Together with my guest Dr Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner at BT, we explore designing customer experiences that are useful, usable and used.
Our discussion explores Nicola influences, including music and theater, in crafting compelling narratives for technology adoption and change management. Nicola shares insights on navigating the balance between automation and the human touch.
We also delve into futuristic ideas, discussing the potential impact of extended lifespans, uploading knowledge on to the brain, responsible technology use, and the integration of technology and human experiences in a digitised world.
Connect with Nicola and Kamila
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Transcript
Hello, this is Kamila Hankiewicz and I need
to tell you what’s going to happen.
It’s about you and AI ready.
Hi, Nicola.
It’s a pleasure to have you here.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for inviting me.
You’ve been one of the top people I
always wanted to have on this podcast.
Lots of people are seeing you as a guru
grow, especially in customer experience and just understanding how
the work of the future will look like.
You’ve been having extensive experience juggling different
roles in BT and elsewhere, so I
think it will be an amazing conversation.
I do my best.
Of course, it’s difficult not to see it.
You are such a vibrant
personality as a waistcoat wearing.
You always highlighted.
Also in your TED talk, you
play ukulele, you love coffee.
Chocolate or chocolate coffee.
How do you think those unique aspects of
your personality influence your approach to fostering creativity
and innovation within BT and elsewhere?
I like to think I bring a little
bit of different thinking into the mix.
Obviously, I work for a tech company and
I always say I’m half a technologist.
I’m never terribly sure whether it is the waistcoat
bit or the not waistcoat bit, but I’m half
a social scientist, so I have a background in
psychology, so instantly, that’s quite a weird combination.
I don’t think chocolate and coffee are
that weird a combination, to be honest.
But it seems very natural to me.
But psychology and technology sometimes can be seen as
a slightly weird one and I always question the
fact why people think that is a weird combination
because people have to use technologies.
I like to think that I bring that thinking into a
tech company to remind techies who do fabulous things and are
incredible with technology that actually people do need to use it
and there needs to be a reason to use it.
It’s not that they’re just going to
go, whoa, this is really cool technology.
I’m going to really adopt this because unless you’re
a very early adopter and real tech enthusiast, that’s
probably not going to be the case.
So yeah, it is really trying to bring a little
bit of different thinking in and I like to think
the waistcoat, to be honest, firstly, I don’t really like
suits and secondly, I like waving my hands around.
So I quite like to have something that
doesn’t mean I have to wear a suit.
It’s slightly more formal than a t shirt,
but I can wave my arms around.
So that was in itself a sort
of creative solution to a problem.
And obviously I have about ten or twelve different
waistcoats that I can choose depending on my mood.
But, yeah, it’s definitely something which makes
you seen from the authors as well.
So you are perfect in building your brand. Okay.
I know you’ve been involved with
BT for many, many years.
You’ve worn lots of different hats, and I know that
you also, in your spare time, you are very creative.
So you sing.
I don’t even know how to pronounce this.
Irish instrument. Yes.
Wow.
I’m just learning new things from you.
As a vocalist and musician, you appreciate,
obviously, the harmony of creativity, and you
bond it with technology in your life.
So how has your musical passion influenced
your innovative approach, especially when you design
and draw parallels between designing customer experiences?
I don’t know.
I’ve never really thought about it.
I always say I was also very heavily into theater
and acting and things like that, and I’m also obsessed
with film, so I sort of bring that.
I saw your tweet out by the x profile.
I know I’m obsessed with a
lot of creative things, I guess. I don’t know.
I mean, I think I used to be in a
four part harmony group, and I think you suddenly realize,
particularly in things like four part harmony, that having everyone
who can sing the same pitch and the same notes
actually doesn’t make a very good four part harmony group.
So if you want to take that analogy into
business, the differences in us are the bonus.
If you like it, that’s what
the lovely melodies come out.
When you’ve got four different people with very different
ranges and different things that they bring to the
party, it enables you to create something different.
And I think that’s one of the things I
actually like about being in tech, because I am
slightly weird, but actually I can sing in tune
with people who are much more deep techies.
And actually in things like AI, which I did
AI as part of my original degree, because my
original degree was applied psychology and computing.
And I always say if you do psychology and
computing, you either go into AI or you go
into human factors and HCI and usability.
And I did both, actually.
I started off in AI, but AI is one of
those ones where psychology and the technology interact really closely.
In the old days, you mentioned I’ve
been with BT for a long time.
Yes, I’ve been with BT over 30 years now.
So obviously I started when I was six,
but I started in that first wave of
incredible enthusiasm about AI before it hit the
top of disillusionment for about 20 years.
But that was all about neural networks and
learning and all of that fabulous stuff.
So bringing that sort of insight into people that
were then saying, well, how do we encode this?
How do we put it into a database?
How do we get it out into natural language?
All of that was really intriguing and still is,
to be honest, because of course, you might have
noticed we’re in that second incredible burst of AI
energy at the moment and slightly different models being
brought in as well from other disciplines.
But that’s the reason why I think we do
probably need to think about bringing people from different
perspectives in to create technologies that actually do work
for everybody, because everyone is different and we all
bring our own unique perspectives.
So if we can make everyone sing in tune,
that would make beautiful technology in the end.
So yeah, there’s a music analogy, I guess.
I know that you publish a lot on
future of work and also on BT website.
How do you see the balance
between automation and human touch?
So what kind of strategies you think
as larger organizations are always very risk
averse and they don’t really particularly like
to be early adopter, as you mentioned.
How do you think you can help?
Or how can companies at least try to
innovate, try to test various technologies available already
to enhance rather than replace human elements?
Yeah, well, I’ve always said there’s
sort of two arguments here.
One is around automation and the other is augmentation.
So we’ve already seen a fair amount of automation.
I work quite a lot with contact centers.
For example, I can get very geeky about contact
centers because my phd was actually on contact centers.
So they’re fascinating places because they are
where people and technology come together.
And I think actually my first job in
BT was looking at effectively an agent copilot.
So the idea there know we had great agents
who were really good at talking to people, but
they weren’t engineers, they weren’t network experts, and we
didn’t really want them to be.
So how could we actually take the wonderful knowledge in
the heads of our engineers and put it into a
tool at that point called an expert system, which the
agents could then use to actually interrogate, to actually do
the technical bit of their job so that they could
then concentrate on the customer?
And I always say, actually it kind of worked.
And we’re seeing that come along now
around that sort of agent augmentation piece.
But in the contact center industry, they’ve always
been in the bleeding edge of automation.
So that’s very much around taking all of those
wonderful transactional tasks that nobody wants to do out
and to a certain extent we’ve done that.
Then there’s the whole discussion around
what does that make agents redundant?
Well, no, actually what we’re seeing at the moment
from our research is that actually customers are calling
a lot more because they’ve tried the transactional stuff,
and obviously if they’ve done that, they don’t need
the agent, but it’s the complexity, the emotive stuff
that they’re reaching out to the human for.
So we’re still having these conversations around.
Automation should, if it’s working right,
take away the boring stuff.
That doesn’t make the human redundant,
that makes the human’s role doing.
We have to do the complex stuff, the emotive
stuff, the stuff that’s very hard to codify.
And actually that’s the unique
part of the human experience.
Our brains are incredible, to be perfectly honest.
So actually having those brains engaged with customers to
do active problem solving, to empathize, potentially with a
copilot, an AI copilot, again, sitting next to them
to fill in the gaps on.
They can’t be experts on everything,
particularly if you’re a company.
I work with a lot of our major corporate customers.
They’ve usually got incredible complex product
sets which are updated quite frequently.
We can’t update people’s brains constantly because they’ve
been in training, so we can’t constantly take
them off contact to train them.
So actually we need tools to actually sit
next to them and help them to interact.
What we don’t want to do, however, is
our brains are great, but they have limitations.
So I talk a lot about cognitive load.
So if you imagine the cognitive load on an
agent at the moment is they’re having a conversation,
they’re having to listen to the customer, they’re having
to figure out what the customer is talking about.
Sometimes they have to calm the customer down, and
then often they’re interacting with maybe ten different systems,
which they also have to remember how to use.
So I think that the augmentation piece is around.
Well, can we take some of that cognitive
load on the technical side out, because it’s
difficult to take the customer side out.
So that’s really where I’m thinking in terms of that.
Where do humans play in this?
And I think the emphasis in the future, once we’ve automated
pretty much as much as we can think about, how do
we then allow AI and people to work together?
And I think that’s the interesting bit, because, again,
just putting the technology in front of people does
not make them automatically go, hey, let’s use it.
We spent a long time building a
knowledge system for agents which they didn’t
use because they hadn’t been involved.
They didn’t really know what they had some
flaws sometimes the early versions of chat bots. Yeah.
And also the knowledge in their heads.
If they’re experienced agents, they think they know
everything because they’ve learned and they do.
And actually that’s their role in maybe
teaching the AI some of this stuff.
But even then, some of the stuff in their
brain, again, we don’t update their brains enough.
How can we update the systems more?
But then how do we persuade them to just
check, okay, is this the right thing to say,
or should it be something that’s just very intuitive
that pops up, that isn’t annoying?
Which is the other thing that those prompts
going, did you know, have you checked?
Can become incredibly annoying, and then if they become
annoying, we either turn them off or ignore them,
which means, again, it doesn’t work so well.
So I think there’s a whole load of things around
that sort of interaction piece that we need to be
thinking about, because people don’t just automatically go, hey, this
is great technology, I’m going to use it.
There’s a whole load of horrific
psychology behind why people adopt technology.
I often talk about that. Yeah.
And there are so many side benefits to
adopting, to enhancing human interactions with technology and
giving human access to the whole knowledge, because
I’m working also in very similar field.
And what we find is that oftentimes the solution
to some particular problem, even for complex product or
service, has been already written or done somewhere by
someone, but one person cannot possibly, possibly see or
know who has done what. Right? Yeah.
A lot of it certainly is around reputation.
I mean, we found trying to understand the
networks of how humans work together is fascinating.
And by the way, that’s also a lovely big data problem.
But you often find experts who aren’t
necessarily at the top of the tree.
They’re not necessarily the leaders or the
managers, but they’re the key influencers.
And actually they’re the ones that you
need on your side if you’re introducing
new technologies, particularly new technologies that might
challenge some of our expertise.
And in a contact center, it’s always
fascinating to just look at the dynamics.
So they’re usually the people that
the agents spin their chair around.
If it’s a physical contact center, they spin their chair around
and they will ask the question of, so it’s those guys
that you go, right, I need to talk to them because
they’re obviously a key influencer and I need to get them
to help develop the system so they become a key influencer
in terms of people adopting that.
So we actually had, in one of the studies I did,
one of those key influencers was saying to an agent who
asked them a question, well, did you know you could find
this on the system and show them how to do it?
So that the agent didn’t ask that
question again, they used the system.
So that sort of thing, I think we
need to think about in terms of adoption.
But it is trying to understand that dynamic of
who knows what about what, who’s the key influencer
and they’re the ones you need to recruit.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And it also helps to do
this knowledge transfer for onboarding, right?
Yeah, completely.
A lot of it’s about education.
I talk about the three U’s of technology.
That’s my next question.
Okay, I’m jumping into the next question already.
The three use are, is it useful, is it usable?
And then who else is using it?
So useful, usable, used.
Useful is in the eye of the beholder.
To be honest, most technology is inherently
useful, but unless people think it is,
they’re not going to adopt it.
And a lot of that is about education.
It’s about not just dumping the technology
on someone’s desk overnight, actually giving them
an overview of what it does.
And as I said, look at peer
influencers who maybe have been trialists of
the system to actually influence that.
And it needs to be a
technology certainly on the usefulness.
If it makes people’s job harder, or indeed if
you’re a customer, if it makes their life harder,
you’ve got a much more uphill battle.
Because frankly, one of the common things we find
in terms of psychology is most humans are lazy.
We want the easy route.
So with any innovation, one of the first questions I
always say is, who does this make it easier for?
If it’s for both the
company and the customer, brilliant.
That should work.
If it’s the customer, not the company, actually,
that might work as well for the customer.
The company might question it.
If it’s the company, not the customer, you
have to question why you’re doing it.
So I think that’s the first thing to consider.
The usability bit is the easy bit, to be honest.
And I mentioned usability earlier, that was a fair
proportion of my past career looking at usability.
And obviously that’s a whole science.
And whether you want to call it design thinking,
which I think it’s most popularly known as, now
that’s really around, is it seamless is it frictionless?
Is it easy to use?
And obviously you could measure that as well.
There’s lots of metrics you can put in.
That’s why it’s kind of the
easy bit, because it’s more measurable.
The third bit, though, so useful and usable
systems are not always used, and that is
really around who else is adopting it.
And the analogy I tend to use is social media,
because the reason I adopt a social platform is probably
because I know other people on that social platform.
So that is all about peer influence.
A social network of one would be
a bit rubbish, to be perfectly honest.
So it’s who else is on the platform
and who’s influencing me to go on.
And that works across the board.
And obviously you will then get tsunamis
of people coming into the system.
Potentially you’ve got tsunamis of people going on to
another platform as well when the next trend hits.
So there’s a lot of behavioral economics
you can do there because you can
influence or nudge people to do that.
And again, it’s around trying to understand where
those nudges should come and who potentially should
be doing those nudges, because it is all
about who else is using it.
Are my peers using it?
Do I recognize me in terms of people using it?
I did do a TEDx talk ages ago now
on my very, very sad obsession with the adoption
of ticket machines, which was exactly useful, usable use.
Let’s ask these questions and then figure out how
we actually get people to adopt these more.
So, yeah, very topical at the moment as well.
And you mentioned about the modes or the moods.
A customer is at the point where he’s using it. Right.
So when he’s in critical situation, he may not use it.
Yeah, that’s another classification that we’ve done.
So we actually have done lots of research which
we’ve published under the banner mostly of the autonomous
customer, which is actually, we’re into our 13th or
14th year of doing that research and it’s global
research and it’s panel research.
So what we try and do is to
go into a number of countries and recruits
500 customers in each country that are representative
for the age and demographic of that country.
And we just ask them general questions
around what do they expect from customer
experience and what channels they use.
We’ve got some incredibly interesting pictures around
how channels are ebbing and flowing and
what channels are the preferred channels.
For a start, the phone is the number
one channel and we’ve always been astonished.
It did look as if it was going to go
out at one point because it was going down in
preference and then suddenly it went back up again.
And obviously I’m interested in the channels,
but I’m also more interested probably in
why, what’s going on behaviorally here.
So when we did a lot of interviews with customers,
we found that there were a few common themes.
Firstly, customers don’t obsess about channels.
We as customer experience people do.
Customers don’t.
They have a goal, basically.
And underlying that goal, which is this
significant bit, is an intention state.
And that intention state tends to
be either positive, negative or neutral.
So positively motivated customers,
we call these visionaries.
So these customers typically are doing
something they want to do.
They’re getting married, they’re planning a
holiday, moving house, all of those
things are really positive things.
So they’ll do their research, they’re willing to
invest some time, energy and effort into it.
We call them shopper swaps, actually, in the
retail situation, because they will google stuff, they
will look stuff up, they’ll read reviews, so
they’re quite knowledgeable, but they can be also
quite paranoid because this does matter to them.
So I always say you can put information in front
of customers, you can give them lots of stuff.
Actually, they’re very omnichanneled visionaries, but sometimes they
just do need a little bit of a
nudge or just a bit of reassurance.
This is the right thing for you.
Personalization is a great thing to do for visionary
customers, because if you can know enough about the
customer, you can then kind of use the technology.
This is the right thing for you, or at least
curate those choices so we can use technology here.
They sometimes do need just a little bit of
human reassurance, but they’re lovely customers to have.
The trouble is most of us
often don’t have those customers.
So we tip into negative, particularly if we started positive
and we hit a problem, or we could start negative.
We call these customers in crisis, as you mentioned
earlier, and the whole chemistry of the brain starts
to change because weird hormones start to run in
when we’re angry or frustrated or scared. Even.
So that disrupts our thinking patterns.
So we’re not logical at that point.
There’s a lot of illogic, there’s
a lot of tunnel vision.
Even our short term memory capacity starts to.
Well, it halves, actually.
So normally you would design to short term
memory capacity, which is thought to be.
There’s a debate at the moment, but seven to
nine bits now, I used to design ivrs, those
lovely press ones, press twos that everyone hates.
I feel sorry about that.
But generally on a top level menu, you would do, press
one for this, press two for this, press three for this.
That would be six bits of information that
I need to store in my brain.
I might get another option in, but
it’s forcing that short term memory capacity.
And then you mistakenly click the wrong button.
Yeah, or just don’t know what
to push because you can’t remember.
The trouble is, of course, if you’re angry
and frustrated, if your short term memory capacity
halves, you go from seven to nine bits,
right the way down to three, four, five.
So, putting complex information in, press
one for this, press two for.
Well, actually, I probably can’t remember
what one is if I’m angry.
So I keep saying, with a customer in crisis,
this is why they reach for the phone.
Typically because they usually want to talk to a human.
They want to vent, they want to hand
their problem off and get it solved.
If you’re going to put technology in,
you’ve got to make it very simple.
So that’s the simplicity piece.
But largely, when we look at those
graphs about people using the phone consistently,
we get customers in crisis doing that.
And we’re seeing that in
the patterns into contact centers.
Now, despite a lot of automation,
people are still using the phone.
In fact, if the automation fails, obviously the phone
is often their first port of call as well.
But I keep saying, I’ve talked
about the positive and the negative.
There is a middle point.
We call them utilitarians.
So these aren’t completely neutral.
They actually really do value things like
value for time, value for effort.
If you make everything really easy and
put easy, simple automation in front of
these guys, they will accept it.
If it goes wrong, they’ll tip into
crisis mode and become very different.
This is the thing, actually, what we’ve done in
the past, when we started to learn about this,
we were saying, well, how much information can we
get about the customer up front?
And then can we start to signpost them,
nudge them again to the channel that is
likely to be their channel of choice?
So if they’re in crisis, yes, maybe put some
simple tech in front of them, but ultimately get
them through to a human agent, because that’s actually
where they probably want to go.
Visionaries give them lots of channels.
Don’t confuse them.
Give them access to a tool or
humans to give them that nudge.
But utilitarians, if you do it right, you should
be able to take that all the way through
using technology and do not duplicate the effort, like
when customer for example already fills some information, I
don’t know, over some form, and then they ask
them to do the same thing somewhere else.
Yeah, we’re seeing that with bots.
I keep calling bots ivr for digital
because we’re almost seeing that horrendous.
Press one, press two.
Play out in the bot world now, because as you
said, the worst thing is you have a conversation with
the bot, the conversation ends with the bot.
Either can’t help or, and then you have
to start again on another channel, which is
probably going to be the phone.
Could be chat.
If it’s chat, brilliant, because then you can
port that whole conversation across to the agent.
Actually you can on voice as well.
But theoretically, then the best experience would
be the human agent picks up seamlessly,
and that’s where some of those disconnects.
Certainly some of the bot projects I’ve worked in on
in the past, the bots developed completely separately from the
contact center, so the two don’t interact at all.
I think the most successful deployment is absolutely
around can you skills base route that to
the right agent with the right skills and
also port that conversation across?
So it’s, from a customer perspective, completely
seamless, and that’s a good experience. Right.
So this is all about this net and
easy score, which you developed the methodology. Right.
Some of it is neteasy came out again
from the autonomous customer research, because one of
the things that came out very obviously time
and time again when we asked customers was,
what do they want from a customer experience?
And there was always a very high
percentage of people just going, can you
just make it easy and actually drink?
What does it mean?
Well, yeah, and that was the problem, because then
you get into the argument, well, okay, so this
is clearly an issue for customers, and it’s something
that drives a lot of customer behavior.
So how do you measure it?
And actually, we did try customer effort scores.
This was a long time ago, and
those customer effort scores have changed completely.
But in the original way of asking a question on an
effort score, again, they have made this a lot easier.
But it was how much effort did you need to
put forth to do what you needed to do today?
And then customers came back and said,
I’m not sure I understand the question.
So we had to make the question easier.
And actually, at the time, again, there
wasn’t net promoter score was out there.
So we kind of thought, well, can
we do net promoter score for easy?
So that’s what we did effectively.
So we asked one question, how easy did you find it?
And you rank difficult, easy, don’t know.
Obviously, you can then assign values to that.
So if you’re negative, you’re difficult.
If you’re positive, you’re easy.
So it’s exactly the same as the net promoter.
But for that, I’m not a huge fan
of the net promoter score, I must confess.
I think it’s quite a good sort of blunt
instrument for the board, but I’m not sure it
really gives us, if you’re looking at an operational
level, it doesn’t necessarily give you the clues that
you need on how do you change things?
And the net easy score did.
So actually, going back to the IVR, like most ivrs,
we discovered that our ivrs were not very easy.
I think we got to about press 52
at one point because like most ivrs, it
had kind of mutated rather than was designed.
So, I mean, the consequence of knowing that that
was being a point of significant friction with customers
meant that we could start to redesign it.
So take the option numbers down.
So not press 52, press maybe six.
As I said, playing to that short
term memory capacity, using a lot more
natural language, using the customer’s language, not
the department’s language, all of those things.
We could start to see the easy score shift.
And actually, oddly enough, the other correlation we found
was net easy actually did correlate very highly with
the net promoter score, because it’s not really rocket
science to figure out that people that are finding
you difficult are probably not going to recommend you.
Yeah, there is a definite
link between those two scores.
Okay, so what do you see the current
trend, and where do you think it’s going
in terms of collaboration, engagement and customer experience?
Maybe since you’ve been also doing lots of work in
AI in natural language, do you think this is the
main technology right now adopted, or there are some others?
I mean, to be honest, when you look at
the future world of work, which is my other
piece of research, it’s a lot of mundane technologies
that have accelerated the ways that we work.
So I call them the holy trinity of technology.
So there’s cloud, there’s
collaboration tools and connectivity.
That’s what’s allowed us, to be honest, those
tools were around way before the pandemic.
But the pandemic kind of drove that
bullet train into forcing people very differently. Yes.
About the way of working.
Had we had a pandemic, I mean, one
of my first jobs in BT was our
first homeworking trials back again in the 90s.
If we’d had a pandemic in the 90s, it was
costing us 11,000 pounds a seat to set someone up
at home simply because we had to bulldoze their front
gardens, because there was no such thing as wifi or
4g or five g at the time.
So we actually had to lay a physical pipe.
So I think we would have ground to a
halt if we’d had a pandemic in the 90s.
It’s those holy trinity of
technologies that got us through.
I think the debate then is those
technologies have been around for a while.
So video being a prime example, been around for
a very long time, hadn’t been widely adopted.
Now is part of the infrastructure of our lives, whether
that’s in our personal lives or in our work lives.
That allows us to think a bit differently.
But as we know, playing out in the press at the
moment is a whole load of discussions around hybrid working.
Is it good? Is it bad?
I’ve seen it accused of all sorts of things.
I think there was actually a headline in one
of the papers yesterday saying that people were.
Well, actually, it was a slightly interesting
headline because I think they were suggesting
that people were napping and having sex
at home rather than actually working.
I think I’ve been doing it wrong, I think.
But eating cheese, actually, there was
even a utility eating cheese.
Eating cheese was one of the other ones
that got bandied around at one point.
Again, not doing a lot of that.
There was one of the.
During meetings, I mean, the other more intriguing one, there
was a utility director that said that people were using
more water when they were working from home.
So I keep saying, those of you in
the shower at the moment, get out.
I thought, like, water, water, like using and drinking.
Sorry.
Yeah, but I don’t think I drink more water
at home than I would in the office.
So nets, it probably is about the same, but yeah,
I think there’s a lot of opinions flying around.
Again, I’m a scientist, so I look at the
data, the data is a lot more nuanced.
And I think, again, those technologies are allowing us
to be very effective, to do quite a lot
of things outside those four walls of an office.
But I think one of the critical questions with hybrid
work is to ask, well, what’s an office for?
And that’s quite a difficult question to answer.
And I think because it’s all things to all
people, you’ll get a different answer depending on who
you ask as to what the office is for.
The key is it’s not a one size fits all design anymore.
It needs to be an attractive place for people to
go to do the things that they want to do
in an office, which typically are around, to your point,
collaboration, connectivity in terms of connecting with people, building those
human networks, and also creation of community.
So those are the things that
we need to design offices for.
Obviously, not everyone can work at home or wants to
work at home, so we also need spaces where you
can do quiet work away from the distractions.
And particularly when you get into
people, for example, in the neurodiverse
spectrum, the office, they would struggle.
They struggle with.
So how can we create areas which are much
quieter if they do have to come in?
To be honest, one would question why?
Because their productivity will dip significantly.
But if we do need to bring them in, is there a
quiet space that they can work from that isn’t a hot desk?
They want their own desk.
They want a familiar environment.
So again, that’s a challenge.
I think the thing is, offices are becoming a lot
more fluid in terms of how they’re being used.
Who’s in them?
We know on Fridays no one is in them.
So should we open the office as quite a lot
of people close their offices now on a Friday, should
we heat an entire office or cool an entire office?
If there’s only six people in, that’s,
again where we can use data.
Better to try and figure out who’s in.
Can we start to create hotspots and cool
spots rather than heating the whole building?
Again with a climate crisis?
Got to figure this out.
So I think there’s a whole
load of ripple patterns around.
If we just take those three very simple technologies,
holy Trinity, there’s a whole load of things we
can discuss, and then, of course, AI overlays that.
So all of the discussions around generative AI at the
mean, the press again are hyping it up and saying,
okay, it’s going to be loads of people. Redundant.
Well, it’s very difficult to automate an entire job,
but certainly we can automate tasks within a job.
But actually that isn’t necessarily
about redundancy, that’s about productivity.
And I think that’s, again, how do
we augment as well as automate?
I think that’s the big discussion there.
But there’s undoubtedly a very big place
for AI into the future around.
Could we make ourselves more productive?
Does that mean we could do a
four day week work a lot less?
Well, we’ll see.
Going back to your productivity and hybrid work
bit, do you know any research, have you
read any interesting findings using data?
If working from home is indeed less effective
in certain situations or maybe certain industries?
Yeah, I mean, the place I go for data at the
moment is the fabulous Nick Bloom at Stanford, who is.
It tends to be slightly biased towards the US,
but he’s actually producing tons and tons of data
at the moment, and obviously the data is changing.
That’s the fascinating thing about this peak office
was February, which is understandable actually, because it
was cold and energy costs were very high.
I call it value for commute.
People are at the moment making some quite interesting judgments
around, well, if I commute, particularly if it’s a long
commute, if I commute 2 hours into an urban location,
am I getting the value for that commute?
So when I’m in an office, am I getting
that connection, that collaboration, that creation of community, am
I able to do what I need to do?
Is the Wifi good enough?
Quite a lot of it, because inevitably, because we’re going
more hybrid, a lot of meetings now, even if you’re
in a physical office, are in the digital world, because
even if one person can’t come in, you’ve got to
go digital is then your default.
So I keep saying, if you’re looking at a hybrid model,
it’s not about the office and it’s not about home, it’s
about how do we create a digital platform that is effectively
that common ground for everyone to work on?
And then of course you’ve got to tackle the horrible
hybrids, which I would include the hybrid meeting, because we’ve
all been on them, half the people in the room,
half the people in the digital space.
The people in the digital space are ignored by the
people in the room, because simply there’s no physical presence
and the technology is still not quite there.
So although we can put lots of cameras in and do
spatial audio and all of that lovely stuff, can we start
to bring in some of the other trendy technologies?
I always say I have to mention
both AI and the metaverse, because my
innovation credentials would be revoked otherwise.
So could we start to bring in more metaverse type
technologies to create more presence from the digital world?
And that could range from a mixed reality
space where you beam people in full size,
to holograms, actually is something we’re looking at
in terms of volumetric video.
So could you beam people actually physically as
a hologram, to much more simple deployments?
I mean, I’m less convinced about virtual
reality headsets because I tend to vomit.
I call it vomiting reality.
But can I start to create maybe
mixed augmented reality environments where I get
a much more tangible sense of presence?
And again, that common ground between the physical
and the digital, because our brains, again, are
brilliant, but they’re quite primitive, they’re cave brains.
So we tend to include and trust people
that are in physical proximity to us.
And I think that’s, again, I can understand why people
want people to be in the office, because that’s a
very big reason why people are in the office.
But again, not everyone’s going to be there.
We’re constrained by geography.
So how do we use the digital world to
create something more compelling in the physical sense?
I hate that word.
But how do we bring physical and digital
together in a much more, I guess, again,
seamless, easy environment that can enable us to
collaborate in very different ways?
Have you been thinking of giving any thought about
neural hacking and what obviously Elon Musk is trying
to do with neuralink and the other similar companies?
Maybe only then is going to, like, the
adoption of holding virtual offices will be happening.
Yeah.
I mean, I used to be a futurologist, so this was
certainly one that we were looking at ages ago, again.
So Peter Cochrane, who used to be my
old boss in BT, was always talking about,
effectively, what Elon Musk is now talking about.
I think the issue is so practicality, I’m not sure.
Our brains are very complicated and we
don’t really understand how they work yet.
So actually having something that will share
my experience with someone else using a
neuralink is an intriguing question.
And certainly there’s been Kevin Warwick, actually,
one of the academics, who literally had
a chip inserted in bits of his
body to communicate with his wife, actually.
I think know that was
very intriguing, but very invasive.
And I’m not sure.
Yeah, I’m not actually sure I want a chip implanted.
And then again, if we then talk about privacy,
is my every thought then going to be transmitted?
How do I turn this mean?
One of the academics we used to work with
at MIT, Steve Mann, was one of the early
adopters of augmented reality, where he constantly broadcast live
onto the Internet using a of.
You need boundaries there, because if you go to the
bathroom, you probably don’t want to be broadcasting live.
And I think with neuralinks, it’s, again,
there are times where I don’t want
to be broadcasting my every thought. So how do we.
There’s a lot of ethical questions behind
that particular technology, as well as the
feasibility of will it actually work?
But again, if we’re looking at things like disability,
those kind of interfaces could actually provide a lifeline
for people that for some reason cannot communicate.
So I think that there is always a real
positive spin as well, and a much more inclusive
spin on some of these technologies that might be
more beneficial for that community than possibly anyone else.
Yeah, and I see lots of examples.
I don’t know how good they are, or
it’s just pocs, basically, but vrs being used,
or like the headsets being used in healthcare
and people with heavy medical conditions.
Yeah, and even down to.
We’re looking at changing the
nature of collaboration with it.
So one of the things we’re working on in
the augmented reality space is in the healthcare sector.
So having a paramedic with an augmented reality headset on
and a haptic glove working in conjunction with a remote
clinician who also has a pair of glasses on, who
can effectively then see through the paramedic’s eyes.
So we’re looking at high definition video.
The fun bit, of course, is the touch bit.
So the clinician has a joystick
that is driving the haptic glove.
So what they can then do is nudge the
paramedic’s hand to make sure that they’ve got their
hand in the right place to do procedures that
they wouldn’t be able to do unsupervised.
So we’re looking at changing that dynamic, obviously.
Hopefully the target of that is to reduce hospital
admissions so that we can do an awful lot
more via the paramedic and the ambulance, rather than
having to put everything through the hospital.
So watch this space on that.
I think there are a lot of technologies that
can change that dynamic around collaboration, bringing in remote
second opinions, doing some tasks that we would maybe
think need to be colocated, like hairdressing even.
Could we have a robotic arm doing our hair?
Not sure I’d like that at the moment.
I would be scared around sharp
objects that I saw some machines.
I think it’s in San Francisco.
It’s quite popular.
You have your nails painted.
There were some, obviously, machines trying to do pizza,
but I would still prefer to go to Italy,
ideally agree to have my pizza done by Paolo.
So I know that because you said you
are also huge fan of movies, and I’m
sure you’ve seen lots of futuristic themed movies.
So what do you think about this kind of
vision of the future, about human interactions and using
or living in metaverse, if I can say, like
the ready player, one scenario, or Lucy, although Lucy
is a bit different, I think.
Or you think it’s going to be.
I think you already answered the question in this area
that it will be more like a hybrid between AR
or using tech while still focusing on physical bits.
Like falling in love with a real person
made of flesh, not some kind of Android.
Yeah, with my futurologist hat on.
I always say that if you want to go any
more than about a year and a half into the
future, you probably want to look at science fiction.
And certainly, if you’re looking at a ten
year, 20 year vision, look at some really
good science fiction based on real science.
And whether that’s novels or movies, movies tend to be
a slightly more accessible way of exploring the future.
And we’ve always done it.
I mean, the number of techie people, including myself, who
have been influenced by the likes of Star Trek.
So those visions of technology, some
of them have come true.
The Star Trek communicator was very much influential
in the design of things like the iPhone.
So we can see that pan out into real design.
I think for those future scenarios, actually, science fiction
is one of the essential things to look at.
So everything from, I mean, if you’re looking
at film minority report, I think that was
actually mit did the technical consulting on that.
So very solid science, and you can kind of
see that augmented reality future panning out on that.
So with the haptic gloves, with the interfaces
that are being manipulated with the surveillance society,
that’s the interesting bit about minority is happening
in some countries completely, right? Yeah.
And again, you have to question, is that a
society I want to live in on the more
positive, do they even have a saying?
Well, yeah, I think the more positive mean I
actually am a big fan of her, which is
a very low key movie with Joaquin Felix and
Scarlett Johansson, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with
the operating system voiced by Scarlett.
I mean, who wouldn’t?
But I think that world is so interesting
in terms of the way that it’s realized.
So obviously, having the operating system be so human and
so compelling that he can fall in love with it.
But if you look at the other things that
go on in that particular universe, his job is
to write letters, and the value in that society
is the written letter, because everything has been automated.
So for very high value
interactions, they write a letter.
I think that’s beautiful.
So that’s all around
valuing humans slightly differently.
The other thing about that whole design
is that the cityscape is actually optimized
for pedestrians and green transport.
So it’s not a car based society.
So I always cite that as one of my favorite films.
It was never a big blockbuster, and not
a huge number of people have seen it.
But in terms of that realization of a future
that actually, I would quite like to live in.
That’s one of the ones I usually hold up.
I remember the main plot, but I don’t
remember this bit about not having cars.
What was the reason? How did they.
They were just envisioning a likely society.
So it was clearly a society that had looked at
climate change and optimized cities to make it agree.
To be honest, we’re seeing it now with things
like the discussions on the 15 minutes city.
Now, those discussions have been going on
for many years, to be perfectly honest.
But with the climate crisis and carbon
targets and all of that lovely stuff,
it’s become part of that conversation again.
So can we create urban
environments that don’t need cars?
And that’s a good example of a
film that had that kind of.
It wasn’t central to the plot at all.
It was something that was in.
Remember that they want to do it in Paris, I think.
Right.
Like the 15 minutes city, but
in a way, London is similar. Right.
It used to be lots of different villages and at
some point, in some way you can find everything within.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there are a lot of discussions across
the world, I think, on the 15 minutes city.
It’s a much criticized model as well.
It creates a lot of duplication.
In some senses, it’s quite difficult.
You can’t have a hospital necessarily within
15 minutes of everybody because you just
simply don’t have the medical resources.
It’s somewhat of a nirvana to have absolutely everything
within a 15 minutes walk or cycle ride away.
But it’s nice to think about it again.
If you’re looking at a future I
want to live in, potentially that’s one.
Do I want to live in the matrix already?
Player one, probably not so much.
Going back to your lack of resources in
terms of medicine stuff, we mentioned about machines
and robots, the problem with aging society in
Japan, they invest heavily in building software and
hardware to sort this problem. Yeah.
And it’s intriguing that perception of robots in Japan
is very different to western perceptions of it.
I think it’s because they do have a massive
demographic issue in that they have a dwindling younger
workforce to help an increasing older population.
So robots are a possible answer.
So I don’t think there’s so much of the discussion in
the japanese press, although I did speak a little bit of
japanese at one point, but I can’t read it.
But I have no idea if they’re going.
Robots are taking our jobs, whereas the
press here tends to dwell somewhat on
the more negative aspect of that.
Again, they look at the
automation rather than the augmentation.
But, yeah, I think robots are.
They certainly do have some use, certainly in
some of those healthcare things where you simply
don’t have the resources to manage it.
It’s a way of managing a problem, but
it doesn’t necessarily replace the human, and they
fit it nicely with their concept of futuristic
robotic Japan versus the traditional one, so they
need to promote it heavily as well. Yeah.
Although I always say that the uncanny valley is
one of the big issues with those humanoid robots,
and I don’t think that’s been solved yet.
I still find them a bit creepy.
My ideal robot would be, again, going back to movies.
Baymax, I think, is one of my favorite in big hero six.
Not remotely humanoid, but is cute and cuddly and
apologizes a lot, and is empathetic to a certain
extent, that machines can be so japanese.
Well, actually, odly enough, it was
based on a manga cartoon.
It actually is a japanese vision of it.
But that’s more the robot I like.
I’m not sure I want any AI
to be human, because they’re obviously not.
And I think there’s a lot of research,
obviously, out in the human computer interaction field
around, should we make Bots or robots humanoid?
Probably not, because people, even if they
can’t necessarily tell now, certainly with the
generative AI, it’s quite convincing in terms
of the avatars we can generate.
There was a very fascinating study I
saw presented at Nudgetok this year.
It was saying, even if we can’t tell on a
conscious level, we can tell on an unconscious level.
And that means that our degree of trust
tends to drop, because we just go.
It’s kind of a cognitive uncanny valley, if you like.
We’re just going.
There’s something slightly off on this.
So I think, yeah, that’s an interesting
one around that uncanny valley piece.
So I always say, if you’re going to build an AI, don’t
make it human or don’t make it pretend to be a human.
Go the Baymax route.
It’s kind of cute, but it’s obviously not the.
Yeah, yeah.
Because there is lots of weird applications
as well in terms of software.
I’m sure you’ve heard of replica.
You can upload, maybe your member of the family who
is no longer here, and then communicate with them.
And some people also not.
Maybe not for those members, but they create some
avatars of their ex girlfriend, but make it in
a way that the girlfriend actually loves them.
It’s just like crazy, depending on where they.
It is crazy.
I mean, again, if you look at the psychology behind it.
We tend to anthropomorphize anything.
We anthropomorphize our cars because our brains
tend to interpret everything in human terms.
So if I can generate an anthropomorphic replica of
somebody who I’ve lost or someone I know, on
the surface it looks creepy, but you can see
psychologically why it kind of works.
But, yeah, it is a bit creepy.
It is.
How can we ensure the responsible use of technology
and just making sure that we still stay mentally
in the presence, not focusing on our thought and
time on something which doesn’t exist.
Again, it’s around.
Particularly with AI.
I think you do need that multidisciplinary
team, so those people singing in harmony,
coming out from different areas.
So you need technologists who
understand the technology, you need
psychologists that understand the interaction.
Just social scientists.
It doesn’t matter.
To help kind of understand that human component,
you need ethicists, definitely need ethicists to figure
out, we could build it, but should we?
Going back to Jurassic park on that one, isn’t it?
I think you do need a multidisciplinary team to look at
this, because there are so many things we could do with
this technology, but we do need to sort of step back
and say, firstly, does it pass the three use test?
So is it useful? Is it useful?
Am I likely to use it?
And then obviously, you do need people to
look at the wider business contexts and figure
out ethically and legally, where do we stand?
I think generative AI is one of those ones
that is pulling all of those questions up.
I was in a session the other day where a
lawyer actually asked everyone to contribute one word to a
story at the end when they generated the story.
She said, who owns the story?
Now, that’s a really interesting one from a generative AI
perspective, because you are pulling inspiration, or the AI is
basically using data from all sorts of sources and then
bringing it together, is that its ip?
And obviously that’s why we’ve got actors strikes
and writer strikes in Hollywood at the moment,
because that’s a really juicy question that needs
to be absolutely debated, because, again, it isn’t
necessarily about replacing the human.
I use generative AI a lot.
I use it to generate more ideas because it sometimes
comes up with stuff that I haven’t thought about.
And I can then jump off from that.
But typically, the content it generates for me at
the moment generally does need a lot of editing.
So it’s not a case of it does absolutely
everything for me, what it does is and you
see patterns, you see the words, it keeps reusing.
So there is even some kind of game I saw
on LinkedIn where people play guessing if the email has
been written by generative AI, because lots of people just
take spray and pray to the next level.
Yeah, you can usually tell for sure.
Yeah, I mean, there’s lots of debates.
I’m involved with a couple of universities
and there’s a big debate there around.
Obviously a lot of students are using generative
AI to generate essays, and I actually don’t
necessarily have a problem with that as long
as they have thought about it.
And if I can then ask them questions afterwards, take
them into a much more situation around, do they actually
understand this or have they just used the AI to
be lazy again, we like being lazy.
It’s the understanding that’s the important
bit, to be perfectly honest.
So that then puts pressure on educators to say, well, the
essay might not be the be all and end all here.
We might need to look at different ways
of assessing students so that, yeah, they can
use AI, but it’s their understanding of that.
And as I said, using it as a jump off point
rather than something that just writes your essay for you is
kind of how they’re going to be working in business.
So if you’re looking at education fueling skills that we
need in business, I suspect we’re all going to be
using generative AI because it is a useful tool.
It stops that blank sheet of paper syndrome, for a
start, it can stop you from reinventing the wheel by
reinventing the wheel effectively, but it can improve our productivity
and then enable us to do, as I said, hopefully
it takes away the boring and mundane stuff.
I’m an optimist, by the way.
It takes away the boring and mundane stuff and
allows us to, and actually allows us to do
the things that humans are good at.
And as I said, if it reduces our workload
as well, does that mean we can work less?
That is a very big question, because up until
now, to be perfectly frank and honest, technology has
intensified our work rather than necessarily taken it away.
So there is the anxiety that we end up just working
more and more if we become more productive using AI rather
than using that time to take a well deserved day off.
Yeah.
And I really like the concept of
personalization, which AI gives in education. Right?
Like, I remember I’m 35, so I still
had physical books I had to learn.
And some of the things were outdated, even though
every year you had to buy new, like, there
were new editions, but still things were outdated. Yeah.
So I just wonder how kids of even today
and kids of the future will consume knowledge and
learn to create, to formulate their own. Yeah.
It’s less about learning by rote.
It’s kind of learning how to apply that knowledge, which
again, I think is what makes us uniquely human.
There is a quote that was attributed to Albert
Einstein saying, if you actually glue together, it’s not
the exact quote, but if you glue together humans
and machines, actually, you could create something remarkable.
And that’s why I keep saying, I think my
focus in the future is very much around how
do we augment, how do we get humans and
machines together, because we do do very different things.
But how do we get the strengths of the
machine allied with the strengths of the human?
Because actually that’s the perfect
place to be the analogy.
Well, it’s not an analogy.
The example I tend to use is in the chess world.
So in the chess world particularly, I had the pleasure
of being at a conference with Gary Kasparov a couple
of years ago, who was infamously beaten by a machine.
But rather than giving up chess, he had
just invented a new way of doing chess.
So I think it’s called augmented chess,
but I might be wrong on that.
But basically it’s a person and a
machine playing a person in the machine.
And of course, then also the way that grandmasters train
now is not against other grandmasters, they train against the
AI, because the AI is the best player.
So it’s changed the whole dynamic around chess.
So rather than destroying the
game, it’s made it intriguing.
And I think that’s probably what we need to look
at in terms of the world of work as well.
It can change the game in terms of that augmentation
piece, and it can change how we train as well
by giving us the best and the most up to
date content that we can then jump off and create
stuff that we do when we’re unique to human.
Yeah, I saw this.
In a way, it’s related, this quote from somewhere, that
AI is not going to take your job, but the
manager or the person who uses AI will.
So I guess in the end we will end
up with who has the best train, best personalized
or fit to whatever the work they are doing.
Algorithms.
So they will be having advantage.
Yeah, absolutely.
Interesting.
Okay, let’s put your photologist hat again.
So I keep recalling the scene in matrix
where neon needs to pilot the plane, or
it was a helicopter, I don’t remember.
And he gets the skills of
piloting the plane loaded immediately.
I think people get joy of living and get
such a satisfaction from overcoming challenges and learning things.
So if such thing ever happened,
what would be left of living?
What would be left of sense of life?
Yeah, I mean, mastery is one of those big motivators.
Again, my phd was on the psychology of
motivation, largely so we know that mastery of
a task and curiosity, learning new stuff, is
actually something that does motivate us.
If it becomes as easy as just downloading
it, would it be quite as satisfying?
Well, it’s easy.
It would be lovely if I could have downloaded how
to play a ukulele and be able to play it.
I’m still not a master of the
ukulele, but I practice every day.
I’m getting better.
But it’s partially that practice that’s the fun bit.
You get annoyed, but then as you do it more and
more, you get to the point where you actually enjoy it.
Yeah.
And I think actually mastery is one of those interesting
ones around AI, because if it takes the simple stuff
away, the simple stuff is what we normally train on.
So if I don’t know how to do the
basics, I probably can’t master the rest of it.
And that’s, again, a big debate.
Even things like, well, flying a plane you can
do remotely, you don’t have to download anything.
So unlike Keanu, actually, there
are autopilots that do it.
The danger then is pilots forget how to
fly an aircraft and they’re the safety backup.
So actually, that industry now, pilots do have
to retrain very frequently on the basics.
They quite often do disengage the autopilot.
So they do actually do certain things manually, so they
remember how to do it, they refresh their skills.
So I think there is an interesting learning
capability there that we need to build in.
It disrupts education as well.
So I keep saying that our sort
of linear way of thinking about education,
then work, then retirement is completely disrupted.
Actually, Linda Gratton at London Business school
has done some fabulous research on this.
But if we’re having our skills sort of either
taken away by machines or we need to refresh
those skills continuously, that means that we have to
educate ourselves continuously as well, rather than front load
education into our young years.
And that’s got a profound implication on, well,
universities and employers as to how do we
educate older people throughout their career, people that
might not be retiring either.
That’s one of the more depressing things that if we
live longer, we’re probably going to have to work longer
and our skills are more likely to get automated.
I guess out.
So yeah, there are a lot
of implications on the education system.
I always say the future of work
and the future education are completely entangled.
To your point about living longer.
You’ve heard of the guy in America, Brian Johnson.
Johnson James from a blueprint.
So his aim is not to die, but his objective
is to live up to, I think, 200 years.
Would you want that?
Again, we looked at science fiction, a lot of
even films or novels that are about longer lives.
Whether you’re a superhero or
whatever, often is miserable. It depends.
I mean, if you’re living to 200 and all your
friends are dying at 70 because they can’t afford all
of the things that you’ve done to replace your blood
and all sorts of things, then you replicate them and
then you have them somewhere on the cloud, forgotten.
Yeah, you just download them to the
cloud and their company for you.
Yeah, I’m not sure.
Again, back in my deep futurology days, there
were quite a lot of discussions around what
would happen if we could make death die.
There are lots of quite negative implications
for that as well as some positive.
But yeah, I’m not sure.
But we do live longer. We are.
Although Covid took the figures down a bit, sadly.
So longevity has gone down by a few years globally.
But whether that will continue, I don’t know.
It depends how long Covid is going
to be around, to be perfectly honest.
Or whether we get a wave of something else coming in.
But yeah, we’re not living. We are optimist.
I’m an optimist.
Okay.
And I forgot you also have something in common.
Like we have something in common.
I train karate and I know
that you’re a qualified judo coach.
I am, yeah, absolutely. Yes.
Again, that’s something I haven’t done for a while.
But yeah, I was very into judo. Wow.
How many years have you trained?
I trained from about the age of 18.
I gave it up when I was about 32,
but my body was destroyed, as many judoka find.
So I definitely have terrible fingers.
They’re all bent and shoulders and knees now.
So I gave up.
The latter years were coaching, but then my job got.
I was in a global post at that point.
So it was very difficult to keep the
training up to get all the coaching qualifications.
So sadly I had to give judo up. But I still go and watch
it whenever I get the opportunity.
And the basics, like the foundations of
what martial arts teach us is the
discipline, respect and helping others.
You still have it within yourself.
Yeah, I think I’ve always called judo human chess.
So it’s a really good mental discipline
as well as a physical one.
Also, I used to teach kids as well,
and you just see some kids who are.
There was one that he was heading towards a
bad pathway and he took up judo, and there
was a discipline there that hadn’t been there before.
And he started to even just achieve
things at school that he didn’t before.
And you could just see the transformative nature of.
I mean, judo, strictly speaking, isn’t
a martial art, it’s a sport.
But obviously its roots are jiu jitsu, but
all of those things, that solid foundation, I
think, is a good rule for life.
But, yeah, it’s also very tactical, as you know.
And also the one thing I love, I’m very small.
I’m only five foot three.
I always say that’s about the only sport where
there is a huge advantage of being incredibly small.
Yeah.
No one expects that you can beat them up.
You’ve got a low center of
gravity, which is an advantage in.
Okay, okay. Yeah.
And to your point, I saw lots
of great initiatives around in Brazil, rural
places or disadvantaged places in Brazil.
Teaching kids jiu jitsu
absolutely changes their future. It does indeed. Yeah.
I think that’s a really positive thing about
a lot of sport, to be honest.
But martial arts in particular. Yeah.
When do you find time for the older things?
I don’t with judo anymore, sadly.
But, yeah, no, I have
other movies, movies playing, singing. It’s amazing.
It’s amazing.
You are inspiration to all this. Thank you.
Okay, last question, because I know that
we are run out of time.
So what advice would you give to companies,
but also individuals who aim to bridge gap
between tech and human centric experiences?
What would you tell them or
advise them to make it easier?
Think about the customer, think about
the user, and ask those questions. As I said earlier.
Is it useful? Is it usable?
Who else is going to use it?
Because those are just fundamental things
that do need to be answered.
And I think, again, technologists are brilliant and they
invent some very clever stuff that will never, ever
be used, not now, in the future.
There is sometimes, I mean, I’ve worked on a
lot of technologies that really were way before their
time and not ready to be adopted.
And that is a question as well.
It might be that it might never get adopted.
Actually, some of those technologies that I
worked on 2025 years ago are now.
Video was one of them, actually
are part of our everyday lives.
That one, to be honest, always looked promising.
It was always the next big thing.
It was always just about to take off.
And to be honest, it was starting to,
prior to the pandemic, that, as we know,
the pandemic changed everything on that particular one.
And that’s probably one of the technologies that we’ve
seen the most acceleration on via the pandemic.
Now, obviously, we end up spending hours and hours
on back to back video calls, which is not
necessarily a good thing, to be honest.
Again, cognitive load, tiredness, all of that stuff.
Our problem often is we just lift
the analog into the digital without thinking.
Should we do it?
It’s not to say video calls
are bad, because they are incredible.
Back to back ones are not so good, though,
because our brains are not built to do video
calls all day and in a frictionless environment, that’s
often what we were doing, particularly during lockdowns.
I used to joke that I used to have a perpetual,
when I woke up, I’d have a perpetual sense of Zoom.
But obviously other platforms are available.
But, yeah, that’s another big point of
discussion that we probably shouldn’t go into.
But I have got a paper out on meetings, so if anyone
wants to read it, they are most welcome to ping me.
Okay, yeah, please do share the link. Okay.
Less video calls.
Well, potentially, yeah.
I think we need to question meetings and
whether this should be a meeting and video.
Again, it’s a great tool, and I certainly
have spent quite a lot of my time
today on video, and it’s been very productive.
So it’s a case, if it’s productive and it’s good.
Brilliant. Yeah.
Everything in moderation.
Absolutely right.
Nicola, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. Thank you.
