Human & AI Collaboration in the Workplace

Alessandro Recino is a Principal Technology Specialist on Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

He currently works with a Digital Native and scale-up global team at Microsoft focusing on bledeing edge machine learnig and AI projects.

Once described as “human caffeine” on Twitter, Dr Nicola Millard injects a positive, people-centred expresso shot to innovation and future strategy. Half social scientist, half technologist, all academic, she uses techniques from disciplines such as design thinking, psychology, anthropology, computing, and business consulting to generate data, provocations and stories which can engage and create conversations from the board room, to the front line. No frothy coffee; just solid research.

In her long and varied career at BT – mostly based at Adastral Park in Ipswich – Nicola has done many jobs, including futurology, research, usability, customer service, marketing, and business consulting. She was involved with some BT firsts, including the first application of artificial intelligence into BT’s call centres, BT’s initial experiments with home working, and helping to develop BT’s “net easy” score, a new way of measuring customer experience. She currently looks at innovation in both employee and customer experience for BT’s large corporate and public sector customers.

Nicola got her PhD from Lancaster University in 2005 and has authored over 50 publications – including 1 book and numerous book chapters. She is an award-winning presenter, with 2 TEDx talks and hundreds of conference panel, chair and keynote sessions under her belt. She occasionally pops up on radio and TV around the world, including appearances on ‘Woman’s Hour’, ‘Tech Tent’, ‘The Media Show’, ‘The Genius of Invention’ and ‘Back in Time for the Weekend’ for the BBC.

She is a judge on numerous award panels, including the European Contact Centre & Customer Service, Institute of Customer Service, the CCMA & the Association of Business Psychology awards. In both 2020 & 2021 she was listed as one of the top 20 UK CX Influencers by Customer Experience Magazine.