Service Science and the Impending AI Revolution | Jim Spohrer

Picture two cafes that serve precisely the same coffee. The first cafe has friendly baristas, comfortable seating, free WIFI, and great music. In the second cafe, the employees are bored, the music is bad, and the WIFI is slow.

Most of us would choose the first one. This is because our experience of a product goes far beyond the product itself - it's closely linked to the services that deliver it and how companies and customers co-create the value of that service.

These are a few of the fundamental insights of service science, an approach to service innovation co-created by today’s guest – Jim Spohrer.

In this episode, Dart and Jim discuss how service science can help us deliver a better experience of work. They provide examples of how service science has changed the work landscape as we know it, how service science leads to innovation, how AI will influence our experience of work in the near future, and much more.

Topics Include:
- Understanding service science
- The future of employee/employer engagements in our changing economy
- International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP)
- The biggest service innovations in history
- Ethical concerns of artificial intelligence
- Digital twins, and how they’ll affect employees
- Servant leadership
- And other topics…

Jim Spohrer is the co-creator of service science and open-source, trusted AI. He is a retired IBM executive and 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 Partnership).

Resources Mentioned:
Succeeding through service innovation: A service perspective for education, research, business and government https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/uploads/Resources/080428cambridge_ssme_whitepaper.pdf

Books Mentioned:
-Service in the AI Era, by Jim Spohrer: https://www.amazon.com/Service-AI-Era-Architecture-Perspectives-ebook/dp/B0B2H87LFS
-Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright: https://www.amazon.com/Nonzero-Logic-Destiny-Robert-Wright/dp/0679758941
-If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes, by Nick Donofrio: https://www.amazon.com/If-Nothing-Changes-Donofrio-Story-ebook/dp/B0B178D91G
-The One Minute Manager by, Kenneth Blanchard: https://www.amazon.com/Minu

Work with Dart:
Dart is the CEO and co-founder of the work design firm 11fold. Build work that makes employees feel alive, connected to their work, and focused on what’s most important to the business. Book a call at 11fold.com.