Live at the Pure Accelerate Summit in Las Vegas

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.
This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead, with insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:32)
Rob Lee is Chief Technology and Growth Officer at Everpure. He was an architect at Oracle. He focused on large-scale distributed data management systems, and he joins us right here in Vegas. Hello, hello. Great to have you here with us.
Yeah. The AI narrative story, it has evolved over the last three years. We just talked with your CEO about how the shift from kind of app-centric to data-centric. Talk to us a little bit about when you are talking with clients and customers, what is it that they are most concerned about?

**Rob Lee** (1:05)
Well, thanks for having me. Great to have you guys here as well.
Look, I think the AI narrative definitely has shifted over the last three years. It's probably shifted quite a bit over the last three months even. When I'm out speaking with clients and customers, I would say the biggest driver in their minds is, hey, AI technology is great. It has a lot of promise, a lot of hopes and aspirations. Connecting that then to reality and results and ROI, I think that's now dominating the discussion, especially in the enterprise.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:35)
Is it holding them back from spending maybe even a little bit? Let me see how this is going to impact before I kind of move forward.

**Rob Lee** (1:41)
You know, I think it's probably a little bit early to call that, but it's definitely entering into the narrative, I would say, six months, nine months, 12 months ago.
It was very much more about, hey, let's get out there, let's experiment, let's try. Now, these days, I would say even earlier on the discussions, ROI, understanding what that's going to look like, understanding what that path is going to be, is starting to enter into those discussions. I do think that given more time, eventually, economics just says, eventually, folks will need to understand what ROI looks like, how that's measured, whether it's productivity, whether it's velocity, whether it's efficiency. I think the industry is just in the early stages of sorting that out.

**Carol Massar** (2:21)
We just had this great chat with Charlie Giancarlo, the company's CEO and Chairman.
He did a good job of explaining to us this shift that's happening from this app-centric world to this data-centric world. One area that I want to understand as a consumer and as a lay person, is what this ends up looking like for our day-to-day lives. What does it mean if a company can go from running 1,000 or 3,000 apps, to taking all the data that feeds into those apps, having it in a centralized location, having AI actually make sense of that data in a way that is productive? What does that mean for us?

**Tim Stenovec** (2:54)
Like AI not just being another workload?

**Rob Lee** (2:56)
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I think it's a great question and I think time will tell to some degree. In some sense, it's not dissimilar to the early days of the Internet. There was a point in time where everybody looked at the Internet. They said, hey, if I go put up a web page, get a.com address, I've created business value.
I think what history has shown us is that the Internet is a great technology.
It's then the use case is how that technology is put into place that transforms lives. Whether it's how you buy things online, you retail, whether it's how you consume media, etc. Those are all applications of the technology. I think with AI, we as an industry are in the early stages of that.

**Carol Massar** (3:36)
Do you buy the view that we're going to have agents acting on our behalf? Are you preparing for a world in which that exists?

**Rob Lee** (3:41)
I do. To get back to your previous question, I think how we as consumers will appreciate that shift to data becoming primary at the forefront, is that architecture I think is inevitable. AI will, is accelerating it. I think that transition, the way it will play out is it will allow companies, it will allow technology to make faster decisions, better decisions in real time. If you think about how your consumer lives have evolved over the last 10, 15, 20 years, you have a lot more personalized experiences with every consumer vendor you deal with, whether it's things you buy, retailers, personal electronics.