You ask what gives us credibility and how we do that? Well, we already have the relationships in things like managed print services. We already have a technician and a sales team. I am inside of a university, a hospital, a church, or a law office. Now we’re bringing incremental services around IT services for things like payables and HR solutions, where you can bring in a resume and we can run it against your open jobs.
The last piece is one we started more out of necessity, and it was a critical thing that we had to do. When COVID-19 hit, my technicians couldn’t go onto customer sites, so we started a product called CareAR, which uses augmented virtual reality, video instructions, and AI to do things like remote solve. Those are examples of things that we’re doing to try to grow in our non-core business.
Think about invoices or supply chain updates. Yes, it’s robotics as a service, and using UiPath to ingest documents into multiple systems. I can do the traditional swivel chair and enter data from one system to another. But as I’m doing that, I’m now adding AI and intelligence on top of that. With static data today, I can move information from one system to another. But think about data in motion, sensor data, supply chain data, and GPS data.
Let’s break it down a little bit. When I go to a university or a hospital, how can I start doing the administrative tasks through technology? That is, bringing in patients, discharging patients, and thinking about pharmaceuticals and how we administer drugs. I can do all that with technology, and I can reduce the amount of labor that needs to go on those things.
I have a sense of where Xerox is now. I eventually want to talk about where you’re going to take it, but let’s talk about how we arrived at this place first, specifically with you being the CEO of a 100-year-old company. It doesn’t matter what company it is, there’s always going to be a lot of drama on the inside when it’s a 100-year-old organization. There are lots of peaks and valleys.
The first thing was to get the entire environment and the employee base educated on what we have and where we’re going. It’s the same thing with our customers, by the way. When I talk to large telco customers about what we’re doing in the service industry, guess what? They have the same challenges. Fifty percent of my workforce is going to retire over the next three to five years.
By the way, inside my call center, I use artificial intelligence against my millions and millions of transactions in service. Now that I’ve solved the problem, I can bring the remote technician all my engineering notes with the top three ways to solve that problem. I’m using artificial intelligence to bring the best solution, and I’m using my customer in the field to start that whole process in terms of solving the problem.
Let me ask you a question. Do you want me to send a technician in two to three days between 8AM and 12PM, or do you want to start right now? It’s that self-solve, self-serve world that we’re in. Look, if you go to New York, you can watch taxis go by you 100 times, but you’ll think you had a great experience because you just waited for an Uber that’s 15 minutes away. You’re in control, right?
When I got to the company, one of the things that I said was we had to simplify everything we did end to end, and drive a faster velocity. We used Project Own It to do that. We have taken over $2 billion of costs out, but that wasn’t the end goal. Project Own It was about how we get more velocity in everything we do. How do we get simpler and easier to do business with? How do we get simpler internally? We had 2,000-plus IT applications running the business.
No, it was to get it smaller so we could create the balance sheet that would allow us to consolidate the industry. We were very public with the number with HP. We thought there would be $2 billion of synergies, so we got a loan for $24 billion. We couldn’t get there until we got our own balance sheet right. We put over $2 billion on the balance sheet and got into the position where we could consolidate the industry. We wanted to be the consolidator, not the consolidated.
On the Fuji deal, the reality was that the shareholders, specifically our largest shareholder, did not see the value for the current Xerox shareholders to put the two companies together. It was the economics of the deal. I can’t speak for our largest shareholder, but obviously the economics of the deal didn’t make sense. They voted it down and wanted to bring in a new team to go in a different direction.
Xerox has been doing some cool stuff in 3D printing. The really interesting stuff in the next 30 years will be printing for manufacturing purposes. They already do similar for print and build homes. That's where Xerox should be. A printing manufacturing company.
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Simply... They won't
They just need to copy what they've done before.