Machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and sophisticated optimization algorithms are already part of our daily lives. Do you use a navigation app on your smartphone? Or facial recognition in your camera app? Do you use online spelling and grammar checkers when writing documents? If so, you’re using AI. It should be no surprise to learn that the latest WFM applications are already deploying AI and automation to improve planning outcomes while reducing manual effort.

Too often technology doesn’t join up, to actually make life easy. Yet, if you do make your digital platform totally compelling, people will use it and love it! So what’s the secret? Paul Smedley looks at how we operationalise our strategies and the importance of planning.

Ironically, the next generation is often about what is possible now, from a technology perspective, but not yet operationalised. That’s the challenge. Yet the waves of change, these past two years, have left more ‘in reach’ than we might have thought possible before. So, let us look at our part in becoming ready for customers who want to engage in new ways.

As the world reboots after the firm reset of the Pandemic, we have the opportunity to revisit, redefine and reshape how we have done things. 2020 was a strange year, especially for annual leave, as lockdown restrictions changed how we used annual leave and the Government stating leave can be carried over, firmly “kicking the can” down the road, to give us a problem for another day (or year).