Today’s interview is with Don Schuerman, the CTO and Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Pegasystems. Don joins me today to talk about the upcoming PegaWorld iNspire, how excited Don feels about being back face-to-face again after four years, celebrating Pega’s 40th anniversary and 40 years of innovation, the autonomous enterprise, what that means and what it requires as well as generative AI and where he thinks it’s likely to have the most impact in the near term.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The promise of generative AI in customer care and the challenges ahead – Interview with Ryan McDonald, Chief Scientist at ASAPP – and is number 465 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pega for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.

This year it will be an in-person event, for the first time in four years, and will bring together experts and industry leaders to demystify technologies like generative AI and intelligent automation

They will also illustrate how enterprises can practically apply these technologies to turbocharge productivity, improve low-code app development, and optimize customer engagement.

Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Don:

• We are fast approaching PegaWorld iNspire which is Pega’s annual conference that will be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, from June 11th to 13th.
• My definition of CTO is really Chief translation officer, where my and my team’s job is to make sure that we can translate what’s going on in Pega technology and what’s going on in the broader technology space out to our clients so they really understand how to turn that stuff into value and what it means for them and we can turn around and translate what we’re hearing from our clients back into the road map.
• I try and make sure to carve out an hour so that I can ride my bike to the office because that allows me to get some clear space.
• I think a lot of our best thinking happens when we’re not trying to think about a thing.
• PegaWorld iNspire is going to put 4000 people in a space, throw some hopefully provocative ideas at them and see what comes back out the other side.
• The big theme for us this year is the autonomous enterprise.
• AI is like chomping up the world right now.
• We’ll be looking at how do we apply all of this AI stuff, combine it with lots of powerful automation to build an enterprise that is continuously evolving, continuously optimizing and, maybe in some places, even self optimizing or continuously learning automatically so that we’re delivering better experiences for our customers.
• We’re building the kind of agility that naturally needs to be in the organization to respond to a world that is pretty unpredictable.
• There is a direct line between the autonomous enteroprise and what Rob Walker talked to me about back in 2016.
• A good way to think about the autonomous enterprise is through the example of autonomous cars i.e. We’re probably over a decade away from there being a whole bunch of cars that you walk into, you say go here and the car just takes you there. And, there’s lots of reasons for that. But, there are these autonomous capabilities in the vehicle that help me be a safer driver, a better driver and have a better driving experience.  And I think that’s how we’re gonna see autonomy pop up in the enterprise i.e. self optimizing experiences where I’m continuously learning from what customers are asking for and I’m making more personalized offers and more relevant offers to the customer almost automatically over time.
• Every CXO is being asked to figure out what generative AI means for them and their business. Is it safe and can we use it safely?
• Generative AI is not a product in of itself, it’s a tool.
• Organizations are leveraging new technology that they are learning so much that their competitive advantage is their ability to respond to change.
• I often refer to the distinction between what I call commodity AI and proprietary AI. Commodity AI, generative AI is a great example, is trained for you. You’re going to use the same models that anybody else who pays OpenAI or Google or whatever. It’s great, useful, powerful stuff. But ultimately, it’s a commodity that we all get. Contrast this with proprietary AI, where I have trained some models on my game to reflect my customers and my business strategy. And those models don’t have 200 billion records to feed into them. They might only have a couple of million data points and I can’t afford for those models to be unexplainable. I need to be able to tell my regulator, my customer, my employee etc how and why we made the decision that we made.
• The trick is having the discipline to think about the right tool for the job and have the right frameworks in place so that you’re always starting with the use case in mind and then you work backwards to the tool that’s actually going to drive value.
• When it comes to ChatGPT and generative AI…..”Harness the excitement but don’t be driven by the hype.”
• The journey to the autonomous enterprise fits in with the thinking around autonomous service where we automate the simple and are better prepared to deal with the more complex and complicated.
• At PegaWorld, Pega is also celebrating its 40th anniversary and 40 years of innovation.
• Citibank was Pega’s first customer and are still their customer. In fact, the head of data science and analytics at Citibank is going to be speaking at PegaWorld about their journey with Pega and now how they are using next best action in decisioning to continuously optimize their customer experience, to predict what the right conversation to have with the customer is, to earn from every response they get and to continuously get better over time.
• Other speakers include the CMO of Rabobank and the CIO of Aflac.
• We’ve got a lot of clients who are building what they call innovation factories or low code factories where they use our platform to get them started on their journey.
• Not all of it is going to be done with an AI machine learning model. A lot of it is going be done by empowering our employees to come up with new ideas and quickly turn them into applications and new processes and new experiences so that we can be continuously respond to all this stuff and all these new needs that are emerging in our customer base.
• This whole autonomous mode of operation is really about shortening the distance between idea and experiment and experiment and outcome.
• The worst thing you can do to a designer is give them a blank sheet of paper.
• Don says…. automate the processes that matter to your customers, automate the processes that get your customers the outcomes they want so they and your employees spend less time doing the task and more time actually talking and understanding what each other is trying to get out of interaction.
• Check out PegaWorld.com to find out more and, hopefully, I’ll see you there

About Don

Don Schuerman is CTO and Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing at Pegasystems, responsible for Pega’s industry-leading low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. He has over 25 years of experience delivering enterprise software solutions for Fortune 500 organizations, with a focus on digital transformation, mobility, analytics, business process management, cloud and CRM. Don has led enterprise software implementations and provided technology and architecture consulting to senior business and technology executives from Fortune 500 organizations, including American Express, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and BP. Don holds a BS in Physics and Philosophy from Boston College.

As a longtime improv comedian, Don believes that “Build for Change®” is more than a tagline – it’s a mindset, and that great teams bring adaptability, diverse voices, and a sense of fun to all they do.

Check out Pega, say Hi to Pega and Don on Twitter @pega and @donpega and check out Don’s LinkedIn profile.

Image by ktphotography from Pixabay