Our industry tends to look at technology as if it is the goal of any effort to buy and deploy it and that is because, to a vendor, it is. Vendors like HP sell technology, so they come up with concepts like “Big Data” and “Digital Transformation” as if they are legitimate goals for buyers. But buyers don’t buy stuff just to buy it (actually some do, but that is a different problem). They buy stuff in order to accomplish a specific set of goals, like reduce costs, increase efficiency, better serve their customers, make employees more productive, and make running a company more manageable.
With AI, we are in the everyone-needs-to-deploy AI space, but the market not only doesn’t know what AI can do for them, they don’t know how to deploy it successfully, and like the other initiatives, they aren’t that excited about deploying AI blind.
Well, at HP Imagine this year, HP took the unusual step of building a set of services and solutions that focus on how to use and deploy AI successfully in order to accomplish business goals in sharp contrast to Dell, which is just throwing technology at the market in another vendor-focused push like digital transformation.
HP’s Better Approach
HP showcased not only how it can help you deploy AI, but how it’ll help you use it. That’s the true value proposition: What can you do better with AI that you can’t do without it? The question isn’t just rhetorical. HP has and is creating a set of blended products and services targeted at improving security, improving productivity, increasing efficiency, improving up-time, improving management and reducing overhead costs, particularly with respect to support.
Examples include adding AI to the meeting process (particularly when Zoom is used) so it can auto-generate agendas (I am so tired of meetings that lack an agenda) and does something that could significantly enhance the career of an attendee. This last caught my attention because remote employees need to be able to stand out in a meeting, not make a comment without realizing that there was a critical piece of information everyone on campus knows but that you didn’t know about. This tool listens in and provides links and information automatically that gives context and allows an attendee to appear well informed even if you weren’t. This alone would be huge to any employee and particularly executives who are judged on competence and often found lacking in meetings, which is an even bigger problem if they are remote.
Here are some other examples:
Printers that use AI to intelligently print
Ironically, HP proved the point when I tried to print my “know before you go” page and it cropped both sides, making the result unusable. Once deployed, this technology looks at what you are printing, from a Word document to a spreadsheet, and automatically formats it not only to fit the page but to better showcase the work (no more spreadsheet pages with one line or column on them). And the AI will also provide auto-generated advice on how to make the result even better.
Remote Presence
In a joint effort with Google, HP demonstrated what is one of the most significant video conferencing advances to date, which is the ability for a remote employee to appear on-site without a headset. I’m not talking about telepresence where you use robotics to project what an employee can do, but actually make the employee appear as if they were there. If you’ve seen digital signs where it looks like the shark, tiger or some other object can move in 3D space in front of the screen, that is similar to what HP and Google have created. The result is almost magical. It isn’t “solid light” yet, so you can’t touch them (you can try but it’s like touching a ghost, or I assume it would be), but the level of realism is incredible. Think of one-on-one meetings, doctor/patient meetings, executive-to-executive NDA meetings, and interviews when the distance between the two people would typically require a long plane trip. This is called “Project Starline,” and you need to see it in order to get how potentially transformational it could be for those who are remote from a critical person they need to interact with personally and where a 2D screen just isn’t adequate. I expect cost will be similar (withing $5K) initially to what the 85” collaborative Microsoft Surface Hub cost (the surface treatment used in Starline is relatively expensive) but it should drop as did the Surface Hub did over time and with volume.
Project Starline was so compelling, one celebrity who saw it wanted it for his home and for each of his remote kids’ homes. It will come down in price over time. I’m calling this “remote presence” for lack of a better term. This is a huge step toward making remote one-on-one meetings far more effective.
AI Producer Studio
Part of helping customers make use of AI is using third parties to complete solutions, again, not just selling AI, but providing the entire solution that accomplishes a business goal. One such partnership was with a product called AI Producer Studio. This caught my eye because doing podcasts or creating your own videos when you don’t have a production staff tends to be not only hard, but the results are less than professional. This tool takes what you record and makes it look like you had professional staff do it. It is a precursor to an increasing number of tools that allow you to act as if you are a large group of people when, in reality, you are far more limited.
Wrapping Up: Defining How People Should Work in the Future
Vendors often focus too much on the tool and not enough on the use of it. AI is no exception, and given the power of AI, that has surfaced a bunch of valid concerns about AIs taking jobs, causing security problems and worse. At HP Imagine, HP imagined a better future, one where AI made things work better, made employees more productive, and enterprises far easier to manage. In short, HP imagined a better future, and I wish more companies and governments would follow that lead generally and with AI in particular. The best thing about HP Imagine is that now I too can imagine a better AI future without the interim pain that AI thinks we will currently experience.
