Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our first event took place virtually over Zoom, and was hosted by Peak engineers Lauren Rodgers and Chris Newton. We welcomed Joshua Hill, Platform Engineer at Cloud Technology Solutions, for a talk on on CICD and GitOps in Google’s Kubernetes Engine.

You can watch the event in full, and on demand, here ?

About Devbase

Devbase is home to a community-based event series designed to support digital innovation. It focuses on growing personal development and is a place for engineers to connect with other digital professionals, thought leaders and employers in the space. Devbase aims to build a knowledge hub of learnings and skills and make it accessible for all, covering a broad range of engineering topics and themes that could help in your development. This includes; best coding practices, emerging technologies, AI integration and infrastructure as code (IaC), to building soft skills and supporting mental health in the workplace.

We organise regular Devbase meetups for engineers from all fields of expertise, including: software development, machine learning, DevOps and AI Engineering, to name just a few. Anyone can get involved, present their work or just benefit from the great learning and networking opportunities available to all.

The audience will be made up of DevOps, software engineers, QA, students and company CTOs from various tech companies and backgrounds.

Talk abstract

This talk details how to use Google Cloud Platform and some 3rd party tools to make a CICD pipeline for deployment into Kubernetes. It will outline a multi-environment deployment of a simple application and then the tools leveraged to update and manage this on Google’s Kubernetes Engine.

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Held at LEAF on Portland Street, the afternoon event was hosted by Peak’s Mark Perkins, a commercial manager who specializes in helping businesses in the construction industry realize the benefits of AI. Mark introduced the evening by outlining the incredible potential of AI for businesses operating in these sectors, and why, in today’s ‘data economy,’ the technology’s importance is more apparent than ever.

The first two speakers of the afternoon represented Peak, with our Head of AI Consulting, Chris Ashley, and Head of Customer Success, Alex Kerswill, taking to the stage to share some of our most relevant case studies and success stories with a highly-engaged audience.

Chris outlined some of our great work with leading online merchant, CMOStores.com. He explained the power of personalization across CMOstores.com’s six digital superstores, and how our Customer AI solution is being employed to serve the right customer with the right product at the right time (via the right channel!)

Next up, Alex discussed two more Peak case studies from a demand and supply standpoint. He outlined the ways we’ve helped leading hire provider, Speedy, to dramatically reduce its inventory levels whilst maintaining high service levels thanks to AI-powered forecasting techniques.

Following a short networking break, our first guest speaker of the day was introduced: Richard Frost, Head of Sustainability, Innovation & Risk at CRH. Best known in the UK for being the parent company of Tarmac, CRH has a global footprint spanning 32 countries and over 3,700 operating locations. To create long-term value, the business embeds sustainability principles into all areas of its business strategy. It was great to hear from a business that places such a strong focus on environmental sustainability, but one that is also highly committed to social and economical responsibility.  

Richard fielded several questions from the audience following his talk, and was asked about the opportunity that AI carries for CRH, and what areas the business is already looking at in terms of optimization potential.

“Logistics is a big one for us. A big piece of legislation that we have to react to, and one that is a key challenge, is the rise of low emission zones; buildings are in cities, low emission zones are in cities, and we have huge trucks that need to deliver our components and materials,” said Richard.

“This would be a huge cost to us, so we’re going to have to completely redesign a lot of our logistics models to meet these new kinds of legislation that are currently coming through. We could do that through the traditional construction and building materials method of ‘trial and error and see how it goes,’ but I don’t think we’ll be here much longer if we do it that way!

“We’re going to have to find some innovative approach to help us do that, and I feel that this environment [AI and machine learning] is the ideal solution for it.”

Last but not least, it was time to hear from Chris Shaw, Delivery Director of Urban Splash, a market-leading urban regeneration developer with over 25 years’ of experience in delivering thousands of new homes and commercial spaces.

Chris’ talk focused on the unique and innovative approach the business is taking to house building with its ‘House’ project. This is a new concept of modular building that offers customers bespoke, architect-designed homes that are distinctive, modern, and a real alternative to the world of volume house building. 

After the talk, we quickly caught up with Chris to find out more about Urban Splash’s views on the impact of technology and the potential of AI in construction, particular in modular house building…

“The big thing for us is the storage of materials in our factory. I’d say around 30% of our factory space is taken up by storage, and if we could use AI to move to a just-in-time (JIT) inventory, that could start to allow us to free up more of our factory space. We could then introduce additional lines and things like that to actually make our assets sweat more – so we can ultimately deliver the same quality product, but at a lower cost.

“Will AI play a big role in the future of house building? Absolutely it will. We live in a world of big data, and the bigger we get as a business, the more data we’ll gather. The more data we have, the more we can feed back into the ‘machine,’ if you like, which will then funnel back into the whole process. It’s an exciting time.”

Our next speaker was Sam Wilson, Solutions Architecture Director of Bruntwood, a leading regional property company with over 100 office and retail spaces across the UK.

Sam has overseen a big step change in the way the Bruntwood team utilizes its vast amounts of data in order to improve its business processes, highlighting several examples of AI in the workplace currently being employed successfully by different teams. This includes AI models built to help its commercial team improve lead scoring accuracy, as well as AI-powered tools to help HR/People teams provide candidates with fairer, unbiased interviews.

In an insightful talk, Sam (pictured below) spoke at length around the challenges some businesses often face when it comes to getting all teams to buy in to the initial idea of AI, reaffirming the notion that there is an element of education that needs to happen when it comes to getting teams clued up on the benefits of AI and the changes it poses to workplace structure – especially as we move further towards more mainstream adoption of the technology.

However, in Bruntwood’s case, the proof was in the pudding when it came to getting employees on board and excited about the benefits AI had to offer.

“I think our team are on board because they’ve seen first-hand that what they’ve been given by AI has been a helpful tool, rather than something that could potentially replace them,” explains Sam.

“So you could say that it’s augmented their working knowledge rather than replaced it.”

This idea of humans and AI working together harmoniously is one that more and more businesses will need to achieve if they are to full reap the benefits of being AI-driven over the coming years. For Sam, this continual improvement of skills and job functionality is a key aspect of how AI is changing the workplace.

“For us, AI isn’t telling them exactly what to do, it’s advising them what might work if they’re stuck,” he says.

“So it’s not a ‘stop, do it this way,’ it’s a ‘how about this way?’ and that’s working quite well for us. This makes a massive difference in their willingness to buy into AI systems, because they see that what we’re doing is trying to make their lives easier.”

After Sam’s presentation, we moved on to the world of AI recruitment, welcoming Cathcart Associates’ Liam Wilson to the stage.

Headquartered in Edinburgh, Cathcart Associates specializes in providing businesses with technology recruitment solutions.

Liam’s talk covered various aspects of bringing AI and data science talent into a business, the patterns and trends he’s seen over the last few years, and how he expects the role of AI in the workplace to continually evolve as adoption becomes more commonplace.

After his talk, we caught up with Liam to ask him a few questions…

This event was a great way to wrap up what has been a fantastic debut year for our Masters of AI event series. As well as tackling the topic of how AI is transforming the workplace, over the last few months we’ve discussed the best steps to take to implement a killer AI strategy, the role of AI in modern marketing, and how the technology is being used to drive efficiencies.

We’d like to thank everyone who has helped to make the Masters of AI series a success this year, and a huge thanks to all of our fantastic speakers and engaged audience. We’ll be back bigger and better than ever in 2020, so be sure to keep an eye out on our events page to find out what we’ll be getting up to.

We had the pleasure of sponsoring this year’s event, presenting a talk on artificial intelligence (AI) for sustainable retail and treating the lucky attendees to our famous Peak AIPA beer at the event’s evening drinks reception.

As an event Knowledge Partner, our CEO Richard Potter delivered a 15-minute keynote presentation on the retail stage. He covered one of the conference’s hottest topics, explaining how AI can help modern businesses to drive both sustainability and profitability by leveraging more value from their vast amounts of data.

Sustainable retail has been a major talking point for a number of years, but now more so than ever. Customers are demanding more and more transparency from the brands they choose to shop from – in fact, 93% of global consumers expect the brands they use to actively support social and environmental issues.

Here are some of the key takeaways WIRED Smarter attendees learnt from Richard’s talk:

• Consumer attitudes are changing: the public care about reducing plastic usage, paper and reusable bags, recycle/repair schemes, ethically-sourced materials, and restrictions on returns
• Despite this shift in attitudes, £12.5bn worth of clothes still ends up UK landfill each year, while 13m tonnes of CO2 are emitted by UK retailers annually
• Brands are now having to take action and promote sustainability, at a time when the retail market and economic landscape are turbulent, and profitability across the industry is being squeezed
• Maintaining profitability whilst also delivering on the consumer promise of sustainability is no easy task, but AI is helping retailers to achieve both elements by enabling smarter processes and improved efficiencies
  • AI supports profitability, with AI-driven retailers growing 30% faster than their non-AI peers, with 50% higher profit margins
  • AI also supports sustainability, with optimized processes leading to environmental gains – such as fewer returns, a reduction in waste materials, lower emissions, and reduced carbon footprint
• Just a 5% reduction in wastage, achievable with AI, could save £625m in UK landfill wastage and 15,000 tonnes in saved materials

If you’d like to find out more about Richard’s talk, you can view his WIRED Smarter presentation slides here.

After the talks had finished, it was time for a well-earned beer, with the Peak team trying our hand at bartending! Here are some of the best pictures from our evening drinks reception, where we served up our delicious Peak AIPAs…