I have been doing video interviews with a number of C level executives, VCs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. See the full list here.
This time it is Ed Abbo, President and CTO at C3.ai, which blends cloud computing power, machine learning and sensory data to help accelerate digital transformation at asset-intensive manufacturing, utilities, oil and gas and other customers and in service-intensive industries like healthcare and banking.
He describes acrobatics at customers rapidly scaling up during the crisis like 3M and others which saw a dramatic increase in PPE and other product demand. Others scaling down like Shell Oil. He also describes Enel Energy, a utility with 60 million customers in 30 countries. Andre Blumberg of CLP had described some of the swings in energy demand they had seen in Asia/Pac - multiply that many times with Enel's global coverage.
He also describes their COVID-19 Data Lake which should hopefully dramatically improve the next-generation of pandemic modeling.
Finally, he spends some time on how C3ai helps corporate IT move to hundreds of bite-sized, agile projects which leverage traditional monolithic investments, not replace them in multi-year projects. It's a new way to approach digital transformations - a sea change from prior experiences in his long career at Siebel and Oracle.
