Wayne Butterfierld, Partner at ISG

Sponsored by: Foundever, WNS & Genpact

Wayne Butterfield, Partner at ISG

“I feel like my career has been based on trying to utilise technology very early on,” Wayne muses when we begin to talk about emerging tech.

Wayne Butterfield has been at the leading edge of deploying a series of technologies since the start of his career in the UK at O2, now Virgin Media O2. While at the mobile network, he was among the first peoplae to deploy at scale robotic process automation and supported O2 to become one of the largest users of online messaging as long as 15 years ago.

After a stint at BT where he replicated the successes he’d been part of at O2, he moved to his current company, ISG, eight years ago.

He first headed up AI and automation at the global AI-centred technology research and advisory firm before moving to Texas, USA, and also onto his current role as Partner.

Now Wayne is now concentrating on contact centre transformation, the future of the service provider industry, and the impact of Agentic AI on the future of work and software.

We began by talking about how Gen AI and Intelligent Automation are reshaping the business landscape (but what companies need to be aware of) in a conversation that also covered the risks and rewards of being early to adopt new tech, the shift in outsourcing models, ways in which customer experience roles are changing and much, much more.

So, grab a coffee and settle down for a read that could help you consider how you deploy new tech – or how you don’t.

Sponsored by Genpact

Welcome Wayne, we’re delighted you’ve joined us at Digital Edge to share your extensive expertise.

Let’s kick off this conversation talking about the tech that seems to be on everyone’s lips – Gen AI and Intelligent Automation. Can you share what you think are the biggest misconceptions companies have about these technologies?

I think the biggest misconception is that these technologies are going to transform work without work being transformed. What I mean by that is we have designed work with people at the centre. We humans are the world's greatest problem-solving machines. So, to add technology or to replace us with technology is far more difficult than people may imagine.

Intelligent Automation and Gen AI are still very narrow. They can be excellent at an individual thing but, in comparison, people are brilliant at everything. So, while technology can transform work, we need to transform work so it works better with technology.

I think it’s a misconception that it's going to be easy to add this technology and find a return on investment without actually putting in the groundwork. And unfortunately, all of that groundwork is really boring, involving combing through your knowledge bases, making sure that your processes have endpoints and documenting tribal knowledge.

And the other misconception is that all this is going to be quick, whereas it takes six to nine months just to get your house in order for this technology to work well in your environment.

Technology can’t easily fill in the gaps that are currently seamlessly filled in by people because we have the knowledge, the skills and the experience.

Little of that is written down – and if it's not written down, AI can't learn it.

How can companies overcome the barriers to achieving human levels of accuracy with Gen AI? And make sure everything is in place for the new and emerging technology to work effectively?

You've got to make knowledge management of strategic importance, rather than a necessary evil. That means keeping your processes up to date and making sure that you've got a good knowledge base so that any and every question has an answer written down.

At the moment, there’s perhaps around a 25% gap which is filled by tribal knowledge and experience. That’s what we need to fix in order for Gen AI and Intelligent Automation to get to the levels of autonomy that marketeers are selling these Gen AI based tools on.

And we can’t forget the adaptation we are going to have to help our employees make to work alongside our new Agentic colleagues. Your people are key in any change, and they can certainly make or break a Gen AI deployment. I’ve seen it firsthand.

If all an organisation’s information is available to Generative AI, what does that mean when we consider the ethical concerns or any possible business benefits of keeping some information only available to humans?

Most organisations, I would suggest, when deploying any of these technologies are thinking about it from a cost-efficiency perspective. Very rarely at an individual stakeholder level are they thinking too much about IP, especially because the vast majority of the deployments these organisations will make are going to be in walled off secure enviroment.

And while people think the vast majority of their data is proprietary, the reality is there’s often very little difference between most organisations within most industries when it pertains to a lot of the data that they have, especially for questions, answers and processes.

So, until you start utilising Gen AI with personal data or utilising these technologies to make decisions that could adversely affect a person or people, then the vast majority of the moral concerns are not something I think most people will focus on.

There are some areas where we have to think a little bit differently – when using personal data and when utilising the technologies to make potentially life-altering decisions, which could be anything from approving a loan to the diagnosis of a disease. But the majority of things that these technologies have been used for soi far is cookie cutter across any industry or organisation, hence why the moral & ethical concerns have so far been quite limited.

So, we know that today’s technologies have tremendous potential. But what key innovations or breakthroughs have you witnessed during your career that have transformed business operations?

I think that until now, many of the Automation technology waves that I’ve witnessed have been what I call digital iteration (small incremental changes) versus digital transformation (wholesale changes), But perhaps those times are changing?

It’s been a journey for me with the internet first, then the advent of the smartphone and the App Store, which was a fundamental shift in how consumers interacted with technology, swipes vs typing.

I think the next interface that we're going to see is probably not VR or AR, the next iteration will be Agentic AI in some kind of form, utilising natural language vs our fingers.

If I think about the tech that is truly here and that has changed things, our ability to converse with a capability through either voice or text to get answers to questions has been transformational.

We’ve become more open to interacting with a non-human entity because we've been doing it for 15 years, and the cutting edge right now is ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is generating responses as opposed to what we've done previously, which was hard coding in responses. So that capability over the past 15 years has gone from very basic to pretty amazing.

Sponsored by WNS

I also think about things like self-service and digitisation – they're not AI, but they’re about our ability to do more ourselves as opposed to rely on people. We take that for granted now because it’s been such a slow burn to get here, but that has been truly transformational. The point and click interface is now unrecognisable from when it first started and conversing between people and machines is becoming the norm.

Where we are now is a technology thinking through a problem and being able to take actions, propose solutions and in some future cases, do this all autonomously – This technology is becoming known as Agentic AI. It's not just a single technology, but a bunch of different technical capabilities that are used in combination to solve complex business problems.

Also, where we’re going with language is absolutely amazing, including things such as the ability to smooth someone's accent. That means if I'm speaking to an offshore call centre, I can understand them significantly better, therefore, I'm more comfortable in the interaction. We are now also close now to real time translation from any language to any language, which is fantastic, and this is just off the top of iceberg for how AI is being deployed in and around business operations, including the contact center.

Pioneering new solutions often involves taking calculated risks. You’ve taken bold technology decisions throughout your career. Tell us, have they always paid off?

I think most of the things that I do have a bit of risk associated with them!

In 2010 while at O2, I introduced robotic process automation with Blue Prism, replacing people doing transactional activities with technology that basically took over a desktop and was pointing & clicking to get work done.

That was embryonic in nature then and when I deployed it, I was one of the first five people in the world to do so. Now 90% of large organisations globally use that technology.

Was that a risk? Quite possibly. Did it pay off? Absolutely! Perhaps that technology is going to be replaced by Agentic AI, which is another technology that I'm deploying into production with my ISG clients really early on. It wasn’t just RPA either, Social Media, Self Service, Chat Bots and even Digital Messaging were all on my agenda at some point from 2009 onwards.

Generally, the risk is associated with adopting technology early, taking the gamble and hoping that there's an ability to prove that there's been a return on investment.

I think it's probably easier to deploy any technology than it is to get employees customers or end consumers to be accepting of change. So, I don't think the difficulty is deploying the tech, I think it's getting people to adopt it and that's why you'll see some things succeed and others fail.

Thinking about AI, the reason why businesses have found so much value in Generative AI is because consumers accepted it in their personal lives, which meant that they took it back into the business.

Consumer acceptance is critical to any big innovation. And that is why the ChatGPT moment, for example, has driven this big AI revolution. Not because ChatGPT was so transformative on its own, but because it captured the imagination of consumers in their personal lives first before they took it into their working lives.

What have you learned from taking

these tech risks?

I talk about my career basically being a car crash of learnings! I made the mistakes early on so other people didn't, but I'm accepting of that.

And a lot of my clients are accepting of me being a risk taker because of my experience. We put guardrails in place where necessary, we work with the right vendors and we recognise there is value in going early, while there's secureness in going after because others have already made all the mistakes.

If you never make a mistake, you're not pushing hard enough. And as a futurist, if you're not making mistakes, then you're not thinking far ahead enough, so that how I've lived my career. It's why I continue to push boundaries and work with new technologies. It’s why I have this continued interest in what's next, then what's next and, after that, what's next?

People find what I do and how I think interesting, but there are only certain types of people who want to take these risks and do something for the first time.

And now it's even more difficult because handing over autonomy to technology is a next wave of risk. Where we're moving to in the future is that these technologies are going to try and think for themselves in the main. That is a very different place to where most organisations have ever been in the past.

The risk now is that everything's moving so fast that people are having to cut corners. An enterprise can only ever move at a certain pace. People can only ever change at a certain pace. Technology is exponentially changing much quicker now than most people can adapt and than most projects can deliver, so most people are also learning at the same time because they're worried about being left behind.

Moving on to the subject of outsourcing models. You’ve spoken before about the fundamental shift in these. How do you see AI reshaping traditional BPO services in the coming years?

I call this BPO 4.0 because we've already been through a number of iterations, starting in the 90s with a move to more global models. BPO providers became more competent. They became specialists in industries and experts in the work that they were doing. Confidence grew, technology exploded.

If you think about 4.0, it is truly technology plus people as opposed to people plus technology world. Right now, it’s 50/50, because most software is still very narrow, but there are a few reasons why I think service providers are going to be able to take advantage of these technologies.

One is because service providers are not doing it once, they're doing it 10 times, whereas every other organisation is doing it for the first time.

Organisations generally don't want to change something major every year or every six months – the enterprise cannot move that quick. Whereas a service provider has no choice but to move quicker, especially now when a lot of its work has been removed or automated, so it needs to continue to evolve.

The 4.0 world and beyond is utilising Agentic AI and the latest technology, plus the expertise of the people. The who and what is doing work is going to change. This is going to change the type of partnership and commercial constructs that are set up and worked between both the end client and the service provider, and as a result of that, we're going to have to change the way that we contract and govern.

There needs to be a different commercial construct. No longer should fee per hour be the key commercial driver for a successful partnership, it should be outcome focused or output focused. The BPO industry has struggled at times with a mess for less opinion for some 20 years, whereas now they really are on the cutting edge of technology and more strategic partnership is needed, and should be grabbed by both hands by the enterprise. I personally would be really surprised if the way we do work has not significantly altered within the next decade, and I’m not sure that most in house Teams are set up in a way that would enable them to change as quick as the service provider community can, so it’s going to be a really interesting next few years

We saw that you partnered with Foundever, the global CX BPO service provider, to discuss in a whitepaper one of the ways in which customer experience roles are changing as a result of new and emerging technologies.

What are some of the most exciting applications of AI technologies that you’ve looked at?

I speak with Foundever and other service providers about this on a regular basis. The advancement that organisations like Foundever are making is the reason why I believe the BPO industry has a 4.0, 4.5 and a 5.0 future ahead of it.

One of the technologies that interests me is Customer Service Co-pilots. These Gen AI agent assistant tools and copilot technologies are a prime example of how using tech removes the heavy lifting from a human agent, allowing them to be quicker in an interaction and also to concentrate on who they’re interacting with. I love that type of tool.

The second one is AI training.

Most people have a bad impression of service providers in comparison to internal teams and I believe that’s mainly because the level of support that service providers receive in comparison to internal teams is often lacking.

Utilising AI to listen to queries, understand processes and create training scenarios and documents was never possible before in such an automated fashion, but now with Foundever’s capabilities and that of others, you are able to recreate almost any scenario in any channel – text or voice – and have a generated conversation with an AI whose sole purpose is to train an agent on a query type, so that agents get to live and feel that interaction. It’s groundbreaking for them.

Some of the other technologies where AI is assisting is through accent smoothing, enabling a smoother conversation with offshore advisors. That is another key capability that the service providers are really taking advantage of, in order to create a much clearly line of communication with the end customer.

An lastly the future is going to be very Agentic based, and so certainly the Service providers like Genpact who are really thinking through what and how this type of technology can benefit it’s clients, set the benchmark for a Tech + Human mix that’s both accurate and cost effective, and also do this in a safe and regulatory compliant manor, it’s going to be a game changer in how the BPO’s of the future are viewed by their clients.

One of the key reasons why I think the service provider community is head and shoulders above most silo’d organisations is that they have been early adopters and are using this technology at scale. They've already learned the rules and undertaken many of the risks much sooner and cheaper than most organisations would ever be able to do it themselves.

And it doesn't stop there. That is going to continue with new models that have new capabilities. They’re now at the cutting edge of so many different technology types that I can't see a world where most organisations will keep up with innovation better than the service provider community. Organisations like Foundever, Genpact and WNS have a big advantage.

Sponsored by foundever

With all that you’ve just mentioned in mind, how are service providers such as Foundever positioned towards the demands of this new digital future and why has ISG named them a global leader?

They’ve appointed a Chief AI Officer who is experienced in the utilisation and deployment of AI, and I think that is a required step. You need somebody like Guillaume Laporte who's been there, done that and got the war wounds, which I have a lot of respect for. The speed of Foundever’s deployment and the quality of the technologies that they've been putting in place to assist their clients shows the benefit of that, hence why they are multi award winnings with my company.

I do have to pay close attention to the rest of the Service Provider market also, as that is a key part of my role at ISG now. I love the collaboration with many of the service providers, and they all have their strengths. I really appreciate the partnership with Genpact, who to many are known as the go to F&A Service Provider globally, but that’s not all they do, and they are really innovating in how they commercially construct transformations, and how they are linking up entire business journeys through an enterprise to create newer ways of working and extra value for their customers, as well as WNS who are winning new client logos through their use of AI, in areas like creating new insights in their Customer 360 capability, providing customers of other service providers incremental value and building trust without having to have won huge outsourcing deals for entire departments.

Many businesses struggle with balancing human expertise with automation. How do you advise leaders on the right mix of AI and human-led operations?

I was invited to speak at a CFO Dinner recently by Genpact, where this was discussed in depth to a very Finance focused audience. It was appreciated by the people, especially those in Risk & Compliance, that my view is that people are still super important, and that event with Agentic AI on the horizon, we are still years away from a major Finance Transformation for many.

I think the key thing here is, for the vast majority of AI deployments I've seen so far, I would call augmented intelligence. While this may mean you need less people, there are very few instances in the history of humanity where a technology has completely replaced people in such a swift manner.

The really important thing is to ensure that your people are brought in on this journey. As I spoke about towards the beginning of this conversation, if 25% of the answers are inside people's heads and not written down, then you need their collaboration to get AI working as optimally as your People.

One of the audience members brought up a great point at the dinner I mentioned, In that the regulations are not keeping up as quick as technology, and so even if an AI Agent was doing a lot of the work, you’d still need a named person to be involved and responsible in case something went wrong, and someone needs to be punished on behalf of the AI

Hopefully your people are assisted by these new capabilities and they're therefore happy to be teaching the AI technology to do what they do, always with the aim that people could do different work as opposed to no work. We’ve generally done a good job as a society to raise the level of our people versus removing them completely from work so far, this does need to continue for sure.

Do you think it’s possible for society to do this

in the future to the extent that we've been able

to in the past?

Yes and no. I think we as a society need to think through how people still have structure and purpose in their lives as individuals if we no longer have the structure and rigour of work.

On the compensation side, people talk about universal basic income, which feels like something we need to investigate but I do not believe that is the answer. I do see the societal impacts through many different lenses and I do not believe that we have the answers yet.

But I do believe that as much as the optimists will say, “For every historical industry that has been automated, new roles have been created,” we are going to struggle to continue to create new roles come the next 10, 20 or 30 years. And that’s because of the way technology is changing and both physical roles and mental roles being significantly automated simultaneously. I don’t believe we have the answers yet. But we have to remember that the worst AI is ever going to be is today, and it’s already becoming better every day

We’ve covered so much ground, but with our conversation drawing to a close, can we ask you what one piece of advice you’d give to C-suite leaders looking to future-proof their businesses with AI and automation?

The first piece of advice would be to become AI literate yourself, so you understand the capabilities before you deploy it in your organisation. To make informed decisions for your organisation about AI and automation, you do have to get a grounding in them so that you are able to make the right decisions and not expensive mistakes.

And the second piece of advice is, while people say you have to deploy these technologies otherwise you’re going to get left behind, outcomes should still rule.

If you don’t truly understand what your outcome and end goal is and how technology aligns to it, then you are likely going to struggle for return on investment.

Therefore, you have to think through where you’re going before you think how you’re going to get there.

That’s the big challenge, but there are people, organisations and service providers that are doing this type of thinking for you that you can leverage to become as informed as possible before you make any particular change. Then reformulate where you’re trying to get to before you figure out how you’re going to get there, and do that in an iterative way on a regular basis. Question what are the mechanisms you need in order to reach towards you ambition, what do you need to change to be able to hit those individual mechanisms and then how can technology support?

It's a methodical way of moving through and ignoring the hype and being able to achieve good change for the right reasons.

And with that, we’ll have to end a conversation which we’d happily have continued for another hour – or two. Instead, we’ll be closely following Wayne’s sharing his future thinking at a range of conferences and online. A big thanks to Wayne and ISG for sharing this expertise with us.