Businessweek Extra - Tom Siebel

things with you. What's what's your world like right now in California? Well, in northern California, I would say that we've been there's really been very little impact from COVID In the county that I'm in San Mateo County, there are this would be everything went in North Apollo Alto and Silicon Valley. We have three quarters of a million people as the population. There are seventeen hundred hospital beds, and on any given day there might be fifty people

hospitalized with COVID. If I look at Santa Clara County, which is the county immediately south of US, where there's roughly two million people, that would be everything from Paulo Alto to San Jose, there's about two million people four thousand hospital beds. On any given day, there'll be a hundred and fifty people hospitalized for COVID in San Mateo County.

I believe there are no people on ventilators. So, um, you know, most people in the town that I live in, Woodside, there have been ten people diagnosed with COVID, So it kind of missed us. Well. I mean, there's an argument meant to be made, I think Tom, and I'm guessing some of your local lawmakers would make it, which is,

you guys did the right thing. I mean you sort of shut it down pretty early in the entire Bay area, right, We did shut it down early, and it kind of you know, I think the purpose for shutting it down was to keep from overwhelming the hospital systems, and we never got close to that. I mean, out of sev hospital deads on an e given day, fifty might be occupied with in this county, fifty might be occupied with COVID patients. So it uh, you know, maybe it worked.

I'm you know, there's lots of different opinions on this, but it kind of never happened here. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting, Well, let's hope it stays that way. Yeah, exactly, Um, lesson learned, you know, in terms of a playbook for for how to do it. Are you guys in the studio or you're doing this from Paul, we're doing it from home. We're getting from you guys are a professional operation? Uh, it's seamless professionalists of congratulations. Well, thank thank you. Yeah,

we well we've gotten good at it. We're at the end of our ninth week doing this from home, so I mean kudos to our team who got us all set up. But it is sort of it's an amazing tribute to technology, Tom, which you know far more about than we do. So let's talk about how technology is maybe helping us get our arms around this. We were talking with you earlier in the year about cyber attacks.

We've got a different sort of attack on our hands now. Uh, And I do wonder how technology and this whole concept of a data lake help us understand how that's being used here. Well, you know, you recall that one of the things we spoke of when I was with you last in New York was the area of precision medicine. Okay, and precision medicine unquestionably will be one of the largest

commercial and industrial applications of artificial intelligence. So we can use this for a disease prediction, adverse drug reaction, genome specific medical protocols AI assisted diagnosis. So this is the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the U. S economy and many economies, and AI is going to impact medicine in a huge way. Now enter COVID. So this is a really unique opportunity UH to apply AI to

contribute to this dialogue. And we looked at all the you know, everybody has just been guessing uh and uh. And you know, as you change from you one TV channel to another, and you listen to Neil Ferguson at King's College or the person at Stanford, and one person says the morbidity rate is going to be between two percent and five percent. And another expert with the same level of expertise says, the morbidity rate is gonna be gonna be like, you know, one one one percent. What

is a policymaker to do. Well, what we did is we formed a coalition that we call the C three AI Digital Transformation Institute, and we founded this with Microsoft. We funded this to a two and of about four hundred million dollars, and we aggregated the human capital at m I T. Carnegie, Mellon, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and UM and you see Berkeley to engage in large scale research on applying AI to

mitigate COVID pandemic. And so this is AI and machine learning models to mitigate disease, bioinformatic modeling and simulation of propagation. So that's a that's a major initiative. It's underway, it's really exciting, and that is one of the efforts that we've been engaged in. All Right, our guest at this hour is Tom Seebel, founder and CEO at C three dot AI, author of Digital Transformation, Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction. He joins us on the

phone from Woodside, California. So, Tom, you really laid out what data Lake is all about. What's your goal? So this is you know, COVID nineteen data collection. What are you hoping that it does or what do you expected to do? And and what's a time timeline on it? Well, in order to perform data science in order to get accurate prediction whether it be course of disease or the

effocacy of social mitigations. These sitis need data. So what we have done in the past month is we have taken the twenty two largest data sources that are available in the world about COVID from JOHNS. Hopkins and coord nineteen and the New York Times, in the Milligan Institute and what have you. These are ct scans, These are mortality data, core morbidity coursive disease, and we have aggregated those data into a unified, federated image that we've made available.

This is called the C three AI COVID nineteen Data Lake, and we've made this resource available to the world at no cost to be able to do research, and we've we've had so this is by far the world's largest copus uh uh corpus of COVID data available researchers. This is being powered by our friends at AWS who provided the the cloud platform to do it. And I think this will be an enormously important resource for people to research, to do research, understand the course of the disease and

control that this epidemic and other epidemics like it. I mean, Tom, it's interesting, you know, and we wanted to talk to you a lot about Silicon Valley sort of what's going on there, But and maybe as a bridge to that, it does feel like there is this dare I say, And maybe I'm just optimistic here on a Friday afternoon, but you know, this sort of spirit of collaboration and

maybe urgent collaboration that's happening around this particular pandemic. And I don't know why that is, if it's just sort of the scope and scale of it, if it's because it is so dynamic and fast moving, and the effect economically and on our individual lives has has been so traumatic. Am I overstating that? You think? No, I think you've daled. And I think we're dealing with an ex essential event for people, for families, for communities, and for companies. And

company and individuals are pulling together. Research institutions are pulling together, Countries are pulling together in concerted, extraordinarily large scale efforts to understand the pandemic and control it. And it's I think it's very you know, it's very inspiring to watch it happen, and it's uh and it's it's really exciting to be able to be part of it. Well, and I do wonder. I mean, you know, speaking of silicon value, I mean, this is kind of old school silicon value.

In some ways. It's obviously a very competitive place. But I mean you have witnessed the other you know, sort of the best of Silicon Valley, I would imagine in some ways. I'm sure you've seen some other stuff too, but uh, you know, you understand the ethos of the place. I think that everything what is going on with COVID globally, this is a test, Okay, this is a test of us as people. This is a test of our families.

It's the test of our social structure, is the test of our government's Okay, and when our government structures and you know, hopefully when history is written, we will all have passed this test. But I think this is an opportunity for all of us to be our best, to be the best we can be, Okay, and and and

and and and solve this problem because it is solvable. Yeah, but it's right, but it's you can do it better and quicker, right if we all work together, and that we're staying amazing collaboration through what we're doing with the Digital Transformation Institut in the COVID data lake. We are in active cooperation with organizations all around the planet, World Health Organization, you, NEST, GOO, c d C, NIH, Stanford University,

you name it. Everybody is leaning forward and all they wanted Microsoft, AWS, IBM all when you when you call him, you ask him to help, all the answer is always how to Tom, how can we help? And so it's uh, it's really really been um inspiring to see this develop and I think we're we can expect to see UM you know, I think highly efficacious solutions forthcoming in a

reasonably short period time. Well that's what I wanted to ask you, because the time frames certainly has been one that we've heard everything even Bill gatesway in you know, everything from as soon as nine months to you know, maybe eighteen months President talking about a vaccine by the

beginning of the year. So I do wonder what you're hearing, UM from the community, this global cooperative community, about a real time frame, because everybody we seem to talk to you, Tom says, you know, we just talked about UM with the head of the Broadway you know, theater, you know, industry that it's not until we get a vaccine. We've talked with Bob Crandell used to head up American airlines. You don't open up airlines really until you get a vaccine.

So what do you hear about a real time frame about that specific sickly? Oh, I think there are lots of ways to deal with this disease other than disease, other than vaccine, and we are dealing with it today and there's but there's lots of questions about which of these which of these techniques are efficacious, and which are not. And if we have a large enough data sets, we can tell which are effications and which are not, and we can we can mitigate the spread of disease, we

can save lives. And this is this is before the advent of a vaccine, which is obviously a year or two off because that's how long it takes. But this is I mean, this is a natural application of artificial intelligence and data science and now we are aggregating the data so people can make better informed, more accurate decisions, and more more accurate policy decisions. That was Tom Siebel, founder and CEO at C three dot AI and of

course founder of Siebel Systems. I mean, this is someone again who has seen so much in the world of innovation and technology, and now he's trying to apply that to the virus, right, and it's all about data and Jason, I think it's safe to say that that's how we ultimately get ahead of this. Absolutely really enjoyed that conversation. You've been listening to Bloomberg Business Week Extra. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Radio Live Monday through

Friday at two pm Wall Street Time. I'm Bloomberg Radio. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. This is Bloomberg