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Jacqueline Woods

Chief Marketing Officer

Teradata

Leon Mishkis

Chief Operating Officer

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Teradata harnesses trusted data and AI to enhance business strategy

Artificial intelligence and data are converging to revolutionize how companies operate, and Teradata Corp. looks to be at the forefront of this change. From customer experiences to trusted data in AI, the company is tapping NewtonX Inc.’s market knowledge to blueprint a future with data-driven AI excellence.Teradata’s Jacqueline Woods and NewtonX’s Leon Mishkis discuss trusted data for AI with theCUBE

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play_circle_outline Maximizing Executive Results: How AI Enhances Customer Experience

play_circle_outline Analysis of customer complaints for innovation

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Jacqueline Woods, Teradata & Leon Mishkis, NewtonX

Jacqueline Woods

Chief Marketing Officer Teradata

Leon Mishkis

Chief Operating Officer NewtonX

Today in Los Angeles, California, Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay conclude an eventful day by discussing the insights into Teradata's product evolution and the future direction, emphasizing the importance of AI and data integration. Jacqueline and Leon discuss their partnership with NewtonX, highlighting the focus on understanding customer needs and ensuring trust in data. Research findings reveal challenges with data quality and alignment with AI strategies among executives. The need for trusted AI, transparency, and responsibility in technology developme... Read more

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What is the importance of transparency in building trust with data and information? add

What do people need to take responsibility for when it comes to technology? add

What are some advantages of using AI technology in improving customer experience? add

What is the importance and value of customer complaint analyzer? add

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Jacqueline Woods, Teradata & Leon Mishkis, NewtonX

Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Teradata community and welcome back to Los Angeles, California. My name's Savannah Peterson here with Rob Strechay for what is going to be a very exciting conclusion to an inspiring day. Rob, this has been power packed.

Rob Strechay

>> This has been awesome. I think really bringing a lot of the insights about why the product is the way it is, how it's grown over the years and really where it's going. And again, the data just doesn't lie about why AI and data are coming together and why Teradata is really making it possible. There you go.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Oh wow, way to bring in that conference tagline, Rob. I love it. And speaking of one of the things we've learned a lot today has been how Teradata meets their customers where they are, which means you have to understand the customer and the executives that they're reaching, which is why I'm so excited to have Jacqueline and Leon on this segment. Thank you both for joining us.

>> Thank you, Savannah. Thank you Rob. We're happy to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Jacqueline, you are a timeless pro and veteran of theCUBE. I am curious what made you want to bring Leon on specifically today?

>> NewtonX is and has been a wonderful partner to us and it's funny when you do actually kind of search on the internet and everyone says Google it if you really want to find it, that's what I did to find NewtonX. This is a very true story. I was actually looking for market research firms that were interested in understanding what we wanted to understand. They met that test. I was looking for firms that were really understanding us and our company. They were that firm, and also that they were proactive in calling back. Literally I kind of reached out to three companies as people generally do. Not only were they Johnny on the spot, but they gave us examples when they returned from my questions. It's like, I want to know about XYZ, and they kind of put up Teradata. Here's what we know about you and here's what we know about your space, and they literally won me over and they have been a tremendous partner ever since.

Savannah Peterson

>> Leon, how does it make you feel to hear that?

>> Honestly, very grateful that Google search led me to theCUBE, led us to a great partnership.

Savannah Peterson

>> That says a lot about SEO. Nice job, NewtonX. Nice job.

Savannah Peterson

>> Cheers to our marketing team.

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> So Leon, tell me a bit about the research that Jacqueline engaged you to do specifically.

Savannah Peterson

>> So we've been partnering with Teradata over the last few years on various research initiatives around brand health, around establishing the right KPIs for the brand, and most recently we have launched a very, very exciting research in the AI space, specifically around trust in AI of senior executives.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think one of the things, I kind of took a little perusing through it just so that I could get smarter about it and I think again, being the analyst and diving in, 40% of the respondents saying that they don't believe their data is actually in the right state, be it in quality or put together. That seems to be a really interesting outcome of this and something that's germane to what Teradata is. Is that the kind of stuff that you were seeing out of the responses here?

>> I think that's true and for me, I don't think it was that surprising. Data, everything starts with data, period, which is why I start with market research. Everything that I personally do, even for my job as a marketer, you have to be grounded and rooted in the data, and you have to have really good data in order to do the work that you need to do. So for 40% of the company saying, hey, I'm not really sure I trust my data. I'm not really sure I have the, it's significant. That's four out of 10 people, which means that six out of 10 don't have the right data or don't trust their data, which was kind of reflective in two ways particularly for Teradata. We are the golden record keeper. So one of the things that companies rely upon us for our capabilities is having these trusted records and we call them golden records, so that was awesome. And to understand that hey, that's what we do and people are looking for that, particularly in this time of AI. The second thing is just a recognition that good data is scarce. It's scarce, and you have to really curate pristine data. It doesn't just come. It's not like I'm just going to do it and it just shows up and I can just now kind of accept or ingest a large language model. I can't just ingest every single kind of data feed in my company.

Savannah Peterson

>> So many different tools, different silos.

>> So many different tools, all that stuff, it doesn't work that way. It's not that easy and I think that's what we also learned from some of our research that it's just not that easy as well.

Rob Strechay

>> What were some of the execs, what were some of the findings, I guess you could say, of the execs and some of the outcomes that they were looking at in this GenAI? There's a ton of hype around it and we talked to a lot of organizations as well. What did you find that was really compelling in that as well?

>> It's quite fascinating to see sometimes the gap between ambition and reality, which is very much due to siloed data centers and not really taking care of the data because bad data in, bad data out, which means the AI model is not that helpful. What we have seen is that there's a lot of excitement around AI initiatives. 84% of executives expect immediate results, meaning within 12 months, which is, and I still remember the days of digital transformation which took 10 years for a lot of companies.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was going to say, I love how we've gotten the order of magnitude fed up with the-

>> 50-

Savannah Peterson

>> For the desire there.

>> 54% results in six months, 84% within 12 months, but the reality is that 30% of execs believe that their AI strategy is not aligned with their business strategy, meaning they're trying to sprint on AI but not aligning the business strategy, which will lead to issues down the line.

Savannah Peterson

>> It seems like Teradata is the perfect partner for that then because you're seeing this across so many different industries at scale.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're seeing it across so many industries, but we are a hundred percent a proponent of not doing AI for AI's sake. You need to have use cases that make sense. They have to be something that's going to create value for the enterprise, and I like to think that we really major on our customer's customers because the ambitions of most companies is who does that company serve, whether that be a bank, whether it be a healthcare company who's serving the patient, whether it be a government entity who's serving a citizen, it's like who are you serving and then what are the things that you need to do to give them a better experience all around, whether that's a product or a service?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, and I think, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just a quick one. I love that you said that Jacqueline because that's a typical pitfall we've been seeing. Five years ago everybody wanted to put everything on the blockchain for the sake of putting it on the blockchain. Now we're like, instead of looking at which problem am I solving for, let's just do GenAI. It's really, it's great to see that Teradata is really thinking about how can we create value and solve things using AI, but not for the sake of it, but for the purpose of it.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think that's been one of the themes in all of the conversations is working backwards from the use case, the outcome that you're trying to do with AI and GenAI. Another one that I think was also, and you kind of alluded to it a little bit, was really trusted AI and being able to trust it. What does it really mean to be trusted and trusted AI for that matter?

Rob Strechay

>> First of all, I think trust starts with transparency. You have to know where the information and the data is coming from. You have to be able to understand its origination. You have to really ensure that you have the right governance, security, and compliance around it so it doesn't either become "contaminated or polluted," so it itself doesn't hallucinate when you're building models. I think all of those things are hugely important. In order to create trust, when you're transparent and everyone knows how you're getting to the conclusion, they can trust the output of what's coming out. I think that's hugely important and that's why trusted data is so important for us. The other point that I would make, and I said this many times, but every time I have an opportunity to say it, I will say it again-

Savannah Peterson

>> Say it again if it's a gem.

Rob Strechay

>> It is a gem. People talk about responsibility. Technology cannot be responsible. People have to be the ones that are responsible and they create these environments that can be trusted by building the technology that you can rely upon and that you can trust, but we are the ones that have to be responsible.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm glad you said that again, louder for the folks in the back. I feel like that's one of the things too when people try and blame a technology for things that happen negatively as an impact of that, someone built it, someone designed it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Someone built it, someone designed it, someone didn't put the right compliance and guardrails around it. If someone got into something through a back door, that's because there was a door that was open.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exactly.

Rob Strechay

>> I think there's the other side of that. I know there was some positive outcomes of AI that you found in this study as well. What were some of the positive outcomes that executives were excited about with AI?

>> There's a lot of opportunity. AI is truly a technology that can drive exponential change because it can create content, it can replace content. The number one use case that we have been seeing is customer experience. If I look at technologies in the past, usually you have to decide for one thing, either you improve the quality or you reduce the cost. With AI, especially if we're thinking about customer service, you can reduce costs, you increase the response time of customer representative, and you increase the quality because you have all of the answers. But again, your reputation is on the line, which is why it's so important that you can trust the model and the data.

Savannah Peterson

>> The data here says that 50% of executives that you spoke to are trying to do exactly that, to improve the customer experience. It's not often that we have half of a very large scaled community all trying to do the same thing.

Rob Strechay

>> I think that's where most companies know how they're actually going to create value. You're all looking for personalization with your own, whomever you interact with, be it a bank, an airline or whatever services that you're using, you have a certain expectation on how to be treated. And when that experience is great, you tell 10 people about it. And I think that the next horizon, because there's only so much efficiency that can be gained through productivity, but where I think you can actually have real growth as a company is identifying new services, understanding what those services are that can be offered. I think that's an opportunity for people to differentiate themselves. I think that's very exciting and that's why customer experience is so important because I think that's where people really believe that they're going to unlock growth for their enterprises.

Rob Strechay

>> What are some of the other use cases that you're hearing about that really tie into that as well?

Savannah Peterson

>> One that I love is customer complaint analyzer. I could talk about this all day long. I could talk about this all day long because people love to complain. But I tell people, for me, the big thing about customer complaint analyzer is not just saying, okay, we have a broken process and we should do this differently. The one thing that I truly love about it is I actually think that you can find things to innovate on. So if you can identify something that you can do differently than maybe what your competition is, it is a huge opportunity for innovation. Understanding from all these multiple places, there was just an 800 number 10 years ago. Now there's everywhere. There's every platform, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, every place, you can tell the world that you're not happy. We can analyze all that information and understand who's saying what to whom obviously based on demographics and a whole bunch of other things as well, so we know what types of customers are actually complaining, and that's where that value you can really unlock. Do I serve this demographic a little bit differently than another demographic? And I think those are different types of opportunities that really we have seen with that solution so I just love it.

Savannah Peterson

>> You bring up something I think that's really important there, which is how much you can learn from a moment of mistrust or when ...

Rob Strechay

>> That's exactly right....

Savannah Peterson

>> a customer doesn't quite know. I always find that to be one of the most powerful moments to surprise and delight the community and flip them around. I love that you're saying it as a new service offering as well. I could see people thinking, oh gosh, I just want to get this resolved as quickly as possible. It's not just that.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's not just that.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's how do we get to the point where this question never comes in, and how do we give them something else to do with that time they would've spent complaining. Plus, if they complained, it means they care.

>> That's true.

Savannah Peterson

>> And it means they-

Savannah Peterson

>> They took the time to complain.

Savannah Peterson

>> Exactly. It gives you constructive feedback. It's not, yes, of course there's the ego moment of that, but the point is you then get to learn and continue to do better, and the opportunity here is huge. I mean, according to your data, only one in 10 executives say they've realized AI at scale, enterprise-wide, that leaves, and I would imagine that's even perhaps generous realistically. I'll just say that as an analyst, I would say that's a nice perception. Way to go with those companies. I'd love to see what that was really looking like. But if you've got 90% of the total addressable market who is looking for a solution like that, that must signal to you that you're doing the right things at the right time Jacqueline.

Savannah Peterson

>> I feel like it is. I really do feel like it is. I feel like this is our moment.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, I love that. You can see it in your smiles already.

Savannah Peterson

>> The opportunity is truly exponential. If we stay with the customer complaints, back in the day, people calling, they record the call and then you have thousands of calls that you'd need to analyze, which nobody is doing, so maybe they get high-level trends. Now you basically analyze all of the data. What are the trends, what are the unmet needs, and what are the opportunities and new product offerings you want to build? It's not only you analyze complaints, you're innovating based on that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and I think that's critical. All right, last question for both of you. You're a pro. We're definitely going to have you back on too, I'm sure. What do you hope to be able to say next year at Teradata Possible that you can't yet say today?

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Savannah Peterson

>> Leon, I'm going to start with you because you just gave me a knowing nod, so go for it. I'll get to Jacqueline in a second. I'll give you a little time. I got you. I got you.

Savannah Peterson

>> For me, it's really about the next level of implementation. A year ago when the whole hype started, it's like we're going to replace everything with AI. We learned that's not the case. Now we're in the phase what are the real use cases and how do we implement it at scale? So a year from now, I would love to hear, hey, these are the four or five big things that actually work at scale for large enterprises, and I'm sure Teradata will play a big role there.

Savannah Peterson

>> I would love to hear it, Leon. How about you Jacqueline?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, let me build on that. I would love to hear that too. For me, there can be things that are groundbreaking and we want to be a part of those things that are groundbreaking. Tomorrow, one of the customers that I'll be interviewing is talking about how they're using Teradata and AI for cancer intervention. Next year what I want to talk about are the huge improvements and strides that we've made in areas like that because I think there's so much value that we can deliver to the world that hasn't been seen yet. I believe that it is a much shorter cycle time than what we've seen in years past, and next year I want to be able to come back and say, yes, we were doing that, and we've done even more.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, and we've improved and saved lives while we're at it.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's exactly right.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it, Jacqueline. What an answer. Jacqueline, Leon, thank you both so much for joining us.

Savannah Peterson

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's been a blast. Rob, always a pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in to our fantastic day of coverage here at Teradata Possible in Los Angeles, California. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.