The risks and opportunities of adopting AI and related technologies and why Business Schools need to be at the vanguard of change. AMBITION talks to Rob McCargow, Director of Artificial Intelligence, Technology & Investments at PwC
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career to date?
I’ve had a fairly circuitous career to put it mildly. I started off studying microbiology and had an initial career in executive search, recruiting boards for companies, working for larger recruiters as well as running my own business for a while.
After a little while of that, I career changed into the humanitarian sector and worked in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak response in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, which was an interesting and illuminating experience.
When I came back from doing that, baby number three was on the way, and I think it was then that my wife uttered the immortal words, ‘Isn’t it time you went and got a grown-up job now?’ I wanted to save the world and do important things and I thought that PwC sounded grown up.
I came to PwC five years ago, in a workforce HR role for the first year. But over the last four years, I have been working in the AI field, mainly in how we are applying the technology to solve problems for ourselves internally as an organisation, as well as working with a range of clients that we support across the world and across all sectors on how they are looking at this technology.
This is much more than a technology role. It brings into it a broad array of different functions and fields, including the economic impact, the risk and regulatory environment, the implications for the world of work, and ethics. It’s been a fascinating few years and has taken me to many interesting places around the world to talk about it.
Do you think it’s fair to say that when it comes to AI, individuals and businesses are really keen to talk about it, but are perhaps a little bit frightened to push forward with implementing AI into their activities? With that in mind, what do you see as being the future of AI, especially within the workplace?
I think there has been a lot of noise about the technology over the last four to five years or so. There have been some breakthroughs, banks and financial services have been the most rapid adopters of the technology and there have been some big strides there. But yes, talking about the technology has certainly outweighed any meaningful action.
I think there is a real challenge with the technology, as you alluded to in your question. There’s an issue around the reputation and the real implications of the technology. There are certain people who have a misguided viewpoint about the power and the implications of the technology. There are also people who are deeply distrustful and fearful about this and these fears fall into a few camps – the short-term potential risk now, as well as this slightly far flung, long-term existential threat posed by the technology that is espoused in science fiction.
I think we are at a really interesting inflection point. There is real value coming though, but the decisions that are being made about how [AI] is to be used and how organisations adopt this from now on in will have big implications about how positively it is received by workforces, customers and society at large, as well as other stakeholders such as regulators.
I think there is a misnomer that AI is only being used successfully in the big technology companies. Have you seen it being used in industries which might surprise us? Perhaps by smaller companies or non-profits?
This speaks to the problem of defining and categorising the technology. I think it’s important to take a step back and really drill down on what we are talking about here. This technology is already pervasive in all our lives as citizens: it’s in our smart phones; it’s getting us to meetings on time; and it’s recommending movies on streaming services – it’s already here.
In terms of adoption, we are seeing remarkable breakthroughs in many industries. The areas which particularly excite me are in the fields of healthcare and pharmaceuticals. For example, throughout the pandemic, there has been some extraordinary progress with regards to the adoption of AI to help accelerate the investigation of both the vaccination of Covid-19, as well as novel drug treatments for treating symptoms of the disease.
We can talk about some of the more eye-catching applications of this, but I think we talk a lot more at PwC about the use of boring AI. Uses that aren’t particularly exciting or sexy but offer profound enterprise value behind the scenes of an organisation.
In 2019, you were a keynote speaker at the AMBA & BGA Global Conference in Istanbul. Something that really resonated with me at the time was when you said: ‘In terms of AI, you need to take society with you, or you will continue to see techlash’. Can you tell me a little bit more about techlash and how governments and regulators could negate the effects of it a little bit?
The stage we were at in Istanbul, it all still felt a little bit far off to the layman on the street, in terms of how it would impact on their lives. I think what you have now seen is the real-world impact of AI and algorithms on consequential decisions on people’s lives.
A very recent example of this was around predicted A-level grades which created an enormous backlash for pupils and parents across the UK. This is just one example of the real-world impact of the technology, where if a system cannot be explained, or if how it is being used to make decisions is not being explained to stakeholders, then you do real damage to the trust within an organisation.
We could also look at the application of [AI] in facial recognition technology which is causing a lot of discomfort for stakeholders across the world, in terms of both security and identification of people in protests, for example.
People can now feel the impact on their lives and this is why it’s more important than ever that enterprises using the technology are extremely clear about how they are doing it, are transparent, and are focusing on the ability to use the technology to build trust not to harm it.
As you mention, we have seen AI being criticised in its use. Do you think this creates more risk for the widespread adoption of AI?
It’s probably going to make organisations pause for thought before they press play on applying this technology and probably for good reason. Have they thought through all the externalities? Have they thought through all the unintended consequences? Have they got the right people in the room challenging an algorithm’s developers?
[This criticism] could start a positive ripple effect that sees organisations thinking much more holistically about the potential opportunities and harm that could come through the use of this technology. We hope that this leads to an acceleration of far more awareness and sensible adoption of the technology going forward. If we go back to this being an inflection point, we really need to make sure that people understand that this is not just a conversation for technologists.
Have you noticed any industries or organisations that have been able to make particularly good use of the technology during the Covid-19 pandemic?
If you take AI out of the equation for a minute and just talk about technology adoption full stop, Covid-19 has seen organisations rapidly accelerate their digital transformation agenda. Organisations have been forced at scale to immediately create remote working, and that has broadly gone very well for most of the organisations that we talk to.
With that opportunity, comes the chance for organisations to experiment more, take a few more sensible and accelerated risks about the technology, and think about how you can improve the lot of your workforce during this time.
One example I could give you is a fairly interesting experiment for a thousand volunteers in PwC’s workforce, who are equipped with smart watches. This programme creates biometric data to detect issues such as stress, sleep patterns and heart rate variability. We are also cognitively testing people in the morning and using machine learning to see if we can find discerning patterns in the aggregated and anonymised data that might indicate effects on workforce wellbeing, especially during the pandemic. This is something we hope can be utilised not just by ourselves but by our clients as well.
Recent research from AMBA & BGA found that six out of 10 MBA employers are going to be a little bit more discerning in their recruitment in the coming years and that there may be too many applicants for too few jobs, in the more senior areas of the business. In this light, do you think that candidates need to think about new skills and knowledge to aid their search for opportunities in the new normal?
I think this was a trend that was already beginning to surface before the pandemic and the pandemic’s implications. I think all [Covid-19] has done is to accelerate many of those trends. It was already evident that people were going to need to be able to display an ever-increasing level of agility, adaptability and curiosity to ensure that they were constantly thinking about future-proofing themselves and investing in lifelong learning endeavours.
To give an idea of scale, PwC has about 275,000 people across the world. We have put aside an investment pot of $3 Billion USD over the next three to four years to upskill every single member of staff. This is not just giving them plenty of training courses but thinking about digital mindsets, training everyone on AI, automation and data analytics – just getting everyone digitally savvy and ready for the way we are going forward.
How do you think that Business Schools can keep up with the rate of development of the technology, to ensure that this pipeline of technology savvy leaders is coming through?
I think that it’s absolutely essential for Business School leaders to be more connected than ever with breakthroughs in technology. It’s moving at such a rapid rate that our team alone is often running 20 or 30 experiments on AI in the UK alone, proof of concept and other projects, at the same time simultaneously. The awareness of the art of the possible, I think needs to have a direct impact on the creation of the curriculum.
It’s hard to have curricula locked in stone now for multiple years. I think it often needs to be altered ‘in-flight’ to consider the impact of technologies. For example, a US organisation called Open AI has a technology called GPT-3, which is well worth having a look at. It’s been trained on an enormous dataset of text around the world. You can give it a snippet of an excerpt of a story or white paper and it will use AI to create itself the rest of the article, in a scarily convincing way. If you start thinking what that means for a whole raft of different jobs, its actually quite frightening.
Business Schools need to have their finger on the pulse. They have to be hardwired into being the most cutting-edge innovators leading businesses. It is more important than ever to do this on a continuous basis, rather than just having an annual or bi-annual check-in to see what the temperature is at the moment.
I hope you will forgive me for saying that you are prolific on social media; you have a great following and it’s something that you use very effectively. I was wondering if you could tell us how social influence has impacted your career and perhaps offer some advice to others on how they might make the most of social media in the current climate?
I think I was probably advantaged in my first career, as a headhunter, as collecting contacts is a natural biproduct of your day-to-day activities. I have therefore always been well connected with a big network, so how that has expanded and how it has been nurtured over the last four or five years has been absolutely integral to any great success I have had.
For a business leader or an aspiring business leader, the inability to connect organically or in person with your staff or your customers, is putting an emphasis on digital impact and influence more than ever. People need constant assurance that you are there, that you’re connected, and that you’re showing your human side. The ability to showcase your personality is important though social media channels. In a business context, the two I tend to use the most are LinkedIn and Twitter.
I think a couple years ago, colleagues were saying: ‘Oh you’re doing the twitter thing again,’ so it was slightly mocking, like it was a hobby or a bit of a waste of time. But now I think it is recognised as essential for business leaders to have a digital showcase for what they are about.
