Our Chief Strategy Officer, Michael Wyrley-Birch, had the following four takeouts from the Gartner Digital Workplace Summit in London.
EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES
Companies are now taking the historic IT priorities of access, connectivity and security as a giving and now creating digital workplaces that empower employees to explore new technologies and AI tools to superpower their performance and work in new ways.
And this approach requires a culture shift. A culture of innovation and learning what is possible. This cannot be done by IT alone, but in partnership with stakeholders around the business who recognise the opportunities that technology can bring to enhance the way they collaborate, learning and transfer knowledge. It’s far more than just achieving efficiency. Research has proven that less than 50% of saved time is put back into productive work. The biggest gains in technology is to make us more innovative and smarter, not just faster.
ROE NOT ROI
Often the best technologies cannot not be initially assessed in terms of ROI. By definition, if it’s a true innovation the real data does not exist yet. Rather consider Return on Employment (ROE). For example, Gartner Analyst Matt Cain tells a story when we he was asked to calculate ROI on email when first introduced. This involved calculating cost of the mail room, postage, internal mail, fax etc. They could not find a way to calculate a positive ROI! The assumption was that they could not stop the others and email was just an extra cost and complication! And where would we be today without email! We are in a similar position with Generative AI (Gen AI). Expectation are really high and all ROI calculations are based on assumptions and forecasts.
GEN AI IS ABOUT TO DISSAPPOINT
Gen AI has hyped it up to be almost the answer to everything. The magic wand that will enable us to sit back while it does all our work in the blink of an eye. It's at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle.
However, people are now discovering that it’s not always accurate and and instead it will give you a "grammatically perfect wrong answer". Like all great innovations it's always going to drop from the highest point of “hype” into the trough of disillusionment.
The good news is that it is forecast to build back up and settle into normal life very quickly as it improves at and exponential rate and most importantly we learn how to use it. Gen AI is not this over arching umbrella that will control our live, but instead a series of smart tools that super power our individual performance.
IT'S OK TO FAIL
It's OK to fail! For example, it’s been often found that the highest performing teams also fail the most. Their high performance is based on the learnings from their failure.
Rather than running highly controlled pilots, recruit the enthusiasts around the businesses and just start doing!! They will fail and learn fast and give you the insights to build better solutions.
