ABSTRACT:  Despite advances in computer science, your typical large-scale enterprise company still runs primarily on "carbon" -- large numbers of human workers running the core business functions. This carbon workforce consists of millions of people worldwide performing manual, repetitive, and deterministic tasks on a daily basis that in many cases a computer is much better equipped to perform.

In this talk, we will first discuss why enterprise companies (even "tech giants" in the Fortune 50) are still so much behind the technology curve. And with this understanding, how advances in distributed systems and machine learning can help companies catch up by first identifying automatable work internally and shifting the effort to "silicon."  Then, we will describe a technical and systems approach to solving problems in automation across the industry with sublinear effort through an automation platform with mindfulness around what is needed to build automation, independent of the process.  This platform has been used to deliver automation services to Fortune 50+ companies world wide over the past 3 years.  With this, closing remarks on why even today's technology cannot completely replace this particular carbon workforce.

BIO: George Nychis is a co-founder of Soroco, a fully-funded startup that is trying to disrupt how work is done in the enterprise. Soroco leverages cutting-edge technologies from computer science to drastically reduce the amount of manual and repetitive work that's being performed by office workers every day. Previously, George received a PhD from CMU in 2013 in the field of computer networks, where he built and designed systems and protocols for robust wireless communication