Resiliency

It has been a few months since my last message. The current pandemic situation has incited me to write this article. I also want to thank those who were kind enough to tell me they were looking forward to my next article as it was too long since the last one.

First, I hope you, your family, your friends, and your colleagues have stayed healthy. I cannot offer any advice on how to fight the coronavirus but will refer you to the World Health Organisation website.

·        https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019

My travels to speak at events and meet our clients around the world have all been cancelled. I am not going to be in Rio this week or Kuwait, KSA, UAE, UK, Malaysia, Singapore, and all over Europe in the coming weeks.  I am sorry for not being able to meet with you during one of these trips, unfortunately the current situation is completely out of my control.

While we are all moving into some form of social distancing in the physical world to protect our communities, business is moving forward. We were going to make some very significant announcement at CeraWeek and OTC. With both events cancelled, our marketing team is reviewing how to adjust their marketing campaign and budget. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter and these announcements will be hard to miss. Since we were finalist in the digital innovation category at the ADIPEC award ceremony for our work on offshore production platforms with AkerBP, we enjoyed multiple awards and successes. Just two weeks ago, before the CoronaVirus changed our world, we enjoyed learning that our product for endpoint protection against malware, DeepArmor, was selected as the “Cutting Edge Endpoint Protection” product by RSA. This same product had already been voted by the CRN as the best end point antimalware.

·        https://apnews.com/44481dd09f08fb44bc87f15603be25e6

Before we went into social distancing, I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at UT Austin, RICE, Texas A&M, and the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Artificial Intelligence is transforming the world. Data science is moving from engineering back into academia and research with the arrival of data science tools that are revolutionizing this field one more time. The biggest challenge for universities is to keep on teaching the fundamentals of engineering, science, philosophy, and other fields of knowledge while making sure they foster creativity in their students.  Creativity is the one thing we find very difficult and the one thing we may never be able to reproduce with AI.

Moving forward, our world still needs food, electricity, medical care and while we weather the current downturn, we must prepare ourselves for the aftermath. Over the last few years, we have continuously expressed our belief that while the price of oil was out of our control, it was important to build resilient corporations that could weather any up or down swing that the market would be throwing at us. Artificial Intelligence already provides our clients today with very large cost saving and efficiency benefits which allows them to go thru the downturn with serenity while planning for the best way to come out of the downturn with the strongest structure.

With our team we cannot visit with you in your office until some form of normality resumes. We are working hard to make sure we still provide you with the information needed to move forward on the path to a data driven enterprise.

• We are adding webinars to compensate for the lack of conferences. Old ones are available online while new ones are already scheduled.  https://learn.sparkcognition.com/webinars
• May I suggest that now is a good time to read about AI on the CognitiveTimes magazine?  https://learn.sparkcognition.com/cognitivetimes?
• Have you looked at TimeMachine? All the sessions were recorded. https://timemachine.ai/tm19-recap/ We hope to see you on November 11-12 in Austin for TimeMachine 2020

I probably won’t be able to visit with you in person over the next few weeks. Let’s compensate with video-calls. I am already scheduling multiple video-calls and would love to have one with you.

We will get thru this together and with AI we can help your company be stronger on the other side. 

I hope to have the pleasure of speaking with you soon. Call me to setup a video-call.

Finally, I have recently read or re-read two books written by my friends.

• "The sentient machine" by Amir Husain. Everything you want to know about Artificial Intelligence in a book you can finish in a few hours.
• "Any Version of History is just a Story" by Saeed Al Mubarak. This one will challenge your mind for hours as each chapter is pushing you to think and analyse how what you have just read applies to your life. Past, present, and future.

PS: In every downturn, some of our dear friends are unfortunately released by their corporation. We are hiring talent. Feel free to share this information.

Thank you,

Philippe Herve