Wednesday, December 30, 2020

How can Artificial Intelligence (AI) help business ?

Having read lots about the benefits of AI and how AI would transform humanity, I was very inquisitive to know in spite of all the hype around AI, have we started using AI in a big way. 

In Dec 2018, I was attending a one day program on AI at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore which had an afternoon session with IBM engineers. Towards the end of their demo, I asked the engineers what were the actual applications of AI by IBM in the present day world, at least in India. The engineer was frank enough and admitted that it was just chatbot applications. 

AI had not matured beyond that at least for the industry. Even after two years, I find other than Google in their Maps, Gmail, search apps, not much AI is available in public domain for people to start using and experience the benefits.

While going through the article AI for the real world by Prof. Davenport and Ronanki in Feb '18, HBR (click here), I was able to understand what were the business benefits of AI and in general what were the AI challenges that global organisations face. 

Why are organistions skeptical of implementing AI when there is so much hype around it, is a question that would naturally come to any manager or engineer working in the industry. 

An anagram IEPPIO is apt for this occasion as per primary research conducted by the HBR paper authors on 250 executives in 152 AI projects, gave the real challenge faced by AI in the real world. 

I - ntegration

E - xpensive

P - oor understanding

P - eople

I - nnovative technology and 

O - verhyped technologies

The world is yet to fully understand the cognitive ability of humans, how humans distinguish one decision from another and in spite of the best intentions, fails completely in this area.

Of course, the technologies are too expensive, which takes it out of the realm of ordinary startups and medium sized organisations. 

We are yet to fully understand the nuances of AI and its applications

We do not yet have the real human resources to support full deployment of AI across organisations

Even though we extrapolate saying what all the technologies can do, we have immaturely developed technologies, ie. over hyping it.

The over hype or over selling of the technology has created a sort of glass palaces in the minds of the public and they expect AI to change the world radically overnight, which is not possible.

Once we know the challenges faced by AI, it makes sense to understand how we can overcome it. 

Understanding the Business benefits of AI

  • I mprove
  • O ptimise internal systems
  • F ree workers from monotoinous tasks to do creative work
  • B etter understandiong of p[roducts and processes
  • C reate new products
  • O ptimise external processes like Marketing etc
  • P ursue new markets
  • C apture new knowledge to venture into new products and processes
  • R educe headcount at organisations

The potential business benefits of AI is great as how we understand it, the benefits may again increase over time as we progressively understand more features of the AI system. 

All these benefits if exploited well can result in great commercial benefits, besides reducing the boredom and monotony experienced by employees at their workplace.

George..

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Role play on Artificial Intelligence in the class

We all know of the very many ways in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a very important role in our daily lives.  From the very simple search on Google, to replying to our emails on Gmail, to translating docs from one of the popular languages on Google Translate to another language, to the use of Personal Assistants from Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple, the uses of AI are varied and colourful. 

One of the biggest challenges for an AI system is to collect enough training data to prepare the AI system to learn and help make correct future decisions. If we start on poor quality training data and low volumes of training data, the output also would be equally poor, incorrect and incompetent.

The availability of large volumes of high quality training data is gives organisation the early mover advantage. 

The entry of Google in the search domain decades back gives it so much of training data and strong algorithms that can help it get the right search output for your search inputs. It will be very difficult for a new search engine incumbent to beat Google in search at least for the next fifty years. 

Maybe a new SEARCH ENGINE player with a 

  • radically different approach to AI effectiveness or 
  • strong faster processors working on quantum computing or
  • ultra fast communication protocol for the results from servers to customer desktops or
  • an efficient, innovative and quick algorithm may be able to thwart Google.

The role play being designed in the class for students is to help them understand the importance of high quality training data for a high quality AI output. 

What are the different ways in which an organisation can try to collect large volumes of high quality training data in a short time ? (click here for interesting AI based case studies)

Can it collect this training data from 

  • different functionally related areas, 
  • geographically different areas 
  • different set of customers
  • equivalent product markets ??

Let us leave it to the ingenuity of the students to tell us from where to collect the training data to help the AI systems take the right decisions .. 

Ref : 1. Ajay Agrawal,Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, How to win with Machine Learning, HBR, Oct '20.

George..


Types of AI

Artificial Intelligence is growing these days and is attractinmg attention of scientists and managers from across the globe.

Referring to the article 7 types of Artificial Intelligence, in Forbes of June 2019 where the seven different types of AI classifications are briefly mentioned.

The basic classification of Artificial Intelligence is of two types based on the likeness to the human mind and the ability to analyse.

According to the classification of AI based on it's likeliness to the human mind, Reactive, Limited Memory, Theory of Mind and Self Aware AI are the different classifications.

1. Reactive AI machines are 

  • limited in their applications.
  • do not have memory based functionality
  • no ability to learn from previously gained experiences
  • can only respond to a limited set or combination of inputs
  • cannot improve their operations

An example is IBM's famous chess playing Super Computer Deep Blue. 

2. Limited Memory AI is what we observe in chatbots, Personal Assistants like Amazon echo, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana and Apple Siri, all self-driving vehicles.

In addition to the capabilities of Reactive Machines, these AI machines can learn from historical data to make use in decision making. Image recognition that makes use of Machine Learning and Deep Learning is an example of this. 

Image Courtesy, Forbes.
3. Theory of Mind AI is futuristic and exist only as a concept or work-in-progress

A Theory of mind AI will be able to better understand the entities by being able to discern the needs, emotions, beliefs and thought processes of the entities it is interacting with.  Theory of Mind AI tries to understand humans better.

4. Self Aware AI is akin to the human brain with all it's rationalising and emotional capabilities.

Though it may takes decades or centuries to fully realise and understand this type of AI, it can change humanity for the better or consign it for doom or disaster. The potential for self-preservation of these AI machines, can take over or spell the end of humanity, which can be a great threat to the world.

The other three types of AI are 

  • Artificial Narrow Intelligence which we see in all our current applications with learning capabilities and ability to perform repetitive tasks autonomously using human like capabilities. 
  • Artificial General Intelligence is futuristic and is the ability of machines to learn, perceive, understand and function like human beings. They develop competencies across multiple capabilities and domains with reduced learning time to carry out tasks efficiently and accurately.
  • Artificial Super Intelligence is the ultimate in AI development. Because of their multi faceted intelligence these machines will be better capable at doing all things better than humans because of their faster memory, data processing, analysis and decision making capabilities. These machines can also spell the doom of humanity, thus being a great risk. 

How can humanity make effective use of these different types of AI to help in growth of humanity and not its doom is a serious question facing human civilization now. Can we, if not control, at least co-exist with AGI or ASi to help humanity for the next millennia ?

George.

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Will AI enable a big revolution in the education scenario ?

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits. Educational methods include teaching, training, storytelling, discussion and directed research. Wikipedia

The above definition of Education is very vast, sweeping and cuts across the breadth and width of human civilization.  So far we were depending on the human route to enable transfer of skills and knowledge from one generation to the next. With increase in population and the vastness of knowledge that needs to be transferred along with the multiple branches of knowledge that exists today, the correct streamlining of this knowledge, information and skills to the multude of people across the different continents of the world is very daunting. Can AI help to solve this crisis and how ?

I happened to go through couple of international publications in this regard. Ron Schmelzer in July '19, Forbes (click here) shares some ideas of applications of AI in education.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help education in many striking ways. It can be used in the following ways.

1. Personalised learning - Instead of providing a single syllabus for all the students, learning will be personalised. What to learn personally, divide learning into small convenient modules for asynchronous learning and asynchronous testing, preparation of custom learning modules and learning material for students. This will also include online interface and feedback from teachers and Professors

2. making use of AI Personal Assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri to provide conversation interaction to students that assists in collecting teaching material, educational assistance, setting reminders, alarms, to help answer small queues of students and to help in adaptive learning.

Adaptive learning, also known as adaptive teaching, is an educational method which uses computer algorithms to orchestrate the interaction with the learner and deliver customized resources and learning activities to address the unique needs of each learner. Wikipedia

3. aiding in administrative tasks like admission, examinations etc. that take faculty time away from students. This time can be reallocated to students increasing the faculty student interaction time. With AI Personal assistants taking the rote tasks of admission, institutional information seeking, arranging for field visits , placement activities etc more time is available for faculty to interact with students.

4. breaking barriers, cutting across the quality of the institution, teachers etc., AI systems can help ensure impartial decision making based on academic merit, improving the fairness and quality of the admission process.

An HBR article in Oct '19 by Lasse Rohinianen titled How AI and data would personalise higher education, (click here) talks of personalised learning that can be administered by AI to each student  for unique experiences helping Professors be more effective in teaching. This helps identify early student problems, avoiding students quitting and enabling successful completion. 

Chat bots that interacted with students in the University of Mursia in Spain helped improve the motivation levels of students by 91%. Understanding student interest and preferences, new courses and experiences were introduced to improve student learning, educational experiences, delivering the right knowledge and skills to improve later adult life professional accomplishments.

Chat bots can also help give mental health counseling to students. 

The challenges that were observed were

1. preparing students for tech based world

2. preparing students for digital transformation

3. AI cannot help in imparting creative, cognitive and emotional intelligence skills. This requires human intervention. 

Only Professors can help students by providing guidance, support, mentoring, understand the importance of what is being learnt and its practical applications. AI cannot help in this area.

With the invasion of AI in education, students need to understand how 

1. Algorithms use data to make decisions, 

2. how the data should remain private, 

3. how the data is being used and 

4. the design and development of AI systems.

A human-AI hybrid machine only can finally benefit humanity as a whole ..

George..



Monday, December 14, 2020

What is being customer centered like ?

Customer-centric (also known as client-centric) is a business strategy that's based on putting your customer first and at the core of your business in order to provide a positive experience and build long-term relationships. - superoffice.com 

Happened to read the article in HBR of Oct '18 on 6 ways to build a customer centric culture by Denis Lee Yvon. (click here

A company which gives the best product and service to customer will never ever fall short of customers as existing satisfied customers will help new customers to try the product. 

Customer centredness in other words means creating a positive experience for the customers. Getting the operations personnel in the organisation to understand the customer concerns and his/her pain points will help the organisation to understand the organisation better. 

This includes the following points 

1. maximise service / product offerings 

2. build relationships 

3. respect customer preferences 

4. keep cusomer satisfaction at the forefront of business growth 

5. engage with customers in innovative ways to understand customer preferences'

6. include customers in corporate decision making 

7. include customer in futire product/ service planning of the company 

8. involve customer to know his/her pain points in the interaction and try to solve them 

9. give more than what the customer wants or asks for 

10. given quality items and service offerings to customers to ensure repeat purchases 

11. meeting customers in person in fixed time intervals 

As per the above author, the organisation can build a customer centric culture as given below 

1. operationalise customer empathy 

2. hire for customer orientation 

3. decentralise customer insights 

4. facilitate interactions of employees with customers 

5. link employee culture to customer outcomes 

6. tieng employee compensation with customer service, giving employees skin in the game

7. adding strong reverse logistics network to handle customer returns unsatisfied products

 Amazon is said to be one of the best customer centred organisations in the world be it in the case of forward logistics or reverse logistics (returning unliked or poor quality items) without asking a single qiestion. The author heas been a beneficiary of this ASmazon India customer centred approach many a time and is highly appreciative of it.

The amazing growth of Amazon globally is indicative of the extreme customer centred approach it nourishes as part of the company culture.  

A University or a Learning Experience Center ?

When I was reading that Amazon is the most customer centered company in the world, I never expected it to be really obsessed with the customer.  Reading about Amazon and how in 1994, when I was teaching at the Goa govt. Engineering College, after PG in Industrial Engineering  and teaching Information systems to PG students, Bezos had already setup Amazon, after completing BSE from Princeton in 1986. I too completed my BTech in '86 from Govt. Engg college, Trivandrum CET, in India. The similarity is very striking. Bezos went ahead with an entrepreneurial zeal.

Taking a cue from Bezos, I was thinking loud, should we rename Universities as Customer Learning Experience Center. (CLEC) ..

Watch the video at 2012 re:invent meeting interaction .. (click here)

In the above video, Bezos explains the growth of Amazon Web Services, his personal experience with Lean systems, waste removal etc..

Passion and customer centricity are the two great qualities any entrepreneur should have ..

Between customers and competitors,  an entrepreneur should focus on customers..
 
George..

Wednesday, December 09, 2020

Is Uber a Disruptive or Strategic Innovation ?

The other day I was listening to an HBR podcast by Alexander MacKay, faculty member from Harvard Business School describing Uber's global strategy (click here). 

Uber the ride sharing app introduced by Travis Kalanick in 2009, has now changed to become the world's largest ridesharing app with 2020 revenues of $10 billion and offering 6.2 billion rides annually, ie. 17 million rides daily. It has a market cap of $60 billion presently.

Prof. Clayton Christensen, from Harvard Business School coined the term Disruptive Innovation around 1995 through his book The Innovator's Dilemma.

To qualify as a Disruptive Innovation,  an innovation should 

  • start as a low quality product or service at the low end of the market and move slowly over time, disrupting established players at different levels by offering progressively higher quality and satisfaction to the customers
  • be offered initially as a cheaper alternative to the existing products or service at the lower end of the market, gradually improving over time in quality and performance dislodging established players.
Uber is not a low quality product and it is not an initial cheaper alternative. Both these reasons disqualify the Uber phenomenon being classified as a disruptive innovation. (click here).

My earlier writing in this area has made the situation very clear. (click here) Taking the case of the Indian Space research programme. Starting in 1961, it started growing, slowly disrupting the launch of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite launch market dominated by ESA etc and then in 2007, through Chandrayaan 1 to the moon disrupted major players like ESA and China Aerospace, and then in 2013 with the launch of Mangalyaan to the planet Mars disrupted NASA in terms of cost and reliable technology. ISRO has not been able to do any major space disruptions of late, but it has come to be globally recognised as a space power to be reckoned by other space powers. The cost disruption initiated by ISRO at one tenth the cost of similar missions from NASA or ESA, in the planetary missions market is indeed laudable.

Tesla has been slowly disrupting the transportation scene through the launch of their electric cars. The Kochi international airport running on solar energy is slowly started disrupting the 10 million annual traffic airports, slowly building to 50 million annual traffic and then to 95 million, slowly disrupting the Jacksonville airport in US.

This article from medium (click here) explains the salient features of disruptive innovation, even though it says Uber is a disruptive innovation. Developments in AI, self driving cars, IoT applications are all going to disrupt the world in the coming days in ways humanity has not even dreamt before.

I have come up with a question set to decide whether an innovation is disruptive or strategic . Try to answer the following questions. 
  1. Is there a large unmet, untapped market in need of the product or service because available goods and service are priced high for the uptrend markets ?
  2. Is your product or service lesser priced than the market leaders ?
  3. Is your product or service now able to meet the demand from the low quality segment of the market ?
  4. Is there potential for the product or process to grow to satisfy higher end needs customers ?
  5. Can the market leader drop or stoop down to your level and kick you out of the market by offering a similar low cost product or service ?
If the answers to the first four questions are YES and to the last question is NO, then your product or service is in line for a disruptive innovation. Finally we see, it is the reach, acceptance and the cost of the product or service that plays an important role to disrupt the leader and topple the apple cart. 

George..

Lean strategy and Lean Operations ..

We have heard of Lean Operations and Lean Manufacturing. What is the exact difference between these two terms. 

While Lean Operations talks of generally actions that help to improve value, reduce waste and tools to track value additions and waste reduction, Lean strategy looks at the bigger picture of how value improvement and waste reduction actions can help optimise costs and actions and help align with the organisational objective of product, sectoral and market leadership.

While going through the article Lean Strategy (click here) in HBR March '16, by HBS faculty member David Collis, the distinction is made amply clear. Getting Lean Operations to align with organisational objhectives is pretty tough and requires careful understanding of organisational processes and optimisation efforts.

This is different from the environmental strategy an organisation may adopt. click here


Monday, December 07, 2020

Is Digital Transformation about technology or talent ?

This is a very interesting question that came up while having a discussion with my faculty colleagues on the necessity of including Digital transformation topics into an advanced MBA course curriculum, like we have at Alliance School of Business, Bangalore. I am sure Indian Institutes of Management in their different campuses and XLRI, Bajaj Institutes will get to learn a lot from our experiences as and when we share them with the public. 

The other day I was going through an HBR paper titled Digital transformation is about talent, not technology (click here) by Becky and Tomas in May '20 issue. It was really an eye opener.

Innovation is otherwise called Creative Destruction. Technological Innovation and people talent go hand in hand. One may have the best technological innovation, but if the right people are not available to deploy the technology, the technology is of no use. 

Which are the other areas to concentrate for a successful digital transformation ?

  • As much as technology plays a big role in Digital Transformation, it is also about investing in training people. 
  • Focus on the soft skills of people of offering sup[port and the right motivation to employees 
  • As all the time, the chnage should get full support from the top management and in fact should be driven by the top management.
  • Data Insights available from the analysis of data using algorithms should be acted upon to take advantage. Data is the new Oxygen for the industry.
  • Digital transformations are not bound to be successful from the word go, it can fail, but fail fast, so that corrective actions can be resorted to. If failing fast is not possible, learn slow and succeed slowly should be the guiding principle.

The above points lead us to the conclusion that Digital Transformation is much as about developing the right talent, as it is about having the right technology.

George..

Intro case on SCM

This case from Business India on the challenges faced by the Indian dairy industry, by Mother Dairy in Delhi, is a good intro case to Supply chain management, taken from the text book on SCM written by Prof. B. Mahadevan from Production and Operations area of IIM Bangalore .

Even though it is more than six years old, this is an excellent case to explain to the students the need for Supply Chain Management, on the complexities faced by the Indian supply chains, especially how complicated is the dairy supply chain in India. The extent of uncertainties, the varied players, the transportation and storage complexities is really an eye opener for students. 

I circulate copies in the class and students respond wonderfully whenever I have taken this case to introduce SCM to the students.

A big thanks to Business India and Prof. Mahadevan from IIMB.

George

Sunday, December 06, 2020

Story of Amazon - How Bezos' built one of the world's most valuable companies

 A phenomenon that is catching up with the millennials these days across the world is online shopping (B2C) and the one name that facilitates all these hue and cry in the online domain is nothing but Amazon.

I happened to listen to a HBR podcast (Nov '20 click here) on the same topic and which has also been put up as a Google podcast (click here) where HBR interviews Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta.

Amazon (worth $1.6 trillion) Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is worth $184.6 billion in 2020. How can a company be so successful and source of rage for youngsters and technologists the world over ?

Bezos' 3 strong points are given here

  • Customer focus and the resultant data insights
  • Logistics (Operational and Supply Chain) excellence and 
  • Focus on technology

Amazon is a service oriented company. In services, we lay great emphasis on customer focus. What makes Amazon stand out from other service comp[anies that also focus on customers is the OBSESSION WITH CUSTOMERS.

We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts. And it is our duty to make the customer experience a little bit better - Jeff Bezos

Leadership style

What is special about Bezos' leadership and communication styles ?

  • Long term focus
  • Customer focus
  • Willing to experiment, fail, learn and innovate

His communication style is never messages or emails, it is writing 6 page long memos, distributed just minutes before the meeting, which everyone reads and discusses together. 

While most of the CEOs focus on the next quarter or the next, Bezos goes a step further, he is planning now what the company will be doing after 5 years. This long term focus is  helping him in getting the right acquisitions and product introduction like for instance the Kindle and Amazon echo series of AI based Personal Assistants. 

His very popular HR strategy has been to recruit and surround oneself with people smarted than one is. 

Issues :

Has Amazon given a ear to the packaging wastage and the resulting damage to the environment ?. Not yet. 

Amazon wants its employees to go out of the way to make the customer experience always the best, resulting in some compromises when it comes to treating employees. 

How is Amazon planning to integrate the mom and pop stores which they are replacing these days. Amazon does not have a clear answer to that too.

George..

Wednesday, December 02, 2020

During Covid times, has employee productivity declined ?

Has the Covid time brought about improvement in employee productivity as they are working from home or has it lowered the employee productivity ? This is an interesting aspect which we would be interested in knowing as almost everybody in the knowledge based industry has been working from home for almost eight months now.

In cutting edge research conducted by Professors from Harvard Business School and New York University it is reported that while the best corportations have reported improvement in productivity during the Covid times, the majority of organisations have reported fall in productivity.  We all were under the impression that Work from Home has reduced the stress employees undergo daily going to office / work (saved on an average 48.5 mins time for each employee) and hence the productivity would increase, but that has not been the case.

Employee productivity depends on three important factors, 

  • time
  • talent (human resources) and 
  • energy

The time each employee dedicates to productive work, the talent he displays while engaged in his work and finally the discretionary energy the employee is willing to give to the company while carrying out his work.

The amount of talent and energy an employee spends at work also brings in another aspect of work, the engagement.

As per research conducted by Eric Garton and Micheal Mankins and reported in HBR of December 2020 (click here) 

  • an engaged employee is found to be 40% more productive than a normal employee (satisfied worker) and
  • an inspired employee is found to be 55% more productive than an engaged employee. 

In the best organisations, Covid time has resulted in improvement of productivity by almost 20%. Because of virtual attendance, talented employees are able to be part of multiple teams across geographies enabling their contribution at different places at the same time, resulting in better attainment of organisational objectives and hence improvement in productivity.  

But most of the organisations have reported drop in productivity as the organisations have lost talent and have not been able to inspire their employees due to many reasons, mainly due to family pressure, medical emergencies at home, the caution and care at home against catching Covid infection may have dampened the eagerness of employees to give their best.

Sagging energy levels of the employees have been found the biggest cause for drop in productivity and efforts by organisations to improve the energy levels have not had great effort except in some organisations like Adobe. Adobe has been able to tap into the discretionary energy of the employees evident by a high employee engagement score by giving the employees a no-layoff pledge, an extra day off in a month and by updating them with frequent updates on Covid and their business

Final Outcome: 

While the best organisations have experienced an improvement in productivity of 5-8%, other organisations have experienced a drop in productivity of 3-6% due to wasteful ways of working, inefficient collaboration and decreased levels of employee engagement.

The important learning we get from the above study is that employee engagement has suffered badly during these Covid times. We look forward to better employee engagement measures by organisations to improve employee morale and productivity in future.

George..

Tuesday, December 01, 2020

How can one do effective Decision Making ?

 All managers are day in and day out making decisions, decisions that have great impact on the running of the organisations. It is said that Jeff Bezoz makes only 4-5 decisions a day, the rest he leaves it to his subordinates. It is because , taking only 4-5 decisions will help Jeff to take the right decision and not be clouded by the pressures of decision making. Prioritisation is thus a very important point of Decision making.

While researching more into decision making I( came acros this very recent article in Harvard Business Review , Dec 2020, How to avoid rushing to solutions when problem solving, (click here) by Daniel Markovitz. 

The author cites 4 points

1. practicing going to the problem site and realising the problem. The Japanese call it Genchi Genbutsu.

2. Frame the problem properly. It is said that Einstein once said, if you have 1 hour to solve a problem, he would spend the first 55 minutes trying to frame the problem well and the last 5 minutes trying to solve it. The more time we spend trying to understand the problem from different perspectives, as given in the top pictorial, the better it is, as it will help pinpoint the exact problem and help with use of the right tools to solve it.

3. Think backwards (or find the root cause) one of the best and most effective tools is the Ishikawa daigram (fishbone diagram)

4. Ask Why many times, (5 Whys) to arrive at the root cause of the problem. More often than not, we address the symptoms than the actual problems. When we ask Why many times we move from the sphere of symptoms to the sphere of causes and finally the root cause. Some problems may get solved in two or three whys, while some others may take us to 5 or 6 Whys.

The Japanese after arriving at the root problem, take the right decisions to see that the issue or problem does not recur and IS SOLVED ONCE AND FOR EVER. 

So the next time, we come across serious decision making, try to follow these steps which will help us take effective decisions to solve the problem.

George

Daily build release of Ubuntu 21.04 ..

The opening screen of the daily build release of Ubuntu Linux 21.04 Hirsute Hippo slated for final release on 22 April 2021. This is a non - Long term support OS, ie. it will be supported only for 5 months from its release with official updates.

My experience with this futuristic OS is excellent. I would rate it as **** (4 star).
 
After using for almost 4 hours this afternoon with Youtube video and audio, newspaper sites for colour reproduction, google sites, colourful websites to assess coiour reproduction, I can only say that this Ubuntu 21.04 is an excellent futuristic OS. 

The office suite is Libre office, though it is a bit slow on older computers, it is very efficient and powerful omn my machine. 
 
Negative points : (only one I could note)
 
1. The release does not have a wide collection of software, no VLC player, no GIMP ...

The OS comes with a small set of software, was sized at 3.1 GB, and I am using it as a Linux OS on USB system on my new ADATA (Taiwan make) USB, that I ordered at Amazon this morning and got delivered by 3 PM.
 
I have been trying different versions of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Lubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Suse and what not, this OS beats them all. It is so very fast. My system is a HP (2012 make) laptop HP 430, has 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, Intel i3 processor ...

What I can briefly tell about this OS, which is at the testing phase and not yet released, (to be released on April 22, 2021) is that this is a cool, fast. no problems OS. This is sure to beat all other Linux OS which will get released soon. 

Since I have this on my new ADATA nUSB drive, I shall be checking on my office system tomorrow. 
 
These are the different steps involved in the final relase stated in April 2021. (click here)

George..
 

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