“It's not going to land by itself” How Irish organisations are working with their people to embrace the wave of tech

This article was originally published in The Currency on 11 December 2024.

From AI to the metaverse, several organisations including ESB, St. James’s Hospital and Kerry Group have worked with EY Ireland and Microsoft to deploy new tech with their staff and learned valuable lessons on what to do (and what not to do).

Whether it’s navigating the ever-changing world of AI or wrapping their heads around oceans of data, organisations have much to ruminate on with digitisation.

The only certainty on this front is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach and some technologies will work better for some than for others.

At professional services firm EY Ireland, artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, and how companies will grow their businesses using it has been top of mind in recent years.

Generative AI, typified by ChatGPT, stormed onto the scene in late 2022 and quickly upended digitisation strategies of many businesses. Suddenly, everything was moving even faster than before.

“Generative AI really started to pick up pace with our clients from the winter of 2022 and has only grown in interest since this time. Fundamentally, we see that AI is changing everything, because AI is becoming part of everything,” EY Ireland Managing Partner Frank O’Keeffe said, adding that there was a job of work ahead to determine the “hype levels versus the reality or the action”. However, he cautioned, waiting is not a winning strategy. “No one wants to be first. Equally no one wants to be last. But more than anything, no-one wants to be found wanting.”

“AI is becoming incredibly important for our organisation across all our areas of work, to enable us to be able to support our clients who are at various stages of their AI and digital transformation journeys” he said.

“At EY we are a people business, powered by technology, so while we are training, upskilling and digitizing our entire workforce in technology so they can support our clients, the people element will be just as important tomorrow as it is today.”

AI is just one tool in a larger toolbox, from data analytics to immersive technology in virtual reality and the metaverse, that businesses are trying to understand.

This is evident from a number of case studies, recently showcased by EY at a recent event on “Digitising the workforce through technology and AI at the EY Wavespace Labs in Dublin city centre.

Digitising the lab

St. James’s Hospital is one of the country’s biggest and busiest hospitals and so its laboratory is one of the biggest and busiest labs.

Fiona Kearney, the laboratories manager at the hospital, oversees the day-to-day of the lab and how technology is being weaved into the operation, which is one of great scale and complexity.

"On a typical day [technicians] would process around 5,000 tubes [that] would have come through our doors and we only have a small team in there with about 15 people,” she said.

“On a perfect day they'd have about two minutes to complete all the work required: open some samples and request forms, check the demographics, check the name, date of birth, check it into our patient administration system, check into our laboratory information system, barcode it and then rack it and distribute it.  They don’t always get two minutes though, more often it’s closer to a minute.”

The roll out of electronic patient records and the move to cloud has been a major undertaking at the lab, she said, and one that has started to bear fruit for the lab technicians.

“For the MRSA lab, they went from nine or ten hours to do those samples down to about two hours. That's time back in our pockets to do other things,” she said.

Making that transition to the cloud is not always smooth though, considering the sheer amounts of data involved. For example, running 24 samples on a sequencer in the MRSA lab takes 15 terabytes of data.

But making the transition has been necessary and there are always new challenges to manage.

The 2021 HSE cyber-attack was a massive wake-up call for the entire healthcare system but for labs like St. James’, it had to contend with a re-think of its infrastructure and the way it manages data to ensure greater security.

The next phase of the lab’s digitisation journey is AI in the realm of pathology. It is a use case that has great promise for speeding up diagnosis processes, particularly in cancer diagnosis.

“When you go in for surgery, standard practice is that you have a sample removed, it comes to the lab, we slice it up and make slides, that we look at it under the microscope,” Kearney said. “The microscope days are fast concluding, they're going to get replaced with digital pathology, you're going to have a software that says this sample looks like it has cancer so flag it to the pathologist, you need to look at this quicker.”

This could save valuable time in getting a diagnosis and ensuring the right cases are prioritised.

“It might say for the next ones, you can get to them at the end of the day or the end of the week, they're negative, it doesn't look like there's anything there. It will be a huge game changer in the digital pathology world.”

Taking back time

One organisation that is taking initial steps into Generative AI usage as part of their Digital Transformation is the Kerry Group. The food and ingredients company has run a pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot, Ashling Sheridan, who is data science and engineering lead, said.

This involves rolling out Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot on tasks in the likes of Excel and PowerPoint to cut down time-consuming repetitive tasks.

“We have a large workforce so how are we going to start preparing them for a technology that's going to come at them is front of mind for the business. There's no avoiding it,” Sheridan said.

The major learning for Kerry though wasn’t necessarily the technology itself but the attitudes and culture around it.

“The key element that we needed to focus on from an organisation perspective was the change management and training piece which is really where EY had capability to help. Getting users to use the tool and change their ways of working was a big task for us,” Sheridan said.

The results have shown employees shaving off about one hour and 20 minutes per use case from generally mundane or repetitive tasks on a weekly basis.

“A use case for example is where you need to summarise a presentation or you need to summarise meetings and there are four instances where we believe people would be doing that use case every week and that's where you got the one hour and 20 minute saving.”

It remains a work in progress, she said, as it cannot be simply a case of rolling out a new piece of technology and just expecting results.

This is particularly the case with AI tools like Copilot where its use needs to be honed to get better results. This is especially true with the prompts that users give to the programme for certain tasks. These prompts need to be nuanced to maximise the output from the AI.

Providing this education to staff is a key element of the roll out and to onboard staff.

"When they were educated, their response was much more positive,” Sheridan said. Moreover, Sheridan said there needs to be a tangible benefit to staff from the adaption of this technology.

“We're a fast-paced business and I think everyone's companies have just got busier and busier all the time. We really want to improve the productivity of our team but also to ensure that they got something meaningful back from this increased use of technology. So whether that's giving them extra time back so they can do some extra learning and development or whether that's just to give them some time back, we’re open to seeing what works”

Digital twins

At ESB Networks, Sarah Claxton is the senior manager for organisation and capability, leading the training of new technicians.

ESB is deploying immersive tech like virtual reality, digital twins and the metaverse to augment the way it trains technicians.

Whether it’s the shift to electric vehicles or hitting the country’s housing targets, there is one common factor: they all need electricity.

“What has to happen on the network is phenomenal. Who does that work?” Claxton said. This all means a greater demand for technicians and they all need to be trained.

ESB has a live network training facility with 13,000 volts in Portlaoise and, as Claxton explained, the demand for training at the facility is greater than ever.

"Since 2021, we have doubled the training days in that facility because we have doubled the number of apprentices we've hired,” she said.

"At the same time, our contractors are growing their workforce to address what needs to be done here.

"We only have one networks training centre, it's not really feasible to start building all over the country,” she said.

Deploying a digital twin, or an exact digital replica, of the Portlaoise training facility can alleviate some of these bottlenecks, allowing trainees to familiarise themselves with some of the training requirements like examining busbars.

The other major benefit of this, Claxton explained, is the data that will be generated from each training session that can then be used across the organisation. This will be particularly helpful for spreading knowledge from retired workers when they leave the profession.

Buy-in

Echoing Sheridan, Claxton said any organisation deploying tech like AI or virtual reality has to be thoughtful around how it is rolled out and used among staff.

In the case of education and training, she said a lot of organisations learned the hard way during Covid that you can’t just stick a learning programme on Zoom and expect the same results as in-person.

“Everyone shifted to technical training during Covid and I think we've all learned the lessons of what not to do. For us in particular, we learned that online or self-serve training where you're pumping loads of stuff through the funnel that is success factors and expecting people at the other end to go 'great, give me more' doesn't really work,” Claxton said.

Microsoft provides much of the technology underpinning these applications. Its General Manager in Ireland, Catherine Doyle said that with any new technology in the workplace there will be teething problems but attitudes do change gradually.

"Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic it was considered pretty rude to have a Teams call on video with a client, and that if you didn't show up in person that you're the height of ignorance,” she said. “I remember when it was not acceptable to instant message someone as well from a business point of view, it was only for personal use. If we now think about all of these things, they're now totally normal in the workforce.”

Kerry’s Sheridan added that there needs to be a “buy-in” from senior management at the start of any new tech deployment and solid communication across the employee base.

"The big thing for us is getting senior stakeholder buy-in. There is a cost to this so firstly we need to get their buy-in to say they're happy for their department to go on the next phase of Co-pilot 365. They see the productivity gains and how it's going to be better from a work-life perspective,” she said.

"After that it's about getting the employees bought into the change. Yes, we may have the senior leaders saying this is a great tool, let's go ahead and move to the next phase but for us we did have some resistance from some of the employees because they're nervous and need to be supported along the journey.”

Microsoft’s Doyle said it’s “important to have the vanguards within organisations, someone who is going to champion it and actually keep it moving and allay concerns”.

“Feedback from our customers is that they found it went really well for the first sort of four months and then people started to revert back to the way they did it before,” she said. To see a meaningful deployment and one that lasts for the long haul, companies need to be cognisant of good communication.

“It's not going to land by itself.”

Discover how EY can help, visit ey.com/ie/digitalworkforce