PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Kerim Akgonul keynote - The Age of Transformation is here. Are you there?

My name is Kerim Akgonul. I am responsible for products here at Pegasystems and I am incredibly excited to be here with you today. Actually, I've been really excited about being here doing this presentation for you since we had PegaWorld on this stage last year. And this whole time I've been trying to think about how to make my presentation, so it's informative. I want to see if I can infuse some fun into it, and I've been trying to figure out how do I make it memorable. So this last couple of months, I've been going through and watching some great keynotes from the past years looking for inspiration, and I find myself going back to the same one over and over again. It's a presentation, I think, from like 20 years ago. Delivered by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. I think they were launching .NET and during that presentation he asks a question to his audience.

He says, what is the key to digital transformation? And some of you will remember it. He immediately answers the question himself. He says it is developers, developers, developers, developers. Straight to the point, people remembered years, decades later. So I've been wondering, if he was doing a keynote today, what would he say is the key to digital transformation? If I was doing a keynote today, what would I say? Well, wait, I am doing a keynote today and I bet a lot of you know what I'm going to say - that the key to digital transformation is GenAI, GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. And you're going to hear a lot about this throughout this conference.

And the reason why I've been so excited about doing this presentation is because since last year, because when we were here for PegaWorld 23, we announced the availability of a brand new microservice, a GenAI microservice that is highly available , enterprise grade, that is built directly into our Pega Cloud architecture, and that it became a core part of our product solution offering. And we built this basically with access to Azure's open API for large language model use. But the architecture is built in a flexible way. And just this morning, we announced the availability of our GenAI service to work with large language models from Amazon as well as Google. And since that release of Pega Infinity 23, GenAI has become a standard part of everything we do in our products because we know that GenAI is so much more than just summarizing texts or writing, you know, rap songs, or maybe even helping you do your kid's homework. That GenAI is actually a real revolution in technology, and its impact will be even greater than that of the internet. And we all know that the internet was a major revolution in technology. The internet moved us in to the age of information. Internet was great.

It's still great. It connected us all. It completely changed the way we do business. It truly transformed the way we live our lives. And that age of information was all about the creation and collection of tremendous amounts of - want to guess? Information. During these last years and decades, all of our organizations amassed millions and millions of documents. So many documents everywhere. So much information that once someone needs to figure out how to do something in their job, when they need to figure out an answer to their question.

It's actually easier to find someone in the company who knows someone else, who probably has a cousin that works upstairs that might know the answer to your question... than look for the right documentation. Imagine being new at a company with so much documents and so much knowledge scattered all over the place. What would it take to be good at your job? What would it take to be great? You know who was really great at this job? Alexander the Great. Well, Alexander the Great wasn't that great when he first started, he was just a 13 year old boy, you know, his parents called him Alex. His friends around the castle called him Al.

But Al was much luckier than all the other kids in the kingdom. You see, when Al turned 13, his parents hired Aristotle to be his personal tutor. That's not fair. So whenever Al had any question about how the world worked or how to go and expand his empire, he could just turn over to Aristotle and he got a pretty decent answer back. He didn't have to run around the castle looking for answers to his questions, and that surely gave him a leg up in being great. But now I do realize that you don't have really the flexibility to hire someone like Aristotle to sit next to every single employee waiting to answer their random questions about how to do their job. But you can still make sure that every single one of your employees have the answers to all of their questions at their fingertips at all times with the Pega GenAI Knowledge Buddy. Alan mentioned the Knowledge Buddy earlier on. Knowledge Buddy is great.

It is super simple. It is very practical. Essentially it's accessible from any app, any environment the employees are using. And the way the employees interact with it is the same way you would ask a colleague a question about how to do something. You can just ask the Knowledge Buddy and it will immediately give you the answer, and it will give you a reference to the document, to the content, where the information comes from and the way it works is you basically point Knowledge Buddy to all your documents and knowledge repositories. It takes all of that context and content and indexes it into a vector database. And then from wherever the employees are working, they can just ask the questions and get the answers back immediately. So gone are the days of new employees, or even the seasoned ones, not having immediate access to up to date information around how to do their job. So I want to take two minutes and actually show you how the Knowledge Buddy works in the context of a contact center agent.

So meet my cousin Tony. Tony's great. Tony is a customer service agent at an insurance call center, and luckily they use Pega Customer Service on Pega Cloud. So on the agent desktop, Tony has access to all the different tools to make him very effective when he engages with his customers. So I was talking to Tony the other day, and he tells me the story about where he got a call from a panicked customer a couple of weeks ago, and the customer wanted to know if the damages to the upholstery of his beautiful, classic car by a tiger was actually covered by his policy. So, you know, Tony's been doing this for like ten years and he's never heard this question before. And normally what he would do is he would put the customer on hold, go ask around, look for some documentation, find the supervisor. But you know he doesn't need to anymore because he's got Knowledge Buddy built directly into his agent desktop. So he asked the question directly into the Knowledge Buddy and boom!

He gets the response back immediately, that the damages are covered. No problem. As long as the tiger is actually owned by the policyholder and not some random celebrity. And just like that, Tony saved time, provided an accurate customer interaction. And really, this made Tony great at his job. So that's basically how Knowledge Buddy works. Just gives you the answers at your fingertips. Now I want to quickly shift over to another GenAI capability for the customer service. And this one is called the GenAI Agent Trainer.

Now look, Tony has been on the job for ten years, but there's a lot of churn, turnover in the contact center. So they are always hiring new agents. So right here we meet Heather. She's a brand new agent and as a new contact center agent, she needs to learn how to take calls from customers and be able to process their requests. And traditionally, training a new agent is a labor intensive and time consuming process. You have to read lots of documentation, watch videos. Sometimes they have to plug in with other agents and listen to customer calls and see how they're processed. But the CS, the customer service agent trainer, changes all of that. So what it does is it creates a collection of virtual customers to call directly into Heather's phone set And these virtual customers make service requests the way a real customer would, and it creates different personas of customers.

It creates new customers that are calling in or, you know, customers who've been around for a long time. It creates happy customers that are calling in and ready to talk, or it creates, you know, angry customers who just want to get things done quickly. And Heather just processes these requests, just as she would with a real customer. And at the end, the CS Agent Trainer gives actually coaching recommendations and basically tells Heather where she is doing great. And what are some areas that she has to actually improve on. So this saves time. This makes things much more efficient. And I want to actually quickly show you like a one minute video to see how that works. Thank you for calling U+ Bank.

My name is Heather. How can I help you today? Hi Heather, I'm calling because I am moving to Las Vegas and I wanted to change my address on my account. Wonderful! I can definitely help you with that. I hear great things about Las Vegas. Yes, I can't wait. I went with some friends and had such a great time. That's great.

May I please have the new address for your account? My new address will be 118 Wolfpack Lane, Las Vegas, Nevada. And what is the zip code? The zip code is 89016. Thank you. I have made that change. Should I update the addresses of your other accounts you own? No, thanks. I only need to update my main account for now.

Okay, great. I have made the changes you requested. Thank you for contacting U+ bank. Have a nice day. All right. So that was pretty quick. Essentially the virtual customer called in, made a request. Heather had to basically navigate through the system. And, I don't know, I thought she did pretty well.

But the Agent Trainer did find a couple of improvement suggestions. And the way this will work is, the Agent Trainer will continuously make calls into Heather, and then she will become ready to take calls from real customers much, much faster. It will be much more cost efficient to get her up to speed. And it's kind of a little bit more fun for the agent. Instead of basically reading lots of documents to be able to get trained this way. So it's a big win for the contact center. And throughout this week, throughout this conference, you will see a tremendous number of GenAI driven capabilities as a part of the latest version of Pega Customer Service. And they'll be demonstrated to you and you'll love them. I think you'll love them.

And all of this, really, all of this GenAI capabilities are possible because that service, that GenAI microservice is just baked directly into the core architecture of the Pega platform. That gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility. Now, from Customer Service I want to switch over to Pega Customer Decision Hub. So here, meet Stephanie. Well, you already met Stephanie. You know Steph. And by the way, Steph and Matt are doing an amazing job hosting this conference. So love it. But when Steph is not busy hosting PegaWorld, she's actually responsible for growing customer revenues and loyalty for a large hotel chain.

And she is very busy, she's working all the time. And you know, not surprisingly, she's a very successful digital marketer and she is using Pega Customer Decision Hub to deliver statistical, AI driven, hyper personalized offers for each and every guest on either the website or the mobile app in real time. And what makes Steph great is regardless of which job she is doing, she's always looking for ways to optimize the offers that she is delivering to her guests. Luckily, she has that latest version of Customer Decision Hub running on Pega Cloud with some brand new GenAI capabilities. Meet CDH Assistant powered by GenAI. What makes this new capability awesome is, Stephanie can just directly talk to her Customer Decision Hub application. She can ask questions around what's working and what's not working, how are the statistical models performing? Where are opportunities to optimize? She can actually have a direct conversation with CDH Assistant, and this makes it easy to understand which offers are working, which ones are not, and in this case, Steph wants to know which customer segments are interacting the least with the offers that are presented to them.

And she types it in. She clicks Next and CDH Assistant immediately gives her a response back and says, well, the offers that are being presented to millennials on vacation or the retired couples are working great. They are basically operating at the levels that we expect, but the offers that are being presented to Expo attendees or business travelers, people that are here for IT conferences, there's room for improvement. And here CDH Assistant directs her to yet another GenAI based new capability in in CDH called Intelligent Treatments. This is a capability in CDH that allows digital marketers to fine tune the treatments that are presented with the offers. You see, the way it works is, CDH uses statistical models to determine what offers are presented to customers and guests, and then it provides different treatments for each one of those offers based on different segments. And the treatments are essentially the words and the images that marketers use to present the offers. And one of the greatest capabilities of Intelligent Treatments is it uses GenAI to apply some standard marketing principles to generate treatments that are optimized for specific customer segments, and Steph can choose which ones she believes makes sense for these segments. And in this case, she's going to roll out these new treatments that are targeting business travelers and only customer decision hub in this space combines the power of both statistical AI and generative AI to deliver great offers.

And that's probably one of the reasons why Customer Decision Hub has been ranked year after year as the best, as the number one real time interaction management offering on Earth. And again throughout the next couple of days, you'll get to go through the Innovation Hub and see all of these things, these capabilities yourself. You'll see the impact of GenAI to the digital marketers. You've already seen the impact of GenAI to customer service agents, but this is just the beginning because what is the key to digital transformation? GenAI, GenAI, GenAI, GenAI. And unfortunately, in our software industry, there is a tremendous amount of effort and movement to use GenAI to help developers write more code. They want to have more code, more lines of code, and this is one area that we completely disagree. Most of the organizations that we have the privilege to work with are not really looking to layer their existing 2000 legacy applications with another million lines of code on top. In our definition, digital transformation means getting to a world where there is less code and more modernization.

It means going from hundreds and thousands of old, outdated applications to fewer modern applications that are built cloud native, that are model driven, that are built quickly and can be changed easily with AI that's built into them. And we believe that the way to be great at replacing old legacy applications with modern solutions is using Pega GenAI Blueprint By this point, I hope you know that we are quite excited about Pega GenAI Blueprint and Blueprint is great. Blueprint is as easy to use as an airport kiosk, but it's as powerful as weeks long intense requirement gathering sessions. And we're going to have some Blueprint kiosks throughout this conference. And what the job of Blueprint is, to capture your vision for how you want your business applications to work. Really, it's no different than - instead of building an application. If you're building a house, the same conditions exist. If you bought a plot of land and if you're going to build your dream house, you're not going to have the construction people come in on day one and start pouring in concrete. You're going to actually sit down with a subject matter expert like an architect, and you're going to capture your vision for your dream home in a blueprint.

You're going to decide how your home is going to look. You're going to decide how many bedrooms and how many bathrooms and the garage and everything else. You're going to capture your dream into a blueprint. And once you're happy with your blueprint, then you're going to give it to the construction people, and they're just going to come and build it, and you're not going to hopefully face any surprises, right? The construction people halfway through pouring in concrete, they're not going to come and ask you how many bedrooms you need. The blueprint is going to capture that vision. And I believe that the same actually applies to building enterprise applications. You capture your vision for a dream business application, how it should work today, and then you give it to the developers to actually construct it. And we have lots of new capabilities that we've been building into our Blueprint that will have a chance to reveal during this conference.

And I know we're putting a lot of emphasis... I'm kind of curious how many of you actually have tried - put your hands up - if you tried or seen Blueprint be used. Okay, now keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. Now put your other hand up if you promise me that you're going to go try it yourself today during this conference. Okay, I need more promises. We're going to wait here. All right. Now, if you want to see the latest...

just raise the roof if you want to see the latest capabilities. All right, come on over. Let's just check it out what the next generation of Blueprint looks like. So I want to basically - you can see it, right? Let me show you some of the new capabilities that are coming as a part of Blueprint. First of all, we completely changed the design and the experience to make it easier. So it's just in this case, we had this kiosk because it's so easy that it's just a touch screen. It starts with basically understanding what industry that you want to go into. So we like banking.

We'll pop into banking. And it always gives me some feedback as to what I'm building. It asks me for a subindustry. I'm going to go into retail banking and from here I'm going to pop into lending. So I'm building a retail banking application, and then it asks me the application purpose. And this is very similar with all sorts of different GenAI tools. What is the purpose? What is really the prompt. And here I'm going to select "retail loan origination".

I can type in any use case that I want, any industry, any area. And then when I click Next, here is where we're using the power of Pega's knowledge and GenAI to actually make a recommendation for the Blueprint of an application. So now you're seeing a couple of new things here. Blueprint is first recommending that for this retail loan origination we're going to have three different workflows. Now one new thing that's coming is, you can actually import - if you have already a BPMN diagram that defines the end to end process of this workflow, you can directly import into Blueprint and it will generate based on that. And also it's starting to give you some recommendations on the right. Some visible as to the experience on the right. It gives you on the next step the overall life cycle, the end to end life cycle of each one of the workflows. So you can actually see, you can navigate here.

If I can select clearly, allright, then it's sideways and GenAI, in Blueprint it's going to make you recommendations of best practices. And you get to go in and change this to fit exactly what your vision is as how this application works. And this makes it very fast. It's a very collaborative capability. And then here in this step, we're capturing the data that is going to be part of every workflow. And then as I define the data, it's giving me a clue as to what this application is going to look like. So this new generation of GenAI Blueprint is not only figuring out the workflows and the integrations and the data model, but it's also using GenAI to figure out the overall user experience of the application that's going to be created once this Blueprint is built out. And Alan talked about our Center-out approach. We truly believe in Center-out.

So when you are building out your application Blueprint, you can actually see immediately within like 30s what this application will actually look like for your employees on a desktop. You can see what it will look like when they're on a mobile device. You can see what it will look like if you extend that workflow to a self-service channel. You can see what it looks like - Let's say you want Tony to be able to take calls about this loan origination. You can see what it looks like on the contact center. And if you go into engage with this application, this workflow programmatically, it will even show you the swagger for the DX API of what it will generate and how you would actually programmatically call this application. All of this in a couple of seconds, using the power of Pega's knowledge as well as GenAI. One more thing that I want to basically... Well, I love it.

One more thing that's basically coming is, when we're talking about defining the integration, how basically data becomes a part of the application is, you can now import swagger definitions of existing applications to get that connectivity in place, all of it directly in the Blueprint, all of it through essentially a touch screen experience. You don't need to have your own environment. You don't have to be on the latest version. You don't have to have GenAI connectivity. You don't have to be anything other than being able to just click through and actually have a vision of how you want your applications to work. And this works for any industry. It works for any use case. I'm going to pop back. And of course we have a lot of experience and I've worked a lot with banking.

I'm going to pop into an industry that I'm not familiar with, and I know we have lots of guests here from the energy industry. So I hope this works out right. We're going to pop into oil and gas. Let's go to drilling and well management, who knows how to build applications in drilling and well management. And here Blueprint is going to give me a recommendation for lots of different apps that I can build in this space. We can do directional drilling. Drilling equipment management. We can do mud management. You're building an oil field.

There is mud and somebody has to manage the mud and you need to keep track of it. So let's see what GenAI Blueprint will tell us what would be the standard Blueprint for a mud management application. Okay, it comes back. It suggests that there's mud mixing. Mud circulation. Of course, mud conditioning. You have to condition twice. And what we're not going to do mud monitoring. So I'm going to actually delete this here and it will immediately - If I tap it correctly, it will immediately drop it off from the recommendation.

It will give me the workflows. It will give me the data structures. It will build the entire end to end blueprint for how to do mud management. And of course it will give me the whole UI. Oh, by the way, I can actually click around on this UI and see the end user's experience directly in this UI that is generated by GenAI as well, which I think is pretty cool. And I know that we have lots of international organizations. People use Pega Infinity across the globe, and what we wanted to make sure is that these applications are available across geographies, across industries. So I'm going to go into this mud management, and I'm going to change this to... let's go Japanese.

And we have lots of friends here from Japan. So this one is for you. So I hope it will show us the right stuff and we'll get to generate this application in any language. We will get to experience the UX of this in any language and we love it. We think this is awesome. There's nothing like this in the industry, and GenAI Blueprint is just getting more and more powerful every day. So you're going to basically go and get to try this for yourself. You're going to actually participate. When you go to the Innovation Hub, there will be a bunch of these kiosks that are going to be set up, and it's all there for you with all the product team around it, for you to actually try it with your own use cases and be able to understand the power of it.

And one of the other really cool things that you're going to see when you get to the Innovation Hub is that there is the preview of a Blueprint that is being built out for Customer Decision Hub, and what we need is we need you to go see it, understand it and give us your feedback. And we love the idea that Blueprint is a SaaS app on Pega.com, so we can evolve it with new capabilities every week. And since we launched it several weeks ago, we've gotten so much engagement with it. This is basically the fastest of any product offering, any solution, any capability that we've ever had that has seen this level of adoption. And we're hoping that you're going to make this a part of your real digital transformation journey. And don't forget, once you actually capture a Blueprint, when you actually have a Blueprint that defines your workflows and your processes and your data and your UI the way you would like to see it, you are literally two clicks and two minutes away from having your blueprint vision become a real enterprise grade application on Pega Infinity. And again... We think this is really exciting. Alan talked about doubling developer productivity.

This is definitely going to help help out with that initiative. It is incredible to see this support and engagement from our partner organization where we're coming together and building Blueprint templates in industries that they have expertise in. And like I said, you're going to go to the Innovation Hub. You're going to basically try the latest designs for yourself. But it's not just Blueprint. Throughout the conference, you will see practical implementations of GenAI everywhere. We believe GenAI is a real revolution in technology and that GenAI will move us out of the age of information into a world where employees have answers to their questions at their fingertips. A world where marketers can precisely target their customers with the right offers. A world where you can actually design an enterprise grade application literally in seconds.

GenAI will move us out of age of information and directly into age of transformation, and Pega will be there with you every single step of the way. And all of that starts right now. Have a great PegaWorld. Thank you so much for your attention and thank you.