Scott Amyx

 About

  • Experiential, Interactive & Engaging Innovation Keynote Speaker
  • Talks about exponential technologies, Fourth Industrial Revolution & success in a rapidly changing, digital world
  • Tribeca Disruptor Foundation Fellow, a disruptive innovation awards program of Tribeca Film Festival, Singularity University/ Smart City Accelerator Mentor and Startup Board Member, Winner of the Cloud & DevOps World Award for Most Innovative Vendor
  •  Past clients include: Amazon, American Express, Coca-Cola, Deloitte, Fiserv, IBM, the United Nations

About Scott Amyx - Managing Partner at Astor Perkins:

Scott Amyx is the Chair & Managing Partner at Astor Perkins. Astor Perkins is a deep tech and sustainability VC that backs mavericks solving some of the hardest problems facing humanity on Earth and in space.

From climate change mitigation and adaptation, longevity, and human survival on Earth and in deep space, to the space economy itself, Astor Perkins is tackling some of the most difficult scientific, engineering, and technical problems that have global market potential.

Scott is also a Forbes New York Business Council Member, Singularity University/ Smart City Accelerator mentor and startup board member and SXSW Pitch (formerly SXSW Accelerator) judge. Scott is a Tribeca Disruptor Foundation Fellow, a disruptive innovation awards program of Tribeca Film Festival. Scott is a national Sloan Fellow/ Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He has spoken at TEDx on exponential technologies, Fourth Industrial Revolution & success. Scott is a global thought leader on breakthrough innovation, voted top global innovation keynote speaker, and author on smart cities, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and winner of the Cloud & DevOps World Award for Most Innovative and was voted Top Global Exponential Technologies Expert by Inc. Magazine, HP Enterprise, and Postscapes & Top 10 Global Innovation Keynote Speaker by Speaking.com. Scott has been nominated to the World Economic Forum as a committee member for the Future of the Internet. The Republic of Korea nominated Scott to present at the ITU Telecom World, United Nations. Sovereignties, governments, multinationals, and international consulting & research firms look to Scott for unrivaled insights and pulse on the changing landscape.

Scott was voted the Most Influential Leader in Smart Cities and awarded the 50 Most Impactful Smart Cities Leaders by Inc. Magazine, Internet of Things Institute, HP Enterprise, World CSR Congress, and numerous institutions. Scott is enabling the realization of a global network of smart, sustainable cities through his partnerships with the United Nations, United Smart Cities, United for Smart Sustainable Cities, Smart Cities Council, and ASEAN Smart Cities Network, family offices, and institutional investors.

Scott has been featured on New York Times, TIME, Forbes, The Washington Post, WIRED, TechCrunch, Inc., Pew Research, Chicago Tribune, InformationWeek, Forrester, Gigaom, ReadWrite, Shots Magazine, Business News Daily, IBM Big Data & Analytics, Intel, Geektime, Examiner, TechBeacon, EE Times, IEEE, El País, Costco Magazine, and television and radio programs. He has spoken at TEDx, European Commission, World Economic Forum, ITU Telecom World (United Nations), International CES, SXSW, IBM Insight, IBM Amplify, IBM Watson IoT, IBM InterConnect, PTC LiveWorx, AMEX, SAP, CRM Evolution, THINK!, NED, Cloud Expo Europe, Cloud & DevOps World, KAIST, Samsung SDS, ArabNet Dubai & Riyadh, Internet Summit, JCK Las Vegas, Customer Service Experience, Razorfish Tech Summit, Location & Context World, Internet of Things World, K-Global Startup, and more. Scott is the co-author of Internet of Things and Data Analytics Handbook, an academic publication by John Wiley and Sons and The Advances in Information Security, Privacy, & Ethics (AISPE) Book Series: Managing Security Issues and the Hidden Dangers of Wearable Technologies, an academic publication by IGI Global.

Scott is the author of Strive: How Doing the Things Most Uncomfortable Leads to Success, about unlikely individuals who persevered through change to become outrageously successful. His second book, The Human Race: How Humans Can Survive in the Robotic Age, is scheduled for release next year and will cover how artificial intelligence, robotics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to a net job loss that will increase income inequality and stoke further populism and nationalism that are already sweeping across the globe.

Scott has a master’s degree in applied microeconomics and public policy from the University of Chicago. Scott was a national Sloan Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.

Read more

 Topics

What Scott Amyx Talks About:

Strive: How Doing the Things Most Uncomfortable Leads to Success

Find out how doing the things most uncomfortable leads to success. Pioneering thought leader Scott Amyx shows anyone striving to succeed, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are, that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but doing the things uncomfortable he calls “strive”.

Drawing on his own powerful story of an impoverished immigrant frequently told that he would mount to nothing, Amyx, now a celebrated venture capitalist and futurist, describes his meteoric rise from obscurity to prominence, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not intellect, opportunities or even network but pursuing personal change that’s uncomfortable. In this book, Scott takes readers into his defining life moments and stories from some of the most unlikely individuals who persevered through change to become outrageously successful. He also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in high performance.

Finally, he shares what he’s learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers—from corporate CEOs, unicorn startup entrepreneurs to global policy leaders. Strive shows how you can shape your life and your career, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of delightful surprise.

The Human Race: How Humans Can Survive in the Robotic Age

Scott’s second feature book The Human Race: How Humans Can Survive in the Robotic Age is scheduled to come out next year. Scott explores the imminent net job loss from artificial intelligence, robotics and the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its impact on income inequality and rise in populism and nationalism that are sweeping across the globe.

AI-driven cyber-physical automation is expected to displace 50% to 80% of the human workforce by 2030. As the pace of convergence of exponential technologies reach near vertical slope, the trend of human displacement is unstoppable. What will be the role of humans?

For the structurally unemployed and underemployed, it will be bleak future with limited options. Only those with highly specialized PhDs in fields that create, train and maintain AI, robotic and advanced scientific and technical systems may have a place in the world of hyper-automation. Contrary to popular belief that only predictable physical work is automatable, as narrow AI continues to master new niches, it will amass a superset of capabilities that will not only replace tasks but holistic job functions. There is no senior executive, policymaker or subject matter expert that will be safe.

Scott explores the limitations of universal basic income and taxing robots. Instead, he proposes a vastly different, out-of-the-box solution called the Human Currency. It’s a global economy and a cryptocurrency based on human-to-human empathy services. Moreover, it has the resiliency and sustainability built into the system to ensure the viability of the human race for centuries to come.

Scott emphasizes the need to pursue job training and labor force development in human-to-human services that leverage our ability to empathize with the human condition. The empathy business models and services will become the bedrock of post Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Are You Ready for Disruption?

How do you turn disruption Into innovation? In PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey, 62% expressed concern about the impact of disruption in their industry. Disruption is coming from all direction — from the Internet of Things, blockchain cryptography, AI/ machine learning, data analytics, decentralized computing to changes in consumer behavior.

According to an Accenture study of 1,000 large enterprises, big companies struggle with innovation. The biggest barrier is not a lack of vision but because, by definition, big companies are mature. Organizational structures and processes are in place to guide the company towards efficiency. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets, and listen to their best customers. Such practices and policies ensure that executives can consistently deliver positive earnings to Wall Street, but they also minimize the types and scale of innovation that can be pursued successfully within an organization. No company ever created transformational growth by doing what they do a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper.

The biggest barrier is not a lack of vision but because, by definition, big companies are mature. Organizational structures and processes are in place to guide the company towards efficiency. Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery. Employees are taught to seek efficiencies, leverage existing assets, and listen to their best customers. Such practices and policies ensure that executives can consistently deliver positive earnings to Wall Street, but they also minimize the types and scale of innovation that can be pursued successfully within an organization. No company ever created transformational growth by doing what they do a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper.

Exponential Disruption: Is Your Organization Ready for the Era of Human-Machine Innovation?

Disruption is a great term, as long as it’s being applied to your competitors and not your firm. Exponential technologies are creating disruption. The convergence of exponential technologies is expected to disrupt almost every sector and business. Changing trends are forcing leaders to take a hard look at their business models and core competencies. New entrants are threatening to displace “cash cows” and prominent brands. How is your company positioned to take advantage of the multi-billion dollar opportunity that beckons? Or is your business at risk from the advances in technology? If your company is not embracing technological and business model changes, it may be in danger of becoming obsolete.

The Future of Innovation & Jobs

The new marketplace for industries like manufacturing, energy, gas and oil, and construction is a far cry from that in decades past. The perfect storm of problems has been brewing, as novel challenges cut into revenue and force corporations to scramble to find fresh opportunities. Obstacles to growth come in many forms. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that there has been a gradual slide in worker productivity, not over just the last few quarters, but over the last decade. However, just as some industries are struggling, there is little doubt that the tech sector is going strong—and that it is shaking up other verticals to create value and opportunities for expansion and growth. While it is not likely that a single solution can bring about significant change in the industrial sector, the appropriate application of advanced technologies, data analytics, machine learning and robotics can result in a greater optimization of business workflows and processes, enhanced safety, improved research and development, and the creation of new revenue streams. The silver lining is that innovation also ushers in new types of jobs that didn’t exist before. Innovation coupled with continuous lifetime learning and retraining creates a flexible and adaptable labor force.

How to Consistently Think Outside-of-the-Box for 10x Growth

Your boss tells you to create the next multi-million dollar blockbuster product. After all, you are the expert. Yet, no matter how much your team tries to think outside-of-the-box, your innovation iterations can’t seem to break through the legacy product. Sure it has better bells and whistles but at the end of the day, it’s still the same widget with a new name.

Scott shares that companies can systematically achieve better innovation outcomes by utilizing a combination of crowdsourcing and AI computation to create serendipity. Great ideas don’t have to occur once in a blue moon; it can happen consistently. Scott asserts that great ideas are inspired from other domains. Using a proven research-based methodology, Scott helps your organization to solve highly complex product development and innovation projects by utilizing the symbiosis of human-machine innovation.

Why Innovation Benefits from Dissent

How are decisions made in your organization? We like to believe that we make optimal decisions based on group consensus. According to research, even the best orchestrated consensus thinking is less creativity than the sum of their members. By definition, consensus is a general agreement among members of a group. In order to reach consensus, there are trade-offs. We start out with a complex problem with many dimensions, much like a heptagon with 100 sides. As concessions are made, the once jagged polygon smooths out to a simple rounded polygon with less sides. What we get is something not dissimilar from what others have already come up with, including our competitors. We fail to achieve a breakthrough.

Scott shares that in order to produce superior decision-making, organizations must embrace authentic dissenting viewpoints. Based on research, Scott indicates that when a team member shares a dissenting viewpoint, the creativity of the group increases. Dissent stimulates thought that is divergent and leads to greater innovation and creativity. It improves the quality of decision-making. We become more independent thinkers and, more importantly, we think divergently.

Why Innovation Shouldn’t Start with Business Requirements

There is an exciting new project kicking off at your work. So naturally, you start with requirements gathering. You hold a series of requirements gathering working sessions with stakeholders and users. The questions are generally oriented towards “what do you want?” However, this is highly problematic, especially if this is a new product or service. Matter of fact, asking your target customers what they want might even lead to disastrous results.

Scott presents the concepts of benefit-oriented and emotion-oriented requirements methodologies that will not only sharpen your requirements process but produce a profoundly innovative solution that will be lauded and loved by your customers. A benefits-oriented approach summarizes the greatest user needs to the highest abstraction level. It forces us to lift our eyes up from granularity of feature set to see the big picture. An emotion-oriented requirements approach increases user adoption, engagement and ultimate success of a new product or service by focusing on the underlying human emotional goals.

How AI is Transforming Retail & Financial Services

Scott Amyx walks the audience through the lens of a customer journey as s/he interacts with retail and financial services powered by AI. From chatbots to human like digital assistants (AVA), Outernets’ computer vision technology that turns any windows and surfaces into interactive experiences, Endor’s social physics platform that applies AI predictive data analytics to human behavior, fraud prevention powered by AI to Digits that converts credit cards and debit cards into cryptocurrency cards for purchases, the AI evolution is just beginning.

How to Transform a Nation

How to build a Fourth Industrial Revolution-driven nation to spur sustainable economic growth, to build new industries, to create jobs, and to raise the human capital of local citizens.

The World Economic Forum’s survey gives us hints on when the future will have arrived. When we have robotic pharmacists, when our clothes are Internet connected to when AI is seating on the Board of Directors. These disruptions cannot be stopped. It represents rapid and unstoppable evolution in the human innovation curve. With this massive automation and intelligence, many will lose their jobs — a net 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025.

So how can a nation instead of being disrupted become the disruptor?

Scott Amyx shares a framework for transforming a nation. In his presentation, Scott shares the role of futurism, R&D, experimentation, investment, implementation, and knowledge transfer in the transformation of a nation.

 

Read more

 Recent Publications

Scott has his finger on the pulse!

Amazon

 View Similar Speakers

For more information about this speaker:

Call toll-free on 1-866-727-7555
Or, email your request.

Book Now