娇色导航

Welcome to 娇色导航leadership live at IDC Directions. I'm Lee Rennick, VP tech evangelist for IDC, and I'm thrilled to welcome Corey Farrell, CTO digital and technology from Pearson. Corey. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. We just came off the main stage doing a panel there.

Thank you for that. No problem. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Sure. So I am the CTO, as you said, digital and technology at Pearson.

Pearson is a very old company, almost over 100 years old, and we've had to reinvent our ourselves a number of different times, but a lot of it has led to where we are today, which is a learning and educational company that's global.

So we focus primarily on all phases of learning, from kindergarten through 12th grade, as you move on into higher education, then you may want to get your second or your third career and how you get up skilled.

And you know, in those different areas, language learning is a big deal for us. Virtual schooling, we do that as well.

And then the other large portion of our business is around assessments and qualifications, which is everything from nursing degrees through if you're getting AWS or Microsoft certified, you're more than likely taking an assessment with Pearson. So all things learning and you know throughout your entire life, fantastic.

Thank you for sharing that. Okay, well, we were up just up on the stage. We're hearing a lot today about innovation, especially in the area of agentic AI.

So just curious what you're seeing in market, and, you know, perhaps, how you're working with agentic AI and agentic AI to, you know, accelerate business. It's almost overwhelming.

I think at this point, like every week, there is a new agentic announcement that's made. You know, you've seen, you know, even starting last year, Mark Benioff kind of talked about Salesforce turning themselves into an agent first company.

Obviously, introductions of agentic workflows and tools are in all the hyperscalers. So they're continuing to roll out more and more, you know, Google with its

agent space kind of capabilities Salesforce has agent force,

and then you start to see agentic working its way into every single one of the application estates that most companies are using. Whether it's your Microsoft tooling, it's your service now tooling,

you know, there's operational tooling that has agentic in it. So it can be somewhat overwhelming for somebody who sits in a technology seat like I do, around how it's all going to work together. And then you start to layer on things like agentic orchestration.

How do you take agents and let them work with one another and coordinate across themselves. The concept of guardian agents then gets thrown in where you're building out agents to make sure that you're compliant with your security protocols, or gatekeepers of the agents.

So, long story short, it can be daunting, just because there's so much out there, startups all the way through your big, established companies, and it's often difficult to know what's the right fit for your company, and how do we make it valuable to the business that we're trying to operate within?

Yeah, it must be a really exciting time.

We were talking about that on the stage, but sort of difficult time, because there are so many AI startups, and there are so many vendors who are promoting, you know, selling it, and then there are so many other factors within business right as to how to navigate it.

So I appreciate you sharing that with us. So we've heard a lot from our researchers and analysts so far on the stage. Last yesterday, I got had the opportunity to interview Ritu Jyothi, our Chief Research Officer, and Meredith Whalen.

Anything you're hearing today at the event, just around trends in market.

The last keynote, I thought was interesting, because I do a lot in the infrastructure and operation space. And,

yeah, there's, there isn't as much yet given to how agentic is essentially going to kind of revolutionize the way that your modern day IT support function, whether that be it help desks all the way through, kind of your infrastructure teams.

So you're starting to see, you know, companies kind of sprout out that are able, are pitching the ability to automatically detect incidents, like a network incident, or maybe you made a code change at that night for an agent to identify a problem, figure out maybe your shopping cart started dropping, or maybe users started calling in to figure out what the problem is, do a root cause analysis, figure out that it traced back to code.

Correct the code. Deploy.

Into an environment where it tests out the code and all the different scenarios, and then theoretically, then goes and fixes the issue in real time using agentic processing and decision making.

Like that is very powerful. Like, if you have agents working non stop in that in that regard, yeah, that has a lot of potential.

So, and you could probably apply that same, you know, set of use cases to anything, any major function, marketing function, sales functions, Customer Care functions, there are use cases that are out there, everywhere. So I'm, I'm really only because I do a lot of infrastructure operations.

Those are the use cases that start to excite me a little bit because, you know, we have incident managers that we have to deploy around the clock on, you know, with page pages at all hours of the night.

And if you've done Incident Management, it's not a fun job to be woken up at three in the morning with an incident.

The other area I think is going to be really super interesting is around how AI governance and security works, and whether companies are prepared for just how to manage all of that stuff, yeah, especially when you get into autonomous decision making of agents or, you know, you're you've got AI tools that are popping up like mushrooms, you know, at this point in time, how do you govern all of that?

You want to give your employees enough to be able to experiment and try things and figure it out, but you can't.

It can't be the wild wild west either, because there are a lot of these tools can have pretty big impacts to your company if they're not, you know, handled accordingly. So we're just wrapping up the first quarter. We've just wrapped the first quarter of the year. Just wondering.

You know, any emerging trends you feel will dominate tech and how you're you're viewing, sort of the next phase of the tech rollout for the remainder of the year. Is there a next phase? I think it's an evolution. I don't even know if it's a Yeah.

Just kind of all blends together these days. I don't know if it's exactly the next phase, but I do think that there will be a significant emphasis on coding specific to as it relates to the just sheer amount of code that will be deployed into the ecosystem.

If you think about it, you know you have agents now or code assist tools that are essentially low code or no code. Some people are calling it vibe coding.

Now, if you've heard that, that term, but vibe coding, from what I understand, it's, you know, people that may not be training coding, but they are talking using native language around what they want to design.

I want to build a website, and I want a purple background, and like you're talking about what you're feeling in your head, and it's translating it into code, okay? And code is being produced as a result of it, yes.

And what that basically means is, if, if, if your CFO can create code, or, you know, anybody with a marketing background can create code.

We're going to see more code produced in the next year than maybe in our entire lifetimes, which is going to be incredible, but also a little bit scary. How do you manage that level of code to make sure that it's governed the right way? It's when it breaks.

How do you troubleshoot and dag nut and those sit probably using AI as well, but those are the trends that I think are really interesting. Data is probably another big one

asking a question of data.

I think that the entire way that we used to think about how you had data lakes, you had visualization tools like your tableaus and your Power BI and lookers and those type of things, the medium that they have will go away completely, because you'll have anybody that wants to ask a question of data.

Tell me, you know the sales that we had from March until April for product X, and put it into a pie chart so that I can put it into a PowerPoint presentation, and boom, it's it does it. You don't need to build all these complicated analytics.

All you need is native language to ask questions of data.

So I think you're going to start to see, you know, the movement of what was once maybe traditional, it moving way into the business for everything data, which I think is pretty exciting to put, like data in the hands of the people who really are looking at it, which are between the business users.

Yeah, this is interesting. My husband's a CTO, and he showed me the vibe, the vibe stuff. He showed me how that works.

So as you were talking about it, I was remembering looking at what was supposed to be a website about, I don't know what it was, right, that the code created, and it was, I mean, I'm just thinking like you can't solely do it just that way right now.

Or at least, it didn't seem like that to me. It wasn't as an evolved, looking sharp thing. It was picking.

Code, and, you know, images for code and all that stuff, and putting it into something. But it was really interesting, and he demoed it to me, so I remember that and be interesting, because it'll be interesting to see how that, yeah, right, it's close.

There are tools like cursor. I don't know if you've heard of cursor, and I think Microsoft GitHub copilot is getting close. Yeah, where it is literally as easy as describing. Yeah, that's so cool. Thank you for mentioning that. All right. Well, we are at IDC directions.

You flew all the way from Washington to join us, correct? Yeah. So maybe just some insights or thoughts on like coming to events like this and how it supports you and in your career. Well, one, I think it's always a great opportunity to network with your peers

sometimes, at least I know in my job, it's often you're in the echo chamber of your company and the problems that you're trying to solve specific to them and breaking away once in a while to understand and learn what are other companies kind of going through, what are the challenges, yeah, that they're facing, yeah.

How are they explaining all of this to, like, their business users, or their boards or things like that? Yeah. So I think that that's where, you know, I like to get educated. So being that I work for a learning company, is very important.

It's very important to me to keep continually learning all the time, and these are places that you know allow me to do a lot of that awesome.

Well, thank you so much for coming out here today to San Jose, for being on our main stage and for having this interview. I appreciate it so much. No problem. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks.