Posted on

Using AI to Augment Customer Service Agents

There is seldom a sector or field that is not undergoing some form of transformation at the moment, many at the behest of a tidal wave of digital technologies that are upending the traditional way of doing things. While many of these claims suffer from frothy over-hype, the way companies engage with customers is one domain in which the claims are justified.

A recent report from Deloitte highlighted how customer service has transitioned from the cost center of old, and the most sophisticated companies now aim to create experiences that delight customers and turn them into loyal devotees of the brand.

Posted on

Making Open Offices More Energy Efficient

Open-plan offices are renowned as being terrible for our productivity and efficiency at work, but they're also pretty awful in terms of energy efficiency. Lighting is often on for the entire office, regardless of whether it's actually in use, and even lighting equipped with motion detectors can be far from optimum as it results in lights frequently flickering on and off.

Research from the Eindhoven University of Technology proposes a better approach that could potentially reduce energy consumption by over 25 percent whilst maintaining the usability of the space.

Posted on

Using AI to Track Emotional Experiences

Companies around the world are striving to deliver exceptional customer experiences and elicit positive and exciting emotions that prompt the customer to return time after time.  Being able to measure our emotional response to things is not always easy, but a team from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University (RSM) believe they’ve developed a system that does just that.

In a newly published paper, the team describes how their electroencephalography (EEG) based technology tracks how we feel from moment to moment.

Posted on

Why Empathy Matters When Designing Products

Turns out, empathy and creativity are two peas in a pod.

It seems intuitive that if you can step into the shoes of your customers and experience what they do, then you have a good chance of delivering exceptional customer experiences. It's perhaps for this reason that so many successful startups emerge from the personal pain of the founders.

Nonetheless, the importance of empathy to creativity was underlined by recent research from the University of Connecticut and the University of Illinois, which asked participants to imagine consumers eating a snack before then designing that snack on their behalf.

Posted on

Your Boss’ Opinion of You Really Does Matter

Eliza from My Fair Lady is a classic representation of the Pygmalion effect. 
Photo Credit Wikimedia Commons

The Pygmalion effect is one of the more fascinating aspects of psychology, and should be one of the most understood aspects of modern management. It suggests that our performances can be directly influenced by the perceptions of our bosses. So if they think you’re going to be great, and act as though you’re going to be great, then the chances are, you will be great.

There has been no shortage of evidence to support this hypothesis, but one more will certainly do no harm. It comes from a Chinese study into teaching at a couple of universities in southern China.

Posted on

The AI System That Can Detect Lung Cancer

A central tranche of AI in healthcare today has been in spotting signs of problems in medical imaging faster than humans currently can.  The latest example of this comes via a new study from Google and Northwestern Medicine, which proposes to improve the detection of lung cancer using deep learning.

“Radiologists generally examine hundreds of two-dimensional images or ‘slices’ in a single CT scan, but this new machine learning system views the lungs in a huge, single three-dimensional image,” the researchers explain. “AI in 3D can be much more sensitive in its ability to detect early lung cancer than the human eye looking at 2-D images. This is technically ‘4D’ because it is not only looking at one CT scan, but two (the current and prior scan) over time.”

Posted on

Middle Managers, the Flow of Ideas, and Innovation

It really does take a village, not just upper management.

Few people in an organization have been the focus of so much attention in innovation circles as middle managers. Depending on your point of view, they are seen as either an essential conduit by which information flows, or a barrier to the spread of ideas and knowledge.

Indeed, it’s a topic I myself touched upon when I looked at some new research from Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the topic. Mollick suggested that middle managers are especially important in industries that require innovative employees such as biotech, computing, and media.

Posted on

What Impact Might Automation Have on the Diversity in Public Service?

Predictions about the impact of autonomous technologies on the workplace have been as varied as they have been numerous. What we all agree on, however, is that there will be some kind of impact. The latest study to offer up a prediction comes from the University of Kansas and explores the impact automation might have on the public sector. The study looks not only at the traditional aspects of the automation of work but also whether the introduction of new technologies might influence the equity of service provision.

The authors make a debatable start by arguing that many of the investments in automated technology are driven by efficiency concerns, which is a proxy for layoffs and reduced headcount, and while this is fine and dandy in the private sector, the public sector has more noble ends and must also aim for both the fair and equitable delivery of vital services to the public and the creation of an equal opportunity workforce.

Posted on

Would You Trust an Automated Doctor?

You're in the park going for a run, and your wearable device is tracking your performance, your heart rate, and various other aspects of your physical health. Pooling this data over a period of time gives you a strong idea about your physical fitness. Combine that data with your diet, your genetic data, and your electronic medical records, and you can paint a comprehensive picture of your physical health.

Making sense of this data, together with any symptoms you volunteer, is increasingly the preserve of autonomous technology that can absorb vast quantities of data at a time when doctors report inputting data into electronic medical records as a key source of stress. Would you trust the diagnoses of such autonomous systems or would you prefer to have a human doctor have the ultimate say in the recommendations you receive?

Posted on

Are We More Likely to Trust Machines With Private Information Than Humans?

Recently, concern has been aired around just what kind of information devices such as Amazon’s Alexa is consuming as it sits quietly in our homes. While various people have voiced concern about such a possibility, recent research from Penn State suggests that consumers are pretty relaxed by it all.

The research finds that people are generally more willing to trust machines with private information than we are human beings.  The authors believe that the ‘machine heuristic’ imbues people with greater trust in technology than humans, as people are capable of dishonesty and fraud.

Posted on

Wiggle Room Is Key to Meeting Deadlines, Research Suggests

Your inner child will be thrilled to learn that you really can wiggle your way to success at work.

The old business trope posits that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and so most goals should have sufficient flex built into them to reflect the uncertainty inherent in them.

And now, research from the University of Michigan highlights how accepting this uncertainty can result in more successful outcomes for the project.

Posted on

How AI-Driven Translation Is Boosting Global Trade

As I struggle to master the many curious foibles of the Czech language, I embarked upon a losing race against the indelible march of AI-based translation tools that will almost certainly master it before I do.

Aside from the practical benefits of this, a recent study from Washington University in St. Louis highlights the benefits this capability brings to global trade. The researchers crawled through data from auction site eBay and found that even small improvements in the quality of translation available to consumers correlated with a 10.9 percent boost to trade between countries on the platform.

Posted on

True Servant Leadership Places Followers First (and the Results Are Staggering)

A true servant leader is (literally) worth his weight in gold.

The concept of 'servant leadership' is certainly not new, but it's perhaps also fair to say that it's a concept that many still struggle to adopt.

Why Is Servant Leadership Crucial in an Agile Organization?

If any evidence were needed, a recent study from the University of Exeter Business School aims to provide it. It shows that tailoring training and recruitment to help managers with empathy, integrity, and trustworthiness has a profound impact on the productivity of the company.

Posted on

Relationships at Work Are Everything

Even at work, it's all about who you connect with.

Malcolm Gladwell famously shed light on the role of 'connectors' in his best selling book The Tipping Point. He regarded connectors as, obviously, people who know a lot of people, but more importantly, people who can connect different worlds and spot things in one world that can be applied in another.

Or as Gladwell himself said, "connectors are people who link us up with the world. People with a special gift for bringing the world together."

Posted on

Using AI to Predict Breast Cancer Five Years Out

One of the most common applications of AI in healthcare has been in analyzing medical images to provide earlier diagnoses of various conditions. The latest project of this kind has recently emerged from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who have developed a deep learning model that can predict the likelihood of breast cancer up to five years into the future.

The system was trained using mammograms from over 60,000 patients for whom the outcome was known. The idea was to train the system so that it could spot the subtle patterns in breast tissue that ultimately lead to tumors emerging.

Posted on

Investment in Human Capital: It Appears Most Stakeholders Can’t Be Bothered

When will investors realize the value of well-supported human capital?

It's a common trope that organizations proclaim their people as their biggest asset. A recent report for the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) by researchers from the University of Kansas and Warwick Business School suggests the reality might be somewhat different.

The paper set out to explore whether investors value human capital data, and if they do, what kind do they seem to prefer. Rather sadly, the analysis suggests that workforce data is largely ignored by analysts when assessing an organization, with the authors suggesting this might be because it's hard to find, with organizations not generally making such data public.

Posted on

Telecommuters Are More Productive, No Matter the Task

Of course telecommuters are more productive. They get to work like this.

The virtues of working remotely have long been trumpeted, whether in terms of lower stress levels, higher productivity, or better work/life balance.

6 Pro Tips for Getting Your Boss to Let You Work From Home

A recent study from the Florida International University College of Business explores whether telecommuting retains the productivity benefits even when working on highly complex projects. And (not at all suprisingly) their findings suggest this is indeed the case, largely because working remotely ensures that the worker suffers from fewer interruptions.

Posted on

Using AI to Help Traders Behave More Rationally

Trading is an area of life in which automation has taken off like little other. While speed is undoubtedly a major selling point of robotrading systems, the ability to act rationally and devoid of emotions is also crucial to the success of such systems.

Despite robotrading taking off, however, human analysts are still prevalent in the financial sector, so it remains crucial to ensure that they act as efficiently as possible. Recent research from the University of Singapore explores whether machine learning can be used to help detect undue emotion in traders and help them act (and trade) more rationally.