The rise of the humans - learning to thrive in the world of generative AI
Dave Coplin, Founder of the Envisioners and former Chief Envisioning Officer of Microsoft UK
Dave Coplin, Founder of the Envisioners and former Chief Envisioning Officer of Microsoft UK, was our amazing keynote speaker at intelliflo innovate 2024 in June. With over 30 years of experience, he has helped organisations and governments worldwide navigate and embrace transformational technology.
His fascination with technology started as a child with Star Trek. To eight-year-old Dave, the television series presented a “Utopian vision for technology in our modern society. A thing that made us better as human beings and enabled us to do amazing things.”
Thirty years on though, he doesn’t feel its vision of technology as a great liberating force has been realised. He explains, “I don’t see technology as something that empowers us to do amazing things. I see a prison. I see something that constrains how we think and controls how we work.”
Dave thinks that part of the issue is the way we think about productivity. We’re fixated on making what we already do more efficient, rather than considering whether there is a different, better way of doing it. He argues, “Many of today’s working practices were adopted by businesses in the Victorian era. So we’re taking all these 19th-century processes and using amazing 21st-century technology to make them a bit quicker and a bit cheaper. That’s absolute madness.”
However, one silver lining from the pandemic is the incredible change it made to our relationship with technology. Dave says: “We went into that experience with many of us, right across the breadth of society, not having the richest of digital experiences. We all know some people who would use their ignorance of technology as a badge of honour, and may still do. Yet those same people got through the pandemic by binge-watching Netflix, ordering from Amazon and Skyping their grandkids.”
He believes this new, deeper relationship with technology, provides an opportunity for advice firms. People now have a far richer experience of technology and are looking to their providers, including advisers, to match that experience. He says, “If I’m ordering something online and it’s going to take more than 24 hours, frankly, I’m going to go somewhere else. People now care about the kind of experiences they are receiving, they want to be digitally enabled. Every business that survived the pandemic did it in part by pivoting into the digital world. And for me, this is what the rise of the humans is all about. This world where technology enables us to deliver great experiences to our customers, offers ways of engaging our employees so they enjoy what they do, and actually elevates our capability as humans.”
Just as computers moved from the desks of specialists into the mainstream with the launch of Microsoft Windows, generative AI is going to be part of everyone’s future. As Dave describes it, “I’ve never known another technology that is so powerful and transformative and yet so accessible. So easy to use and adopt.”
He sees generative AI driving productivity, automating – at a conservative estimate – 30% of our work within the next decade. It will also make dense data accessible, with the ability to upload reams of information into a tool like Chat GPT and interrogate it using natural language. It will also lower the cost and increase the speed of innovation, by allowing more experimentation in building apps just using natural language.
And most importantly, Dave believes generative AI will improve the quality of work provided by humans. Rather than replacing people, technology will give us the time to do the human elements of our roles more effectively. “We can choose to take the robot out of the human. Think about your own job, I’m sure some elements are boring, repetitive and monotonous. With AI, if a human takes less than a second to think of the response to a given challenge, you can easily automate it. And once we take away the robotic things, we’ll have more time to do the things that the robots can’t do.”
However, this move to a more technology-led future does have its challenges. People will need fundamentally different skills from those of previous generations. Dave argues: “To this day, we’re still taught to retain facts and information. But we now live in a world where we have access to all the facts – and all the opinions – that our society has ever known or created. Work and education shouldn’t just be about remembering things. We also need the critical skills to know what to do with all that data we can access, the right questions to ask to find the information we need and whether we can trust it. Just because the algorithm says it’s the answer, doesn’t make it the answer, we need to have the skills to exert human judgement.”
So how can you take the initiative and unleash the power of large language models and generative AI within your business? Dave says you need to work hand in hand with the technology to bring to life what makes your firm different. He recommends digitising everything that exists around every asset that you have, “I don’t mean the physical assets, I mean the intangible invisible assets. The data you have, the customer relationships, the connections, the knowledge that your employees have. When these things exist in the digital realm, you can understand what’s happening, where you need to change, exactly what your clients want and need.”
When you’re adapting and adopting this new technology, Dave believes it’s crucial to think about your customers and employees and about effectiveness rather than simply efficiency. If 30% of what you do can be automated, what you choose to do with that extra time in your day is going to be vital.
His own light bulb moment came during a project with Microsoft about ten years ago in the early days of AI, “We were using machine vision to analyse the brain scans of patients and cut the process of spotting tumours to about thirty minutes, and more accurately than an oncologist who would take about five hours. But instead of opting to process another nine patients to be efficient, the oncologist said, ‘This is the point where I’m about to tell another human being whether they have or haven’t got brain cancer. Where I add the most value in this process is to take that time and spend it with the patient.”
Given the power of generative AI to change the way we work, Dave believes this is a vital learning for the financial advice sector. He concludes, “You can expand your customer base, you can get more clients and just crank them through the sausage machine. But increasingly, your customers are going to be coming to you having already asked Chat GPT for a financial plan, so you’ve got to look at how the technology can make you better at what you do. If we do that across our lives, then, and only then, are we going to be able to rise up and live up to the potential that this amazing technology has to offer.”
At intelliflo, we are working on several ways to help incorporate AI into your financial advice business. If you’d like to hear more, please have a look at this page.