Session Information:

Building Your Future Workforce in Insurance

The fully automated Enterprise is a game-changer for Insurance and Financial Services. We believe that in the future, people will work in tandem with robots, focusing on impactful initiatives rather than administrative tasks. Imagine getting the right data, to the right person, at the right time to make decisions.

Session Transcript:

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, and welcome to this webinar on the Building: The Future of Workforce.

Thank you for taking the time to spend some time with us today, What your job, a giant joining us live, or Later on demand. We have a great lineup for you today. This is a real hot topic for us, and we've got a super lineup of experts to have a great chat over the next 45 minutes.

My name is Elaine Mannix, I'm the Global Insurance Lead at UI Path, and I'm going to be your moderator today.

We're gonna kick off with some housekeeping rules, First off, just to let you know the format and how we're going to run today.

And so, so the housekeeping rules for today will be, yes, we're gonna do a couple of polls and that's just to get your input.

Make sure we're answering your questions, and we're on the topic, so we'll launch those in a couple of minutes.

We'll also have some handouts, and those handouts can be downloaded during the session, and there'll be available afterward as well.

You will be on mute today.

However, that doesn't mean you can't have a chat, there isn't a chat option here.

So you can chat with the panelists, or you can actually ask a question as well in the Q and A.

We have my lovely colleague, Satya, who has 20 plus years of experience in insurance as well, answering those questions throughout the session today. So please, please feel free to do that. And just to get us going on that, if you'd like to pop into the chat where you're coming from us today, it'd be great to see you know who's who's coming, who's joining us from what parts of the world as well. So, if you could do that, that will be great. And then we'll actually get going.

Yeah.

So let's start off the topic. Let me set the scene now, take a couple of minutes to set the scene.

Obviously, we've been in very strange times over the last year. And all our workforces have been impacted and we were just having a chat with the panelists saying, actually, most of us are still working from home and certainly not traveling.

So, looking at sort of the state of the play at the moment, we're talking about a lot of workforce's at home.

A lot saying How will actually the new work be? And people are starting to realize that. Probably, be technology is going to change their, their, their jobs.

And so we're looking at this particular topic today.

And one of the main reasons to date to have this session is to actually get a view and actually learn, I know when I was a customer, the reason for joining these sessions Was certainly to hear from other people To get some inspiration to hear their stories. And, really, importantly, to get sort of lessons learned as well.

Now, I'm going to introduce our lovely panel today, as well. And, while we're introducing the panel, a lovely Paula is going to set off a poll and see if we've got some questions here.

Now, I'm going to ask the panelists to come on to come online, and we can start to meet them. I'm gonna start introductions with Gene for us.

But go ladies first, And J, let me give an overview and introduction to Jane. Now, there's no way looking at the credentials. And the bio of our lovely panel here. There's no way I can do them justice.

But let me start off by giving you a little bit of background.

So Jean is 20 plus years of experience in insurance, she's the VP, Chief Digital Officer, and Lean Six Sigma, and security benefit.

And with their 20 years experience, she applied that to RPA, combining Lean six Sigma, and RPA scales, to look at automation and how it can drive efficiencies and various other benefits across the business.

Jane's an early adopter, security benefit. And you're an early adopter of this. And she's got a great philosophy, where they look, it's just wing to wing. What does that mean? They don't just automate part of a process. They look at the whole thing.

So, Jean, welcome to our panel and thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

And next up, we've got We got Jeff and Jeff comes from Innovation Strategist, Encoder, And decoder is the one stop shop for insurance. And a big focus on on innovation, and obviously great to see that in the title again.

20 plus years experience from Jeff and are all around technology. And Jeff's been on this is automation journey for the last two years.

I'm gonna, we'll focus now on scaling. I'm bringing automation to all departments across it and open it to intelligent automation. So, welcome Jeff, Thank you for joining us.

And we've got Rob. Rob joins us from a unit and he is the AVP Transformation and Data Science.

A really interesting looking at his bio 15 plus years. Again, experience in them in automation and technology and his focus area is automation, audit and risk management. And we're going to talk about that today, and how there's been a real surge in sort of the three lines of defense.

He leads the transformation and data science efforts for the enterprise audit, and he's responsible for driving innovation and change.

So welcome, Rob.

Thanks for having me.

Great, it's great to have, I'm gonna just change my needle camera here, so I can actually see you all.

So let's kick off now to get the poll results, if you'd like to share. Those are up on the screen, if you can see them.

I can't see them right now.

So if you'd like, I can review the answers. So the question was, is there a future work skilling program in your organization?

And 40% said, not yet, that there is talk, and 60% said, yes, we trade employs planning for more so, Well, that's a good, that's a good results. So it is on people's minds that people are starting to look at, the future workforce, and, certainly, the sessions I'm involved with with customers. It's certainly off the top of that, at the moment.

So, to get to know our panelists, I'm going to ask everybody to give us a little story. And when I had my insurance user group, I certainly asked all the new members to tell me what was most proud of and some lessons learned. So I'm gonna start off with asking. Gene. Gene, would you like to share one of your proudest moments and best lessons learned around this lovely topics we've got?

I think mine was my most satisfying win, not necessarily our biggest win, but the most satisfying for me personally, and from standing up the organization with my team. We had we reported directly into the CFO at the time.

And when we were working on metrics, how to measure our success, we were coming up with the multitude of metrics on, how can we do this? We're early on, It was three years ago. There weren't a lot of guidance out there, So, we're coming up with different things, and we used, Of course, ours removed. I mean, that's what everybody uses initially, But we also came up with hours gained, because what we're finding is, we were doing a lot of projects where people just didn't have the time to get to the information. It was a lot of manual work. They just didn't have time to do it. And we added that as a metric on and started reporting out on that metric. And our CFO kinda gave us.

It just wasn't buying, and he said, I don't, I don't understand, why would I want to measure hours gain? I said, Well, they're digital workers.

And I finally got him to understand, because he had a project come through on, on A reporting project. Even though I had had several projects throughout the company, and I would explain those, It wasn't until one, hit his line of business, His area of responsibility that, it finally made sense to him. And, I said, OK. You're hours gain On, That was 2500 hours. And he's like, How, How did you figure that out?

And I said, basically, if you had wanted somebody to create that 50 page pack for you on a monthly basis, it would have taken a full head count if they were having to do it all manually, We digitized it, we've made it, so it's Push button.

And now, you get it delivered, and you didn't need to bring on an additional head, and, all of a sudden, that was like the trigger.

And at our final report out, at the end of the year, it was with all the senior leadership.

And he actually spoke up on that point and said, you know, when they first came around, I didn't really get the whole hours gained. And he goes, That is such an important metric, because now we can really understand how much time did remove remove from the business, and how much time did we gained from just the digital worker? So that was actually finally very satisfying for him to finally admit that we're right.

He was not right, so that was my proudest.

Biggest win, I think, for the team and for, for RPA itself, to show the true value.

Hmm, that's great, Jeanne, Thank you for that and creating capacity.

I've seen that across a lot of customers now, where they're creating capacities and doing more, where maybe they were doing proportional risk based or for sampling, Another sign actly, a bot can work, 24 7, Why not?

Why not do sort of more with that, So that's brilliant. Jeff, would you like to share one of your nice stories we share with our audience today?

Sure, it was very similar to Jay's story, with slightly different outcome that was unexpected.

We were standing up, we had gone through the proof of concept with UI path and RPA in general, and we were really implementing that first, that first project.

And we were trying to get buy in, hitting a lot of wall. A lot of pushback, you know, this isn't the way we do things.

Typically, you know, it would follow more of a standard, more typical software development technology stack by Java or dot net.

But we came in, and we tried to do this. We completed the automation extremely fast by a comparison of what it would take someone to do in Java or dot net, and then it started to execute.

And we got a few months into it.

And what we ended up doing, it was a conversion project, so we're converting policy records from the mainframe into Guidewire.

And we got a couple months into it, and the VP of Commercial Lines, these are commercial, and policy has said, You know, I was really skeptical about this, But I'm glad you talked me into it, because I was able to reduce my temporary labor staff by two, and all of this. And so then, we immediately jumped from the hours given back, or the bauer's gained.

metrics that we were according to say, well, wait a minute, here's an actual hard dollar savings that you implemented, you know, just two month end of this.

This bot running these, various conversions.

So, so, that was a huge eye opener for everyone throughout the organization when that got communicated out.

So, that was something that was?

I don't know if I'm proud of it, but that's definitely the biggest eye opener, and the lesson learned from that is, you gotta market. When those things happen, you got to market them. And you gotta, you gotta, you gotta brag about yourself.

And that'll really help your, your project move forward.

And Jeff, really sort of important lesson there because we're used to sort of long, chunky IT projects and we talk about this enabling technology be much quicker, much agile, deliver results much quicker. But, obviously, you jumped in and did that and show people, actually look at what we can do with this in probably quite a short period of time.

Yeah, and that's the key to, you don't want to take on, on the world.

You don't wanna try to boil the ocean with us, especially with your first one, because it, you're not used to it. So I talked about a commercial and policy, and it was it, but it was the basic account. information. You know, it was the policyholder, basic information, It, with some additional insured. That was location, simple, things like that. At the account level, we eventually got into coverages as future projects, but we did that kind of crawl Walk run Approach to it.

And we saw that savings right off the bat. with just that first little chunk.

So, definitely keep it small. And show rapid results. Basic, agile concepts.

Great, great, thank you for that.

Rob, tell us about the world, of all day, what you've been doing there.

Sure, well, I'll take a step back before I just jump into the audit piece. So, you know, unum is a Global Absence Management Disability and Voluntary Benefits Insurance Provider. And so one of the things that we're looking to do is rapidly grow our business to protect the lives of 45 million people.

And so while growing our business, we also want to delight our customers. And that means that giving them all the information and support that they need when they need it most. To do that well, we need to work more efficiently. So that we can make bigger investments and more transformative and higher value areas. And that's where we're on a journey using these process mining capabilities.

And one of the areas we're working to transform at UM is the Internal Audit organization Using those capabilities. Because we're insurance company, one of the key areas that we look at is how we're managing the claim management life cycle and how we're meeting the service level agreements with the employers that we do business with. And we offer, you know, several different products, and currently serve 38 million customers, trying to target that $45 million. And to audit that level of activity, in an efficient way, we really just needed to better understand ourselves. Because I think we talked about it a minute ago, which is, you know, it's been sample basis. And so how do we really understand how well we're servicing those 38 million customers? We've been using the UI path, process money to do that, and that's catalyzed an increased level of automation for us. And so while we're still on this journey, we've been able to automate the coverage that we were previously doing in a manually, by over 25%. And it's really proved to be a worthwhile investment.

And then at the same time, in the last year, during this journey, you know, covert hit and unit, has been processing more leave, an absence management claims related to Clovis than our entire 100 year history. And so our active work with process mining at that time allowed us last June to really diagnose some of the volume challenges we're experiencing in our business and create an opportunity for us to model sort of future impact.

That's great. That's, that's brilliant here. I mean, from all three of you hearing sort of, real and relevant set of examples. Which is what we always want to hear, isn't it? This technology is out there, it's going after a few years ago, but what do people are doing with it when they really trying to solve because that's what it's about sort of solving a problem. We're gonna get onto our topic now of the of the of the day, which is the future work. And I'm Paul is going to launch another poll. I'm hoping I can see the results on this, this time, Paula.

And while we do that, Let me give you a little view about the sort of future work. Lots of studies out there at the moment.

Um, lots of information coming from from forrester's about, you know, 80% of work, if insurance work is going to be impacted now, not replaced or impacted by technology, is that what's going to start happening.

And, so, we want to hear about, you know, How is this going to actually, and can we prepare for it, and how can we actually look at the future and actually start to provide the skills, the training and, and get ready for this stuff that's coming? I'm really investor, so suppose in our employees as well.

Have we got to go to that poll?

We've got the poll up, Elaine.

What challenges are you seeing, and, yeah, probably 50% of folks have voted, so I'm going to close the poll, and let's share the results here.

So, what challenges are you seeing?

It looks like Finding the right opportunity in business case.

20%, having the resources capabilities.

60%, and People don't trust AI yet, 20%.

OK, OK, Interesting. So let's see if we can answer some of those throughout our session today. It's certainly about opportunities and, and and sort of trusting AI as well and and and capability.

That's a really important one, which is our topic today future? You know, the workforce and how can we, how can we get people ready?

I recently wanted to share theirs, and this is just a bit of a fun slide and if you wanted to do some reading, it's a future fitting with, um, with Forrester there, it's quite interesting. And, but it starts to talk about the skills that we need for the future in uncertain times.

And you'll notice that a lot of them are around soft skills, knowledge, skills.

What type of roles and these reports are to look at, You know? And certainly the World Economic Forum on there. I found that was really interesting because it's broken down by Region. So there will be one on me.

There will be one on the Americas what's happening in those areas?

Um, So, so let's see if we can do that now.

Let's, let's start off by asking, I'm going to start off, we'd rather than on this sort of his future of work, um, using sort of automation in your space with the three lines of defense, as I mentioned, more and more questions are certainly coming from, from, from, from those roles, where, where I'm talking to customers, and what do you see? Do you see the roles changing? Do you see the value, or the emphasis of work changing in that space?

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I get this question, and interest a lot. So one of the great things about process mining for us, has been the level of zero point in time, and ongoing insights that the capability can provide. You know, our use case has been using this capability to further enable automation, in the third line of defense, you know, being internal audits. But that ultimately, you know, better supports how we're servicing our employers and our policyholders as customers. In the level of insight that that technology can provide is one that we're really looking to enable those second and first line. So while we're maybe doing it for ourselves today, and to catalyze automation and to give us a level of insight, I think it's a longer term view is how do we enable the second line of defense being your compliance and your risk management type of functions. And then, ultimately, the first line of defense, being the frontline business management that interfaces with the customer.

And so how can we take the same insights that we're good today and pass that forward? And what this does is, in the end, this provides great value to both the first and the second line of defense, but also allows the audit function to have ongoing monitoring capabilities. So, really understanding the depth and breadth of risk without necessarily using, you know, resources to try to understand those things in a manual auditing way. and instead, can focus on newer and potentially even more complex activities.

And I love that. So, so, there's, there's very much a future focus, obviously, in your company for, for those roles and how you, those roles, will evolve.

Right, which is great.

Let me come to Jane now, Jane. I've heard about law and you might want to explain that to people. They're sort of the whole people emphasis in your company. Which is when I met you at in Las Vegas, a couple of years ago. I thought this is, this is great. This is a real people focus, not leaving anybody behind. Would you like to share your story about the people side?

I think you're on mute, Jeanne.

There you go.

And in November of 2019, my COHE in the RP area Amy Chandler and I sat down and tried to figure out what could we do for the upcoming year? How much time out of the business could we do?

And our business, we have a lot of the information, the business outsourced, our applications, and so forth, are outsourced to our sister company. So we don't do a lot of that processing where a lot of RPA teams get their big wins, right With data entry in that type of stuff. We just didn't have it. So, we decided to come up with a plan and it, we called it Roar 20 K. And Roars did for review, optimize, automate, and reward.

And we've got the backing from our HR, our CEO, our CFO, and the rest of the business.

And our CIO, they all came together, and they agreed that this would be a great thing for us to push. And so, our CEO sent out an e-mail.

They agreed to make everybody have a, a goal for this, and it was to take at least one manual process off your desk in 20 20, And we started in November, and we were just looking for 20,000 hours, which to us seemed like a lot, because, like I said, we didn't have a whole lot of easy wins. We didn't have any easy wins on that.

Well, as the year went along, we ended up, I think almost 50% of our company participated.

And we put it, we either removed or gained over 54,000 hours of time. We tracked and all the projects now they weren't all RPA, but most of them were, and we did have some big wins and RPA. When the lend the business leaders got behind it, we, we had competition. So like the department that had the most implemented projects for the quarter, they got roar awards, they, it's a traveling trophy and so they're really became this big competition between finance and investments. They really both wanted to win it. And those two areas, the CFO and our, and our chief investment officer had been great supporters. And really driving people to think about it. Identify those projects, And so, it was such a success that we brought it along into 2021, and this year, it's or 21 K X, because everybody thought, even though that the 20 K was 420,000 hours, everybody thought it just meant for 2020.

So, we just kinda let them think that, and then they wanted to change the title at 21 K. So we said, that's fine, and we changed our target to 21 K. So, it has been a real success.

And basically, what we saw was, one, at once, one, once one, once an individual did one project, then, they started seeing multiple projects.

And about mid year, we started tracking even those individuals that were part of multiple project projects.

And I like the 50% overall, I think 20% ended up 20 to 25%, ended up being part of more than one project that got implemented.

And so you really saw that, once they saw how easy it was, especially in the RPA, and how quickly we could turn and give them relief in an area that they couldn't do, or couldn't support completely.

The funnel just opened, and we have an innovation hub, where people put in ideas. And we started with about 150 ideas.

And at one point in time, during 2020, we're up to almost 190 new ideas that had been implemented. And I think we're back down to about 150 now.

But month over month, we were staying at about 150 to 160 ideas in the Innovation Hub. And we were just taken those, and just. Working up.

And so, it really became, no, I was concerned when we all went home in March, whether or not we could have and sustain, because we had, you know, all kinds of marketing material plan So they could see it and be.

And none of that worked right there at home on their desks. Dependents are all hanging. We now have a pendant wall instead of the penance. Everybody was going to get a little pendant that participated. And those are all still on a wall in our, in my office because enlists stars for every project. And when I looked at those, I was in the office yesterday, and I look because we were keeping them until everybody gets back in the office.

Most of those tenets, of the half of the participants have multiple stars, which means they've been involved in multiple projects, and some dependents are just covered. It's just amazing that people gravitate toward it. It was easy to think of. War 21 K means something to people. And they're like, OK, what's my war 21 K goal?

You know, what am I going to do? And it's just out in front, and it worked really, really well, but it worked because senior leadership got behind it.

Yeah, that's a great story. And making it very real and relevant for everybody, and getting them involved, because engagement is one of the, you know, one of those success factors You have to have to go wide and deep across the organization. So, that's, that's brilliant.

You know, we talked about Jeff, we'll come on to you now, where you talked about engaging people and getting them involved, and how important this is the people side of all of this change. Could you tell us about it? Because I know you've been doing automation.

You mentioned on the back of transformation, and M&A and now, it's you're obviously looking forward to say, how is this going to actually improve and change your company?

I will say, this is definitely going to be a part of the technology stack for a fair majority of the workforce in the future.

However, right now, you do face a lot of challenges. People hear robotic process automation, and it's not the thing most people think of. Oh, I could do that.

Oh, it's a conversation of, well, you really could do that. And let's talk about how you can do that.

So along, we started, little over two years ago, and we formed a center of excellence around.

And we have dedicated RPA developers, and a dedicated business analyst, or two.

And then, we also have some temporary work staff where people were interested. And these were mostly IT folks. And we've said, Yeah. Here. We can.

We can show you. We can give you the, you know, the online training that UI path provides. Excellent.

We can provide a one-on-one mentor to really get you started. If you want to come to our stand-up, you're more than welcome. You can use our servers to run, you know, unattended automations on the, you know, use orchestrator and are pretty robust.

You can also run attendant automations, you know, on your own desktop. You obviously have to worry about your own licensing at that point, and things that we do have the new studio Lighting does really help.

Share, are the old Sorry, the old version of video license was really help us share now, they're down to named licenses And we had to kind of go through that conversion process So it's a little bit more cumbersome from a licensing standpoint, but definitely Still doable is.

And so that gives you that, that gets it out just some IT folks that already had interests.

But then, also, what we've done is, we, we've come through and, and gone to businesses and we get a lot of requests for automation that we really have to turn down. mostly because they just don't pay for us to do it. If you think about all the overhead, a center of excellence goes through, it works like any other technology.

There's a lot of overhead with requirements gathering and elicitation.

And then no documentation to be able to turn it over to a developer when you're talking about 7 to 10 step process. It doesn't make a lot of fun.

Then, you also have user acceptance testing, and deployment.

So, we've tried to push back and say, wow, what, what if, we could teach you how to do this and guide someone through that process of trying to do that, that, that. We've had mild success with that.

We've written a attendant automations for people and just let them execute it and watch how it goes and let them take it from there.

Um, But ultimately, what we've decided, at least right now, there's definitely a technology savvy back of people who are a set of people, who can use this technology and pick it up fairly intuitively.

Whether it's UI path, path, or another automation technology, then they can get those and they can run them attended, But then, Som.

There are some groups in our organization that that's just not a reality right now. And we recognize that.

And so, one of the really nice things about Orchestrator is they have a, an API stack. So, we wrote a really simple portal for, for folks we call the, the Automation Portal.

And people can go in and they can actually execute whatever automation, assuming they have the right, and execute whatever automation they have.

So, this really helped off and I, and our security team actually likes it a lot, too because we're automating things but they had to give admin access to a lot of individuals, such as a CSR, to reset a password.

Bad, F full-blown admin access into the ...

into Box or one of the other security technologies and now, they've just created a service account that the only the robot knows about Orchestrator keeps confidential.

And, now, all these people can go in, and they can, it's all log. They can run the automation. They don't have admin rights. So, are auditing, like, this a lot better.

And it still get that, that feeling, that robot in anyone's hands who actually need it without having to have that technology in place. So we've kind of worked around that, but I would definitely say in the future, this is going to be a technology stack that that most people share now, like Excel macros.

Yeah, I mean, you make a great point there. Making it accessible is obviously really important to get the people who are really interested going on it, and, you know, word of mouth and success breeds success.

And you talk there about sort of, all the Academy, The Academy training is free. So, if we talk about, you know, the future workforce, some people sort of, in some degree, take responsibility for their own training. They could go and do. All this stuff. Couldn't digest themselves. They could actually start looking at this training and start actually looking at digital skills themselves.

Auto company responsibility and an individual responsibility that, if you're interested, jump in.

Oh, yes. I would definitely agree with that. I think there does have to be it's not as easy as saying, here's the link to the academy. I mean, you do have to have some form of mentorship there, there.

There needs to be the interest, there needs to be some form of technical savvy enough as well, but yeah, yeah.

But I think by and large, most people could could go through a program like that with the right guidance and And the guide rail setup.

Yeah, yeah, and it's certainly something we're seeing, democratizing it across and with a lot of customers, which are the citizen led stuff in trial, But, You're right, in our business, In a regulated business, we need to look at the governance and the structure and the quality of that. And, how can we do that? How can we do it in in in in a safe way that? We're going To? Go? On? I'm going to ask you guys a bit of a questionnaire and Some of this is sort of down to you know, there's a lot of hype out there, But also, you know, it's, it's it's a real topic as well, So what do you think about digital assistance? And let me let me tell you, first of all, I think a digital assistance is from a non techie point of view, so Jeff, you might disagree with me. I'm coming from a real technical background. So, a digital assistant sort of sitting on your desktop where it can be either, you know, it's available on demand, It's got a list of tasks, it can do for you.

It can, you know, tap you on the shoulder, if it's noticing stuff where you can just control it and say, actually, I want to do X, Y, and Zed for a claims officer. It could be you, know, I want to pull some claims information policy, endorsement, any complaints around, anything like that do a KYC check, let's say so That's the context of a can I ask you guys if you if you think this isn't reality do we think we're going to have digital assistance when people say we're going to have them in our personal lives before we'll actually have them in our work lives.

Real interest in, you know, we're talking about these now at the moment, So let me start off by asking you what do you think? Do you think digital assistants are coming for everybody, or maybe they're already on their way?

I think they are.

Aye.

Constantly try to push by team to say, how can we even make our RPA more of a digital assistant for people? Could we give them, you know, a chatbot that they could just go in and type and say, go run this? You know, now that the API is there into the Orchestrator, we've got some of that working as well. We have an individual that's starting to use that. So, in, in the basic terms, that's kind of a personal assistant. You know, she wants to go run this whenever she needs to run it and it saves her a lot of time. You know, otherwise, she be doing it manually so she logs into the Orchestrator. Launches it and it goes, and so, in the most basic format, to me, that's, that's there. And I know other technologies are coming out with them.

I've looked at other digital assistance throughout, you know, other, you know, add ons even into Outlook. I've got one that we'll send out to someone that we're trying to meet. It'll send my calendar out and said here's the open spots, pick one, so that's a digital assistant. So are they going to beat they're here? They're here.

They're just people don't think of them as a digital assistant to me, that technology, to send my calendar out to someone and say, pick a time, to me that's it. That's what my actual assistant typically had done.

She doesn't have to do that anymore. They can pick their time, and we can meet, so, I definitely think it's coming.

Right, so cost effective, it's going to be that I think that's the barrier right now, is, is the cost structure.

So, Jane, Jane, do you remember when we all were looking for mobile phones at one point? I'm old enough to remember, you had to get the Q factor. I think that's expensive. Now, you're not get when you're not senior an alpha. Now. Obviously, we told them on everybody because I think we get an extra two hours work a day out of everybody? For them? So, I think that economies of scale sort of will come.

I'm gonna ask, and I'm going to ask this, sort of Rob, no rope and I've been working on sort of persona sort of task automation and giving them a digital assistance and wanted them as, you know, because I've sent you an e-mail on, it was for an auditor.

We take these high frequency task tasks, and we put them there. And I'm not forcing people to use. I'm just saying, you know, these might be handy.

These might be good for you to actually start sort of running during your day, and it might save you an hour half an hour, a week, two hours, whatever.

So what do you think, Robin, in your world Do. You think it's, it's coming, it's here.

Yeah, It's coming. It's here. I think there's a mix in it.

It comes down to skill and comfort level of the individual. But I think, at the end of the day, I think there's that We need to start thinking about our work in the same way that we think about our personal lives. You know, at home, we're always looking for more time to spend in new and exciting ways, and we've been accustomed to having the information about our personal lives at our fingertips, and in mobile way. And so, what we really need to do is start thinking about our work in that way. How can we do our work in that way, and how can we offer our services in a more digital way? And that aligns with the expectations and our personal lives. And so, yeah, I think, what we want to be able to do, we're doing some of that work. You know, currently, it's early days. But, even, just metrics, reporting information like that at our fingertips that, we when historically have. Or being able to maybe meet with a business partner and take a temperature about something, right? Just get that real-time instant feedback about something, How are things going on your organization?

Right, It could be a three point scale. You could capture that information live, recorded, You have a team of 100 people meeting with business partners all the time, if we have a pulse on what's going on in the organizations. What kinda fun or interesting heat map, tell us, And what would that tell us about the stability of the controls, and that organization, based unquote, how things are going? So, there's a lot of different ways to use technology, to audit in different ways, to get insights about our business, and intro to really, just bring that, right to your fingertips. Because I think a lot of times, people will be like, well, what's going on with your projects? Or how is this going? And things like that, just having that, those mobile kind of insights are really important.

OK, that's great.

I mean, this is, this, is when the sort of power, of data, and insight at your fingertips starts to really come into play, Which we will actually transfer, how we work on the future work.

So, Jeff, what do you want to use him, from, from your point of view, if you've touched on some of it already.

Is it, is it coming? Is it there, is it?

Is it ready?

Yeah.

Yeah, in addition to trying to push RPA out, we're always trying to make automation smarter and, and, you know, more user friendly, with, which comes with AI.

And those digital assistants that you're talking about. And I agree with with everybody out there. They're pocketed right now. They're, they're kind of siloed. There's a lot of them out there for very specific thing.

I don't know if everyone will have 1 by 2025.

But I think as time moves on, more and more people will have them, And, as time moves on, they will become less siloed and more enterprise agnostic, and more advanced, and more skilled, and more, you know, more depth and breadth of topics and searches.

Yeah, I mean, we could we I mean, we have those visions of the future, don't we, where you talk to a word to do that? What I will?

I got an Alexa at Home, you can add stuff to your shopping list, are asking, You know, when the next bus, Whatever you probably don't have poses locally in America, but we do a process here in London And you can ask you know what's the weather dune and stuff like that? So, I think for, for a digital assistant, that you can start to say, Where's this? What's the, what am I doing?

Give me information, share, collaboration, I'm hoping that's the vision, I'm hoping we're going to get to that quite quickly, and it's going to help us.

I'd love to help be my in my job, and the next thing I wanted to sort of ask you as well, and the 45 minutes has gone super, super quick, is, is your, your sort of top tip, I love to ask people this, because certainly the questions that come in that we've been getting, people really want to know, You know, lessons learned, well, what color should they not falling? What's the best thing to do?

Can I ask you, what would your top tip be for for somebody that you would take with you.

I've kind of got to, first of all, when you stand up, make sure your change control procedures are in place and you've got good, solid change control.

You got good documentation because you know, that was a lesson I learned from early Adaptors and in being in the customer panel, Hearing people having to start over because they didn't have the right procedures put in place to stand up. So I took that very seriously.

And my COO was an auditor prior in a prior life so she understood those controls. She did both CFR and internal audit. So she understood those controls and has done a great job Ensuring we didn't fall into those pinhole pitfalls, because that was the first one. And then the second one is as you get into it and you start looking at projects.

And a lot of our projects are surround data, and we learned this the hard way. We went into a project, and it should have been about a two week project.

And I think it ended up being a 2 to 3 month project for a programmer, because the data was just so bad, You really have to make sure, before you start to program, you can't fix bad data. Don't try to fix bad data.

Get in there, Understand what the data looks like. And if you have to go back and tell that business owner, hey, you gotta get your data cleanup first. And then we'll come in. Be happy to, or will live, and be happy to help you fix the data first, But don't expect us to program all of that data. So those are my two tips.

Great. Thank you, Jean. I fell into the second that second one as well. What a project as well. Maggie data should never ...

kept going, yep. Yep. Robb? What's your top tip?

I love that data, one that resonates with me as well.

You know, I think I'm going to take a less technical kind of path here, and I'd say not defining, and describing the future, state, I think, is maybe biggest, mistake and key takeaway.

You know, what I've learned is that, and I think people often think this is that people aren't necessarily change resistant. But, I think that's a quick label for many people to say, well, we just have change resistant people. And, I see I hear that used all the time. I think it's that they're not buying what you're selling, is, what it is. And, so, to do that part, well, you need to do two things. one, I think, is, quantify the value that the technology or the work will have. Let's get, you know, we talked about gene. Having a 20,000, our goal that is very tangible, very specific and has a finish line, you can tell whether you crossed it or not. That's great. And that works for, especially senior leaders who are looking to invest in projects.

The second, though, is to be able to, You need to qualitatively describe how the work will change for the future, or how you, how the work will change the future, and how one's role or job will be different. You need to make it real for people. You let people know how, You know, how will be different and how that will be different for them. And this helps them understand what skills that they may need for the future and give them the opportunity to go after some of those skills. And for some, they may say that this isn't the right work for me, and that's OK, too. But really getting in a in a ceiling based view of how that will change the work for the individual, is the Part two to having that finish line or bucket that you need to fill.

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. I love that, Rob, That Explaining the vision for where it's going because people like that.

They don't like to think What's the company or to explain to me where we're going and what we're doing, and what parts I'm going to have in it. And as you say, that I can prepare for that.

What's coming up? Because it's not, you know, it's going to arrive tomorrow, but I've got then I can go on that journey with you.

And that comes back to not leaving anybody behind, isn't it, as well, that there's division, there's the support. Let's do it.

It can't be a leadership view of the vision, It's gotta be a person, individual views. And that's where I think leaders get it wrong. Right, They talk about, Well, here's what we'll be as a company. OK, I get that. I understand what you're saying, and you've shown me what the finish line may be or the goal that we're trying to go to.

But if you told me about what it will mean to me, and what my job will be tomorrow, and how I get out of bed every day, and how the work will be different, that makes it different for people. And then, people can assess. Alright, I'm in on that, and what skills will I need for that, Or, no, that's not right for me. That's OK. But getting really clear about that is how you can be successful in this type of work.

Thank you for sharing that.

Jeff should talk tip.

I think I could go on for hours, just about the bad data topic, and what's a good process to automate versus a bad process to automate, um, But I will say odd.

On that note, there are good processes to automate, nor are bad process to automate, and there are bad process is not to automate. And when you have bad data, that's probably a good sign that. hey, anything you do is only going to perpetuate bad data, more places faster than a person can. But just because the processes and efficient, we've never really shy away from that.

I know a lot of my peers will say, No, we need to go fix that process.

And a lot of business owners aren't ready to make that investment. And you miss out, I think, on a lot of opportunities, because just because the process is inefficient.

Yeah, the person might do it in two hours, and that's inefficient, but a robot, even if it still takes the robot, to our robot, you could keep doing it all night, is not going to take breaks and do it.

And we've seen benefits from that And we've seen people. We've gotten a lot of praise for that.

I think looking at those processes and not being really black and white about it.

Hmm.

It's really good to think about things from the, from the holistic picture. Is this easy to automate?

Yes. It may not be the most efficient thing, but it's a robot brute force works.

Um, I would say that, and keeping in mind, I think this was already hit on, but this is, this is programming. Yes, it's using the user interfaces as opposed to databases and APIs.

Usually, it's still programming.

It does need to follow a software development life cycle, because as soon as you start doing something you're not supposed to be doing like any automation, it just makes everything balloon out of control. So you do want to be very careful and you want to test And you want to develop and you want to make sure that the business area sign off on it. So those would be my two big tips.

Blanck: That's, that's great, Thank you. Thank you. Check a wealth of experience there.

And I think, you're right, I think we could sit here all day and actually share the lessons learnt and all the stuff that's happened and all the stuff that we will do, but there's a general to the team there about no engagement of people because it's the people who are going to make this successful.

And explaining whether it's visioning, whether it's getting them on board, which is which is really great to have a discussion around, around that side of it, too. So I've Got time left to to say.

Thank you to the panelists for for sharing their experience and their knowledge I Know there's loads of information and sort of material out there, and we've handed somehow as well to get in touch, So I'm sure these guys would be delighted to go onto LinkedIn with you as well.

Go on to LinkedIn and ask them a question that they're great at sharing And so it leaves me to say thank you for everybody for joining us. We hope you have found that useful.

It's given you some ideas, Um, and, and it sounds like, you know the future of work is, is, is coming, is here.

These three companies are certainly on their well onto their journeys and looking to the to the future.

So thank you for joining us. I did want to to just find lies on, and we have an event coming up, that meant that may interest you what our CEO, Daniel Diaz, who's going to actually talk about our new release and give us our top tips, so that's something you might want to join.

And that will be available on our, on our website.

So, thank you for everybody for joining us. It's been a pleasure, and you've made my job very easy today, and I look forward to meeting you in person. And thank you for everybody for joining us.

Thank you.