Replacing human agents with AI, matching it to the right sales workflow: > “So we watched how this was going very closely,” he said. “We’d review transcripts from the early customer interactions, verbatim transcripts, to see how people are reacting in a conversation with Watson – because they didn’t know it was Watson.” > > Kalinsky found reassurance in particular from a Watson-customer conversation that occurred one night at about 2 a.

Replacing human agents with AI, matching it to the right sales workflow: > “So we watched how this was going very closely,” he said. “We’d review transcripts from the early customer interactions, verbatim transcripts, to see how people are reacting in a conversation with Watson – because they didn’t know it was Watson.” > > Kalinsky found reassurance in particular from a Watson-customer conversation that occurred one night at about 2 a.

> Please believe me when I say that I totally agree with Holger’s assertion that this process produces absolutely top quality software – and that the people doing the work are often among the very best in their respective corners of the software world. My main beef – which is why I use the term suckers – is that I think they should be compensated when that good hard work results in someone else – particularly a VC-backed company – making money on the fruit of their labor, in Red Hat’s case about $3 billion last year, with almost $500 million in profits, that after IBM bought the company for $34 billion.

> Please believe me when I say that I totally agree with Holger’s assertion that this process produces absolutely top quality software – and that the people doing the work are often among the very best in their respective corners of the software world. My main beef – which is why I use the term suckers – is that I think they should be compensated when that good hard work results in someone else – particularly a VC-backed company – making money on the fruit of their labor, in Red Hat’s case about $3 billion last year, with almost $500 million in profits, that after IBM bought the company for $34 billion.

> Unfortunately, syndication on the modern web still only happens through one of a very small number of channels, meaning that none of us “retain control over our online personae” the way that Werbach imagined we would. One reason this happened is garden-variety corporate rapaciousness—RSS, an open format, didn’t give technology companies the control over data and eyeballs that they needed to sell ads, so they did not support it. But the more mundane reason is that centralized silos are just easier to design than common standards.

> Unfortunately, syndication on the modern web still only happens through one of a very small number of channels, meaning that none of us “retain control over our online personae” the way that Werbach imagined we would. One reason this happened is garden-variety corporate rapaciousness—RSS, an open format, didn’t give technology companies the control over data and eyeballs that they needed to sell ads, so they did not support it. But the more mundane reason is that centralized silos are just easier to design than common standards.

Two big features: > So how does zero downtime actually work in production? Seroter explained that, for example, an organization could deploy an application (v1) with Cloud Foundry and then perhaps a second app (v2). After the v2 application is deployed, an administrator could then just simply switch the network route to enable the new version. The same basic method is now being scaled in an automated approach. > “Let’s say I have five instances of my app and when I deploy the next version, under zero downtime deploy, as each instance of that app comes up in that same bucket, one of the old one comes out,” Seroter said.

Two big features: > So how does zero downtime actually work in production? Seroter explained that, for example, an organization could deploy an application (v1) with Cloud Foundry and then perhaps a second app (v2). After the v2 application is deployed, an administrator could then just simply switch the network route to enable the new version. The same basic method is now being scaled in an automated approach. > “Let’s say I have five instances of my app and when I deploy the next version, under zero downtime deploy, as each instance of that app comes up in that same bucket, one of the old one comes out,” Seroter said.

> There are various mechanisms and methods that we use to transform the skills of our incumbents. Dedicated classroom training programs is one way, but it is the least preferred option. Mostly, we believe in pairing employees who need to be trained with others who are native to those capabilities; we have found this to be one of the most effective methods of transforming people. We hire people with the required capabilities and pair them up with the incumbents, and the result is that those capabilities are multiplied across the organization.

> There are various mechanisms and methods that we use to transform the skills of our incumbents. Dedicated classroom training programs is one way, but it is the least preferred option. Mostly, we believe in pairing employees who need to be trained with others who are native to those capabilities; we have found this to be one of the most effective methods of transforming people. We hire people with the required capabilities and pair them up with the incumbents, and the result is that those capabilities are multiplied across the organization.