We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - August 3. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Along with all the analytical and operational gains artificial intelligence (AI) brings to the enterprise, there is another, more fundamental change taking place. As the technology becomes more adept at understanding human speech and intentions, we stand at the cusp of a dramatic transformation in the relationship between humans and the digital universe. Using techniques like natural language processing (NLP) and neural networking, AI will very likely bring an end to the graphical user and even command line interfaces, which require a fair amount of mastery to operate, in favor of a more conversational approach in which operators merely state what they want and the system understands and responds. That's right, no more clicking or tapping through endless menus, no more finding the right app – just ask, and it is yours.

Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver the rapid expansion of IT demand ushered in through digital innovation. "It's a scale issue," says John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell Technologies. "Without autonomous operations, it becomes impossible to keep up with the growing opportunity to become a more digital business using human effort alone." The main hurdle to autonomous operations, says Roese, is more psychological than technological. "You have got to be open-minded to this concept of rebalancing the work between human beings and the machine environments that exist both logically and physically," he says. "If you're not embracing and wanting it to happen and you're resisting it, all the products and solutions we can deliver to you will not help." Technology and infrastructure-driven AI and machine-learning discussions are expanding beyond IT into finance and sales--meaning, technology has direct business implications. "Selling is a relationship between you and your customer, but there's a third party--data and artificial intelligence-- that can give you better insights and the ability to be more contextually aware and more responsive to your customer, says Roese. "Data, AI, and ML technologies can ultimately change the economics and the performance of all parts of the business, whether it be sales or services or engineering or IT." And as companies gather, analyze, and use data at the edge, autonomous operations become even more of a business necessity. "Seventy percent of the world's data is probably going to be created and acted upon outside of data centers in the future, meaning in edges," says Roese. "Edge and distributed topologies have huge impacts on digital transformation, but we also see that having a strong investment in autonomous systems, autonomous operations at the edge is actually almost as big of a prerequisite … to make it work."

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review's editorial staff. "The reason for that acronym was because I firmly believed that the future was not about information technology and communication technology independently," says Roese, president and chief technology officer of products and operations at Dell Technologies. "It was about them coming together." Close to two decades later, it's hard not to call him right. Organizations are looking to the massive amounts of data they're collecting and generating to become fully digital, they're using the cloud to process and store all that data, and they're turning to new wireless technologies like 5G to power data-hungry applications such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In this episode of Business Lab, Roese walks through this confluence of technologies and its future outcomes. For example, autonomous vehicles are developing fast, but fully driverless cars aren't plying are streets yet. And they won't until they tap into a "collaborative compute model"--smart devices that plug into a combination of cloud and edge-computing infrastructure to provide "effectively infinite compute." "One of the biggest problems isn't making the device smart; it's making the device smart and efficient in a scalable system," Roese says. So big things are ahead, but technology today is making huge strides, Roese says. He talks about machine intelligence, which taps AI and machine learning to mimic human intelligence and tackle complex problems, such as speeding up supply chains, or in health care, more accurately detecting tumors or types of cancer.

If we want humans to trust artificial intelligence (AI), then we need to teach the machines empathy, according to John Roese, CTO and president of products and operations at Dell Technologies. Roese joined two other Dell Technologies' companies CTOs on a panel at last week's Dell Technologies Summit: Dell Boomi's Michael Morton and RSA's Zulfikar Ramzan. Boomi is a data management company that lets businesses integrate and transfer data between cloud and on-premises applications. RSA is a security company whose founders pioneered public-key cryptography. The three CTOs discussed three big problems in the data era: what does infrastructure look like in an artificial intelligence (AI) driven, real-time data environment?

Machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) represent one of the biggest disruptions to your career according to John Roese, CTO of Dell Technologies. During the Dell Technology World keynote, Roese made this bold but accurate statement. Despite the hype, AI is real and can't be ignored. Leading businesses are using machine learning to deliver quantifiable business value today. For example, Google used the AI knowledge gathered from its DeepMind acquisition to improve its cooling systems, saving the company of hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is perhaps the most pronounced narrative in business: Across industries, intelligent machines are marching (and these robots will take your jobs). Yet, most CEOs barely mention the subject to the employees who most fear they are at risk. Oftentimes, in their announcements of transformative projects--such as robotics processing automation (RPA), machine learning, natural language processing, and AI--business executives commend new operating efficiencies or workforce productivity, but fail to mention the impact on jobs. This impact, of course, is profound. A recent study by McKinsey predicts that over the next 13 years as many as 70 million workers in the U.S. will be forced aside by robots.