Page 161 - Hard Goals

152 HARD Goals

a fortuitous happening as the magazine was all about artifi cial
intelligence (you know, computers developing consciousness and
talking to you, and so on). Kevin’s technical brain immediately
woke up, and he was riveted. By the time the plane landed he
was tweaked like a coffee addict and he knew exactly what he
was going to do: “The answer was so obvious,” Kevin said. “I
had stopped learning. We had gotten so successful that I just
wasn’t learning enough.” And so, fueled by the idea that using a
science that was truly on the cutting edge (artifi cial intelligence)
would suffi ciently activate his own brain, he set out to create the
smartest software the human resources world had ever seen.
There are self-service technologies that allow corporate
employees to manage their health benefi ts or whatever. But
there aren’t any besides SmartBen that have a digital person
appear on the screen and talk to you. “Ben AI,” as he’s known,
uses artifi cial intelligence programming to analyze all of an
employee’s benefi ts, retirement savings, salary history, and
more and makes smart recommendations. He literally looks
at you and tells you how you could more effectively save for
retirement and what it would do to your paycheck. And if
employees want to collaborate with him, they can use the
interface to model their own changes; for example, to pick
the right health plan for their family’s unique requirements.
The net effect is that the employees make much smarter deci-
sions, pick plans that are totally right for them—which makes
them much happier, and the company saves money with all the
effi ciency.
But all of this awe-inspiring technology belies how incred-
ibly diffi cult it really was to achieve. “We had to rethink every
aspect of how we design, develop, and code,” says Kevin. “We
had to move from traditional programming to real cutting-