Technology is a disrupter and will have a profound effect on the job market, but humans are still so much better at caring, negotiating, empathising, innovating and creating. These attributes will continue to outstrip the machine, and will become the most valuable skills.
This is the vision of the renowned futurologist Nicola Millard, who is head of customer insight and futures at BT. She has been closely following the development of artificial intelligence technologies such as speech recognition and machine vision, and believes that while they have come on leaps and bounds, machines won’t be making humans completely redundant just yet.
Millard was speaking at the launch of BT’s new innovation website, the 7th Network, which shares forward-looking insight on the future of technology and communications from BT and guest experts. Her work focuses on understanding emerging trends in order to aid the innovation process, and recently this included conducting research on how customers want to communicate with brands. Perhaps surprisingly, she found that along with web chat, the phone is still one of the most popular ways of engaging.
“The phone is very accessible and we trust it,” says Millard. “We are naturally lazy as customers – 88% say they’ll stick with a company if they make it easy. If you think of a park, there are often wonderfully constructed paths around the sides and then muddy ones through the middle because that’s the quickest route. The question for us is how do we design ‘easy’?“
BT’s 7th Network complements the six sections at the Science Museum’s new Information Age gallery. BT is lead principal sponsor for the gallery, and donated 80 of the 800 objects on display, including the Rugby Tuning Coil. This amazing, almost sculptural, piece is six metres high and was the world’s most powerful transmitter when it came into service in 1926, making it possible for Britain to transmit messages to the British Empire and ships on all seas for the first time.
Sandeep Raithatha, BT’s head of innovation central, talked at the event about how the coil is just one component of BT’s own history. Formed back in 1846 as the Electrical Telegraph Company, BT is now the UK’s third largest investor in research and development, and has over 14,000 technologists and scientists worldwide.
Raithatha’s team at BT moulds raw ideas into fully fledged business plans. As part of this process, he has a team of technology scouts working worldwide to find the best new innovations and help make them a reality. Many of these innovators regularly submit ideas in the hope of receiving a maximum reward of £30,000 from BT Infinity Labs.
Asked what the secret is to being a successful innovator, Raithatha offers a simple prescription. “Often it is about thinking in different ways. Perhaps there’s something you’ve seen someone else do and could combine it with what you’re doing in your own job.”
Meanwhile, Millard says that a great product should fulfil “the three U’s test”. “Firstly, is it useful – is it going to change my life in some way, or make it easier,” she explains. “Secondly, is it usable – is it easy to use, perhaps with the kind of pioneering design that Apple came up with for the iPhone.
“And finally, is it used – we are seeing a lot of older people getting iPads now because their friends have got one, and that peer adoption effect can be crucial in increasing a product’s popularity.”
Combine these three elements, and tomorrow’s innovators could find themselves with the next product that changes our lives and the world for the better.
- More on the future of communications and technology at www.bt.com/7thnetwork
Content on this page is paid for and provided by BT, sponsor of the technology and innovation hub.
