Remarks by Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Casposella, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, at Envision 2016 in New Orleans on April 4, 2016.
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela. (Cheers, applause.)
CHRIS CAPOSSELA: Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning, everybody. (Crowd responds.) Awesome.
It’s my real privilege and honor to welcome all of you to the very first Microsoft Envision.
You know, for years, Microsoft has been holding events for IT professionals and developers and our partners, but we’ve never before done an event like this dedicated to business leaders from all different roles and all different industries.
So this is really an exciting new chapter for all of us, and I’m thrilled to be on stage here welcoming you all to New Orleans.
There are about 6,000 people here in person, and then we have many tens of thousands more joining us online from literally all walks of life. So we’re really incredibly excited to have all of you here because this show is really for all of you.
When we think about the roles and the industries that are represented here, it’s pretty staggering. Just about every industry that we can think of, from manufacturing to financial services, professional services, sports and entertainment, consumer packaged goods, government — you name the industry and we have folks here from that industry.
And roles as well. Sales leaders, marketing leaders, IT leaders, finance leaders. We’re really excited to have a first-ever conference dedicated to business leaders of different types.
One out of three of us is from outside of North America. One out of four of us is from a small or midsized organization.
No matter what your industry or what your business, we’re just thrilled to have you here, and we think we have a fantastic show for you.
You’ve told us you’re here to learn about new products, new solutions, to network with your peers, to get very practical solutions to the business challenges that you all face. And we think we’re really going to deliver that over the next couple of days.
This conference is all about business transformation and digital transformation and the role that technology can play in making those two things happen.
We’ve structured this conference in a way that we’ve never structured any conference we’ve ever done. Day One is really about the roles that we all play. So this morning, we have some great sessions that I’ll walk you through in a moment.
But after the morning sessions, we go to four different role-based tracks. And we have four different keynotes starting at 1:00 that take a role pivot.
I have the honor of doing a marketing session. And we’ve got other business leaders from Microsoft talking about leadership and sales, leadership and finance, leadership and policy and governance as it relates to the cloud.
And then we have many breakout sessions among marketing, sales, finance and policy, shall we say.
Day Two, we take a totally different pivot, and we go to an industry pivot and a vertical pivot. And you’ll see we have eight different industry representation with general sessions, and then many, many breakouts by industry.
And I’d encourage all of you, no matter what industry you happen to be in, to open up your minds, take a different perspective, visit some of the other industry tracks that are outside of your particular industry, and we think that will be very worthwhile.
Then on Day Three, we take a third pivot. And this is all about the Microsoft road map and how to do business effectively with Microsoft.
We have 300-person sessions down to very intimate one-on-one meetings.
So we have three different tracks, if you will, or three different pivots to the three different days. We’ve got big keynotes, we’ve got small one-on-one meetings, and sort of everything in between to really deliver the different formats that we think you’ll really be able to get the most insight from.
At the same time, we have an amazing expo floor where we’re going to have industry trend sessions, we’re going to have product content. So if you want to go deep on Dynamics or deep on Office or deep on Azure, you’ll be able to do that. And the expo hall is the place where a lot of those things will happen. As well as, obviously, booths from Microsoft and many of our partners.
So it’s a really, really rich, totally different format than we’ve ever tried, and we’re really excited to make it happen.
Now, I want to give a big thank-you to all of our sponsors. You’ll see these sponsors in sessions, you’ll see these sponsors on the expo show floor, and these sponsors have brought their own customers to Microsoft Envision so that they can get the left-to-right view of what we’re able to deliver together. And this event and our solutions wouldn’t be possible without our sponsors. So a big thank-you to them.
And then, finally, for our big keynote sessions, this morning and at the end of day tomorrow, I wanted to just lay this out for you.
To kick things off, of course, we have our CEO, Satya Nadella, who’s going to talk about digital transformation and what it means for business and society at large.
After Satya finishes, Peggy Johnson, who is a Microsoft executive vice president on our senior leadership team in charge of business development, she’ll talk with Dan Schulman, who you see there in the upper right, he’s the CEO of PayPal, and they’ll have a conversation around digital disruption in that industry.
Then I have the honor of interviewing Captain Scott Kelly from NASA, who’s got just an unbelievable story, and that will wrap up this morning’s keynotes.
And then tomorrow at the end of the day, I’ll also have the honor of bringing Tim Shriver on stage, who is the chairman of the Special Olympics, and they’ve done some amazing work to transform as well.
So we’ve just got an incredible lineup for you. We couldn’t be more excited to have all of you here for our inaugural Microsoft Envision. Welcome to Microsoft Envision. (Applause.)
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Satya Nadella. (Cheers, applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: Good morning and welcome to Envision 2016. It’s such a real pleasure for me to be here in New Orleans for our very first Envision and business conference.
As Chris was mentioning, we’ve done many conferences, but nothing like this one where we’re bringing business leaders like yourselves who already think about technology and how technology is shaping both business and society, and we’re going to spend the next three days having a conversation about what that means and how you as business leaders can take advantage of technology to shape what we do as businesses as a society.
As I have traveled the globe and talked to many of you and many leaders both in business and in government, it’s clear that technology is playing an increasing role in everything that we do.
We’re talking about how technology can truly shape growth, how we can use technology to change, disrupt the landscape of the industry that we participate in.
We’re also having the conversation about how technology can help us be more agile, how can we move with speed? How can we adapt to the changing workforce and the expectations of the new workforce?
We also talk a lot about technology and what it means to gain that next level of efficiency through automation that is unprecedented.
We’re also having board-level conversations for the first time about some of the unintended consequences of technology. Cybersecurity is a top-of-mind issue for all business leaders.
And when we think about that mainstream role of technology, the responsible that business leaders have now to be able to understand this force and then to be able to use it to shape your own destiny has become much more crucial.
And when you think about leaders and institutions that have used technology throughout, the one name that stands out is NASA. And one leader whose name stands out recently is Captain Kelly. Please help me welcome Captain Scott Kelly on stage. (Cheers, applause.)
SCOTT KELLY: Thank you, Satya.
SATYA NADELLA: Captain.
SCOTT KELLY: Thank you.
SATYA NADELLA: It’s such a privilege to have you join us at Envision, it is such an honor. I know that you spent 340 days, is it, in the last mission of yours up in space? And I know it’s done a lot of things, physically also made some changes. You might want to share some of that?
SCOTT KELLY: Well, flying in space for any amount of time is definitely a challenge. Flying on the space station for 340 days definitely had some more challenges for me personally.
There was some talk about how I grew two inches. It was really I stretched about an inch and a half, and then quickly scrunched back down when I got back into gravity.
But there are a lot of effects from long-duration space flight. Part of what we were doing was comparing me on the space station to my brother who’s an identical twin as a control subject on the ground. So there are a lot of interesting things I think we’ll learn from this experience that hopefully someday will get us on our way to Mars, hopefully in the not-too-distant future.
SATYA NADELLA: That’s pretty amazing. I was hoping you’d come back and say, “I grew hair.” And I was going to take the next ticket up there. (Laughter.)
SCOTT KELLY: Maybe sometime in the future. Maybe I need to fly in space for two years.
SATYA NADELLA: You’ve flown four missions over your career of 20-plus years. And I know NASA and space travel has always been associated with technology. But maybe you want to describe, over the 20 years, how technology and the use of technology has changed space exploration.
SCOTT KELLY: So when I originally became an astronaut in 1996, I was coming from the United States Navy. And this was at a time when we, at least in the Navy, were just starting to use email. The Internet was something that was relatively new that I didn’t have a whole lot of experience with.
The space shuttle was actually flown using a 486 processor. And we used checklists, pieces of paper that were about this high.
Fast-forward 20 years on the space station, and the space station is basically operated with a bunch of laptop computers using different types of software, some of them use Microsoft — Windows 7, actually, I don’t know — we’re a little behind there. (Laughter.)
SATYA NADELLA: We’ve got the Windows 10 upgrade going.
SCOTT KELLY: I’m going to call NASA right when I get out of here. (Laughter.)
But we now operate the space station using mostly laptops kind of like people use in their businesses and offices, which is a pretty remarkable transformation to go from what we were doing on the space shuttle, which is a very complex vehicle, to something that is a much more connected vehicle with the International Space Station.
SATYA NADELLA: Yeah, it’s amazing how going from the checklist to the level of automation of the space station.
One of the things that you got to do in space was to use the HoloLens. And I know NASA has got, actually, a pretty extensive set of programs around HoloLens. Maybe you want to share some of that with the audience.
SCOTT KELLY: So before I flew in space on this mission, I actually went to Seattle and looked at the HoloLens and was very, very impressed.
But I was also a little doubtful that we would be able to make this technology work on the space station, at least initially.
Usually, when you’re doing anything, there are startup transients and we have a Wi-Fi network up there that isn’t always working top-notch.
But when we turned it on, I was pretty amazed at how seamlessly it worked with our system on board the space station and was very impressed with what will, in the future, be its ability to help us do our work.
On the space station, you know, we’re the scientists, we’re the plumber, the electrician, the doctor, the IT guy. We have to fill all these roles. And when I put that HoloLens on and had the experts on the ground, some of them were from Microsoft because this was a test, when they could see what I could see, when they could write things in my visual field, things that when I went to another part of the space station, and then when I came back, it was still there.
It has an audio system that is incredible. I hope soon it’s going to come out to where I can just have the audio system, because it’s really unbelievable.
But not only does it give us the ability to have these people on the ground helping us, it lets people on the ground experience what we’re seeing in the space station.
So I just think it has incredible applications not just in space, but throughout all kinds of different industries.
SATYA NADELLA: That’s fantastic to hear. I mean, having seen technology at NASA in space exploration, maybe you want to leave us with some thoughts on how, as business leaders, we can think about technology in any industry that we’re participating in.
SCOTT KELLY: You know, being on the space station for this long and living in what I think is the most complicated vehicle ever designed and built, and done it, we did it with an international partnership with different languages.
When I was backing away from the space station for the last time, having experienced this for 340 days, I was just absolutely inspired by what we are capable of achieving if we dream it. And then we have to put the resources behind it.
But the message I like to leave with people is that they should dream big, work hard, put the resources behind what they’re trying to achieve, and then we can do anything, whether it’s going to Mars or curing cancer. We just have to dream big.
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you so much, Captain Kelly.
SCOTT KELLY: My pleasure.
SATYA NADELLA: Such a pleasure. Thank you very much. (Cheers, applause.)
It’s really the stories like Captain Kelly’s and NASA’s that inspire us in everything we do at Microsoft.
Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
For us, it starts by thinking about people and even institutions as really first-class when we think about how technology can shape our society.
We think about this at a global scale. And most importantly, we think about the success our customers can have with technology. We think about building technology so that others can build technology and make things happen.
And, of course, we realize that this is not just us. We have many partners. In fact, right here at Envision, you can see the ecosystem, that platform approach that we as a company have always taken to ensure that what we build can get amplified, and more importantly, be delivered in ways that you can succeed with.
We’re going to realize this mission in this mobile-first, cloud-first world by really going boldly and innovating in three key areas.
The first area that we’re very focused on is more-personal computing. Think about this. In the years to come, as part of our lives, we’re going to have more computing, not less. You’re going to have sensors in your living room and in your conference rooms that are capable of general-purpose compute. We’re going to have small screens, large screens, you’re going to have HoloLens.
So there’s going to be ubiquitous computing all around us. And what will matter is the mobility of the human experience across all of this computing. That means your applications, your data need to transcend all of this computing.
So it’s not going to be about mobility of one device, but it’s the mobility of the human experience across all devices. And that’s what we’ve set out to do with Windows 10, building out this one platform that is from IoT to HoloLens.
The second area of focus for us is reinventing productivity and business process. Because if you think about it, with all of this abundance of technology, what is still scarce is human attention and time. And our goal in terms of reinventing productivity and business process is to help you reclaim that time, deploy your focus on things that matter the most to you and your organization.
And to do that, in fact, we want to bring your communications productivity tools with business process because those seams are where a lot of time is wasted.
And the third area of focus for us is around building out the cloud infrastructure. And more specifically, we think that in this new age, data is the currency. And so we want you to be able to take the data assets that you have and convert it into intelligence and intelligent action and insight.
So that’s really the purpose of all of this cloud infrastructure, so that you can reason over large-scale data and turn it into intelligence.
These are the three interconnected ambitions we have that help deliver your digital transformation. It’s really not about our ambitions, but it’s the application of our ambitions so that we can deliver digital transformation for you.
That means we want you to be able to ask and answer two key questions: How is your business being changed by digital technology? As well as: How is your core business model being changed by digital technology? These are the two questions that need to be asked and answered as part of your digital transformation.
To do that, each of you, irrespective of the industry you are in, you have to start thinking and operating like a digital company. It’s no longer just about procuring one solution and deploying one solution, it is not about one simple CRM or ERP or even office automation solutions that you get from us or others, but it’s really you yourself thinking of your own future as a digital company, building out what we refer to as systems of intelligence. These are these digital feedback loops where you’re building systems that help you engage with your customers, empower your employees, optimize your operations, and reinvent products and business models.
But the key is the systems approach. And it’s not just technology. In fact, it is about the combination of technology, people and process that you put in place to drive these feedback loops. It’s that systems approach to how you become a digital company that I think is going to define your competitiveness, your ability to, in fact, change the landscape of the industries you participate in.
And what I want to do over the course of the rest of the keynote is to share some stories of leaders and companies that are already doing this.
And we want to start with Virgin Atlantic and how they’re reshaping how they connect with customers and engage with customers.
They start with a 360-degree view of who their customer is. They’re able to collect all the data, refine it, and turn it into understanding and predictive power. And that understanding and predictive power of their customers is what they exercise and how they’re able to reach customers wherever they are. And then, most importantly, deliver personalization at scale.
That ability to take understanding and predictive power of customers, but realize it in everyday interactions, is what makes Virgin Atlantic more competitive. In fact, they think of their customers not as customers, but as potential fans. And that is what I think is pretty unique about their story. To just hear directly from them, let’s roll the video.
(Video: Virgin Atlantic.)
SATYA NADELLA: (Applause.) It’s fantastic to see how the leaders at Virgin Atlantic were able to take technology and create a system of sustainable advantage for them in terms of how they reach customers and service customers and turn them into fans.
And when you think about customer engagement, the history of customer engagement has been shaped and reshaped by changes in the point of engagement and the nature of engagement.
And we’re at the cusp of one such major shift. When you recall the first time your business created a website and you had customers interact with you as a business using the website, you had a two-way communication mechanism, an interactive mechanism, which was unprecedented.
And since then, we’ve scaled to many other places. Today, we have applications that we deploy on mobile phones, which are perhaps the most-personal devices, and they’re always there.
Going forward, we envision a new platform which is going to be as powerful, if not more powerful than the Web or mobile apps. We call it “the conversation as a platform.” It is about taking the power of human language and applying it much more pervasively to all of our computers and computing. And then using that medium for even contact with businesses.
We will have new capabilities in computers to understand human language. That means you have to be able to teach them through techniques of artificial intelligence and machine learning how to interpret human language and respond to human language.
You’ll also have new actors such as personal digital assistants that are going to be available to users all over, and even bots. Think of bots that you will build as the new websites or new mobile apps. And your customers will interact with your business through these bots.
This is a world that we’re at the very beginning stages of. But we think it is, in fact, going to be much more ubiquitous in terms of its deployment.
Think about all the people in the world who use SMS today. And imagine that medium becoming much richer so that anyone can interact with your business if they can text or message.
And to show you a little bit of what this could mean for brands and businesses, I want to invite up on stage Lilian Rincon from our Skype team to show you what Conversations as a Platform can mean for business transformation. Lilian? (Applause.)
LILIAN RINCON: Hi. Thank you. Well, hi, everyone. I’m super excited to be here with you guys today.
I have the pleasure of showing you our vision for how we see intelligence integrated into one of the most popular ways that people communicate today, Skype.
The Skype that you know and love is going to be smarter, more helpful and entertaining.
We’re moving into a world where you can plan trips, shop, even talk to intelligence bots, all within your Skype chat.
Now, I’m going to show you a demo of this next generation of Skype. Since it’s Skype, it’ll work on iOS and Android, but I’m going to show it to you on my Windows Phone.
All right, wrong phone I picked up.
OK, so here you can see I have one missed notification in Skype. So let’s see who that’s from. Oh, it’s from Gurdeep. For those of you guys who don’t know, Gurdeep is our corporate vice president of Skype, so I can’t ignore his message.
So I go into the conversation and I see right away I have a visual video mail. Let’s play it. (Video mail plays.)
That is such great news. I’m a huge fan of Codess, so I’m going to send him a quick thank-you.
So right away, you’re seeing some new things in this next gen of Skype like visual video mail where you see the video message with the transcript right below. This is one of the ways that we’re starting to take intelligence from things like Skype Translator and bringing them into everyday features like video messages.
Now Gurdeep is telling me that the team has sent me a little treat. So that’s great. I’ll send him a little emoticon.
So the other thing that you’ll notice here is that my personal assistant, Cortana, is always there in the upper-right-hand corner. Cortana is available in Skype whether I want to talk to her one-on-one, in a group, or as you can see here, she’s actually subtly improving key points in my text.
So, for example, for those of you guys that don’t know what Codess is, I can tap it and you’ll see that this rich card from Bing that tells us that Codess is this great organization for women in technology.
Now, you’re seeing at the top, I’m getting a notification from Cortana. By tapping it, I go into the conversation with Cortana.
And she’s telling me that Café du Monde would like to know my notification for delivery. This must be the little treat from the team, they know I’m crazy about beignets. And I’m going to track delivery.
So as you can see, Skype is turning into this conversational platform. This is actually one of the first ways that we’re showing you that. Cortana, my personal agent, is actually brokering the conversation with a third-party bot, the Café du Monde bot.
The other thing that I see here is a rich card that actually shows me exactly where my beignets are and that they’ll be here within a few minutes. And I see this all within Skype. This is one of the many great ways that you’re going to start seeing businesses using Skype and Cortana to communicate with their customers.
Since I’ve committed to doing this keynote, I’m going to go ahead and plan the rest of my trip.
Please block my calendar for Codess from April 10th through April 12th. So you saw there, I didn’t feel like typing, so I’m using push to talk.
Now, because Cortana has context from my other conversations, what you see here is she doesn’t just have the date right, but she actually has the location and context that this is from the conversation with Gurdeep, which is perfect.
Now we’re seeing Cortana be proactive about the next step in planning this trip. So, in this case, she’s actually suggesting my favorite hotel, the Westin, be added to the conversation.
This is another example of Conversations as a Platform. In this case, Cortana is actually introducing the third party, the Westin, into my conversation.
The other thing, too, that you’ll notice is because Cortana has introduced the Westin, in this first line, the Westin actually knows the dates and the location, so I don’t have to repeat myself, which saves me a ton of time and energy.
Now I see a card that allows me to look at different rooms. And I’m going to choose the normal one that I normally stay at.
And just like that, you know, in a few easy steps, I was able to block my calendar and also book my hotel room.
Now, there’s nothing else the Westin can do for me, so no thank you.
And because Cortana has my relevant details, the Westin bot can actually leave the conversation.
Now we’re seeing a third aspect of Cortana. You know, how often has it happened to you that you go on a business trip and you forget you have friends or family in that location?
Well, in this case, because Cortana knows my connections, she can actually be proactive about suggesting who I communicate with. So she knows my friend Janey lives in Dublin, and she’s suggesting that I connect with her while I’m in Dublin.
You see here a rich card which allows me to call her or video call her, but I don’t know what time it is in Dublin. So I’m going to go ahead and message her.
That takes me to the conversation with Janey. But the other thing that you’ll notice is that because Cortana has bridged this, she’s actually even pre-populated the text with the context of why I’m actually contacting Janey.
And it looks like Janey is available, fantastic, she’s even going to show me around town.
So this is just a glimpse into how Skype and Cortana powered by Bing can make our conversations more productive, informed and fun.
But as you know, a big way in which Skype is used is really real-time video. I just showed you how we think about intelligence and messaging conversations, and now I have the pleasure of introducing how we’re thinking about intelligence and real-time video conversations.
With Skype video bot, we’re going to reinvent the way that friends, family and businesses get together. For the first time, we’re going to enable a very personalized experience for people to connect with their favorite character, brand or business.
Imagine you and your friends shopping together on a Skype call and being able to use the power of video with the help of a video bot to try on different outfits and find the perfect one.
You can now create rich experiences like this for a global audience across Windows, iOS, and Android clients. The opportunities for your brands are limitless.
With that, I really invite you to come over and connect with us at the Skype booth, which we’ll be hosting the next few days to learn more about bots and figure out how to get started. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: So, hopefully, you get a glimpse of what is possible with these conversational canvases such as Skype. In fact, Skype has over 300 million monthly connected users, something like 3-plus billion minutes of talk time each month.
And there are many such conversational canvases. And our vision is to turn these communications tools and canvases into rich points of contact and engagement for all businesses and brands.
To go beyond applications, the ability for you to be able to be right there and present, to engage with customers while they’re having conversations is, we think, a very powerful step forward, and we’re excited about it and we want to help you build these new bots and extensions to personal digital assistants that, of course, will work with Skype, but are not limited to Skype. They go beyond Skype to all the places where people are communicating.
I want to now switch to talk about empowering employees. It’s a truism that your organization, your institution, is only as good as its people, but it’s also true that your organization and its ability to empower its people to do their best work can only happen if you have the systems and technology.
For me, even personally at Microsoft, the move to Office 365 was just not a change in the deployment mode of something like Exchange, it was, in fact, a very different way to work. The very nature of work has changed.
For example, for me, each evening, I go to bed and make sure that I read my OneNote notes on my phone where I get all of the information for the next day, basically every meeting that I’m going to have with customers, partners, internal meetings, the briefs of those are there in digital form for me to be able to read and, of course, take notes on them.
I have tools like Wunderlist where I keep track of all the things that I’ve got to get done at work and at home that’s available to me on all devices.
Power BI is a tool that’s absolutely changed not only the way I view our business success and metrics, but it’s changing conversations inside of Microsoft.
We talk a lot about leading indicators of success versus lagging indicators. We all know that revenue and profit come after customer engagement. And so we track these metrics and they’re available to you everywhere.
Instead of just sending spreadsheets or reports that are static, the communication that happens inside of Microsoft is now dynamic because of Power BI.
We also use Yammer to really have the social conversation inside the company. In fact, every night I look at the sentiment analysis of our Yammer conversations so that I’m informed about what’s top of mind for the 100-plus thousand people inside of Microsoft.
We use Skype for Business for my town hall meetings each month and to be able to take questions. In fact, we’re also starting to use Microsoft Pulse to be able to even analyze what is the reaction of people to anything that we’re talking about.
These are tools that have shaped individual communications, individual productivity, as well as how you participate in meetings.
But we think that’s it’s not just about individuals and teams, but the entire organizational effectiveness can be shaped through technology, by reasoning over the data, the digital artifacts and footprint of how people communicate, how people interact can, in fact, inform things like how you should organize, how you should conduct meetings.
We acquired a company that is doing leading work in organizational effectiveness last year called VoloMetrix. This was formed by a set of management consultants who worked with many leading organizations all over the world to understand what does it mean to use digital technology to drive organizational effectiveness?
And now VoloMetrix is part of Microsoft and the Delve product line where we’re trying to really take that scarce commodity, which is human time, and help inform you individually on how you can spend your time more effectively but also scale it to the organizational level so that we can inform business leaders like yourselves on how best to create organizations, lead organizations and also conduct things like meetings.
And to give you a flavor for how you as leaders can go about using technology to shape the organizational effectiveness, I wanted to invite up on stage Natalie McCullough, who is one of the founding members of VoloMetrix and now part of the Delve team. Natalie? (Applause.)
NATALIE MCCULLOUGH: Thank you, Satya.
What if you as a business leader could save $30 million for your organization just by cutting one meeting? Chances are that you and everybody else in this room could do just that if only you knew where to look.
Inside of our collaboration systems lies an incredibly rich set of data just waiting to be mined for insights like this.
We can harness the very systems we use today to get work done. Our email, our calendar, all of Office really, to become more strategic in deciding what work to do, in deciding how to spend our time. Our time, which is the most valuable resource that we as individuals and as an organization have.
Recently, we worked with one large company who had a goal to be more nimble. And we started at the very top, and we analyzed one of their most-visible meetings, their monthly management meeting.
We aggregated the collaboration data for that meeting and not just for that meeting, but the prep for that meeting, the prep meetings for those meetings, the prep meetings for those meetings, you get the idea.
We used the rich system of data to discover that for this company, they spent over 300,000 hours and $30 million on this one very expensive meeting, a $30-million investment for their company.
And quantifying the cost of this meeting took something that they all felt anecdotally as a pain for their business, and it turned it into a hard ROI, a dollars-and-cents opportunity that they had to act on.
So over the last five years of working in this new domain of organizational analytics, we have learned how to translate the signals that are coming in from these collaboration systems into metrics that are both meaningful and predictive for real business outcomes, for things like customer retention and customer growth, for employee engagement, for sales attainment.
And we’re helping business leaders across the organization unlock these hidden sources of productivity.
With sales, for example, we can marry hard business outcomes, sales attainment, quota achievement, with our behavioral data to create a model for how high-performing sales people in the organization differ from the average.
And what emerges from this data almost every time is that high performers make very different decisions about their time than the average. How they navigate their organizations, how they team with other roles, how they cover their accounts, it’s all very different and very distinct.
And we can arm sales leaders with this model so that they can inform their training program, they can refine their sales forecasting, and they can use this data to operationalize how they manage their business. As Satya said, moving from lagging indicators to leading indicators.
What I’d like to do is show you an example of how we can make that real for a company.
Here we have a Power BI dashboard for sales effectiveness. Fairly simple dashboard where we’re pulling in this rich data from the Office system into our operating cadences.
We know from our work that the time a sales person spends with customers is one of the most important and predictive metrics for their success, and so we really want to get a bead on this metric. We want to understand it as a company overall how we’re doing. We want to see how we’re doing over time.
We can see, actually, that we have a negative trend here. We have a problem here. And we want to be able to double-click on this data and understand how our different regions are doing.
We can see with this data that we have two regions that are really struggling, that need more support. They’re not coming anywhere near our benchmark of 10 hours. And we can see that we have one region, the southwest region, that’s really outperforming. That’s an opportunity for learning and growth and figuring out what they’re doing right.
Similarly, we know that the size and shape of a salesperson’s network is one of the most-predictive factors for their success. And we can use this Office Graph data to get new and important insight into that network.
We can understand how many accounts they spend their time with. Perhaps more importantly, we can understand how well-penetrated into those accounts they are. And we can understand and get new insights into the shape and size of their internal network.
Finally, we know that sales leaders love to get their hands on as much data as they possibly can about how their territories are being covered. And so we can use these signals from the Office system to complement our CRM data and drive a new level of insight.
We can see not just how many accounts we’re contacting, but we can apply a layer of intelligence to that data to understand which accounts are we actively engaged with as defined by the intimacy and the frequency of our interaction with those accounts.
And we can identify the key persons within those accounts that we need to get to. Say you have a go-to-market strategy that targets chief marketing officers or chief technology officers, you can actually see how effectively your field is executing that strategy.
So this is an example of a very real dashboard that sales leaders are using to manage their business with leading indicators, not lagging indicators. Later today, one of our customers, the leader of sales effectiveness for Symantec, is going to join Judson Althoff in his keynote address for sales to talk about how this data is transforming how he runs his sales business.
Back to you, Satya. (Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: Hopefully that gives you a flavor for how you can use data and reasoning over data that’s coming from all the systems that you have — HR systems, CRM systems, as well as your Office automation systems like Office 365 — and really bringing it all together to drive organizational insights and drive organizational effectiveness.
The next area of digital transformation is optimizing your operations. And to bring this to light, I want to use the economy of Ecolab, a company that we’ve been working with for a few years now. And Ecolab is focused on a very key area for our society going forward, which is water management.
Ecolab is transforming their business primarily because of IoT. The fact that now they have their field equipment connected on a continuous basis enables them to go from an organization that was reacting to events to becoming an organization that is much more real-time, much more predictive.
Their relationship with their customers is being completely reshaped. Not only are they able to deliver unprecedented levels of service, they’re also able to continuously improve their service because of the fact that they’re connected and they’re able to instrument, effectively, their field equipment, they are learning and improving on a continuous basis.
This is something that software companies have done for all time because we instrument our products. But now anyone in industrial equipment can also do the same, and that’s what Ecolab has done.
They’re also able to adapt to events. Think about field service. Field service is that ultimate challenge of being able to bring together all the resources at the right time to be able to solve the customer issue.
And we’ve taken algorithmic approaches in the past, but now because of the connectivity, the ability to, in fact, take the 27-plus petabytes of data that Ecolab generates each year and apply machine learning techniques on it, they’re able to take even their service capability to the next level.
And so show you some of this work, I wanted to invite up on stage Eric Boocock, who is from our Azure IoT team, to show you how Ecolab is using CRM and Azure to completely transform their business. Eric? (Applause.)
ERIC BOOCOCK: Thank you, Satya.
SATYA NADELLA: Welcome.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Thank you. Good morning. Ecolab is creating new ways to monitor and control industrial processes on a global scale thanks to the evolution of services, big data, and the Internet of Things.
Today, I’m going to show you how through the power of machine learning and Cortana Intelligence, Ecolab can proactively identify operational issues of their customers, dispatch and manage field service technicians using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and engage with customers through self-service portals and provide environmental goals through embedded Power BI.
At the global command center, Ecolab uses Power BI to get an aggregated view of what’s going on at their client site.
With over 100,000 sensors generating more than 27 billion data points, Ecolab monitors the impact on water, energy and waste at their client sites.
But coming through this report, I see an alert that Cortana Intelligence has flagged. I can drill through this alert to get more details about the specific sites.
So I look at the site, I can see the CO2 emissions, the energy saved and the water saved is tracking within target, which is great. However, an alert has been generated for the cooling tower. There might be a potential issue that we need to address here. And the fact that water consumption has significantly risen over the past 24 hours indicates a problem.
The machine learning capabilities in Cortana Intelligence detects this anomaly, generates an alert at the Ecolab System Assurance Center, and proactively creates a work order to dispatch a technician.
Using the new CRM field and project service capabilities, the best technician can be identified to complete this work order.
The sensor data, coupled with machine learning technology, can identify the best technicians based on skill sets, locations and the inventory required to complete this task as well as predict the issue, recommend the required maintenance steps and the time to resolve.
By adding this work order to the master schedule, I can trigger a notification to the field service technician.
In the past, this would require waiting for a customer to identify the issue, call up the customer, and then bring the technicians to site, look up the schematics, print out the work order, pull together the repair parts and then re-dispatch the technician, a highly manual process.
But today, through the power of field service capabilities and the intelligence of the system, we’re able to pass this data directly to the mobile service technician’s mobile device.
So this technician, when they open up their work orders, they can see the prioritized work order and have access to all of the information about the past that they need. The location of the customer site, the severity of the issue.
The primary incident asset in this case is this blow-down valve. It’s related to cooling tower No. 3. It’s going to take me three-and-a-half hours, and I can even see the work order tasks, the different tasks that I need to perform. All of this information being sent directly to me because of the systems of intelligence providing just the right amount of information at the right time to complete this task.
When I finish the task, I can simply upload the picture of the blow-down valve that I’ve repaired to share this with the account team so everybody knows what’s on site at this customer location. And to simply round out the work order, just obtain a nice signature from the customer that we’re all done and that’s fantastic. (Applause.)
So access to all of this real-time data for Ecolab helps them optimize the value they provide to their customers. But they desire to be transparent in how they deliver this value to their customers and how they present that to them.
With the new portal capabilities available from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they can easily drive engagement with their customers.
Last week at Build, we announced Power BI Embedded, the ability to take Power BI and embed it in client-facing applications.
So here you’ll see a customer portal that Ecolab can share this information directly with their customer. They can get a real-time view into what’s going on at their customer site. They can interact with this data just like the technicians at Ecolab do to analyze their data. The customers can now interact with this Power BI data and see the ROI generated at this particular customer site.
So access to sensor data, real-time intelligence enables Ecolab to help their customers reduce their water, energy and waste consumption.
We’re proud to be able to partner with Ecolab to provide this technology to help them find solutions to the world’s biggest challenges: clean water, safe food, abundant energy and healthy environments. Thank you. (Applause.)
SATYA NADELLA: Thank you, Eric.
ERIC BOOCOCK: Thank you.
SATYA NADELLA: That gives you a feel for the power of some of these new systems and how they can make organizations much more real-time.
In fact, even the new devices are really reshaping business and digital transformation. Something like the Surface Hub is changing how people have meetings. HoloLens, in fact, is something that Ecolab is working with to change how they do field service.
You can imagine, they have people in oil rigs who need to be able to get at expertise back in headquarters. And they’re able to, in fact, do the same thing that Captain Kelly did, which is to Skype in and have the people with the expertise show through holographic output how to fix issues.
This notion of mixed reality or this new medium of mixed reality that comes to life with HoloLens is reshaping architecture, industrial design and many other fields of operations.
And to just give you a flavor for it, let’s just roll a video.
(Video: HoloLens.)
SATYA NADELLA: (Applause.) The last area of digital transformation that I want to talk about is how do you transform your products and services using digital content?
In fact, if you conceive of every company as a software company and a digital company, how would the nature of the products and the business model shift? Will the gross margins shift from the things to the service that you deliver because of digital technology?
And this is something that we’re seeing world over. Whether it’s Fujitsu helping businesses transform in something like agriculture in Japan, a startup doing urban farming using IoT in London, whether it’s an industrial equipment manufacturer like ThyssenKrupp that makes elevators in Germany, they’re all fundamentally transforming their businesses to become software and digital businesses.
In fact, this week, and today we are so pleased to announce that we’re partnering with Toyota around connected cars. Automotive is an industry that is going through a significant change. And Toyota is thinking of digital technology not just in the car, but beyond the car. They’re trying to imagine what if the car was able to communicate with the infrastructure all around them? How would that lead to safer roads and better traffic conditions? They’re also trying to deliver services in the car and beyond the car.
We’re also partnering with R3, which is a consortium of 40 financial institutions that is using blockchain technology that is available on Azure as a service to fundamentally transform how transactions happen and how settlements happen inside of financial institutions.
Today, there is a lot of time delay between a transaction and when the money flows, and there’s a lot of cost. And using this distributed ledger technology and blockchain, you can change the landscape of the financial industry.
And it’s not limited, in fact, just to financial tasks. It can reshape the public sector, healthcare, manufacturing and supply chain. So many industries can be reshaped and we’re very, very excited about this new partnership with R3.
These are some examples of what we think it means to transform the core of the product with digital technology.
And I want to leave you, though, with a thought about how we as business leaders don’t work in isolation. We are part of our economies and our societies. We live in a multi-constituent world. Our long-term ability to grow is directly related to our ability to make our climate more sustainable, our economies more viable, and that only happens if we ask ourselves the question of what difference is our business making, what difference are we making?
In fact, many of you have missions like Temenos, which is a company that builds banking software, but now is making banking software available on Azure so that micro-credit organizations in Africa, Latin America and Asia can have the same sophistication that large financial institutions have.
There’s a startup in Kenya called M-KOPA that is delivering solar energy through solar panels to rural poor in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
Not only are they doing that, but they’re able to, in fact, even create a credit rating for people who learn less than $2 a day.
Beyond even the mission of these companies to transform the world, I know and I applaud everyone in the audience who have philanthropic arms to their business, who are participating in their local community.
We at Microsoft have a program called Public Cloud for Public Good, where we’re committing over a billion dollars of credits to all of our customer services for nonprofit organizations and research institutions.
And we’re seeing the benefits of that really shape society. Optolexia is a set of researchers in Sweden who are using eye-gaze technology, basically taking eye-gaze data, putting it in the cloud and applying machine learning to detect dyslexia early on so that intervention can be brought to those students and change their educational outcome.
Public institutions in education in India and in Kentucky are using Azure Machine Learning to be able to detect dropout rates and then use the scarce state resources so that they can intervene on their behalf to change the educational outcome of the students.
These are just a few examples of how technology can make a difference. And as you spend your time in the next couple of days at Envision, I want you to envision what difference can your business make? What difference can you make as you as leaders use technology to shape the world?
Thank you so very much, and have a fantastic Envision. Thank you. (Applause.)
