ReThink Productivity Podcast
In this exciting podcast, Simon Hedaux from ReThink Productivity shares his insights and strategies for improving productivity and efficiency in the retail and hospitality industries. With the help of clients, partners, and the ReThink team, Simon covers everything from measuring and tracking productivity to developing and implementing effective strategies.
Whether you're a business owner, manager, or employee, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get more done and improve their bottom line.
Here's what you can expect to learn:
- How to measure and track productivity
- Proven strategies for improving efficiency and reducing waste
- How to create a culture of productivity and innovation
- Tips for motivating and engaging your team
- Real-world examples of how other businesses have used ReThink Productivity to achieve success
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts and get ahead of the curve with your own business.
ReThink Productivity Podcast
Chapter 11 - AI
Sue and Simon discuss Chapter 11 - AI from their book "Every Second Counts: How to Achieve Business Excellence, Transform Operational Productivity, and Deliver Extraordinary Results."
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. We are on the final chapter of Every Second Counts. You might have heard the summary by Notebook LM that we pushed out, but this is real people, sue and I. Hi, sue, hello, on artificial intelligence. I wouldn't say this chapter was an afterthought, but I think it's fair to say, during the writing process, which I was clearly heavily involved in the writing process, which I was clearly heavily involved in that AI grew legs and arms and multiple heads and just went ballistic, didn't?
Speaker 2:it? It did, and I think it's fair to say that it's probably evolved since we. The book was published as well, because kind of it was over a year ago now, so it's a year's a long time in AI, isn't it? Five minutes, seemingly, is a long time in AI isn't it?
Speaker 1:Five minutes, seemingly, is a long time in AI, with things being developed, new machines, new bots, all sorts of stuff. Anyway, what did we talk about in the AI chapter of the book?
Speaker 2:Hopefully we were on the right track in as much we talked about AI being a tool that we saw as working alongside people. So particularly in things like hospitality, contact centres, retail, where part of the experience is that human contact, then how can AI help that? And we talked about kind of a number of ways it might help. You know it's been used in things like contact centres for a long time to help route people and manage demand, but I think we're starting to see some new new uses for it come through as well. Anywhere there's lots of data, it's it's a good application priority.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I've seen I suppose recently, to bring it more up to date optimization of things like opening hours capacity. So, where you've got dedicated types of organizations with specialist people that need specialist equipment or space to work in, how do you optimize the booking of those? Or back to opening hours, the most convenient times to maximize your demand based on when your customers are going? Because in a world where and we talked about numerous times, ni, national Living Wage all those things that we know and can't impact are happening to us, it seems like opening hours maybe isn't one of the things that people think about, it's just a given. But if you want to lay the model with a minimum per opening hour, every opening hour that you can save or get in the right place has a significant sales or cost impact. So there's, there's other data sets, like you say, that maybe we've not explored yet and people are on the cusp of doing yeah, no, I think there's going to be some interesting things and some useful applications.
Speaker 2:I think in there's a lot. I think there's still a lot of jargon talked about with ai, which is something we put in the book, and AI can be initials added to anything and kind of what is? Ai is an interesting definition. It's perhaps a bit different for different people. If you think about it as a tool that can help, then there's some interesting use cases coming along and as those start to be known about and accelerated, I think it's going to have some really big impacts in terms of how people do things, and I don't think it's the, it's not the robots that are coming and replacing everybody's jobs. It's about people working smarter and the things we've always tried to do with productivity in terms of getting more benefit and more value delivered for every hour of work input that you put in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've seen some interesting examples, haven't we in, say, restaurants. So where you've got people who aren't necessarily in the store taking the order for the drive-thru, or even AI taking the order for the drive-thru. Can things be cooked automatically, watching how long it takes to cook something to the optimum somebody really need to be stood there and watching the fryer contact centers. They were kind of at the cusp early with all the call handling technology and solutions. But again, how does that grow? How do you auto route things through? And this isn't necessarily. Are you on the cusp of again we talked about it before this intelligent automation piece offices. So again, in a future world, will my ai bot talk to the british gas ai bot and they'll work out billing queries between them and you tell them come back and tell me what the best tariffs to be on for my ev, whatever it might be. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in there and we shouldn't forget retail.
Speaker 1:You know it's there on the self checkouts there's a camera. What's that camera doing? Well, it's probably using facial recognition to do something or other. At the time of recording today, one of the supermarkets is using ai to start to help with shrink, so recognised shot lifters, which will be interesting, again as a user case, how that does or doesn't work. So, wherever you are, there's an application For me. Time will tell whether it's true AI or back to your point, sue somebody's just put AI on the end of something that existed, which I think is a bit of Emperor's New Clothes. It's out there at the moment, so we'll see, and we can all make nice funny pictures of cats wearing pyjamas on the moon, talking into a mobile phone and all those lovely things, but that doesn't really seem to be the best use case of a bit of fun. But I'm sure you've all seen the photos and the deep face that exist for every type of person and walk away.
Speaker 2:And I think some of the if we think about instances we've seen where you could improve workflows and streamline things. A lot of the things that get in the way of doing that at the minute are kind of getting different pools of data connected and talking to each other, and I know the tools exist to make those connections but actually they often seem a bit more tricky to do than you know. It seems easy in principle to just connect that data to that kind of data, but actually it can take a while. So again, it'll be interesting to see if almost the development of AI helps address some of those issues, because without it it feels to me like it'll slow down AI, whereas if there's things that they can do whether it's to do it a different way or to speed up, to allow them to speed up AI, it could have that aspect of it could have wider implications at all absolutely so that that's the book.
Speaker 1:We've done it. Um, clearly, I had a massive part in writing it, so that was a book writing process for you, seeing as you did most of it, and let's be fair because we've done white papers and case studies and that sort of thing before.
Speaker 2:We'd already got some of the material, which was a good place to start from. But actually it was interesting to reflect back on what matters, what's important, and to think about some of the different case studies. So it was an enjoyable experience to get it all together and then see it done.
Speaker 1:Just don't ask me to do another one. I was going to say when's the second edition coming out. So no, you never know.
Speaker 2:It has been talked about, it has been talked about and we're thinking about some ideas, aren't we? Of what? Would add value for people, because there's no point just doing it as a vanity project.
Speaker 1:It needs to be something that's actually useful for people, so I hope you've enjoyed listening to us talk through all the chapters. Clearly, they're all available as separate podcast episodes. Hope you've enjoyed reading the book. If you haven't read the book, drops a note and I'm sure we can sort your copy out. Thanks for your hard work and it's soon. You're welcome and we'll speak soon.
