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Enterprise beams up GenAI and consumer UX to make key applications fly

The bizarre interview between Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak at the UK government’s AI Safety Summit earlier this month did little to champion the idea that humans are the solution to a potential artificial intelligence (AI) problem.

It did, however, suggest that AI will put an end to the need to work – not that either Musk, the richest person in the world according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (on 10 November 2023), or Sunak, reputedly the UK’s wealthiest ever prime minister, have anything to worry about.

It was also suggested that AI has the potential to be the “most disruptive force in history”. For most people and organisations, this is not news. Since the unveiling of ChatGPT 12 months ago, GenAI has emerged as a game-changer. Coupled with the increased consumerisation of enterprise applications, 2023 has to go down as a seminal year.

It’s certainly a time of rapid change in software development and application features. GenAI is now the recognisable face of AI, inspiring automation and changing the way businesses think about their relationship with software, data and business processes.

For instrance, one of the UK’s major telcos recently teamed up with IT consultancy Embracent to solve a slow onboarding problem for new joiners. The result is a GenAI-driven application called Sherpa, which now manages the process, including identity verification, generating and sending offer letters, and coordinating calendars and contacts of new colleagues. What is key here is that this wasn’t a dumbing down to fit the technology – it was a re-engineered experience, with GenAI doing all the grunt work.

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Tim Jones, chief exec: FCDO digital transformation: one down, four to go

Only last March, the minister for the Cabinet Office Jeremy Quin talked up the shared services strategy on its two-year anniversary claiming it could, hypothetically at least, save around £1.8bn over the next 15 years. Through five clusters, the project aims to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems under one SaaS roof.

This plan to modernize government back-office systems and find efficiencies is obviously ambitious with long-lead deadlines. But two years on, the government may actually have something to shout about. One of the departmental clusters has successfully completed its “go live” phase and unified its HR and finance operations on Oracle Fusion.

One of the five clusters in the shared services strategy, the Overseas cluster primarily consists of the ForeignCommonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), a body formed in 2020 through the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DFID). However, as Tim Jones, the interim director general for finance and corporate at the FCDO points out, the cluster is so much more than that.

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Reputation on the line? Tech redundancies & jostling for future business

“These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,” wrote Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO in a recent blog explaining why the company was cutting around 10,000 jobs in the coming months.

Microsoft, which claims that 2022 was a record year financially, is one of many tech firms that have committed to redundancies. Some are more eye-catching than others. For example, fast-growing payments firm Stripe announced at the end of last year that it was cutting 14 percent of its workforce, blaming over-hiring. Salesforce, the poster child for the SaaS industry, is cutting around 10 percent of its employees, with CEO Marc Benioff claiming, “as our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

The numbers are stacking up, but as tech redundancy tracking site Layoffs.fyi shows, this is not just about the Big Tech players. The site claims that already this year, 122 tech businesses have laid off over 37,000 employees. While over-hiring during the pandemic may be one reason for cutting headcount, the breadth of the layoffs suggests something more seismic.

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Siemens aims to pioneer industrial metaverse usage

It is de rigueur for any company to be talking about the metaverse these days, but for German engineering firm Siemens, it is becoming something of a crusade. Following up on its announcement of a collaboration with Nvidia in June this year to “enable the industrial metaverse”, Siemens now seems to have gone all-in.

“We don’t claim that we know what the metaverse is, but we have an idea of what it could be and we want to shape it,” says Peter Korte, chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens, speaking from the company’s Siemensstadt industrial complex in Berlin.

Korte is a slick operator and he is smart. He knows that if Siemens can plant a flag in this space early enough, it will only add to the business’s own transformation plan to become a more digital, software platform-driven engineering firm.

Now you don’t get to be a company that celebrates its 175th birthday without knowing a thing or two about pivoting and smelling what is selling. Siemens celebrated this milestone in Berlin recently, with a dinner in Siemensstadt. Among the speakers was German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said Siemens had “electrified, moved, united and constantly reinvented the world” – and here it is again, up to its old reinvention tricks.

“We believe digital twins are the building blocks for the metaverse,” says Korte, adding that it’s “all about making it real”.

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Blurred lines: is the consumerisation of enterprise tech creating unnecessary division?

For Adam Doti, a Salesforce veteran of over 11 years who has designed the UX for platforms such as Salesforce Lightning, the whole debate over the consumerisation of enterprise technologies is simple. Users are demanding ‘frictionless design’ and if that means using engaging consumer techniques in enterprise products, then so be it.

“Enterprise technology companies need to stay hyperfocussed on human-centred experiences and consider the humans who work for a company, more than the company itself,” explains the Salesforce VP and principal design architect. 

“What are their needs as users of your product? At Salesforce, we show deep empathy for our users and remember that many of them spend eight hours a day on the platform as a function of their role, making human-centred design so critical.”

The point Doti makes is that if technology is easy to use and more intuitive, it is less likely to create a barrier to productivity. A simple case of using whatever technology works and gets the job done. But is that right? There is a distinction here – it’s one thing to design enterprise products to look and feel like consumer products. But it’s completely another thing to actually blur the lines and use consumer products in the enterprise.

During the pandemic and the rush to set up working from home, there was an inevitable shift in digital technology use. Employees working from home expected technology to be as simple to use as consumer technologies. Simplicity was key. With IT support staff stretched to breaking point, organisations needed employees to self-service as much as possible and that meant using devices and tools that were more familiar. It led to an increase in choice and, consequentially, a surge in sales at firms such as Apple.

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