Schön, dass wir wieder mit dabei sind bei einer weiteren Folge von TJs Technology Tuesday. In dieser Episode einmal einen Vortragsausschnitt einer Keynote, die ich vor kurzem gehalten habe, zum Thema künstliche Intelligenz. Ich wünsche Ihnen viel Spaß dabei.
Beginn der Keynote
Looking to realistic ideas and realistic use of technology. Another nice example is self-driving cars. Don’t know if anybody of you has already driven a Waymo car in San Francisco. Anybody who has already taken a… I see some drives there. I hear a lot of Germans say, Self-driving cars? I would never go into a self-driving car. What they did is they just Okay, don’t be dogmatic, be pragmatic. They now have more than 41 million kilometers with self-driving cars in San Francisco and in Waymo and the other cities. In that time, they had 11 crashes. They compared it to regular ones, and they are above the 100. Yes, of course, A human being would never be so stupid like a Tesla to drive into a white lorry. But an artificial intelligence would never be so dumb to have a look on the smartphone and crash on the preceding car. Actually, I have a very good friend of mine who’s living in San Francisco, and he says, I have a very simple strategy. When I want to cross the street, I always have a look. Is this a real driver or is it a waymo? The moment it’s a real driver, he stops.
The moment it’s a Waymo, he crosses the street because he knows the Waymo car has seen me before I saw it. So artificial intelligence is making different mistakes. We have to understand to say, yes, artificial intelligence is making mistakes we as human would never do. But in most of the systems, the bottleneck is not technology. My team always says, Boss, it’s not the system, it’s the man who’s sitting behind the system. You’re the problem. And looking into how we judge technology, there is a very smart company and a hype cycle, you probably heard it. So the Garden Company. And they’re always looking into how are expectations on technology developing over time. I always compare it a bit to driving a bicycle. Who of you has children? We see some hands. Who of you ever have been a child? I assume now you’re in the game. I still remember when I got a bicycle at my birthday Okay. Of course, what I was, I was excited to say, A bicycle? Yeah, I love it. I can explore the world. Everything is possible with my bicycle. Then came step number two. I will never ride a bicycle again.
I always crash it and it, no, nothing. Of course, my father was smart enough to say, Okay, give it another try, give it another try. I assume some of you can align with that experience. Probably, bicycle driving is not as exciting as it was when I received my first bicycle. But now I can even move very productively with that and still have some fun. That’s also when you look into technology. Nowadays, nobody talks about metaverse. So metaverse was the big thing before artificial intelligence. So three years ago, if I would have said, I’m going to a conference. I said, Conference? That is 1980. We are meeting in the We all have artificial intelligence. We have VR glasses, we have AR glasses or virtual reality, artificial augmented reality. We all are there. Nobody is going to meet. Apple Vision Pro came, and now While the press is now writing, Yeah, Apple Vision Pro is a flop, Porsche is implementing it into their car dealerships. So next time you get your next 911, so you see the one in black and you say, Okay, that’s a bit boring. How does it look in yellow? No problem. You get an Apple Vision Pro, and then you can shift the color.
Or while other people are saying, Metaverse and Apple Vision Pro is dead, Lufthansa is using it to train their in-cabin personal. They can decide, Do I want to have a friendly guest or an unfriendly guest? And have a very realistic training experience. This is what I always say. So summing up that together, what are the biggest mistakes in terms of why technology is usually increasing complexity, increasing costs, but not productivity? It’s three things. Number one, tools for fools. Number two, shitty data and processes. Number three, unrealistic expectations. So therefore, it’s a very good idea to start with probably not the shiniest systems, but with the systems that are working. All was to say, before we start with artificial intelligence, let’s start with common sense. Or, as Andreas already said, switch on brain first and then technology. A company out of a very different sector who did that very smartly some years ago was Mercedes-Benz in the USA. Buying cars Cars in the US is a bit different than buying cars in Germany. If you tell a US guy to say you have to wait nine months for your Mercedes Benz E-Class, they would ask you, Which pot have you smoked?
The usual stuff is that you go to your dealership and you drive off the dealership with your car. But they had a challenge. You see that challenge on the picture here. Because the moment when somebody said, I want to have that car, they said, Let’s go to the office and finish the leasing agreements. The problem is sitting here, those doors. Because some of the clients decided to use one of the exit doors before they arrived at the office. They said, Okay, how can we close that gap? What can we do to solve that bottleneck? And what they did to say, the moment a client says, I want to have that car, that’s really great. They say, Please sign here. And what you see here is a first-generation iPad. So it’s as sexy as when you receive a parcel from your career when you’re back at home. Is it about shiny pictures, about shiny systems? No. It’s about the mechanic behind it. It’s like when I always ask, what is the ugliest web page in the world? The ugliest web page in the world is Amazon. So every designer is saying, This is a piece of crap.
But it’s one of the best converting web page in the world. So it’s not about shiny, bling-bling, it’s about the mechanic. And therefore, I always say, Relevance beats flamboyance. Another company that has understood technology very well is the Coca-Cola Company. On one day, like today, they had a management meeting, and the former CEO of the Coca-Cola German organization, Ulrich Nehmer, he stood in front of his management team and said, Guys, we have a problem. When a client wants to have a Coca-Cola fridge, it takes us four weeks to place it. Four weeks where the client is making no turnover, we are making no turnover, and competition can jump in. And what he did, he didn’t ask, How can we get that a bit faster? He stood in front of his team and said, What do we have to do to reduce that from four weeks to 24 hours? And at that moment, it was even quieter than here in this room. And he was very generous. He said, We can discuss whether we reach that this business year or next one. By the way, it was at the end of the business year, so he was very generous.
He said, We can discuss about which processes do we have to optimize? Which technology do you need? How do we have to train you? But one thing I’m not going to discuss is about the goal. What he said, this is Oreg Nehama, he said, Technology is It’s only sensible when it meets four criteria. Criteria number one, it has to increase speed. We have to get faster. Criteria number two, it has to improve collaboration. Number three, it has to improve connectivity between also the different departments, suppliers, and clients. Number four, it has to increase scalability. Then it makes sense. On the other hand, this is a picture of the meeting rooms because what they did is they changed monthly meetings where everybody was just complaining why everything doesn’t work to daily stand-ups. And what they did, they had here these blackboards, these metal ones, and they had small groups where they’re just asking the questions, How many refrigerators did you sell yesterday? And how many refrigerators do you sell today. Because Ulrich Nehama is very clear, and Coca-Cola is very clear, to say within Coca-Cola, there are only two jobs. Either you sell Coca-Cola or you help to sell Coca-Cola.
The nice thing, I came in there as a digital process advisor, and the first thing what I saw was this one, those digital whiteboards. I was just observing them, and I saw the teams at the one stage were discussing more on how to change the digital color of the digital pen than about how many refrigerators they are going to sell. The first measure I pulled through to say, Okay, throw out these whiteboards, the digital ones. We threw them out. We said, You’re a crazy digital guy. I booked you to get more digital, and you say, Okay, get less digital. To say, Yes, digitalization makes sense, but you don’t have to do everything digital just because it works. Do it when it helps you to be more productive and to solve the problems of your clients in a smarter way. Talking about smart solutions. So like this one, for example, invented in 1849. So I don’t have very many ideas to say how you could improve it. So for example, breathing, a very old concept, but don’t think whether it’s sensible to change it. On the other hand, when you’re looking into… A friend of mine posted that in May to say, What is a solopreneur doing on a Sunday morning in May?
I said, Jens, I think we have to talk. Because there are solutions like get my invoices, for example, where it can automate those stuff and where you also as a service provider can say it’s not about booking any receipts. This is something that artificial intelligence can do even smarter and more efficient today. Your role is a different one as an advisor. It’s important to understand strategic IT in terms of to say which are the goals you want to achieve? Like Coca-Cola, to make more turnover. How do we have to adjust our processes to deliver those coolers faster? And how do we have to use technologies? Which technologies do we use and need to achieve that? It also, of course, makes sense to think it from the other end. To say, okay, there was, for example, a new technology where they saw, okay, the iPad is able to measure exactly the dimensions which are available for the refrigerator.
I hope you could take the one of the issues they had were to say, okay, a lot of refrigerators came even before the four weeks. The problem was just they were two millimeters too wide. They said, hey, iPad can measure that. We can optimize their process to achieve our goals. It’s both ways, but it should always be with a strategic focus, and therefore tools and gadgets are important, like I stated in the beginning, but always embedded in a strategic process. Your next event, find an informative, an inspiring, a moving audience, who is your team, your sales partner, your service partner, who is inspired, inspired, and, above all, in the implementation brings. Then I’m very pleased. When you me talk to me, I’ll be happy to speak to you as a keynote speaker as a Workshop-Verantwortlicher, or in anderen Formaten, and mit ihren Kunden. Mit ihren Kunden spreche ich natürlich dann auch nicht nur diese eine Stunde, wo ich einen Vortrag halte, sondern ich bin bei den Vereinstaungen den ganzen Tag mit dabei, sodass ihre Teilnehmenden hinterher sagen: „Wow, das war aber ein toller Service. Genau das ist meine Idee, seit ich 1988 bei Nixdorff begonnen habe, das Thema Digitalisierung, Vertrieb und Produktivität zusammenzubekommen, aber das Ganze auch mit Spaß, mit Motivation, sodass neue Technik keine Angst erzeugt, sondern dass die Teilnehmenden Lust auf Digitalisierung, Lust auf KI haben.
Ende der Keynote
Fazit
Ich freue mich sehr, wenn ich auch Ihre nächste Veranstaltung dementsprechend bereichern kann. Ihr Thorsten Jekel.
