Enterprise Software Innovators Enterprise Software Innovators

On the 31st episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Pranab Sinha, CIO of Matterport. Matterport is a next-generation virtual modeling tool that uses 3D-scanning technology and machine learning to create immersive digital replicas of physical spaces. In this conversation, Pranab shares how Matterport uses the latest AI capabilities to enhance their products, the importance of a cohesive AI data strategy, and upcoming AI use cases he’s most excited about.   

Quick hits from Pranab:

On AI powering Matterport’s newest products: “Our digital twin technology and platform is powered by the Cortex AIm an advanced machine learning engine, which essentially takes the physical spaces and combines the digital image into a photorealistic, digitally accurate digital twin.”

On areas where Pranab sees AI’s immediate impact: “One is around customer service, customer support, IT service. It's a lot of repetitive tasks that we have and we see real use cases, real potential on using AI to augment our intelligence that we have with our people on the front line. The second use case is around security. There is good news and bad news. You have all this great technology being developed, but at the same time, that technology will be available to the guys who are trying to disrupt your business.”

On data structures needed to make AI viable for Matterport: “One of the big things we pride ourselves on is the data that we get and how we train our models. Trust is a big thing. Data security is the biggest thing. And so when you put your physical space on our digital twin platform, we want to make sure that you have absolute confidence.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Good to Great by Jim Collins

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Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 30th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Alan Boehme, Former CTO at H&M, Procter & Gamble, and former CIO at The Coca-Cola Company. For over 20 years, Alan has led technology teams at some of the world’s most recognizable brands. He has a wealth of insights into how next-generation technology can transform customer experiences and improve business processes. In this conversation, Alan shares how H&M uses technology for sustainability, his insights into the ways startups can best collaborate with enterprises, and details about how smart mirrors piloted at H&M are now in use at both H&M and COS to enhance the customer experience.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded in 2022 when Alan was still CTO of H&M

Quick hits from Alan:

On leveraging data locked in clothing tags to enhance customer experience: “There's a lot of RFID data locked in tags on garments. We decided to lift the data out of our core warehousing systems and we created a data layer in the store that now mimics what's in the warehouse. By using 5G readers embedded in the ceiling and RFID readers in the walls, we can get 99% accuracy of everything that's in the store at the same time. When you pick a garment up and walk around the store, we know which are going into the fitting rooms and which ones are being left behind. Which ones are being tried on which ones are being returned to the rack. We can create an experience for you with a mirror [using that data]. By lifting the data out and making it available using artificial intelligence and machine learning, it becomes more predictive.”

On the global nature of innovation: “The way we have to look at innovation is that it comes from anywhere and everywhere in a corporation and around the world. It's not bound by any geography anymore.”

On how startups and corporations can best collaborate: “Corporations tend to define their problems too tightly and they're looking for specific solutions; [doing so] loses the creativity of the startups. You lose the intellectual capital that the startups bring, on top of their technology and services if you try to focus them too much. [As a startup], you want to present a business problem, and instead of telling [a corporation] how to solve it, ask them what they can bring to the table in order to make it work and make it solvable.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by R “Ray” Wang

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/ 

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer

On the 29th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Bob Muglia, former CEO at Snowflake and former President at Microsoft. ​​For over 30 years, Bob has been at the frontier of modern technology and spent over two decades at Microsoft, becoming one of four Presidents reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. After a stint at Juniper Networks, he was CEO of Snowflake, a foundational cloud data company, and today sits on the boards of several technology startups. In this conversation, Bob discusses navigating AI as an enterprise business, the role of data in AI’s success, and valuable lessons on innovative leadership.

Quick hits from Bob:

On exciting trends emerging in AI: “Probably the most incredible thing that's happened this year, ‘what is the programming language of 2023?’ English. English is the new programming language, which is a crazy thing to think about. Now, you’re basically programming these AI models by talking to it in English, and pretty soon they'll be multimodal and you'll just literally be talking to them. So it's making things much more accessible.

On the importance of data quality relating to AI: “AI only knows as much as the data that it is trained on or fed with. It has to be provided with data in order to provide answers. If you can't come up with that data in a coherent way, you are not going to be able to use these models very effectively.”

On ethics being present in AI driven products: “I encourage every company that I work with to create a set of values and to really live by those values and to demonstrate that in many deep ways throughout the organization. That's something I focused on throughout my career. One of the observations I've had is that in the technology space, the values of a company are reflected in their products. This is only going to become reinforced and more true as AI takes on more and more decision making capability within these products.”

Recent Book Recommendations: 
Robot Visions by Isaac AsimovThe Datapreneurs by Bob Muglia--

Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 28th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, host Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) talks with Naresh Shanker, former CTO of Xerox and CEO of PARC. Xerox is a foundational computing and technology company with over 20,000 employees and multiple spinoff companies operating at the frontier of modern technology. Before running IT and product teams at Xerox, Naresh was formerly the CIO at HP, Palm, and other notable companies. In this conversation, Naresh describes AI’s impact on enterprise software, the importance of data strategy for successful AI applications, and how technology executives can empower teams using AI solutions.

Quick hits from Naresh:

On the areas AI can make global impacts: “AI is going to continuously evolve into the acceleration of GenAI and start marrying this bridge between the whole human condition as well as context. When you start putting this together, you're going to start looking at things like its applicability in the field of energy efficiency. So smart cities, smart water, smart transportation, these spaces are going to start accelerating at a global level.”

On understanding data as it relates to AI: “There is going to be data that's going to be what I call foundational to these models, to these learning-based models that can actually help advance certain capabilities that are much more commoditized. Then there is going to be a whole layer of specialization. That specialization has nuances because there is going to be foreground IP, background IP, meaning intellectual property. And then there are going to be all of the policies, regulatory aspects that govern that data. Then there are security and regulatory requirements. All of that has got to get layered. The way we break down this challenge is to just make sure that the data can be what I call classified, segregated, compartmentalized in a way that it can actually serve as building blocks around what is truly a commodity to advance a set of capabilities versus what is going to be very specialized to be a differentiator in specific industries to advance specific sciences.”

On the importance of AI frameworks: “We are going to see more deep tech. Where there is going to be a combination of sensing technologies coupled with very strong AI. That pivot is going to be very critical. So putting in place the right frameworks that can take advantage of both these agile frameworks and hardware and software ecosystems so that we can iterate quickly, learn from failures and adapt to these changing market conditions globally is going to be super critical.”

Recent Book Recommendation: From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at www.enterprisesoftware.blog.

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 27th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Tom Gerdes, EVP & CIO of The Heico Companies. Employing over 9,000 people globally and with an annual revenue of over $2.5 billion, The Heico Companies is the parent company for over 70 high-performing manufacturing, construction, and industrial businesses. In this conversation, Tom discusses the advantages of generative AI at enterprise scale, the realistic impacts of AI on modern manufacturing processes, and ethical considerations of AI adoption.

Quick hits from Tom:

On The Heico Companies’s current use of automation: “Some of our products have telematics built into them. And so taking that information, being far more aware of the status of the equipment, how it's being operated and ensuring that you're getting the maximum value for your end consumer out of that product. While you think about things like cranes and forklifts being non modernized technology, even when they're human operated, the real ability to get better data and better insights and then use those models to start getting what you've seen in a lot of airline industries, which is uptime and availability of equipment and really putting that across our portfolio of products.”

On the impacts of AI on human labor: “I don't see a transformational shift in taking a lot of the labor out of that process. I think it's about skilling that labor up and utilizing automation as a means to get more value out of what we do in a manufacturing organization. But when you're running a furnace to produce steel billets and when you're rolling those into a rod and we're drawing it into wire, there's certainly a level of automation that can work there.”

On the risk of adopting AI tools: “If you're trying to drive risk to zero. You're in my view, driving value down to negative or certainly below zero. I think it's very hard and I think the whole component of generating value is about understanding and accepting risk, and making sure that risk is also effectively communicated to the business.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Essentialism by Greg McKeown

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.

On the 26th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Naveen Zutshi, CIO of Databricks. Databricks is a leading AI enterprise software company enabling organizations to build, deploy, and maintain data solutions at scale. In this conversation, Naveen shares fascinating use cases from the next generation of large language models, how AI can transform every aspect of enterprise work, and the best ways to stay knowledgeable about the cutting edge of AI.

Quick hits from Naveen:

On Rolls-Royce harnessing AI: “With Rolls-Royce, their model is selling engines for a very low price because they actually charge the customer per fly run, per hour of flights. They want to keep the engines in great working order and do a lot of preventative maintenance to reduce the amount of downtime for the engines because their entire revenue is tied to this. They use machine learning and AI for all of those purposes.”

On AI’s coming dominance to the world of software: “Marc Andreessen had this note, right? Software eats the world and I think data and AI is going to eat software, and that is proving more and more true.”

On the entire C-Suite being interested in the next generation of AI tools: “Before [this latest AI wave], you were using NLP and AI, but it was used primarily by data scientists and data engineers. It is now democratizing this whole notion of LLMs to the entire company. I can’t tell you how many business leaders, whether they’re in sales and other groups who want to start using the technology.”

Recent Book Recommendation: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen

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Like what you hear? Leave us a review and subscribe to the show on Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/ 
Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.