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Expanding the Value of Automation in the Tech Stack

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RPA has been around for over 20 years, but IT leaders in many organizations tend to limit its value by the way they position and categorize it in their IT architecture. On this podcast, Brad Hairston talks with Tony McCandless, Managing Director of the UK/Ireland/Benelux region at SS&C Blue Prism, who explains how CIOs need to shift their thinking around intelligent automation in their tech stack as well as broaden the value of RPA through intelligent skills and combining it with Business Process Management (BPM).

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Here’s what we talked with Tony about: 

*What Tony's background taught him about the role of automation in environmental sustainability

*How CIOs should think of intelligent automation and position it in their technology stack design

*How IT leaders typically categorize automation platforms

*A common misperception of intelligent automation among CIOs

*Roles/skills needed in the IT function in order to drive intelligent automation

*The rise of machine-in-the-loop

*Does RPA automate UIs or APIs?

*The impact of the continuing labor shortage

*A new intelligent automation trend Tony expects to see in 2023

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The World Turned Upside Down

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It didn't take long for OpenAI's ChatGPT to capture the world's attention.  The impressive generative AI capability understands and generates natural language responses to a wide range of inputs, and it is clearly much different than all other forms of AI that have come before it. While there's still no way to determine the complete accuracy of the responses provided by ChatGPT, they are often so fluent and articulate and creative that all you can do is marvel at the outputs and start wondering about how this will affect the future. On this podcast, Brad Hairston uses actual responses to several questions he posed online to ChatGPT to craft a pseudo-conversation with the technology.  It's all in the name of fun, but hopefully it proves to be educational along the way!

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Here’s what we talked with ChatGPT about:

*What makes ChatGPT so powerful

*What the future of AI looks like and should humans be scared about it

*How ChatGPT will impact RPA & intelligent automation

*ChatGPT’s thoughts on movies, travel, poetry, humor, literature and science

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In this episode, host Michael Marchuk speaks with Vincent Lassalle, a leader within the Demos Helsinki global think-tank.  Corporations tend to think of their strategic planning with a 3-5 year target, but Vincent helps refocus the way companies and governments can achieve both commercial success as well as beneficial societal impact over a much longer time horizon using their Skopegy methodology.  Join us as we talk about how organizations can engage in digital transformation while helping to shape the world around them for the better.



Here’s what we talked with Vincent about: 

- Why looking towards future trends may actually lead you astray

- How commercial organizations can benefit from building longer-term strategic plans

- How government and commercial entities can work together to build a stronger society while benefitting financially 



Link to one of the papers discussed in this episode: https://digitaltransformation.demoshelsinki.fi/



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In this episode, host Michael Marchuk chats with long-time industry expert, Ian Barkin about the evolution of the automation industry and how RPA and AI are transforming organizations and their people.  Ian discusses how digital transformation is not just a set of technology, but a mindset to alter how work gets done.  



Here’s what we talked with [Name] about: 

- Where organizations are making the most headway leveraging intelligent automation to support their customers' experiences

- How the concept of digital transformation has evolved over the past decade

- Why organizations have to see digital transformation in light of changing the skills that employees will need to support this new way of working



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Making Sense of Big Data

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It is often said that to do AI and analytics well you need large amounts of data, good algorithms, and powerful compute resources. But is there perhaps another prerequisite that is so manually intensive that it is hindering the momentum of most AI efforts?  On this podcast, Brad Hairston talks with Alex Ratner, Co-founder and CEO at Snorkel AI, who explains how his company is helping companies tackle what he believes is the biggest obstacle to AI, the labeling of data used to train machine learning models.

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Here’s what we talked with Alex about:

*The Snorkel AI value proposition

*How the Stanford AI lab and Snorkel AI isolated the data labeling problem

*An overview of foundation models

*Differentiating generative AI from predictive AI

*How generative AI will impact companies’ adoption of AI

*How generative AI presents some challenges for intelligent automation

*The impact of data labeling at scale on the global AI race

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A New Era of AI Captures the World's Attention

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The evolution of AI and its impact on society has been an incredibly provocative topic for many years, but nothing has created as much reaction (both positive and negative) as the advent of generative AI.  On this podcast, Brad Hairston talks with Damian Lewandowski, an expert on automation and AI at McKinsey & Company, who provides his perspective on how/where generative AI can be used to transform companies.

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Here’s what we talked with Damian about:

*Why generative AI is such a hot topic

*The prospect of generative AI becoming the dominant form of AI in the years to come

*The potential impact of generative AI on human creativity and higher-level thinking

*Detecting AI-generated content

*Potential use cases for generative AI

*How generative AI may impact intelligent automation

*Cautions about generative AI that companies should take into consideration

*How companies should approach this new capability

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