What if you had a hundred workers ready to assist you with your startup, both launch and ongoing pivots?  To help you answer this question, this talk shares a roadmap for the future of AI and service science. Over the next forty years, AI systems will become more capable and less expensive, progressing through stages: tool, assistant, collaborator, coach, mediator, for the roughly two thousands types of occupation that drive the US economy (O*NET). Service innovation is about increasing the quantity and quality of mutually beneficial interactions as people, businesses, and nations adapt to accelerating change. In the end, learning to invest time, effort, and other resources is fundamentally important. The life of an entrepreneur is about learning to invest in getting better at competing for collaborators – customers, partners, investors.  Not surprisingly, this is exactly what is expected of innovators and leaders in large corporations as well. 

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 Program).

Professors David B. Janes (janes@purdue.edu) and Tillmann Kubis (tkubis@purdue.edu)