Interview with Matt Sakaguchi, Manager, Google LLC - Speaker at Global AI Conf - SCA - Jan 2019 Posted on : Dec 10 - 2018

We feature speakers at 3rd Annual Global Artificial Intelligence Conference - 2019 Jan 23 - 25 – Santa Clara to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Interview with Matt Sakaguchi, Manager, Google LLC Topic - How AI Improves Human Conversations In Messaging.

Interview with Matt Sakaguchi

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.

I have had an usual path to the technology field. My first full time job after college was as a police officer, which I did for 8 years. An injury forced me to change careers, and after a very long, 6-year journey of odd jobs and, frankly, mishaps, I got a job in Technology in 2001, where I've worked ever since.
Currently, I run two Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams for Android and the Google Play store.

2. What have you been working on recently?

My teams have been making progress in obtaining client (phone) metrics and creating monitoring solutions that encompass the UX from a individual user perspective. This has traditionally been a blind spot for building and serving mobile applications -- namely, what is happening on the phones in the wild?

3. Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?

We built and deployed a memcache component into the location services stack which saved the developers time, machine resources, and staffing.

4. Will progress in AI and robotics take away the majority of jobs currently done by humans? Which jobs are most at risk?

AI will definitely reduce human involvement in a certain class of jobs, such as end-user support. Now that we have AIs that can hold conversations, these roles will soon be replaced by AI.

5. You’ve already hired Y number of people approximately. What would be your pitch to folks out there to join your Organization? Why does your organization matter in the world?

Google matters because our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We have powerful technologies that have truly changed the world, from search, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence that can make phone calls for you and control your house, accurate maps, transit directions, indoor maps, real-time language translation, to name a few.

6. What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your talk?

By the end of my talk, the audience will know what Google discovered during its quest to find the most effective teams. The audience will know what these attributes are and ways to create them for their teams.

7. Any closing remarks

Talk summary:
Matt Sakaguchi talks about some of the practical research Google has done around building effective teams. He addresses not only the research, but the insights of a manager who worked with his own team and others, to instill the findings and principles in the real world, along with key insights from the Pilot program at Google.