In early October, Ivanti hosted its first ever virtual event: The IT Leadership Summit, or #ITLS18 for social media. There were a total of 30 presenters, including Forrester analysts, product marketing managers, director-level IT professionals, and executives.

Here is the video and transcript from Kevin J. Smith's: "The Role of AI and Automation in the Rebirth of IT" segment.

The Role of AI and Automation - ITLS

Kevin J. Smith: Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm Kevin Smith, with Ivanti.
 
And, today, is our third and final installment in our "Summer School Series." We hope you've enjoyed it. We're gonna be looking at AI and the future of IT. What I think is a really fun, interesting, and very relevant topic, something that's on all of our minds. 

Well, we've really enjoyed the Summer School Series. It was an idea we had in making summer a little more educational and bringing you some events to look forward to. And so we've really enjoyed being part of this, and really enjoy providing it to you, and giving you a forum in which we can kinda share information and learn together.

Remarkably, we're saying goodbye to summer. I can't believe it's August 29th, but it is. We're saying goodbye to summer. Fall is just around the corner. We're starting to see the early signs of fall. And although we're sorry to say goodbye to summer, we're looking forward to the fun, and events, and all the great things that fall and what follows fall brings to us. 
 
I'm gonna ask you to please send in any questions you might have during the session and we'll take those at the end. If we have any questions that we should discuss with the group, we'll look at those at the end. And with that, let's go ahead and get started. 
 
I want to just take a minute to look at the overview of what we're gonna cover today. And this is how I framed it, is we're going to look at humanity. And the concept of today is that we have this wonderful thing that we're a part of, all of us members of humanity. We have this fascinating technology that's emerging in our market, you can call it AI, you can call it intelligent technology. And there are so many variations of that. This is clearly here to stay, and it's gonna be part of the landscape of IT, and part of the landscape of business for the next 20 years. 
 
And then I wanna, kind of, take on a discussion of humanity and intelligent technology together. What does that really look like? There's been a lot of hype in the media and a lot of controversial thought I would say, a lot of strong opinions about what that future looks like. So, I know many of you have an opinion on that. I'm gonna share mine, and that of Ivanti, and what a potential model could look like, maybe a little bit different than what you've heard. And I'm gonna explore how we could put that model into practice, and how that model could become reality over the next 10 years. And that's the thing, this is not 20 years out. We're gonna start to see AI and intelligent technology reshape how we work in our team, reshape the business in the next five to 10 years. And if anything, I think that curve is accelerating. And then I'll take a look at, sort of, the landscape of the new IT as a broader context, as a broader perspective, and what the role of that intelligent technology could be in that. 
 
So, hopefully, I'll say a few things today that you'll find are interesting. I might say a few things that are not directly in line with what you're thinking. Ultimately that's good, we should have a spirited debate about this, and might give you a few things to think about as well.
 
So, let's start with this wonderful thing that is humanity. And humanity is wonderfully complex. I think when you look at humanity you have to consider... Now, let's take a very objective factual look at humanity. And you're struck at how many dimensions there are to humanity, how incredibly broad and incredibly deep all the issues are that surround humanity. And you also recognize that, yes, humanity is not perfect. Humanity has its challenges. And like anything, humanity has these wonderful attributes, but we also need to be very clear in where humanity might be challenged or might be limited. And that's part of what I wanna go through. 
 
So I'm going to call this the "Tale of the Tape" and look at humanity now. This is some of the minuses of humanity. Again, I think this is very healthy for us, to take a look at humanity through a very clear and objective lens. 
 
So humanity could be very emotional. I know, shocking, some of us more so than others, but there's a lot of emotion that carries us through this evolution of humanity. 
 
Humanity as a system now, I just I think in terms of, again, being objective, humanity is somewhat weak when we look at all the marvelous strong and unlimited systems that we have available to us today. 
 
Humanity is not particularly fast. So slow might be harsh, but I'll use that word as humanity not being operating at light speed if you will, given the acceleration of systems we're seeing in our world today, and the remarkable speed that we're seeing in technology today. 
 
Humanity can be inconsistent. We don't always get the exact same thing every day from humanity. We don't get the exact same thing from minute to minute and from hour to hour. And again we could discuss both sides of this. Of any issue is that that's part of the wonder of humanity, is that we are not perfectly predictable. 
 
Humanity can be slow learners. We don't necessarily have the capacity to learn, and unlimited capacity to learn, and a capacity to take on new information and synthesize that in real time. 
 
And, yes, humanity is people are unique. And that's one of the remarkable things about humanity, is that every member of humanity, every person is unique, and different people have different capacities to learn. But we just have to be fundamentally aware of, if we're in a race of learning, humanity against technology is probably not gonna be the winner in that race. 
 
And then I got a kick out of this one writing this. Yes, humanity has the ability to multitask, again, some people more so than others. But we can be easily distracted. There's just so many amazing things happening in the world around us. There are so much stimulus, and so many things especially in the world today, so many things that are happening is that humanity and people can be distracted at times.
 
Okay. So I wanted to start with some of the challenges of humanity or some of the minuses of humanity, again, because we're being very objective here, we're very, very clear, we're being factual. But we also have to look at some of the wonderful pluses of humanity. 
 
Humanity and people can be amazingly creative. We see evidence of this every day, we see people that come up with ideas that are just wow, those wow moments we are amazed at, the creativity that humanity is capable of, and I think in many ways, uniquely capable of because the creative process is so dynamic, and so complex, and so multi-dimensional.
 
Humanity is wonderfully empathetic. And if we just take a look at this one quality, empathy, it is not a simple thing. Empathy is many things rolled into one, many things that are coming together to create this remarkable emotion that is empathy. 
 
People can be funny, yes, we know some more so than others. So some people think that they're funny, and everybody around them will quickly tell them that they're not. But let's just say humanity has a sense of humor. And as with anything in people and humanity, is that varies. 
 
Now bear with me because I'm gonna bring all of this back to our model here. But I think we have to start with framing these characteristics of humanity. We're natural problem solvers, people are fantastic at this, fantastic at taking input and working through what can be a very, very dynamic robust, and complex problem-solving process. 
 
People are great negotiators. And negotiating, even again just as a specific skill, what you're doing is you're taking hundreds or thousands of data points and then immediately making some decisions and judgments on that data, and playing it back to another party. I mean, that's the process of negotiation. What we've discovered in trying to recreate this process in AI and in intelligent technology is it is not an easy thing to recreate. And in particular, in real time with unknown variables, and variables constantly changing, the party you're talking to, the person you're talking to getting happy, the person you're talking to getting upset, having specific concerns, telling you their specific things that that is causing them to be challenged, that is very dynamic. And again, as a person you're synthesizing these thousands of inputs, and thousands of elements, and immediately making decisions, and decisions you hope are good ones. So, let's never forget how remarkable that negotiating process is and how it's a fundamental part of business. This is relevant because it's a fundamental part of relationships and a fundamental part of business.
 
People are also incredible domain experts. People have been working in IT. And let's use that domain for now in the world of IT for 15, 20, 25 years, and during that time they have accumulated a remarkable knowledge, and they have become our domain experts, and that is something of remarkable value, something that's really important to our future. And I'm gonna come back to that. 
 
But now, let's take a look. We've looked at humanity, maybe some of that made you uncomfortable, maybe some of that you are nodding your head and saying, "Yes, you're right." But let's do the same thing for technology and AI. Again, I'm using this broader category of intelligent technology, but we can frame all this as AI, artificial intelligence, if that's something that you like. 
 
And intelligent technology and AI is remarkably powerful. What we can do today has come light years from where we were 10 years ago, and even where we were five years ago, where we loved to talk about AI. But the reality was, it wasn't really fit for purpose in business yet, most of the potential of AI was still ahead of us. But today, we're seeing AI becoming more practical. We're seeing specific parts of AI...and it gets a very broad category, so let's be very specific about what we're talking about. There are elements of AI that are becoming very useful today. 
 
And that is just the beginning. I would say that if you look at the next 10 years, the potential of AI is still ahead of us, even though it's starting to be very useful today, I think it's probably, you know, one to 5%. And trying to put a yardstick to that in what we can use today versus what we're going to see come into the world of IT over the next 10 years, we'll probably still have 95% to 99% of that ahead of us, and it's gonna happen fast. This is not gonna happen slowly, this is gonna be a wild ride over the next 10 years as all this AI rushes towards us and we find all this amazing stuff. But let's be clear, intelligent technology is surprisingly limited when you look at it very, very carefully. So let's go through our Tale of-the Tape with the minuses. 
 
Intelligent technology is absolutely emotionless. And again, every one of these things has an upside and a downside, but I'm just gonna...we're taking a look at the minuses here, and it's very emotionless. It is very, very, very focused, very single dimensional, very, very serial in most respects, very emotionless. It's quite simplistic. Intelligent technology today has been designed to do typically a single thing, and to do it very well, but it won't operate out of that that simplistic model.
 
I talked about this issue earlier when we were looking at humanity, and humanity is very good at negotiating. And think about a very demanding one-hour negotiation, we have found that it's very, very, very complex, and we've not been able to model that effectively in AI, and intelligent technology in terms of a unique negotiation. Now when we can define the variables, AI is extremely good at that, when it's known parameters, known variables, let's say a game of chess, very, very good. But the problem in negotiating is that the rules change and the process of that. And so as such, I think AI will get there. But today that is a very, very advanced process that we have more work to do. 
 
If you look at the evolution of AI, look at it on the whole, it is somewhat immature, we are really...even though we've been seeing AI in different parts of society for the last 10 to 15 years. I mean, think of IBM's Watson. I think that's a good one because they've done a good job of marketing that, and we've seen commercials on Watson for the past five to 10 years. You know, Watson has had some medical applications, gaming applications, you know, played chess, and starting to have other vertical applications, but it's still relatively immature. Google Home, and Alexa, and Siri have made AI more mainstream. But again, when you look at what those intelligent elements can do, when you look at what those AI elements…and they really are AI, make no mistake about it, those are artificial intelligence entities, they are still somewhat immature.
 
I mentioned this before, AI tends to be one dimensional. Our focus right now is making it do what it does very well, even though that is within a very specific definition. And you can't change the rules on AI in the midst of an interaction or in the midst of an execution. It doesn't work that way. 
 
And then I added this one because I think it's another fascinating attribute that we need to think about, and that is finesse, the ability to dynamically and in real time apply more or less force. Let's think of it that way. Finesse is a wonderful thing. How would you define finesse? Like we talked earlier about empathy, that's another very interesting emotion and one that is very important to IT, as we study the evolution of technology, and as we study the future of business. Never underestimate finesse in business and in the future of business.
 
So let's take a look at the pluses of intelligent technology. Oh, goodness. When you look at the speed of technology it's remarkable. We typically measure what we do as people in terms of minutes or hours. And that's kind of the standard we're comfortable with. But when we look at technology, we're measuring it in terms of microseconds, in terms of milliseconds, seconds then start to look very slow. And that's one of the amazing things that technology can bring us, is just this... And I use the word lightning specifically because technology does really bring us to the threshold of the speed of light. We don't really see that so much in people, we really don't. 
 
Technology is perfectly consistent. Once we have technology and AI element automation configured, it does what it does perfectly consistent every time, hundreds of times, thousands of times, millions of times, and we get the same result. 
 
Technology is tireless. Technology doesn't need a break. Technology doesn't need a day off. Technology doesn't call in sick. It is wonderfully tireless. And again, we need to keep that in mind, that kind of goes hand in hand with consistency and lightning fast. 
 
Technology intelligent. Technology can be immensely strong. And this isn't just the...I'm applying more of a physical form to this. Let's think in terms of robotics, robotics in field service, for example, robotics and doing field repairs, and robotics and doing something in IT, let's say in service management, that requires us to deploy a resource into a facility. Well, yes, that's people today but expect that to be robotic resources in the next five to 10 years. And, man, make no mistake about it, the robotics that we're gonna be deploying become incredibly physically strong, and there are applications for that. They're not everywhere, but there are very important applications for that. 
 
Intelligent technology can be limitless learners. The capacity to learn in intelligent technology is remarkable, so never underestimate that. And the curve that AI is on in terms of its learning is one reason why this whole process is going to accelerate in the next five to 10 years, because these intelligent elements are learning and they're learning every minute of every day. And again, that's gonna benefit us.
 
And scalable. That's another wonderful thing about how we can leverage intelligent technology in making it scale. 
 
Okay. So now with that look at humanity and now with that look at AI, so what do we have here? Do we have…are we facing a future of threat? Is there gonna be conflict, or is there going to be partnership? And what I'm gonna argue, and maybe you've started to see this pattern emerge in what we just went through, and these profiles of humanity and intelligent technology.
 
But my proposal to you today is that we should see this as a partnership. We should see this as a fascinating partnership because we can't let conflict happen. If we allow there to be conflict between AI and humanity, that could fundamentally threaten our culture as we know it today. And as stewards of IT, as stewards of technology…and that's how I want all of you to think of us as IT professionals, we are the stewards of the technology, we are the overseers of technology and business. That's a big responsibility. That is, I mean, bordering on a sacred responsibility, and the business is trusting us and IT has empowered us. So business has empowered us with overseeing the technology and the data of the business, everything technology and everything data in the business is our responsibility. We are stewards, and we have to take that forward, and we cannot subscribe…I would put to you that we cannot buy into this notion of conflict. We can't subscribe to that.
 
And we have to embrace this idea of partnership because a partnership could change everything. A partnership could elevate IT and the business to a remarkable level of performance that is not possible without this partnership. Think about that for a minute. If we let humanity continue to go down its path, we will continue to improve and we'll continue to evolve. If we let AI go down its own path, same thing, we'll continue to improve and we continue to evolve. But the bottom line is we need each other. Humanity needs AI, and AI needs humanity. And I'm going to say that again because that's an important concept. Humanity needs AI, and AI needs humanity desperately in order to be the best versions of what we can be in the future. That is my point for the session today, is embrace this idea of partnership and that humanity for the next 25 years, is incomplete without AI, and AI is even more incomplete without humanity. 
 
Because the very best of humanity and the very best of AI, that is a transformational force and we can't be that alone. Humanity continues to amaze us but humanity can't be the transformational force because business has changed, the rules of business have changed, our world has changed, and we need intelligent technology to transform the business. And I would put to you that AI is even more incomplete without humanity. Yes, AI continues to evolve, AI can do amazing things, but there are big gaps in what AI can do in the next 10 years without the partner of humanity.
 
I've made that point I think clearly, let's explore what that partnership could look like. So, just kind of bear with me for a few minutes, for the next 10 or 15 minutes, and let's embrace this idea of partnership. Let's embrace this idea of the transformational force that humanity and technology can become. And I'm going to look at how we can leverage intelligent technology. So I'm going to give you specific examples of where we can leverage AI. And one category…and, you know, we could call this different things, I'm gonna call it automation. And there are many things that will improve the life of IT in the next 10 years. There are a few things that can change our life, and automation is one of them. 
 
So we're gonna go through this cleansing. Some of you that have been to my sessions in the past, or have been on other webinars, you've heard me talk about this, the cleansing of IT. We have to remove all the waste that has built up in our business processes over the last 25 years. And there's a lot of it there. And it's not because people made mistakes, it's not because we did IT a disservice. This is just natural. There's waste in every business, and there's waste in IT. And it didn't happen overnight. It just accumulated slowly over the past 25 years. And it's important that we do this because, if I could use a technical word for a minute, we can't automate the crap that we have in IT. And there's not a ton of it, but there is some of it, and again that's the waste that has built up over time, just a little bit here and a little bit there. And then over the course of decades, that becomes quite significant. So we need to scrub IT, we need to eliminate all the waste from our business processes, and that has to be done by humanity. Because what we're going to do is we're going to begin to automate all the work product in IT, and we need to remove complexity wherever we can because complexity slows us down. 
 
So this is what I'm going to put to you, is we have to get to 90% automation in the next five years. Now, you could argue, yeah, maybe this is 80%, or maybe this is some other number, I could argue with 95%. But whatever it is, that automation is gonna grow significantly over the next five years. And today, I'd put it in 10% to 20% range for most IT organizations, but it's gonna grow. Self-serve becomes the norm. 
 
And I'm not using the term self-service here, because we tend to think of that as a very specific thing in helpdesk or in service desk. Yes, that's one example of self-serve. But let's think of this more broadly of how we serve, how we give employees and customers the ability to serve themselves, the ability to learn, the ability to execute tasks, the ability to get whatever they need whenever they want it, that's self-serve. And what's gonna happen is intelligent assistants are gonna become common. 
 
And you know, bots is a good example. You're starting to see bots be used in IT and in business. And most of those applications are pretty simplistic but they're very helpful. Make no mistake about it, they're very helpful. Bots are gonna become more and more intelligent. Bots are gonna become more and more capable of doing more for us. I mentioned the example before about Home, and Siri, and Alexa. We tend to see those intelligent assistants and that's what they are, they're intelligent assistants and today, they're very personal. We're gonna start to see business versions, think of the brother of Alexa in business, or the brother of Siri for business, and maybe even on your smartphone, you have Siri that helps you on personal matters, making a phone call, updating a contact, you know, setting an alarm, giving me a reminder. There'll be a business equivalent of that that's even more capable. So think of Alexa or Siri, but a thousand times more capable, in a business version of that. 
 
That is what we're going to have available to us not 25 years from now, 5 years from now, just 5 years from now to help us do business, and to help us answer questions, to help us have a conversational dialogue. That interface is gonna become more and more common because it's natural to us. It's convenient and it's fast. So these automation examples, these intelligent assistance are where we're gonna be able to leverage intelligent technology just over the next 5 years, this is not 15 or 20 years ahead of us. 
 
So, let's look at how we can leverage humanity in this wonderful partnership. I have take this specific area…and there are many of them, but I've picked a specific area because I think as IT professionals, we are increasingly recognizing that innovation is strategic. Innovation is the future of the business. Those businesses and those IT organizations that find a way to innovate are gonna be the leaders of the future and they're going to thrive. Those IT organizations and those businesses that don't innovate or can't innovate, they are gonna struggle to even survive and many of them are gonna fail. This is the lifeblood of IT and the lifeblood of business is innovation. 
 
This becomes a cultural focus. Part of what we have to do in transforming IT in the next five to 10 years is making innovation a key part of our culture, a natural part of our culture. This is fundamentally a creative process. My proposal is that, in many respects, this is beyond the capacity of AI in the next five to 10 years, we can't count on AI to innovate for us. Yes, we can count on AI to do those wonderful things we just discussed, and even more just in the scope of our time together today, and I wanted to limit my slides to 40 to 45 minutes. What I gave you are 6 or 7 examples of what a 100 things could be that AI does for us.
 
But make no mistake, and I'd love to have this debate with you when I see you at a future conference or event, but we can't count on AI to innovate for us. I'm making a distinction between automation and performing certain functions very quickly and even intelligently, versus the creative process of innovation. This is focusing on the user experience. This is focusing on the customer, and how we connect to our customer, how we make happy customers, how we create loyal customers. This is innovation improving and making breakthroughs from time to time, and the user experience in how we serve our customers creating new products, offering new services. This is an engine. This is an engine we have to build for IT and for the business. 
 
And my proposal, if you read between the lines here, is that IT can't just systematize innovation that's created in the business. IT has to become an engine of innovation. IT has to become a source of innovation for all of the business. And that is part of the transformation of IT in the next five to 10 years. And in doing that, oh, goodness, boy, in IT, we are rule followers. We don't like to color outside the lines, we like to color inside the lines. So it's kind of foreign to us. What I'm proposing to you is that we have to take more risks in IT.
 
Now this isn't negligent risk, this is calculated risk, because a lot of the great breakthroughs come from taking risks. We have to do more prototyping, we have to do more strawman models, we have to have more crazy ideas in IT, and we have to make that part of the culture. We have to encourage the people of IT to bring forward crazy ideas. And some of those don't merit more investigation, but some of them will. Some of those crazy ideas, we're going to invest in, and we're going to create new test beds, our new prototyping labs within IT to foster this whole notion of innovation. This is our future, and this is humanity. We need humanity to focus more on innovation, in IT. Yes, in IT, and that's what I'm saying, and in bringing that to the business.
 
Now, yes, of course, there are gonna be people in R&D and development and marketing across the business that have innovative ideas, but what I'm suggesting is IT now is another source of those innovative ideas. IT is now gonna create a model that allows us to accelerate those innovative ideas and bring them to the business. And this is going to be the role of humanity. 
 
Intelligent technology and AI is going to automate many of the standard functions, many of the repetitive tasks, many of the high volume tasks in IT to free up our people to focus more on innovation. And that is the relationship here, that is the partnership, is IT is gonna take more time, IT is gonna find more time to focus on innovating, find more time to bring forward crazy ideas because AI is gonna offload 10%, or 20%, or 30%, or 40% of the work that we do in IT every day today. Yes, maybe it gets to 80% in the next 5 or 6 years, 90%. Great, we still need our people because they're gonna be focused more on strategic activities and focusing more on innovation. So, I hope that makes sense. And I'm gonna move on here, and give a profile of what that better business looks like. So this is what it looks like.
 
So this partnership between humanity and AI allows us to operate around the clock. It allows us to grow and do everything we do incredibly fast, fast becomes strategic. I could talk about fast alone, just by itself, for an hour. But fast because everything…because where there is great product, and great service, and great quality, let's not forget about quality, fast becomes strategic. How fast can I get it? That is really important as products commoditize, as services commoditize, fast becomes highly relevant in our market. 
 
We have to be more personal. IT has to become more personal so the business can become more personal. That is really important. I see automation getting to 99% in the next 10 years. Probably can't get there in the next 5 years, but I think we'll get to 99% in the next 10 years. And then everything becomes more about innovation. Everything becomes more about personal. How personal can you serve me? How well do you know me? Everything becomes quality. And that becomes the new frontier, is speed, quality, personalized service operating around the clock. That's the profile of business. That is the new profile of business. And then you've got to make it easy for me. And whatever my experience is, it has to be easy, and innovation becomes…we recognize it as the lifeblood of business. 
 
And this profile of seven things…I'm sure you have your seven things too. But this is a very, very fast kind of profiling what the future of business looks like only made possible through the partnership of AI and humanity. And both of those elements, both AI and humanity, occupy an equally valuable place in that partnership. And this profile we're looking at, let me be clear, this is not possible with humanity alone. We're too challenged in doing things at the speed of light, or getting all the way to the high level of automation, or operating around the clock. 
 
Conversely, this is not possible with AI alone. AI I can't do this on its own, not even close. But when you put humanity and AI together, I'd submit anything's possible. And this profile becomes achievable, not in 50 years, this is not some future culture, this is possible in the next 5 to 10 years. And I would put to you, the wonderful people of IT, that we can lead the way, we can make this possible, we can make this new partnership possible. And look at my last bullet there for just a moment and think about that. 
 
I submit that technology upvalues humanity. Technology doesn't diminish the value of humanity, technology and AI upvalue humanity. Why is that? Because it allows us to focus humanity...I've already made this point, I'm gonna make it again because it's important. Technology frees humanity, AI frees humanity to focus on the wonderful things that humanity does best like the creative process, like innovating, like improving how we serve our customers every day. That is where we need humanity focused, making the wonderful emotion of empathy available to our customers of the wonderful process of negotiating. All of that is absolutely critical. This is our future together, AI and humanity. 
 
And now my final couple of slides. I'm just gonna talk about the IT rebirth. And kind of let's pull this back a bit, and let's look at a broader context of how we transform IT because that's what we all have to be thinking about. We all have to be thinking about, how does that happen? In a broader sense, this is the context. So we've talked about AI, we've talked about humanity, let's take a step back, culture. This is all about culture and people in our culture. AI becomes an active member of our culture, but we have to be focused on our culture because we can't think that technology gets us there. Ultimately, technology is an important asset. Technology is an important resource. 
 
But the way we get there, the way we get to a transformed IT, the new IT, is through people and culture and outside-in thinking. IT has traditionally been kind of inside-out. We focus on technology and then we march it over to connect it to customers in the markets, in the business. That's gonna change. We need to think in terms of outside-in, everything begins and ends with the customer. We begin and end with the marketplace and then we march that back into technology and data. 
 
IT must have a singularity of purpose. We believe that IT has to unify, IT has to come together around the singularity of purpose to better serve the business, and to even more importantly better serve our customers. 
 
We've got to bring new diversity to IT, new skills, and new talent. IT is gonna look different. It won't happen in the next year, it won't happen in 2018, it won't happen immediately in 2019, but we're gonna bring more skills and more diversity to IT as the look, and culture, and makeup of IT begins to change and accelerate over the next 5 to 10 years. And I do think that's the rising for this new IT. I think we'll build this new IT in the next decade. It's happening today, and it's going to accelerate. And that just in the next 10 years, IT looks fundamentally different, IT thinks fundamentally differently, and IT executes fundamentally differently. 
 
Think entrepreneurial. How much have we seen IT as entrepreneurial in the past? Well, not very much, but I'd submit to you that IT is gonna become very entrepreneurial, and that's a function of outside-in, that's a function of focusing on the customer and on the business. It's a function of new skills, more business skills coming into this. 
 
Here's an interesting idea. Technology needs a mentor, AI needs a mentor. AI is a baby, AI as an infant, AI is a child, whose most of its potential is ahead of it. And AI's mentor must be people. So, one of the key roles of people and humanity in the next 10 years is mentoring AI, making AI great, helping AI to learn, helping AI to learn the skills of a sense of humor, of empathy, of the creative process. AI can only learn that from people, it can only come from people. Those skills are unique to people. Easy and fast become attributes that help us win in business, and they're absolutely critical. 
 
And then the final thought I'm going to leave you with is that, as we build this new model for IT, it's not just for IT, this is not a new IT, it's not a unified IT or a transformed IT for IT sake, this is about the new IT becoming the new business. This becomes an unstoppable force, an unstoppable influence that won't put its brakes on at the boundaries of IT. This new model that we've been talking about for the last 35 or 40 minutes, that becomes the model for the new business, and increasingly, there is no difference between a transformed IT and the business. They become one. So we're gonna unify IT, and then we're gonna unify the business. We're gonna to transform IT, and then we're gonna transform the business. And this model of innovation, this model of customer focus, this outside-in model, this model of the creative process and the new culture, of obsessing on the customer, that is the new business model. So we're gonna create that in IT because we have to transform IT, but then it's gonna create this remarkable influence over the whole business, and we're gonna all come together, and it's gonna be a lot of fun. 
 
So, thank you, guys. I really, really appreciate you joining us today. My email address is here. Feel free to contact me. Feel free to contact anybody you know at Ivanti. I hope you've enjoyed the Summer School Series. We bid farewell to Summer School now. That is my Twitter handle. Follow me on Twitter. And take a look at Ivanti. Ivanti puts up some great stuff on Twitter as well. And with that, Erica, do we have any questions we want to discuss from today?
 
Erica Azad: Hey, Kevin. So we just have one question in the chat. And feel free, everyone, to continue submitting questions. This question was someone, they were wondering for advice to help start shifting their team's mindset to focus more on innovation.
 
Kevin J. Smith: Yeah. That is a great question. And the key is, is we have to start small, and we have to carve out a little bit of time…and this doesn't have to be every day. So this could be weekly, it could be monthly, it could even be quarterly. So what I encourage you to do is carve out a little bit of time to brainstorm and to share those crazy ideas. You could do this over lunch, you could bring in pizza, and once a month, you have the crazy idea luncheon or the brainstorming luncheon. You decide what the schedule is, could be at the end of the day, and people stay an extra half hour. Could be a breakfast, you bring in breakfast burritos or muffins, and you do it at the beginning of the day. But create a cadence of brainstorming. 
 
And what you want to focus on is, how do we make the user experience better? What are our ideas for how we improve the user experience? And, yes, this is about IT, anywhere an IT system is touching an employee, or touching a customer, how do we make that experience better? 
 
Another great topic is waste. How do we simplify what we do? How do we scrub some of the waste out of IT or out of some of the systems of IT? Are there reports that we do that are no longer necessary? Are there manual approvals that we're waiting on that we can automate? Are there unnecessary... Are there legacy systems that we can simplify? Are there legacy systems we can eliminate? All of that is incredibly valuable. All of that is really good. So once you start that process of brainstorming and bringing ideas to IT, it starts to gain momentum and it's really about just taking the time to talk about it. 
 
And so maybe it's a cross-functional team and anybody is invited, anybody can come from the security team, from service desk, from the endpoint team, from the data center, and we create this forum where we're talking about innovation, we're talking about the user experience, and we're looking for ways we can eliminate waste. It doesn't matter if you do that quarterly, or monthly or even weekly. Once you start that process, the culture starts to shift, we start to spend more time on innovation, and then you start to plan for how you can focus even more on that in the future. So I hope that helps. Long answer to that question, Erica.
 
Erica Azad: I think that was great. And that's all the questions we have. So if you have any final thoughts, then we can wrap up.
 
Kevin J. Smith: Okay. Again thank you, guys. We know how busy all of you are. I hope you heard one or two interesting things on the call today. Really appreciate you making us part of your day. Hope you've enjoyed the Summer School Series. Look for a new event coming from Ivanti in the future, potentially a new series of events. Try to do these webinars in a way where you can participate, doesn't have too big of an impact on your day, you don't need to travel or get on a plane. We'll continue to do that and try to bring you good learning, good information and some value in your day. 
 
So, it was my pleasure to be part of your day today. Thank you again, Erica. That is our final thanks. And hope to see you again at another event in the future. Goodbye for now.