The Future of Work from NJIT

Business Week on iTunes, SoundCloud, or Bloomberg dot com. You can also listen to our radio show weekdays at two pm Eastern only on Bloomberg Radio. Yeah, we do want to talk about startups. We want to talk about a lot of things, science and innovation and entrepreneurship, all at work at the New Jersey Innovation Institute and adventures link here with more on the work that n j i T is doing to really facilitate the startups coming out

of it into the real world. Dr Don Sebastian, he's president of n j i T New Jersey Innovation Institute and he's here with us at nj i T at their Newark campus. So nice to talk with you. I told you I was reading about your zation a little bit last night, tell us a little bit about for our audience kind of some of the work you're doing.

Sure so. Nji is is an unusual organization where a nonprofit created under the university and and the expression of the university's economic development mission, meaning what we're a tech university, how do we help build a tech based economy? And having spent many years at this interface between university and industry, as they say in the commercial, we know a lot

of things because we've seen a lot of things. There are a lot of models that just don't work when we try to graft academic research onto the needs of industry, and so we've arrived at a model that really focuses on how can we begin together bring together companies that are birds of a feather, small companies, startups, entrepreneurs, faculty students, whatever the source of the innovation is in technology specific clusters and help them not just grow with specialized facilities

and coaching, but really make early stage matches between the big companies who need them now as a source of innovation. We all grew up in the era of large scale corporate R and D, and all the great technology we know came out of Bell Labs and Sarnoff, R C A Labs E C, R and D. They go through the whole catalog of industry. Those enterprises have to the large case atrophied or even disappeared completely. And M and A has replaced R and D in many, many industrial sectors.

But then that's an inefficient process, you know, it's not like every tech these days can be done in the garage, and you do, well, wonder what's lost in the process with all of that R and D at those big facilities going away. Someone's going to do it right, right, all right, And if you're depending on the small guy to do it, there's only so much you can do.

Apps in your basement and then you can, you do do some simple stuff, but when you get into nanotechnology, gene splicing, you know, AI, advanced AI and robotics, you can't do that as a one or two person operation in a garage. Well. Well, one of the things that we're obviously focused on throughout the course of this entire show, in our visit here is the future of work, in the future of jobs, but so much of that feels like from your perspective, needs to be proactive rather than reactive.

You need to be helping sort of create companies, but also certain types of companies and cultures that that sort of dictate or help sort of shape the future of work, right, yeah, yeah, And if we don't do it, guess what the rest

of the world is organized. Right, So, whether it's China Dot Com or it's the front offer models in Germany, there are other places in which there are very well oiled public private partnerships that try to help small, mid size and merging businesses come together and ultimately connect to the big O E M s and and bring products

to market. So for every one company that maybe the next Apple that does start in the garage, they're probably a thousand who have a better destiny if they were to develop into some product that could be brought by a larger company or be part of a supply chain done. I think so much of this and startups is about future growth for this country, right, And if you take it, you know, certainly future growth globally if you take it

on a mobile perspective. But I do think about so where is the US when it comes to being leading as startups? I mean, I think everybody for so long were so jealous of Silicon Valley, but I feel like China certainly on a mission, and there are other parts of the world too, So where is the US in

that standard? So I just came back from a weak trade mission that the state sponsored Israel startup Nation, Yeah, oh, he is a place from innovation size of New Jersey and you look at the volume of startups to go there. So I think what's more important is how do we get them to the next phase, right from startup into something that can be functionally A startup is a business plan, angel investment at least, but what about actually producing enough

for proof of concept? Doesn't make technical sense, but doesn't make dollars and sense. How do you get into that pilot stage? That's the big barrier for many of these small companies. If you have a thick drug, for example, a new pharmaceutical, if the big company says, well, come back when you've had clinical trials, we'll phase three clinical trials. That could be a ten year hald and even a multi billion dollar investment. Right, So what are we doing

about a don Yeah? Well, so in each important industrial sector, we're trying to put together these expensive facilities. I use cell engine for example. We've invested in creating a pilot manufacturing facility as sterile manufacturing is called cGMP. We're inventors of these next generation of cart and gene spicing type technologies can come and create produce UH clinical trial arts. Right and and at the same time the big companies are coming for us. Tax is the same thing, right,

because these are pivots. This is another important thing. Most of our anchor industries are facing true disruptive technology threats and either they're going to figure out how to become their own disruptor or they're going to go the way of the gas company. When when Edison strung up electric lights just got about a minute left. So what's a success story. So so this this model is emerging. I think in healthcare I T space really wonderful example where

we begin in this transformation to digital health. About ten years ago when UH the Affordable Care Act created funding to create the transformation of doctors from paper to electronic medical records and the technology to interconnect. In that context, we transformed seven thousand physicians here in the state and then went on to show she's a hundred and seventy five million a year in cost savings by using that

technology to achieve outcomes driven healthcare delivery. Now we run the state's healthcare information exchange and with that that's attracted right, So that's the honey that attracted bears. Yeah. We brought in a lot of small companies who want to plug into that infrastructure, and we've shown that we can then do the business coaching specific to the industry that's helped

them grow as as small enterprises into thriving companies. All right, thank you so much for joining us and for having us here in Nework, doctor Don Sebastian, president of the New Jersey Innovation Institute here on the campus of n j I T n j I. I think I might have sent in, well, the president g I D will get angry about violence they find a pink slip in a novel. Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk

technology and innovation. Man, they're impacting just about everything in our world, whether at home, at work, and at play. At work is one that is garnering more attention thanks to a lot of different technologies. And someone who knows about that as Robert co and he's vice president of Global R and D in Chief Technology Officer at Striker Joint Replacement graduate of n j I t UH and so we want to bring him in and talk a little bit about how innovations are changing how we work.

He's joining us on site here at nj I t Nice to see you again. Oh thanks for having me in a proud Yeah, this like old home week? Are you like sort of like you know, walking through me like I remember that place, picking up some T shirts and sweatshirts, no comments. So I feel like there's more momentum when it comes to technology innovation impacting the work for his workforce. And I don't know whether it's because all of a sudden AI is picking up some speed.

Tell me how you see well, actually between AI, between connectivity if you really look at at a division that I represent, like a striker where we do total hips and total needs. You know, we're trying to still to improve patient outcomes, make patients return to work faster, have patients leave an operating room, manage expectations, patient satisfied, remove their offstere arthritis, but they get them back to a normal level of functions. So innovation needs to be strong.

And we're living in a global world right now, and that works for R and D as well. So and necessary for R and D globally, like it's going to be a global take, does it not? Oh? Absolutely? If you look at the innovation across the United States, by the way, where you have a geography difference, you go to go to where the talent is. So whether it's in Australia, whether it's in Japan, whether it's in Europe.

It's really the combination. And as you look for this technology and you look at where the people are who are smart, the universities that that dwell upon this, you want to go where they are. You want to connectivity and connectivity will allow a rate of innovation that incorporates

that technology. And so does that change not just how you hire, but also once people are on board sort of how they work where they are Like with play play it out for us, right, So if you're to go after let's say a new technology, so let's use your your augmented reality example, right, artificial intelligence. There are universities, by the way, such as nj I T that that focus on that. Now that labor force may be local

to that college. For me to say, hey, labor force, uh, you're a university in Germany, you come to Northern Bergen County, New Jersey. The likelihood of that may not be all that great, But if you really think about it, why can't people feel that they're all working together? Why can't through video conferencing, through augmented reality, through all the computer simulation and that power that can merge people together in ways that never could before. Well, I think about the

medical community. So does that mean I mean maybe we're already doing it, that you could have an expert surgeon in Australia who operates robotically possibly on somebody in New York. I mean, can we get you know, I don't know if it's there yet. Is that where we're going? Yeah, well, maybe the world gets there eventually, but but I don't think we're there right now. So we're not practicing medicine. So we will get more data. But the purpose right now of a company like Striker to gain more data

is to make that surgeon smarter about that patient. The more data we can help give that surgeon on that individual patient that's unique to that patient, we will win. But the data can come from many places. So why don't we look at, say, say large medical centers that are well known, and why don't we capture the way

they do worthpedic surgery. Why don't we learn from those surgeons, their technique, their approach, where they place an implant, how they do physical therapy, when their patients go back to work, what's their rehab procedure. And now we could track patients through artificial intelligence, through data like never before. And that means the pool of patients right gets bigger, right because you can share information with everybody who's doing a particular

procedure or dealing with a certain implant. Correct. Well, So it's a striker with robotic surgery if you really think about it. We're sitting here now and we're analyzing CT scans on last year over a hundred twenty thousand patients, and we're checking checking to see what their operative condition was when they returned to work, what their pharmaceutical use was, very patient satisfaction. You can out pool data in massive quantities that you never could before. Stratify that. So let

me give you an example. If you're a sixty four year old woman and your b m I of thirty four rheumatory darthritis, what's the best implant for you? Now we can help answer that question. Should you go to a hospital home from the hospital same day, or should you stay in the hospital for four days? What is your expectation for when you return to work? When will you walk upstairs better? When we get up a car better?

All right, so let's talk about in the minute or so we have left, let's talk about the patient side of this, because a lot of people listening watching, they're probably your current customers or future customers. Let's be honest, like this is something I hang out with a bunch of runners, and you know we're of a certain age, and like, this is the sort of thing that you know is very relevant to folks going forward. Tell us

about the market out there right now. So the market right now, the patient's expectations have changed so much in the last ten years. No longer do people not want to play golf. No longer do they not want to walk in No longer they want to have have pain and be staying home six months after surgery. They want to be able to walk faster, they want to return to a normal sense of quality of life. That's a higher and higher expectations. Robotic assistant surgery allows us to

do that. But eventually we will learn in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of patients across the globe with digital health and be able to look at that data and make recommendations on patient care and implants like never before. Customization to right, It's exciting, it's exciting stuff. Um, thank you, thank you so much to come by you. Are you thinking about like a knee replacement? Yeah, yeah, but I just I'm looking down the road. You can have the road.

Want to keep running? All right? Robert Cohen, Chieftain, technology officer of the Joint Replacement Division over at Striker And as he pointed out, produm of this fine institution. All right, our next guest. We love talking to him. And if you're talking about science and technology, he's gotta be talking to. Dean Kennedy is the founder of First for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, joining us on the phone

from Manchester, New Hampshire. Dean, Carol and I were talking before we came on about the last time you visit us in New York City. You brought that amazing the rugged terrain robotic wheelchair. It was so cool, so great to catch up with you. It's great to be back

with you. And since I saw you last we delivered for those machines to a couple of our a few incredible Americans, including Medal of Honor recipients that left their legs in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and one of the early one in Vietnam, and we're changing their lives and it's great. That's amazing. Congratulations. Well, we look forward to catching up for you next time you're in New York City. But let's talk about STEM education right now.

That's the core of everything we're talking about. When we think about the future of work, it starts with education. Tell us what you are working on right now in that will soon sort of be making its way through the educational system. So there's two paths for that. In my day job, as you know, I build medical equipment.

And we just received, believe it or not, another grant in excess of fifty million dollars from Health and Human Services to accelerate the pace at which we're building the core technologies to manufacture replacement human organs, which would be a huge wind for patients that need chronic care like dialysis because the kidneys don't work, or insulin pumps because they are pancreas doesn't work, and since I do pumps and dialysis machines, I can't wait to put myself out

of all those businesses by manufacturing the organs to replace replace them. But by the way, the theme here is I already have eight hundred engineers on all these projects, and my little company has got a hundred open positions, so as you know, everything, but my day job consumes first and uh and at first, we're trying to create the next generation of the workforce that will solve the

problems we're all worried about today. Whether it's manufacturing organs, solving the healthcare system, solving the global warming issues with better ways to make use, transports, store energy, you name it. There are almost an unlimited number of incredibly important problems that need to be solved. They all need to be solved by a generation of people that have better technologies

than the one we're leaving them with. And the only way we're going to get there is to dramatically increase the number of kids that have the skill sets and the ambition and the judgment and the courage to go and do bold new things with technology to solve these problems. I can also tell you go ahead, no no, no,

please finish, Please finish. I was gonna say that I listened to some I must say, I don't want to insult anybody, but some silly people that seems to think there's a credible debate about whether science and technology and

engineering and robotics are going to eliminate jobs. I wonder if those people are around, you know, a hundred years ago and two hundred years ago, when the steam engine came around, or when the first you know, uh, you know bulldoz who was built saying, oh my god, that Bulldoz that can do the job of a hundred ditch diggers. That machine is gonna put everybody out of work. Well, actually it'll take work away from the people that are doing backbreaking work now will have a limited time in

their life to do it. It's not a fun job. It's a dangerous job at the boring job at a low paying up. But the idea that the the caterpillar, that the Bulldoz who would do the work of all the van bag figgers, and there would there'd be no

work for them. No, once you raise the bar and you can make that many more holes, you can move that much more stuff, you just build super highways, not just little houses, and every single technology ever developed creates way more jobs than eliminates because it creates way more opportunities for everybody to share a better standard of living.

Dean just got about forty seconds. We are sitting or at n J I T. I'm Jason, and I are in a room full of students who are studying engineering, science, technology. Given that six students entering school today will work in jobs that don't currently currently exist, you got forty seconds. What's your advice to these students. My advice to them is to get about learning what's in the textbook today about solving today's problems. By the time they graduate, those

problems will be solved. But don't worry. There'll be new, better, more exciting problems that have more pressing needs to be solved. The world is moving so quickly now that educator from the has to be preparing you to learn how to learn and relearn and stay current. And kids that have those skill sets will never have a shortage of opportunities and careers. But kids that don't learn how to learn and don't learn how to embrace technology are going to

be under the bus on it period. Be nimble. That's what's important. Dean came in. Thank you so much, founder of First the Robotics competitions that he does to encourage girls, boys at all ages to be involved in STEM is just remarkable, really wonderful to see. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. Yes, indeed, everyone, this is a special hour of Bloomberg Business Week in the next sixty minutes live from n j i T,

New Jersey Institute of Technology. We are also streaming on YouTube, and we're focusing on the future of work because there's so many different things going on, and I think a lot of folks were filled with a room of student here at n j i T wondering about, you know, what will work look like, what kind of jobs will be needed? And our guests for the hour Marcus Weldon, he's president of Bell Labs and corporate Chief Technology Officer

and Nokia. Also Virginie Mallard, who is head of Corporate Technology for the US at the German engineering and manufacturing giant you know them, Semens. She also heads up the global research activities of Semens, Head of Technology, Field, Simulation and Digital twin. I had to actually look up and understand which digital twin is one of the coolest things

that we're going to talk about. Love love this, Love this and Joe Millitichi's senior vice president of R and D at Mark former senior vice president of R and D at embdin. So what's really wonderful about this panel up here is that they're looking at technology innovation what

it means for the workforce in some different perspectives. So first up, what I just say, I'm also excited to have all these students in the room because they're going to keep us honest, Like you know, we're gonna look out and see if they're paying attention or not, and if it gets boring, they're gonna flag and they're gonna start waving their hands the more interesting and more interesting.

Um No, it's gonna be very interesting. And I want to start with I think talking about the technologies that really are front and center for you and you know, Marcus, let me start with you, um what are the technologies that you guys are really spending a lot of time on knowing that it's going to change your industry and potentially change the types of jobs you're going to need in the future. That's a great question. I mean, we were in a weird business because we're in the networking business.

So to some extent, our job is to connect all the technologies, and because of the way things become interconnected, we have a role in all of them. So the digital twin concept we talked about earlier, we think about how to create digital twins. Why would we do that because that seems like more of a semens thing. But of course part of digital twinning is getting the information in and out of that digital twin over a network.

And then the outcome of digital twin is to move a robot, So we have to think about robot moving. And it's all because we're sort of the fabric company, if you like. I think it's very new Jersey to be in fabrics. But with the networking, we're the networking fabric. And that's five G. You've had a lot about five G from everyone. The current waiting, we're waiting waiting waiting, not waiting as long as if as when it was LTU because it's faster download speeds. That's my that's my

five G joke. But the effect, but no, the next version of five G is all about industrials. So that's the thing that people don't realize is five G today is about faster consumer. But the next version has lots of features built in for industrials, so it becomes the fabric of industrials, which then allows you to digital twin and control robots and and control things remotely and do remote teaching and and and instruction and all sorts of

interesting things. For us, we see ourselves as building fabric technologies connect to all the other technologies. So we are thinking robotics, we are thinking AI, we do think five G. We think all sorts of interesting thoughts and invent at bell Lapps. All right, So one of the other things New Jersey is known for is the pharmacy lital business. We're going to get to that in just a second, but I don't want to get too far from this

concept of digital digital twins. This is probably something that the students are like, yeah, we know what that is, but I don't know as much as do you know what it is? Educating here? All right, tell us what it is. I don't know why. I was pretty sure you will ask the question. She's ready. I have a short version, very simple is the digital twin is a virtual replica of a of a physical phenomena or physical set of machine or process. That is a very simple definition.

Now beyond of that physically is to connect the physics to to the to the simulation and to interact each other. For example, with a model, you can predict and you can simulate, and you can send this information to the machine and the machine can collect some data for example with sen source right and saying this information to the simulation, and the full concept all similar. They're telling me, put

put the machine. Consider to your mouth. So I'm gonna be I'm going to be not quite that digital twin, but I want to move in it because we want to hear what you're saying. Go ahead. So, as a as a conclusion, that digital twin is the full concept of physical set the machine, for example, and it is a virtual replica the model or the simulation associated to the machine, and they interact each other, sending for example, predicted data to the machine and machine sending a measured

data to the simulation. But Virginia, I have to say, my version of digital twin is of the entire physical world. Yeah, so you would see your world like a game. Yeah, So if you think of it as a massive game world that you enter, but it's actually your physical world, and you can explore it and you can ask questions of it because it has all the answers, and then you can experiment with what if right, because you can

ask the digital twin to simulate a scenario. Which is why Siemens and others you know, really like this is you can explore conditions that otherwise we destroy the physical thing, and so you can do very interesting things. But for the students here, it's sort of like a big game but of the real world. That's I think how I think of the twins. So what is interesting in in Sements it is, you know, it's a old company of

one android seventy plus. Your old company well well known in industrial manufacturing and more recently is also a big player in a software UH provider. And that's why what is interesting in Sements. We have this knowledge of manufacturing and the machines and process and we have also the simulation and the software right availabel, and now we are able to connect and to combine the two physical and

virtual world to to propose a new tools. You are listening to Bloomberg Business Week at special edition here live in Newark at n J. I T I want to jump right back in with Joe Militich. He's over at Murk relatively new job. I think, for you, what's the coolest technology you're looking at right now? There are a lot of them, so that it is a hard choice, but I'll but I'll give you one. So the Nobel Prize was given for chemistry and for bio catalysis, which

is so okay. So first of all, um, when we we look for we look for ways that you can modulate human disease with with drugs, with new medicines. A lot of times are chemicals. They're made synthetically. But the more complex molecule we want to make, the harder it is to put together, because most chemistry actually can make two or three different kinds of the same molecule and then you have to sort them all out at the end. It's a big purification process. But but inside the human body,

inside all living things, we have enzymes, catalysts. These are proteins mostly a few exceptions, but mostly proteins that actually bring things together and then make the thing you want out of them. And they do it with very little waste, and they do it at high efficiency, and they're catalytic. They do it over and over it again. So what we've been able to do recently is make much more

complicated chemical structures but use bio catalysis. We've been able to invent enzymes that never existed before because of a convergence of many technologies that make it possible for us to actually start with a certain kind of enzyme and change it into something we wanted to do specifically for a specific reaction. It's amazing. So twenty seconds. So what

does that mean in terms of our world. It means that we can invent better medicines faster, and we can make them cheaper, and we can make them greener with very little waste, very little, very little impact on the environment. So it's very important, and I was thinking a win win on so many different levels right everywhere. To see that, you are listening to a special edition of Bloomberg Business

Week Live from nj I T here in Newark. We're having a conversation about the future of work, and part of understanding the future of work is understanding where science is going, what the jobs are going to be, and what the aspirations are for this next generation of technology. Joe Militage, I want to put this question to you. You have the senior VP over at R and of R and d over Mark uh local company, and I do wonder what's going on in the world in terms

of disease biology. We're talking about this during a break and I'm so intrigued by what that actually means. So I've been a student of human disease biology from my whole career, and the essential problem we have is we want to understand what goes wrong when people develop a disease, and then we want to figure out something we can do to modulate that, some medicine or some vaccine we can give that will modulate the human disease. But the problem is we don't know as much as we would

like to know. I can tell you during my career we know three order of magnitude more about human biology than we did at the start. And it's not even a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent of enough. We're incredible that old. Uh, You're right, I'm not. You're only as old as you feel, so I'm not old at all. Um. But what here's here's

the exciting part. The the exciting part is because of a convergence of many different things, we can now it's now possible to study human disease biology with a resolution and with a continuity that's never before been imaginable. Now we haven't cashed in on it yet, but you can feel it coming. So think about it. In the past, if we want to know something about a human disease, we relied on a patient going to a health care provider and telling them once a month or once a

week about Now you can know everything continuously. If you do it ethically and if you do it in a in an informed way, you can understand not what a disease looks like at a doctor's visit every few weeks or months, you can understand it what's going on, can genuously what the patterns look like. If you want to actually take a sample from a patient with consent, of course, and if you want to analyze it, you can analyze it with a depth of resolution, down to finding out

what's going on in single cells inside each tissue. You can understand it with a depth and complexity that was never imaginable, even just even just a decade ago. I have to think this is something you're seeing Virgin that you know because of the the equipment and and all the research that you guys are doing. I can't tell

exactly the same story. But in the factory, for example, the robots and the artificial intelligence are bringing to us more safety, safety environment, are your quality maybe sometime quick quick execution of the task. And at the same time the human will be dedicated to elevated the task. They will be maybe in charge of the logistic programming the robots. That's why the segmentation of the task in factor will

will be different in the future. But definitely the robots and the AI are going to bring us higher quality and at the same time giving the human the possibility to have elevated roles. Well, this is what's interesting, and Marcus, I want you to come in on this because I feel like we've written about this a lot in Business Week magazine, this whole idea of it's not robots taking over for humans, but you're going to see man and machine kind of working much more closely than ever before.

Well said, that was actually my punchline. Sorry touched that collaboration. Yes, so there's a what we look at this a lot of you of the future of work is it's man and machine, a woman and machine in perfect harmony, and digital twining is a way to create a harmony between them because think of it, the machine, the software system or the AI system has a view of the world. The human has the same view of the world, and

they can interact in that world. That's the point of a digital t when they can sort of experiment and interact with each other. So that perfect harmony does a bunch of really interesting things. It increases productivity because if you think about what our problem is today, and we've eventuled these great technologies, but to some extent, they distract us more than they help us. Meaning what we are deluged by data that you don't know what to do with,

or social media or reality TV not Bloomberg. That's that's credible, positive, high quality and just life enhancing. There's a lot of static out there, static and the static actually we don't we're not equipped as humans to deal with. So you can think of the role of the machines is actually to help us, you know, wade through that static and that morass of data to create knowledge and understanding that

we use to perform tasks more efficiently. And the key is we perform the task because humans are actually incredibly well adapted for physical world tasks. We have lived in the physical world. We know how it works, We know how to manipulate things much better machines. For all the very clever robots you see out there on YouTube, they have been highly optimized to do humanlike things, but the human was already doing that thing. So our view is

that it's about augmenting humans. And you can think of a robot that you can control is your extension AI system, is your extension of your brain. All those things allow us to be better versions of ourselves that will actually work fewer hours but more productively, and normally, more productively means higher wages. Oddly enough, so a fewer hours, higher wages means more leisure time. Leisure time you tend to do things that are cognitive and cause growth, and that

makes you a better worker. So we've got this very positive feedback loop we see of humans when they're augmented actually work more productively in similar jobs that have been adapted by a roll of machine takes well and Joe, I mean, we do get this sense and we're talking um you know with the series Executive and Striker earlier. Uh, this notion that machines can also you know, prevent humans from making misstakes. Absolutely, so we can if it just

got about thirty seconds. Okay, if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, we need our factories to be more modern than they Yeah, and that's eminently possible now for all the reasons that have been described and more. There's a convergence of all the things we've learned about what we want to control, that we can make things tenser, safer, smaller, more productive, more unit productivity for time. All Right, you guys are gonna stick with us? Yes, I was looking

at definitely. I think human and machines collaborating each other and the complimenting each other. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week Karl Master along with Jason Kelly. We're live in front of a room full of students here at n j I T at their campus in Newark, New Jersey. We have a great panel. Marcus Weldon is President of

Bell Labs, corporate chief Technology officer at Nokia. Virginie my Art she has head of Corporate Technology for the US at Semens, and then we have Joe Military Chief Senior vice president of R and D at MURK. So here we've been talking about some of the different technologies, whether it's five G, whether it's AI, digital twins, UM. You know, what does that mean for the type of workers that are going to be needed in the future. So Marcus, let me start with you. What do you what do

you look for when you want to hire somebody? Super smart people? Uh so n G I T grants you qualify that. What we actually look for is UM people are willing to adapt to changing realities. So one of the things we really think is that the role of digital twins and augmentation and intelligent assistants will be to help you do whatever it is you do better. But

therefore you will be expected to do more things. So instead of getting an education that is linear like I did, and then I go and do a job and I do that job forever, I think you'll be expected to be adaptive, maybe on a weekly or maybe even daily basis, because you'll be augmented with the task will be taught to you or sort of on the fly, either because you put a headset on or somewhere you're augmented and you'll be able to do many more things because you'll

learn those things on the fly with the information you need, rather having to be pre trained on that thing. So you're gonna have to sort of be agile and adapted. But that sounds like an awful lot of fun. As Joe said that, my job will be to be adapted to any changing reality and I'll be well paid for that. Yes, go ahead, Yes, incments. We are looking also for smart people. But we also believe in the diversity of people. Could you just stand up. I just want to know who

that is. Just believe it. In the diversity of education. Yes, we believe that in different paths of education for example apprenticeship or community college, or also people coming back to education after having another experience in their life, and it could they could bring to us and experience we need.

In very good point, I love this idea of diversity, and you know, until come on in on this, because I do think we increasingly understand that a company performs better when their boards are diversified, their senior talent and really all along in terms of their workforce. So tell me how that is important to you, guys, and what else you're looking for. So I'll just echo the sentiments on diversity. But what I think I'd really like to reinforce is the comment about the fact that we can't

think of education the same way. It's going to be continuous and forever, so you can't. We have lots of different skill sets we depend on to discover and invent and develop a new drug and get it to market. They used to be in silos. You just you'd be a specialist you'd get good at So you need a

hundred different specialties. We still need those, We still need that depth of expertise, but we also have to have people who can understand across the whole spectrum and integrate it, because if you don't integrate it, you don't see the opportunities when convergence if possible. I agree that you really have to really really push on that, and that's where diversity comes in for us exactly. It's a spectrum function.

The more spectrum of disciplines and genders and nationalities and cultures and educational backgrounds, broader spectrum to look at the problem, all equally able to sort of solve it because they helped in the way they need to be helped. It's diversity sort of happens as a catalyst for all of this, I think, I think it's really good. And the thing that I think is the most important thing is just being intellectually curious, relentlessly curious about how everything works, everything

that's everything that could touch what you tell. I would say that about journalism. I think it's just you have to be curious about the world and stuff. Go ahead, Yes, intimates where we believe in the in the education program for our workforce in the US, we have a fifties thousand US employees and we spend fifty million every year to in education program to train them and to to

reskill them in the new technologies. This has been and that's interesting to go ahead, No, but I think there's been a debate about what's the corporate responsibility and re educating the workforce to make sure that they have the workers. And it sounds like obviously semens as being important. Yeah, we do too. But I think in the for the students in the room, what I would say is they will be live trained. And that's what's the really interesting change.

Because today you have to take courses in a rather formalized way, even though their online, there's still sort of courses, But what if I could learn the task minutes before I have to perform it? So I think that's the really interesting change in the future, and it will be perfect knowledge, not the noise we were talking about. I mean, I do wonder about in thirty seconds sort of the delivery system to some extent of education. Right, Well, certainly

it needs to be real world in real time. But there's another big component we need, and that's that there's a lot of challenge. So we look at data sets that are as diverse as you can possibly imagine, and they're not in common formats. So we need a We need a whole coundry of data scientists too, who can work with biologists and worth chemists and with you know,

microbiologists with toxic common language, you know. But but they have to be able to actually get to the data because putting it in a data lake isn't good enough. We are here at n j I T. Marcus Weldon, Virginie Maard and Joe Militage still with us, and I want to quickly pick up on this theme of sort of diversity of thought. But how you get there, Joe, Like, how do you institute that sort of thing or how

do you train people to to think like that? I think you have to create the right environment, the right work environment. It involves everything from facilities, to who you hire, to what you make accessible. But you know it's working when people are so excited because they're learning new things and they feel that they're going to have an impact, you know you've got it. And and it's it's not it's not something you can necessarily make perfectly formulaic. But

when people are learning, they tell you. When people stop stop tell telling you that they're working long hours, and they tell you that they can't wait to get to work. That's when you know you have to have that kind of a learning environment all the time. So how do you institute At semens, we we strongly believe that the diversity brings value to the company. It's about the competitivity. If you play a soccer game with five players, you

have less chances than with eleven players. That's why we have to include all the people out of the game today and to propot them some education program to join us and to bring the experience the background right. And it's it's about the diversity or so of the mindset.

And Marcus just thirty seconds here we are completely background blind oddly enough, meaning it really is if if you have the enthusiasm, the curiosity like you take care of UH and UH, a thirst for new knowledge, the rest just happens, right because it's like you said, visionally, we look at the largest population people who fit that criteria, and that naturally is everyone. So we never limited by any category. UH, it's all categories in to be the

most sort of thriving population. You are listening to Bloomberg this week live from m j I T. It's a special edition. We're focusing on the future of work. Our guest Joe Militich. He has senior vice president of R and D at Mark Virginny Major. She is the head of Corporate Technology for the US at Siemens and Marcus Wilton, President Bell Labs in corporate Chief Technology Officer at Nokia. We had a great question from the audience here, one of the students posing this to to the panel. We

talk a lot about AI and automation. We talk a lot about sort of being intellectually curious, but we do worry. I think we should worry about those who are left behind to some extent, who might not have the capability of the opportunity to play at that at that higher level.

What do you make of that, Virginia. I like this question because it makes me the opportunity to to tell you that sometimes you can overcome this uh this point, we have, for example, instruments low code platform called a Mendis were quite or two years ago, and this platform allow you to create apps without knowing how to code it. It's you have just to know maybe how to solve a problem, how to have a common sense, and then the platform is coding for you and create the app

for you. And this is an example of how we can interiorate this kind of workforce breaking to us an experience from the from the shop floor with a with a good technical knowledge without knowing how to code. We like this Coostin. I think the excellent question because actually one of the great equalizers of AI and augmentation is it augments the people who know less, perhaps more than augments the people who know more. So it's actually meant to level the playing field so everyone can do their

task whatever it is better. And in fact the toss the hardest to replicate with a machine of physical toss. So I would argue What it does is in the future, physical task performance will be more human augmented with an assistant that tells you what you need to know. Even if you didn't know the math or the engineering, it'll be telling you how to do it in a way that helps you. You may have had the form of education, so I think it's a it's a really bright future

for leveling things. Well, does it also mean then going forward, that you don't have to know so much math, are so much science going forward? That would be a huge rely for me. But I do wonder about that. So I think it will augmented because because whatever level you start at, you can get ten times better in a much shorter period of time. And there's almost no limit of questions that I can think to ask. So I

don't see the future getting limited. The only thing is going to limit us is whether or not we can sustated economically at all. That But it's not actually a technical or a scientific limitation anymore. The future is unbounded. I mean why everywhere? What also a level? If you level an bounded which is sort of really interesting. Well, and I just think about something as silly as Siri or some of the go home devices, right, that you can ask so much information because there's so much data

fed into it. Think about, you know, how much you can know automatically and what you can do with it. Remember we had to look stuff up in books, remember encyclopedias, to a library, go to a library, or pick up

a phone or something like that. All right, So in a few minutes that we have left, you know, we also want to talk about especially since we're at the top university that's obviously thinking very aggressively and ambitiously, and yet we have an educational system that maybe might be a little sclerotic, as they say, and not so quick to change. What's the piece of advice that you guys would give to universities or higher education institutions out there?

And I think that and the great question was how can industry and education partner to create these lifelong partnerships that are going to be needed in terms of education. It's a great to question. I think we saw Dr Bloom earlier saying a lot of really good things about maker spaces and makerspaces in generally will be involving types

of equipment industrials will be using. So I think collaborations between places of ng I t and industry are more naturally happening because the types of equipment used to be massive and industrial. Now you can because of course More's law, you can now get in a small form factor. You can have an university, and then it's just a case of coupling the two by some programs. We have summer internships.

We hire a lot of graduates from the New Jersey area, but they've been working on systems and machines and tools that we would also use. But do you see sort of institutions sort of separating a little bit in the sense that like, if you can't keep up, if you can't be as progressive, maybe you're not gonna exist. But but I think the most important thing is to teach students how to ask questions. Yeah, that's the most important thing. How to problem solve, What are the right questions to ask?

How do you actually delve in and to and really to actually gain enough confidence doing that so that you're not afraid and so that it doesn't seem intimidating, because the tools will be there to get whatever information whatever is possible. And then when you don't find the information right, you know what you want to work on because that's where you've got to add value to the system. Ask

the question, keep asking, you get the answer exactly. And so I think the major job of universities is actually teaching people that you can be curious, now much more curious than you ever could fairy well, but maybe we've been a bit linear book knowledge. But we have to

turn knowledge into curiosity again. I think I think that the partnership between universities and companies are very important because we've benefited each other from the academic knowledge, of course, but the company can bring to the to the college and high school also kind of understanding of what we need. And for example, sements provide us some software to the high school to teach the kids right and to and to show them what they can do with the software

and how to design the parts. And we provide also some equipment right. And that's what's interesting. You're finding it's starting at younger and younger ages that you want to get into UM education and certainly have an impact. Folks, thank you so much. I mean, we certainly could have continued for a much much much longer time. So I just want to thank our guests here on the panel.

Marcus Weldon, President of Bell Labs, Corporate Chief Technology Officer at Nokia, Virginie my Yard, head of Corporate Tech over for the US at Siemens, and then Joe Millitan, she's Senior VP of R and D at Mark. So thank you both so much, and thank you to our audience as well. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Bloomberg Business Week. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud,

or Bloomberg dot com. You can also listen to our radio show every weekday at two pm Eastern only on Bloomberg Radio