partnerships across borders, so that if you are from Lancashire you’re not limited by opportunities.
I see the greatest opportunity for Lancashire with companies that are traditionally set as proper businesses, with bricks and mortar, that can utilise technology through the support others can give them. That’s something we’re not tapping into enough.
HG: The biggest opportunity for Lancashire is AI. It is also the biggest risk to any form of growth. As we move forward into a new generation we are seeing evolution. Everybody seems to think AI is a new thing, it isn’t, it has been around for quite a few years and there are people at the sharp end of AI, like ourselves, that are now seeing that ‘evolution chain’.
Right now, you can use generative AI through natural language processing. That’s great
They are going to have to keep up.
Our challenge is talent, finding good people in the Burnley area. We put out adverts and get CVs from around Lancashire but where we are is perceived to be quite a long distance from certain areas. We offer home and flexible working, but you still need a base for operations and that is going to be a growth challenge
PO: Talent is a real concern from an economic growth point of view.
to attract talent from the big city lights and to keep talent that has gone to study around the country, around the world.
Sometimes they come back to Lancashire to work, but not very often, so we’ve got to do something to make that happen. It is something we’re working on.
We’ve got to make sure it starts at an early stage, talking to schools, to make sure they
When you have people like Elon Musk saying,
‘I don’t know where the end of this is going to be,’ then we need to start listening
because you have one AI engineer that can carry out or automate the jobs of two or three people.
It needs to be regulated and the next phases of AI you see will be security and regulation. Something that powerful should never have been released without regulation, it is literally this generation’s neutron bomb and we don’t even know it yet.
Right now, it feels like a Star Wars version of the Wild West. When you have people like Elon Musk saying, ‘I don’t know where the end of this is going to be,’ then we need to start listening.
ME: Ultimately every company needs some form of tech. Manufacturing and aerospace businesses, traditionalists in some regards, are going to have to upscale and bring up their level of tech in-house or externally. That is going to drive more opportunity, especially around AI.
know what the opportunities are. It includes talking to businesses so they are also involved.
We have moved just past the guys on stilts walking around lighting the gas lights in Lancashire, but there’s a little bit further to go.
TS: We have embraced tech and AI over the last 12 to 18 months. We do a lot of lead generation for people and we’ve created our own CRM system, with sales and marketing automations and part of that is AI driven. We’re not trying to replace people but we’ve seen a skillset gap.
We don’t use it to build websites but AI can be used to fix coding problems. It speeds up productivity if you can simply find out what an issue is without having to go through lines and lines of code, like we used to back in the day.
There is a big education piece, because people are still scared of AI.
Mark Edwards It’s difficult in Lancashire
Are you using AI to your advantage and are you aware of what it can do for you?
ME: We sell Microsoft’s version of AI, ChatGPT, and we embed it into different areas of our business. The marketing side has been using it for a long time.
We’ve been using it in our traditional day to day work. It does a good job of helping people who aren’t particularly skilled in Word and Excel, making them more productive.
And we also use it from a security perspective, because it reads a lot of data that comes in from people, such as login processes, looking how it will stop threats coming into it.
We are finding our customer base is stepping into it more and more, but slowly and it is not full adoption at this stage. I agree with other people, AI is not going to replace jobs, it is just going to speed up people’s jobs to make them more productive.
CM: A lot of organisations within our digital hub community are using AI for different reasons. There is a misconception around AI, robotics and automation that they will take away people’s jobs. It is about upskilling and the opportunity to redeploy the workforce to do other jobs.
We have advanced manufacturing organisations and advanced engineers. Now we are building ‘ManuTech’, a manufacturing tech cluster.
A lot of manufacturers in the region don’t necessarily have a tech team and they are being left behind with regards to digital transformation.
Continued on Page 56
Heath Groves
Mo Isap
Cat Mawdsley
Phil Owen
Ben Scott
Tom Smith LANCASHIREBUSINES SV
IEW.CO.UK
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