Expert round table: Driving hands-on digital impact

Sam began by discussing ‘Immersive experience through AR & VR’. She explained this will demand organisations start designing from an immersive first approach, so they craft experiences that are as intuitive as they are technologically advanced. The value of this approach is enormous, with 71% of customers saying that they'll shop more often if AR technology is made more available.

Sam then covered ‘Revolutionising communication with voice & NLP’. While this brings greater personalisation to the experiences organisations offer, she stated that accessibility is where this technology will be a real game-changer. This is because it will enable more people to interact with digital technologies in a meaningful way. Expanding the adoption of voice and NLP will require organisations to place even greater emphasis on privacy and data security, as they’ll be collecting and analysing huge amounts of voice data.

Katie’s opening talk was ‘Thinking about data 'ownership' differently’, namely by considering the SOLID protocol of data decentralisation. Positing that “data will drive the next evolution of the web”, she outlined the u​​ser and business benefits of sharing data — the former can gain things like preferential product rates by doing so, while the latter can enhance the personalisation they deliver to their customers. 

Katie’s second talk expanded on her first, with its topic being ‘Implications this has on data security and compliance’. This is particularly important, as she highlighted that forward-thinking public organisations, like the Flanders Government in Belgium, are using decentralisation to create data-driven products for their citizens.

Continuing with the theme of data, Dan’s first talk was ‘Data quality and metadata management’. He discussed how organisations can change how they own and interact with data by using a data mesh. It’s an architectural framework that democratises processing, increases flexibility, brings cost efficiencies, enhances discovery, and strengthens security and compliance.

Dan then moved into the hottest topic in tech — AI in the form of large language models (LLMs). He predicted that the explosion of interest in AI will mean that ‘Good old ML (including Deep Learning) will have a resurgence’. Firstly, this is because using AI requires organisations to do work that was previously being done to leverage machine learning (ML). Secondly, this is because there are cases where it’s cheaper for organisations to use ML than to leverage LLMs.

Luca started his talk by discussing ‘AI in SRE/DevOps/Platform Engineering’. He addressed how companies have begun using AI to summarise problems, and explored how this principle can be expanded. Luca referenced incident management as being a clear example of this, as AI can be leveraged to provide a summary of an incident. This would make developers’ lives easier by enabling them to ask questions about their system like “What can I do to make it more resilient?” Or “Which part of the system is more likely to fail?”

The final topic of the webinar saw Luca bringing cost optimisation directly into the conversation, as he spoke about how ‘FinOps will move past the cloud’. Explaining that FinOps is an operational framework to maximise the business value of the cloud, he made the case for organisations to expand this approach into everything they do. This will see companies further consolidating their tools and platforms, so they can bring greater consistency, improve efficiency and control their costs.