Leading the Future of Work with HP Solutions

How are new solutions for collaboration reshaping the modern workplace? 🏢

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Find out at the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed! Modern Work Track Opener, Dave Shull, President of HP Solutions at HP, joins host Daniel Newman for an insightful discussion on HP's contributions to advancing the future of work.

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Key takeaways include:

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🔹The Evolving Workplace Landscape: Explore the dynamic shifts defining the modern workplace and how HP Solutions is strategically addressing these profound changes to support businesses.

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🔹Empowering Remote & Hybrid Work with Technology: Explore the role of technology in enabling productive, seamless, and secure experiences across diverse remote and hybrid work environments.

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🔹HP's Innovation & Sustainability Commitment: Understand HP's unique approach to driving innovation across its product line, deeply integrated with its commitment to sustainability in the workplace.

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🔹Navigating Future Workplace Trends: Gain forward-looking insights into emerging tech industry trends that will continue to shape the workplace, offering strategies for companies to adapt effectively to new norms.

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Learn more at HP.

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Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.

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Or listen to the audio here:

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Daniel Newman: Hi everyone and welcome to the Six Five Summit AI Unleashed. I'm joined today by Dave Shull, president of HP Solutions, and he's going to be our keynote speaker to open up our modern work track. We're going to be talking about the future of work. Dave, it's so good to have you back again, it's been a minute, but to always love you joining here on the Six Five.

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Dave Shull: Looking forward to it and I'm sure it'll be fun.

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Daniel Newman: It's been a great summit so far. Work is changing really fast. I think everyone out there can appreciate just over the last couple of years, the new tools that have been introduced into our lives. We went through the period of time where we went remote and then we got really used to video. It was a major boom for your business. And now we've seen this AI proliferation happening at breakneck pace, introducing, enforcing all of us in the workforce to kind of rethink how we interact, how we do our jobs day to day, how companies are going to grow and how they're going to scale. So I want to talk a lot about that, but let's just start out with a little bit about how you're thinking about it leading HP Solutions business. How are you guys thinking about this vision for the future of work and how are you positioning yourselves to deal with this kind of parabolic change that we are all experiencing?

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Dave Shull: We think first of all, you got to start with a customer. And we've been surveying every year sort of the employees and how they're feeling about the future of work themselves. And what's remarkable is still only 28% of employees feel like they have a good relationship with their work, and that's up a grand total of 1% over last year. It's like that's really disturbing. So I think the first thing to acknowledge is, boy, we have a big, big problem and HP is saying, okay, we want to lean in hard and we want to make sure that whether it's a video camera or a PC that I have here or a printer that I have out there, we want to make sure that every aspect of what the employee needs to be productive is something that we address. And then making sure that we're solving the problems for their employers, for the CIOs so that employee base is as happy as engaged and as focused on growth as possible. And as you just said, hybrid and AI, boy, they really twist things up and they create all sorts of opportunities, but also a lot of challenges.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm listening to you say 28 or percent or 1% better as a founder, CEO, as a president of a business unit, of course your business is probably better, but it makes me think, gosh, how is the relationship? And just because chat GPT can do some of your work for you, and I say that somewhat facetiously doesn't necessarily mean people are happy or we as humans are conditioned. We get adapted to things, we get adjusted to things. We're constantly, most of us are constantly seeking more. We want to learn, we want to grow, we want to evolve. And that's, by the way, one of the things I'm really excited about this era is I do think it's going to uplevel us as humans and the things we're going to do. 

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The other side of it of course is some of this, well, what are we going to do when you don't have to write a press release anymore or you're not doing same exact kind of research that we do or the analysis can be done really quick. There's lots of questions here. So talk a little bit on your side though, because hp, whether it's the work being done on the workstations, whether it's things you're doing in AI studio and AI boost, you're building a lot of advanced compute solutions to sort of take some of the consumer things that of course people on your devices do every day, but you're also trying to make it enterprise centric, enterprise friendly to help people bring innovation to work and make your customers more productive. How are you sort of addressing that and putting that into place?

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Dave Shull: Yeah, so let's go hardcore into sort of AI modeling. As you kind indicated, you think about a 4G PU machine, our Z eight workstation, and it's like that's a powerful machine. But if you're coming in new into the world of AI or data modeling, how do we set up the libraries for you? How do we make sure that the outputs that come out of that are being checked as much as possible? And so AI studios a set of tools that says, let's bring the power of these GPUs to the masses and make sure that it's as scalable as possible. And then when you're on the road, of course, and you might be using a laptop, I have an amazing laptop right here that can actually run some massive, massive models, but I might also want to be able to reach out and grab some other GPUs where I want to scale.And so that's the power of boost which says, okay, let, let's make all that possible at the edge. So I don't necessarily have to hit the cost of a cloud or don't necessarily have to worry about the security of that data. And that's a pretty exciting place to be. So we're talking to a lot of manufacturers and engineering firms and product designers and forecasting agencies saying, Hey, we want to make sure that you have the best of these AI models actually practical and usable to you because that really is so core to people feeling productive and feeling engaged.

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Daniel Newman: You bring up a lot of great points and some of it's also the scale and the usability. So much of the focus these days, AI has been explosive, but we do tend to focus a lot about rack scale, the data center and so much of the use and the consumption is happening on our devices, very small GPUs or NPUs, some of them are even a little bit older and we're using 'em right on the application on our browser. We're using these things every day and you've been really focused on building these workstations that are kind of the intermediary. You don't have a 72 node rack with GPUs and a, but you can do some really advanced modeling for dataset on things like customer product design. So that can be done. And by the way, no latency and lower and more predictable costs. So those are all things that are kind of going on there. I alluded to David early in the conversation, I kind of alluded to that period of time where we were all home and all on video all the time, and we of course have seen this kind of ebb and flow. We've seen some companies have gone to hybrid work, some companies have told everybody to come back to work, other companies. And by the way, this is a debate. This has not been answered yet, whether

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Dave Shull: Constant debate, constant debate,

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Daniel Newman: And I think it's also cultural. I think some companies can really make it work. I think other companies struggle probably has a lot to do with leadership. It has a lot to do with the tools. But how is collaboration playing a role here? Because it's still every one of us. I dunno about you, but every day I do five of these. Even when I'm traveling and I'm go to events, I'm still peeling off to go into a cafe somewhere to get on a video in between my in-person meetings. I mean, it's pervasive now. So how is hp, it's made a lot of investments kind of building on this and continuing the momentum as we've sort of seen it somewhat normalized in terms of how much we talk about it every day.

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Dave Shull: It's interesting. We're asking our leaders to be back in the office a couple days a week, and we think that's important to model to all of our employees. I'm sitting here today in our headquarters and that's really important. But if you think about it, we have locations in dozens of countries. And so it doesn't matter if I'm back in the office, I'm still talking to people all around the world. And so this video networking, this video, collaboration's really not going anywhere. So therefore for you want to make sure that you show up the best, you want to make sure that when you first walk in the room, that first five minutes is productive. We're years into this journey now, and how many times do we still walk into a meeting and say, am I on? Can I share content? Am I connected seamlessly with my PC and the video devices? And so we're all about that layer of making sure that the devices work seamlessly. And then of course once you get into the meeting, you want to make sure that the video quality is as natural as possible. So if I had colleagues here, we're seamlessly pulling it together into a conversational mode. And so Poly  Poly’s been doing that for many, many years now with the audio technology and the video processing. But AI, boy, AI just supercharges that, right? And you want the information that's coming off of these video devices to be so much more translatable into real productive results as well.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, I love some of the features that we've seen evolve too, like real time translation. You talked about being all over the world as we've seen almost zero latency, the ability to have two people speaking a totally different language with no latency, no gap. I mean things like that are so powerful. And the other thing is talk about a productivity hack, but when we started being able to record meetings, summarize them, capture, I mean, gosh, I can't tell you how many times I come off a meeting and be like, that was a great meeting. I don't remember anything we talked about, but there's

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Dave Shull: What am I supposed to do? Can you please tell me what I'm supposed to do? What are my actions? That's what we all want. Coming out of these meetings is

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Daniel Newman: Perfectly, I mean, when you're having as many as we have, it's so easy to be like, that was just great. And then you get a day, you run straight to the next meeting, straight to the next meeting. It's like I had 13 meetings yesterday. I need a quick summary. So these tools have become really, really powerful. Another thing that you all have been very focused on is sort of driving that workforce experience using tools. And this is one of those things where it's kind like how technology can be used in a way that is involved in people's every day, but it's not overly intrusive. But at the same time, it helps monitor behaviors. It monitors things like when people need rest, when people are most productive, by the way, when they're safe. We know security is going to be an exponentially bigger problem in the era. And not just security, but also just how we use data. So there's a lot of reasons for companies to be sort of guiding employees along. And it isn't all for just watching Big Brother stuff, it's also to make sure employees are having a great experience. Talk a little bit about how you are thinking about workforce experience building this workforce experience platform to drive employees to better outcomes.

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Dave Shull: Well, I think the name itself is actually very important that workforce experience means we're really focused on the employees and what's their experience of the technology. That has to be the primary metric. But then if you flip it around and think about it from a CIO point of view, if you have a hundred thousand or 200,000 employees around the world, first of course you got to get the devices to the employees. But then when the devices get set up, you want to make sure it's set up properly, it's been secured properly, and is it actually being used if you ship conference room equipment around the world to a remote location? Is it being used effectively? Are they having network problems? Are they having camera quality problems? How do you address that real time? And so this workforce experience platform or W XP is our acronym, is really targeted to the CIO saying, you want your employees to be engaged, you want them to be focused on growth.

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How do you remove the digital friction? How do you remove these frustration points that we all run into, whether it's with a PC or a printer or a headset or a video camera. And so HP's committed to doing that on a multi-vendor basis. We don't care who makes the pc, we don't care who sort of outfitted the conference room. We want to make sure that we're providing insights. And then really what's fascinating with AI is not just running scripts to fix problems, but really using smart AI agents to mitigate problems before they show up and to make sure that the CIO has almost a real-time dashboard of this is working, this is not working. Here's where you need to put your attention. So it is powerful and I think it's going to goes back to that 28%. How do we remove the friction so that more people feel like the tools are enabling them to do their jobs? Great. Boy, that's transformative for us in a world of AI and hybrid.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, it's like when my watch tells me to stand up and sit down, I wanted to tell me, Dan, you've done a lot today. Take a nap. By the way, I don't think it'll ever do that, but it's a dream.

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Dave Shull: We should work on that app. I don't know. I mean, workforce experience is a whole holistic view. I mean, have a glass of plan afterwards, have a cup of coffee in the morning. It works.

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Daniel Newman: I know it sounds a little silly, but I mean, I don't know about you. I basically, I work two 12 hour shifts. I have twins. There's two of me, and I work in 12 hour shifts. But in all serious, sometimes I'll have a morning, I'll be up at five 6:00 AM 3:00 PM you start getting that fatigue, 10 minutes, you go sit down, you close your eyes, you open your eyes, you feel like a million bucks. You can get that next 12 hour shift started. Off you go. Let's wrap this up and talk a little bit about the big future of work. So we know the future of work is going to look different. We know the jobs of the future are going to change. We know that with every revolution has come more not less opportunity. So for everybody out there that has that kind of what's going to happen with AI, I think there will be some jobs that we know that probably will go away, but there will be new jobs created. And by the way, we're just starting to see how this is going to play out. But you have to stay nimble. I mean, you as a company have to continue to stay on the forefront. So how are you thinking about enabling the future of work to make sure that employees are ultimately powered by tech, fueled by passion and inspiration and that companies can continue to grow even in a very different era?

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Dave Shull: So it's interesting, I have a couple of teenage kids, and so I'm thinking about this of course from a business point of view, my job, but also from their generation point of view. And you see how natively comfortable they are with multiple technology, how natively comfortable they with all the different varieties of AI and the power of AI, as we all know, is not automated in a task. The power of AI is that it's bringing in all the world's knowledge into sort of this easy to navigate and interrogate and have a dialogue with intelligence. And that transforms it because it allows me to become an expert so much more quickly in a number of topics and then make decisions that are much more well-informed and much more oriented to the future. And so that's exciting. So I think first of all, we all need to make sure that we keep that perspective, which is the power of the world's information at your fingertips, and you can just talk to it. And that's a new world. Now from an HP point of view, how do we make sure that the devices that we put out there fully benefit from that? 

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So let's say that you and I are not in a Zoom meeting, whatever microphone or whatever camera's in the room. I want to be able to interrogate that device and make sure that it provides the power of the world's information back to me. And if I have two of them together, I want to make sure that it's doubly or triply good. And then as I walk from room to room and have a device with me, whether it's a headset or a computer or a video phone and knows who I am and is able to bring the context of my day with me and provide information that's based on my private information, my secure information that allows me to do my day better. And that to me is a really transformative vision for how we all will be working in the future. Then you apply that to industry verticals and frontline workers who may be in a retail environment or a healthcare environment. We're already processing visual information on more than a billion patient records a year, and you think about the power of that and how you use petabytes of data to kind of create a better diagnosis or a better outcome for the customer interaction or the patient interaction. That's really exciting to me going forward.

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Daniel Newman: Yeah, you made a great point. We didn't really even touch on it here, but so much of the opportunity sits in data that's barely touched AI yet, and that's been a big theme here of our Six Five summit. I'm sure it's going to be one that you're going to be thinking about a lot, unlocking all the power of all the tools, all the tech, all the data all the time. Dave Shulll, thank you so much for joining me here at the Six Five Summit. It was great seeing you. Let's do it again soon.

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Dave Shull: It was fun, Dan. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

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Daniel Newman: And thank you everybody for joining us for this modern work track opener at the Six Five Summit. Stay connected with us on social and explore more conversations at sixfivemedia.com/summit. We have your access to thought leadership shaping the industry with more coming up next.

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