#15 Future Workplace Insights: Creating Frictionless Experiences Through AI and Human-Centered Design

TRANSCRIPT

Claire Ward: Good afternoon and good morning from wherever you're joining us. My name is Claire Ward from SPS and I'd like to welcome you to the Power of Possibility podcast. 

And today I'm so excited I'm joined by my colleague Nicole Mangarella who's our global head of technology and innovation and super excited to be joined by Phil Ross who is the CEO of Unwork and also the founder of WorkTech who we've been working closely with over the last couple of years and is also an author of a book called Unwork which I'm currently diving into and thoroughly enjoying. So welcome both. And today we're going to be unpacking some of the things that we've been seeing at the New York Tech Week, London Tech Week, but also our very own US summit where we were looking at the intersection of technology and hospitality when we look at workplace experience. So lots to get through. It's a really exciting time right now in our space. I'm delighted to have you both here. 

I can't believe it. This time last week the three of us were in New York and it feels like, you know, two weeks ago but it's not even a week ago. And we've had three events. We were unpacking things like the survey findings from the performance gap. You shared some amazing windows into some of the incredible projects you've worked on, with the likes of JP Morgan and Macquarie and the things that you're seeing in workplace technology. We took a deep dive into the intersection between workplace experience and technology and the role that that's playing and why people are still really important. And one of my favourite sessions is how we looked at how we can use data intelligently to help shape, you know, workplace services in the future. So we covered so much ground in such a short period of time, but I think what be interesting for me, Phil, is as somebody who stayed with us for the day at the US Summit, what were your thoughts and observations when you spent the day listening and looking and how that linked into what you were seeing and hearing in New York Tech Week? would you share us on that? 

Philip Ross: I mean, for a start we were in Amazon's fantastic new space in New York building. the old Lord&Taylor for those that know Manhattan. So, you know, that that venue was fabulous and obviously a kind of partner client of yours. And you know, actually if you rewind the highlight at the end of the day was the lab, right? Getting going down to see their future lab of innovations, everything from robotics to you know, identification through cameras, the biometrics, through to the kind of the vision for almost teleporting, right?  

Some of those technologies were astonishing, which are cloud enabled. but the day takeaway for the day was that everyone's focused on experience. Dan's opening keynote, Amazon's opening keynote was all about the idea that AI will help shape a new experience, and just transform everything from work process, process to the way that we enable different experiences. And that for me is very exciting. 

Claire Ward: What were your thoughts, Nicole? 

Nicole Mangarella: I think for me the robots were definitely cool and interesting. I think I remember going to their builder studio probably about I wanna say two or three years ago and seeing that hologram and thinking, my god, we could use that in so many different applications. And at the time it was ludicrously expensive. And I think I asked this time and the price has dropped about thirty percent or so. So, it's sort of nice to see some of those leading technologies start to become commercially viable.  

So, the some of the use cases that we want to explore actually now make a business case and we can use them. I think for me, one of the biggest takeaways was around Jess Kriegel's keynote explaining sort of the tie between the importance of experience driving beliefs and then those beliefs helping to drive business results. 

Every experience that somebody has as part of that company, whether it's within the office space, whether it's working remotely, whether it's collaborating with their teams or with service providers, drives the types of results they’re really looking to achieve.Nicole Mangarella, Head of Global Technology & Innovation at SPS

 For me looking at it from a a technology transformation and implementation side of it, you can really see when people believe that the technology and the systems and the processes that you're implementing are going to help drive the types of results that they're really looking to achieve. That whole process becomes, I won't say easy, but it's definitely an easier process and a faster process than when you don't have that belief at the starting point and her way of connecting the fact that every experience that somebody has as part of that company, whether it's within the office space, whether it's working remotely, whether it's collaborating with their teams or with service providers, all of those experience go and drive those beliefs. And so if you're not investing in that experience, you're missing a trick. 

Claire Ward: Do know what? What you say there really just sparked some thinking there for me. And what you were great at was storytelling and how you can bring those things alive through stories and how it really can resonate with people. And that's exactly what the Builder Studio did for me. Because that's the question: is like how many technologies?, is it where we have probably about 200 different applications that we can build from that? And it's why they call it the Builder Studio. 

But what they took us around, they just demonstrated very simply and very effectively use cases. They really brought their technology alive through demonstrating use cases. And that was so clever to me. And it made me think about how we build and how we solve for problems at SPS. It's all about outcome-driven innovation. But it was really interesting how you bring that back to people. It's always, always, always about the individual so we can have these fabulous offices, these fabulous technologies, but fundamentally it's how do people feel. And that kind of takes me back to the survey - here we go, the survey we did with WorkTech for the second year - And if we start to unpack some of the findings, five key findings, one of them really surprised me is that engagement's dropping. We've seen a drop in engagement, yet we're not seeing people leave businesses.  

And I think there's this fear of what's the future going to hold when it comes to the likes of AI? The world is shifting, it's a lot more uncertain. So people are staying, but they're not productive. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. 

Philip Ross: Yeah, I the so they was really interesting. And I think, you know, some of the findings, you know, people wanting, if they're in the office, to have focus, which I think is a big area, removing friction came up time and time again. You know, building experience where it's not just you know the baseline, but it's about delight, moments that matter, memorable moments, you know, something a bit different. Yeah. Which can be led by amenity, food and beverage, you know, and as Jessica mentioned, culture, that drives engagement.  

So, I am surprised that engagement schools are what they are. You know, it's it's interesting. And we've have we moved on from the kind of quiet quitters, I don't know. I you know, there's unemployment rising now, especially amongst 20 year olds. You know, that that's that's a fact and a worry. AI is going to decimate a lot of entry level jobs. How do you build engagement? I don't know. I mean the post COVID generation is reluctant to come back to work five days a week. we've seen in New York the mandates. 

You know, all the investment banks, the hedge funds are back five days a week and their profits are great, right? So, are we gonna see a backlash and, you know, a reaction against declining profitability or performance or engagement maybe? Because you know, I think what I'm seeing is that you know, what is the role of the office?  

You know, why do you bring people into an office? There's quite a few different aspects, but one of them is to build your human capital. And, you know, I'm hearing more and more that if you're not there, you're not present, you're not promoted, you're not getting the best projects, you're not close to your boss, which has an impact on you know, everything from remote. 

Claire Ward: Well got me there, but how often is the boss turning up? 

Philip Ross: Or I mean all the senior people there, right? I mean you were saying, you know, about your early experience around remote working and presence and so on. 

Nicole Mangarella: Yeah, I d I I always find it interesting and it's evolved obviously since I started working quite a while ago. But my first position in the workforce out of school was for a software company and my role was fully remote because I was traveling a lot, because where I was living at the time was in between the two physical offices that they had. But I would go in for a few days at a time, a week at a time if there was something particularly difficult to talk to the programmers about or to talk to our sales team about. And you can do a lot of things remotely, and I think what we heard at the connected experience event was a lot about the workplaces being a place to connect and where that connectivity is important. 

I think there's to your point on, you know, AI and sort of the anxiety around that maybe decreasing some of the engagement. There was a Gensler study recently that said that about 30% of your workforce is is probably becoming an AI powered user.  

That group of the workforce is then spending more of their time learning and socializing than they are doing solo focused work. And so I think that ability to give people the types of spaces and the type of resources that helps them connect and collaborate is becoming more important as you look at, hopefully, that level of power users increasing in organizations. 

Claire Ward: And also I think we'll see different roles will evolve. I'm grateful even the job to be done never changes, but the way that we do it does. And then we're in that uncomfortable phase of change at the moment, that messy, “nobody quite knows where it's going, but eventually we will get there”. And when we get there, we'll go, well, that was actually quite straightforward in the end. But when you're actually in it, when you're in change, it feels difficult and it's evolving. But I think your point is really well made. 

Especially for younger people coming into the workplace, that idea of learning how to socialise, learning how to engage, learning how to be curious and having the bravery to be curious, I think is going to be very interesting. I mean, when I started work, we didn't actually have PCs on our desks. You know, I was one of the first people to get a laptop and it was, so what did we do? We used to talk, we used to chat, we had a telephone, we had whatever we had on our desk and we did our job, but there was a lot more social engagement. 

Now admittedly things might not have moved as quickly as we'd have liked but we learnt the skill of collaboration and working together. 

Philip Ross: But I think driving collaboration, as you said, Nicole, is is key for the workplace. I'm not sure many do it very well. You know, so most offices are still pretty much factories, you know, unsociable, you know, collection of desks and meeting rooms and not much else. So, it's only the leading organizations who are really understanding the power of amenity and social space that that get it right. 

Claire Ward: Do you think collaboration can be a learned skill? 

I think space impacts behaviour. Churchill, in a famous quote after the Second World War, said that, "We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us." I think it is really interesting how the Parliament building is designed for a two-party adversarial government process and how its architecture reinforces that situation and process. Philip Ross, CEO UnGroup

Philip Ross: Yeah. I think so. I think I think space impacts behaviour. 

Given we're back in London, there's a very famous quote from Churchill. Do you know the quote from after the Parliament was damaged after the Second World War and they debated whether it should be knocked down or repaired and rebuilt, he came out with a quote saying: “We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us”, which I think is really interesting, right? So, the Parliament building is designed for a two-party adversarial government process and it's architecture that reinforces a a situation and process. The workplace is the same. 

If you design it in a experience which is uplifting when you get into work when you kind of come out of a ghastly commute and you're kind of you know, you're feeling a sense of wonder, and if you look at someone like Bloomberg that channels everybody through a pantry as you arrive in the workplace, which is that kind of social moment that makes a big difference. 

Claire Ward: So it's intentional design for the outcome that you want to achieve. Yeah, it's interesting, really interesting. 

One of the other findings in the report that struck me, and I think it was picked up from some other research, and that's like nearly 60 % of our day is spent on the work of work. So that's all the admin and the unnecessary things that we have to do before we can actually get into deep work. Are we starting to see, and it's question for both of you, technologies or approaches that are going to help deal with some of that to free up, you touched on it, to free up our time.  

Not to do more, but maybe to be more creative and better at what we're paid to do. 

Philip Ross: And I think Nicole we had this great work tech on Tuesday this week in London with Meta. The focus of which was AI. To some of the stuff that was shared on stage I thought was exceptional.  

Claire Ward: Oh, tell me. I have FOMO it for not being there [laughs] 

Philip Ross: From I know from Microsoft , there were two things that jumped at me. Microsoft talking about the fact that their places platform would not only, you know, nudge right size, sit you by the right people for your working day, allow you to book the right s resources, but it will also will check if the tech is working before you go into the meeting room, which is great, right? And then you're seeing others talk about using AI that rebalances the workplace every morning. So that's brilliant, right? 

Claire Ward: Tell me what you mean by that. 

Philip Ross: So, I think that if we've booked a room for a meeting tomorrow in the workplace, you know, and it's for ten people, but only three of us are coming in person, nobody ever changes the room to be a or more appropriate size. You know, we sit in a room maybe designed for fifteen people. 

Claire Ward: I understand. 

Philip Ross: So, AI will do this. It will every morning look at all the cancelled rooms. It will reassign everything based on the actual number of people coming in and check it based on access control. It will change the location of all the rooms based on where you're gonna be sitting, so, they minimize walk times. 

It will look at your preferences, and that will be done in the background. And so as you as you kinda wake up for your day, it will share with you through your cell phone what your day looks like where you're sitting and what that is.  

Claire Ward: It's the virtual PA. 

Philip Ross: Yeah, and it orchestrates it. And likewise if I want to book a room, I don't have to go into some awful platform and say I want to book room 306.

I believe that technology should be invisible. I want to be in an office environment or workplace environment that feels tech free, but is entirely tech enabled. I want it in my work life.Claire Ward, Chief Innovation Officer, SPS

Claire Ward: This is coming into another thing for me, right? So, I believe that technology should be invisible. I want to be in an office environment or workplace environment that feels tech free, but is entirely tech enabled. That's how my home runs. We've got technology everywhere in my house, but I don't feel it. I don't have to log into it. It just works.  

All the TVs work together and all the music systems work together and you know, all of the wifi internet and my home office all works in the background. 

I don't have to log into anything or I don't have to mess around with stuff. So I've got that in my home life. I want it in my work life. But Nicole, I can see you smiling. We've seen some other technologies recently, are outside of the Microsoft walled garden, if you like. But for me, it goes back to where is it getting the information from in order to make those informed decisions?  

Nicole Mangarella: You hit the nail on the head. I think the part that's always interesting to me and it was great at our event to have a session just on how we can use data to change experiences, to create things proactively and also to measure some of the impact.  

I think I at London Tech Week I heard a lot of people recognizing the importance of data, not just collecting it and sort of aggregating it, but actually wrapping the context around it. We heard the same thing at the Work Tech event at Meta as well.  

And I do see a difference in the way that tech companies talk about their workplace experience and the way that non-tech companies talk about their workplace experience.  

I agree that there's a lot that Microsoft could do, but the version of Copilot that they share on the stage and the version that a lot of companies in regulated industries are using the capabilities aren't the same, nor should they be.  

The sensitivity of the data of the information limits some of the things that you can give it access to. I think that will change. I think we're getting better focus on the regulatory impact, on ways to be able to protect the data, on ways to make sure that information is safe and secure and it's only accessing what it needs to access.  

Claire Ward: Exactly, I agree with that. 

Nicole Mangarella: But the experience that you're talking about and the number of passive data points that need to be incorporated. Some of that data's not digital.  

So, the example, maybe we are only three people and we've booked a meeting room for the size of twelve, but maybe that's because we work at an architecture firm and the model that we're working with needs a table that's in a room the size of twelve people. If that information isn't captured digitally somehow, whether that's in an Outlook calendar or a meeting planner or maybe it's in a service ticket, and it's not brought together, then when that room gets rescheduled to three people, I'm in trouble.  

And it hasn't made my day easier. Now it's made me share other information that I didn't share initially, but it's added to the friction of it. And I do think there's a lot that we do with data and selfishly the way that we we've brought it together through our SPS Nexus platform has been really informative for us in understanding how our teams want to use the information for better services and how clients want that future state where it's proactive and it's automated and it's sort of seamless behind the scenes, but getting the information and doing the work to make it possible is not a small task. 

Claire Ward: It's not and I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier and that's the people that design that probably don't exist in our business today. And you do want data solution information architects that can actually start before you even open the box and plug the technology in. It's this end to end journey and that's one of the slides I loved that you shared when you were talking to us in New York is the part of This is how I start my day. This is how I and it was that journey mapping is so important 

Philip Ross: People don't do it as well. 

Claire Ward: I saw some yesterday actually, because I was at the Rotterdam Work Tech event and we had a lovely presentation from somebody from ING and she was speaking specifically about how they were upping and trying to improve their hybrid working. So some people are in the office and some people are working remotely as they have to because they're in different countries. 

So hybrid is here, especially if you're in a global organization. And she talked us through the project. And within that, they did lots of journey mapping, they did lots of engagement with the staff. It was a brilliantly, brilliantly runed project. But I would say that that approach is not common. 

Philip Ross: ING's is great, I mean they have a great kind of track record, in innovating around work and workplace with a thorough basis and I think intentional design of experience is critical. I mean the approach I showed is based on service design.  

So basically you segment by a persona you get as close as possible to your customer whether it's a person coming in for an interview nervous and you know potential talent or a VIP client coming in or an employee or whatever it might be. 

And you design with intent an experience that's meaningful. But you need the way that diagram works, the top layer is what the person feels, touches, thinks, the sentient workplace, and so on. Then there's a measure. That's the interesting part. There's actually an experience index. So you're finding the points of friction or the pain points, all the moments that matter, and applying a measure. But then the key is how do you deliver the experience? So the bottom part of that diagram is who owns the experience, who's involved in delivery, and how you join that up. Because often in in organizations it's very siloed and that's a big problem. 

Claire Ward: That’s my pet thing. You and I have had this conversation. But have you got any thoughts on that as well, Nicole? 

Nicole Mangarella: I also loved the slide when you put it up. I was actually there was a client that popped right into my mind. They're actually here in London, I won't name them, but they have an office, beautiful office, client facing, they're in consulting. So their clients are coming in, they're paying by the hour, they're very concerned with making sure that they get the most out of their time. The challenge with that office is you can't actually get a cab right to the front door. 

It's on a pedestrian only walkway. And so if you're running late as a client, even if you're in that Uber and you think, okay, I'm gonna get there with some time to spare, you have about a five minute walk until you get to that front door.  

So that front of house team, the previous experience before we took over the account was you would walk in and one person would greet you, and then you would move over and another person would greet you and they would help you up the stairs. And then a third person would greet you when you got to the top of the stairs, and they would hand you off to a fourth person who would then escort you through the process after you had checked in.  

And it was meant to feel very welcoming and high touch and like you're very important because you've had four people who have now you know been allocated to see to your needs but for somebody who's rushing in to a meeting that they're literally paying by the minute for that's not really the right kind of service delivery. And so, transforming that process and saying, what if we had one person and by the way they also are able to see, okay this person has a meeting. It's supposed to be happening in five minutes. 

It takes seven minutes to walk from the front desk to that conference room. So let me pre-print that visitor badge. Let me go and actually get out from behind the desk. Let me wait by the door. I know what they look like because they've been here before and they're one of our VIP clients. And let me actually greet them, know that they're late for their meeting and usher them straight to that, also letting the team that they're meeting with know.  

That's a huge difference not just for the experience that that person has, because let's be honest, usually I'm the one that's late. So I know very much what it feels like to be rushing to that meeting and the extra stress that that puts on top of it. But that also helps that business run a lot more smoothly knowing that now that one hour block that's set aside for that client is gonna be kept to that one hour and they're gonna get value. 

Claire Ward: And what I love about that is it's done two things. It's process excellence. I mean, that's basic process mapping. You've removed handoffs. You've gone from the point A to point B in the quickest time. It's delivering on the brand. It's a brand experience. It's engaging with the customer. See, I love that as an example. And then going back to your moments that matter, it's about how do we remove those friction points? Because that was the other thing that came out of the research was 

People's frustrations are handing off, sending information to teams, waiting for decisions, technology that doesn't work, meeting rooms that are not available. Key thing was finding help, getting support. So, these are all, these are gaps in the day that if we could remove those hand breaks, it would make the whole day feel a lot more productive. And I think that was one of the things that we were looking at is this productivity gap, this performance gap.  

The other thing that was quite interesting in the survey is we talk about measurement. We've got this obsession with measuring things at the moment. Everywhere I go, everybody's trying to measure aspect. It’s like, sometimes you just got to let things happen and focus on the outcome and how we're getting close to it. But measurement, when we surveyed people, we talked about the workplace metrics and what are you measuring? And it was like, well, occupancy, utilization, cost per square foot, CO2 output, how much power are we using, but it all kept coming back to utilization. 

Yet when we talked to employees actually, they talked about productivity and what kind of things would you be measuring and what would you like to be moving the dial on. What they're talking about is, to management level, it's attrition rates, retention rates, engagement rates, feedback from surveys, customer satisfaction.  

The customer, the senior management might be looking at revenue per employee. The employee is looking at outputs like the ability for me to be able to produce my work on time and get a positive reaction from the person that I'm producing it for. So, there's a real kind of disconnect between what employees want to be measured on and what they think success looks like in the workplace environment and what C-suite, senior management, are looking at. often, so that means are we optimizing for the wrong things? You know, if senior management are optimizing for occupancy and employees are optimizing for customer satisfaction, who's right? 

Philip Ross: Totally agree. I think also you know, back to Nicole's point around time. I mean I think if you compare us to other industries, it's quite interesting, right? So, you know in airports it now tells you the time to walk to the gate. Because, you know, people who are late have a huge impact. It's a very clear contrast. 

Nicole Mangarella: It's a big benefit. 

Philip Ross: Minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, huge, right? Yeah. Because airports are complex. And you know, the Uber driver, right? It says, you know, two minutes away time to kind of get downstairs kind of thing. So why don't we do that in the office?  

Because as you're right, it's a huge downside. And the downtime is massive. And I think where the AI is going to change things is, you know, with vertical buildings, there's always a problem with elevators or lifts. Huge wait times. And if you've got a meeting room five floors up. 

It can be a nightmare. And you're late and it's all you know, so I think all of this is around load balancing, logistics, you know, efficiency. So therefore, what people measure is interesting. If you've got ten people in a meeting and it starts fifteen minutes late, that's a number, there's a there's a cost of that cause you know what you're paying them. And you know the downtime of that. So, I think all of this is measurable and then it goes right the way through to the carbon footprint because, you know, if we're occupying our buildings inefficiently and we could have hibernated three floors, that also has a big impact. 

Claire Ward: But I often wonder, you've got a management team that are racking their brains as to how we can become more efficient and therefore more effective. For me, most of the answers to the problems in an organization sit within the heads of the people in the business. You know, so if you've got 4,000 people in your business, in your office, generally speaking, they will be able to tell you what's not working, what could be done better, and what could be improved. And I don't know how good as UK PLC we are at doing that. Fishing for problems to solve or do we outsource it to consultants, management consultants to do? I don't know in your world of work and you spend a lot of time working with organizations, would you say that big business is good at doing that? Going off and using the resources within the organization to solve problems? 

Philip Ross: I think it depends. I think in some functions like real estate, you know, some of it's very slim. You know, they don't have much internal resource, so they rely on external vendors and partners, and that's good and bad, but I think as we adopt AI, there's a lot more you can do with a smaller team and resource. And we are beginning to see companies employ data scientists in those teams who are able to un understand data and vibe code. You know, I've I've got clients who are using vibe coding to to create platforms for insights.  

So, I think you can do a lot now. And it's just about the kind of ambition, the the kind of North Star roadmap, you know, where are we heading and why? Purpose.  

Claire Ward: And where do I fit in? I had a brilliant conversation with lady called Louise Shepherd who is hopefully joining us at our Connected Workplace Summit in July. She's very senior within workplace and real estate at Zurich and they have recently had a new CEO and he coined this movement and it was make today, I'm probably paraphrasing, but it's make today, make tomorrow today. 

And he was encouraging everybody in the organization, irrespective of where you sit in the organization, to share frustrations, frictions, problems that are stopping you then from doing their best work in essence. And the number of problems that they have been able to resolve or number of challenges that they've been able to resolve has been quite phenomenal. And what it's done is help the business move forward, quicker and it's made people's work and jobs much more effective and much more efficient. And it was just a simple, simple idea. You know, I love that because everybody takes part. It's not the provision of, or it's not the privilege of a handful of people in charge. It's everybody is involved in making it better. 

Nicole Mangarella: Makes sense. 

That's one of the things I think that's most exciting about some of the AI applications is if you look at a company the size of Zurich, that's a massive amount of people. So historically, the best way to get feedback was to sort of cherry pick a small group of people and then get that feedback and then digest that feedback because you just couldn't manage if you asked every single person for feedback, it would be like opening the floodgates and there would be no effective way to go and analyze that information and then take action on it. 

We know that if you ask people for feedback and then you don't take action on their feedback, there's your disengagement problem right there. And some of the newer AI tools, especially and we talked about this at our summit briefly, some of the newer things that we're seeing in the space are really around taking some of those customer experience measurement tools that lets you take unstructured feedback, analyze it, mine sort of the the context based sentiment of what people are positive about and what people are negative about, and then use that data to make changes at that kind of scale. And then we're also seeing better mechanisms for getting that feedback sort of asynchronously, whereas, you know, you send out that feedback survey, you send it out once a year, it kind of takes the temperature of that moment. 

Maybe the person fills it out on a day that's particularly not a great day or they fill it out on a day that's a a nor an abnormally great day. And you sort of miss the trends of the flow of how the workplace is working with it. And I think that's where I'm excited to see especially some of our AI partners are really building out better ways to manage large teams of people, not just take a temperature of a small group and pretend that a small group represents the whole, which is exciting to be able to have that to change. 

Claire Ward: It is and I think just we are blessed with our partner network and the people we get to work with and bringing those technologies into our kind of workplace experience proposition that we take to market is fantastic. You know, being able to do it in a safe environment as well. You know, AI, there's obviously concerns around it. I was doom scrolling last night as I came across thinks like “did you hear about the issue in China…”, and things like that.  

You may remember it, you might have come across it. The security team were monitoring power usage and they were seeing these huge spikes in server capacity. And it was an agent that they'd built to go off and do one task that had managed to do something else. And it was doing lots of things it wasn't supposed to.  

I will share the link to you. I'm probably rambling here, but it just struck me as, okay, so it's like having a renegade employee within the organization. 

Philip Ross: Well, AI will talk to AI, right?  

Claire Ward: This is what's happening. That's exactly what was happening. And checks and balances in place to control that. So this idea of using these technologies in a safe and controlled environment I think is going to be more more apparent and the more we know about that. You know, our heritage is in security, safe, compliance and I think we bring that to the table and I think that's going to be more important. 

Philip Ross: One of our strategies at Unwork is around how AI will impact the organization and the workplace. So, the two interesting ones are the frontier organization, which is how AI will work alongside humans, right? And there will be agentic workers.  

McKinsey's forecast seems to have 40,000 agentic workers, almost the same as their physical workers. So, what kind of spaces do you need for the future when you're working alongside agentic agents? We're seeing the beginnings of team spaces where you go into a purposely built pod or studio or something different and working intensively with AI with a smaller group of people. That's very different, and then there's autonomous organizations where the AI will just take over and automate and do its own thing with robotics or with just intelligence.  

And then, as well as the LLM you know, the vision of a agentic agents, there's a kind of the physical AI world that's taking over, which is back to your comment about data.  

And the stuff I was seeing on the West Coast recently is now looking at the just the use of unstructured data inside buildings and businesses. And the AI agent doesn't care about the structure and the naming conventions. It can just go off and use unstructured data, make sense of it and make decisions. 

Claire Ward: But then you've got to have somebody at the other end who's going to read it that actually can say whether or not it's coming back with something that is realistic, relevant or right. 

Philip Ross: I mean there's a hallucination issue, but they're saying they won't need a human intervention. You know, for example, let's say an air conditioning unit, you know, the AI will be able to look at the vibration sensing, the filtering and and all the rest of it. And today we send a maintenance person round, you know, once every three months to change everything. The AI will say you don't need to change that filter, that can last another three months and it will automate that process. There'll be no human intervention at all. 

Claire Ward: Yeah. 

Nicole Mangarella: I mean, the predictive maintenance piece of it, I think that's been around for a long time. I remember there was a case study year back about how they were using it on oil rigs because it's incredibly expensive to go and fly a helicopter out to an oil rig and replace something. So, the more that you can predict and make fewer trips, it pays for itself in a very short amount of time. I think Claire to your point, you really highlighted something important, which is yes, you can automate the collection of data. 

Yes, you can automate some of the flagging of the trending, but without that domain expertise, it's really not as impactful as you want it to be. And we see that across any service area that we work in, being able to combine the data in a way that really makes sense and to know what data you don't have that is still influencing the question that you're trying to answer. And either, you know, being able to go out and get that data from that day forward or being able to sort of hypothesize and make a reasonable guess and then follow that through is really important. But that domain expertise, that context around what that information actually means for the business is the critical piece that makes it useful.  

Claire Ward: That's the bit I might just see it's having a team of highly very smart capable people that going off and doing stuff and then coming back, reporting back and saying this is what I found and I'm gonna read it and go yeah, that makes sense to me or yeah, and then you start to think about the art of the possible to your point what's missing go away and find out more. That’s how I see us leveraging AI, it's hockey stick.  

It's creating some velocity in innovation or creativity or problem solving or service delivery. It's getting to the nub of the challenge quicker to be able to then move us forward. Yeah, it's fascinating. 

Nicole Mangarella: Yeah. It's definitely an accelerant. I think the point you made earlier, Phil, is about the impact on the entry level jobs. I think there's been a lot, depending on whether you listen to the tech guys or labor economists, you get sort of both sides of the coin of it's gonna really eliminate it or they're not going anywhere. And I thought it was really interesting at London Tech Week earlier this week, the CEO of Accenture for UK was talking about the impact on the way that they're doing business and consulting is one of those businesses that it's prevalent throughout.  

It's got a lot of great use cases, good and, you know, sometimes not so good. His point was they're actually hiring a larger intern class, than they normally would. 

But what they did is they sat down and they actually redesigned what that intern experience looks like, to take advantage of the fact that this intern class is - I hate the term - AI native, but I'm gonna use it 'cause I can't think of a better one.  

They have great experience using the tools. Having them come in and do the same thing the previous intern class in just i isn't gonna be satisfying for them and isn't gonna be helpful for the business overall. I do think it's a lot of redesign of how the work gets done and how much time it takes and the types of things that are done. But it's not it's still skills and tasks, it's not full roles that that it's capable of at least today. This could be out of date in six months. We’ll find out 

Claire Ward: But nothing stands still. I mean, look at motor cars. You go back and it's just accelerating, the speed of change is just accelerating.  

Today a car is run by a battery. There's no engine in there, it's a battery. And you know, if we're looking at a Tesla or if we're looking at the job to be done getting from A to B hasn't changed. But the way that we get there has changed. And this is what's exciting. You know, nothing is standing still. 

Philip Ross: That's an interesting one, Claire. As innovators and so on, I've used Waymo quite a lot in in the States, which is the self driving car from Google, which is amazing as an experience, but it still is a car with a steering wheel and a driver's seat that no one's using. So why? So you know, why hasn't somebody stepped back and if we can have a self driving car, does it need to look like a car? Why can't we just build a space for us to sit in with a drinks fridge, with some comfortable chairs? And it just drives us so we can have a conversation. Do people expect to see a steering wheel that's moving around? 

Claire Ward: But the answer is at the moment, yes. Why? Because we're in this period of transition. And if you're going to get people to go from being in a car with a person in it to a car without a person in it needs to feel vaguely familiar. Eventually... It's a shame. I know it's a shame, but you are a futurist. You are somebody that lives in the future. And there are people that are behind you. And there's that first... You know, it's a generational thing as well. I'm going to get in this car and I'm like, okay, first of all, I've seen a steering wheel. 

When I drive, when I get in a car in the States or in Europe, I always get in the wrong side to start with and they always say, are you driving? I'm saying, no, I'm not driving. So I get in the other side and for five minutes I'm feeling really uncomfortable because I'm sitting on, with no steering wheel. So, I think it's about familiarity, but you're right, in 10 years time, that space will be filled with something else. 

Nicole Mangarella: I was gonna say I don't think the market for cars without steering wheels is large enough yet.  

Claire Ward: Yeah, that's a much more practical way. 

Nicole Mangarella: If you're an automaker and Waymo comes to you and say I want you to make cars, but I want them to not have a steering wheel … and there are very small smart car manufacturers that make those types of like little pods that are essentially are going around. But if you think about it, I think the driverless cars only launched in London like a week or so ago. They're still very, very new. And they're having some issues with sirens going off down dead-end roads and some like London's a whole different animal than the West Coast or even New York for driverless cars. And I feel like it will get to the point where 

makes financial sense for an automaker to do it, but probably not yet and I'm also curious maybe Waymo decides that they're the right person to buy an automaker and make the cars themselves and then fully integrate it. I haven't driven in one yet or ridden in, but it still sort of look, you know, the Waymo car still look sort of science project. 

Philip Ross: Little bit. And they use jaguar cars, right? They're just normal. And you're missing the benefit. I my Uber over here to the podcast this morning, you know, clean car, but he had l LBC on at full blast, which is that kind of call-in radio station London full of very bigoted people. And the last thing I wanted to listen to was just some idiots espousing views that I don't really care about on my way over here. I wanted some peace and quiet. 

Claire Ward: And you're way too nice to just ask him to switch the radio off. I'd have switched the radio off. [laughs] 

Nicole Mangarella: I love the Uber feature when I have to take like an early morning Uber to an airport or something where you can request for a silent ride. I'm so sorry, I have not had my coffee yet. I don't know that I'm in the mindset for conversation. 

Claire Ward: User preferences. I'm going to take us somewhere else. We are blessed. We have the most amazing customer base. We get to see inside some incredible organizations. You get to work with some of the most visionary architects and planners, but they are, I guess, in a minority, these organizations globally. 

And workplace experience, employee engagement, and getting people to be more productive is not the exclusive right of just the people at the top of the pyramid. Big organizations, vast majority of organizations in the UK are SMEs. They don't have the deep pockets and they don't have the access to experience and talent like you and Nicole to be able to help shape some of those conversations. 

How can organisations without those kind of budgets start to make sense of the world that we find ourselves in and how can they make some practical moves towards better engagement, better productivity? It's a big question. Either of you have given that some thought when it comes to workplace design, and workplace experience. 

Philip Ross: Yeah, I mean I think you know, measuring white collar productivity's always been a challenging area. So, you know, some roles you've got very clear measures of outputs, a sales function, right? You hit a sales target, you don't hit a sales target. That's a very clear others less so, but I think more and more, you know, as Nicole talked about the data, you know, we'll be able to kind of correlate data. So what interests me is let's take a sales team of a thousand people, what are the the top five percent performers doing that's different from the bottom five percent? 

So, you know, how much time in the office? Where do they sit? Who do they work with? What do they drink? Where do they present? you know, how much time do they spend doing emails versus being you know in meetings and VCs? So all of this kind of can be used to kind of correlate and measure performance in new ways. And therefore you can align the workplace. Maybe a particular meeting room is terrible for pitching, you know, and just no one knows, just but the data is there somewhere. 

Maybe somebody working in a very noisy, distracting environment doesn't succeed as much as somebody who's got some more focus and privacy. So, all of these things are can be very interesting. 

Nicole Mangarella: Yeah, and I I do think I I mean they're they're not small as far as valuation, but they're small in number of people. There was at London Tech Week the the CEO of Lagora was was asked about how they're handling scaling out. You know, they're based in in Stockholm, they've been opening new offices all around the globe to meet the demand for the software that they provide, and his first question was our important thing is to make sure that we maintain our company culture as we scale. And they were very much, he was very insistent that really is part of sort of their secret sauce of why they're successful, why people use their software and things like that. And I realize they're, I mean, they have from a valuation standpoint, they can definitely afford to hire us and things like that. But I think as smaller companies look at it, it's a matter of prioritizing the fact that your culture really will impact your growth.  

And there are studies and ways of measuring that and there's things that show it historically. And so, you don't necessarily have to invest a ton of money into things, but you do have to invest the focus in that area of the business because it will impact your ability to hire talent, your ability to expand and retain and preserve that important culture, and your ability to then attract customers and grow. 

Claire Ward: So that idea of we've all worked in scale-ups and that idea of a dispersed workforce, you know, lots of organizations let real estate go during Covid and haven't taken it back and they've chosen to have this dispersed workforce. 

Some have got a hybrid workforce where they have an office and they have a majority of their people. How do you, have you seen some good examples of where organizations have managed to maintain or to, you know, drive that culture across a dispersed workforce? And it's interesting, Lagora is interesting because it's across geographies as well, not just, let's say, in one country, it's across multiple geographies. Have we seen some good examples of that? 

Philip Ross: Yeah, I mean I think you know, a lot of our clients are global. Most of our clients are global in fact. And actually some of them are interesting. So there's data around reporting lines. You know, one of my tech clients, most people report to somebody in a different geography. 

Claire Ward: Yeah. 

Philip Ross: So these are things that are, you know, It's the way of the world, right? You know, I've got clients in San Fran who have to you know start work at five in the morning to align with markets. You know, so all of these things shape culture, behavior, the provision of workplace, support and so on. And yeah, there are some clump companies that are more virtual. There are some that have got an RTO policy of five days a week back in the office. They've all got different reasons. and they're all driving a different culture and outcome.  

There's no right and wrong really. If profitability is being maintained, if intellectual property is being developed, etc., you know, that can be seen as the right outcome. But I do think that it may be a short term position. I think that sometimes you're measuring things like patents and innovations and intellectual property. But a lot of that's been historically developed.  

There's kind of it's a pipeline and, you know, there's the kind of classic Christiansen innovators dilemma. You know, the companies that didn't see, you know, the classic Kodak moment where, you know, suddenly a an industry goes off a cliff. And, you know, do people have the right level of innovation, skunkworks, you know, labs to test out what's next and be ahead of the game? 

Claire Ward: We, as SPS, as we get further into the whole workplace experience and helping our customers deliver on their ambitions, what you know of us as an organization now and what you're seeing in the marketplace and hearing, what are the things that you think we should be focusing on or you think we need to be doubling down on more? What would you say? have you got any thoughts on that? 

Philip Ross: Yeah, I think probably two things. Yeah, one is based on the work tech research we've been doing together. A: researching, so keeping close to what customers are saying. But B, you know, I think delivering services that don't just kind of replace the existing but move the dial, you know, so either stretch or invent, you know, create new ideas… 

Claire Ward: And services. 

Philip Ross: Absolutely. If I put my Unwork hat on, you know, the Unwork side of things, how does an employee access that service? I mean it's very old school today. They raise a ticket, but could we reinvent the platform? Can we look at an app oriented approach? You know, we all carry a cell phone that should allow us to personalize at scale. So, if we achieve mass personalization, you could deliver a service based on who the individual is, where they are in their situation.  

Claire Ward: Human centric.  

Philip Ross: Yeah. They can request through an app for service, experience, amenity, whatever it might be, and then you can respond to that in a much better way. So, I think those are the kind of two ingredients. I think, you know, the innovation and then the personalization. 

Claire Ward: Adjacent services that remove friction, that help an organization get closer to its goals, and a human-centric approach to delivering those services. I love, mean, I think the big thing for me around prop tech, if I call it that, is this idea of interoperability. You know, and how do we make it feel seamless and invisible in the background? Nicole, what are your final thoughts? 

Nicole Mangarella: I was gonna say I think I'm gonna violently agree with you with a little bit of a different flavor. But I think your point about access is really important because if I move backwards from the AI as a you did what data do you have to put into it, a lot of your your data problems they're not really data problems, they're process problems. And so, we've been based on feedback from clients and and selfishly feedback from our own teams, we built out an SPS Nexus platform that was designed to help people access services more intuitively. But what we didn't do is we didn't build full stack.  

So, we didn't build a brand new ticketing system because a lot of clients have a ticketing system. We didn't build a brand new outbound shipping system because there's a ton on the market that we partner with that work really, really well. We didn't build out a new booking system or catering system because there's huge ecosystems of those that exist and they are purpose-built with really deep domain expertise in those situations. But what we did build out is a way to connect them so that as a user, if you're going and you're saying, I need a space, and by the way, I need some setup for it, and by the way, I need some catering for it, and three people are visitors from outside, we can link it together, even though it lives in separate systems, so that if you change the date of that meeting, you don't have to go and change everything afterwards. And I feel like that piece of it helps us, also on the data side because then it gives us something that is more organized, that isn't missing information, that we understand the context and the semantics around it.  

And so solving in some cases zooming out from what the actual problem to solve is has been really helpful, at least for us, in being able to say this is a more holistic solution. This is something that's going to help you give better access to the support your people need to do better work. But it's also going to give you the data behind it to be able to show what that next area that they want support in. 

Claire Ward: Yeah, that's easy to understand as well, isn't it? As well if you're in an operation role as well. I think we have brought ourselves full circle back to technology and as usual I could spend hours talking to you both. Phil, it's been an absolute pleasure to see you again and spend another hour in your company. Nicole, love hanging out with you and I'll see you in the office on Monday. Have a great weekend everybody. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you<