The word “innovation” usually evokes new ways of thinking, acting, and accelerating what’s possible, but none of that means much if it doesn’t deliver meaningful results. So, when it comes to gauging innovation’s impact, Phillipa Leighton Jones and Matt Griffin are particularly well attuned. In this special episode recorded live from Mobile World Congress 2023, Phillipa and Matt share their perspectives on how connectivity has become the underpinning of so many of the innovations we see today. From AI and sustainability to the nearly unlimited access to knowledge connectivity offers, we’ll hear their views on the latest breakthroughs the technology world is embracing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
As always, my focus is on exploring the intersection of
technology and business by having conversations with the most forward
thinking leaders. Throughout my career, I've covered everything from massive
parallel processing to advanced robotics, but what truly inspires me
(00:24):
are the stories of innovation and transformation. I'd like to
think that every episode of The Restless Ones is a
special one, but today I've got something really special. I
got to sit down with Philippa Layton Jones, Senior Vice
president of the Trust with the Wall Street Journal, and
(00:44):
Matt Griffin, CEO of the Three to eleven Institute at
Mobile World Congress twenty twenty three in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Philippa and Matt both served as judges for the second
Team Mobile for Business Unconventional Awards, and both have a
lot of site into and passion about technology in general
and the power of connectivity in particular. The conversation was
(01:08):
a lively one, and as you'll hear, Philippa and Matt
are both generous with their time and expertise. So now
I'm going to throw it to Jonathan of the past
to lead us into a discussion about tech trends, connectivity,
and the restless leaders who are changing the world. Welcome
(01:32):
to the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. We're here at
Mobile World Congress twenty twenty three, and it's a very
special episode because my guests today are both amazing people.
With me, I've got Philippa Lighton Jones. Philippa, Welcome to
the Restless Times.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You very much for having me here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
We've already bonded over our shared love of English literature,
which we both slaved over when we were students.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Sent me did very long time ago, and for me
at least days when we read books and there was
no internet, pre Internet.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Days right shortly after literature itself had been invented. If
I'm not mistaken, and we have Matt Griffin here, we're
going to be talking with you a lot about the
far off future days because you're a prognosticator, so that's
really exciting.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Well, I say, I don't know about prognosticate to people
call me a procrastinator and a futurist. That's it, but
you know that'll be a new one on me.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Well, and before we jump in, I always love to
get to know my guests a little better. Philip, I
would love to hear more about your journey into covering
tech and whether or not that was something you had
a burning desire to do or you kind of followed
that path through other courses, and how it brought to
you to where you are today.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Great question.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
The year was nineteen ninety seven, I think, and I
had just graduated in English literature and I knew I
wanted to be a journalist and.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That's very hard gig to get, right.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
It was London, mid nineties, pre internet days, so there
were probably like fewer reporting jobs as well.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
You had to fight pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
But I managed to get myself into an organization and
the gig was covering tech. Now I wasn't really a
technologist at heart, so that was a steep learning curve,
a kind of a critical juncture, I would say, in
a career, but also super interesting at the time, right
because it was when folks were grappling with what is
this thing?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Like what is tech?
Speaker 3 (03:23):
First of all, on what is the Internet? We maybe
had one email address across our organization, and so that
was an interesting journey to see that kind of rapid adoption.
My beat specifically was technology in finance, so across investment, banking,
asset management, those kind of like arcane things which were
also not terribly well covered back in the day.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It was quite sort of a.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Trade and you saw really some big corporate names trying
to come to terms with how was this technology going
to reshape their business? And you saw the early adopters
who were kind of like visionary, and you saw the detractors, right,
I remember one won't name him, but one very notable
chief executive of one very big information company who said,
(04:06):
this isn't going to change the way we do things.
We carry on the way we're doing and they were
left scrambling to catch up for a long time. But
one thing that was kind of interesting in that beat
with the folks who were almost too visionary and had
ideas before the market was ready to kind of adopt
those ideas. And we saw that a lot with stock exchanges,
(04:27):
for example, and like the emergence of these electronic communications
networks and matching engines and like really quite kind of
forny stuff, but where ideas were excellent and now they're
kind of like old school, but at the time the
world just wasn't ready to adopt them. It was too much,
too soon because the pace was filtering, I guess, And
so that took me on a journey of covering tech,
(04:48):
which now obviously underpins everything we do. There is kind
of no beat that doesn't cover tech in a way.
So that's the sort of potted history.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, it's fascinating too, because you got in just a
couple of years before the infamous dot com crash, sure,
which was transformational in many many ways, and then we
saw the rebuilding process where we defined what later we
would come to call Web two point zero. You're also
starting right when Steve Jobs is coming back to Apple.
(05:19):
It was a truly pivotal moment in tech and in
business just as you were getting started. Matt. I'm curious,
how did you first get interested in technology? What drew
you to the world of tech?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
So I kind of reversed into the world of tech.
My background is I'm a marine biologist and oceanographer by training.
I did a bunch of work with the UNHCR around
coral reef and coral reef preservation and so on and
so forth, but then ended up falling into a job
with e MC so then ran global sales specific organizations
like IBM and ATOS. I headed up IBM's what we
(05:51):
call PSNS business, so public safety and National Security business.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
And when you're having a look at the five eyes,
which is typically you know, the GHQ's, the.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
CIA and everything else, Yeah, they want to understand not
what's here now, not what's just coming, but they want
to understand technology from a kind of N plus two
N plus three perspective. So I set up a variety
of different sort of what we call blue sky forums,
especially within these organizations. In the two thousand and six
two thousand and seven, I saw over two hundred and
(06:21):
fifty thousand people in the technology industry then being made
redundant because you had the technology chance like IBM, who
had kind of seen this thing called cloud but didn't
really understand what it was. It was fundamentally disruptive to
their business, so they didn't really like it, so they
didn't really want to put their arms around in in the.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
First place, which is a kind of a cultural thing.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
And if you really want to actually understand how you
can protect people's jobs in the future, then you need
to understand technology. You need to understand what it is,
why it is, what it's capable of. You need to
understand what the trajectory looks like, and then you need
to be able to kind of try to plot all
of that out and say, in the future, we think
(07:05):
technology will be able to do X generative AI at
the moment as a superb example.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
Of Armageddon going wrong, and then you.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Have to plot that back to say, well, if technology
in the future can do this, and these are the problems,
the societal and business issues that we actually see, here
are some of the solutions to that. So now I
cross over six hundred emerging technologies across every sector up
to fifty years out, and we do get crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, When I used to do an episode at the
end of each year where I would do a predictions
episode of what happened the next year, I would hold
myself accountable, and at the end of that following year,
I would do a follow up to say, how did
I do? You would not hire me, Matt, I was
hit that. Oh gosh, if I were baseball, I would
have been benched years.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Everyone's hit rate bad on those things, though.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
I think so, especially when you're looking at a near term,
just because you never really know what the next disruptive
thing is going to be which may not even be
tech related, right, It could just be a change in leadership,
It could be a change in strategy. Those are the
sort of things that can be really disruptive that are
very difficult to predict.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, I mean business models, geopolitics. If you have a
look at COVID. You know, we had COVID, then we
ended up with the Ukraine War. Then we ended up
with supply chain crunches, high rates of inflation and so
on and so forth, cost of living problems and issues.
And what we typically find is, ironically, when we have
a look against this backdrop of sort of geopolitics and
environmentalism and everything else, technology is actually quite straightforward to
(08:33):
predict because it follows common paths. So you can see
the ecosystems developing and building, you can see the problems
that people are trying to solve. You can see the
investor communities piling into particular things and so on and
so forth. So actually, ironically, it's the rest of the
stuff that starts confusing the world.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Let's talk a little bit about what we're seeing currently,
specifically in the mobile space, since we're here at Mobile
World Congress and one of the things I would love
to talk about are some of the things that people
are spotting right now. Is kind of an emerging directions trends,
so however you want to define it in the space,
and then Philip, I would love to get your opinion
about that, like sort of are we seeing the industry
(09:12):
coalesce around anything in particular?
Speaker 3 (09:15):
I think there is a kind of coalescence of two
things that I think are super important and we should
spend some time talking about. One is obviously AI, right
is what's happening with genai?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Is it a real thing?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
We were talking about this a little bit earlier, you know,
a couple of years ago, we were talking about NFTs.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
We were all desperately trying to launch something with NFTs.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Then we were thinking about the metaverse, and then maybe
we're not thinking about the metaverse quite so much. We
were thinking about AR and VR, and maybe we've kind
of like scaled back a little bit on that now too.
Is it time to slow down on AI? One has
to be very measured about the consequences of AIJENAI obviously
is only one facet of it, and I think thinking
through the unintended consequences of technology, right, what is the
(09:52):
endgame for this even one year from now, five years
from now, ten years from now, there's chat, GPT and
open AI is sort of like really one of the scene.
Where do we go next with that? What are the
real world examples? And then one other thing is there's sustainability,
which I think we have to be thinking about this
and I know we'll come onto this a little bit
when we talk about the awards maybe, but if we're
(10:13):
not putting mobile technology to work to help with things
like smart cities and dealing with the outcome of climate
change of climate disasters, we're missing a trick, right. I mean,
I know that the tech industry and the mobile industry
specifically has put sustainability really front and center of its considerations.
How big are our text acts, how much carbon are
(10:34):
we using to sort of keep our businesses afloat? But
I think it's much much more than that, and it's
about how do we create the solutions of the future
but also sell them in Like, we're seeing a lot
of rowing back of commitments at a government level, at
an organizational level, and I think that that is without
wanting to sort of get in the soap box here,
that is worrying, and I think that it is up
to the technologists of the world who have those solutions
(10:56):
to get on the front foot.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
So those are the themes that are really emerging for me.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Well to your point about sustainability and climate change, conservation,
all of those things. I'm of two minds of the subject.
I know a lot of people who talk about us
engineering our way out of a problem, which I think.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Is part of it.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
But to me, that's almost like saying this is a
future Jonathan problem, which I do in my personal life,
and future Jonathan hates Jonathan of today because Jonathan of
today could have taken.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Care of and you've already done the damage you remember,
right exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
But I think there's incredible potential. I mean, we're talking
about a global population where a massive number of us
are carrying around an incredibly powerful computer that's constantly connected,
and that there are ways of leveraging that that could
make a significant difference if we engineer the right approaches
to it. It's almost like it's an untapped resource, and
(11:45):
we're starting to see some businesses find ways to tap
into it in a very specific way that benefits their business, right.
But to me, that also means that there's the potential
of harnessing that power in ways that can have massive
pos of global impact. It just requires the right infrastructure,
the right approach, the right governance to make certain it's
(12:06):
run properly. Yeah, Matt, I'm also curious if you have
seen anything that is sparking your interest.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Well, I mean, if you have a look at MWC,
for example, there are no particular trends that actually stand out,
which I think is actually interesting.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
So a lot of people still say, well, maybe that's
a cop out.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
But we've got things like smart cities, we've got Internet
of Things trends, we've got the impact of five G
for example, basically on mobility. You know, there are conversations
about security and so on and so forth, deployment, network optimization.
But actually, for me, by see the fact that we
don't really have any trends that are particularly standing out
shows to me that you've actually got a very very
(12:44):
broad ecosystem. And actually, when you have a look at
fundamentally what five G is, five G is a general
purpose technology. It is a technology that can be used
very broadly and can be innovated on top of to
improve all kinds of different sectors for lots of different
kinds of use cases and everything else. And I think
when you actually have a look at the diversification of
(13:07):
all these different trends, it's really starting to show that
people have gone from the let's try to find the
specific killer applications for five G, you know, and we
had metaverse and AR and VR gaming for example, and
people are now starting to think, well, okay, now what.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
Do we really do. How do we really start pushing
this into the enterprise, how do we start deploying this,
how do we actually practically do this?
Speaker 2 (13:28):
But when we.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Actually look sort of further out, there's obviously conversations around
six G. We've already seen the US FCC starting to
sell seven G spectrum as well. We're already starting to
eye quantum communications. Then we've obviously got space based satellite
systems as well, and T Mobile have obviously teamed up
with SpaceX.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
So there's actually a lot.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Happening just in that communications space. When we actually have
a look at five G today, we're topping out at
say what one point five maybe two point five gig
asecond But in the labs, when we have a look
at six G, we're already starting to talk about sixteen
gig a second. We're talking about pushing to terrabits per second.
So that's interesting. And then when we talk about quantum technologies,
(14:08):
we're talking about more unhackable sort.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Of systems and everything else you mentioned.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
From a user perspective, people are looking for, you know,
what does this accessibility do for me? Right now, let's
say we bring generative artificial intelligence into it. Fundamentally, when
we have a look at things like five G they
give us access to stuff. One of the things that
excites me about accessibility using these different technologies is accessibility
(14:33):
to knowledge. Now that's different. So today Boally, we've got
about three point five billion people on the planet connected
in one way or another, so they have access to
the Internet, they have access to education and ed tech
systems and so on and so forth. However, when you
have a look at the Internet today, what we all
have access to is we have access to information. Now,
(14:53):
when you start overlaying these large language models, these systems
understand natural language to such a high degree that they
have an IQ of one hundred and fifty five. Now
what that means is they're able to take all of
this raw data. This information and start mixing the domains.
So now that we start generating knowledge. So now we're
(15:16):
starting to move from a global society that had access
to information across these networks to a global society that
has access to expertise and knowledge. And when you really
start thinking about how five G, for example, actually really
enables people to have access to these increasingly powerful cloud
(15:37):
based technologies, whatever they happen to be, that's one of
the most exciting things that I see as I travel around.
You know what happens when people have access to knowledge
and access to systems that can help them accelerate their
learning sixfold. When you can use generative artificial intelligence with
children to boost their grades by thirty percent for almost free.
(16:00):
When we have corporates that are taking juniors in a
whole variety of different domains and subjects and topics and
boosting them to a two h one level within three weeks.
So all of a sudden, what we have is we
have the network layer that gives us access to.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
New things, to do new things, but from.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
A societal perspective, access to knowledge, and then that's just
going to keep driving the five G ecosystem even more
because access to knowledge means that we now have access
to new ways to solve the problems that we actually have.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
So it's that virtuous loop.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Which is nice to run into in tech. Yes, often
we're talking about the alternative, but I love that vision
of the future. I love the thought of using generative
AI to perhaps capture that long promised but never delivered
goal of being able to give students specific approaches to
(16:57):
learning that are catered to them. That's something that technology
has been promising for years.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
So we are now at the point where every single person,
not just child, but every single adult has access to
a one on one tutor that has a thousand times
more general knowledge in its head than anyone on the planet,
where you can ask it anything. You can ask it
to teach you to become a five G network engineer,
(17:24):
or you can get it to teach you about, you know,
my daughter's case habitats and that sort of stuff. You've
now got access to a one on one tutor.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Both my parents are teachers, so I this speaks directly
to me because you're talking exactly the experience they would have,
where if they had the ability to focus on fewer students,
they could see those students flourish much more effectively. And
when you're looking at things like class size. Where I
come from in Georgia, class size could get quite large,
even in primary school. So that's a very powerful use case.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
But it's also a combination of technol you know, everyone
looks at say generative AI and say, oh, well, we
can train children and adults in new ways using it. Fundamentally,
you need the connectivity beneath it, sure, which is where
that general purpose connectivity actually really makes sense. I mean,
without that connectivity layer, you haven't got it right.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
I just want to interject you.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
It's just as we're thinking about this in the news
industry obviously, and we at the Wall Street Channel and
Da Jones have been using AI for decades now in
terms of, you know, uncovering data points within company announcements
and to analyze large amounts of data.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
But I think we are cautious.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I would say that the work our journalists do is
deeply researched.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
On a very human level.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
And if we've got AI reading vast amounts of data
that we know isn't research to the same degree, We've
got to be very very careful in the kinds of
news that emerges over the next few years and decades,
right that actually the data en it's all about data
and data out as we all know, and that we
preserve the governance over that data end. One thing I
(19:00):
think that will be a continuing theme for the news
industry is how is AI reshaping our business and our
world and the kinds of news that people are reading,
because we know that young people are kind of pretty
platform agnostic on where their news comes from, and we've
got to make sure that we kind of reinforce those
standards of journalism. That makes journalism journalism, right, not something
(19:22):
that can be created by a machine. So just to
put the kind of like Devil's Advocate hats on this.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Oh, certainly. The other thing, Matt that you mentioned, and Philippa,
I'm sure you have insight on this as well, the
concept of connectivity being sort of that underlying foundation that
facilitates innovation in other ways. That's really what this show
is all about. I mean, we talk about that a
lot on the Restless Ones, about the idea of how
(19:48):
we're in a realm of connectivity that is enabling specifically
business solutions on a level that was impossible before. To me,
that's really exciting. And again it really boils down to
the fact that we we have this connectivity technology that
is enabling that.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, and I think we see that moving at such pace,
and I hope we'll come on to this and talk
about some of the awards that we've been looking at recently.
But connectivity empowering and facilitating a whole new ways of
working has been so game changing, so powerful, taking things
to places you would never have been able to previously
do things. I used to be a reporter in Africa
(20:25):
and where we were promised that it had excellent connectivity,
it really didn't. It was kind of like cables that
would get soaked by the rain, and it was all
powered by a hydroelectric dam that wasn't always working. And
you see when you're stripped of that connectivity how disabling
it is, even on a personal level, but at a
business level. And all of the things that we've come
to rely on now you're hamstrung, right if it's not there.
(20:48):
We kind of do take it for granted, and we
are ever more ambitious than what we want to do,
and we're ever more geographically dispersed in what we want
to do.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And you only have to have.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
I mean, at the simplest level, WHI fi not working
at your hotel before you realize your own personal work,
worlds comes crumbling down.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So I think you know a lot of what we
all come on to talk about.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
I hope you'll see the underpinnings of connectivity. Even in
one year, it has changed the way businesses are doing
so many things.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I think that's a great way for us to kind
of talk a little bit about the Unconventional Awards. You
both are judges for this year's Unconventional Awards, and there
are various categories that we wanted to chat about.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, so this is the second year of the Unconventional Awards.
We were both judges last year as well, and the
quality of the entries this year was astonishingly high. There
was a huge surgeon entries as well. So I think
that is testament to corporations and individuals within those corporations
really condoning onto You can make a real change, you
can be innovative. But what we were seeing was real
(21:58):
change happening at an organization and an industry level.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
An area that we were looking at was innovation in
community and I was wondering if there was anything that
kind of stood out to you.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
So there were so I mean, we had three in
sort of going in no particular order. We had the
City of Bellevue who were using five G and V
two X so vehicle to X technology to try to
reduce road traffic accidents, which when you have a look
at the number of people that are killed on American
roads basically every year, I mean, there's what eight hundred thousand.
We still don't see cars at driving themselves yet we're
(22:28):
at category three. Category five is probably still two to
three years away. But actually, for me, when you have
a look at the City of Bellevue, was really good
to see a city that was actually moving from how
do we connect vehicles and transportation and things that are
mobile basically to city infrastructure to do X, Y and
Z to how do we actually bring this really down
to the ground to actually reduce fatalities typically pedestrian fatalities.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
So that one really stood out.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Then we've had the Hampton Valley Ford's volunteer Fire Department.
You have this really hard working volunteer fire department, and
they said, what we've done is we've used five G
to really improve the reliability and the speed by seeing
of our networks and our network services and our communications,
and when you have a look at what they do,
they see they're in life saving situations incredibly regularly. And
(23:19):
just by having access to reliable and fast communications networks
and systems and everything else means that on the one hand,
they can get situational intelligence faster. So what's going on,
what's happening, who's in the building, what part of the
buildings are catching fire, how do we deal with it?
So in the heat of battle, they've got more information
that they can use very quickly to expedite people from
(23:40):
a building or whatever happens to be. But the reason
bey why I sort of felt a little bit guilty
is because actually the fire services should.
Speaker 5 (23:46):
Have reliable networks. Anyway. I sort of felt like, on
the one hand, you know, they've done very very well.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
Also they're thinking you should just have this stuff as standard, right,
But they took the ball by the horns, they ran
with it. They actually sort of picked the ball up
by themselves, and they actually did this by themselves as well,
And I think that's where they deserve around for applause.
But then the other one that sort of stood out
to me was Chicago Public Schools. Now in the UK,
I do a lot of work basically with homeless charities
(24:14):
and communities. And in Chicago schools case, they have about
thirteen thousand students at any one time, and about a
thousand of those students really are a truant. But some
of the problems that those students have go much deeper
than that. You know, there's a lot of absenteers and
because the parents basically are shall we say, unfit or
(24:34):
unwell to manage sort of particular situations and so on
and so forth. And with the public schools district in Chicago,
they ended up providing laptops and connectivity to a thousand
students that are truant.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
What it's doing is it.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Was enabling those people basically who were on the streets,
who had problems at home. It gave them a lifeline
into the Chicago Public schools community and seeing more than
actually going back to school, and when you have a
look at the importance of education on people's future lives,
it's life changing. So as an innovation, it might sound
(25:10):
fairly just straightforward, but actually it's probably one of the
most important kinds of innovation that we have because it
is changing people's lives as well as the lives of
any kids that they have. It's lifting them up in
a way basically that maybe a digital twin can't.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
So this was obviously the Community.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
Awards, but it was really good to see individuals within
the community identifying the problems to solve and then technology
is part of how they solved that, but obviously not
the whole picture, but it's part of how it was solved.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think Matt makes excellent points there, and this is
a recurring common theme throughout these awards. A lot of
what we've seen with these awards has been and certainly
a big theme of last years was these are life
changing things that are happening. These are people who think,
how can we use connectivity to genuinely make the lives
better of you know, big recurring theme we see healthcare, cities, infrastructure, education,
(26:08):
and the digital divide, like so much of the digital divide,
which is so important and if we don't get that right,
what's the point because we're just kind of like creating
for creating's sake.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So innovation in employee enablement was one of the categories.
I was curious, Philip, was there any particular use case
that stood out to you as being particularly interesting in
that regard.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, one of the other entries we saw was Southland,
which is a construction firm. They had had huge growth
in their workforce and yet they couldn't tell when somebody
was injured on the job, and so they launched five
G enabled network to just figure out when they've gone
from a fifty to two hundred and fifty man team
to a two thousand man team or woman team, how
(26:49):
do you check people are checking in and checking out
a job so no one's got injured on that job.
Small thing, but it's how their business will survive. So
I just wanted to pick up on that point of
unconventional and we've I think we've always said this, we
don't want to see innovation for innovation's sake. We want
to see things that are actually moving the dial in
meaningful ways but also impact.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
And I suppose by as judges, when we're actually evaluating
the entries that we have in one of the criteria
is impact. And when you have a look at the
impact that some of these initiatives actually have, in some
cases it's entire communities, it's staggering. I mean, you know,
what happens basically when you are able to use technology
to say level up, but actually to improve the lives
(27:31):
of an entire community. When we start feeding that through
to the local government perspective, you end up with people
being better educated, being able to get better jobs, getting richer,
which starts solving some of the wealth and poverty divides.
Basically that we actually see is they get better off.
They have access to better healthcare, better education, they've got
access to better food, you know, all these kinds of
(27:51):
different things. So when we actually have a look at
some of these entries basically from an impact perspective, certainly
one of the things I look at is how does
this fundamentally change somebody's future prospects? And then if you
change the prospects of one individual, they then start passing
it on as well. So when we have look at
Chicago public schools, for example, you haven't just got a
(28:12):
thousand children who are now being included in the community
in a new way to sort of lift them up.
But as they start getting older and older, no doubt
they will start passing that on to other people. So
now you have this massive network effect of people doing
good and say it, but it all stems really from
one or two individuals basically within an organization saying we've
(28:35):
got access to these tools and these support networks and
these resources. Should we do A or should we do B?
But actually then doing whatever that happens to be.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Now.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
I love the insight into the judging process because I
often find myself guilty of focusing in on the micro
of an element and I have to remind myself to
step back and look at bigger pictures.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yea, And the judging process is pretty robust, right.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
We get into like a lot of debate and it
takes quite a while to get it when we do that.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Call, so like okay, who's the winner here?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And we all obviously have very different perspectives, but we
all kind of a guided by that principle of like
does it change lives at scale?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And is it a case study that can be used
at scale as well?
Speaker 3 (29:17):
I think that that's so important is like does this
just work for this corporation or this industry or can
you scale it? Is it something that by being called out,
you've got other folks saying okay, we could use that.
You know, there's going to be other Vauntry fire services
that go, we could do that.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
This is how we change the way we do our work.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
So yeah, just to sort of give you a little
bit of extra insight there on that judging process and
how it all comes together and the underpinnings of it,
which is that it's going to be changing things and
potential to change things at huge scale.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
But also, you know, to Philip's point, when we first
set about with the awards, one of the things that
we were actually thinking of is on the one hand,
we need to raise up and promote the good innovations,
say the good initial but actually by putting some of
these organizations on a pedestal quite rightly, like the Hampton
Valley Forge Volunteer Fire Department, it actually means that people
(30:10):
in other departments around the US can say, actually, if
they did it, we can do it. But also it
now means that these people could technically phone them up
and say, we've heard that you did this, what were
the benefits, what were the results? How did you do it?
So now but you have one innovation. It's essentially, you know,
using an analogy, the fire department can kind of hold
(30:31):
the tork job and then once they've actually completed these initiatives.
They can pass that torch on and say, right now,
it's your turn to use this to do X, Y
and z, to get better outcomes on whatever it happens to.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
Be, to save more lives. So it's that ripple effect.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I like the torch analogy. I will remind you that
the firefighters are meant to put them out.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
Well I didn't say it was lit, you know, that's it.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
And you could be talking about a flashlight, which.
Speaker 5 (30:55):
Is exactly yeah, that's it. Maybe that's the modern equivalent.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Well, we have two moregories of unconventional awards to kind
of chat about. The next one up is the innovation
and Customer Experience. I'm curious if there were any standouts
in that category as well.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
So for me, actually Emphasis really stood up.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
Now again this might sound slightly strange, but what Emphasis
were doing was they were using five G combined with
artificial intelligence to help improve tennis players play, improve their
form and everything else. So what they were doing is
they were using things like cameras, artificial intelligence, and biometrics
to automatically monitor a tennis player's form and then feedback
(31:33):
to that tennis player.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
Say, if you did this, basically.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
You'd actually be faster, you'd improve your scores, et cetera,
et cetera. Now again, you know, this is sort of
one of as on the surface, you look at it
and you think, okay, it's just applies to tennis players. However,
the way they actually created it means that it could
actually be scaled out to little.
Speaker 5 (31:50):
Leagues everywhere and everything else.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
It can be applied basically not just to tennis, but
to every single sport out there. And when we actually
have a look at the impact of these sort of
technologies on health and wellness, being able to, for example,
start putting equipment alongside an athletics track, where that equipment
now monitors how someone is running, and you can say, well,
actually you're running slightly skewed with your gate is slightly off,
(32:12):
which means your hips going to be out and you're
going to end up with.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
A bad back.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
So if you start adjusting your running posture to this,
you can not only get faster, but you can avoid injury.
Is actually important, and especially you know, when we have
a look at the importance of health and wellness in
today's society, we could have a podcast on that alone.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Sure, yeah, it's very similar to their education status too,
where you're talking about using technology to give personalized health
and wellness information to the individual. Well, that's a fantastic example.
And then our last one, of course, is the innovation
in industry. Philippa Lee, you wanted to have a talk
about that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
This was such a strong category. We saw some amazing
endeavors here. One that I would call out in particular
as bosson Children's Hospital. So this is an absolute clinical
leader in pediatric care, recognize global leader doing some of
the most important work in the industry. However, the hospital's
Wi Fi network was causing significant challenges. So you are
(33:08):
trying to take care of your patients and you can
only enter their clinical information in a fixed desktop in
the patient's room. Clinicians want to be able to connect
with each other, use their mobile devices, connect their own
devices into the hospital network, and so that's what they did.
They implemented gain using t mobile technology. They put in
a layer of connectivity that meant they were now able
(33:29):
to enter clinical information on the fly. They were able
to connect with more kind of like bring your own
devices and really make a game changing impact on the
way they were caring for their patients. And also recording
data and that again, now we have a case study
that can be rolled out at scale to other hospitals,
which we kind of know a lot of these hospitals
(33:49):
are based on this kind of legacy it infrastructure that
is holding a lot of clinical work back. You've got
the real talent and the real science and our d
happening at that clinical level, and the technology is holding
them back. So Boston Children's Hostile is one that I
would really call out there as something that is again
changing lives at a kind of life or death level.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And a huge challenge as well from a technological standpoint,
because you're talking specifically about healthcare. Obviously you're type of
very sensitive information as the security, right, I think, so
designing your system so that you have this ability to
connect in and have that interconnectivity while also ensuring that
safety it is not a trivial matter. So I see
how that's a huge endeavor. And to see an organization
(34:35):
go through and start to idate and solve those problems
that can then be ported to other organizations.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Well, it is it's like this osmosis effect. You know,
something happens basically within one organization and all the benefits
start leaking out all the other organizations in the ecosystem,
in the industry.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
Whatever it happens to be. And I think bas with
all of the.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
Awards that we've actually awarded, all of the innovations and
initiatives we actually looked at. When you actually really starts
scaling this up, the improvement to people's lives is staggering.
But then also you know, impacts on the environment from
the sustainability perspective. I applaud everybody that actually put their
ideas forward because they all made a massive herculean effort
(35:16):
not just to do something, but to actually implement it
and really carry through.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Yeah. Look, these are important towards I think because it
just shows possibility. It really helps drive that knowledge and
awareness of what's being done at this sort of innovative
level and shows that like you put something in a
soundbox and real change can happen, the possible.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
So before I can let you go, I do have
to ask you one more thing. It is just the
simple question, and Philippa, I'll start with you. Our show
is called The Restless Ones. So what does restless mean
to you?
Speaker 3 (35:49):
I think it is do not be afraid of calling
things out when you think that something can be done
better right and making the change that will actually have
this sort of far reaching effect. Think through the long
term consequences. Is this idea actually going to change the
course of our company, of lives, of society, of news
or whatever it might be? Right, Because you've got to
(36:11):
have that long term view. You've got to have good governance,
whether that's at an individual level or like the people
you're bringing along with you, and you've got to think
through the unintended consequences. But I think if you keep
that long term view and you are restless and curious,
and you think about the wider impact of what you're doing,
that will make your idea successful.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
That's a great answer, Matt for me, by Sally being
restless is all about never stopping to try to find
problems and never stopping to try and find solutions. And
that's exactly by say what a lot of the people
who've entered have actually done. They've looked for problems, they've
looked for solutions. Generally they've found solutions.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Carry On, a lot of the people I've had on
the show, their background is an engineering and I love
talking to engineers because they just see the world as
a series of problems waiting to be solved, and they're
constantly thinking of the solutions.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, Barack Obama has a great line on that, right
he Because there are like hundreds people in your organization,
you will find the problems and it's then ages diagnosing
the problems to people who fix the problems are the
ones that you want to hang on to. And I
think that that is a lot of being restless, is
spotting something and then going and fixing it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Fantastic, Philip and Matt, thank you for joining the Restless Ones.
This has been a great conversation.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Thanks again to Philippa Layton Jones and Matt Griffin for
joining me on the Restless Ones. I'm so glad we
were able to sit down and talk about technology's capacity
to make real substantial change in business, in communities, and
in people's lives. And it was also good to remind
ourselves that it's beneficial sometimes to step back and ask
(37:50):
really big questions and to consider all the possibilities and
potential consequences of our decisions, the stuff that you know
leaders do every single day. There's a lot going on
this year at Mobile World Congress. The use cases that
we talk about are just a small slice of the
innovation going on all over the world, all made possible
(38:10):
by connectivity. And while we've been having some conversations about
business and technology for four seasons on The Restless Ones,
I can't help but think that we're just on the
precipice of an astonishing future where we see potential become reality.
Thanks for listening to The Restless Ones. We've got more
(38:32):
than fifty episodes focusing on business leaders and tech in
the archives, so be sure to check those out and
tune in for more conversations this season about how leaders
are leveraging tech to create amazing new opportunities. Until next time,
I'm Jonathan Strickland.
Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland.
As always, my focus is on exploring the intersection of
technology and business by having conversations with the most forward
thinking leaders. Throughout my career, I've covered everything from massive
parallel processing to advanced robotics, but what truly inspires me
(00:24):
are the stories of innovation and transformation. I'd like to
think that every episode of The Restless Ones is a
special one, but today I've got something really special. I
got to sit down with Philippa Layton Jones, Senior Vice
president of the Trust with the Wall Street Journal, and
(00:44):
Matt Griffin, CEO of the Three to eleven Institute at
Mobile World Congress twenty twenty three in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Philippa and Matt both served as judges for the second
Team Mobile for Business Unconventional Awards, and both have a
lot of site into and passion about technology in general
and the power of connectivity in particular. The conversation was
(01:08):
a lively one, and as you'll hear, Philippa and Matt
are both generous with their time and expertise. So now
I'm going to throw it to Jonathan of the past
to lead us into a discussion about tech trends, connectivity,
and the restless leaders who are changing the world. Welcome
(01:32):
to the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. We're here at
Mobile World Congress twenty twenty three, and it's a very
special episode because my guests today are both amazing people.
With me, I've got Philippa Lighton Jones. Philippa, Welcome to
the Restless Times.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You very much for having me here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
We've already bonded over our shared love of English literature,
which we both slaved over when we were students.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Sent me did very long time ago, and for me
at least days when we read books and there was
no internet, pre Internet.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Days right shortly after literature itself had been invented. If
I'm not mistaken, and we have Matt Griffin here, we're
going to be talking with you a lot about the
far off future days because you're a prognosticator, so that's
really exciting.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
Well, I say, I don't know about prognosticate to people
call me a procrastinator and a futurist. That's it, but
you know that'll be a new one on me.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Well, and before we jump in, I always love to
get to know my guests a little better. Philip, I
would love to hear more about your journey into covering
tech and whether or not that was something you had
a burning desire to do or you kind of followed
that path through other courses, and how it brought to
you to where you are today.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Great question.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
The year was nineteen ninety seven, I think, and I
had just graduated in English literature and I knew I
wanted to be a journalist and.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
That's very hard gig to get, right.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
It was London, mid nineties, pre internet days, so there
were probably like fewer reporting jobs as well.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
You had to fight pretty hard.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
But I managed to get myself into an organization and
the gig was covering tech. Now I wasn't really a
technologist at heart, so that was a steep learning curve,
a kind of a critical juncture, I would say, in
a career, but also super interesting at the time, right
because it was when folks were grappling with what is
this thing?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Like what is tech?
Speaker 3 (03:23):
First of all, on what is the Internet? We maybe
had one email address across our organization, and so that
was an interesting journey to see that kind of rapid adoption.
My beat specifically was technology in finance, so across investment, banking,
asset management, those kind of like arcane things which were
also not terribly well covered back in the day.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It was quite sort of a.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Trade and you saw really some big corporate names trying
to come to terms with how was this technology going
to reshape their business? And you saw the early adopters
who were kind of like visionary, and you saw the detractors, right,
I remember one won't name him, but one very notable
chief executive of one very big information company who said,
(04:06):
this isn't going to change the way we do things.
We carry on the way we're doing and they were
left scrambling to catch up for a long time. But
one thing that was kind of interesting in that beat
with the folks who were almost too visionary and had
ideas before the market was ready to kind of adopt
those ideas. And we saw that a lot with stock exchanges,
(04:27):
for example, and like the emergence of these electronic communications
networks and matching engines and like really quite kind of
forny stuff, but where ideas were excellent and now they're
kind of like old school, but at the time the
world just wasn't ready to adopt them. It was too much,
too soon because the pace was filtering, I guess, And
so that took me on a journey of covering tech,
(04:48):
which now obviously underpins everything we do. There is kind
of no beat that doesn't cover tech in a way.
So that's the sort of potted history.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, it's fascinating too, because you got in just a
couple of years before the infamous dot com crash, sure,
which was transformational in many many ways, and then we
saw the rebuilding process where we defined what later we
would come to call Web two point zero. You're also
starting right when Steve Jobs is coming back to Apple.
(05:19):
It was a truly pivotal moment in tech and in
business just as you were getting started. Matt. I'm curious,
how did you first get interested in technology? What drew
you to the world of tech?
Speaker 4 (05:31):
So I kind of reversed into the world of tech.
My background is I'm a marine biologist and oceanographer by training.
I did a bunch of work with the UNHCR around
coral reef and coral reef preservation and so on and
so forth, but then ended up falling into a job
with e MC so then ran global sales specific organizations
like IBM and ATOS. I headed up IBM's what we
(05:51):
call PSNS business, so public safety and National Security business.
Speaker 5 (05:55):
And when you're having a look at the five eyes,
which is typically you know, the GHQ's, the.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
CIA and everything else, Yeah, they want to understand not
what's here now, not what's just coming, but they want
to understand technology from a kind of N plus two
N plus three perspective. So I set up a variety
of different sort of what we call blue sky forums,
especially within these organizations. In the two thousand and six
two thousand and seven, I saw over two hundred and
(06:21):
fifty thousand people in the technology industry then being made
redundant because you had the technology chance like IBM, who
had kind of seen this thing called cloud but didn't
really understand what it was. It was fundamentally disruptive to
their business, so they didn't really like it, so they
didn't really want to put their arms around in in the.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
First place, which is a kind of a cultural thing.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
And if you really want to actually understand how you
can protect people's jobs in the future, then you need
to understand technology. You need to understand what it is,
why it is, what it's capable of. You need to
understand what the trajectory looks like, and then you need
to be able to kind of try to plot all
of that out and say, in the future, we think
(07:05):
technology will be able to do X generative AI at
the moment as a superb example.
Speaker 5 (07:09):
Of Armageddon going wrong, and then you.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Have to plot that back to say, well, if technology
in the future can do this, and these are the problems,
the societal and business issues that we actually see, here
are some of the solutions to that. So now I
cross over six hundred emerging technologies across every sector up
to fifty years out, and we do get crazy.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, When I used to do an episode at the
end of each year where I would do a predictions
episode of what happened the next year, I would hold
myself accountable, and at the end of that following year,
I would do a follow up to say, how did
I do? You would not hire me, Matt, I was
hit that. Oh gosh, if I were baseball, I would
have been benched years.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Everyone's hit rate bad on those things, though.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
I think so, especially when you're looking at a near term,
just because you never really know what the next disruptive
thing is going to be which may not even be
tech related, right, It could just be a change in leadership,
It could be a change in strategy. Those are the
sort of things that can be really disruptive that are
very difficult to predict.
Speaker 4 (08:09):
Well, I mean business models, geopolitics. If you have a
look at COVID. You know, we had COVID, then we
ended up with the Ukraine War. Then we ended up
with supply chain crunches, high rates of inflation and so
on and so forth, cost of living problems and issues.
And what we typically find is, ironically, when we have
a look against this backdrop of sort of geopolitics and
environmentalism and everything else, technology is actually quite straightforward to
(08:33):
predict because it follows common paths. So you can see
the ecosystems developing and building, you can see the problems
that people are trying to solve. You can see the
investor communities piling into particular things and so on and
so forth. So actually, ironically, it's the rest of the
stuff that starts confusing the world.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Let's talk a little bit about what we're seeing currently,
specifically in the mobile space, since we're here at Mobile
World Congress and one of the things I would love
to talk about are some of the things that people
are spotting right now. Is kind of an emerging directions trends,
so however you want to define it in the space,
and then Philip, I would love to get your opinion
about that, like sort of are we seeing the industry
(09:12):
coalesce around anything in particular?
Speaker 3 (09:15):
I think there is a kind of coalescence of two
things that I think are super important and we should
spend some time talking about. One is obviously AI, right
is what's happening with genai?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Is it a real thing?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
We were talking about this a little bit earlier, you know,
a couple of years ago, we were talking about NFTs.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
We were all desperately trying to launch something with NFTs.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Then we were thinking about the metaverse, and then maybe
we're not thinking about the metaverse quite so much. We
were thinking about AR and VR, and maybe we've kind
of like scaled back a little bit on that now too.
Is it time to slow down on AI? One has
to be very measured about the consequences of AIJENAI obviously
is only one facet of it, and I think thinking
through the unintended consequences of technology, right, what is the
(09:52):
endgame for this even one year from now, five years
from now, ten years from now, there's chat, GPT and
open AI is sort of like really one of the scene.
Where do we go next with that? What are the
real world examples? And then one other thing is there's sustainability,
which I think we have to be thinking about this
and I know we'll come onto this a little bit
when we talk about the awards maybe, but if we're
(10:13):
not putting mobile technology to work to help with things
like smart cities and dealing with the outcome of climate
change of climate disasters, we're missing a trick, right. I mean,
I know that the tech industry and the mobile industry
specifically has put sustainability really front and center of its considerations.
How big are our text acts, how much carbon are
(10:34):
we using to sort of keep our businesses afloat? But
I think it's much much more than that, and it's
about how do we create the solutions of the future
but also sell them in Like, we're seeing a lot
of rowing back of commitments at a government level, at
an organizational level, and I think that that is without
wanting to sort of get in the soap box here,
that is worrying, and I think that it is up
to the technologists of the world who have those solutions
(10:56):
to get on the front foot.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
So those are the themes that are really emerging for me.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Well to your point about sustainability and climate change, conservation,
all of those things. I'm of two minds of the subject.
I know a lot of people who talk about us
engineering our way out of a problem, which I think.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Is part of it.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
But to me, that's almost like saying this is a
future Jonathan problem, which I do in my personal life,
and future Jonathan hates Jonathan of today because Jonathan of
today could have taken.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Care of and you've already done the damage you remember,
right exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
But I think there's incredible potential. I mean, we're talking
about a global population where a massive number of us
are carrying around an incredibly powerful computer that's constantly connected,
and that there are ways of leveraging that that could
make a significant difference if we engineer the right approaches
to it. It's almost like it's an untapped resource, and
(11:45):
we're starting to see some businesses find ways to tap
into it in a very specific way that benefits their business, right.
But to me, that also means that there's the potential
of harnessing that power in ways that can have massive
pos of global impact. It just requires the right infrastructure,
the right approach, the right governance to make certain it's
(12:06):
run properly. Yeah, Matt, I'm also curious if you have
seen anything that is sparking your interest.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Well, I mean, if you have a look at MWC,
for example, there are no particular trends that actually stand out,
which I think is actually interesting.
Speaker 5 (12:21):
So a lot of people still say, well, maybe that's
a cop out.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
But we've got things like smart cities, we've got Internet
of Things trends, we've got the impact of five G
for example, basically on mobility. You know, there are conversations
about security and so on and so forth, deployment, network optimization.
But actually, for me, by see the fact that we
don't really have any trends that are particularly standing out
shows to me that you've actually got a very very
(12:44):
broad ecosystem. And actually, when you have a look at
fundamentally what five G is, five G is a general
purpose technology. It is a technology that can be used
very broadly and can be innovated on top of to
improve all kinds of different sectors for lots of different
kinds of use cases and everything else. And I think
when you actually have a look at the diversification of
(13:07):
all these different trends, it's really starting to show that
people have gone from the let's try to find the
specific killer applications for five G, you know, and we
had metaverse and AR and VR gaming for example, and
people are now starting to think, well, okay, now what.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
Do we really do. How do we really start pushing
this into the enterprise, how do we start deploying this,
how do we actually practically do this?
Speaker 2 (13:28):
But when we.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Actually look sort of further out, there's obviously conversations around
six G. We've already seen the US FCC starting to
sell seven G spectrum as well. We're already starting to
eye quantum communications. Then we've obviously got space based satellite
systems as well, and T Mobile have obviously teamed up
with SpaceX.
Speaker 5 (13:46):
So there's actually a lot.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Happening just in that communications space. When we actually have
a look at five G today, we're topping out at
say what one point five maybe two point five gig
asecond But in the labs, when we have a look
at six G, we're already starting to talk about sixteen
gig a second. We're talking about pushing to terrabits per second.
So that's interesting. And then when we talk about quantum technologies,
(14:08):
we're talking about more unhackable sort.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Of systems and everything else you mentioned.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
From a user perspective, people are looking for, you know,
what does this accessibility do for me? Right now, let's
say we bring generative artificial intelligence into it. Fundamentally, when
we have a look at things like five G they
give us access to stuff. One of the things that
excites me about accessibility using these different technologies is accessibility
(14:33):
to knowledge. Now that's different. So today Boally, we've got
about three point five billion people on the planet connected
in one way or another, so they have access to
the Internet, they have access to education and ed tech
systems and so on and so forth. However, when you
have a look at the Internet today, what we all
have access to is we have access to information. Now,
(14:53):
when you start overlaying these large language models, these systems
understand natural language to such a high degree that they
have an IQ of one hundred and fifty five. Now
what that means is they're able to take all of
this raw data. This information and start mixing the domains.
So now that we start generating knowledge. So now we're
(15:16):
starting to move from a global society that had access
to information across these networks to a global society that
has access to expertise and knowledge. And when you really
start thinking about how five G, for example, actually really
enables people to have access to these increasingly powerful cloud
(15:37):
based technologies, whatever they happen to be, that's one of
the most exciting things that I see as I travel around.
You know what happens when people have access to knowledge
and access to systems that can help them accelerate their
learning sixfold. When you can use generative artificial intelligence with
children to boost their grades by thirty percent for almost free.
(16:00):
When we have corporates that are taking juniors in a
whole variety of different domains and subjects and topics and
boosting them to a two h one level within three weeks.
So all of a sudden, what we have is we
have the network layer that gives us access to.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
New things, to do new things, but from.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
A societal perspective, access to knowledge, and then that's just
going to keep driving the five G ecosystem even more
because access to knowledge means that we now have access
to new ways to solve the problems that we actually have.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
So it's that virtuous loop.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Which is nice to run into in tech. Yes, often
we're talking about the alternative, but I love that vision
of the future. I love the thought of using generative
AI to perhaps capture that long promised but never delivered
goal of being able to give students specific approaches to
(16:57):
learning that are catered to them. That's something that technology
has been promising for years.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
So we are now at the point where every single person,
not just child, but every single adult has access to
a one on one tutor that has a thousand times
more general knowledge in its head than anyone on the planet,
where you can ask it anything. You can ask it
to teach you to become a five G network engineer,
(17:24):
or you can get it to teach you about, you know,
my daughter's case habitats and that sort of stuff. You've
now got access to a one on one tutor.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Both my parents are teachers, so I this speaks directly
to me because you're talking exactly the experience they would have,
where if they had the ability to focus on fewer students,
they could see those students flourish much more effectively. And
when you're looking at things like class size. Where I
come from in Georgia, class size could get quite large,
even in primary school. So that's a very powerful use case.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
But it's also a combination of technol you know, everyone
looks at say generative AI and say, oh, well, we
can train children and adults in new ways using it. Fundamentally,
you need the connectivity beneath it, sure, which is where
that general purpose connectivity actually really makes sense. I mean,
without that connectivity layer, you haven't got it right.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
I just want to interject you.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
It's just as we're thinking about this in the news
industry obviously, and we at the Wall Street Channel and
Da Jones have been using AI for decades now in
terms of, you know, uncovering data points within company announcements
and to analyze large amounts of data.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
But I think we are cautious.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
I would say that the work our journalists do is
deeply researched.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
On a very human level.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
And if we've got AI reading vast amounts of data
that we know isn't research to the same degree, We've
got to be very very careful in the kinds of
news that emerges over the next few years and decades,
right that actually the data en it's all about data
and data out as we all know, and that we
preserve the governance over that data end. One thing I
(19:00):
think that will be a continuing theme for the news
industry is how is AI reshaping our business and our
world and the kinds of news that people are reading,
because we know that young people are kind of pretty
platform agnostic on where their news comes from, and we've
got to make sure that we kind of reinforce those
standards of journalism. That makes journalism journalism, right, not something
(19:22):
that can be created by a machine. So just to
put the kind of like Devil's Advocate hats on this.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Oh, certainly. The other thing, Matt that you mentioned, and Philippa,
I'm sure you have insight on this as well, the
concept of connectivity being sort of that underlying foundation that
facilitates innovation in other ways. That's really what this show
is all about. I mean, we talk about that a
lot on the Restless Ones, about the idea of how
(19:48):
we're in a realm of connectivity that is enabling specifically
business solutions on a level that was impossible before. To me,
that's really exciting. And again it really boils down to
the fact that we we have this connectivity technology that
is enabling that.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yeah, and I think we see that moving at such pace,
and I hope we'll come on to this and talk
about some of the awards that we've been looking at recently.
But connectivity empowering and facilitating a whole new ways of
working has been so game changing, so powerful, taking things
to places you would never have been able to previously
do things. I used to be a reporter in Africa
(20:25):
and where we were promised that it had excellent connectivity,
it really didn't. It was kind of like cables that
would get soaked by the rain, and it was all
powered by a hydroelectric dam that wasn't always working. And
you see when you're stripped of that connectivity how disabling
it is, even on a personal level, but at a
business level. And all of the things that we've come
to rely on now you're hamstrung, right if it's not there.
(20:48):
We kind of do take it for granted, and we
are ever more ambitious than what we want to do,
and we're ever more geographically dispersed in what we want
to do.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
And you only have to have.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
I mean, at the simplest level, WHI fi not working
at your hotel before you realize your own personal work,
worlds comes crumbling down.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So I think you know a lot of what we
all come on to talk about.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
I hope you'll see the underpinnings of connectivity. Even in
one year, it has changed the way businesses are doing
so many things.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I think that's a great way for us to kind
of talk a little bit about the Unconventional Awards. You
both are judges for this year's Unconventional Awards, and there
are various categories that we wanted to chat about.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, so this is the second year of the Unconventional Awards.
We were both judges last year as well, and the
quality of the entries this year was astonishingly high. There
was a huge surgeon entries as well. So I think
that is testament to corporations and individuals within those corporations
really condoning onto You can make a real change, you
can be innovative. But what we were seeing was real
(21:58):
change happening at an organization and an industry level.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
An area that we were looking at was innovation in
community and I was wondering if there was anything that
kind of stood out to you.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
So there were so I mean, we had three in
sort of going in no particular order. We had the
City of Bellevue who were using five G and V
two X so vehicle to X technology to try to
reduce road traffic accidents, which when you have a look
at the number of people that are killed on American
roads basically every year, I mean, there's what eight hundred thousand.
We still don't see cars at driving themselves yet we're
(22:28):
at category three. Category five is probably still two to
three years away. But actually, for me, when you have
a look at the City of Bellevue, was really good
to see a city that was actually moving from how
do we connect vehicles and transportation and things that are
mobile basically to city infrastructure to do X, Y and
Z to how do we actually bring this really down
to the ground to actually reduce fatalities typically pedestrian fatalities.
Speaker 5 (22:53):
So that one really stood out.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Then we've had the Hampton Valley Ford's volunteer Fire Department.
You have this really hard working volunteer fire department, and
they said, what we've done is we've used five G
to really improve the reliability and the speed by seeing
of our networks and our network services and our communications,
and when you have a look at what they do,
they see they're in life saving situations incredibly regularly. And
(23:19):
just by having access to reliable and fast communications networks
and systems and everything else means that on the one hand,
they can get situational intelligence faster. So what's going on,
what's happening, who's in the building, what part of the
buildings are catching fire, how do we deal with it?
So in the heat of battle, they've got more information
that they can use very quickly to expedite people from
(23:40):
a building or whatever happens to be. But the reason
bey why I sort of felt a little bit guilty
is because actually the fire services should.
Speaker 5 (23:46):
Have reliable networks. Anyway. I sort of felt like, on
the one hand, you know, they've done very very well.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
Also they're thinking you should just have this stuff as standard, right,
But they took the ball by the horns, they ran
with it. They actually sort of picked the ball up
by themselves, and they actually did this by themselves as well,
And I think that's where they deserve around for applause.
But then the other one that sort of stood out
to me was Chicago Public Schools. Now in the UK,
I do a lot of work basically with homeless charities
(24:14):
and communities. And in Chicago schools case, they have about
thirteen thousand students at any one time, and about a
thousand of those students really are a truant. But some
of the problems that those students have go much deeper
than that. You know, there's a lot of absenteers and
because the parents basically are shall we say, unfit or
(24:34):
unwell to manage sort of particular situations and so on
and so forth. And with the public schools district in Chicago,
they ended up providing laptops and connectivity to a thousand
students that are truant.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
What it's doing is it.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Was enabling those people basically who were on the streets,
who had problems at home. It gave them a lifeline
into the Chicago Public schools community and seeing more than
actually going back to school, and when you have a
look at the importance of education on people's future lives,
it's life changing. So as an innovation, it might sound
(25:10):
fairly just straightforward, but actually it's probably one of the
most important kinds of innovation that we have because it
is changing people's lives as well as the lives of
any kids that they have. It's lifting them up in
a way basically that maybe a digital twin can't.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
So this was obviously the Community.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
Awards, but it was really good to see individuals within
the community identifying the problems to solve and then technology
is part of how they solved that, but obviously not
the whole picture, but it's part of how it was solved.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
I think Matt makes excellent points there, and this is
a recurring common theme throughout these awards. A lot of
what we've seen with these awards has been and certainly
a big theme of last years was these are life
changing things that are happening. These are people who think,
how can we use connectivity to genuinely make the lives
better of you know, big recurring theme we see healthcare, cities, infrastructure, education,
(26:08):
and the digital divide, like so much of the digital divide,
which is so important and if we don't get that right,
what's the point because we're just kind of like creating
for creating's sake.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So innovation in employee enablement was one of the categories.
I was curious, Philip, was there any particular use case
that stood out to you as being particularly interesting in
that regard.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, one of the other entries we saw was Southland,
which is a construction firm. They had had huge growth
in their workforce and yet they couldn't tell when somebody
was injured on the job, and so they launched five
G enabled network to just figure out when they've gone
from a fifty to two hundred and fifty man team
to a two thousand man team or woman team, how
(26:49):
do you check people are checking in and checking out
a job so no one's got injured on that job.
Small thing, but it's how their business will survive. So
I just wanted to pick up on that point of
unconventional and we've I think we've always said this, we
don't want to see innovation for innovation's sake. We want
to see things that are actually moving the dial in
meaningful ways but also impact.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
And I suppose by as judges, when we're actually evaluating
the entries that we have in one of the criteria
is impact. And when you have a look at the
impact that some of these initiatives actually have, in some
cases it's entire communities, it's staggering. I mean, you know,
what happens basically when you are able to use technology
to say level up, but actually to improve the lives
(27:31):
of an entire community. When we start feeding that through
to the local government perspective, you end up with people
being better educated, being able to get better jobs, getting richer,
which starts solving some of the wealth and poverty divides.
Basically that we actually see is they get better off.
They have access to better healthcare, better education, they've got
access to better food, you know, all these kinds of
(27:51):
different things. So when we actually have a look at
some of these entries basically from an impact perspective, certainly
one of the things I look at is how does
this fundamentally change somebody's future prospects? And then if you
change the prospects of one individual, they then start passing
it on as well. So when we have look at
Chicago public schools, for example, you haven't just got a
(28:12):
thousand children who are now being included in the community
in a new way to sort of lift them up.
But as they start getting older and older, no doubt
they will start passing that on to other people. So
now you have this massive network effect of people doing
good and say it, but it all stems really from
one or two individuals basically within an organization saying we've
(28:35):
got access to these tools and these support networks and
these resources. Should we do A or should we do B?
But actually then doing whatever that happens to be.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Now.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
I love the insight into the judging process because I
often find myself guilty of focusing in on the micro
of an element and I have to remind myself to
step back and look at bigger pictures.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yea, And the judging process is pretty robust, right.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
We get into like a lot of debate and it
takes quite a while to get it when we do that.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Call, so like okay, who's the winner here?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
And we all obviously have very different perspectives, but we
all kind of a guided by that principle of like
does it change lives at scale?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And is it a case study that can be used
at scale as well?
Speaker 3 (29:17):
I think that that's so important is like does this
just work for this corporation or this industry or can
you scale it? Is it something that by being called out,
you've got other folks saying okay, we could use that.
You know, there's going to be other Vauntry fire services
that go, we could do that.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
This is how we change the way we do our work.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
So yeah, just to sort of give you a little
bit of extra insight there on that judging process and
how it all comes together and the underpinnings of it,
which is that it's going to be changing things and
potential to change things at huge scale.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
But also, you know, to Philip's point, when we first
set about with the awards, one of the things that
we were actually thinking of is on the one hand,
we need to raise up and promote the good innovations,
say the good initial but actually by putting some of
these organizations on a pedestal quite rightly, like the Hampton
Valley Forge Volunteer Fire Department, it actually means that people
(30:10):
in other departments around the US can say, actually, if
they did it, we can do it. But also it
now means that these people could technically phone them up
and say, we've heard that you did this, what were
the benefits, what were the results? How did you do it?
So now but you have one innovation. It's essentially, you know,
using an analogy, the fire department can kind of hold
(30:31):
the tork job and then once they've actually completed these initiatives.
They can pass that torch on and say, right now,
it's your turn to use this to do X, Y
and z, to get better outcomes on whatever it happens to.
Speaker 5 (30:41):
Be, to save more lives. So it's that ripple effect.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I like the torch analogy. I will remind you that
the firefighters are meant to put them out.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
Well I didn't say it was lit, you know, that's it.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
And you could be talking about a flashlight, which.
Speaker 5 (30:55):
Is exactly yeah, that's it. Maybe that's the modern equivalent.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Well, we have two moregories of unconventional awards to kind
of chat about. The next one up is the innovation
and Customer Experience. I'm curious if there were any standouts
in that category as well.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
So for me, actually Emphasis really stood up.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
Now again this might sound slightly strange, but what Emphasis
were doing was they were using five G combined with
artificial intelligence to help improve tennis players play, improve their
form and everything else. So what they were doing is
they were using things like cameras, artificial intelligence, and biometrics
to automatically monitor a tennis player's form and then feedback
(31:33):
to that tennis player.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
Say, if you did this, basically.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
You'd actually be faster, you'd improve your scores, et cetera,
et cetera. Now again, you know, this is sort of
one of as on the surface, you look at it
and you think, okay, it's just applies to tennis players. However,
the way they actually created it means that it could
actually be scaled out to little.
Speaker 5 (31:50):
Leagues everywhere and everything else.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
It can be applied basically not just to tennis, but
to every single sport out there. And when we actually
have a look at the impact of these sort of
technologies on health and wellness, being able to, for example,
start putting equipment alongside an athletics track, where that equipment
now monitors how someone is running, and you can say, well,
actually you're running slightly skewed with your gate is slightly off,
(32:12):
which means your hips going to be out and you're
going to end up with.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
A bad back.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
So if you start adjusting your running posture to this,
you can not only get faster, but you can avoid injury.
Is actually important, and especially you know, when we have
a look at the importance of health and wellness in
today's society, we could have a podcast on that alone.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Sure, yeah, it's very similar to their education status too,
where you're talking about using technology to give personalized health
and wellness information to the individual. Well, that's a fantastic example.
And then our last one, of course, is the innovation
in industry. Philippa Lee, you wanted to have a talk
about that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
This was such a strong category. We saw some amazing
endeavors here. One that I would call out in particular
as bosson Children's Hospital. So this is an absolute clinical
leader in pediatric care, recognize global leader doing some of
the most important work in the industry. However, the hospital's
Wi Fi network was causing significant challenges. So you are
(33:08):
trying to take care of your patients and you can
only enter their clinical information in a fixed desktop in
the patient's room. Clinicians want to be able to connect
with each other, use their mobile devices, connect their own
devices into the hospital network, and so that's what they did.
They implemented gain using t mobile technology. They put in
a layer of connectivity that meant they were now able
(33:29):
to enter clinical information on the fly. They were able
to connect with more kind of like bring your own
devices and really make a game changing impact on the
way they were caring for their patients. And also recording
data and that again, now we have a case study
that can be rolled out at scale to other hospitals,
which we kind of know a lot of these hospitals
(33:49):
are based on this kind of legacy it infrastructure that
is holding a lot of clinical work back. You've got
the real talent and the real science and our d
happening at that clinical level, and the technology is holding
them back. So Boston Children's Hostile is one that I
would really call out there as something that is again
changing lives at a kind of life or death level.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
And a huge challenge as well from a technological standpoint,
because you're talking specifically about healthcare. Obviously you're type of
very sensitive information as the security, right, I think, so
designing your system so that you have this ability to
connect in and have that interconnectivity while also ensuring that
safety it is not a trivial matter. So I see
how that's a huge endeavor. And to see an organization
(34:35):
go through and start to idate and solve those problems
that can then be ported to other organizations.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Well, it is it's like this osmosis effect. You know,
something happens basically within one organization and all the benefits
start leaking out all the other organizations in the ecosystem,
in the industry.
Speaker 5 (34:51):
Whatever it happens to be. And I think bas with
all of the.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
Awards that we've actually awarded, all of the innovations and
initiatives we actually looked at. When you actually really starts
scaling this up, the improvement to people's lives is staggering.
But then also you know, impacts on the environment from
the sustainability perspective. I applaud everybody that actually put their
ideas forward because they all made a massive herculean effort
(35:16):
not just to do something, but to actually implement it
and really carry through.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Yeah. Look, these are important towards I think because it
just shows possibility. It really helps drive that knowledge and
awareness of what's being done at this sort of innovative
level and shows that like you put something in a
soundbox and real change can happen, the possible.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
So before I can let you go, I do have
to ask you one more thing. It is just the
simple question, and Philippa, I'll start with you. Our show
is called The Restless Ones. So what does restless mean
to you?
Speaker 3 (35:49):
I think it is do not be afraid of calling
things out when you think that something can be done
better right and making the change that will actually have
this sort of far reaching effect. Think through the long
term consequences. Is this idea actually going to change the
course of our company, of lives, of society, of news
or whatever it might be? Right, Because you've got to
(36:11):
have that long term view. You've got to have good governance,
whether that's at an individual level or like the people
you're bringing along with you, and you've got to think
through the unintended consequences. But I think if you keep
that long term view and you are restless and curious,
and you think about the wider impact of what you're doing,
that will make your idea successful.
Speaker 4 (36:32):
That's a great answer, Matt for me, by Sally being
restless is all about never stopping to try to find
problems and never stopping to try and find solutions. And
that's exactly by say what a lot of the people
who've entered have actually done. They've looked for problems, they've
looked for solutions. Generally they've found solutions.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Carry On, a lot of the people I've had on
the show, their background is an engineering and I love
talking to engineers because they just see the world as
a series of problems waiting to be solved, and they're
constantly thinking of the solutions.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, Barack Obama has a great line on that, right
he Because there are like hundreds people in your organization,
you will find the problems and it's then ages diagnosing
the problems to people who fix the problems are the
ones that you want to hang on to. And I
think that that is a lot of being restless, is
spotting something and then going and fixing it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Fantastic, Philip and Matt, thank you for joining the Restless Ones.
This has been a great conversation.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Thanks again to Philippa Layton Jones and Matt Griffin for
joining me on the Restless Ones. I'm so glad we
were able to sit down and talk about technology's capacity
to make real substantial change in business, in communities, and
in people's lives. And it was also good to remind
ourselves that it's beneficial sometimes to step back and ask
(37:50):
really big questions and to consider all the possibilities and
potential consequences of our decisions, the stuff that you know
leaders do every single day. There's a lot going on
this year at Mobile World Congress. The use cases that
we talk about are just a small slice of the
innovation going on all over the world, all made possible
(38:10):
by connectivity. And while we've been having some conversations about
business and technology for four seasons on The Restless Ones,
I can't help but think that we're just on the
precipice of an astonishing future where we see potential become reality.
Thanks for listening to The Restless Ones. We've got more
(38:32):
than fifty episodes focusing on business leaders and tech in
the archives, so be sure to check those out and
tune in for more conversations this season about how leaders
are leveraging tech to create amazing new opportunities. Until next time,
I'm Jonathan Strickland.
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