I was relieved that there wasn’t yet another train strike on November 1st and was able to take the 6.15am to Waterloo – progress. The occasion was CRN ON, a Channel event at Chartered Accountants Hall at One Moorgate Place in London, organised by the very able CRN events team.
Hosted by Victoria Pavlova, the theme centred around the adoption of a Total Experience (TX) approach when navigating talent, technology and transformation to drive winning sustainable strategies in the Channel.
Victoria’s panel was made up of industry experts and it was a pleasure to hear these people share their thoughts and opinions and recount their own experiences in the following sessions:
What ESG strategies should you prioritise to enhance the Customer Experience?
Richard Behan from CAE Technology Services and John Booth from Carbon3IT talked about extending the lifecycle of an IT estate from three to six or even eight years. Reuse, refurb, refresh and add value wherever possible.
I asked if it is more and more the case that consumers are basing their hiring preferences based on social responsibility, inclusiveness, or environmental policies being in place. Is this a main factor for customer loyalty? The answer was yes.
Having a sustainability policy will give a competitive edge.
Utilising data and analytics tools to make impactful strategic decisions.
Chris Gabriel from Sapphire Systems and Adrian Woolmore from Trustmarque discussed the potential of leveraging data and analytics’ tools in shaping strategic decisions, highlighting best practices from their own learned experiences. Chris was adamant that we all need to embrace AI or be left behind.
Chat GPT-5 is coming and we can only speculate what it will bring but of course it will be bigger and better. A next generation language model like GPT-5 could increase its training dataset size and variety. Even though GPT-4 fares better than its predecessors, it doesn’t know a lot about obscure scientific concepts and lesser-known subjects. And in the absence of knowledge, large language models (LLM) tend to hallucinate or respond with made-up information – humans are needed to check sources for reliability and authenticity.
GPT-5’s release could mean that GPT-4 will become accessible and cheaper to use. Its high cost has turned away many potential users.
Should we be considering AI to enhance Total Experience?
Daniel McMahon from Hymans Robertson talked about the lived experience of AI-driven driven projects in pension and financial services, as well as the ethical considerations associated with integrating AI technology. He said a company can’t expect its people to ‘do AI’ as part of their job as was the case when we started to become aware of this ‘AI technology thing’. It’s imperative to designate people to AI-driven roles full-time, it is that important.
Employee engagement, positive culture and its contribution to the Total Experience.
Anushka Davies has been with Softcat for 23 years. She is Head of Employee, Diversity & Inclusion and is more interested in the employee experience, believing in putting Softcat’s employees before technology in her job. She is truly a people person and meets with the board of directors every Monday to discuss the company’s people.
Anushka has just won CRN Women & Diversity in Channel Awards 2023.
The event was sponsored by Agilitas