Thank you for coming to the Intel AI lounge

and joining us here for this economist world event.

My name is Jack.

I'm the chief architect of our

autonomist driving solutions at Intel

and I'm very happy to be here and to be joined

by an esteemed panel of colleagues who are joining to,

I hope, engage you all in a frayed dialogue and discussion.

There will be time for questions as well,

so keep your questions in mind.

Jot them down so you ask them to us later.

So first, let me introduce the panel.

Next to me we have Michelle,

who's the co-founder and CEO of Fine Mind.

She just did an interview here shortly.

Fine Mind is a company that provides a technology platform

for retailers and brands that uses artificial intelligence

as the heart of the experiences

that her company's technology provides.

Joe from Intel is the head of partnerships and acquisitions

for artificial intelligence and software technologies.

He participated in the recent acquisition of Movidius,

a computer vision company that Intel recently acquired

and is involved in a lot of smart city activities as well.

And then finally, Sarush, who is data scientist by training,

but now has JDA labs,

which is researching emerging technologies

and their application in the supply chain worldwide.

So at the end of the day, the internet things

that artificial intelligence really promises

to improve our lives in quite incredible ways

and change the way that we live and work.

Often times the first thing that we think about

when we think about AI is Skynet,

but we at Intel believe in AI for good

and that there's a lot of things that can happen

to improve the way people live, work, and enjoy life.

So as things in the Internet, as things become connected,

smart, and automated, artificial intelligence

is really going to be at the heart of those new experiences.

So as I said my role is the architect

for autonomous driving.

It's a common place when people think

about artificial intelligence,

because what we're trying to do is

replace a human brain with a machine brain,

which means we need to endow that machine

with intelligent thoughts, contexts, experiences.

All of these things that sort of make us human.

So computer vision is the space, obviously,

with cameras in your car that people often think about,

but it's actually more complicated than that.

How many of us have been in a situation on a two lane road,

maybe there's a car coming towards us,

there's a road off to the right, and you sort of sense,

"You know what?

That car might turn in front of me."

There's no signal.

There's no real physical cue, but just something about

what that driver's doing where they're looking tells us.

So what do we do? We take our foot off the accelerator.

We maybe hover it over the brake, just in case, right?

But that's intelligence that we take for granted

through years and years and years of driving experience

that tells us something interesting is happening there.

And so that's the challenge that we face in terms

of how to bring that level of human intelligence

into machines to make our lives better and richer.

So enough about automated vehicles though,

let's talk to our panelists about some of the areas

in which they have expertise.

So first for Michelle, I'll ask...

Many of us probably buy stuff online everyday, every week,

every hour, hourly delivery now.

So a lot has been written about

the death of traditional retail experiences.

How will artificial intelligence and the technology

that your company has rejuvenate that retail experience,

whether it be online or in the traditional

brick and mortar store?

>> Yeah, excuse me.

So one of the things that I think is a common misconception.

You hear about the death of the brick and mortar store,

the growth of e-commerce.

It's really that e-commerce is beating brick and mortar

in growth only and there's still

over 90% of the world's commerce is done

in physical brick and mortar store.

So e-commerce, while it has the growth,

has a really long way to go and I think one of the things

that's going to be really hard to replace

is the very human element of interaction and connection

that you get by going to a store.

So just because a robot named Pepper comes up to you

and asks you some questions,

they might get you the answer you need faster

and maybe more efficiently, but I think as humans

we crave interaction and shopping

for certain products especially,

is an experience better enjoyed in person with other people,

whether that's an associate in the store

or people you come with to the store

to enjoy that experience with you.

So I think artificial intelligence can help it be

a more frictionless experience,

whether you're in store or online to get you from point A

to buying the thing you need faster,

but I don't think that it's going to ever completely replace

the joy that we get by physically going out into the world

and interacting with other people to buy products.

>> You said something really profound.

You said that the real revolution

for artificial intelligence in retail will be invisible.

What did you mean by that?

>> Yeah, so right now I think that

most of the artificial intelligence that's being applied

in the retail space is actually not something

that shoppers like you and I see when we're on a website

or when we're in the store.

It's actually happening behind the scenes.

It's happening to dynamically change the webpage

to show you different stuff.

It's happening further up the supply chain, right?

With how the products are getting manufactured,

put together, packaged, shipped, delivered to you,

and that efficiency is just helping retailers be smarter

and more effective with their budgets.

And so, as they can save money in the supply chain,

as they can sell more product with less work,

they can reinvest in experience,

they can reinvest in the brand,

they can reinvest in the quality of the products,

so we might start noticing those things change,

but you won't actually know that that has anything to do

with artificial intelligence, because not always in a robot

that's rolling up to you in an aisle.

>> So you mentioned the supply chain.

That's something that we hear about a lot,

but frankly for most of us,

I think it's very hard to understand

what exactly that means,

so could you educate us a bit on what exactly

is the supply chain and how is artificial intelligence

being implied to improve it?

>> Sure, sure.

So for a lot of us, supply chain is the term

that we picked up when we went to school

or we read about it every so often,

but we're not that far away from it.

It is in fact a key part of what Michelle calls

the invisible part of one's experience.

So when you go to a store and you're buying a pair of shoes

or you're picking up a box of cereal,

how often do we think about,

"How did it ever make it's way here?"

We're the constituent components.

They probably came from multiple countries

and so they had to be manufactured.

They had to be assembled in these plants.

They had to then be moved,

either through an ocean vessel or through trucks.

They probably have gone through multiple warehouses

and distribution centers and then finally into the store.

And what do we see?

We want to make sure that when I go

to pick up my favorite brand of cereal, it better be there.

And so, one of the things where AI is going to help

and we're doing a lot of active work in this,

is in the notion of the self learning supply chain.

And what that means is really bringing

in these various assets and actors of the supply chain.

First of all, through IOT and others, generating the data,

obviously connecting them,

and through AI driving the intelligence,

so that I can dynamically figure out the fact

that the ocean vessel that left China

on it's way to Long Beach has been delayed by 24 hours.

What does that mean when you go to a Foot Locker

to buy your new pair of shoes?

Can I come up with alternate sourcing decisions,

so it's not just predicting.

It's prescribing and recommending as well.

So behind the scenes, bringing in a lot of the,

generating a lot of the data,

connecting a lot of these actors

and then really deriving the smarts.

That's what the self learning supply chain is all about.

>> Are supply chains always international

or can they be local as well?

>> Definitely local as well.

I think what we've seen over the last decades,

it's kind of gotten more and more global,

but a lot of the supply chain

can really just be within the store as well.

You'd be surprised at how often retailers

do not know where their product is.

Even is it in the front of the store?

Is it in the back of the store?

Is it in the fitting room?

Even that local information is not really available.

So to have sensors to discover where things are

and to really provide that efficiency,

which right now doesn't exist,

is a key part of what we're doing.

>> So Joe, as you look at companies out there

to partner or potentially acquire,

do you tend to see technologies

that are very domain specific for retail or supply chain

or do you see technologies that could bridge

multiple different domains

in terms of the experiences we could enjoy?

>> Yeah, definitely. So both.

A lot of infant technologies

start out in very niched use cases,

but then there are technologies that are pervasive

across multiple geographies and multiple markets.

So, smart cities is a good way to look at that.

So let's level set really quick on smart cities

and how we think about that.

I have a little sheet here to help me.

Alright, so, if anybody here played Sim City before,

you have your little city

that's a real world that sits here, okay?

So this is reality and you have little buildings and cars

and they all travel around

and you have people walking around with cell phones.

And what's happening is as we develop smart cities,

we're putting sensors everywhere.

We're putting them around utilities, energies, water.

They're in our phones.

We have cameras and we have audio sensors in our phones.

We're placing these on light poles,

which is existing sustaining power points around the city.

So we have all these different sensors

and they're not just cameras and microphones,

but they're particulate sensors.

They're able to do environmental monitoring

and things like that.

And so, what we have is we have this physical world

with all these sensors here.

And then what we have is we've created

basically this virtual world that has a great memory