AI is a key differentiator for all parts of the media value chain. It helps content creators be more creative and editors be more productive. AI helps consumers find the content that matches their interests to have more personalised experiences.

I recently spoke to business leaders within the media industry around how they are using AI and how they expect it to change their value chain. What came out of these conversations were some very clear opportunities organisations can take to improve their outcomes.

1.      Keeping humans at the heart of your plans to innovate with AI

What was clear in all my conversations is that organisations should not look to AI and machine learning as something that needs to be implemented just for the sake of it.

“Machine learning works best where we’re working with business stakeholders who are focussing on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’. Focussing too much of the ‘how’ can lead to rabbit holes.”

Managing Director of a digital services company

AI is there to assist your people in the work that they do and help them innovate. Whether that’s taking over manual processes so they can spend more time on value adding tasks, or just collecting data to help deliver better insights that drive actions.

Focus on the business solution that needs to be solved over implementing technology for the sake of it. As a result, you will ensure that you will get ROI in terms of costs, productivity, and a positive employee response.

2.      Build an AI-ready culture

Part of the positive employee response I just mentioned is ensuring you have a culture that supports the implementation of AI. This is not about employing more data scientists or analysts. It’s about democratising AI knowledge throughout your whole organisation. Firstly, this means ensuring your employees have the skills to understand and use AI effectively. Secondly, it’s also about listening to their feedback and ideas on how to use AI for innovation.

“Having those skills in house allows us to be much more aware of the opportunities with data,” says a Technology Transformation Lead at a large media organisation.

Take advantage of on-demand training, such as the AI Business School or Microsoft Learn. You can also empower employees to build low/no code solutions that will streamline operations through Power Platform.

3.      Drive trust and security in the media industry

The media industry has an important relationship with their audience. You need to ensure you meet strict government compliance and regulations. Additionally, you need robust secure systems that protect your customer’s personal data. And with AI, this data needs to be used ethically and responsibly.

“We have to be wary of the data implications of that and the ethical use of these technologies. We have to keep sense checking along the way to make sure it is the right thing to do.” 

At Microsoft, we take a people-centered approach to the research, development and implementation of AI. We also encourage organisations to cultivate a responsible AI-ready culture in their business.

AI built on Azure takes advantage of multi layered security. This includes an investment of over $1 billion in research and development. We have more than 3,000 security experts monitoring to safeguard your data and the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud service provider. Part of our core privacy principle is that you own your data – and we will never use it for marketing or advertising.

4.      How to streamline operations and empower employees

For many organisations, the immediate impact of AI is in streamlining operations. For example, the Azure Video Indexer uses AI to automatically extract metadata, such as spoken words, written text, people and scenes from video and audio files. This makes it easier to search and find content easier. Also, you can easily add closed captioning in multiple languages, build recommendation algorithms, and automatically create clips from sections. As a result, you reduce a lot of time-consuming work for employees, so they can focus on value added tasks.

AI can help organisations collaborate easier or be more productive. For example, knowledge mining can enrich internal information to help your employees identify and explore relevant content at scale. Therefore, they can quickly gain oversight over projects, or discover new insights with data.

5.      How to innovate media industry production

For media production, AI can automatically detect when companies need to scale out computer processing power. It can help identify points in content that can be or repurposed in other ways and automatically add advertisements. In addition, it can also help producers create better content using audience insights.

A Software Engineer I spoke to used AI to analyse videos, images, and text to understand how to better film a very popular reality TV show. “They had a 1.5 percent increase in rating over the season, which is amount to $75 million,” they said.

6.      How to build personalised customer experiences with AI

Sometimes it’s not just about the content. Additionally, it’s also about the relationship. AI is extremely useful to create personalised algorithms to improve recommendations for consumers. Most importantly, it can also improve the relationship they have with your organisation.

AI can help tailor each person’s experience. This can be by interpreting data to give your employees insights to reduce churn, predict any or even just simply give them an overview of the customer’s history.

For example, a new partnership between Microsoft and NBA Digital uses machine learning and AI to personalise game broadcasts and other content to their viewers. AI will tailor the content to their preferences, reward participation and provide more insights to deliver new innovations.

7.      Accelerate business growth in the media industry with AI

“We’re finding customers over the last 12 months are much better informed about the capabilities of machine learning and coming up with very creative ways of using it,” says a Managing Director of a digital services company.

At the core of it, AI is helping media organisations innovate and differentiate. It’s helping them optimise their business processes, costs, and improve their relationships with customers. They can uncover deep insights or new ways in which they can innovate. It’s empowering their employees to do more.

And in the future, the possibilities of AI continue to grow. We’ll see AI being used for more personalised audience participation and create new ways of building engaging content. Finally, it will help us even explore completely new spaces such as augmented reality.

“It’s very exciting. I hope there’s no limits, frankly,” says a Technology Transformation Lead at a large media organisation. “I’m seeing things that I thought were 10 years away, I honestly think they will accelerate due to the willingness to adopt AI and the way we’re working now.”

Find out more

Empower your future with AI

Innovate with a modern data strategy

Capitalise on the AI opportunity

About the author

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

He is a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry and has played both sides of the fence. Stuart started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here, the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

The post 7 ways the media industry can use AI to differentiate appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

I recently joined in a panel discussion with business leaders in the telcom and tech industries who spoke about how organisations can start planning thier own customer experience transformations.

“In an industry where you have a lot of competition and very low switching costs; products and services are becoming increasingly commoditised. Telcos need to differentiate in customer experience to grow,” says a telecom industry lead.

The future state of customer experiences

Customer expectations have outpaced their present experiences. This makes ensuring positive experiences vital for a brand’s reputation and profitability.

A 2018 PwC report into customer experiences found that 43 percent of customers surveyed would pay a premium for greater convenience, while 42 percent would pay for a more friendly experience.

Pair with this the importance of telecoms updating their infrastructure and moving to 5G – now has never been a better time for organisations to reduce silos and create unified data streams. An organisation needs to ensure all their employees have access to and can understand data to provide these pivotal customer experiences.

However, what we are seeing is a lag between business strategy and the technological upgrade needed to support it.

“You can spot all the exciting opportunities in the horizon, but it’s difficult to execute those given the current tech and infrastructure that telcos are operating on,” says an industry expert. “There is a real job to be done around modernisation within IT and within architecture.”

So how do telecoms modernise and develop better customer experiences?

A truly integrated customer journey

“Designing and delivering innovative new products and services that create demand, reasons to stay beyond switching costs, and then reasons to recommend means not just meeting – but exceeding – every single interaction,” says a telecom industry lead.

They add that omnichannel has gone further, into opti-channel – where each touchpoint has a thoughtful role to play in the customer experience. However, the challenge is the handovers – where critical information gets lost between agents or touchpoints and the customer gets frustrated.

Take advantage of a solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 that integrates data from across all silos – sales, marketing, supply chains, and more into the customer journey. When the customer is at a certain touchpoint, all the information needed to help that customer is there. It can even provide predictive insights, so you can help the customer before they realise they need assistance. This means your employees can focus on providing quick, reliable and personalised service.

Engaging customer experiences that generate trust

Telecom firms handle a lot of unique data around customer identities. And security is highly important to customers and your reputation. “When we look at identity across any industry right now, it’s about the security and privacy of the end consumer and the trust that you have. That is part of the experience,” says an industry expert.

There’s still a stereotype that privacy and security hinder employee productivity. But with solutions that have built-in intelligent security, you can actually enable productivity. AI and automation take over low-level monitoring, so IT teams can focus on more important tasks. Integrated security that authenticates users and endpoints works in the background. This means employees can get on with their work, while data stays protected.

Empower customer experiences with AI and analytics

“The focus has morphed from [analytics] being an afterthought to ‘I need to do this because it’s important for my business,’” says an industry partnership leader.

AI and analytics are helping telecom firms build new data-driven operation models within their organisation. It can help augment customer touchpoints and create stronger brand experiences. A chatbot powered by AI, for example can answer frequently asked questions. An app can help a customer onboard and activate new products and services instantly. Putting this data into your employees’ hands means they can provide better and more personalised experiences. It also can be used to streamline operations. This gives employees more time to spend with customers or more time creating innovative services.

“If you can reduce the call handling time, if you can give more specific and relevant service more rapidly, that is a huge improvement on your customer satisfaction score or NPS score. That translates directly into revenue,” says an industry expert. “Giving sales associates access to those kinds of data points is absolutely critical. There is a significant area here of augmenting the physical experience.”

From there, you can use the data collected to start turning insight into value and discovering where business opportunities lay.

A 360-degree customer view

For employees to provide the best customer experiences, they need to have a full view of customer data. Reducing silos and unifying data is the best way to do this.

“The single customer view and the customer data platform project are absolutely critical,” says an expert. “Effectively building the single customer view and then having a way to have systems and data visualisations to be able to democratise that across the business.”

Our industry partnership leader agrees. “I think the most important point is democratising data,” they say. “Standardising data and making it simple to use in the form of APIs.”

Solutions that present data in easily digestible ways, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power BI ensure your employees are confident interacting with and understanding it. Power Apps empowers your people to be able to build low and no code apps and solutions.

Part of democratising data is to ensure that your employees have the skills to do this. Make a digital literacy programme available, leveraging a mix of self-service, on-demand and online training to ensure everyone gets re- and up-skilled.

Effective customer experiences are the new premium services

“The limiting factor to innovation and the customer experience used to be our own imagination. But we can literally design and build anything we come up with today,” says a telcom business leader.

Reduce silos, unify business data and integrate secure solutions that provide 360-degree customer views. You can then easily create experiences that delight and engage customers throughout their lifecycle. This data can be used to drive real value, turning telecom firms into real drivers of business and create new partnerships, innovative products, and build sustainable growth.

Find out more

Empower your employees to thrive

Discover how to build a data-driven organisation

About the author

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

He is a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry and has played both sides of the fence. Stuart started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here, the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

The post How to make customer experience the key differentiator in telecoms appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Yet those that have taken the transformation leap can now stand as exemplars to newcomers. Their innovation has prompted the creation of many media-specific tools and services in the cloud which are now tried, tested and good to go.

In its new report, The Cloud for Media, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) examines the practical benefits of the cloud for media companies and software vendors to the industry. It guides companies through cloud technology, strategy, migration, economics, and the skills and governance they’ll need to make transformation a success.

So what are the advantages of migrating media workflows to the cloud? What kind of changes do you need to prepare for? And what are the key takeaways from this report?

Benefits of the cloud

To leverage the full potential of cloud technology, media companies will need to commit to a new business strategy. That’s because migration changes existing business practices and relationships. To carry these changes through, your finance, technology and operational teams really need to be fully behind them.

In theory, this shouldn’t be controversial. The cloud will enable them to simplify processes, cut costs, and be more productive through being able to automate tedious tasks. Meanwhile, it can also free the wider business to adapt, experiment and innovate.

Let’s look at five more industry-specific benefits.

1. Collaborative production

The cloud enables more collaborative workflows, especially in content production. Many producers have successfully adopted Software as a Service (SaaS) tools such as collaborative document editing, file storage and resource planning. With very little training, they can quickly benefit from an excellent user experience.

2. Secure remote work

The cloud’s role in enabling remote and mobile working – supported by premium collaboration tools – is well known. Powerful cloud security solutions will also help protect your employees’ applications, data and devices. For example, single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA) free staff to securely access their tools and resources whenever they need them. From anywhere.

3. Agile content delivery

With cloud-based workflows, you can speed up the supply chain. That’s because, once content is in the cloud, both software and people can access it directly, without a series of distributions. This can be especially useful for news broadcasting and live sports, in which breaking news or a winning goal can be shared with all distribution channels in near-real time. Better still, you could even look to automate the process.

4. Global distribution

A lot of large OTT platforms are run in the cloud, serving video to viewers using content delivery networks (CDNs). If you’re dealing with multiple regions, demand can be unpredictable. But the cloud allows you to scale delivery, without over-provisioning, to match changing demand. You can also use it to deliver live, broadcast-grade content and channels online (as several providers do for major sports).

5. Broadcast

Cloud-based channel playout and linear channel origination is finally on the rise. Protocols like RIST, SRT, and Zixi, combined with gradually improving connectivity and bandwidth, have enabled live streams to be transported into, around and out of the cloud. A note of caution: connectivity remains an area for attention.

Three practical tips for cloud migration

Each organisation will have its own migration journey, dictated by its individual business and customer needs. But the report highlights three key takeaways that will apply for all media companies.

1. Engage your whole organisation

First, get your CFO on-side. You’ll need their support, because the cloud uses an OpEx rather than a CapEx model. Next, work with the business to rethink workflows – don’t just migrate them to the cloud. Finally, to build support on your journey, regularly communicate the end to end strategy and provide training so your teams have the right skills to work alongside the latest technology.

2. Go ‘cloud native’

In other words, create solutions that exploit the cloud’s capabilities. That means taking advantage of its scalability, agility, resilience, performance and cost-effectiveness. Make sure your solutions are also built with security in mind. Consider factors like identity, access management, and encryption.

3. Commit to the process

Define a strategy and plan, and get going. Break your migration journey into manageable steps by migrating individual business areas or workflows one at a time. Move whole workflows to avoid migrating content in and out of the cloud too often (which adds cost and time to the process).

A practical way to learn about technology is to get hands-on with it – perhaps with a straightforward use case. The cost of experimenting is low, so why not try building a component that takes advantage of cloud capabilities, then tracking its performance and fine-tuning it? Or build a different component. Either way, it’s time to seize the day.

Find out more

Download the report: The Cloud for Media

Discover more: Azure Media Services’ new AI-powered innovation

Read about NBA and Microsoft’s new partnership: Redefining and personalising the fan experience

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

As a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry, Stuart has played both sides of the fence having started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is now an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

The post 5 benefits of cloud technology for media companies and how to migrate appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

A new report published by the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) with software developer Signiant, Will COVID-19 change the way we work?, uses quantitative and qualitative survey data to explore these and other questions.

The survey – whose respondents were senior employees representing dozens of media companies – started in March when most people began working from home and continued until late June 2020. And the results give us an intriguing insight into the new world of work and how we might expect it to unfold.

The way we were before the new normal

The report starts by looking at the pre-COVID work scene. While there was little appetite for permanent home working in the UK, the option to work from home was supported by 62 percent of respondents.

Interestingly, this preference varied across generations, with millennials more comfortable working away from the office.

The report politely corrects the many commentators who have identified a sudden, seismic shift in our working practices. It notes that, before COVID-19 emerged, there was already considerable pressure on employers to be more flexible and enable workers to spend less time in the office.

In the media industry, 96 percent of employees say they had worked from home at some time or other. In other words, COVID-19 simply accelerated a pre-existing workplace trend.

The report suggests that employees who were allowed to work from home previously also tended to be more engaged and more productive. In fact, the findings of large US employers are described here as ‘startling’, with reported home-worker productivity improvements of 15-40 percent.

Adjusting to the new normal

In the UK, approximately half of the entire workforce started working at home from March 2020. So how did they find the experience? What did they like, and what did they like least?

The overall attitude was largely positive, with less than one in 10 UK workers reporting they were unhappy. Most employees also self-reported their productivity to be the same or higher than in the office.

Their individual mood tended to fluctuate in line with their industry’s fortunes. For example, those who worked for content providers were close to the average score, while those who worked for technology providers – whose services were in demand throughout COVID-19 – were generally more positive. By contrast, work had stopped for many production companies at the start of COVID-19; their employees reported feeling less positive overall.

The future workplace: seven features of the new normal

In its final section, the report surveys C-suite attitudes that hint at media-company workplace trends in the coming months. Here are seven of the key themes.

1. Accelerated business transformation

At the end of June, 64 percent of companies predicted they’d need to rethink their working environments “quite a lot” or “hugely”. When this was probed further, 89 percent felt their approach to business would change to an extent or dramatically. And in the case of content providers, 100 percent felt their approach to business would change.

2. More flexible working

The majority of employees believe they’ll see “dramatic” changes in how they work. In March 2020, most media companies already used cloud-based work tools and were more prepared for flexible working than they realised. Few respondents want full-time home working, but 80 percent believe that by 2021 they’ll work at home for an average of two days a week or more.

3. Cost-cutting

With tighter budgets expected, it’s suggested that organisations will act to reduce both their operational and real-estate costs. The report cites a Gartner survey that found 74 percent of organisations planning to move some staff to remote working as part of a cost-cutting exercise.

4. Investment in tech

The report cites PwC research in which almost one-third of US CFOs surveyed said they’d be investing in technology for growth. Twenty percent believed investment in areas such as automation to be a way of enabling cost reductions. It’s also reported that tech spending will focus on building resilience and agility.

6. Flatter structures

Our recent shared adversity has seen new employer-employee trust nurtured by productive home working. 77 percent of respondents say their strongest positive feelings about returning to work relate to ‘seeing colleagues/sociability’. Some commentators speculate that our experiences have increased employers’ empathy and may prompt a move to flatter team structures.

7. Better contingency planning

When asked if their company would specifically plan for resilience in the future, 67 percent of respondents reported that they would. Many companies already started becoming resilient, pre-COVID-19, with applications and work becoming cloud-based. At the same time, no media company will emerge in the new normal the same as it was before. It’s a great opportunity to take learnings, success, and failings and plan your resiliency in terms of technology and culture for the future.

The new normal

We should be cautious about predicting dramatic long-term changes to the way people work given the complex and fragmented supply chain the industry is based on. However, in future, it could suit employers and employees to reduce reliance on office space. People want variety – so flexible working rather than home working. We may also see a proportion of city dwellers moving to rural surroundings and the coast as organisation use technology to access and connect the right talent and resource on a project basis more effectively. And companies will invest in technology solutions to reduce costs, enable growth and become more resilient and responsive in the new normal.

Find out more

Read the report: Will COVID-19 change the way we work?

Get solutions and guidance: Help content producers and creators work remotely.

Discover the ebook: A guide to building resilience.

Join the conversation at Envision

Digital technology is changing not just how organisations operate but how leaders lead. Join us at Envision, where executives across industries come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in this era of digital disruption. You’ll hear diverse perspectives from a worldwide audience and gain fresh insights you can apply immediately in your organisation.

Connect with leaders across industries to get relevant insights on leadership in the digital era.

About the author

As a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry, Stuart has played both sides of the fence having started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is now an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

The post Changing the way we work: media companies in the new normal appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.