I spent many years working with start-ups and large corporations, and invariably they all spent a large proportion of their budgets getting their message across to consumers and other businesses.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has advanced significantly in recent years, becoming much more sophisticated
Share on X

Yet while there is no doubt that external communications are important, I found that the most successful companies were, in fact, the ones which dedicated just as much time, effort, and resources (if not more) to get their internal communications right.

Because it’s all well and good projecting the right image to the outside world, but if your messaging is not consistent internally, in other words, if your mission is not clear to your own team, you have very little chance of it ringing true to those outside it.

One of my favorite quotes from Richard Branson really sums it up:

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.”

Building a cohesive and inclusive corporate culture is challenging for any company, but those challenges are exacerbated even further in an age where many employees work remotely, often in different time zones.

With the right NPL tools, interactions can be turned into meaningful engagement at scale
Share on X

It might seem counter-intuitive, but where it comes to fostering better communication channels amongst humans, machines can be our most powerful allies. With technologies such as Artificial Intelligence – in particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP) – it is possible to enable better communication without having to over-stretch resources by dedicating people to maintaining those channels manually.

It’s all well and good projecting the right image to the outside world, but if your mission is not clear to your own team, you have very little chance of it ringing true to those outside it
Share on X

NLP has advanced significantly in recent years, becoming an increasingly sophisticated tool in discerning syntax (the arrangement of words in a logical manner) and semantics (referring to the contextual meaning of words), able to more accurately gauge human sentiment and leverage it appropriately. It can be used to bridge Top-Down Communication in Organizations and foster a better employee-employer relationship by ensuring that the employees receive all the relevant messages that they require, whether it is through regular email messaging or through highlighting their accomplishments.

“ It is a well-known fact that many companies fail to pass down relevant messages to their employees making them feel unwanted and disengaged,” said Gaurav Bhattacharya and Saumya Bhatnagar Co-founders of Involvesoft, a platform that enables companies to improve employee engagement through the use of NLP. He stresses that nowadays it is possible for chatbots to be highly effective in establishing a meaningful connection with an employee, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and helping them where needed.

Involvesoft provides its users with an Instagram-like feed that allows employees to read the latest news and announcements, spotlight stories, and take surveys and communicate with members of their community, which in turn improves top-down communication as the messages reach all the employees through the platform.

“Whereas an employee might be reluctant to ask a colleague or supervisor about something for which they feel they might get judged, a chatbot could help bridge that gap,” says Bhattacharya, adding that many times an employee will refrain from asking an important question because they are worried about how friends or colleagues might judge them, and this has a significantly negative impact on productivity levels, not least because failing to ask a question might mean a mistake is repeated without that person even realizing it.

As the CEO of the company, Bhattacharya very much practices what he preaches, since his own company also leverages NLP to make employees happy and successful by helping others. The Involvesoft platform helps companies and their employees to give back to the community by creating personalized giving and volunteering opportunities.

Involvesoft leverages NLP to make employees happy and successful by helping others
Share on X

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a hugely successful tool in building a cohesive company culture, often much more so than perks and personal rewards. In fact, Bhattacharya explains that such initiatives have been shown to improve company culture and team collaboration by up to 81% reducing turnover by as much as 30%.

NLP can thus create a self-learning virtuous circle, whereby every conversation, every interaction, and every good deed helps to evolve both humans and algorithms into a better platform. The information and insights gathered through this constant feedback loop are constantly deployed in optimization across the board within an organization: From user experience to consumer outreach, advertising and HR.

Whereas an employee might be reluctant to ask a colleague or supervisor about something for which they feel they might get judged, a chatbot could help bridge that gap
Share on X

With the right NPL tools, interactions can, therefore, be turned into meaningful engagement at scale, and provide a veritable goldmine of information for human resources and marketing teams alike, improving not only the work environment but also the product. It’s a win-win!

Tech Trends offers a broad range of Digital Consultancy services to guide companies, individuals and brands in effectively leveraging existing and emerging technologies in their business strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a XR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Communicating In the Age of Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Tech Trends.

The airline industry is investing heavily in pilotless planes, but should it be fixing existing systems first?

The holidays bring that familiar mixture of anticipation and dread that comes with traveling at the busiest time of the year. And this year passengers have even more reason to feel trepidation as they head out to the airport, even if they’re not flying with United.

42% of current US pilots will retire over the next decade
Share on X

Hundreds of American Airlines passengers recently discovered that a computer glitch had jeopardized their holiday plans. In September, Ryanair also experienced a similar failure that led to a much larger scheduling meltdown, affecting over 700,000 passengers and causing no fewer than 20,000 flight cancellations.

Ryanair has since gone on to hire more than 200 pilots, capitalizing in part on the collapse of some of its competitors – such as Monarch Airlines – but critics point to the fact that more staff won’t solve the flaws that led to the fiasco in the first place.

The immediate crisis facing the airline industry is keeping up with demand among rising concerns about crewing shortages
Share on X

So why don’t the airlines simply implement new solutions to optimize their operations? Tom LaJoie, the president of airline crew and flight schedule management firm eTT Aviation, says that the aviation industry is notoriously conservative and generally loathe to make changes to its mission-critical structures.

“Their operational systems have many tentacles into other systems, and those interfaces must be updated with a new system,” he explains. “Some airlines get caught in a situation of waiting too long to upgrade their systems due to costs and complexities of the implementation phase.”

Watching all those scenes of miserable passengers stranded at airports, and given the industry’s resistance to change, you’d be forgiven for thinking that airlines are in crisis. And yet, profits are actually expected to hit record levels in 2018, and global passenger numbers are up by 6 percent on average.

So the more immediate crisis facing the airline industry is keeping up with demand among rising concerns about crewing shortages. According to a Boeing report, at current rates of growth airlines would need to recruit and train around 600,000 new pilots over the next 20 years – over 253,000 in the Asia Pacific region alone.

Why don’t airlines implement new solutions to optimize their operations?
Share on X

Expansion in China and elsewhere is indeed putting pressure on established markets like Europe, and aviation groups broadly agree that recruitment is going to become increasingly challenging as the prospect of pilot shortages looms.

Add to this the fact that 42% of current US pilots will retire over the next decade, and that new regulations brought in by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have limited pilot flight time in an effort to reduce fatigue-induced errors, and you have something of a perfect storm brewing which could be bad news for passengers.

Airlines are spurred by the promise that automation could potentially save the industry an estimated $30 billion over the next two decades
Share on X

So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that research conducted by investment bank UBS found growing momentum to develop technologies which would allow aircraft to be flown remotely. At this rate, the study claims, pilotless planes could be possible by 2025

Autonomous flight is already being tested and conceptualized, in fact. Lilium Aviation recently tested its all-electric, two-seater, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) prototype, while Airbus recently completed a successful test of Sagitta, an uncrewed aerial vehicle, which flew autonomously for seven minutes on a pre-programmed course in Overberg, South Africa.

“In the not-too-distant future, we would expect to see a situation where flights are pilotless or the number of pilots shrinks to one, with a remote pilot based on the ground and highly secure ground-to-air communications,” the UBS study claimed, saying the changes would eventually make flying safer by minimizing human cockpit errors, as well as bringing peripheral efficiencies in terms of fuel gains through optimized operations, for instance.

Paul Eremenko, Chief Technology Officer at Airbus, recently said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that the company is already pursuing single-pilot operation as a potential option, but doesn’t rule out going even further: “A lot of the technologies needed to make that happen have also put us on the path towards unpiloted operation.”

These companies are spurred by the promise that such technology could potentially save the industry an estimated $30 billion over the next two decades. Yet on the other hand, unmanned cockpits pose obvious security concerns around hacking and glitches, not to mention removing the ability of a human pilot to deal with unexpected emergency situations on board.

The data solution powered by the Sisense business intelligence helps schedulers on the ground to work with crewmembers to solve problems before they cause delays or cancellations
Share on X

So even though such a move could save passengers as much as 10 per cent on the cost of their fares, 54 per cent of the 8,000 respondents surveyed by UBS said they would be unlikely to board a pilotless flight.

“While it is true fully automated flight will be possible in commercial passenger operations, the public’s willingness to travel on such aircraft will likely be a bigger obstacle to its full implementation than mastering the technology itself,” notes eTT’s LaJoie.

In his view, the investment in autonomous passenger travel is a “a very long play,” and might even prove something of a distraction for airlines that should be focusing on upgrading their existing systems to make them more intelligent and dynamic.

“Automated tools are particularly important now, not just for regulatory reasons, but because the shortage of pilots – particularly at regional airlines – necessitates scheduling each pilot for maximum utilizations and efficiency within regulatory boundaries,” he says.

LaJoie’s company specializes in flight schedule management, taking into account a complex set of variables including crew readiness and vessel location to maximize pilot availability. Their complex data solution, powered by the Sisense business intelligence platform, helps schedulers on the ground to work with crewmembers to solve problems before they become large enough to cause delays or cancellations.

Much like the broader debate around driverless cars, automation is not a silver bullet that will solve the industry’s problems. And although greater use of big data analytics and AI will inevitably play a large part in building the future mobility mix, it is not necessarily about replacing humans, but about empowering them to be more efficient and productive in their jobs.

Much like the broader debate around driverless cars, automation is not a silver bullet that will solve the industry’s problems
Share on X

Even though overhauling logistics and improving business intelligence may not sound as sexy as autonomous flying cars, there is a case for addressing the improvement and integration of existing systems infrastructure, as these can potentially yield the greatest returns for both industry and passengers.

This article was originally published on The Next Web

Is automated flying the future of air travel? https://t.co/s88qy98HJj

— TNW Contributors (@TNWcontributors) December 20, 2017

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Is automated flying the future of air travel? appeared first on Tech Trends.