AI and wearables: tech coming soon to an office near you

While the per­son­al com­put­er trans­formed the office of the 1970s, the fax machine smoothed com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the 1980s and Microsoft had become ubiq­ui­tous by the end of the last cen­tu­ry, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) looks set to spark the lat­est office rev­o­lu­tion.

Gart­ner has pre­dict­ed that 2021 will see AI cre­ate almost $3 tril­lion of busi­ness val­ue. But, says Tim El-Sheikh, chief exec­u­tive of tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment stu­dio Neb­u­li: “It’s about how we can make tech­nol­o­gy and AI work along­side humans as opposed to replac­ing them.”

AI will take over a lot of the heavy lift­ing in the office, he says, such as prepar­ing and dis­patch­ing reports, man­ag­ing and updat­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment sys­tems and min­ing data for pat­terns. But while El-Sheikh is adamant “AI is the future, it’s inevitable”, he is also at pains to “destroy the myth that AI is a solu­tion for every­thing”.

It is essen­tial com­pa­nies can walk before they start to run, he insists. It’s about being AI ready, and robust dig­i­tal and data strate­gies need to come first, because if the foun­da­tions aren’t in place, projects will fail.

Making training virtual

Dig­i­tal entre­pre­neur Felipe Polo believes that to get the most from the new gen­er­a­tion of office tech, busi­ness­es will need to adopt a cul­ture of risk-tak­ing and pilot new soft­ware. How­ev­er, they must be sure it “enhances process and can future-proof the busi­ness, rather than com­pli­cat­ing it fur­ther”, he says.

One of the biggest impacts of this new wave of tech will come from vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) and it’s abil­i­ty to enliv­en the dullest of train­ing ses­sions. “Even before the pan­dem­ic, the mil­lion-dol­lar ques­tion for busi­ness­es think­ing about their learn­ing and devel­op­ment was ‘how do you engage your employ­ees when it comes to train­ing?’” says Justin Par­ry, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of VR train­ing com­pa­ny Immerse. 

Accord­ing to Ofgem’s Tech­nol­o­gy Futures report, in a tra­di­tion­al set­ting with Pow­er­Points and hand­outs, par­tic­i­pants remem­ber just 30 per cent of what they hear and 20 per cent of what they see. Put on a VR head­set and recall jumps to 90 per cent.

Richard Hess, immer­sive expe­ri­ence lead at Nestlé, works with Immerse on VR-con­tent rang­ing from teach­ing con­sumers about sus­tain­able sourc­ing, to safe­ty train­ing for employ­ees. “It gives employ­ees an envi­ron­ment to learn and the abil­i­ty to ‘fail’ that is more impact­ful than in a tra­di­tion­al train­ing envi­ron­ment,” he explains. 

“For safe­ty train­ing, this could be a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion where a work­er needs to apply cor­rect per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment or fol­low steps to safe­ly turn off a machine. When learn­ing in this type of envi­ron­ment, VR can pro­vide a vis­cer­al and emo­tion­al response to what they are expe­ri­enc­ing. This leads to greater reten­tion of the mate­r­i­al and greater advo­ca­cy for work­ing in a safe man­ner,” says Hess.

VR could also sup­port remote job inter­views. “We’ve seen how quick­ly new tech­nolo­gies can be adopt­ed thanks to the pan­dem­ic, so if VR fol­lows suit, it won’t be too long before the dread­ed back-to-back Zoom becomes a bit more engag­ing,” says Polo.

Playing Big Brother

A more con­tro­ver­sial area for new tech is the role it is start­ing to play in mon­i­tor­ing employ­ees and the con­cept of sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism. In 2017, Bar­clays was crit­i­cised for installing motion sen­sors on staff com­put­ers that could track how long employ­ees were at their desk. Last year, the bank was cen­sored again, this time amid accu­sa­tions they were using soft­ware designed to give insights into work pat­terns to  spy on staff.

In Feb­ru­ary, Loopin was launched, an app designed to bridge the gap between dig­i­tal engage­ment and well­be­ing in the work­place, by mea­sur­ing the mood of employ­ees. It has already piqued the inter­est of HSBC and the Eng­land foot­ball team man­age­ment. Employ­ees are able to see their own and wider team mood mea­sure­ments, while man­agers receive insights so they can under­stand their peo­ple bet­ter and devel­op effec­tive lead­er­ship strate­gies.

But is this type of tech tak­ing things too far and edg­ing into Big Broth­er ter­ri­to­ry? Not accord­ing to Loopin chief oper­at­ing offi­cer Antony Thomp­son. “It is not anoth­er tool for HR to peer in and see what their peo­ple are doing,” he says. “It pro­vides man­agers with real-time data about how some­one in their team is feel­ing, so they know if they need to pick up the phone or have a cup of tea and a chat with some­one today not next week.” 

Office of the future

Oth­er inno­va­tions com­ing to an office near you soon include prod­ucts such as aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) smart glass­es, which will over­lay dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion on top of the real world. Par­ry at Immerse talks about AR as “one device to rule them all” and “a tech­nol­o­gy that can sub­sume all oth­er tech­nolo­gies”. He says: “The tar­get here is a light­weight head-mount­ed dis­play that can turn any sur­face into a key­board or draw­ing board.”

The idea of iden­ti­ty and access man­age­ment, or IAM, is also like­ly to focus minds, as com­pa­nies come to terms with employ­ees log­ging on remote­ly or bring­ing their own devices into the office. 

Decep­tion tech­nol­o­gy is an excit­ing new form of cyber-defence that sets traps and decoys for hack­ers and can be backed with new pass­word­less tech­nol­o­gy. While bio­met­ric sys­tems using fin­ger­print and face recog­ni­tion are already com­mon, they could soon be super­seded by prox­im­i­ty-based authen­ti­ca­tion, when users car­ry a wire­less key that allows them to log on to dif­fer­ent devices sim­ply by being near them.

Even order­ing sta­tionery could change thanks to Epson’s Paper­Lab, which is capa­ble of pro­duc­ing new paper in-office from secure­ly shred­ded waste paper.

For Nebuli’s El-Sheikh, how­ev­er, less is more and he pre­dicts a future office that’s based in the cloud, with per­haps the odd tablet thrown in. But if the vast pow­er of host­ed quan­tum com­put­ing becomes more main­stream and acces­si­ble, he says, the min­i­mal­ist office of the future could fea­ture lit­tle more than a smart­phone.