Digital Transformation Expo 2024: The road to reinvention

Posted on 10 Oct 2024 by Molly Cooper

At the beginning of October, the Digital Transformation 2024 Expo took pace at the ExCeL London, co-exhibiting with the UCX and Digital Commerce Expo to bring visitors a holistic digital solutions show.

The manufacturing sector on a continuous digital transformation journey, whether that involves the implementation of an ERP system, a new CRM or more intensive forms of digitalisation such as AI, machine learning and humanoid robots and cobots.

The exhibition featured speakers from a variety of industries, including the manufacturing sector, who shared insights around their own journeys and experiences. The overarching theme of the show was ‘the road to reinvention’; while most are still on this road, it was clear that some know where they are heading while others seem to be getting lost along the way.

Here are some highlights from the manufacturers who spoke on day one.

Panel with JLR: Next generation of threat detection

Detecting threats and protecting assets is vital for any business, or so you would think. Risk is made up of threats and threats are anything that is outside of a business’s control which could cause harm. In terms of the threat landscape, cyber crime is increasing and the marketplace for attack is at an all time high.

The tools and data available for cyber criminals to use is becoming more readily available and it is a much safer method of activity for criminals to exploit. In many cases the choice of being on the street (exposed to harm with a greater risk of being caught in the act), or sitting behind a computer screen is a simple one. Cyber criminals are opportunists and can cause significant challenges for businesses as well as being harder to prosecute if caught.

Jonathan Marnoch, Principal Cyber Architect at Jaguar Land Rover wanted to address the elephant in the room – ageing infrastructure and how you protect it. JLR had a project with a 100 year-old shipyard with a £10m CNC machine. Although not impossible, those machines were not built with today’s threats in mind and protecting them can be a difficult task due to the amount of data they create. Organisations need to be taking cyber security more seriously across their networks and move away from the notion that doing the bare minimum will be enough to safeguard their operations and processes.

The second half of the session focused on AI. The consensus was that the technology has enormous capabilities, where Generative AI can help when a threat occurs by triggering systems for human analysts to check. However, there was a word of warning to stay sceptical – do not place ALL your trust in AI.

Fireside Chat with Elvie: Transformation in customer care

Fem-tech manufacturer, Elvie, has recently gone through a significant global transformation with its customer care strategy. Typically, customer helplines and chatbots provide automated answers or long phone calls with unhappy customers. However, with Elvie’s main customer being new mothers, the approach needs to be different. It moved its call centres from Bulgaria to Manilla, with the employees being women, mothers and grandmothers, and provided full training courses before launching.

From its stats, Elvie found that online chat queries were not being solved at a high enough rate, but why? Philip Purdy, Global Customer Care Lead explained: “Mothers were having issues with the breast pump they bought. They would get online and start the chat, but within five minutes of back and forward conversation something would come up. The baby may have woken up or started crying so the chat would time out and their query would be unsolved.”

By implementing a new system, the company had the ability to save the chat with the user. When they then had the time to reopen the chat it would remember where they left off and continue to resolve the issue, instead of asking them to repeat the whole conversation again.

The company is also delving into AI for chats to understand where to direct customers, but also for comment filtering. AI reads comments from Elvie’s socials and places them into positive and negative categories so the teams can monitor what is good, bad and what needs addressing.

The AI system analyses each email, chat and call the agents have and provides them with a score immediately after closing. This allows the agent to know how they are performing and for Elvie to know if more training may be required.



Panel with Pandora Jewellery: Building trust in AI

Tiffany Qiao, Senior Engineer at Pandora, explained how Pandora launched its own ‘Pandora GPT’ and how the use of it is improving customer care and providing real-time analytics for its site and shoppers. It is helping the business to prioritise areas of need and, due to being its own product, has customers already built in.

One issue some businesses are facing when it comes to AI is trust. Data teams fully trust AI and are using it to write reports. Whether the data is correct or not, the teams (especially graduates) are then being asked to present the data shown. However, it’s then that they tend to hit a barrier due to the lack of engagement with the data and they are unable to speak to the findings due to the lack of thought process behind it.

Another panellist, Mike Leverington, Director of Insight Capability at ITV, explained how we will continue to need creativity. Stories, products, television, films are all reflective of what we see around us, the society and the time. AI is unable to do this, and as such is unable to help with creativity.

Panel with Unilever: Getting the right mix

Digital agility is about the culture of growth and innovation without fear. Many businesses have grown their digital agility more so within the last decade than in the last century, and this has all contributed to giving them a competitive edge.

Dipesh Patel, Chief Digital Officer for Beauty at Unilever (Europe, MET & ANZ), highlighted how digital agility is about being smarter, faster and cheaper. Businesses need to move fast and take advantage of the waves happening on various platforms. They should not be constrained to one just because it seems like the correct fit.

Panel with STEM Learning: Reimagining approaches to talent

Manufacturing is not the only sector facing a major skills shortage right now. Nikki Clegg, Technology Industry Stakeholder Relationship Manager at STEM Learning, offered up some shocking statistics about the current state of skills within technology over the last 18 months.

  • 71% of businesses do not have a written skills plan
  • 63% of businesses have no plans to attract diverse talent
  • Many businesses still believe that apprentices ‘lack’ productivity

When it comes to closing this gap, many businesses are averse to bringing in inexperienced people. However, experts from across the industry are imploring businesses to recruit on skills, not experience. Nikki stated that some are equating X amount of years’ experience in technical skills in place of a degree or equivalent qualification.

Often, diverse groups see a mental block when working in businesses where managers, seniors and C-suite level directors do not reflect who they are. It can cause them to be unable to see themselves in those positions and therefore, not continue to grow within the company.

The industry needs to be opening STEM careers to everyone. It has been said that once children become a certain age (5+), they then begin to place barriers on what they can do, or what is seen as achievable. STEM Learning uses sector ambassadors to go into schools and showcase what the industry has to offer and continue to encourage boys and girls of all backgrounds into the sector.

Summary

Throughout day one of the expo, many important discussions were had about the journey manufacturers are on, how they need to up their game when it comes to protecting assets from cyber attacks, and that the AI debate is still dominating the conversation.

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