EP #116: How AI Digital Humans Are Impacting The Future of The Workforce with Iliana Oris Valiente, Accenture Canada Innovation Lead, and Tamara Bowman, Digital Human Innovation Lead at Accenture

(gentle music) Welcome back to another episode of Everyday in Dorfins, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness in daily living. I'm your host, Stella Staphanopolis, and this week is actually not the typical type of interviews that I publish. I had the opportunity to use Accenture's broadcast studio to interview the Canada Innovation Lead, Ilyana, or as valiante, and the Digital Human Innovation Lead, Tamara Bowman, to talk about artificial intelligence, digital humans, Accenture's investment in this technology, and really how digital humans are impacting the future of the workforce. So not super wellness oriented upon first glance, however, as you'll hear as we get into the conversation with Tamara and Ilyana, we actually talk about how this type of technology can help create better work-life balance by better understanding the use cases on the different scenarios in which digital humans are applicable. Also, for those who don't personally know me, for those who just found me through this podcast or have been following along everyday and Dorfins on social media, maybe what you don't know is that outside of podcasting, building this brand, being a yoga instructor, my full-time job is at Accenture, and I sit within Accenture's innovation practice out of the New York office. So it was actually like a really amazing opportunity for me and my career to get to speak with such pioneers in the innovation space at Accenture. And just working in this area, it's been really cool to bring kind of what I'm doing in my full-time job, also onto the podcast, here with everyday and Dorfins. That is a brief tangent, but also wanted to share that this interview, while not directly correlated with the types of health and wellness content that I typically share, is still super meaningful to me, because it kind of speaks volumes to the work that I do every single day at Accenture. So in this episode, Ilyana gets to share her own experience using her own digital human, creating her digital human, Tamara's role actually helping to build and shape the technology behind this, and really how they see the future of digital humans, shape the way in which we find work-life balance. And lastly, of course, we end with a brief discussion on happiness, well-being, and how Tamara and Ilyana find their endorphins in daily living. Before we dive into the episode, reminder to like, rate, and review this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer, and make sure to follow along on Instagram every day endorphins to stay up to date with episodes, events, stream of consciousness, et cetera. And you can also follow along my sub-stack, which is just everyday endorphins, to gain access to more content related to health and wellbeing. Are we all comfortable? We're saying right. - Yeah, so it just, you know-- - Yeah, guys, it's relaxed at the same time. Should we do a grounding exercise? - We can breathe. - Oh, okay. - Yes, let's do that. - We need to guide us through one. - Yes, we can also get an instructor. - You are? - I am. - I need to learn how to meditate. Okay, we're doing it. So we're gonna start by closing our eyes. Just take a moment to notice your feet on the bottom of the chair, staying grounded here. And take a deep inhale through your nose. (inhales) Just an exhale. (exhales) Let it go. Just tapping into a sense of presence here, relaxing the space between your eyebrows, and just releasing any tension in your jaw. Let your shoulders fall away from your ears and relax the back of your neck. Take another deep inhale through your nose. (inhales) Exhale to let it go. (inhales) One more breath like this. Inhale in here. (inhales) And exhale, side out. (inhales) Gently begin to flutter your eyes open. Amazing. How do we feel? - I feel great. - It's amazing what happens when you take, what was that, 45 seconds? - Probably, yeah. - To breathe. Basic human things. - Need it. - For breathing. - I need more of that. - We don't breathe properly. Oftentimes, I started to lose my voice. Pretty consistently after conferences and just being out and about because I go to so many events at any moment in time. And one of the people on my team suggested I go see a voice therapist. - Yeah. - Oh, okay. So I go, I set up my first appointment. We do a bunch of exercises and she realizes there's actually nothing wrong with your body and the composition of your vocal cords and the rest. - Oh. - Her conclusion was you don't breathe. - Okay. - What do you mean I don't breathe? When you speak, you need to take pauses. You need to take deep breaths. - Yeah. - And then you need to use your breath to project the voice as opposed to straining the physical muscles to get yourself to speak. - Lovely. So, lesson learned. I did not breathe enough. - It reminds me of choir, Miss Vincent, in high school, you'd lay us down and have the book on a chest and stomach and then teaching the right breathing techniques. - No, abdominal breathing. I used to sing also. - Oh my god. - So that was, yeah, in the Metropolitan Opera, the children's choir. - Why are you kidding me? - You're gonna be kidding. - Oh, I want it to be a child actress. And my mom said, no, your kid's gonna get corrupt if you're in the media world. And then somehow my parents figured out that there was a children's course that I could audition for. So I did that for like eight years in my childhood. - Wow. - And I used to have the talent to sing. I don't have that anymore. - I can't believe that. - I've also had a vocal chord problem. I had to go to a doctor recently, 'cause I talk all the time. So we are considered professional voice users. - Yes. - Interesting. - My voice is my instrument. - It's normal. - Singing loud rock music doesn't help my voice. (laughing) - Can we do karaoke at some point? - We should. We should. And in fact, Accenture has the, they have like the show that they gave. I think it's November sometimes, where we perform on the 65th floor. We perform. I've done it like last year or two. - Sign me up. - Yes. The next one's gonna be sometime in November. - Okay. - Time to fly back. - You'll be flying back to New York. - Just to put that. - Find me up. - Wow. What a wonderful intro, I guess. Bounding over our shared passions for singing and keeping our vocal cords intact and learning how to breathe properly. But that's not exactly what we're here to talk about today. - It's not. (laughing) - As you can see behind you, we're here to talk about digital humans, which is a really interesting emerging area of technology that I don't have a lot of knowledge about. Hence why I'm here speaking with the two of you to learn a bit more about what Accenture is doing in the space and really what a digital human is. So before we dive into this, I'd love for you both to share a little bit about yourselves, your role at Accenture, and why we're here today. - Okay, you first. (laughing) - All right, all right. I'll take the bait. So, Ilyana or Svaliente, I spend my days as the managing director and head of innovation and ESG for Accenture in the Canadian market. So my role, I often joke, is one of the most fun places to be in the organization because I get to work across industries, across emerging technologies, and help clients. So very senior C-suite execs and board members figure out where is the world going and how do they need to pivot their business to be prepared. But I'm also deeply fascinated by the idea of human, humanity, what it means to be human, and how do you build a world and a future that humans actually want to live in? Because there are so many dystopian outcomes possible and people often find that change is really scary, but I don't think it necessarily has to be. So to the extent that I can marry up that personal, passionate, north star of mine would the work that I get to do at Accenture, day in and day out and equip people for where the world is going and give them the skills that they need so that they're prepared and they're excited. And they have something to look forward to. That for me is the perfect intersection. So that's a little bit about me and I'm so excited to actually get to know Tamara, even more in this context. We've known each other for some time. We've grown fast, professional years. And it's really the summer and we'll get into that in more detail that we really fell into this deep end. Now we're getting to work super closely together. But Tamara, you have this incredible non-linear path and story. Introduce yourself. Oh gosh, I don't know if I'll be as smooth, but I will say, I just have a passion for inner and inner. innovation and technology from the coding perspective, every aspect of it. I should start by saying I am a science fiction fanatic. So I read like 900 page science fiction books for the last, you know, decades, decades. So I, one of the things, maybe things I like to say is that I'm leaving out my science fiction dreams here at Accenture because nothing could have prepared me in my life to learn that I am going to be building the stuff that I've been reading about for decades. It's just the best thing. So definitely non-linear. I'm mostly self-taught. I do not have a college degree. I credit my neurodiversity. I have ADHD and helping me. You know, there's a lot of things that, you know, it can hurt, but it helps me to be able to focus, learn technologies quickly, innovate, think deeply about things. I call myself a slow thinker. There's a lot of people like the, you know, the Jeopardy Fast thinker, you know, people, I'm more of a slow, you know, slow thinker. And I think there's, you know, there's range for those types of people. And so I, and I also call myself like the T shape where I do a little bit of everything. So I've been a developer, you know, two decades ago or more, I'm aging myself. I was an original friend and back end developer for Weightwatches.com. Oh, yes. So it goes, you know, it goes way back. It goes way back. And yeah, yeah. And I was a Flash developer. I've had my own companies, my own like small businesses with web development. I've been at Accenture for about 10 years where I've done, you know, so many different things from, I was like the first New York liquid studio employee way back in 2016. So I've done a little bit of everything from, um, geez, a little blockchain, a little IOT, just web development and, um, worked with the FDNY, um, for their new computer-aided dispatch systems. And then I fell into, um, the idea of conversational AI and then discovered, um, digital humans. So over three years ago, three and a half years ago, um, I saw the, an implementation of digital humans where it was an actual person that they were videotaping. And then they would serve up the little video and just having had a Flash animation development background and also this other technology called site pal where it was, um, and this is 20 years ago, like JavaScript driven where you would put in what you wanted it to say and a little cartoon thing would say. So I knew I'm like, okay, 20 years later, there's got to be a better way because of, you know, if they want to change one line, you know, how much content changes, you know, they want to change one line, then they have to, you know, find that same person with the same haircut with the same thing to just change that one line. So I knew there was an automated way of, um, doing it. There had to be, so I did some research with, um, different digital human vendors. Um, and we started working with one called, uh, unique because at the time they had an API, an SDK driven technology, which I knew we would need to help to connect to eccentric conversational AI platform. Um, and then we started building out, um, hyper realistic digital human virtual agent use cases. So what I've gathered from this is to Marin not done. Basically, what has to be, I'm not done. Um, so I had the cool opportunity to see, to see Ilyana actually record a digital human at the office. And I had no idea what I was walking into. I just saw her in a little box in the broadcast studio doing different, um, like, intonations and of her own voice saying, I think a script, right? Um, so where does that fit into the, the equation of actually building a digital human? Well, it's the concept of digital twins. And, and it's really interesting to see, you know, from, be able to see from the technology side to the passion side where people like Ilyana and, you know, who's, here is her digital, uh, twin, Laila and Mary Hamilton, who's her digital twin mayor. You see, they both have AI in the name, that's sort of a little thing that we do, not that we can have it all the time. But yeah, that's, that's a whole concept of the idea of digital twins, which, you know, from the past inside, I think even Ilyana can speak more to what would make her want to have a digital human, a digital twin of herself. Before I jump in there, I want to pick up on Stella's first exposure. What the first day that she had met me was at the podcast recording studio. And I was reading scripts and I had to read three different tones, a happy voice, a neutral voice, and a sad voice, so that my digital human could learn all the different intonations. So for my neutral voice, I read Larry Fink's annual letter to stakeholders. It's about 45 minutes when you read it out loud and to end and it's the perfect thing to read in the neutral voice. For my happy voice, I talked about some of the emerging tech and the trends that I was personally really excited about and that I was paying attention to and questions about, you know, career and my teams and the things that keep me really motivated. And for recording of the sad voice, I actually asked Tamara, I was like, well, what do you mean I have to record a sad voice? I don't think I usually sound particularly sad. And you know what her recommendation was? Read obituaries. That's from Kyle. Kyle Goodman's in you. I have to call out here who's doing the voice technology and gave this like, yeah, I would never have thought. But you know how it affected you. That was really interesting. So before I read the obituaries, I read a book called Love You Forever by Robert Munch and the book literally made me cry. I had never read it before. I know it's a weird request, but what's the saddest book you've read that you could recommend. And as I'm reading it, the tears start rolling and I'm continuing to talk and I'm thinking, oh gosh, Lila now knows what I sound like when I am speaking through tears. And then I read obituaries for an hour. Oh gosh. A, I'm really grateful to be alive. I am very appreciative of everything in life. Because you're reading these stories of so and so who passed at the age of 102. And I mean, it did its intended purpose. My voice certainly sounded very, very sad. And then fast forward. So we submitted all the voice clips and Kyle. I didn't know that there was a person named Kyle on the team that was working on this. And at one point he sends me a little audio clip via Microsoft Teams. And I'm sitting on the couch and I press play and I was like, oh, that's odd that he's sending me a snippet of my voice recording. I guess he just wanted to do this as a quality assurance check, making sure that he's pulling from the right file. Okay, fine. Let's roll with it. And I see that it's less than a minute long clip. Okay, cool. So it's playing. And I get this my voice from the studio earlier. And then the voice says, and Kyle, you really need to hear this next part because it's so relevant to what you're working on next. And that stopped me dead in my tracks. Because I realized I never said Kyle's name during the recording. At the time of the recording, I did not know that there was a Kyle on this team. That's actually not my voice. Oh, it had me fooled. And I realized that those were all expressions I would normally use. And I used some of them in the recording, but not exactly verbatim. Stopped me in my tracks and I sat there and I leaned back into the catch. Wow. This is the beginning. I now have a digital human that is going to know me so well that it's going to be an extension of me. And a lot of use cases, some of which we haven't even contemplated yet, which is so exciting. Yeah. And then it is really interesting to see that side of it from, you know, you can do the technology, but the experiences that one has to go through, you know, to build this. The first, first, you know, we have to talk about the ethics, you know, the ethics and the responsible AI. You know, she had to sign a waiver. We have to be, as we're building these things, we have to be super cognizant about how we're using them. An example is Mary Hamilton, when we were going to do it, another team maybe wanted to use her, but call her something different. I said, you know, no, no, I don't think Mary's going to, you know, go for it. That's not the way we should use it. So it's almost like ethics in action. And it has to be front of mind all the time and there has to be, and there is that Accenture, you know, all of the checks and balances. So it's in it's such an open field. You never know where you're going to, because maybe there's something where you don't want to, you know, have a reading of it. You know, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe that's something you don't want your voice to be used for. And those things, those are part of ethics and those things need to be respected. At this point in the technology, we're more using it to, like if we're detecting the sentiment and something the digital human is saying, then we can, oh, this is a sad sentiment so we can use the sad voice. This is a happy sentiment. He is, you know, the happy voice. That's kind of how we're using the voice now. But eventually, and I'm sure there's teams out there doing that we're actually going to learn about you and your personality via the voice as well. So who is actually behind the scenes programming? What Lila is going to say, for example? And how, where is that connection between creating the digital human and having that digital human actually be an extension of the self? Right. So, it's two answers to that. First of all, it doesn't, it doesn't exactly need to be an extension of the self. That's one use case. So I think it's, you can think of it as use case driven. What, what is the client, you know, want, what are we building, what innovation are we building? All the ways that the, the voice can happen, the technology behind the content, it could be like old school, I wouldn't say old school, still very, very valid and relevant. But, NLP driven natural language processing and the forming of the dialogue via, you know, like a tree structure like, oh, this person says this, detect the intent and then have them say this, you know, we're like, oh, I want to buy a car. Oh, they want to buy a car. You're going to need to know what color is the car. What color is the car? So that's one way. But now we know with the advent of generative AI, there's this whole, you know, chat component and in training component, right now we've trained Laila on Ann Mayor on different documents about Accenture and even about Iliana and Mary themselves. So it can kind of answer ad hoc, you know, any, any types of questions. You know, with the structure of, you know, if we were doing a demo, within reason, but we also want to make sure that it's not inappropriate and things like that. Right. Well, something that just came to mind is Accenture's, like ethos essentially being truly human and this is a digital human. So do you see there being any use cases or applications for this type of technology in that like the mental health space, ad Accenture in particular? 100% in fact, one of the first use cases that we built, not with the digital twins, but with digital humans like Katie here, another AI in the middle, but like Katie here and others that we built out. One of the first use cases that we did was, Latisha Kalyato and the London Liquid Studio, they built out a home care use case. And they did this back in 2017 using an Alexa and it was for elderly care, for elderly people who wanted to stay in their homes longer and not just go, you know, straightened in their single. They wanted to be with their families, but how do they, their families know that they're okay and take care of them. So they built out different use cases to, you know, oh, ask, how are you doing? How was your mood? You know, if you're asking, you know, if I'm asking my mom that every day, she may or may not tell me because I may be annoying the crap out of her or, you know, she may think that she's annoying me or something like that. But they have found that if they are interacting with something like a voice device, they actually develop an affinity and they feel like, oh my God, this is, you know, this is my friend and they're willing to talk to it because they know it's not, it's not going to be judgmental. So we built out, you know, so that's a whole thing with the London Liquid Studio. They built it out, built that out and we actually put a face to it by making a digital human version, you know, of that use case. And when we would demo that to climb, I mean, there would be like tears like in the people's eyes just like, if my, even me, it's hard to even for me to, you know, to think about it, like, oh, if my parent, if my mother or father eventually will have something like this, how helpful, you know, can it be for their lives? So there's definitely use cases and applications in the mental health of someone, a friend that's a companion, you know, who knows you and who is nonjudgmental. So yes. That's so fascinating. That's really interesting. I didn't even know there was a London Liquid Studio. Oh, there's many. There's, there's, there's, there's many. I did not have the, there's, there's many. Over at the world. Yes. And I, as you mentioned, my team is called the digital human innovation team. We've been together over, over three years, physically building out these technologies, working with different partners and building out accelerators to build these use cases extremely quickly, because it has to be, you know, appropriate, it has to look good, you have to test it. So I have a, I cannot, you know, say enough about my amazing, amazing team, Mubin, Sonal, Walters, Buhari, Janani, and also the team that's helped us, you know, the Mac Division team and folks like Sean and Sean and Q and Merer that that's helped us actually build the face and the character that artist work. I feel like we're having an award ceremony. Yeah, I can't, you know, because you know, you, I, I'm so big with giving the credit, where the credit is you, there's no way I could do this by myself. I have the most amazing team. Sometimes the person representing gets all of the credit and I never think that that's fair, but sorry. No, I completely agree. I mean, the skills that Tamara, you have on your team and from all the partners that you're working with, their skills, I didn't even think needed to exist. There was one point in the process where I had to submit a bunch of photos of myself to inform the design, including some really awkward angles that no one should ever see and pulling my teeth back. And you can see the structural composition of your teeth because apparently teeth are what hold the rest of your face up as I've learned through this, this process and videos of myself and 3D body scans. And at one point Tamara says, oh, so for your hair, we need to figure out if we can use one of these preset examples. And she gave me a couple of options and they said, well, none of those really look like my hair. And now you can see that Lila does have hair that looks like mine. So Tamara, maybe you can explain what happened. How do we bridge that gap? And I will say, as you're learning, I learn every day from my team. I am not a character artist expert. So the main folks working on the character is Sean Shane, Q and Madison is doing the movement. So I'm learning from them. So anything I say, you know, and anything that you have heard, me say comes directly from them, but it really, what's really interesting is how complex it is, how complex it is to not only get the hair correctly, but to get that movement. And the other thing that I should mention is that we haven't mentioned here that it's super important to realize is that this is all real time. We work with real time, hyper-realistic, web-based digital humans. We're actually bringing it into an Unreal SDK as well to work with devices like looking glass, but it's all real time. So you have to make it good and complex enough to look good and work good, but not too complex where it's taking up so much data that it's going to be slow response. And that's in the visual, but also in the content of what's being said. Because if you go and you go on, say, chat GBT, and you're typing in some questions, you'll notice that it kind of will stream the answers, right? As it's happening. As it's happening. But for us, we have to kind of wait and we're developing this to not be, but in our first efforts, we have to wait for that whole stream came through and then process it, adding the digital motion and the expressions and things like that. You can imagine all of the seconds. So if you're asking a question, you don't want her to be like 25 seconds giving you the answer because that just kills the whole conversation all by. Exactly. Conversational vibe. So it has to be this balance of the technology. And we had to do so much testing. How do we accelerate this? How do we make our prompts so that it only gives us back this data? It's so interesting and it's a learning and process and it's just the most exciting thing. So where along, it seems like this is very emerging technology. Like we're kind of just at the start. How do you see digital humans evolve over time? And do you see this type of technology being a central focus maybe for our clients in the future? A hundred percent. And I will say there are companies out there that have been doing this for a long time. They all have their own paths. They all have their own strengths. We want to work with them all. And we want to work with our own internal teams as well working on digital humans. So we want to work with them all because we're building out, like I said, accelerators. That's going to be digital human vendor, agnostic and also working with those that we've been working with for a while. So we didn't just build this to have just for ourselves internally. We have built out pilots in use cases over three years with digital humans that we've worked with various companies to build. I don't know how much I can say on the podcast. But here's an example of one. It started off as a police officer training use case. So now imagine this. The digital human is acting like someone who has been the victim of a crime. And it was like say a robbery. Then the police officers will interview that digital human and she's responding like, oh, I was robbed in the alley. It was very scary or whatever. So that's where these sad things can come in. And then they're judged on how well did they ask? Number one, did they ask all of the correct questions that one should ask when they're interviewing a victim? Other ways that that could work is that we actually are looking at the officer, of course, with ethics and the permissions, but looking at the officers, what is their tone? What is their body language? What is their tone of voice? Do they have empathy, right? And then you can imagine that they're interviewing the perpetrator and all these things. So we actually were building out these types of use cases. So that's just one example of things that we've done with actual clients, pilots that we've done. Wow. And then you marry that up with what you can do with various metaverse, digital world experience cases. One of the most profound training scenarios that I've had a chance to experience while wearing one of the VR headsets is our avenues project, which is public info, social work. And for the listeners who aren't familiar with it, imagine yourself as a social worker and you have to walk into a home. And you're making an assessment of whether that home environment is a safe and secure place for a child or if that child potentially needs to be extracted from that environment and taken into state care. And it's this hyper realistic environment. It's a, though you're in the home, it's presenting you with these scenarios that instinctively bring out your various biases right to the forefront. And you can play through multiple scenarios and it will prompt you if you gave a response that maybe didn't illustrate the most empathy. And those virtual environments create a psychologically safe space, which is actually one of the components necessary in order for you to learn. Now that environment is a scripted environment. You have the decision tree. Imagine combining that with the digital human that can respond in real time because it's powered by the generative AI in the background. So this digital human that has the infinite knowledge and wisdom of the internet and combined with these metaverse experiences, this is where you start to see the overlap and the blurred lines between the physical and the real world and the virtual world and the augmented intelligence world and everything in between in this blurred continuum. It's fascinating. I'm glad you brought up avenues because we've brought our clients to see it. And it's very touching. People get emotional in that room with that set on because you really do feel like you're there. And I'm glad you also brought up metaphors because before this recording we were talking a little bit about other companies specifically in fashion and retail that are in the metaverse. So where do you see there being opportunity to bridge the gap there as well when we think about the design of the digital human, our appearance, what we wear, how do we bring in these partners? We are going to have that whole broad spectrum of our existence and it means for companies it opens up an entirely new channel. You've had your in store physical channels. You've had your online e-commerce channels. Many organizations are still trying to catch up to that world. But now you have entirely in world digital native experiences. You think about Fortnite and the ability to host a concert in Fortnite with hundreds of millions of viewers and the ability to buy merchandise in those virtual worlds. The ability to buy merchandise may be in the format of an NFT, a non-frontiable token that you can actually own as a digital asset and carry with you as you go from one digital world to another world to a third world. These are new businesses that people haven't fully contemplated. We're still working through the monetization streams. We're still imagining how are we going to present ourselves in these virtual worlds. Today you could do, as you call yourself, you could have a virtual background. Remember that lawyer or the judge that appeared in cat ears? Oh, I'm sorry. I swear I'm a human. I'm not. I'm not a cat. You could have an avatar that's showing up an interactive one on a team's call. You may have your digital human showing up and representing you on a call entirely without you even attending. I once had for one of my outside of work projects a nonprofit call that I couldn't make. And automatically because it was in my Gmail calendar, my otter.ai pilot joined the meeting. And the person on the other end, like, what is this thing? And they pinged me. I said, oh, that's my automated AI powered note-taking engine. So even though I couldn't be in the meeting, if you folks are okay with it, it'll just create the transcript. And then I can use that plopped into chat GPT and I can get the summary outputs of that meeting. And I will catch up with you all on the actions that are tagged and assigned to me. I essentially had a non-person attending this meeting on my behalf that is acting as an extension of me. But could you imagine a future world where maybe I can send Lila on my behalf into that meeting if I'm triple booked as I often am. And if it's a low stakes, you know, predictable outcome meeting and someone needs to access the memory bank of, oh, tell me a story from what you've done in the telco industry with clients over the past X number of years that may be relevant to what I'm doing today. My human memory is limited. Right. But you could imagine the memory of one of our digital humans. They don't have off days. They don't get cranky or foggy. And so I'm just so excited for that world as we get closer. And that kind of brings it back to my sci-fi dreams of this technology and use cases exactly like that. Imagine you can have multiple digital humans like, oh, you have to, I don't know, pick up something or, you know, buy something or anything that you, me as a neurodiverse person, to me, like, you know, attending meetings, sometimes even being like, you know, at, not attending meetings, but, you know, having to take notes, having to do these things are things that are hard for me as a neurodiverse person. And I can exactly like you say, you can send your digital twin for anything that you, you know, don't want to do. And I would encourage, you know, people, you know, there's a lot of, you know, in the press about the idea of digital twins of people and what, you know, people want to do with them. If you have your own, if you own your own digital twin, what you can do with that and it reminds me of a science fiction book from, a long story from a long time ago where they actually had digital twins of themselves. And you can imagine because at some point, the real you is going to need to be updated on everything your digital twins have been doing. So they have to be. If you have an army of analysts that you are delegating work to, at some point, they have to come back to you and fill you in on the meetings that they had, the outcomes, the decisions that they took, ask for clarifications. Hey, it was a correct. Is there anything you would have done differently? So I look forward to the day that I have my briefing meetings with Lila and she comes back to me and says, here are your four takeaways and actions from today. It's like your personal assistant. It's personal assistant. And what is more personal as an assistant than you? Then you. That's exactly where I want to go and then the next step from there is your digital twin robots. Sorry. That'll be a part two. I mean, I have piles of laundry that need to be taken to a dry cleaners. Yes. I've been sitting on that. I've, you know, some extra hands. So I feel like I've learned a lot about the use cases for digital humans. I'm excited to see how Accenture continues to build off of this and bring it more internally but also to our clients. The one question that I want to leave the both of you with is, you know, we've now been so focused on this virtual world. Genie is such a big hot topic now. We're investing so much time and so many resources into developing out these technologies. How do we stay grounded in the real world while putting so much energy towards building out these virtual worlds? So that's a very, very interesting question because, you know, I have the ability to super focus, to hyper focus and I can be 20 hours straight just like learning this coding or implementing this thing. So that is a, that work life balance thing is a, is a, is a challenge for me. But maybe my own digital twin can, you know, lighten, lighten the load, you know, on some of that. But it is, I think it really is important to balance that, you know, like I said, I think, you know, I think, I'm realizing, I'm out, writing music. So I want to start performing as she says. As she talks about singing heavy metal, she's whispering into the microphone. So what is it that you start performing it? You have to have that work life balance. And I want to close by acknowledging that our, our leadership here at Accenture that's given us the funding and the, and keeping the interest, you know, people like Paul D'Arty, Laungwan, you people like it, Ilyana and Mary and Chavani and so many, so many people and, and my group, as I'm part of Cloud First Design Cloud Architecture, Matt and Max and other people, we have to acknowledge that we're, we've been given, you know, the funding to kind of. not only live out our dreams, but to help our clients. That's the most important thing. These things, the customer experience, because I think we haven't really spoken about that. Accelerating and helping the customer experience is going to be key for all of our clients, especially after coming over what we went through with COVID. That elevated customer experience, so I'm sorry, I diverged, but. No, I think it's so important. So you asked the question, Stella, how do we not lose sight of our humanity and stay very grounded as we have the rise of these digital humans? When you think about the use cases for digital humans, if it's an augmentation of a customer support function at a telco company or at a travel company or as an assistant in a long-term healthcare type setting, that digital human is taking some of the workload off of the shoulders of the human human and allowing the human human to focus on the harder, more complex situations that really require what humans are really good at, which is creativity and the ability to deal in ambiguity and really read the room as opposed to focusing on the repetitive tasks that no one frankly wants to be doing in the first place. I'll give you a personal example. I started my career as a chartered accountant and I'm on the board now representing the 100,000 CPAs. But when I reflect to the early parts of my career where I was an auditor in a client basement somewhere, literally footing and tying numbers to make sure that the financial reporting was accurate, I remember thinking to myself in those moments, why am I doing this? I've just finished a lot of education, I've spent a lot of money on my training and I can't wait until the day that some of these steps are automated so I can be using my full creative self. What I see happening with this next generation of digital humans is essentially the set of tools that we will pair with the human workers that allow us to spend time in more meaningful ways. And many years ago when the Industrial Revolution happened, there was this expectation in society that we as humans would work less because we had assembly lines and machines could suddenly build these products without needing the really heart labor from us. And somehow instead of us getting so much time back, we ended up working more and more. We now have this hustle culture we have. Burn out culture, busyness is worn as a pride, you know, as a batch of honor if you will. I look forward to a day where we can be really intentional as humans around where we spend our time. And anything that doesn't require the highest and best use of a human skill set and if it could be happily done with our extensions and digital humans, great. Let's do that so we can get our own time back for leisure activities. I love that. I'm on board with that. It kind of. More time to do yoga. More time to do breath work. More time to leisurely make a meal without a rush to host a dinner party to get into abstract art painting to travel. To travel. To the world I want. To see our friends. Building a world that humans want to live in. Yes. That's a great point. Thank you both so much for taking the time to record today. This was wonderful and for everyone listening out there, I hope you enjoyed and hopefully we get to do a part two because this is really fun. Oh, as we have more information and as we start to really conceptualize, where can we use Lila? How is she being useful in the Accenture context? How can she be inspiring to our clients? How can she inspire our workforce more generally to come up with their own ideas? Yeah. That will definitely be a part two here. Thank you guys are amazing so thank you so much. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you to Mara. Thank you. That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of Everyday Endorphins. If you liked what you heard, make sure to like, rate and review this podcast on whichever platform you prefer. You can also follow along the Everyday Endorphins Instagram account to stay up to date with episodes, future events and all things related to mental health, well-being and happiness. Don't forget to keep spreading Endorphins and find things in life that bring you joy every day. Until next time.