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[LAUGHTER]
MARCO IANSITI: OK, who's going to start this?
KARIM R. LAKHANI: You start it it up.
MARCO IANSITI: The Age of AI is really
defined by the emergence of a different kind of company.
Which is kind of a big deal, because that doesn't
happen in business very often.
Traditionally, we have built companies
around individual units in silos.
You have a silo around marketing.
You have a silo around product development.
You have a silo around manufacturing.
Because the silos are necessary to optimize how people work.
But as more and more of the company
is made up of digital technology, then gradually,
what happens is the companies need to be built differently.
Modern organizations are really built
around a data-centric architecture that
integrates the data across as many different parts
of the firm as you can.
And then efficiently deploys technology based on that data
to power as many different processes as it can reach.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: Can I just put something in here?
MARCO IANSITI: Yeah, yeah.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: What I can say is the Age of AI
is not some distant thing that's going to happen in the future.
It's happening now.
It is happening to us today.
Even actually at this moment, if you're watching us
on a website, you're watching us on your mobile phone,
this has been enabled by companies that are squarely
innovating in the Age of AI.
The challenge for the rest of us who
are not in organizations that are AI centric, that AI first,
is how do we adapt?
How do we change?
So that we can also be competitive with both
the giants, but also the newly-emerging firms that are
trying to make a difference.
We thought we had time.
We thought lots of industries had
time to make the adjustment.
Of course now, that is no longer the choice.
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MARCO IANSITI: So the COVID pandemic pretty much changed
everything.
All of a sudden, every company had to cope with this.
One of the most amazing thing was that companies actually
did that.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: My favorite example of this
is actually like your local restaurant.
Remember how crappy the websites were for local restaurants?
If you wanted to go look at menus or what's on the specials
today you'd be like stuck in PDF world on your little browser
on your phone.
Overnight, just for sheer survival purposes,
all these restaurants became digital.
They started to work with the Uber
Eats of the world, the Postmates of the world,
to make delivery happen.
The whole restaurant experience became,
overnight, got digitized.
MARCO IANSITI: You know what, Karim?
You know what?
The QR codes, all of a sudden they're everywhere in the US.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: Exactly.
MARCO IANSITI: Because nobody wants
to go into the restaurants.
You want to go and figure out what the menu is.
So you grab the QR code from the door.
And there you get to the website.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: I was so stunned by the rapidity.
I think it was survival.
It's a survival instinct.
This, to us, is the big accelerant.
MARCO IANSITI: Look, it's real simple.
If you walk down the street and you
notice that your local Chinese restaurant is just
using QR codes to point to their menu,
your typical multibillion-dollar enterprise
should be able to do it as well.
People transformed.
Literally, overnight.
One classic example is Mass General Hospital in Boston.
Which is a 215-year-old institution
that overnight in January, it really
re-architected its own operating side
to deal with what they were pretty sure
was going to be this terrible pandemic and terrible strain
on their traditional resources.
So they integrated the data assets.
They pulled in this large data lake.
Essentially, this infrastructure that
would enable you to very quickly create predictive models around
how many ventilators they might need, how many NA5 masks they
might need.
All that had to be predicted.
KARIM R. LAKHANI: This requires a degree of centralization
around the data.
You can't have the cardiology unit
have its own database away from the nephrology unit,
away from the ER department.
Not only do you want all the data.
You want to be able to look across all of these
and then make predictions about where capacity is needed,
where do you expect patients to come through?
And provide this view globally across the enterprise.
This view of data integration, analytics and software
as the core is the big shift.
MARCO IANSITI: It's almost like the pandemic was an accelerator
really, of things that people had wanted to do before,
and necessitated the deployment of certain systems.
That, on the fly, were re-architecting
how the organization actually worked.
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KARIM R. LAKHANI: Another really cool example
that we have featured in the book
is a company called Moderna.
The big aha!
for the CEO Stéphane Bancel around AI and digitization was
he had walked into one of his scientist's offices
in the early days.
The scientist was basically doing some complicated set
of calculations, moving genes from one side
to the other side.
He had five screens all around him
and was basically copy-pasting stuff from Excel
in one cell to the other cell.
That he saw as a nightmare.
Because in the biotech world, you
have a copy paste error, that's going
to put you back six months, nine months,
if something by accident got transposed
or through some careless mistakes.
He basically freaked out.
He said we can't have these large investments
in our technology be driven by manual processes.
So he decided to build Moderna with a digital foundation
and invest it in digital capabilities
across the enterprise.
From Manufacturing to R&D, to Clinical to HR, you name it.
All of those had to be digitized and put together.
This transformation actually help with the COVID pandemic
as well.
Because they were able to, within 42 days,
once the virus was sequenced, to then
be able to submit to the FDA.
a vaccine application.
They're still a startup with 1,200 employees, right?
Competing with trying to create a vaccine
with large organizations in the pharmaceutical world.
If you think about the scale of what they've
been able to accomplish tells you
the differences in processes that
can be put into place if you have digital data and analytics
at the core of your operation.
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