Blognone Tomorrow 2019 : Human & Machine
09.09.2019
Where humans and machines collide
Knowledge has no boundaries. Refinitiv supports employees to explore and learn outside the office with full sponsorship from Refinitiv.
The event started off in the morning with the big tech companies in Thailand showing us what the future will be like and their roles in it. Each innovative product promises humans a better life. Outside the hall, is the showcase by tech firms, from facial recognition, smart cars, to fintech. Refinitiv was there too to show off their new release — Refinitiv Workspace. What every booth had in common was they all used data to get to where they are today. No doubt, data is the new oil but I don’t need to convince you that. All of the speakers had meaningful messages, but only 3 speakers that woke up the dragon in me.
Practical Data:
This session was a talk from CEO of Wisesight and executive director of UOB. Wisesight collects public data from social media, finds insights, and sells those insights to clients. These insights allow clients to focus their marketing on customer needs rather than the product itself. What I found more interesting was TMRW by UOB. TMRW is the new digital banking launched in Thailand to meet financial needs of millennial. The app itself is user-friendly, fun, and personalized (quite irresistible indeed). TMRW collects data through customer engagement within the app. By making the app like a game with an attractive UI, it was able to lure in more customer engagements compared to other banking apps. And with more customer engagement, the AI behind the app becomes more accurate and personalized to the user’s behavior — can suggest the most suitable financial product. Now that’s a win-win.
So what can Refinitiv do? Plenty. Something like TMRW may not be applicable to Refinitiv’s product as our product is meant to be formal and professional, rather than fun. So why not apply it internally? Think of how much more motivation can be added to work (I can already imagine myself waking at 5 A.M. to get to work). The app can help us track work and our progress to meet our OKRs or KPIs. The app should then learn from our engagement, help improve our working habits, and mold us to be bold, focused, and opened! Surely, these insights will be valuable to the individual, team leads, and human resources department. Leaving this idea for Refinitiv to pick up. 😉
Automation and Robotic Process:
I admit I once feared I’d lose my job if machines can manage capacity on-demand, so I was very interested in this session. The speaker, who is the vice president of Metro System, came to give his view on the debatable topic — will automation replace humans? The answer was no. Automation will allow humans to work more efficiently, hence we spend time on other meaningful tasks that automation cannot fulfill. Then it occurred to me that the speaker was right. So far my team has implemented lots of automation into our work, which has saved me time and resources from doing repetitive tasks. An example is an internal machine learning project called Argos by the team located in Bangkok. Argos is implemented to monitor our Grafana dashboards and to report on any abnormalities (with no additional cost too!). Surely, we will be adding more automation to make us even more efficient.
Hyperloop and Path Skipping Development Strategy:
The last session here, by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit was probably the one with the most audience. For those who are not familiar with Thai politics, Thanathorn is a Thai politician and leader of Future Forward Party, which is quite popular amongst millennial. Previously he was the vice president of Thai Summit Group, Thailand’s largest auto parts manufacturer. But at Blognone, he didn’t come to protest or to rally.
The first part focused on picking the right development strategy for a nation to overcome the middle income trap based on the flying geese model. There were 3 path development strategies:
- Path-Following
- Path-Skipping
- Path-Creating
As I listened to him, I realized that these strategies can also be applied to my own life. I can choose to follow successful people, start from selling something small and then expanding the business. Or I can give it a shot and innovate in something no one has ever done in Thailand.
I believe the latter 2 strategies should be applied to life and work. Although it will not be easy to find that innovation, but is it worth the effort. No doubt this will be part of my 2020 resolution.
After showing us the difference path-skipping strategy will make, Thanathorn also showed us how Thai Summit transformed as more automation were introduced to the company. The numbers confirmed that machines were not meant to replace humans but increase the supply chain efficiency. The employees were trained to develop technology. Productivity and quality increased with revenue while costs and time were saved.
All of these sessions proved that we should continue implementing automation into our system. It will help in collecting valuable data to gather insights. It will help take away unnecessary load from us so we can put effort in more value-adding tasks. It will definitely eliminate human errors and improve our productivity. Machines will become a big player in the race. As Refinitiv once said, “Advancing together beyond the speed of change”.
To Blognone, thank you for an opportunity to listen to many great speakers and surely you will enlighten us again with new innovations at Blognone Tomorrow 2020.