Internet of Thinking

In the Accenture Technology Vision 2018 for Pega: Internet of Thinking, Don Schuerman, CTO, Pega, and David Steuer, Managing Director, Accenture, discuss the proactive opportunity that exists with real-time customer data and insights, and how Pega is providing businesses with a central intelligence hub to enable personalized experiences.

David Steuer: Don, thanks for joining me today.

Don S.: Of course.

David Steuer: We're going to talk a little bit about the Accenture tech vision and five themes that we have within the tech vision.

Don S.: I'm excited to talk about this. At Pega, we spend a lot of time thinking about how technology can impact both how our clients and our dream clients engage their customers, and how they drive better efficiency in the operations. So, let's dig in.

David Steuer: Fantastic. Fantastic. Why don't we hit the last trend, our fifth trend, which is really around the idea what we're now calling internet of thinking, right.

Don S.: Okay.

David Steuer: So, you've heard internet of things.

Don S.: Yes.

David Steuer: This is internet of thinking. It's this idea of really adding intelligence into the whole internet of things, right, and it's combining that intelligent automation with the ability for different components within an ecosystem to be able to speak to each other. So, AI enables IOT as an example.

David Steuer: What do you see Pega's role really in that space in whole internet of thinking?

Don S.: We've been very focused on having this core technology that's really good about making decisions, doing it based on data, doing it in real time at the moment of interaction, right. When I think about the broader sort of impact to our clients of the internet of thinking, one thing is the increasing ability to be proactive, right, because what's happening from this internet of thinking is you're getting these intense volume of real time signals, whether it's a device telling you things that might want you to initiate a proactive maintenance, whether it's piece of health information that's coming from a client, whether it's a bot that finds something in a transaction stream that needs to be dealt with.

Don S.: Being able to take those pieces of information in from a wide variety of things, and then drive real time intelligent reactions to it. It's not just driving back end analytics on the data, but a real time responses to what I've learned to help push and guide the client to the right place in their journey into the right outcome they want.

Don S.: As we think about it from a technology perspective, there's going to be this mixed intention to sort of thread the needle between putting the right kind of thinking at the edge, right, into the device etcetera, but also ensuring for the customer there is a single brain. There is a single place where regardless of where that signals coming from, it's pulling that together with all the other signals it's getting, and all the other data that we have about that customer, so that I'm constantly making the best decision, the best action, the best way to make that customer experience great.

David Steuer: Yeah. While these are trends, we're actually doing some really, really innovative and creative projects in this space using that intelligence for a shipping company that's trying to proactively do some maintenance. We're doing some work around digital banking as well using this technology.

Don S.: That's the work that we're doing. We just walked by some of these cool kiosks where that actually becomes the banking center, right, and it's pushing the right kinds of intelligence out to there. Again, I think that the organizations need to be thinking in terms of how do I bring the intelligence into that digital environment, but how do I make sure it's not locked into that environment, so that as the customer hits you on other places, as the customer pulls up their mobile experience that experience for the customer transcends an individual device or channel, but becomes truly holistic for the organization.

David Steuer: Yeah. You wrap it with a traditional case wrapper, and you really have that intelligent decision hub in the middle that's providing that AI within the wrapper itself.

Don S.: That's exactly right.

David Steuer: Those are the five key trends for this year. It's very interesting because I think Pega's could play a key role in helping enabling those trends that we're going to see out there.

Don S.: We're really excited to work with Accenture because we have to do cool stuff together, like the shipping container, like the kiosks, like the impact we're having on some of our client's business.