娇色导航

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm Lee Rennick, Executive Director of 娇色导航Communities for CIO. And I'm thrilled to be here at the 娇色导航Symposium & 100 Awards. To interview Chris Nardecchia, who is the CIO, Rockwell Automation.

Chris, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your current role? Yeah. Thanks, Lee. Yeah, I'm the chief information and digital officer at Rockwell Automation, which is an industrial automation and information management company.

I've been with the company just seven years now. And prior to that, 25 years and life sciences industry in, biotech and pharmaceutical. Oh, wow. So you really been working cross-sector in different industries? Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Well, first of all, congratulations to Rockwell for winning the 娇色导航100 award. That is fantastic.

So I thought we might kick off the interview by telling us a little bit about the Connected Enterprise Batch Performance Analytics Program that is called Rockwell & Rockwell, correct? Yeah, it's quite a mouthful.

So, under our Rockwell & Rockwell banner, we're we try to be the first and best customer of our own product. So we drink our own champagne, you know, eat our own dog food.

Whichever, you know, analog you prefer. And part of that is we also work directly with customers and our products groups in developing solutions on behalf of our customers.

So in this case, the batch process analytics is something that, many in the process industry need in the food and beverage and pharmaceutical to optimize their production process, to create, you know, what we call a golden batch.

So you know how to make that batch. And now can you use analytics to predict when things are going off track. So that's how.

So that's basically what this application does is monitors the quality attributes and keeps them within the range so that when if you complete within those ranges, you'll get a good batch. And, you won't have to throw things away or redo things.

The, the other interesting aspect to it that we've layered on top is generative AI. So you can converse with the application and get more information about, well, I see this attribute drifting a little bit.

Can you tell me more about that and then can you offer solutions I don't want you to do?

So that's kind of the new new addition to this that, you know, in the past 18 months that we've all been able to take advantage of congratulations and so many CEOs are talking about, you know, increased productivity, which is what you've done, it sounds like, but then you're layering AI on top of it to even increase that.

More so correct.

Yeah. And make it a more natural language process so that you're not just looking at data or graphs. You're being able to, you know, go into causal analysis of, well, why did that happen? What could have been the root cause of that. Yeah.

And and so that you can, you know, very, accurately predict where things are going to be.

So there's still today there's the, the human intervention. So it Rockwell Automation we talk about expanding human possibility. So augmenting, people with AI.

But you know, the near future is this is going to autonomously be able to correct itself and take all that input from interfacing with natural language processes and what humans are telling it, and then build up that knowledge base and then kind of close that loop automatically in that.

So really even going into that phase of prompt engineering, right. That's right. Yeah. That's amazing. Well I appreciate you sharing that with us. And congratulations. It's a really fantastic project. So I speak with a lot of CEOs to talk about data and cloud. A lot of conversation.

And Mike with me around on prem versus cloud. The the best way to host data, the cost associated with it, you know, having data on the edge, you know, that type of thing.

So I'd love to learn your approach to data and cloud. And the many any tips you might provide the I.T leader listening in? Yeah, I think this is a very relevant topic. It's one that we discuss internally a lot.

A lot of our customers have this same kind of question. What what I would recommend is always start with what's the problem that you're trying to solve.

So if you get really good problem definition then the solution. And then how to handle the data will become apparent. Many times people are over collecting data, they're throwing in the cloud and then it runs up your, your bill, at your provider.

So starting with the problem, getting very clear on that and then creating a right solution and some things we're going to have to have a very fast reaction time.

And they're going to have to be done fairly close to the process. So you do those at the edge where other ones, you know, might need to ingest a whole lot of data, to get some sort of analysis on that.

And then that's where you want to do the cloud and then push it back down to the edge.

So we think in terms of, you know, edge to cloud and then cloud back to edge and being able to leverage both of those based on the problem that you have in the solution that you have to provide.

And it sounds like then you use that process for Rockwell. Rockwell like that was a big was that a big part of that process for, you know, our Rockwell and Rockwell is really designed to, take our own products.

And a lot of times our partner products and use them in our own operations first, it's so we can kind of, you know, kick the tires on and find out what works and what does it, what the limitations are.

And and if there's limitations, how do you work around those? And then when we go to a customer, there's a better chance that we're going to be able to solve that problem.

We've already seen it before. So that's how we use that really amazing. Thank you for sharing that. All right. So the next question is about the hottest topic still generative. Hi. And I read some of your case studies at Rockwell.

You know that you had some amazing results to reduce customer downtime, increase quality and productivity. We're all talking about productivity these days.

So since you're working in that space, you know, what trends are you seeing, for AI in enterprise? Yeah, yeah.

So, so a couple of things, you know, just off the top of my head is copilots for programing seem to be, you know, delivering productivity so you can get good programmer productivity. You know, anywhere from 10 to 15 to 20% on average.

And some people have claimed, you know, 30 or 50% productivity on certain types of programing for the programing that we're doing. You know, we're more in that 20% range because we're doing really complex things. It's really good at that. It's really good at reverse engineering.

So, you know, things, you know, certain technologies like, you know, writing ladder logic.

This is not something that people are coming out of school learning. Right. But you can now, you know, programing ladder logic like applying generative AI with that. So yeah.

So I think there's lots of things there where I'm not seeing as much uptake is on code pilot for kind of general office work. Right.

But generative AI applied to very purpose things on sorting through a lot of customer information, doing product configurations, you know, looking at, event data and then sorting and, and recommending there's huge productivity enhancements there.

So I think you just have to pick where you're, you know, again, problem definition. And then, you know, probably the right solution in some of, you know, more of what we're seeing are really purpose built language models to solve specific problems. Yeah.

Like how it's going to fit in. What what percentage of the business can it can, you know, encompass or where it can achieve results.

And then looking at the other solutions you still might have. Correct. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you know, I would I can expand on batch analytics and extend that into the way customers are using it and where we see big advantage.

So, we monitor, about a 700 plants across our customer base. So this is these are active plants that are producing whatever products, and we get 60,000 events a month coming into into that, into our, our center. Right.

So that was historically, you have people looking at the events and then disposition in each event wasn't an alarm. Do we have to act on it now? We can use generate.

I just to kind of sort through that because we have a big knowledge base of, oh, the last time we saw something like that, and you take this action and we can give with probability percentages, if you take this action, action, you will resolve that incident. Right.

So that's a huge productivity lift and it takes off, you know, the kind of the rote activities of the people, but the people are still involved in doing it. And then they're also finding new things that then become part of the the database that you can apply to.

Fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. All right. Well, the last question I have for you is, the state of the 娇色导航report.

We we released foundry. We surveyed around 1100 CIOs about their leadership and tech journey. And when we did that, we asked about their role with the C-suite and the board of directors.

And 79% said the 娇色导航now has an educational partnership with the board and the sea and the board of directors and the CEO. Excuse me. So to see, I would wonder, was wondering about that.

You know, what your views are on that. We just had Sheila on stage talking about how she's so integrated with her board and and really educating them around. Yeah, I, I could see how this is, you know, still an issue for many CIOs and companies.

I'd say for me, you know, since I've been there seven years now and there's been a lot of transition, both in our our C-suite and with our board.

I'm pretty fortunate to have a CEO that's very technical in nature, because we're technically one company. So he understands it. But early on, there was an education process on, hey, this is what the IT budget is made of.

Here's where, you need to invest for the future to fulfill the strategy of the company. But it was somewhat of an easy lift for me because our strategy as a company is bringing the connected enterprise to life.

And what that means is the convergence of information technology and operations technology, operations technologies, the technology that runs manufacturing. So it's in our strategy. So it's not just an enabler of the strategy. We're integral to the strategy of the company. So it's a little bit easier for me.

So the education is more been around okay.

How do we do investment planning and prioritization against the strategy versus other things where we can spend money and educating my peers and particularly the CFOs, you know, on on that and having a partnership and cutting out a lot of the programs that were maybe distracting from the strategy.

That's been more the education. And then as we brought new board members on helping them with, well, here's what the company does. And over the past couple of years, it's all been about AI.

So there's been education not just of myself, but my peers in the company on how we're using AI and embedding them in the products. And then how are we using across the enterprise. So fantastic.

I really appreciate you sharing that. And I appreciate you joining me here today. Chris. Congratulations on your word. It's been fantastic. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lee. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you. Thank you.