Tech & Innovation Blog
Future of Conversational AI: Here’s What You Should Know
Voice of Our People, Innovation, Career Insights
The more we understand what drives our situational awareness, consciousness, and creativity, the more we will evolve conversational AI and sentiment analysis with more robust outcomes.
Future of Conversational AI: Here’s What You Should Know
By Azfar Rizvi, Conversational Designer
“I’ll be back.”
We first heard this iconic line in the 1984 Hollywood blockbuster The Terminator, and it’s become a part of our collective consciousness ever since. It was mainstream media’s first attempt in depicting a fictional artificially intelligent system (Skynet), thus catapulting the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Then the depiction of AI went downhill. At least for a while.
People started to fear AI taking over the world through sentient neural networks. There are entire television series dedicated to playing on our fears about how antagonistic AI can be. And rightly so – drama and destruction sell more headlines. That’s the realist ex-journalist in me, LOL! As AI continues to fascinate humanity, our understanding of its limits and potential is evolving, and within it, there lies hope.
Azfar Framing in Action
This year, we finally transitioned from fearing robot overlords to cheering for sentient non-playable characters (NPC). The most recent Hollywood movie, Free Guy with Ryan Renolds, is a step in this direction. The story starts when an NPC develops self-awareness and strays from its programming. The NPC interacts with elements around itself in the game – it starts to think and feel. While this is interesting to posit, NPCs can’t develop sentience and act beyond their programming without human interventions.
The juxtaposition of the extremes has challenged us to think about the boundaries in AI. Corollary, these strides have been a significant force behind the digital transformation of businesses and entrepreneurship. We managed to bootstrap humanity’s collective learning with these recent advancements in AI and deep learning, manifesting the true meaning of the term global village. We’re truly connected and have transitioned from merely if/then/else chatbots to contextual ‘Conversational AI.’
ADP: Leading Digital Transformation
We provide payroll solutions for over 38 million workers worldwide. That means one in six US workers interfaces directly or indirectly with our universe. From a chatbot/conversational AI perspective, it means even more people will potentially interact with A.V.A., ADP’s virtual assistant. That’s where someone like me comes in and introduces Conversational Design (CxD).
Azfar Rizvi, UX Designer
ADP’s Service Technology leadership makes enormous strides to invest in the right infrastructure and create the right teams, producing trustworthy conversational AI platforms. We’re reimagining AVA to ensure our CxD is inclusive. Our persona aims to be innovative and empathetic, allowing intelligent responses to meet user expectations. Unlike conventional chatbots, ADP’s conversational AI understands the context of conversations and answers scenario-specific questions for users.
ADP provides our clients with the best payroll and HR experience, reflecting our processes and outcomes. Our teams work with internal and external stakeholders to ensure the AVA experience has enough context and intelligence to solve our customers’ problems and help us learn for future iterations of our products. As a CxD and Persona evangelist, I relish the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues and industry leaders, envisioning what AVA could represent to the workforce. For many employees, AVA is their first touchpoint with ADP. I write, design, advocate, and build an empathetic experience for this reason. We want to set the tone right for a great experience from the beginning.
The Future of Conversational AI
In one of his letters, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
That quote summarizes the journey in conversational AI – with chatbots starting ambitiously and, as time passed, aligning more with market expectations. The CxD universe that was first created by telling jokes during the formative years of chatbots has now segued into more transactional experiences. We are iterating rapidly at ADP, and the learning allows us to create better, more empathetic conversational AI experience with higher engagement levels. While I may have transitioned from narrative film production and journalism, not a day goes by when I don’t think about the quintessential role storytelling plays in creating holistic CxD.
The chatbot market is projected to grow from USD 2.6 billion in 2019 to USD 9.4 billion by 2024 – with an overwhelming 80% of businesses expected to have some chatbot automation by the end of 2021. According to insights on MarketWatch, “The chatbot market is driven by factors, such as advancement in technology coupled with rising customer demands for self-service and 24*7 customer assistance at lower operational costs. However, lack of awareness about the outcomes of the use of chatbot technology with various applications to restrict the growth of the chatbot market.”
Azfar Visiting School
Good news: ADP is ready for the challenge! We’re working to humanize AVA, our conversational AI. We will continue to create more empathetic, accessible experiences as we build from the number of experiential and transactional use cases every year. Whether enhancing value around payroll or helping to create workforce management automation through AVA, we are determined to harness AI as a tool to boost productivity and enable even better support to our clients!
A significant part of these #ADPTech enhancements depends on our ability to incorporate sentiment analysis and predictive analytics to intelligently understand our users’ conversations and the intents behind those queries. These enhancements allow us to deliver a more robust solution to standard enterprise functions such as employee onboarding, HR-related questions, and global help desk.
All this gives me hope for the future of AI AVA’s global footprint allows us to continue innovating and designing more holistic experiences. As one of the pioneers in Conversational AI, ADP is constantly evolving at a pace limited only by our understanding of how the human brain works. The more we understand what drives our situational awareness, consciousness, and creativity, the more we will evolve conversational AI and sentiment analysis with more robust outcomes. As a storyteller who fell in love with AI, I remain enamored by the possibilities of our collective AI future.
In the weeks to come, let’s talk more about the opportunities around AI storytelling, leadership, and mentorship at ADP. I’ll be back! 🙂
Interested in a Conversation Design career at ADP?
We are hiring! Click here to see what we have available.
Tech & Innovation Blog
AWS re:Invent 2021 – ADP Uses AWS to Enable Workforce Insights
Video, Leadership, What We Do
Accessible Video Controls
Video: AWS
[JACK] Having spent more than 30 years in the tech industry working on analytics in the cloud,
[JACK] I was drawn to ADP because of its mission.
[JACK] It’s a mission that’s aligned to my core values.
[JACK] Those values about helping people improve their lives by unlocking the power of data.
[JACK] But before I tell you how we do that, we need to start at the beginning.
[JACK] ADP started in 1949 in New Jersey, helping businesses pay their employees.
[JACK] From its early days, the company has always been focused on invention and innovation.
[JACK] We’ve had a proud history of a lot of great products and great firsts, fast forward to today, we’re the largest provider of human resource software and services.
[JACK] So, what does that mean in terms of the size and scale of our business?
[JACK] Well, those numbers are pretty impressive. We have over 920,000 clients doing business in over 140 countries.
[JACK] Our technology powers, payroll processing, tax payments, job applications, timesheets.
[JACK] That means a lot of data, and a lot of money is moving through our systems on a daily basis.
[JACK] In fact, we move over $2.3 trillion a year.
[JACK] This is the money that’s used to pay you, pay me, and to submit our taxes, and to put money into our retirement funds.
[JACK] Now, the issue with $2.3 trillion is a massive number.
[JACK] And for me, it’s a hard number to understand.
[JACK] So, I thought about it a little bit, and I said, how can I conceive of that?
[JACK] Well, what if it was GDP?
[JACK] It’s not GDP. But if it was GDP, how big would that number be?
[JACK] So, we kind of took a look at it.
[GRAPH] Comparison charts of GDPs in other countries.
[JACK] Here’s the top ten GDPs.
And if that $2.3 trillion was a GDP, ADP would land somewhere between France and Italy.
[JACK] So, all of that data, all of this information gives us a unique perspective on the world of work.
[JACK] In fact, every month we issue a report in the public interest called The National Employment Report, came out just this morning.
[JACK] And so, as you can see, we deal with all this data,
[JACK] It takes a special ability for us to be able to scale and manage it.
[JACK] We started our journey to the AWS cloud for this data in mid 2019, and we did it for three important reasons.
[JACK] One, so that we could tap the new capabilities.
[JACK] Second, so that we could get elasticity in the cloud.
[JACK] And third, it really has helped us create a data driven culture, so that we are more reactive, more understanding about what’s going on in the world.
[JACK] Today, we’re processing over two and a half petabytes of data with over 25 billion individual data points represented, and that’s boiling down to 312 trillion decisions a month being taken by our analytics and machine learning processes.
[JACK] Our team is at the very heart of that treasure trove of data.
[JACK] We build data analytics products, including the ADP DataCloud, which provides people analytics and HR benchmarking to help companies measure, compare, predict, and understand their workforce and support them.
[JACK] This allows them to see trends, allows them to see if the programs and policies that they’ve put in place are effective.
[JACK] Everything you’re seeing here is calculated on AWS using a full range of data analytics and machine learning capabilities.
[JACK] We use Amazon Sage Maker for our machine learning, Amazon EMR, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Neptune to perform aspects of our overall data processing.
[JACK] These capabilities have enabled us to keep innovating on behalf of our clients, and one way we’re doing this is to help them with some pressing needs in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion across their workforce.
[JACK] That’s why my team developed the new Diversity Equity Inclusion dashboards that we launched earlier this year.
[JACK] It helps a company baseline and understand their diversity program and not only internally, but for the first time in the industry, to be able to compare themselves to other companies, not just other companies in their location, but also other companies in their industry, and by company size.
[JACK] And this baseline information allows them to see whether or not their programs are having a positive and beneficial impact on the diversity programs that they’ve put in place.
[JACK] We still have issues, though, to address in terms of pay equity, but before we get into that, let’s step back and take a look at what’s happened in the US employment market over the past 20 months.
[JACK] What I’m showing you here is data from ADP that shows you what happened in the total US employment over those past 20 months.
[JACK] You can see when the COVID crisis began.
[GRAPH] Total US Employment Rate Change
[JACK] Unfortunately, there were differences in terms of the types and genders of people losing work.
[JACK] In fact, what you can see is, yes, a lot of people lost their jobs. Those jobs are coming back, but men actually fared a lot better than women during the pandemic.
[JACK] Certain industries were affected a lot more as well, hospitality, manufacturing, retail; areas that have not yet made full recoveries.
[JACK] If we look at pay, you can see, though, that the gap between men’s pay and women’s pay is not where we all want it to be, but it seems to be level over time.
[JACK] However, these numbers are a little bit misleading, because if we add back in those jobs that women lost at a larger extent in those industries from hospitality, transportation, the pay gap is actually getting worse.
[JACK] In fact, my associates at the ADP Research Institute tell me that 20 years of progress for women have been lost in terms of pay equity gaps over the pandemic.
[JACK] But collectively, we have an opportunity to improve that.
[JACK] So how do we do that?
[JACK] Well, our team has also recently built and launched a new capability called The Pay Equity Storyboard.
[TEXT] Pay Equity Storyboard
[JACK] It’s a set of insights and tools and explanations and visualizations that allow companies to understand the pay equity issues that they have and to do plans and to make changes proactively, taking insights straight to action to correct pay gaps.
[JACK] Now we released this just a few months ago at the beginning of the summer.
[JACK] So, on just a few months of data, we’re starting to see some pretty incredible reactions.
[JACK] About 1000 clients have started to use the pay equity storyboard, 65% of them showing pay equity improvement.
[TEXT] Improving Pay Equity
1,000+ clients using the storyboard
65% showing improvements in pay equity
$1.1 M average impact
$728 M returned to communities
[JACK] On average, per client, they’ve made a $1.1 million impact, that’s over $720,000,000 returned to communities.
[JACK] This is about people, individual people, and for an individual person that’s equated to about three $500 for 210,000 people and for workers whose industries are hit hardest by the pandemic.
[JACK] This is meaningful money.
[JACK] This could mean making a need of car repair. It could mean enabling children to participate in extracurricular activities, or simply saving money for a rainy day.
[JACK] At ADP, we’re always designing for people and data informs how we do that.
[JACK] At the end of the day, all of our data and everything we do starts with them and you and I, and tens and hundreds and thousands of people.
[JACK] Now is the time to use data to help people, to understand what actions we can take, to create a more diverse, more equitable and a more inclusive work environment and to build the future we all want to create.
[LOGO] ADP, Always Designing for People.
[JACK] Thank you.
ADP helps more than 900,000 businesses manage their people and processes payroll for nearly 70 million workers, generating a massive amount of data in the process. Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer, presents how ADP uses AWS to enable workforce insights and raises awareness of payroll equity by using data measurement, analytics, and machine learning capabilities.
“Now is the time to use data to help people,” Jack said. “Together, we create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment.” ADP continues to help companies measure, compare, predict, and apply futuristic knowledge to their workspace. Watch the full presentation now.
More from our tech blog:
Great Stories: From LEGO® Bricks to Data By Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Life @ ADP EP 3: Tips for Interviewing, How to Make Lasting Impressions, and Helpful Hints
Life @ ADP, Career Advice, What We Do
Hiring Managers want to better understand how candidates overcome challenges.
Life @ ADP EP 3: Tips for Interviewing, How to Make Lasting Impressions, and Helpful Hints
How long should your resumé be? How do you make a good impression? What to prepare for a phone interview?
Life @ ADP, our monthly podcast, answers them in the third episode! In this interview, hosts Kate and Ingrid sit down with Dave Demchik, one of our senior tech recruiters, to discuss what attributes make a top candidate. For those who are interested in a career at ADP, you won’t want to miss it! You will hear Dave discuss helpful tips for interviewing both remotely and in-person and how to make a good impression during and after the interview.
“Recruiters look for candidates who are knowledgeable in the field they are hiring. Be prepared to answer technical questions and have your tool kits ready,” Dave says. “Hiring Managers want to better understand how candidates overcome challenges.”
Dave has been recruiting for about five and a half years and shares the qualities he looks for in candidates. He believes researching and preparing are the first step to a successful interview. Candidates are encouraged to speak with ADP associates on LinkedIn to better understand ADP’s culture before entering the discussion or visit tech.adp.com, our tech careers site and tech blog. Another tip to make a lasting impression is attention to detail, including crafting relevant points on résumés. The conversation dives deeper into tailoring, formatting, and fitting résumés to specific jobs.
The discussion in episode three allows both current associates and future talents to understand what values they bring to ADP, contributing to the community.
“It’s a great time to be a part of ADP!” Dave supports the cybersecurity team, a global security organization at ADP. He is happy to answer any questions and provides his contact information in the podcast episode.
Life @ ADP is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music. Coming up next, we are going to interview one of our veterans and talk about transitioning from the military to civilian life. Stay tuned! Don’t forget to subscribe to both the show and the blog.
What are you waiting for?
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Podcast Launch: Life @ ADP
Life @ ADP, What We Do, Voice of Our People
Always Designing for People.
Life @ ADP will give you a look into our associates’ stories, our culture, and our company.
Podcast Launch: Life @ ADP
ADP is proud to launch its monthly podcast Life @ ADP, sharing with you our associates’ stories, featured interviews, and working culture. Season One is scheduled to have six episodes with content from technologists, talent acquisition, and industry leaders.
We released Episode One – Life @ ADP on September 22, introducing hosts Kate and Ingrid with their ideas behind launching the podcast. Episode Two celebrates Grace Hopper and Hispanic Heritage Month, featuring Giselle Mota. As the Principal of ADP’s Future of Work, Giselle shares with us her journey to ADP, experience with the company, and impacts on the community.
Our podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google, and Amazon Music. Don’t forget to subscribe to both the show and the blog!
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Lifion, Innovation, Award
Jesse joined ADP just over a year ago, and his work on the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team for Lifion had already created an impact. He shared insights on how ADP is pursuing new technologies to benefit the world around us.
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.
Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.
Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.
What are some fun facts about you?
I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.
Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?
The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.
A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.
What words would you use to describe engineers at work?
Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.
Jesse (right) with his family
What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?
Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.
Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!
Learn more about working at Lifion and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
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ADP Wins Prestigious Ventana Research Digital Innovation Award for Next Gen HCM Platform
ROSELAND, N.J., July 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Identified for having the most striking impact in the human capital management (HCM) market, ADP was recognized as a winner in Ventana Research’s 13th Annual Digital Innovation Awards for its Next Gen HCM platform. Named as winner for the HCM category, ADP was selected based on the award program’s stringent criteria, earning acclaim for Next Gen HCM’s advanced technology and ability to drive change and increase value for organizations worldwide.
Learn more about ADP’s Next Gen HCM technology
Ventana analysts examined vendor submissions for their innovative technology approach; how it applies to people, processes, information and technology; the best practices it supports; the degree of team involvement; and the technology’s business impact and value.
“The range of ADP’s Next Gen HCM innovation that merited the award includes dynamic teams and matrix organizational structures, AI-driven insights, and global compliance,” said Steve Goldberg, VP & research director of HCM at Ventana Research.
Differentiating ADP’s Next Gen HCM is the platform’s design for team-based, agile ways of working as a complement to traditional hierarchical structures, as well as its ability to adapt and scale. The customizable solution enables organizations’ flows of work while driving team performance and the ability to rapidly adapt to changing needs. Built cloud-native from the ground up, the global platform supports a personalized experience that cultivates fluid, dynamic work to unlock greater value for the organization.
“We’re incredibly honored that Ventana Research has recognized the impact our Next Gen HCM platform can have on businesses,” said Don Weinstein, corporate vice president of global product and technology at ADP. “Change is only accelerating in today’s business landscape, as we navigate a world that’s becoming increasingly uncertain. With our vast experience in supporting clients, ADP has studied what makes a business successful, and what can stand in its way. We’ve used this knowledge to deliver a flexible and adaptable solution that can support our clients as they evolve amid dynamic conditions and grow with their businesses as fast as needed.”
To help businesses thrive in a new world of work, ADP’s Next Gen HCM provides data-driven insights into how people work best; access to an ecosystem of mini-apps to personalize the workforce experience; benchmarking capabilities from aggregated and anonymized ADP client data spanning 810K+ companies and 30M+ employees; and the ability to react quickly to changing global compliance requirements.
For more information on the Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards, visit https://www.ventanaresearch.com/resources/awards/innovation. To learn more about ADP’s Next Gen HCM platform, visit https://flowofwork.adp.com/.
About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the most authoritative and respected benchmark business technology research and advisory services firm. We provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies through a unique set of research-based offerings including benchmark research and technology evaluation assessments, education workshops and our research and advisory services, Ventana On-Demand. Our unparalleled understanding of the role of technology in optimizing business processes and performance and our best practices guidance are rooted in our rigorous research-based benchmarking of people, processes, information and technology across business and IT functions in every industry. This benchmark research plus our market coverage and in-depth knowledge of hundreds of technology providers means we can deliver education and expertise to our clients to increase the value they derive from technology investments while reducing time, cost and risk.
Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst and research coverage in the industry; business and IT professionals worldwide are members of our community and benefit from Ventana Research’s insights, as do highly regarded media and association partners around the globe. Our views and analyses are distributed daily through blogs and social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. To learn how Ventana Research advances the maturity of organizations’ use of information and technology through benchmark research, education and advisory services, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.
About ADP (NASDAQ: ADP)
Designing better ways to work through cutting-edge products, premium services and exceptional experiences that enable people to reach their full potential. HR, Talent, Time Management, Benefits and Payroll. Informed by data and designed for people. Learn more at ADP.com
ADP, the ADP logo, and Always Designing for People, are trademarks of ADP, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2020 ADP, Inc. All rights reserved.
ADP-Media
SOURCE ADP, Inc.
For further information: Leann McDonough, ADP, Inc., (973) 974-6861, Leann.McDonough@adp.com
ADP’s Martha Bird on the ground at CES 2020 to talk about NLP/ML and AI, plus the top 5 themes for 2020
https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2020/01/the-word-on-ces-whats-really-driving-nextgen-technology.aspx
ADP’s business anthropologist, Martha Bird, reports on the top five themes at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show that are important for today’s industry leaders.
With over 4,000 exhibiting companies, 2.9 million square feet of exhibit space, attracting more than 180,000 attendees and 307 Fortune 500 companies, there was a lot to take in at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Some of the most innovative technologies to come included a flying taxi (Hyundai), electric multi-modal transportation, electric vertical take-off and landing craft (Uber), cool and creepy robotics, green and sustainability tech, 8K bezel-less TVs (Samsung), AI attended drive thru (McDonald’s lab), 150 digital health exhibitors and so much more. Within this tech frenzy, it was my great pleasure to represent ADP on stage and in studio where I discussed how natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence (NLP/ML and AI), in general, is impacting the workplace – the tools, the processes and the people.
While it was impossible to see everything given the sheer magnitude of the event, there are some high-level reflections on what I consider to be the pervasive themes from this year’s event that industry leaders should keep their eyes and ears open for moving into 2020. These are my top five:
1. 5G: Data, data, and more data
On the CES floor, data was the common denominator across products and services on display and those demoed. Given the explosion of data contingent technologies, online privacy and security was a central talking point. How different regions address security concerns around data and privacy was less explicitly articulated although a continuum of highly private to blatantly public could be surmised. Along with a definite trend toward the true consumerization of AI.
Which brings me to 5G. In the next two to three years, networks will expand out exponentially. The first commercial deployments are already being seen but 5G is still in its infancy so it won’t be a matter of simply “flipping a switch” from 4G to 5G.
Along with 5G – increased speed, greater capacity and lower latency – comes huge possibilities for disruptive innovations. There was no limit to 5G talk and imagination at CES 2020. And, of course, there were both pronouncements and announcements on the topic around the coming of 5G handsets. AT&T and Verizon are aggressively developing the infrastructure in an attempt to get out ahead of competition across the globe.
5G will be the “central nervous system of the data age,” according to Steve Koenig, VP, Research at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).
Martha Bird and others and CES 2020
[Inset above] ADP’s Business Anthropologist Martha Bird (right) took the stage at CES 2020. Bird’s panel “Emerging Technologies Enabling Enterprise” was moderated by Michael Miller, Editor-in-Chief at PC Magazine (middle) joined by fellow panelist Yonatan Wexler, Executive VP of R&D at OrCam Technologies (left).
2. IoI (Internet of Intelligence): The Decade of Connected Intelligence
Just as we were getting accustomed to the term IoT (Internet of Things) the talk this year was around IoI or “Internet of Intelligence.” This new way of thinking is a direct response to the way AI is being integrated into all facets of our technology and consumer culture.
We were told in the plenary keynote that as networks grow, we can expect 5G to unlock more opportunities for enterprise. Building upon what we’ve seen with IoT technologies (think smart home apps that rely on little bits of discrete data), the expansion of 5G and AI capabilities will provide multiple nodes of data informing a much more complex and inter-dependent data landscape. Enterprise applications are expected to lead in IoI in part because of massive data resources and the ability to form mutually beneficial partnerships between OEM, software and engineering. IoI covers things like remote robotic surgery and smart cities. Activities with a heavy data lift and, generally speaking, much higher stakes than let’s say a voice activated light in your home.
3. XR: The New Reality Training Our Future Workforce
XR – the latest technology encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. Think virtual world up, down, left, or right, and experienced in 360 degrees. Form factors delivering this technology ranged from 5K gaming chairs to sleek eye glasses very much unlike the early Google glasses. Again, enterprise will have a big stake in this area with many use cases including B2B workforce training, safety inspections, AR glasses used by an architect to design a room, training surgeons across geographies, and in travel and tourism where you are able to take a trip to a tropical island right from your living room. Frankly, I prefer the actual trip but foregoing the lines at the airport and customs does sound appealing. Regardless of my preference, there was a lot of excitement for XR in commercial and industrial settings. Not to mention eSports which realized $1 billion in net revenue last year alone.
4. Culture: Pragmatics of Technological Innovation
While attending a panel discussion on “Future Cities” I was struck by a similarity between re-architecting an existing urban space to accommodate new technologies and the work we do at ADP.
A former secretary of transportation listed one of the greatest challenges to innovating cities as the pre-existing roadway infrastructure. He went on to say that between the legacy streets and traffic patterns it was actually the inability to imagine new ways of mobility that was the major barrier.
People get accustomed to “how things are done here” and find it difficult to adapt to changes in the system. This is a cultural and technical matter. Culture, at the most basic level, is the collection of practices and beliefs we take for granted. These habits are slow to change. New technical opportunities can catalyze innovation and cultural change, but this process is never a one-to-one.
Which brings me to humans.
5. Humans: Agency in a Data-driven Era
Humans (people like you and me) when faced with the explosion of new technologies – tech that augments our vision, our speech, our bodies and, even, our memory – begin to question their own reason for being. The existential ponderings around what it means to be human are concomitant with those group of technologies loosely described as “AI”.
Talk of “machine-human partnership” was pervasive on the CES exhibition floor and in panels and keynotes. For my part, I welcome the question as it points to a shared humanity that we often overlook. Yes, partnerships between people and technology will continue to evolve. Who has agency over the relationship will remain a critical point of personal reflection and public debate.
