Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing is the latest in a series of technological developments that have affected the value of human ability. Graeme Codrington discusses the development in this video.

Computers have the advantage

About 100 years ago if you wanted to be quite successful in the world it would have been very clever for you to be quite physically fit. Because in the industrial age, as before that in the agrarian age, in the age of farming the people who either owned the land or owned the factories or worked on the land or worked in the factories, they were the people who were in charge. Those were your assets, physical ability. What we’ve done over the last 100 years is replaced peoples’ physical, the physical needs in terms of what we need from them physically with machines, you know, the combined harvester and the container and the robots in factories. And then for the last 50 years we have ploughed our resources, as human beings we’ve become clever by being clever. We have moved into the information age where your mental ability is what sets you apart from other people. Now, somebody who was gifted at birth, not by my choice, but was gifted with a reasonable intelligence and a nice IQ and a middle class family that could get me through university, that’s been brilliant. Because I’ve been able to use my brain to make money, but unfortunately right now computers are about to do to me what robots and machines did to my farm working, factory working uncles and grandparents. They’re about to make me redundant because they can think faster than I can. They can think more than I can. They don’t need to take a break to eat or sleep or all the other things I like to do. Inside Finance TV has more fantastic video by Graeme Codrington and other experts on the future of business.

Business strategy models have to adaptable to future disruptions and developments. In this TV show Keith Coats of TomorrowToday discusses strategic thinking for leaders.

Business strategy models in an unpredictable world

Leaders have to be future-focused. Levi right now have a great slogan, which says ‘the future has left, so go forth’. Jim Data is a retired futurist and he articulated that past thinking amongst futurists was something like this … I might have some of the percentages slightly wrong but the rough ratios is 80% of our tomorrows would be built on what futurists call continuations, so if you want to understand tomorrow, look at the DNA of today, 80%. 15% would be cycles – economic, political social cycles – and 5% would be novelties. Now, in the futurist language a novelty is the curve ball, the unexpected, the 9/11, the thing that very few people could foresee. I’ll preface that with past thinking. Current thinking amongst futurists has inverted that table, turned it on its head. They are telling us that up to 80% of our tomorrow is what they call novelty, we simply do not know. Now, even if they’re half correct I wouldn’t go to war over those percentages, it’s the trend here we’re looking at, that the bulk of our tomorrows is going to be a surprise, going to be the unexpected, the unpredictable. The question then becomes how do you build continuity in that? What does the organisation that learns how to build planes in the air, as it were, look like in that context? For one thing it renders redundant strategic planning, you cannot plan your way into that kind of uncertainty. We need companies today who understand the emphasis needs to be on strategic thinking and at all levels of the organisation, this is a leadership agenda.

Inside Finance is very interested in business strategy models and the future business world. Browse our video player for related content.

Business innovation skills need to be harnessed in the right environment. In this TV show Simon La Fosse discusses government helping entrepreneurs grow.

Entrepreneurial business innovation skills are valuable

The heat you see on the west coast of America that is leading to massive salary inflation and people moving all too frequently to try to be able to build these businesses, mean that you’re seeing west coast US businesses saying “We should be setting up in, not setting up a peripheral business in London but maybe we should be setting up in London”.  The same with some of the Nordic countries, so there’s some really exciting stuff happening, that I think has proper momentum and, you know, I’m not a great fan of government intervention, I don’t know whether you call it government intervention or just enabling things to happen, but I think they should be credited with creating an environment that is much more conducive to the growth of entrepreneurialism in a time in our lives which is so exciting, this is, you know, akin to the industrial revolution, it’s just the digital revolution, and I feel lucky to be a part of it and I’m hanging on, I’m trying to keep up with what’s going on.

Inside Finance will continue to produce great TV shows about entrepreneurial business and business innovation skills.

 

Disruptive innovation is well known to have had an huge impact in the music industry. In this TV show Graeme Codrington discusses what happened and how other industries can learn a lesson from it.

Disruptive innovation in music

The best examples of structural change are those industries that we can already see have been impacted by the digital revolution.  Your best examples there come out of the entertainment industries.  So music for example, is an industry that just is in chaos at the moment, I mean they don’t know how to make money anymore, they don’t know where their income streams come from.  They’re the only industry in the world who are currently suing their own clients, you know it’s crazy.  But they really don’t know how to make money at the moment.  And we’re going to see a lot more chaos in the music industry because they’re not innovating, they’re not working out new ways of getting income, they’re not working out new ways of connecting with clients.  And of course because of how they’ve handled themselves over the last decade or so, most of their customers are very comfortable ripping them off and downloading stuff for free and so on.  So it’s a mess.  But it’s easy to look at that industry and of course DVDs and the movies industry are following close behind them and close behind them are the newspapers and the magazines.  And it’s easy to laugh at them, but every other industry has the potential to be digitised in pretty much the same way.  So even the medical profession which you’d think, well, that’s not going to really going to be digitised, it can be done at a digital distance.  The type of advice you get from your general practitioner, you can get via Skype from anyone in a call centre anywhere.  You might not prefer it that way, but it is accessible that way.  And so you think of any industry you like and this digitisation has the potential to disrupt your industry as much as it has disrupted the entertainment industry in the last decade.

Inside finance will continue to follow the impacts of disruptive innovation and the discussions around it. We have more great shows from Graeme Codrington.

Digital generation, digital natives and generation Y are all references to the young people who have grown up with technology. They are now reaching the age where they are entering industry. Graeme Codrington discusses the significance of this.

The digital generation born at the same time as the internet

Technology is obviously a huge driver of change in our world. Recent advances in computing power have really brought computers up to a level where they can now deliver on what our imaginations have been promising for a few decades, and it really just is in the last literally 18 - 24 months that computing power speed size and price have all come together to mean we can really do what we want to do with computers and now we are set up for the next decade of change, but in addition to the raw computing power, it's also the people, we have got a group of people we like to call digital natives who are entering the world of work, these are the young people that were born in that remarkable year of change 1989, the year communism died and the Berlin wall came and Tiananmen Square happened. But also 1989 was the year the internet as we know it was started. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and web pages where born, and young people who were born in 1989 were born in the same year that the internet was born and started working for you last year, and they've brought their computers with them, and so it's this combination of computing power and a new generation of digital natives arriving in the workplace at precisely the same time, its going to cause huge disruptive change.

Inside Finance TV will continue to follow the impact of the digital generation entering the world of work.

The digital generation are entering the workplace. In this TV show, futurist Graeme Codrington considers their impact.

Digital Generation in every industry

In every industry in the world technology, the power of technology and this new generation of young people who use the technology in such different ways are gonna come into these industries and blow these industries apart. I really do believe that we're only just at the beginning of realising what this digital age will mean for us, and that's everything from the automotive industry to the pharmaceuticals from supply chains and logistics, to manufacturing to financial services and everything else in between. And so industries need at look at where technology is going to take them in the next few years.

Inside Finance will continue to discuss the digital generation.

Using new technology may seem like a business risk but, as Martha Lane Fox discusses in this TV show, it is a risk not to.

Business risk - Getting left behind

It’s not that If you don’t get online or use the technologies immediately then ‘this’ will happen. I don’t think it’s quite like that, I think its a long term systemic problem. You will just be left behind because you will be operating in a world that’s just not as modern as other people. So you won’t be taking advantage, both of new cost space that you can have by using technology better, but also the new markets that you can reach. So I don’t necessarily think that you’ll fall of a cliff today or tomorrow. But over time I just don’t think you’ll be able to be competitive.   Keep an eye on Inside Finance TV if you are interesting in hearing more about business risk.  

Social media policy should extend outside the marketing department, as Bob Barker explains in this TV show.

Social media policy - Companies need to leverage their employees.

So companies are just waking up to the fact that they need to leverage their employees.

There’s a terminology that says marketing is far too important to be left to the marketing department, and that is the terminology that’s becoming true now with social media.

So if you just do push only marketing you’re not you know, you’re back to your 2% response or less, or if you’ve just got that mind-set that is, it works but it’s not terribly efficient and people don’t trust that marketing anymore.

So what companies are beginning to realise is that the that sales people and individuals in the company represent a really good way of getting their content out there, the important content that people need to engage with, particularly in the business to business area.

And so people are beginning to realise that if their sales people and their key executives aren’t good online they need to do something about that because if they haven’t got.  For example, if they’ve got ten people on LinkedIn and they’ve got no picture of them.

They  may be brilliant, but anyone of a younger generation is gonna look them up and think well, I don’t want anything to do with them. They obviously don’t understand this new world.

So there’s the companies beginning to realise that. LinkedIn has gained huge momentum the last few years as a defacto platform for people connecting in business.

So companies are beginning to realise the power of LinkedIn, companies are beginning to realise the power of content and getting people to share that content through social channels.

And it’s very important that individuals are used to share that content. It’s much more easy these days.

You’ve got these share buttons on the bottom of all the content. But even people knowing that they can just click on that content and it will share it, people generally don’t know that.

So there is a big opportunity to educate people who haven’t had that education because nobody told you how to use a PC, nobody told you how to use social media to get that education and help the firm do its marketing.

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Inside Finance will have more TV shows about social media policy, usage and trends. Why not bookmark the page?

Technology infrastructure is something all businesses should consider updating. In this TV show Nigel Huddleston explains that investment into digital technology isn't that expensive.

Technology infrastructure to fit a digital world

One of the key things is, is experiment. That’s one of the messages that I have to many players in the sector at the moment. It doesn’t cost a fortune to experiment with a YouTube channel or a Google Plus or indeed any social platform. It doesn’t cost a fortune to try out maybe new mobile devices, what the look and feel of your mobile site is, and invest in mobile optimised sites. These things are not massive in terms of the expenditure compared to say refurbishing a hotel. Yet there has historically been a reluctance on the side of many to invest in it. I would say given today’s consumer is incredibly connected, it’s really important to be very technologically aware and make sure that what the users are doing in terms of their behaviour is at the absolute heart of your strategy and your IT investment decisions. And if it’s not you’re probably going to fall behind.

If you enjoyed this video and want to hear more about investing in technology infrastructure, please browse more TV shows on Inside Finance.

The Digital world allows business to connect with their customers more easily than ever before. Charlie Mullins discusses online feedback.

Digital world increases praise for business

As far as the networks and the internet is going and social gatherings on that. It's very important as word of mouth is what makes a successful business. What we are finding with the internet is we can get feedback from customers that is normally quite positive. Other customers can look at it. The fact that we can interchange all these ideas with people. I have had many people here today say they use the company. People are more inclined now to praise successful businesses. The culture's changing and people in bad times are more appreciative of good business and the more people that are prepared to write about them, especially with the simplicity things of the internet. So for us it has been a wonderful thing.  

If you enjoyed this video about the digital world and online feedback, please browse more TV shows on Inside Finance.

The digital economy has changed the way we do business and the way companies work with each other. In this video Julie Meyer explains why she thinks we now live in a digital ecosystem.

Digital economy is an ecosystem

I do think that in the way that we used to refer to verticals we’re going to be referring to ecosystems in the future. So, we used to refer to maybe healthcare as a vertical and now I think of digital health as an ecosystem. I think it just means that these are multi-dimensional markets and that you can’t think of it in the same way. And you have to look at how the digital enablers or start-ups are interacting with the corporates and the process whereby you value any business and the transactions that will get done, whether the funding’s or the acquisitions,  is going to take on that network shape. We won’t just look at it and we won’t, I think, attribute so much value to the Goliaths’. I think there will be, you know, in those five phases of company growth, the companies that get acquired early for big amounts, like Skype in September 05, why does a company that’s in phase two going into phase three get acquired for 2.5 billion? It’s because the strategic value to the acquirer was so high. Why does a company like Beat That Quote which had £250,000 of EBITDA get acquired by Google for 37.7 million? It’s because the strategic value is disproportionately high compared to where they are in those five phases of company growth. There's a set of structures which have become fairly normalised at this point whereby we will analyse what’s going on in the market. And I think that we’ll have to assess – we won’t look at markets in the same way, we have new tools to look at that. And those kind of David and Goliath model five phases of company growth, ecosystem economics, I think these are the ways. I mean, we’ve been looking at this for a very long time and we’re quite convinced now that our set of glasses kind of works. It doesn’t mean that we won’t, you know, explore and develop and understand better and make some mistakes, etc. But we really do… we, we, you know, we had the epiphanies, we looked for the exceptions, we found the patterns and we really do think we have the correct set of glasses.  

Inside Finance will continue to follow ideas about the digital economy and will have more videos from Julie Meyer.

 

Artificial intelligence in the future might replace professionals, as technology could automate the procedures which workers currently follow. Graeme Codrington gives his view in this TV show.

Artificial intelligence in the future - The GP

Take your local GP. You to to your GP you've got something that you feel is really wrong with you, pain down the side of your body. You go in to the GP and the GP follows a very strict diagnostic pattern. In fact you'd be upset if they didn't follow the medical practices as laid out by the Medical Council of your country. Once they've got a diagnosis based on that very strict process, they then probably turn to their computers and go on to netdoctor.com just to double check and make sure they've got the latest information because just like you, your doctor only had to get 50% to pass at university, and I don't know if you have ever thought about that, about which 50% you're happy your doctor doesn't know. So you are actually very comfortable that they go the internet to find that extra information. and then of course they send you off to a lab for tests, and at the lab is just a machine that takes your blood, everything is automated. So even one of the most intimate of professions, the doctor, is easily replaced. Just like the investment banker. this is happening and is going to continue to happen over the next decade. It's almost every profession from accountants and lawyers, who I think will be the first to go, all the way through to medical doctors and everything in between could easily be replaced by technology. ________________________________________________________________ Inside Finance TV will continue to discuss artificial intelligence and the future world of work. Look out for more from Graeme Codrington.

Digital technology could replace almost any business service. In this TV show Graeme Codrington asks what you can offer that computers can't.

Competing with digital technology

Something that people have known a long time with digital technology is that it is going to dis-intermediate. It's going to take out the people who sit in the middle of all sorts of services, and ofcourse the previous economy was all about services, it was about people who sat in the middle, who were able to take information and match you with that necessary information. But Google and Bing and others have really shown us that you can take those people out and put a system, a computer, in the middle. And that really is the big news for the next ten years, that almost any agency, almost any business service, almost anything that could be done at a digital distance, can also be done on the basis of an algorithm. Sure a complex algorithm, sure something that takes in to account thousands of different variables and emotional factors as well, but there is absolutely no reason why those have to be done by human beings, and every single business service, every single agency, needs to be thinking, 'What can we offer that computers can't, what can we do that computers can't do?' And don't fool yourselves to thinking its a long list. We're going to have to find ways to get, its not about being smarter than computers, because you can't do that. It's not about being faster than computers, because you can't do that either. so what is it? What is it for you? __________________________________________________________ If you enjoyed this video about competing with digital technology, why not watch more interviews and briefings on Inside Finance TV

Progressive technology has allowed people to stay connected wherever they are. Stuff TV's Lucy Hedges discusses the Tablet.

Progressive technology from Apple

Well lets think about 5 or 6 years ago. Smart phones were good but they weren't incredible, which is what you're seeing now. Tablet was almost a foreign term. We had PDAs, we had Netbooks, so miniature laptops, but we didn't necessarily have this rectangle. This little slate that we can fling in our bags its effortless use, its effortless to carry around. That's what we've got now. We've progressed to a level, mainly bolstered by Apple and the iPad. Its completely carved out an entirely new category that's enabling us to get the most out of consumption on the move, be it retail, multimedia, general information or work based stuff. It's allowing us to, with a simple tap and a swipe, have access to online tools, emails and web-browsing. It's great for productivity. There's so much you can do now, and that's partly or mainly down to all of these new gadgets. _______________________________________________________________________________________Progressive technology and digital connectivity have huge implications for business and Inside Finance TV will continue to follow the effects.

Analysing data from sales can be the first step in further research and, as John Halpin discusses in this TV show, this can be done using digital technology.

Analysing data and customer feedback

Well in terms of, you know, myself at the bank, we’ve got a lot of products and we launch products, products what people know, like mortgages for example, and we’re going to be launching that. And we’ve got general insurance products and savings products and credit cards. People know about that. But in terms of maybe the next product or enhancement of the product, it’s quite interesting. You can use some of the data in terms of, you know, what do people think? So that moves what I do into more of a research, so with the colleagues that I deal with in terms of, well let’s speak to these people. Let’s create a piece of research based on their cross product holding or what they have now. If someone’s recently bought travel insurance, for example, from the organisation and I might want to tweak that product. I might want to offer it slightly different. I will speak to the person, find out what was his customer journey like, what would he think if he bought that again, maybe at a higher price but different features? So you can use this kind of information that’s held within a marketing database to drive that. And that will help in sort of the product insight. So it’s linking some of that with some of the other research that you can get widely available from the research agencies in the UK. But talking to your customers and again, back to channels and the power of what we do I mean traditionally you could commission a piece of research. You can go outside into a shopping centre and ask people. You can phone people up. But you know, nowadays email, internet, social media again, these channels can potentially be used. And that helps back more to another point you recently made about how quick you can do that. So if you know someone bought a product as of yesterday, how impressive would it be if that company got back to you and actually said to you, “Well how was your customer journey? How do you think?" You bought this product. They actually tell you what product that they bought. And then do that within a week back to your buyer, that’s quite impressive. You know, and it sounds relatively straightforward, and companies should be doing that. But again, because of technology and systems and integration and that kind of thing, not a lot of companies can do that. ______________________________________________________________________ Analysing data is just one of the subjects covered on Inside Finance TV.

The age of big data is a new and exciting time for business. In this TV show John Halpin shares his thoughts and experiences of data.

The age of big data creates unknown territory

Big data is basically saying, it’s not just all about big brands and big systems and the back office of big head offices, it’s about social media and Facebook and online and Twitter and that’s all data. It’s about blogs.  It’s about, videos.  It’s about news. It’s all this information being captured somewhere.  How can you use that from a company perspective? And the answer is, we don’t really quite know.  It’s very new. Rather than get quite excited about big data and all this additional information and terabytes of new data going into organisations, and basically being quite pleased with yourself that you’ve actually got it.  To me, it’s just like well, there’s always been lots of data. I’ve been involved in lots of data for many years.  It’s how you have it and use it.  If I was going down the route of beginning, doing something in data, rather than get quite excited about big data and how it’s used and how it’s interact. First of all, understand your customers, know what they are, have the information on them.  Can you speak to them? There’s laws in this country about, speaking to customers.  You might have all the information, you’ve got to legally be able to speak to them and say, if your customers are a prospect, all that kind of thing. There’s regulation around the financial services, which is even tighter as well.  But big data is quite exciting in terms of a phrase I used before, is dealing with the fact. If I can prove something on the data that I have now, it helps me very much to go back to my directors or people who are on the budgets and say, “Right, to move us into the realms of big data and transactional behavioural information via social media, I’ll need some software to do that. I’ll need some money.  And the reason why I need money, because I’ve just proved something with you with the data I have already. The age of big data is another exciting aspect of the connected economy. We will continue to bring you expert insight into the impact of social media and digital innovations.

Digital innovation is what Robert Scoble spends his time studying. So much time that he has been called the Roger Federer of the Internet. He discusses his work in this Inside Finance TV show.

The digital innovation game

So if you want to understand what’s going to happen to your business you’d better understand the innovators who are changing your business. Rackspace pays me to go study the future so I visit lots of different companies, mostly start-ups because that’s mostly where the innovation is. For instance the reason I was wearing these ugly airwave goggles is inside here is a little wearable computer and it tells you when you’re skiing it tells you how fast you’re going, it shows you where your kids are on the mountain and where you are on the mountain and all sorts of fun stuff. So I’ve interviewed the start-up that makes the compute package in here, Recon Instruments, and I also interviewed Oakley about these and then I go over and talk to Google about Google Glass and talk to lots of start-ups that you’ve never heard of about what’s coming. That’s different, it’s no longer the kind of software Bill Gates wrote for Windows and this is a new era where we know who you’re with, where you are, what your intent is and what’s on your calendar and what have you bought? They have to be scared they’re going to be put out of business. Paranoid. Andy Grove at Intel said ‘only the paranoid survive’, you’d better be paranoid. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Digital innovation has huge implications for all businesses, keep watching Inside Finance to hear more.

Social trends are a new issue for corporate businesses. John Halpin discusses how corporate organizations might become social and take advantage of our increasingly connected economy.

Social trends in business - The paradox

The real paradox for me are the interesting elements of that, how you link that into a business. And I don’t think anyone’s quite worked that one out in terms of social media conversations, it’s basically people speaking to each other about anything. So where does the big blue business come into that? Where does the brand advocacy come into that? You might see people twittering like, oh, I like Tesco Bank because this product’s great, it’s quite interesting. But does that mean they’re advocate, they’re loyal, can we sell them something else? How can we use that piece of information? I don’t quite know. And you don’t see a lot of advertising at all within the social media space because it’s peoples’ downtime. They’re not really in work, it’s that kind of thing. So I think a lot of organisations, they understand that it’s interesting, big data again, having this information, the linking it, using it. You can see some trends in there, you know. You have to be on the ball as well because they can spiral in terms of a viral, completely snowball in terms of if someone doesn’t like you and they tell a lot of other people they don’t like you. There’s going to be a lot of text coming in to say there’s thousands of people that have read that message. But how you use that in terms of sort of selling stuff or in terms of trade, I think it’s quite difficult. It just might be sort of a monitoring exercise and trying your best to interact with those customers. ______________________________________________________________________ Inside Finance TV will continue to follow ideas about social trends in business and we have more videos from John Halpin.

Digital retail is the future, and retailers have to embrace it says Henderson's Alice Breheny in this Inside Finance TV interview.

Digital retail or decline

Oh, I mean the ramifications, it’s terrible really, I mean I think, you know, if you don’t embrace it then you know, you’re on a slippery slope really into decline, whether you’re a retailer or a property owner.

I think you can defend yourself against it and keep your head above water.

But those that are going to thrive are those that really embrace it and seek every opportunity to exploit it.

But you know, we certainly see locations becoming unviable eventually, you know, there’ll be very little reason for people to visit them.

Retailers that, if they don’t up their game, you know, the competition out there is really fierce at the moment and certain asset types that just won’t be relevant in the future.

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Inside Finance will continue to look at digital retail and the affects of digital technology on other industries.

The digital economy creates a lot of unstructured data. In this TV show Nigel Huddleston discusses the challenge of making it relevant to your business.

Using big data in the digital economy

There’s a real hot topic around big data and it means lots of different things to different people.

But I think the key is, is finding an intelligent way to make this massive confusing information relevant to what you’re looking at.

I think in the hospitality sector again, one of the key things is, is bringing in data from third parties and your own data in a meaningful way

So integrating things like your loyalty programmes with search behaviour, you know, who’s looking for what hotels in which cities and at what times and from what devices, and being able to track that with your own data.

And bring all of these bits of information together so that you can both serve the user but also carry out transactions and push information to the user in a meaningful way.

It’s very confusing.  There’s lots of companies out there trying to help with this at the moment.

It’s early stages but it’s very, very important to the industry.

Inside Finance TV is following discussions about the digital economy - Look out for more from Nigel Huddleston

We live in a connected economy, but businesses should ask permission to use consumer data, as Nigel Huddleston explains in today's TV show.

Our connected economy creates vast data fields

One of the things with data is what we use with it, both as Google, but also as a provider or a supplier of holidays, content hotels.

That one of the key things with data is to make sure that it’s permission based, so that you’re using information the way that the user allows you to use.

 And that means that the onus is on you to make sure that if you’re using that data then it’s useful to the consumer so that you’re using it in a way that’s going to be helpful to them.

 So if you’re checking into a hotel or about to arrive at a hotel and maybe they’re kind of following you from the airport and can see through mobile that you’re on their way. As long as you give permission.

They know that you’re ready to check-in, that they know what room type that you prefer, they know what you like in your room in terms of flowers or drinks in the bar, all of those things are potentially useful, but only with the user’s permission.

But again, early stages there, there’s lots of exciting things going on in using user information.

I think it’s very early stages in this big data field.  I would say we’re probably two out of ten in terms of where we can go with this.

And who knows where it’s going to go, you know, it’s almost as if it’s the early stages of the dot com era again in terms of the power of big data.

Inside Finance TV will have more expert discussion on the connected economy - Look out for more from Nigel Huddleston.

 

One business risk factor is consumer preference which, as Nigel Huddleston explains in this TV show, is affected by online recommendations.

Business risk and social media

We’ve definitely seen that recommendations do impact user behaviour. A survey that actually is about a year and half old now, showed that about 34% of UK users, for example, use social media to inform their decisions about travel purchases. And when they did that, many of them changed the hotel that they were going to book, 12% changed the airline, 12% changed the tour operator. Many changed the country they were going to visit. So it definitely has a meaningful impact on user behaviour. Find further expert discussion about business risk, plus more industry insights, on Inside Finance TV.

In this digital economy more consumers are using mobile devices to make purchases. Nigel Huddleston says mobile optimised sites are key:

Digital economy - 30% of travel queries made on mobiles

The industry is pretty switched on to search, both in terms of paid search and then also organic. I would say perhaps that there are some leaders in the industry. The OTAs, because of the very definition of who they are, they’re online travel agents, probably had a bit of a leading edge to begin with. And some of the suppliers are playing catch up, but pretty quickly. One of the best examples is in the mobile space. Getting a mobile optimised site is really key now. It’s not just a 'nice to have, it’s a must have, you know, many, many users are searching and actually booking travel through mobile devices, whether that’s a high end mobile device or a tablet now. And we’re seeing the early stages of that at the moment. But it’s huge, it’s about 30% of all queries now made on mobile devices. Look out for more experts discussing the digital economy on Inside Finance TV.

Connected marketing relies on well developed personal brands to share company content. Our latest video from Bob Barker explores the issue:

Connected marketing comes from individuals

A lot of companies out there have been using traditional marketing mechanisms.

They’ve been using digital marketing, and what we see is that more and more marketing has got to rely on the individuals in the company to help get the messages out because it’s those individuals that are often the sales people and it’s the individuals who themselves have got networks.

So what we do a lot of is helping people to understand what their personal brand is all about and to make sure, for example, on LinkedIn that they’ve got a decent profile because Google’s going to find you on LinkedIn if somebody’s looking for you quicker than any other platform, so you need to look the part.

You need to be dressed well, and so on and so forth. And then there’s the whole thing about network maintenance, or understanding and managing your network.

So we’ve all built up contacts on our Outlook or whatever it is, and we’re beginning to build up more and more contact on LinkedIn as it becomes more the de facto business platform for business people connecting.

So we have to put time in and understand how we build and nurture our networks using something like that.

And then the other thing is that now we’ve got a brand and we understand our network, we’ve then got all this content that the company’s produced that might be relevant to what we’re talking about but nobody’s sharing it.

So a lot of companies are building all this content and people aren’t sharing it, like these videos.

We see in large companies, when you look at the shares, nothing’s going on, and so we help companies to understand.

We help the individuals in those companies to understand it’s their responsibility to help get this content out there because on the internet when people are researching companies and they’re looking for what people, you know, what companies are all about, they’re doing a lot of their research without the company knowing.

So unless that company’s got content out there and people are interfacing and being out there, and having their brand out there, they’re not going to be visible when companies are looking for who they want to do business with and who they might trust.

Inside Finance TV will continue to explore connected marketing and the surrounding issues- look out for more TV shows from Bob Barker.

Business growth strategy at Google involves developing social platforms alongside existing search functions. Nigel Huddleston explains:

Business growth strategy from Nigel Huddleston

We know that social is really important in travel. We can see from user behaviour that people do actually listen to and act upon the recommendations of people they in particular trust, but even people that they don’t know. So social’s huge, you know, people are actually changing hotels that they choose, they’re even changing which country they’re going to go on holiday based on these kind of social recommendations. So Google’s investing very heavily in it at the moment with Google Plus. But one of the key things there is, it’s not just a standalone, we’re trying to amalgamate it and bring it together with search, so it’s bringing together search and social in a really powerful way. There is more expert discussion about business growth strategy on Inside Finance TV.    

Geo-targeting is a stronger marketing strategy than ever before. Nigel Huddleston discusses how the hospitality sector is personalising offers.

Geo-targeting advances with technology

We’re in a really exciting phase of the hospitality sector when it comes to technology and the use of the mobile devices. There’s a whole host of opportunities that weren’t there before in terms of getting your messages out to the consumer. You can know for example if somebody’s getting off a plane at say Heathrow Airport. We can now target them and know that they’re at Heathrow Airport. We can probably put an offer to them that’s very relevant, you know, discount, 30% off for the hotel that’s just three miles away. So really using that geo-targeting in a way that was never possible before. We will be sharing more ideas about geo-targeting and marketing strategies on Inside Finance.

The digital economy means that some brands will actually need to undigitise to entice people in. Ibrahim Ibrahim discusses: This whole idea of facial recognition, for me is really, really interesting. There is an issue of privacy but it’s inevitable and as Mark Zuckerburg said, it will be entirely normal for everybody to know everyone’s location at any time, and that’s what will happen. It’s how we deal with that and I think also as we live these increasingly digitised lives, people will crave, sort of, compensatory intimate physical experiences. And there’s an opportunity there for brands to undigitise, to unconnect. And just as an anecdote, there’s a great club called The Do Nothing Club. You go there and do nothing. There’s a school of life and you can see this growing explosion really of markets and of charity shops. There’s much more intimate physical, nostalgic places. I think retail will have to take part of that on. I think there’s going to be a move from what we call back of house to front of house where customers want to see behind the brand, see transparency, see things being made. They don’t want them now, and more in the future, being made in Vietnam or in China. They want things, yes, partly made but then finished off in the shop where people can see the craft and the kind of skills. And there is I think, more and more of a return to crafts. Every trend has a counter trend, and I think there’s going to be a counter trend.

The digital economy has created an opportunity for nostalgic brands

There is more content about the digital economy on Inside Finance TV.

In our connected economy it is important for businesses to be social. Google has increased its connectivity with Google Plus, as Bob Barker discusses: So Google is beginning to go social itself. Its Google plus network is only two years old and it’s still working out how best to use that glue. But what they’ve done, if you look at the bar that Google has, when you look at the Google bar, the plus bar is right at the far left. It’s the first thing on the menu. It’s before search. So they see social as very, very important. The thing that Google Plus does, is it gives people an identity within the Google world and it allows people to share content within the Google world, and it allows people to connect with people in the Google world, and they’ve got a real tight integration with everything else that they do. So within Google Plus you have circles of friends. So they’ve been really thinking through how do you operate in the social world. So you can have circles of friends and those circles of friends can also reflect in your Google Mail, so if you want to look at, if you have a particular set of friends you can sort your email by those friends. They also have a free communities application, you can set up communities within that social area, so they’re bringing more and more functionality out. They’ve got hang outs, which is the video conferencing and it’s all integrated into every bit of the system.  So it becomes easier and easier and more integrated to use. So they’re putting a lot of time and effort into this and it’s early days with it, and people are beginning to go onto Google Plus more, because ultimate with all that effort, it’s collating all that content and it’s giving you better search results because it’s part of Google. So if you like, when you’ve used Google Plus and you put content on Google Plus, and you know You Tube is integrated with it too. It’s all that time giving you higher and higher potential to get higher search rankings and being found and being understood is what it’s all about.

In the connected economy online communities continue to grow.

Inside Finance TV will be following ideas about the connected economy and will have more videos from Bob Barker.

The Connected digital economy is a global revolution like the industrial revolution as discussed in this new business TV show from Graeme Codrington. In the industrial age, as before that in the agrarian age, in the age of farming the people who either owned the land or owned the factories or worked on the land or worked in the factories, they were the people who were in charge. Those were your assets, physical ability. What we’ve done over the last 100 years is replaced peoples' physical needs in terms of what we need from them physically with machines, you know, the combined harvester and the container and the robots in factories. And then for the last 50 years we have plowed our resources, as human beings we’ve become clever by being clever. We have moved into the information age where your mental ability is what sets you apart from other people. Now, somebody who was gifted at birth, not by my choice, but was gifted with a reasonable intelligence and a nice IQ and a middle class family that could get me through university, that’s been brilliant. I’ve been able to use my brain to make money, but unfortunately right now computers are about to do to me what robots and machines did to my farm working, factory working uncles and grandparents They’re about to make me redundant because they can think faster than I can. They can think more than I can. They don’t need to take a break to eat or sleep or all the other things I like to do. The question is what’s next? You see if we’ve used machines to replace our bodies, our physical strength and now we’re using machines to replace our minds, there’s only one step left and that’s our emotions, the soul if you like, inside of us. And that’s why I believe we’re heading into a connection economy, because computers can’t do that, not yet. I’m not saying they never will, but probably not in my lifetime. That ability connect with other people, that ability to engage, to have relationships, that ability to be in another person’s life, not just sending information, engage with the data point but actually engage with a person, that’s vital.

 Connected digital economy set to revolutionise business

Inside Finance TV will continue to explore the connected digital economy revolution - look out for more TV shows from Graeme Codrington  

We are now in a digital connection economy. Keith Coates discusses the changes that have lead us here:

Transitions to the digital connection economy

Ralph Jenson talks about various economies through which we’ve transitioned, it’s a very general, very broad framework but it’s really good to help us understand our current context, ‘cause leadership is always context-specific.  So, very quickly, he talks about the hunter-gatherer era, it was an economy in which there was competitive advantage that was forged through a sense of focus.

The interesting thing in the story is that technology is the disruption, so technology changes the rules of the game.  In this particular case the technology that did that, the plough, the ability to harness animals, so we moved into the agrarian society.  From there we moved into the industrial era.  So each of these are economies in which we look at what created a competitive advantage.

The industrial era is interesting because competitive advantage in this particular set of circumstances was created through business efficiencies, that’s where the science of management was birthed.  Frederick Taylor and others – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.  So the legacy of that era remains today.

I still meet companies and leaders who think that their competitive advantage will be forged through greater business efficiency.  Business efficiency is a hygiene factor now.  So, we moved from then to what was called the information-based economy, where it was how we utilised data and from there we moved into the connection economy.

There are more videos discussing the digital connection economy on Inside Finance.

Technological advancements happen faster than we might expect. Andrew McAfee discusses how we can work with artificial intelligence:

Technological advancements in the game of chess

The progression that we’re seeing is that initially computers, robots, artificial intelligence, are laughably bad in head to head competitions against people. But they improve so quickly that they get as good, and then they get much, much better very, very quickly. So for example early in the career of Gary Kasparov as the world chess champion, he played 32 simultaneous matches against the world’s best chess computers of that time, I believe it was in the mid or late 1980’s. He won 32-0, he was just annihilating the digital competition. In 1997 Kasparov played a match against Deep Blue, which was a super computer built by IBM solely for the purpose of playing chess against him and he lost narrowly that match against Deep Blue in 1997. Nowadays though computer versus human chess is completely uninteresting because the computers are so much better. There was a computer chess programme available for small phones, that entered a tournament in Argentina where the entry requirements were so strict that only about 1,000 players around the world, human players, even qualified, the smart phone entered, out of ten matches it won nine of them, so it’s just totally uninteresting to play chess head to head against a computer. It’s so bad that they asked a grand master a couple of years ago how he would prepare for a match against a computer and he said ‘I’d bring a hammer’. So this head to head war we see over and over, but the digital competitor goes from laughably bad to unarguably superior much more quickly than we’d expect. What I find really interesting though is that that head to head competition is not the end of the story, because once you start allowing human and digital labour to come together and work as a team, you get an even additional bump in performance, over what you get from digital alone. So we now have freestyle chess tournaments where any combination of human and digital chess player can come together and what we learn is that fine, computer beats grand master, smart team easily beats computer and that smart team is not composed of grand masters, it doesn’t contain super computers, it consists of people who are pretty good chess players and pretty good with computers, with moderately powerful computers but what the people have understood is how to divide up the task between what people are good at, what machines are good at. When you get that task division right, again you can annihilate the competition. So the shift in our thinking needs to move from racing against machines, which is becoming a fools errand in more and more circumstances and needs to shift to racing with machines, which is where some really huge opportunities lie. More videos about technological advancements are available on our Inside Finance TV channel.  

Graeme Codrington discusses his use of social media and why Facebook for CEOs is a great way of keeping in touch with the world while travelling:

All my friends and family are on Facebook.  But pretty much anybody and any audience who wants to connect with me can.

I once hit the 5,000 friend limit and then went through and did a massive purge and dropped it down to three and it’s now drifting up over four again.

So when you hit that 5,000 limit you maybe have to think differently.

But for me, Facebook is a place where people can get to know me, me as a person.  And I think some CEOs, some business leaders are starting to see the benefit in doing this as well, in just making yourself accessible.

I’m passionate about cricket and most other sports, but cricket in particular.

I am passionate about my family.  I enjoy travel, although I hate travelling, if you can see the distinction between those two things.

And for me, I just thought, well Facebook is the opportunity for me to just let that all hang out.

In the same step as I’m travelling, as I’m with my family, as I’m watching sport, as I’m engaging with my clients, I’m getting a sense of what’s changing in the world.

Facebook for CEOs is a great way to stay in touch with the world.

Inside Finance will continue to look at the uses of Facebook for CEOs and we will have more videos from Graeme Codrington.

 

 

The technology revolution is changing the way people learn about products. They are more likely to follow the advice of  an internet forum than an official review. Andrew McAfee discusses:

Embracing the technology revolution is vital to survival

Well if you’re ignoring the technology revolution among your consumers you’re clearly just missing the boat, in a very broad and deep way. It’s clear that we’re plugged in too much at the time, we’re staring at screens, that we’re getting a lot of our signals from our peers, from strangers over the net via review sites and judgement sites and relying less on the old guard for helping us figure out what our next purchases should be and how we should be shaping our behaviour. Any company that’s not part of that by now is already losing ground very quickly and that’s only going to accelerate. It’s striking to me how the old world of relying for example on restaurant critics and how many stars the hotel has, as given by the hoteliers body, that’s in the rear view mirror now, we just go to Yelp and Trip Advisor and look around. I can’t remember I looked at the official rating for a hotel that I was going to stay at, I find these things meaningless now. Look out for more videos about the technology revolution on Inside Finance TV.

There is just as much digitalisation in marketing as all other industries. Campaigns are being tested on the consumer before they are put into action. Andrew McAfee discusses:

Digitalisation in marketing means Don Draper should be looking over his shoulder

I really have trouble finding parts of the business world, industries, companies, jobs, tasks, that are immune from this computerisation, from the digitalisation going on, the closest I come are more features of the parts of the company that are closer to innovation and creativity and taste and aesthetics, but even there let’s not be too careful.

Mad Men is an incredibly popular television show in the United States and I believe in the UK as well and this Don Draper school of how you come up with the next ad campaign is a thing of the past.  Because what Don Draper does is he understands the mind of the consumer and the mind of the market, he’s going to listen a little bit but he’s going to go away and have his insight, and then he’s going to come back and by virtue of his brilliant pitch to the management of the company, he’s going to convince that customer what to go spend their next advertising dollars on.

This is ludicrous, this is not the right way to go about it.  There are a bunch of problems there, first of all how does he know the mind of the consumer, how do we know he’s correct and why are we basing our decisions on the persuasiveness of one testing pitch in one meeting, this doesn’t make any sense.

So when we look at the worlds of advertising and marketing in these more creative functions, we see technology coming in very quickly, we see ideas being tested, we see the experimentation happening and we see this move away from just blindly trusting the gurus, the pundits, the Don Drapers of the world, and maybe we do rely on them to come up with a new idea, but then instead of taking their word that it is the perfect idea and the best idea, let’s go subject that to some rigorous testing and experimentation and figure out how good an idea it is, before we have to commit heavily to it.

For more videos about digitalisation in marketing and the rest of the digital economy go to Inside Finance.

The disclosure rules have been in for quite some time.  And it’s my understanding, although I’m not a lawyer, it’s my understanding that they were brought in so that the days of ambushing your opponent on the steps of the court after months and months, sometimes years of preparation for a trial and say, you know, “Ha ha, you didn’t know about this document.”

Which really undermines their whole case, e-disclosure was brought in and disclosure as well was brought in to stop that from happening so that both parties understand fully the strengths and weaknesses and certainly in terms of the documents before they get to the long process of preparing for a trial.

It may well be, for example, if the other party knew of the existence of certain documents that a settlement would have been the preferred route as opposed to spending an awful lot of time on expensive advice and procedures to get to the point where they, in effect they give in as they would have done a year ago.

 

When parties are involved in litigation, each party has an obligation to disclose the documents of relevance to the case.  And whether those documents are good for their side or bad, and so with each firm of any size now, having huge amounts of information it’s important to be able to easily digest that information and sift it for relevance to a particular matter.

It’s gone an incredible distance.

There are two types of reviews really, one is a traditional linear review where the lawyers and the clients will look at the documents and read the documents themselves and use their own eyes and understanding to make a categorisation of a particular email etc.

And they will sift those down by using keywords and date range parameters and so forth.

The big steps now are that computers are making those decisions for them, sometimes more successfully than others.

 

For e-disclosure but predominantly emails, the reason for that is it’s now obviously by far the preferred method of communication for the written media.

And attached to emails are documents, so you might have contracts, spreadsheets, image files maybe.

But usually those are just the two types of information, emails forms the largest and then you have a review of what we call loose documents.

So these will be documents that themselves aren’t attached to an email or in any sort of structure of that nature.

 

The big thing that people are talking about now is technology assisted review, where the PCs … sorry, the disclosure systems are able to make a judgement on a categorisation of a document based on the categorisations that have been made before.  How it works is this.  You will have a population of say, for argument’s sake, 100,000 documents, and a lawyer will review the first 1,000 and then the system will say, based on your choices of those first 1,000 documents, I think if you were to carry on, the remaining 99,000, you would categorise in this way

And so then the lawyer will look at those and say, “Well it was right in this document, it was wrong in that document and I would have made that document this.”  So by now you’ve looked at 2,000 documents and the system says, “Okay, well, you know, thanks for helping me out, based on that I now predict that you would make the choices for the remainder, the 98,000.”  And so you finally get to a stage where having reviewed only a few thousand documents, you can have confidence that whilst it won’t be perfect, if 98% of the choices that the computer’s made, you agree with, you may well be able to say to the other side, “We’ll stick with those categorisations that it’s done.”  It’s being talked about a lot.

It’s still very new but it’s potentially a way to save thousands and thousands of pounds in the review phase.

Well, the problem with this technology is one of trust, because in order to … for both parties to agree they both have to understand how the system’s come about to make those choices.  And they … ideally what will happen is both parties will be using the same system.  And they will both agree to use technology assisted review and therefore both sides will have confidence that the system is working fine [0:14:52.3].  It’s not that usual for both parties to have the same type of system.  So your technology assisted review might be different to mine and I’m going to think that it’s actually inferior to mine.  And therefore I don’t want you to rely on your results but I’m happy to rely on mine, getting the two sides to agree is the trick.

 

I don’t think it’s way too complex, I think it’s way too fast. You know, I was talking to a senior partner from an accounting firm now long since retired who was reminiscing about how he used to get instructions by letter. And you know, you’d get round to implementing them, whereas of course now it’s, you know, microseconds basically and it’s Twitter and it’s email and it’s everything, so it’s instant. The trouble is that because people can communicate instantly, they expect instant replies. And I think we’re in danger of doing everything too fast and not doing everything sensibly. You know, I think the hardest thing in business now is to find time to think, find time to stand back and give yourself space and not to react immediately, not to follow the crowd, just to stay calm and so, you know, most of what happens can be ignored. And that’s a very courageous thing to do, but I think that’s probably the most sensible thing that most people can do. Most news is noise, ignore it.

Cyber space is about the virtual world, it’s about the world of the internet, it’s about the world of soft intelligence and all the other intangibles which are not part of the fixed assets of an organisation. Cyber risk is the risk that those assets in cyber space are going to be manipulated or misused. Cyber crime is the use of those assets in cyber space by criminal activity. Cyber terrorism is the use of those assets in cyber space by terrorists. What we’re looking at is a very significant issue that increasingly our assets are invested in cyber space. How do we protect those assets from criminals, from terrorists and from any other people who want to misuse those assets for a purpose other than that which they were intended?

if you’re better governed you become more efficient. Secondly, that once you’re better governed and you’ve got all of those systems into place, that you are enjoying stronger stakeholder support for what you’re seeking to achieve, and that’s very important. But that said, we are acknowledged globally as one of the leaders, one of the proponents of good practice, governance. And that’s good feedback for us because we want to know that we are getting somewhere. However we still continue to encounter organisational collapse. We still continue to encounter cases of value destruction. And that tells us that we can’t be complacent about the systems we are putting into place. But certainly as far as the financial sector is concerned, despite the fact that we’ve had a double recession and people even talking about a third recession after that, most of our corporate world have survived intact and continues to perform well. And we will put that down to the fact that our companies are well run and well governed.

Cyber risk has become hugely topical now really because governments are starting to understand the importance of it. Someone said to me recently there are only two types of companies, those who know that they’ve had a cyber attack and those that don’t. But everybody’s had them in some form or other. It has become a very important to governments, including the UK government and it really needs to now come onto the agenda of boards. Boards need to be looking at it but it’s not just an IT issue. People have thought about it as an IT issue having a cyber attack. But it’s much more complex now and the old idea of corporate espionage, for want of a better term has moved into this space. Companies are very much at risk now of having their information stolen effectively, and that can be corporate secrets of any kind. So the risks are much higher than they ever were, and it’s not just corporates, we see it in other areas such as the forces, the concerns are growing there. But it’s certainly raising … the profiling of this is growing. It’s becoming more and more important and government is certainly concerned that this is where everybody’s at risk.

I’m not an IT expert. But there are certainly small changes that companies can do and there are specialist organisations out there that can help them to do that. There are a number of small changes companies can make that will effectively stop 80% of them. And that is an incredibly cost effective way to go. You can never stop it completely. The world of IT is such as we all know with computer viruses, as soon as you close one loophole or close one avenue then another one opens. So this is an ongoing struggle. People who are working in this area are developing new ways all the time. And like I say, sort of 80% of it can be dealt with in a very cost effective way which leaves you 20% exposed, which is probably always going to be the case. What is being stolen from companies can be as serious as their future strategy, detail, you know, through details of their customer base, all that kind of intelligence that is so important to companies in this competitive environment. If a competitor can get hold of it then obviously that’s very damaging for a company. But we’re not talking about competitors within the UK, this is a worldwide problem and the most cyber attacks are coming from overseas.

Dr Stephanie Hussels, Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Cranfield University on the role of big data in entrepreneurial business

In terms of big data I would say entrepreneurs are really smart now if you are, especially in the digital space of using the data, and I think that has offered so many new opportunities of analysing who your customers are.

How... tracking what customer preferences are, getting a better understanding of... which will help to tailor the product or service that you're offering.

So I think again you need to be smart about it, the danger with it, it's overwhelming.

You have far too much information so I think you need to put the process in to place within the business to utilise it and take it to your full advantage.

Dr Stephanie Hussels, Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Cranfield University on the digital world and entrepreneurship

I think it has offered a lot of opportunities.  I mean when we look back, 1998 Google was only set up.

I mean LinkedIn, Twitter is only recent phenomenon we have.  Personally I think there's great opportunities in terms of reaching your customers, reaching clients whether it's B to B, B to C.

But  I always think there's also... the world's become more visible so maybe things you got away with in the past is no longer possible.

So I think my view is using social media is a great way of promoting your business but also keep aware of social media also comes with potential pitfalls if you don't use it in the right way.

Martha Lane Fox on the connected economy.

According to Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, the connected economy brings new and cost-effective solutions to business in the UK. The connected economy is characterised by the use of digital technologies like social media, smart phones or cloud computing to unlock greater efficiency and cost savings. Although the UK has seen difficulty in key sectors like retail, the connected economy or digital economy has been booming. The UK's £121Bn internet economy is the largest of any G20 country "I certainly think that there are more ways to be more connected into the things that are important because of technology, than perhaps there were in the last economic downturn. So you know I believe very deeply that the opportunity that digital technologies afford you will give you more robust ability to survive. So for example, you know, how would it have been possible to just get out there and select some customers and talk to them in the past as easily as it can be now through a Facebook group or through a LinkedIn group or through a Twitter profile? You know, there are so many ways that you can connect into your customer base, stay close to it. But also though, you know, the opportunity to save money by using digital technologies more smartly, whether it’s with cloud computing through to how you actually talk to your employees, suppliers, whatever the thing might be. So both on there and outside your business and internally, I think that technology can help really ride the wave." According to Inside Finance TV experts like Graeme Codrington, the connected economy is more than just marketing. It's a fundamental change to the way businesses will operate.

Business is no longer linear and you have to adapt your thinking to suit. Julie Meyer explains further in this TV show.

Business strategy models - Networks

If you are still, in any way shape or form thinking linear or hierarchical, you need to update your thinking to a network orientation. That's much more important than just the Facebook as a phenomena or LinkedIn as a phenomena. Everything has moved to a world of interdependency and multiple dependencies in that.