- Welcome to the Shiproom, you're on the air.
Yeah, I go with that, too.
So, 62% of Austria's covered with the Alps,
and for 62% of the next hour,
I'm gonna be talking with one of Austria's finest.
With me today, we have Tassilo Festetics
who is the CIO and vice-president
of Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Tell us a little bit about the history
of this amazing organization.
We're a very, we are like a company with a lot of history,
so if you trace back some of our brands,
they're like, 600, 700 years old.
Stella is like, 1366, if you look at Leffe,
Leffe is even older than that
- Oh my word
- It's a very historic company
We are not digitally borne, obviously,
so now we are being totally digitized,
so we see the world around us changing,
so we started on a journey of digital transformation
but then it started to evolve and go into things
like supply chain, also supply chain is a very exciting--
- I can't even imagine what your supply chain is like.
- It's really exciting because we have like,
we have around 350, 400 breweries across the world.
- I'm passionate about the experience we deliver
to our people and I believe fundamentally
that IT right now is in a place where
it can impact culture more than ever before
based upon the experience that we deliver to our people.
- Well I agree with you that this is like,
this is extremely important because people,
What they use in their private lives, they use
a lot of technology and it's very seamless,
they have easy tools to communicate
and apps that they work in well, and if they don't work,
they're gonna switch for something else.
- And then the opportunity, you know,
if you can just make your workforce five, six, seven percent
more effective, the impact that has on the business
all the way to the customers, and so
that modern workplace, I think is just core
to organizations being competitive and delighting customers.
- If you think about our traditional way of communicating
in companies, where you communicate very unilaterally
via emails, for example, the amount of speed
and collaboration that you lose actually, it's gigantic.
- It changes really the entire way
how your company operates.
- So you live and work in New York City right now.
And you were in China for 10 years before that.
But you grew up speaking German in Austria.
- Yes.
- Okay, so what I have for you is a few Austrian sayings.
And I'm hoping you can read it for us
and then give us what a literal translation is
and then what it actually means.
- Okay.
- Okay, alright.
I can't read this, so I'm gonna give you the card here.
- Yeah, it says "jetzt haben wir den salat."
So that literally means,
"now we have the salad."
You could interpret it as being something
out of a restaurant, but actually what we mean is
"we're totally screwed."
It's very important for us to mention
that Austrian German and German German is very different
so we are very different people.
So the German Germans are engineers,
we are probably less engineers.
"Du gehst mir auf den keks."
Literally, "you're walking on my cookie."
That means "you're really annoying."
Alright, one more.
- And that means "nicht das gelbe vom ei."
That means literally, "not the yellow part of the egg."
Not the yolk.
And that means, "you're not the smartest
on the face of the earth."
- So I see there's a lot of food references
that have to do with--
- There's a lot of them, yeah well, you got like
the ones with, but we are very passionate about our food.
- A couple of years ago, you were interviewed by MIT
in a study that was connected with artificial intelligence
and one of the things that they found was,
you guys had so much data that ingesting and prepping
all that data took so much time
that you almost couldn't get started.
- Data indeed was and is still a problem for us,
especially in our case because we've been made
out of so many different companies
- Acquisitions
- Yeah, and it was, we really, applying that together
was at some point was really impossible
so we started to build everything
as if you start from scratch today.
It's really a transformation that takes time
and stamina to go through
but at the end of it you will have data that is
much faster available for everybody.
- What are the benefits that you think
are going to come from all the work you're doing
around applying AI to that data?
- Well this obviously changes also the life
of employees significantly.
- It has cultural impact.
- Yes, it has a big culture impact
and also has a skills impact.
In certain cases you will need new skills,
so you can retrain people on different things.
- Did you see any reluctance, either within
the organization or with your team,
to start to use AI and how, if there was,
how did you address it?
- I believe that people's jobs are gonna be upgraded,
so I don't believe the entire hype of like, robots--
- It's gonna put me out of work,
no, it's actually gonna make you more effective.
- No, and if you look at history, every time technology
came in, actually we created much more work
- Correct
- People's jobs are gonna become much more meaningful
than they are today, you're gonna take out
the transactional piece that is the activity
that people are doing every month,
exactly the same activity.
- Yeah, I'll tell you one of the things that I think
a lot about, you know, as I think about
what the modern desktop is across the world,
every organization is doing the same activities
as to how they think about managing Windows
and deploying Office, if I can automate more
of that from the cloud with artificial intelligence,
I can actually free up a lot of the teams,
first of all to get the best solution to their users,
but I can also free up the teams to do things
that are more innovative and more strategic.
- I read sometimes about companies that don't see
where they could use AI or ML.
It's so interwoven already into what we are doing
that's it's nearly everywhere.
- Talking about teams, we're getting a phone call
on our Teams' phone.
- Wow that's like, very new.
- Hey, you're on the Shiproom here with Tasillo,
who are we talking to?
- Good afternoon.
I'm Professor Tiberius Waynesworth with
the Society for the Preservation and Advancement
of Brewed Spirits and Energy drinks.
I am a beer historian.
- Do you have a question for Tasillo?
- As part of my research, I'd like to dive into
the ABI back catalog with you.
I would like you to tell me which of the following beers
are actual Anheuser-Busch InBev products.
It's a bit of a challenge
and I call or Brew or False.
Shall we?
Michelob Winter's Bourbon Cask Ale.
- Um, I would say brew, and if it's not a brew
we should brew it, definitely.
- Congratulations, you got one right!
Wisconsin Cheddar Hard Cider.
- Ciders is like a great category.
I would say false.
- Alas, that one is fake.
King Cobra Premium Malt Liquor.
- Oh this is a difficult one, because
we don't do a lot of liquor.
I would say false.
- Oh, dear child.
Michelob Ultra Fruit Lime Cactus.
- I don't know, not sure if we have cactus yet,
so I would say more false.
- Macho Muchacho Lager.
- Ah, I would say false again.
- Bud Light Lime Water-Melon-Rita.
- That's definitely a brew.
- Beer lovers rejoice.
Actually I'm quite impressed.
Thanks for taking the time, Tasillo.
And congrats on your data lake.
- So talking about data lake
- We have started
- So we have started building out
a large data lake
directly in the cloud, we even have a data swamp
and a data lake.
So the data swamp is where your data comes in
and it's not clean yet, it's in the swamp.
Once it gets clean it's a lake.
- Yeah, got it.
- We didn't want to build out something
that is massive, that will afterwards,
look for basically a use case,
but start with things that have a use case,
so we went then with--
- A very specific question, a very specific use case.
- Exactly, because then you build something organically
that grows and you don't have afterwards something
huge, that is very hard to manage.
- So the advice there is really as you start
to do these what will become huge projects,
start with something that is meaningful,
that has a clear business problem
that you're trying to solve,
have success and then grow from there.
- Yeah, that's also easier for you to justify investments.
- Sure.
- Because it's a huge investment, and if you would go
with like building a huge data lake for all
the data that you have, the investment's gonna be,
ah, massive, and you will look for,
how do I use it afterwards?
So we said let's go with things that we really understand
what we wanna do, and then we grow from there organically.
- Do something, get a quick win, you build support,
you build energy, and then you grow from there,
but I think getting those quick wins
that you can then celebrate, is core to any project we do.
- We are starting to build some things out
in the modern work space, starting mostly
with collaboration tools.
- Because that's today the most important topic
for everybody and if people are not able to talk,
see each other, call each other, be together--
- At a higher rate, at a higher speed
with more velocity, more intensity
- And I'm sure you experience that in the past as well,
you had like five different conference call lines,
you had like different infrastructure for video,
you had different structure for phones,
you had mobile phones,
so it was like a wide array of things
that didn't make it very easy for people to collaborate.
We went to Office 365, that was great, so today
I can setup my phone, have a video conference
with everybody, I can pop documents
out of OneDrive,
share them, there is still a process also
where people need to identify all the best ways
of working with--
- It's not just doing the same things you did on prem,
you gotta figure out how you use the new capabilities.
- Yeah and people, their habits have to change, right,
where I think now you're getting much faster,
accustomed to this, but it's much more seamless,
integrated, you can switch between devices,
you can access from any endpoint that you have,
so yes, facilitates a lot the way how people collaborate,
that's for sure.
- Now I'm not sure if you knew this,
but the whole time we've been talking,
there's been an AI analyzing our discussion
and it's come up with 12 questions
from our conversation that I'm gonna ask you.
Now just to make things a little more interesting,
while the clock is running, we're gonna use chopsticks here
and as I'm asking the questions,
we're gonna move marbles from one bowl to another.
- Okay, you chose the wrong component here.
- Okay, question number one.
Waffles or French toast?
- Waffles.
- Who's the greater Austrian,
Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mozart?
- Wow, well the one was like, he made it to becoming
Governor of California, I would say Mozart
has still had a bigger impact on the world.
- Who's the best Baldwin brother?
- Who's the best what?
- What's the best place in the world--
- Did you see her, did you see her?
- Look at that, look at that,
you're trying to now distract me.
What's harder to control in an airplane,
the yaw or the pitch?
- It's not actually so complicated, it's feasible.
Do you fly?
- No, but we did our homework on you.
What kind of water do you prefer, still, sparkling or lake?
- What is lake?
Man, how did you, you have less marbles than me,
that's for sure.
- If Prohibition came back in 2018,
what would Anheuser-Busch start making?
- Ah, we have a great product, it's called Prohibition Brew.
- Well thank you, Tasillo, for hanging out
with us in the Shiproom, and if people wanted
to learn more about you or learn more about
about Anheiser-Busch InBev, where would they go?
- They go to our website, they contact us,
it should be fairly easy.
- Thank you for joining us in the Shiproom here,
it's been great to have Tasillo here with us
from Anheuser-Busch InBev and hear about the work that
they're doing as they're taking advantage of the cloud.
Thank you again for being here.
- Thank you very much.
- Fantastic.
How does AI change your job?
- Oh, if it would really change my job
you would have just a robot sitting here.
- Man, I love the Austrian stuff,
thank you very much.
-Oh, thank you.
- You for sure cheated.