complexity and leading through complexity is a core skill.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. It's it's quite dramatic, I think. Maybe that just makes me sound old, and I'm saying the world's all confusing now, but it does feel like it's getting more complicated much faster than we used to. Anything on this week's show resonate or look like it's heading for your business? Get in touch with us at realitiesremixed@capgemini.com.

Speaker 2:

We're on LinkedIn too, and we'd love to hear from you. Connect and DM us. The awkward questions are the ones we enjoy the most. We love watching the world change while we're talking about it. We'll keep tracking it and telling you what we spot.

Speaker 2:

Please rate and subscribe. Those small things have a big help. Huge thanks to our sound editing wizards, Ben and Louis, to our producer, Marcel, and to every one of you listening. See you in another next week.