The Future of Creating Value with AI

Jim Spohrer is a student of service science and open-source, trusted AI. He is a retired IBM executive, who is a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP). At IBM, he served as Director for Open Source AI/Data, Global University Programs, IBM Almaden Service Research, and CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group. At Apple, he achieved Distinguished Engineer Scientist Technologist (DEST) for authoring and learning platforms. After MIT (BS/Physics), he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon), then Yale (PhD/Computer Science AI). With over ninety publications and nine patents, awards include AMA ServSIG Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Service Discipline, Evert Gummesson Service Research, Vargo-Lusch Service-Dominant Logic, Daniel Berg Service Systems, and PICMET Fellow for advancing service science. In 2021, Jim was appointed a UIDP Senior Fellow (University-Industry Demonstration Partnership). Through the years and currently, Jim serves on numerous advisory boards for industry, academia, government, including startups, conferences, research non-profits, and journals, such as the Journal of Creating Value, since 2015.

This talk explores the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for creating value. AI, both service robot automation and service augmentation platforms, are poised to improve service productivity, quality, compliance, sustainable innovation, resilience, equity, and inclusion for under-served populations. Service is defined as the application of knowledge for the benefit of another. Service innovations improve interaction and change processes in business and society. However, to achieve these outcomes and create value with AI, responsible actors (people, businesses, governments, universities) must learn to invest wisely in becoming better future versions of themselves augmented by their AI digital twin. Learning to invest systematically can accelerate both value cocreation and capability coelevation in a virtual cycle of responsible actor interaction and change processes. However, great risks must also be avoided.