8-28-2017

By Peter High, published on Forbes

Jeff Pashalides is the Head of Corporate at Sequoia Capital, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world. As such, he operates at the intersection between those who are shaping the technology landscape (investors and entrepreneurs) and the CEOs, COOs, and CIOs who would invest in those companies or who would articulate needs unmet by current technologies. As such, he has an unusually strong network and an unusually deep reservoir of insights into the future of technology.

Pashalides has had entrepreneurial experiences of his own, having run Finance and Corporate Development at TrueCar. He also led Blackstone’s software as a service advisory practice for a time.

In this interview, he provides insights into the symbiotic relationship between practitioners, the venture community, and the founding community, how to engage this ecosystem more effectively, and the biggest pain points and opportunities for the executives for whom he has served as a guide on all things Silicon Valley.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

By Peter High, published on Forbes

7/31/2017

A retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of US and International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) Afghanistan and the former commander of the nation’s premier military counter-terrorism force, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He is best known for developing and implementing a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and for creating a cohesive counter-terrorism organization that revolutionized the interagency operating culture. He will be the first to admit that his retirement did not transpire as planned, but the impact that he has had as a private citizen has also been profound.

In 2001, McChrystal founded the McChrystal Group, a consultancy that provides “innovative leadership solutions to American businesses in order to help them transform and succeed in challenging, dynamic environments,” as his site notes. In that role, he has spent considerable time with CEOs across the private sector, helping them understand that the changes he enacted in the military are quite similar to the changes necessary in the business world: silos need to be eliminated, information must flow more freely across the enterprise, ecosystems must be curated carefully and cared for, and companies must strive to innovate while remaining cognizant of an ever expanding threat landscape.

In 2013, McChrystal published his memoir, My Share of the Task, detailing his years in the military, and in 2015, he published Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, describing how the lessons of his military experience apply more broadly. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. He has also joined the boards of JetBlue and Navistar International.

McChrystal describes all of the above and more in this far ranging interview.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

By Peter High, published on Forbes

7/24/2017

Kumud Kalia has been a CIO multiple times over, at Direct Energy, at Qwest Communications, and at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. For nearly six years, he has been the CIO of Akamai Technologies a $2.3 billion global content delivery network services firm. Kalia is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and operation of the applications and infrastructure that support the company’s business operations. As a CIO leading IT at a technology company, in some cases, his team provides guidance of CIO needs and validate the value of the products the company has in development. Moreover, he and his colleagues in IT have developed internal solutions that can be adopted by the end- customer.

Among other areas, Kalia attributes his success to developing a culture that embraces expansive thinking and that is agile in its mentality and its approach. Both have been essential as the company has grown tremendously during his tenure, and its needs and demands for IT’s services are different and far greater than they were six years ago. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.

Peter High: Kumud, you have been the Chief Information Officer at Akamai Technologies for five and a half years. Please describe Akamai’s business and your role as chief information officer.

Kumud Kalia: Akamai has been at the heart of the internet for the past 20 years. Companies that do a lot of internet-based, commercial business use our services to distribute content over the internet. For example, media and e-commerce companies depend on Akamai to run and scale their businesses. We store our customers’ content on our global network of servers that we position geographically close to their end-users. The online experience that the end-user has is the fastest and richest possible because our servers remove latency caused by distance and congestion on the internet. In effect, we speed up the internet by overcoming its natural limitations.

As the CIO of a technology company with many technology-savvy employees, I work with a tough crowd. There are at least 2,000 people in the company who think they can do my job better than I can. There are advantages, of course. Being technologically-aware makes my colleagues more willing to experiment. They also provide critical feedback on technology that we are considering and are adept at debugging my solutions. However, even technology people can be reluctant to embrace new solutions. Engineers tend to consume products that have been built by themselves or by someone they know, and then develop a tribal allegiance to that solution. This challenge is similar to what many enterprise CIOs find with their end-users. I have much in common with CIOs of other enterprises, but I have some natural advantages that come from being in a tech-savvy user community.

High: In our previous conversations, you have said that a CIO and his or her team should foster business agility. IT should not gum up the operation, but rather, as the organization identifies new opportunities to seize, IT should be an accelerator. When you joined Akamai, it was roughly half the size it is now. Presumably, it has plans to continue to grow. How do you think about agility in a fast-growing company?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

By Peter High, published on Forbes

7/17/2017

Chris Corrado has been an IT leader at many esteemed financial services companies such as Morgan Stanley, UBS, Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank. He has also held CIO and CTO roles at technology companies such as eBay, AT&T Wireless, and Asurion. Along the way, his purview has grown from traditional CIO responsibilities to non-traditional ones, such as product development. Currently, he serves as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Operations Officer at the London Stock Exchange Group, a $2.2 billion British-based stock exchange and financial information company. It is headquartered in London.

He notes that CIOs need to be much more cognizant of the “I” In their title. Information is the key to garnering better insights on behalf of the company and its customers. Those CIOs who harness information effectively will take on greater and more strategic responsibilities. Corrado is optimistic that more CIOs will follow in his footsteps to become COOs.

Peter High: Chris, you are the Chief Information Officer and the Chief Operating Officer of the London Stock Exchange Group. Please provide a brief overview of the organization and explain your purview.

Chris Corrado: The London Stock Exchange Group is a collection of complementary businesses. We have a core strategy called Open Access, which reflects our philosophy of transparency and choice. The Group directly runs the London Stock Exchange and the Borsa Italiana. We provide the infrastructure, operations, and technology for the Oslo Stock Exchange. We also run clearinghouses and information businesses that produce indexes and analytics. The firm has experienced remarkable growth since Xavier Role became CEO, in 2009. The existing businesses have grown significantly and we have made 22 acquisitions. Today, the Group is comprised of diversified and complimentary businesses that provide a robust value chain that enables our clients to manage their investment processes. To achieve this goal, we maximize cost effectiveness, time to market and the quality of information. Technology is the fulcrum of this.

There are some unique aspects of the firm that, in turn, make my role as the CIO unique. For example, we sell hosting services because our customers want their technology in our datacenters because this makes our services more robust and less latent. The hosting services fall under me. When Xavier took over, he realized that technology is critical to what we do. However, he was not satisfied with the performance of our technology, which was being outsourced pretty significantly. Since his focus is on time-to-market, we bought technology companies. The companies have maintained their existing clients and have grown their client base as commercial enterprises. We have scaled and stabilized them internally. These fall under me as well. As we continue, I will touch on some other aspects of my position. As an overview, my role is running the company day-to-day operationally, and helping to determine the best client experience for our customers, by leveraging our capabilities.

High: It seems like the best CIOs are thinking about their job more along the lines of being a chief operating officer of technology, as opposed to the traditional order-taking, back office type of role it once was. Do you see this as a natural evolution for a strong CIO?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

By Peter High, published on Forbes
05-23-17

Last week, CrowdStrike, a cloud-based security company headquartered in Irvine, California raised $100MM in a series D, led by Accel Partners. With this injection of funds, the company has reached “unicorn” status as a venture funded company with a valuation over $1 billion. In a post on Medium, Sameer Gandhi, a partner at Accel, noted, “Crowdstrike has more than tripled the growth of its total billings year-over-year. [CEO and co-founder] George [Kurtz], [CTO and co-founder] Dimitri [Alperovich] and team have accomplished quite a lot in just a few years. The team’s vision, product excellence and overall execution is what inspired us to lead the company’s Series D.”

In recent days, inquiries for CrowdStrike’s services have increased dramatically in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack. Previously, the company received great attention for identifying the hackers behind the Democratic National Committee data breach prior to the American election in 2016. Kurtz has noted, “That work raised our profile considerably, solving a high profile problem, separating us from a crowded field in the security space.” CrowdStrike now counts more than ten percent of the Fortune 1000 among its clients.

A serial entrepreneur, Kurtz founded worldwide security products and services company Foundstone in late 1999. The company developed a leading incident response practice, and was acquired by McAfee in 2004. He would rise to the role of Worldwide Chief Technology Officer of McAfee.

While there, he grew frustrated by the antiquated technology at the company that, as Kurtz recalls, “felt more like Siebel when I wanted to develop something that felt more like Salesforce.” He left the company to co-found CrowdStrike in 2012, developing the next generation anti-virus powered by artificial intelligence.

At a recent interview on stage at the Forbes CIO Summit at Half Moon Bay, California, I asked Kurtz for some recommendations on how executives can safeguard their enterprises, and he offered the following advice

Click here to read the full article on Forbes

By Peter High, published on Forbes
3/27/17

Yvonne Wassenaar has been the Chief Information Officer of digital intelligence platform company, New Relic, for a bit more than two and a half years. She represents a rising trend among fast growing, Silicon Valley technology companies who reach a certain size after nearly a decade in business, and determine they need a CIO for the first time. (Recent interviewee, Mark Settle of Okta is another example of this.)

In choosing Wassenaar, New Relic’s executive team brought on someone with the killer combination of a technical background as an undergraduate coupled with an MBA followed by an extended period as a partner at Accenture. She brings equal measure of technical and business acumen together with deep problem solving skills. Not surprisingly, she has also gained board access, serving on the boards of multiple organizations, as well. We cover all of the above and more herein.

Peter High: For a little more than two and a half years, you have been the Chief Information Officer of New Relic, a software analytics company founded in 2008. In your own terms, please describe the business and the roles that IT and the CIO position play within the organization.

Yvonne Wassenaar: New Relic is what I call a digital intelligence platform, which in this age of every business becoming a software business, is vitally important. New Relic technology provides a company with insight into what people are doing with their software. For example, because most people bank on their phone or maybe on their laptop, but less at the retail branch, a digital intelligence platform is critical because what matters then, is not how long the teller lines are or how warm the coffee is, but rather, questions like: “How quickly did the app load? How many people were trying to do what type of transaction? Where are people spending their time?” The insight offered by New Relic’s technology is valuable from a developer-operator perspective for designing and running great software. Furthermore, this type of technology is increasingly important from a business perspective because, if done effectively, it offers us new eyes into consumer behavior which will provide us with more insight than we have ever had.

My role as CIO is an interesting one because New Relic is a technology company that was “born in the cloud.” As such, there is some question as to why New Relic even needs a CIO. However, more companies like Octa, DocuSign, and other similar companies “born in the cloud,” have been adding a CIO role to their docket. The reason being, as amazing as technology is, it does not quite run itself yet. The way that I look at my role within New Relic is to, internally, help the company take advantage of the technology that is available to run the business services of the company; things like sales, billing, and so forth. Even more importantly, externally, to get insights into customers; into how we can better serve those customers and to ensure that we are providing the ultimate digitized customer experience. My role is founded on those two principles of ensuring that internally we can leverage the technology well in a decentralized way but with guardrails, and then externally, that we are bringing the best of our insight from technology to bear in partnering with the CTO in thinking about the products we develop and offer to customers.

High: Do you foresee a time, and if so how soon, where the technology will “run itself” to a degree where the CIO will become obsolete?

Wassenaar: I would say if we turn the clock back five to eight years ago, there were some that believed that the CIO role would become extinct because you had data centers in the cloud, you had SaaS applications, you could credit card swipe your way to nirvana in technology. Now I see a resurgence in the role of the CIO for two reasons. The first is that companies today are structured in a functional fashion. This creates a tendency for them to see things only from one angle. That works fine if you are doing a point solution or something that is working in isolation, but few things in a public company fit that mold. For example, technology such as Salesforce, which may have been fine when they were a small company just supporting a sales organization, however, now it is not just a SaaS application, it is a SaaS platform –and it impacts the value chain across the company. First and foremost, you need someone who has a horizontal viewpoint across functions that is geared toward outcomes. The CIO is a perfect role for that because we have cross-function visibility for large applications, for large investments in AWS and Azure, and elsewhere.

The second reason is there is a lot of work to be done around “basic hygiene” when it comes to running technology at scale. There are certain principles that are important to think about whether you are designing for velocity, or for different use cases, or for size and dispersion of transaction; all of these factor into how you might want to structure your enterprise architecture. I have found that the basic functionality of a SaaS app or AWS is easy to get your arms around, but as you augment, and you build on it over the years, unless you have some understanding of how technology runs most effectively, you will start to create a lot of technical debt. You might be blind to this debt, or you may not necessarily understand or appreciate the investments, or the value of things like staging an environment, or how you actually do agile development in a robust, quality, and effective way. I believe the need for both a horizontal viewpoint and the need to bring a technological mindset to how you architect the ecosystem of solutions that is increasingly not just running your business but serving your customers is going to put increased focus on what people call the CIO role, the CTO role, or the chief digitization role. Somebody has got to play that role, and I think for the next five to ten years, it is going to become more important.

High: You began the description of New Relic as a digital intelligence platform. Digital and intelligence are increasingly the domain of other organizations as well, either in concert with IT, or in some cases superseding IT’s involvement. Given your network and your knowledge of the kinds of companies where the CIO leads the conversation on digital intelligence, versus those where they are reacting to it, what differentiates the former versus the latter category in your mind?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

Peter High

11/1/16

David Thompson has been the chief information officer at a number of leading companies, including Symantec, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. He has broader responsibilities in his current role as Executive Vice President, Global Operations and Technology and Chief Information Officer at Western Union, the $5.5 billion revenue provider of money movement and payment services based just south of Denver, Colorado. In his role, he is responsible for developing the next generation of payment products and services. He also is responsible for maximizing efficiency, quality, and customer delivery for the company’s global agent network of more than 500,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories. This puts Thompson squarely in the innovation agenda for the company, helping the organization both grow revenue while also doing so efficiently.

Additionally, given Thompson’s wealth of experience as a technology leader, but also as one who has always thought of the role of CIO as a business role, he has been asked to join the boards of companies. Since 2010, he has served on the board of CoreSite Realty Corporation, a publicly traded an integrated, self-administered and self-managed real estate investment trust (REIT).

As such, Thompson is at the forefront of two leading trends for CIOs: he has joined the ranks of the CIO-plus, as well as board-level CIOs. When I recently interviewed him, I was interested in his current sets of responsibilities, and the creative ideas his team is driving, but also his own career path, which represents an aspirational track for other CIOs.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 30th interview in the CIO-plus series, including CIO-pluses from Boeing, Verizon, and Walgreens. To read the prior 29 interviews, please visit this link. This is also the 18th interview in my board-level CIO series. To read the prior 17 including the CIOs of companies such as Intel, P&G, Biogen, Kroger, and Cardinal Health, please visit this link.)

Peter High: You’re the executive vice president of global operations and chief information officer at Western Union, and as the name would suggest, you have operation and technology responsibilities. Can you talk a bit about your purview?

David Thompson: I have two jobs. First and foremost, I have responsibility for global operations, which is the management of our customer experience – all of our customer care centers, our interaction with our customers. In addition to that, we have a broad network of partners and agents that service our customers and provide the service globally. Both of those areas require a lot of staff, so a large portion of our employees services our customers’ needs or our agents: Enrolling our agents, training their staff, doing the certifications around [Anti-Money Laundering], and managing the infrastructure associated with our agent network. On the customer care side of the house, I have responsibility to make sure we have a strong, end-to-end process that our customers go through. If a customer has a problem in that process, we have a mechanism for them to interact with us either electronically or via phone, and we can resolve that issue.

The other portion of my job, as the chief information officer for the company, the entire technology portfolio for our customers, our agents, our partners, and the regulators of the company. That is an exciting part of my job. I joined the company as the chief technology officer at a point where we are transforming what we are doing, bringing new capabilities to the market, but at the same time, enhancing the services that we have today.

High: How do you structure your team? Do you have two distinct teams? Are there any other people like yourself that span across both of those?

Thompson: I have a team of 15 direct reports. About half of those direct reports are responsible for our customer care and our operations function – servicing our agents, training our agents, supporting our customers via call center or electronic channels. We also have a series of engineering heads, who are responsible for developing new products on the technology side of the house: engineering capabilities, information security, our global operations’ technical operations: our server infrastructure both in the cloud and on premise.

High: You began to mention in both your responses some of the new things you are doing from a payment product and services perspective. I know this is an area of great innovation for the company. Can you provide some more details?

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Last week, I noted Gartner’s picks for the top-ten technology trends for 2017. This list differed from the lists for 2016, 2015, and 2014 inasmuch as there are more trends that are not yet implemented by even leading CIOs than in years passed. My informal polling of CIOs suggested that most have roughly half of these trends on their roadmap, with many suggesting the number is less than 50 percent. That said, CIOs are interested in better understanding each of these to determine how many more should be added.

My team and I put together our picks for books, articles, and podcasts to better understand the concepts described. Use these as solid primers for your team to better understand the concepts and to translate their validity to your strategic imperatives.

AI and Advanced Machine Learning

My pick for the best book on this topic in recent months is Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable. A founding editor of Wired magazine, Kelly is in his mid-60s, but maintains the curiosity and flexibility of mind of someone much younger than him. He has seen trends come and go, and is a good filter for unwarranted hype, as a result. His book is an entertaining foray into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what it will mean for us.

The authority on the Internet of Things is Stacey Higginbotham, who is a former editor and writer for publications such as Time and GigaOmni Media. She moderates the Internet of Things Podcast.This podcast discusses all angles of the Internet of Things, including interviews with top IoT leaders, as well as unique viewpoints and in-depth analyses on the latest news and trends in the field

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Marc Prosser is a freelance journalist and researcher living in Tokyo and writes about all things science and technology. He has written a great number of pieces on virtual and augmented reality that can be found on SingularityHub.  One of the best isAugmented Reality, not VR, will be the Big Winner for Business. Digi-Capital estimates that AR companies will generate $120 billion in revenue by 2020.This article reviews how Boeing and other companies are experimenting with the technology, and the types of benefits it can provide to companies.

Digital Twin

Michael Grieves is the Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at the Florida Institute of Technology. his paper Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replications is the seminal work on the topic of digital twins, and it explores how digital twins can act as the critical connection between the data about the physical world and the information contained in the digital world about the physical asset.

Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers

Don Tapscott is a consultant and author who has written a number of books on digital trends and their impacts on business and society, including the business bestseller, Macrowikinomics. In his latest book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, co-authored with his son, Alex, the concept of blockchain is explained in clear terms with an eye toward practical recommendations on how businesses might adopt the technology and reasons to do so.

Intelligent Apps

S. Somasegar is a former Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft, where he worked for 27 years. In the past year, he he joined Madrona Venture Group as a Venture Partner. In may of this year, he wrote an article entitled The Intelligent App Ecosystem in TechCrunch, describing how every new application built today will be an intelligent application. He offers an overview of this evolution, and highlights companies that are positioning themselves to realize significant competitive advantages in the years ahead.

by Peter High, published on Forbes

6-20-2016

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a white hot topic today as judged by the amount of capital being put behind it, the number of smart people who are choosing it as an area of emphasis, and the number of leading technology companies that are making AI the central nervous system of their strategic plans. Witness Google’s CEO’s plan to put AI “everywhere.”

There are some estimates that five percent of all AI talent within the private sector are currently employed by Google. Perhaps no on among that rich talent pool has as deep a set of perspectives as Geoff Hinton. He has been involved in AI research since the early 1970s, which means he got involved before the field was really defined. He also did so before the confluence of talent, capital, bandwidth, and unstructured data in need of structuring came together to put AI at the center of the innovation roadmap in Silicon Valley and beyond.

A British born academic, Hinton is considered a pioneer in the branch of machine learning referred to as deep learning. As he mentions in my extended interview with him, we are on the cusp of some transformative innovation in the field of AI, and as someone who splits his time between Google and his post at the University of Toronto, he personifies the value at the intersection between the research and theory and the practice of AI.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the eighth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University.

Peter High: Your bio at the University of Toronto notes that your aim is to discover a learning procedure that is efficient at finding complex structure in large, high dimensional data sets, and to show that this is how the brain learns to see. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and about what you are working on day to day as the Emeritus University Professor at the University of Toronto as well as a Distinguished Researcher at Google today.

Geoffrey Hinton: The brain is clearly very good at taking very high dimensional data, like the information that comes along the optic nerve is a million weights changing quite fast with time, and making sense of it.  It makes a lot of sense of it in that when we get visual input we typically get the correct interpretation. We cannot see an elephant when there is really a dog there. Occasionally in the psychology lab things go wrong, but basically we are very good at figuring out what out there in the world gave rise to this very high dimensional input. After we have done a lot of learning, we get it right more or less every time. That is a very impressive ability that computers do not have. We are getting closer. But it is very different from, for example, what goes on in statistics where you have low dimensional data and not much training data, and you try a small model that does not have too many parameters.

The thing that fascinates me about the brain is that it has hugely more parameters than it has training data. So it is very unlike the neural nets that are currently being very successful. What is happening at present is we have neural nets with millions of weights and we train them on millions of training examples and they do very well. Sometimes billions of weights and billions of examples. But we typically do not have hugely more parameters than training data, and that is not true with the brain. The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.

High: Where would you say we are on the continuum of developing true artificial intelligence?

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by Peter High, published on Forbes

6-13-2016

Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.

Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)

Peter High: Let’s begin with your role at Singularity University, and perhaps a little bit about the University itself. You were president of the University from 2010-2011 and are currently co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics track. Can you describe the University, as well as your role in it?

Neil Jacobstein: Singularity University started on the NASA Research Park campus around 2008. We had our first graduate summer program in 2009. The University’s purpose is to help leaders utilize and understand the business, technical and ethical implications of exponential technologies, which are technologies that increase in price performance every eighteen to twenty-four months. Examples include artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and some other technologies that depend on those. Biology, for example, has become an information science and it is now growing in capability on an exponential curve.

We bring in leaders from around the world to attend our executive programs that are given every couple months or so. Usually there are about eighty to one hundred people in those executive programs and they last about five days. We have a nine-week long summer program that we have conducted every summer since 2009 and typically about eighty people attend. Oftentimes, they have won their seat in that program by winning a contest in their country. I am proud that we now have slightly more women in the program than we have men—we have a good ratio now, finally. We have people from forty plus countries represented, and they are absolutely top students, super competitive students. They cannot buy their way in. The program is sponsored by Google and other companies and in other ways. They live on the NASA research park campus here at Moffett Field and they first are exposed to a few weeks of exponential technologies, including AI, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnologies and other technologies that depend on those, such as energy, manufacturing, 3D printing, and medicine. They address building next generation businesses with each other and also non-profit entities. They form teams and use principles that include crowd sourcing and being able to build and scale entities rapidly, using the principles of exponential organizations. They then address global grand challenges like climate change, education, poverty, global health, energy, and security. Those kind of challenges really require the scale that exponential technologies can provide. The students in their teams—it might be up to twenty different teams—are coached by a wide variety of faculty and staff during the summer program. They then go on to perhaps join an incubator program that we have on campus if they meet certain thresholds, and we have had several successful businesses spin out every year. We are proud of the program and think we are getting better at it every year.

High: In the book Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, it is noted that AI and algorithms could be used to mitigate and compensate for heuristics in human cognition, such as anchoring bias, or ability bias, confirmation bias, cost bias, others like that. As an expert in AI, could you describe that insight, and also the way in which AI, and algorithms more generally speaking, can mitigate those issues?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes