London business leader discusses technology and the future workplace

A former COO of Google Europe, Ben has also held senior roles with Coca-Cola, McKinsey, and AdParlor, alongside serving as a British Army officer. He is the author of Marketing for CEOs and has become a recognised authority on innovation, AI, and agile leadership.

Now working with Champions Speakers Agency as a sought-after keynote speaker, Ben shares insights on artificial intelligence, the future of work, and data-driven decision-making with audiences worldwide.

Q: When you look at the changing world of work, which major trends do you believe leaders need to pay closest attention to?

Ben Legg: “Next, there are three big trends around the future of work. There’s more, but let’s start with those three. The first one is artificial intelligence. So clearly artificial intelligence is making people more productive, but it also means it’s redesigning how people work, what people work on, what they do themselves, what they give to a bot, etc.

“The second is remote first. Clearly not everyone needs to be in an office. You can work with people who are working from home and you can work with people who are all over the world, and every organisation needs to be able to make that work for them.

“Third is fluid organisational design. So the world is changing much faster than it ever has before. It’s also much less predictable than it ever has been before, and what that means is organisations need to be much more nimble. So they need to effectively be able to flex up good ideas, reduce cost fast if something gets killed, expand sideways if an interesting opportunity comes along.

“What that means in practice is organisations need way fewer full-time employees, because that’s just a high fixed cost with very little flexibility, and way better design around how and when do you bring in flexible talent for projects, for part-time, for experts in a specific area. So that you literally can be always thinking through what’s next — what do I scale up, what do I scale down, sideways, etc.”

Q: Artificial intelligence is already transforming the workplace. How do you see AI and other emerging technologies reshaping the very nature of jobs?

Ben Legg: “Yeah, so really at the heart of AI, the main thing it does is it automates routine tasks. So simplistically, if you can standardise something, there’s a good chance it can be done by AI. Now that’s at the heart of it, that’s the tip of the spear.

“But what that means, that’s way more interesting for me, is it redesigns jobs, it redesigns how people work. In simple terms, going forward, everyone’s a leader, because in essence the job is done by AI. So what do you need to do in the future?

“What all our employees and all of us need to be able to do is we need to give a really good brief to AI to say this is the work that needs to happen, this is my goal, here’s what I know so far, help me work out what’s next.

“You then let the AI do the middle of the work — the meat of the sandwich, as it were — and then you need to be able to quality control and say is the answer a good answer, or do I need to do it again? Do I need to tweak the prompt? Do I need to add extra information in order to make sure the output’s good?

“So almost every… if you think about the role of a leader, you’re allocating things to your team. You give a clear brief, they do the work, you do the quality control and improvement. In the future those workers will be AI or bots, and every individual will be able to give a good brief, let the bot do the work, and then take a look at the work and challenge it, improve it.”

Q: Businesses now have access to more data than ever before. In your view, how can organisations harness that data to make sharper, faster decisions?

Ben Legg: “Yeah, so there’s loads. The world of data is really moving fast. There’s more and more data every year and it’s getting easier and easier to gather, but not just gather — to interpret.

“So I think there’s really three things that companies can do to take more advantage of data. The first is speed. Data can be gathered faster, and more of it, and it can be really up to date. So there’s no need to wait a month for a lot of stuff these days. You can have real-time data whenever you want it.

“The second is improved decision-making. So clearly with more data, and better data, and more up-to-date data, you can make better decisions.

“And probably the most interesting but scary one is automation. You can actually let machines make decisions that you would have made yourselves. It really doesn’t have to be all decisions made by “humans anymore. There are some where you make decisions in a very formulated way.

Simple example would be if you’re running an advertising campaign and a certain consumer buys a product, you stop serving them ads for that product because they just bought it. Maybe you serve a different ad, maybe you stop advertising, but there’s no point wasting your money with an ad to persuade them to buy a product they just bought.

“Well, that can be automatic, that doesn’t need to be a human. And then you just amplify that into the thousands, millions, etc. There are decisions like that, that used to be made by humans, that can now be made by machines.”

Q: Marketing has shifted dramatically in the digital era. How do you think technology is forcing brands to rethink their strategies and customer engagement?

Ben Legg: “There’s been a phrase around in marketing for a long time that I know that half my marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half. In essence, marketing was a bit mass marketing. It was spray and pray — you serve the whole world, or a massive proportion of the world, with an ad. Some people will never buy your products, but some people will. Well, that’s becoming a thing of the past.

“Which doesn’t mean brands aren’t important — brands are still incredibly important. But what it does mean is you can now choose who you target with what message, and you can measure what did they do next. Did they click on something, subscribe to something, engage with something, buy something? So even when people don’t buy, there are normally signals that say what impact did your ad have.

“Now, what that means in practical terms is every marketer needs to be a bit of an economist. What did I spend with this customer, or potential customer, on ads and any other engagements? What was the impact on revenue or whatever your performance metrics are, and was it worth it?

“So that’s a massive shift. Historically most marketers probably didn’t care too much about economics, or the financial model of your relationship with customers, but now they need to care.

“That’s the first. The second is personalisation, and this is really still only just getting going. With AI we can literally use AI to personalise almost every interaction with consumers or customers. So you can say, right, okay, what do I know about this customer?

“What’s their relationship with my brand? What products have they bought in the past? How often have they visited the website? Which stores did they visit? Whatever it might be — and say, based on all of that, what’s the right next message?

“And it could be literally personalised, or at least much more precision-targeted than you would do with mass marketing. And AI can do that. AI can sort of take all those insights and help you come up with a much more personalised message, more personalised image, more personalised video, more personalised customer journey, let’s say.

“And that’s going to be even more amplified with chatbots. So right now we’re talking mainly about ads, but there are chatbots being built that will allow many companies to replace a very large part of the call centre or the sales force with AI.

“But doing it the right way is going to be complex. Ultimately, though, chatbots will exist that can have one-on-one conversations with customers or consumers in the near future.”

This exclusive interview with Ben Legg was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.