Converge+ Highlights

2. We were delighted to welcome more than 10,000 people, and
25,000 registrants, to our virtual Converge event, where we
presented “Augmented Coding” headlined by the one and only
cult icon and co-founder of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak.
We are at a key moment in history. We have made such
progress in artificial intelligence in recent years that we are
now at the point at which businesses are using it to become
truly digital companies. At Converge we invited industry
leaders to explore what this fundamental change means to
how we are working and how we will handle our personal and
work relationships. What does a digital business with
artificial intelligence at its core really look like?
We dived into detail about how AI is helping to create
“Augmented Organizations”. This means when organizations
embrace the power of AI to augment their capabilities. It’s
Reinventing the future:
Creating AI-powered organizations
where AI impacts your culture, business and core
processes. One of the key platforms which augmented
organizations are using is called “Augmented Coding”
which represents a quantum leap forward in how we
develop software - we’ll explore more about this,
throughout this report.
In 2020 we are watching businesses reinvent
themselves with AI at their core in real-time. So grab a
coffee, and enjoy the rest of the highlights of Converge+.

3. Thought leaders
Steve Wozniak
Top Technology Speaker,
Co-Founder of Apple Computer
Sanja Licina
Future of Organizations
Studio Leader | Globant
Martín Migoya
CEO & Co-founder | Globant
Brian Elliott
Vice President | Slack
Sabina Schneider
Chief Solutions Officer | Globant
Guibert Englebienne
Co-founder & CTO | Globant
Tan Le
CEO of EMOTIV
James Taylor
Creativity speaker, award-winning
entrepreneur, founder of c.School
Haldo Spontón
Head of AI
Development | Globant
Michael Feathers
Author of "Working Effectively
with Legacy Code"

4. How the new era in brain
augmentation is revolutionizing
the way you think, work, and lead
If we could connect directly to the brain, what could we learn
about this mysterious organ, about ourselves and about the
world around us? This is the question that led Tan Le, founder
and CEO of EMOTIV, to develop a technology that tracks
cognitive performance, monitors emotions, and provides
insights into how our brains are working.
Tan Le spoke about how the concept of augmented brains
and bodies is not new. We’ve been augmenting our
capabilities for a very long time through technology. Today,
we are taking such augmentation to a whole new level, which
has the potential to allow us to reshape our future.
She provided the vision for how in the future we hope to be
able to integrate the brain with physical and digital
environments. We will see improved performances - from
sports, learning processes and productivity in the workplace.
Tan Le envisions a future where we can build environments
that will automatically change according to the activity in our
brain, creating places that instantly adapt to human needs.
Our environment will become an extension of our brain.
Just like EMOTIV aims to realize the power of AI and
machine learning to reshape the future and augment
our bodies, Globant is harnessing the potential of such
technologies to change the way we understand and
use code.
Augmented Coding (AC) enhances developers
capabilities through AI, driving improved productivity
and collaboration. AC uses machine learning and AI to
understand natural language as well as code. It is
already fundamentally changing how we create
software.
This means that instead of a “us versus them”
scenario, we are witnessing how AI is accelerating and
enhancing engineers capabilities to improve the way
we build software. AI will not replace people, it will
accelerate and augment them.

5. “
”
Tan Le
Founder & CEO at Emotiv
The advances we are making in
neurotechnology go beyond
restoring functions, they are
paving the way for actual human
enhancement. Unlocking the
potential of this complex and
mysterious organ is something
we can all benefit from.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1G5KUY5Vd6YhaRehz4mFFQYO9

6. The importance of
creative collaboration
In this virtual fireside chat, Martin Migoya,
CEO and co-founder at Globant spoke with
cult icon and co-founder of Apple Computer,
Steve Wozniak. They started by discussing
how to create companies that disrupt their
industries. Steve Wozniak spoke about the
idea of creativity, and what it means to truly
invent something from scratch. At its heart,
software engineering is about combining
skills and knowledge. Martin Migoya
complemented these ideas, emphasizing the
role of passion, and creating a team that
works well together.
The two gentlemen also spoke about ethics
and honesty - that to build a company you
need people who act on both their passions
and their beliefs.
Using artificial intelligence to accelerate people
Talking about the software engineering industry, Martin
Migoya mentioned how it has been a place where
reinvention has been avoided. But by using artificial
intelligence, with tools such as Augmented Coding,
Globant is working to reinvent it.
AI has become a fundamental part of our work at
Globant and crucially we’re using it to augment
people´s capabilities, not to replace them. It is helping
us recruit and become a more inclusive company as
well as shaping how we create services and products
in a more collaborative manner.
Steve Wozniak Martín Migoya

7. Steve Wozniak
Co-Founder of Apple Computer
and Bestselling Author
“
”
Every change we have in
the world can’t be done
just in your brain. It needs
engineers to sit down, go
through frustrations, and
build things that didn’t
exist before

8. The future of work:
It’s all about digital collaboration
Slack and Augmented Coding share an ultimate goal: to
help teams become more productive, efficient and agile,
bringing interdisciplinary teams and people all over the
world to work smoother and better together, transforming
today’s challenging times into advantages.
Augmented Coding, focused on being a self-service tool, is
a way to enhance and improve a team’s workflow and
collaboration.
Through the power of AI, Augmented Coding frees up
developers from tedious and routine tasks like code
documentation, allowing them to focus even more on
creative and cross-practice assignments, while acquiring a
deeper understanding of their customer and the impact of
their work. As Brian Elliott stated, “AI and augmented code
helps free up software engineers from more mundane
tasks, helps them focus even more on cross-disciplinary
tasks, and get a deeper understanding of the customer
and the impact of their work”.
Today, organizations face tremendous challenges:
how to work and interact remotely, how to align
employees and how to empower their distributed
talents. In this new reality, organizations are
reinventing work dynamics, knowing that it is
necessary to put more effort into inspiring people
and building a shared purpose, despite working out
of the office. These are the issues that Sanja Licina,
Future of Organizations Leader at Globant and Brian
Elliott, Vice President at Slack, discussed.
They explored how we are now able to take
technologies that are helping teams to be more
productive on their own and bring them together
across disciplines. And thanks to these tools, sales,
product and staff teams can collaborate quickly by
focusing on customer needs.
Sanja Licina Brian Elliott

9. Brian Elliott
Anything from an AI perspective
that helps bring attention to, and
augment the more basic tasks,
helps make teams more
productive and efficient, helping
them focus on more complex,
interdisciplinary work.
Vice President at Slack
Watch video

10. Michael Feathers
The Elephant Still in the Room
“The issue with Legacy code hasn’t gone away”
Founder and Director of R7K and
author of Working Effectively
with Legacy Code
Sabina Schneider
Chief Solution Officer at Globant
Legacy code remains one of the main
challenges developers and business face
when aiming to speed up their software
development process.
There is no ultimate solution for legacy
code. That’s because people are constantly
writing new code, and over time it typically
becomes harder to maintain. In many ways
it is a natural feature of software
development. The main challenge comes
when businesses need to revitalize their
systems, and have to understand how the
software is impacting the organization and
vice-versa.
Michael Feathers talked about code as an
“organism”. With repeated change, it
becomes like the growth of a tree, becoming
a bit gnarly at the edges. As it’s an organic
process, we’ll never get away from legacy
code. So organizations need to focus on
taking care of it.
Can AI help deal with legacy code?
Every human approaches a piece of code
with their own history, so the work they do is
based on inconsistent understandings of
that code. AI tools like Augmented Coding
that automatically generate a description of
what the code does can augment our
understanding of what the system is doing.
All those hours and even days spent
analyzing and understanding what is
happening on a piece of code is shortened
and simplified by tools like Augmented
Coding.

11. Michael Feathers
Augmented Coding is able to generate
a story for every piece of code. If we
have tooling that can provide us a
description of what it thinks code is
doing, that is something we can riff off
and augment our own understanding of
what the system is doing.
Founder and Director of R7K and
author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Watch video

12. Augmented Coding:
Writing the future of business
Every business in the future will be
built on technology, and in particular
software. In other words, the business
of the future will be built on code. But
not just any code - they will need
quality code, code that is safe, code
that is maintainable and well
documented.
This is why we created Augmented Globant - to
help us use AI to change and improve different
areas of our lives. Augmented Coding will help
organizations create the code they need to run their
business. Augmented Coding exponentially
accelerates software development, while also
lowering the barriers to create more open and
diverse development teams.
If you are a developer, you have probably dealt with
huge and complex code bases, undocumented
code, legacy code, and even extremely tight
deadlines. Those are some of the biggest pain
points in the day-to-day lives of developers.
Augmented Coding was designed to deal with
those pains, to make developers' lives easier based
on many functionalities powered by AI.
With the combination of the semantic
understanding of code and the possibilities of
creating text and code using AI, Augmented Coding
is a platform that will revolutionize the way we
interact with code. Every business is now digital
and needs software development to survive. No
matter the country, no matter the industry, the
future of businesses lies in software development
and AI is unleashing a new era for this future..

13. Haldo Sponton
We are witnessing the moment where
AI is starting to deeply understand
our natural language, the way we
speak, the way we write, and the way
we communicate ideas. This is very
relevant in many contexts of human
life, but especially in business.
Head of AI Development | Globant
Watch video

14. Shaping the future of
software development
The future is here and it is augmented. People are
already experiencing the impact of digitalization
and artificial intelligence in their personal and
work lives. We’re at an incredibly exciting time in
human history, as the pace of change accelerates
exponentially.
We hope you enjoyed Converge+, and we want to
thank everyone who joined and participated.
We’re looking forward to continuing to shape the
future of software development.

15. What’s Converge by Globant?
Converge is Globant's annual conference, organized for the past
six years, that brings together renowned experts to participate in
tech ignite talks and exclusive business roundtables. All of which
went fully virtual in 2020, and allowed speakers and attendees to
share cross-industry learnings and discuss how organizations
can leverage technology to shape the workplaces of the future.

16. About Globant
We are a digitally-native company where innovation,
design and engineering meet scale. We use the latest
technologies in the digital and cognitive fields to trans-
form organizations in every aspect.
We are more than 12,300 professionals and we are present in 16 countries
working for companies like Google, Rockwell Automation, Electronic Arts
and Santander, among others.
We are featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT and Stanford.
We are a member of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

17. Thank you!