How AI is transforming the workplace: Masters of AI review

Our next speaker was Sam Wilson, Solutions Architecture Director of Bruntwood, a leading regional property company with over 100 office and retail spaces across the UK.

Sam has overseen a big step change in the way the Bruntwood team utilizes its vast amounts of data in order to improve its business processes, highlighting several examples of AI in the workplace currently being employed successfully by different teams. This includes AI models built to help its commercial team improve lead scoring accuracy, as well as AI-powered tools to help HR/People teams provide candidates with fairer, unbiased interviews.

In an insightful talk, Sam (pictured below) spoke at length around the challenges some businesses often face when it comes to getting all teams to buy in to the initial idea of AI, reaffirming the notion that there is an element of education that needs to happen when it comes to getting teams clued up on the benefits of AI and the changes it poses to workplace structure – especially as we move further towards more mainstream adoption of the technology.

However, in Bruntwood’s case, the proof was in the pudding when it came to getting employees on board and excited about the benefits AI had to offer.

“I think our team are on board because they’ve seen first-hand that what they’ve been given by AI has been a helpful tool, rather than something that could potentially replace them,” explains Sam.

“So you could say that it’s augmented their working knowledge rather than replaced it.”

This idea of humans and AI working together harmoniously is one that more and more businesses will need to achieve if they are to full reap the benefits of being AI-driven over the coming years. For Sam, this continual improvement of skills and job functionality is a key aspect of how AI is changing the workplace.

“For us, AI isn’t telling them exactly what to do, it’s advising them what might work if they’re stuck,” he says.

“So it’s not a ‘stop, do it this way,’ it’s a ‘how about this way?’ and that’s working quite well for us. This makes a massive difference in their willingness to buy into AI systems, because they see that what we’re doing is trying to make their lives easier.”

After Sam’s presentation, we moved on to the world of AI recruitment, welcoming Cathcart Associates’ Liam Wilson to the stage.

Headquartered in Edinburgh, Cathcart Associates specializes in providing businesses with technology recruitment solutions.

Liam’s talk covered various aspects of bringing AI and data science talent into a business, the patterns and trends he’s seen over the last few years, and how he expects the role of AI in the workplace to continually evolve as adoption becomes more commonplace.

After his talk, we caught up with Liam to ask him a few questions…

This event was a great way to wrap up what has been a fantastic debut year for our Masters of AI event series. As well as tackling the topic of how AI is transforming the workplace, over the last few months we’ve discussed the best steps to take to implement a killer AI strategy, the role of AI in modern marketing, and how the technology is being used to drive efficiencies.

We’d like to thank everyone who has helped to make the Masters of AI series a success this year, and a huge thanks to all of our fantastic speakers and engaged audience. We’ll be back bigger and better than ever in 2020, so be sure to keep an eye out on our events page to find out what we’ll be getting up to.