The car that refused to start when you buy vanilla ice cream and more..
This story of a car refusing to start if someone buys vanilla ice cream is an often repeated management story. In short the story is
A customer complains to a car company that his car does not start if he buys vanilla ice cream but starts if he buys other ice creams. The service engineer refused to believe and accompanied the customer every day to buy ice creams and he was able to observe that the car indeed refused to start easily when buying vanilla ice cream. The service engineer quickly realised that the vanilla ice creams are served very quickly than other ice creams so the car did not have enough time to release the vapour lock.
This issue was quickly found out because the company had a great engineer who can quickly identify the pattern in the data. In the current world every company has tons of these engineers who work on large sets of data, these engineers are not humans but they are AI enabled machines which are helping people take a lot of decisions, predict and influence behaviours.
ThoughtWorks recently hosted ThoughtWorks LIVE event in Bangalore. The theme this year was AI guided digital business. We had speakers from many backgrounds to share their knowledge on this field. The gist of the event is AI guided business is already happening and every company in every field has an impact to the tune of disruption.
Some takeaways from the event
Digital Transformation cannot happen without Business Transformation
Jaspreet Bindra talked about “Companies have to move to customer’s experience centric business to be digital. Just having a digital plan in place is not going to work out. The entire business has to be transformed to be a digital business”
Collecting a ton of data and finding a pattern leads to new insights that people would have never thought about
Crystal Widjaja mentioned that “GO-JEK got into food delivery business because they were able to find patterns into their customer data who were asking for rides”
Big decisions have to be made in seconds, even those that will incur a good loss if it is wrong
Deepak Sharma said “People don’t wait too long for decisions, loans have changed from drawn out process to flow based lending decided at the point of purchase”
Machine intelligence is already past, the next level is eco system intelligence
Shailesh Kumar’s lingering quote in my mind is “In the past you were excited to have an automatic washing machine, then you were excited to buy a smart phone, in the future you will be excited to own a connected self driving car that can talk to other cars”
Human element is what makes things interesting even though machines can be more accurate and ruthless
Javagal Srinath was enthusiastic about the role of technology in cricket for making fair decisions (1991 sharjah match’s lbw decisions are still fresh in his mind). He also said “We need to be aware that the human elements make the game interesting that is why we restrict to one DRS review appeal to a team so that the game is not reduced to machine decisions”
In summary the event emphasised the fact that AI is already mainstream and the traditional business model is not helpful to embrace a customer centric business. Also there will always be a human element that makes things interesting irrespective of the advancements in AI.
