#30 - Stephen Browning, Innovate UK - On using intelligence augmentation to transform 3 very traditional UK industries

My guest on the podcast is Stephen Browning, Interim Challenge Director Next Generation Services at Innovate UK. He holds an MBA from Imperial College and a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering. He spent nearly 20 years working for Philips Semiconductors and NXP where he held various software engineering, project management, and business management roles. During this time, he formed close collaborations between customers and supplier to deliver open R&D programmes.

Today, he’s leading the Next Generation Services programme as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This programme is aimed at supporting the competitive transformation of the UK’s Accountancy, Insurance and Legal Services sectors by the responsible use of AI and data.

This inspired me, hence I invited Stephen to my podcast. We explore the approach and urgency to transform the 3 very traditional industries. We address the opportunity this creates and why it’s required to take a broader perspective than simply ‘technology’. Here are some of Stephen’s quotes:

Our role is to support the industry to innovate and, thus, support economic growth for the country.

The basic idea of the program is that artificial intelligence and the increasingly soft data will transform every sector of the economy.

We were trying to look at areas where the UK had a particular strength, but where there was a risk of AI and data coming in, disrupting that, and meaning that the UK's, its own strength would diminish somehow.

Ultimately, we have to drive the economic race. We want to make sure that that economic race happens as much as possible in a way that it's going to help people rather than just be a complete replacement. We are very much looking at that human plus machine approach.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

• Why doing things better and faster is not enough to create transformative change and protect competitiveness
• How technology can be a lever to significantly expand market opportunity by addressing non-customers
• What’s required to concur inertia in a company/sector to remain relevant?