The ITPro Podcast

For many companies, AI is now a fact of life. A growing number of those that were running pilots have now moved to production, bringing agents and other forms of generative AI into force in their organizations.
Perhaps more exciting still, these projects are – finally – starting to demonstrate ROI.
In this special edition of the ITPro Podcast, in association with SAP, Jane is joined by guest James Bates, head of industry and customer advisory at SAP UK and Ireland, to talk about AI investment, the importance of workforce skills, and how organizations can successfully scale their implementations.
Highlights
“AI largely to this point has been fantastic in terms of productivity use cases ... but if you think about the prospect of agentic AI and its ability to transform end-to-end processes, where actually you'll have agents really driving actions – albeit still orchestrated, I would stress, by people and people very much at the center of that decision-making kind of process – you’re right, there is definitely a lot of excitement about it.”
“If you think about the sorts of processes and data that SAP and SAP's customers are dealing with … nearly right isn't good enough in our world. Actually, it has to be 100% right, which is interesting if you start thinking about the nature of probabilistic systems versus deterministic. And of course, large language models are probabilistic, and we're having to try and understand how we solve some of those challenges when it comes to the nature of data within an SAP kind of landscape.”
“If we think about where customers are investing and working and deploying capabilities today, it's also in building some of the foundations around AI. So things like data, processes, skills, governance frameworks. And I often think actually that the organizations and customers that will win in the long term are those that are focused on building those initial foundations.”
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It’s been a summer of change in the UK. With Andy Burnham taking up residence in 10 Downing Street, the new prime minister has championed the government’s focus on a more decentralized approach to governing the UK – including a ‘Number 10 North’ in Manchester.
With a proposed shift of power away from London toward other regions, could this approach work in the UK tech sector?
In this week’s episode, we speak to Ben Bilsland, Head of Technology Industry at RSM UK, about the UK’s technology hubs and how a more regional focus could help the UK grow its technology sector.
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