PAW 2019 Conference Series - Jeff Todd - Wolfram Research

Welcome to the 2019 Predictive Analytics World (PAW) Conference Series. Recorded live in Las Vegas, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Jeff Todd, Senior Account Executive at Wolfram Research.   Find Jeff Online: Email: [email protected] LinkedIn Wolfram [00:02] This is Jamin, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast live today at Predictive Analytics World.  I have Jeff Todd, the Senior Technology Expert at Wolfram Research, Inc. Jeff, thank very much for being on the podcast today. [00:14]   Thanks for having me, Jamin. [00:18]   What do you think about the show? [00:20]   I think it’s great.  There’s a collaborative spirit that I feel like a lot of the people here...  As an industry, I think people are all trying to solve a lot of hard problems now.  For a while, I think they were trying to get the data all into one place. Now that they’ve got it there, they kind of the real problem ahead of them.  So I think everyone is up against the same wall. And so, rather than trying to everyone get their own competitive edge and find a way to outsmart the other people, they’re all kind of just here to learn and figure out the same problems, which is really exciting.       [00:50]   It definitely feels like the rising-tide principle’s applying here, where it’s a lot less cut-throat and a lot more collaborative, recognizing the fact that we’re at the very early stages of massive growth inside of major and I call it minor (not in a negative way) but smaller organizations.  At the end of the day, whether it’s optimizing your production line or creating outstanding customer experiences, data plays a key part in the entire ecosystem for success. And the proportion of the decisions that are happening in the organization are still uninformed. In that way I’m saying we’ve got an outsized opportunity in front of us for growth as it relates with insights inside of companies.  [01:40] Yeah, I think that’s exactly right.  I think too we see many organizations that are trying to achieve automation for a variety of tasks that have traditionally been manual tasks.  And that’ll divert a lot of human resources. And you certainly hear about machine learning, neural nets, AI as a fear of interruption to folks like cab drivers and truck drivers and replacing them, and the question of what do these people do.  Obviously, there’s going to be a place for those people to go. It always evolves and expands, but I think it’s very exciting that you have both the type of AI and machine learning outcomes that you have where we’ll be able to get more insights out of the data to be able to make new decisions, make new discoveries, new innovations and kind of push things past and have that growth that you’re describing.  At the same time, I think we’ll see a lot of our world start to change a little bit as things that we’ve traditionally been used to interacting with humans become less and less so, which we already see at the shopping markets, grocery stores interact less and less everyday people on the way out. [02:39]    Yeah, yeah.  Let’s back up a little bit.