London calling

Find out what happened when we sent four budding reporters obsessed with the world of technology to London’s premier tech event.

On a sunny Wednesday in June, we sent four budding tech lovers from across the business to London Tech Week’s headline exhibition and conference event TechXLR8. They were tasked with exploring the future and reporting back on our Disrupt Workplace feed.

The team of roving reporters discovered that the future’s not some far off place. It’s tomorrow, next week, next month. The majority of XLR8 exhibitors talked only as far off as 2023 or 2030. That’s only 5 years or 12 years from now - not that far off. Uber plans to bring us air ride-sharing by 2023…what does your 5 year plan look like?

The team explored how digital transformation is changing how business gets done and learned about the latest innovations in the worlds of AI, Virtual and Augmented Reality (a big focus for the event) from the likes of Microsoft, BMW, McLaren, and Pokémon among others.

PBB’s Fax Siraj, shared how National Bank of Oman is using AR technology to help customers locate the nearest ATM, and find deals on the high street - while BNP Paribas is piloting a Virtual Reality branch where clients can access their accounts, review spending and even purchase a property virtually.

While Audit’s Alex Crossland got lost in the theory of continual feedback loops, and the importance of embedding learning opportunities for AI in each customer touchpoint within a company. Alex learned how Apple uses continual feedback loops in their AI to constantly capture dialog, customer reactions, sentiment, and feedback to improve conversations – as well as the importance of a human handoff for times that AI hasn’t quite learned how to deal (yet).

Meanwhile Gemma Uniacke and Tessa Taylor from our Learning & Development team spent much of their time in the AI summit, exploring how our interactions with AI teach and train it, but also how we are shaped by these experiences. This led to questions around why so many of our AI assistants are female, and perhaps more importantly why only 17% the UK’s AI specialists are themselves female. And what are we doing about it?

Our reporters shared lots of posts and video clips for XLR8 on the Disrupt Workplace group giving more detail on the themes and questions coming out of the day.

If you’d like to get involved in a future disruptive field trip get in touch with the Disrupt team today.