NEXT 2019 Conference Series - Ellen Kolstø - IBM Q

Welcome to the 2019 NEXT Conference Series. Recorded live in Chicago, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Ellen Kolstø, Design Principal at IBM Q.  Find Ellen Online: LinkedIn Website: www.ibm.com/us-en [00:02] My guest today is Ellen.  Ellen’s been on the show before.  She’s with IBM Q, right? [00:08]     Well, yeah.  I’m actually now working in the quantum computing space.  I used to work on AI for two-and-a-half years, which is how I happen to be here, talking about AI.   [00:17] How did your talk go?   [00:19] It was great.  We had a lot of really interesting people in the room, a lot of discussion around “Are you ready for AI?”, “What does it involve?” in terms of having successful AI or AI that works reliably.  So we had a great discussion.  [00:31] That’s awesome.  This is my first time at the NEXT Conference.  Have you been here before? [00:35]    No, this is my first time too. [00:37] What do you think? [00:38]       Oh, I think it’s great.  I think that anytime you can get a bunch of market researchers together to talk about what’s going on, it’s super helpful.  And you learn something from what everyone else is doing. I took a bunch of mental notes even in my own session of people mentioning things.  So, yeah, it’s helpful. [00:53] It’s fun; that’s fun.  So, what are you seeing as...?  Were you able to participate in any of the earlier sessions? [01:00] [Sighs] No, I flew in late last night. [01:01]  That’s what I thought. [01:02] And then we were preparing for this morning’s presentation.  So, I learned a lot in my own session so far. [01:11] Ahh, that’s...  What’s your big takeaway? [01:13] That everyone is super excited about AI, but they don’t know how to get started.   [01:19]   Totally. [01:19]   And my view point on it is it’s the same sort of test-and-learn scenario of any part of market research:  take a small part of what you’re doing, test it out, figure out what you’re learning and move from there rather than trying to boil the ocean.  And I think that was what a lot of the people who tried it were talking about as well in the session.   [01:43] So, what is one practical way...  Can people engage with you or IBM to help in a similar way to like AWS? [01:52]   Uh, well, that’s a good question.  Uh, that’s a hard one for me to answer. [02:00] Are engagements usually...  Like when I think about IBM,