Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria : How blockchain and artificial intelligence can change the way we work

What is a decentralized organization?

'Companies as we know them are comprised of people who build and offer services for other people to consume. Capital becomes an intermediary: investors put in capital so that on one hand the company can charge customers for the service, and on the other it can compensate the employees for their work.' explained Forcano.

As opposed to this model, what decentralized organizations do is 'disintermediate the capital' putting suppliers or manufacturers of the product in direct contact with consumers using a predefined protocol where the value is logged in a token. 'This allows the community to interact directly without needing an agent who intermediates.' added BBVA's head of talent and culture.

One of the first examples of this operating model is Bitcoin : 'It doesn't have a CEO or employees or a headquarters, but the organization has been running for 10 years thanks to an incentive system that compensates the community for its work and fosters decision making in the interest of the ongoing running of the protocol.' explains Izquierdo.

Aragon operates in a very similar way: it has created a community of software developers who participate in the company by means of an incentive system based on tokens, and now the company is working on developing solutions that will enable other companies to adopt these organizational models. 'We want to facilitate the creation of organizations in which people can decide the incentive system and the way people can collaborate between themselves to create a service.' he adds.

For example, one of the alternative governance models that they are exploring through Ethereum is the concept of liquid democracy. This system is based on giving the organization's members the option of voting directly in the decision making process or delegate their votes to experts in specific areas where in which they may lack a minimum level of knowledge.

'The most interesting thing about what you are doing is the opportunity to explore and design new models of corporate governance.' explains Forcano, who stressed that the greatest challenge lay in giving communities the power to 'govern, make decisions, and decide how the organization will grow in the future' by themselves.

The next step: autonomy

Payday represents an example of automation at Aragon: the organization has created a decentralized application that allows each employee to set their specific payday, thereby doing away with having to rely on a person to 'cut the checks' each month. 'It is a good example that illustrates the transparency of the rules that govern a decentralized organization and the system's efficiency in eliminating the friction and bureaucracy associated to administrative tasks,' says Forcano

The next step after 'decentralizing' the way of working through software is automating these decisions so that the organization can run itself autonomously. The idea is that, once they are agreed on in accordance with the chosen governance model, the rules can be hardcoded into 'smart contracts' and recorded in the blockchain, allowing the organization or company to function autonomously.

In fact, Aragon has set up the Aragon Foundation to nurture the project in its early phase. The Foundation intends to lose almost if not all its power in the future, 'and to disappear, if possible.' The goal is to, in the long run, transfer all its power to the token-owner community.

A chatbot to manage vacations

After the video interview, Ron Brown, BBVA Global CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) sat down with Chris Downs, CEO of Normally, a data product and service design studio took to the BBVA Open Summit stage to discuss how the company is exploring new tech-enabled internal organization models.

Normally solves complex design problems for some of the world's largest organizations including the BBC and Facebook, and has developed mechanisms to automate specific employee time and resource management processes. In their case, thanks to artificial intelligence. 'Our employee's salaries are calculated by an algorithm,' explains the CEO.