Business leaders see new technologies as vital to their companies’ futures yet are hesitant about employing new tech, according to BT’s Future in 2021 survey. Rob Waugh separates the fact from fiction on how the digital revolution is changing cultures and benefiting businesses across the UK
United Kingdom companies are optimistic about the potential of emerging technologies, according to a BT survey of 1,217 business leaders.
business.bt.com/insights/the-future-in-2021
Find out more from BT’s Future in 2021 survey at
How businesses can cut through the hype around digital transformation and embrace the reality
The technology most businesses are planning to adopt within five years is 5G, with 23 per cent of business leaders saying they plan to invest in it, followed closely by AI at 17pc.
A third of businesses in BT’s survey said they are actively pursuing digital transformation, building technology into new areas of their companies and into the way they work. Bigger companies are the keenest, with 55pc of major corporations pursuing transformation.
Using 5G connectivity to deliver data services is an expanding area for UK businesses: an impressive 21pc use the technology already, but 26pc plan to do so in the near future, according to BT’s survey.
This is especially positive considering that technologies such as 5G are still at an early stage in their roll-out, with a small number of 5G-ready devices available.
The technology can deliver exciting and unexpected experiences: UK dance organisation DanceEast partnered with tech firm Condense Reality and BT to create live-streamed, augmented-reality dance classes, delivered via 5G. “We certainly didn’t know at the start of the project what 5G would enable us to do,” says Lucy Bayliss, its head of creative programmes. “We knew that we wanted to remove the physical barriers of in-person practice.”
Companies can face challenges in adopting new technologies, says David Shrier, professor of practice, AI and innovation at Imperial College Business School: “A deep sense of heritage and history ground the UK but may also make technological transformation more difficult,” he says. “Resistance to culture change is a major barrier to digital transformation.”
Companies in the UK are beginning to embrace digital transformation and new, game-changing technologies such as 5G, he says, but business leaders need to prepare their companies to embrace technological change.
Business leaders see these technologies as key to enabling flexible working in future, the survey found, but there is hesitancy to act: almost a quarter of UK businesses (22pc) say that they are still not using any advanced technologies (such as artificial intelligence or augmented reality).
The pandemic forced UK businesses into a stark situation, says futurist Shivvy Jervis, founder of forecasting lab Futurescape248. “Even the most hesitant business was made to take the leap or risk losing out,” she says. “It has also drastically changed how employees see themselves and their jobs.”
More than a third of businesses are actively pursuing digital transformation in the UK, rising to 55pc among major corporations, according to BT’s survey. But some business leaders have “blind spots” when it comes to technology: only 40pc of small business owners said they were familiar with AI and machine learning.
The reasons behind a failure to engage with technology often come from company culture, says Alison Watson, head of the School of Leadership and Management at Arden University: “The skills gap is a significant contributor to this, with employee training a key enabler for digital transformation of a business.”
four business leaders’
views on tech
“Technology that helps a company unlock and use its own customer data is essential. If opened up, data contains all sorts of insights to support customer relationships and sales. Add AI and data can be turned into predictive analytics, giving companies a window into the future of the customer lifecycle.”
Allan Martinson, chief executive of Xolo
“For time-strapped SMEs, exploring, finding and taking the risk on new tech is a big leap. Services have to be simple to use, and have a clear value add to a small business for it to be worth trying something new. The big issue for small businesses is there’s no shortage of new, digital services, but adopting these services often means that the SME ends up having to act as their own systems integrator. This is extremely important when it comes to financial information. SMEs spend on average 15 hours a week on financial admin.”
Alastair Lukies CBE, founder & CEO, Pollinate
Much modern software is offered “as a service”, with users paying recurring fees to access online services rather than paying up front for software
Jargon buster
“As a service”
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows you to make calls over a broadband internet connection rather than the phone network. It is used in popular meeting apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams
VoIP
Computing that is done near the source of data, cutting down on the need for processing in data centres far away
Edge computing
Hyperconvergence combines storage, computing and networking into a single system to reduce complexity
Hyperconverged infrastructure
The uptake of emerging technologies varies widely among UK businesses, with VoIP (voice over IP) technology the most widely used, particularly among larger businesses.
But change is hard for bigger businesses, with the largest reporting strong resistance to change (41pc) compared to just 25pc in the smallest, according to BT’s survey.
Larger firms are often stuck in a “technology trap”, says Professor Shrier: “Large businesses often struggle to adapt to new technologies because of institutional inertia and the need for standardisation. Frequently, they have what is known as technology debt, where they’ve made investments in older legacy systems and the cost of upgrading becomes prohibitive.”
Small businesses can actually find it easier to adopt new technology, says Simon Crowther, founder of FPS Environment and FPS Group. “It’s actually easier for small businesses to adapt to new tech really quickly,” he says. “They have less hoops to jump through and people that need to approve spend. Small businesses also have the advantage of often employing a younger workforce which is already tech savvy and utilising what’s available in their own lives outside of work. Small businesses could start using tech like Microsoft teams, Zoom or even a CRM overnight meaning their adaptation time during the pandemic has been significantly less than larger firms.”
Small businesses are more likely to dismiss technologies such as AI, machine learning and 5G with 60pc dismissing a list of enterprise technologies as “not relevant”, according to the BT survey. Futurist Shivvy Jervis says: “For a small business, one wrong move can spell disaster. Adopting new tech is a big roll of the dice.”
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Hull launches a plan to become the UK’s first “smart city” with its own operating system
Timeline of UK’s digital
transformation journey
2020
2019
The 5G network launches in the UK
2016
Mobile devices overtake wired devices as a way of using the internet
2012
The 4G network launches in the UK
2012
The Raspberry Pi launches, offering a new, cheap option for personal computing
2000
Broadband is introduced to the UK
1989
Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web
“Any inertia among banks to embrace digital transformation is now a thing of the past. Driving this is customer demand for hyper-personalised, smart products and services. Artificial intelligence offers real-time access to granular customer spend data, allowing banks to make customers smart offers at the point of spend. This is what banks of the future will look like.”
Abe Smith, chief executive at Paymentology
“The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation to heights never before imagined. Take the manufacturing sector and its implementation of AI and blockchain. Blockchain’s distributed ledger structure can help generate end-to-end insights across the entire supply chain process while AI technology can analyse the wealth of data in real time.”
Jinender Jain, senior VP and head of sales
at Tech Mahindra UK&I
Using data to allow machines to “learn”: whenever you speak to a computer, for example, it relies on machine learning to understand you
Machine learning
Network security service outsourced to a service provider
Managed security service
Network architecture that allows the network to be controlled intelligently by software
Software Defined Networking (SD-WAN)
Which technologies to adopt
“E-commerce showed one thing in the last 20 years: it is not able to deliver a truly hyper-personalised experience where customers only see what they really want or need. AI will be the main driver for such customer experiences as it is much more powerful in that area than the traditional approach; and that’s the reason our tech teams at Spryker are working on AI.”
Alexander Graf, co-CEO of commerce marketplace experts Spryker
“I set up a virtual vintage clothing and antiques clothing business during the pandemic. In the next five years I hope to use AI to create an app tailored for the slow fashion community. It would recommend vintage outfits/clothes based on their height, weight, shape and style. So, essentially, a stylist for clothes from the 1800s to the 1970s.”
Anita Lo, founder of Clara’s Box
Bayliss wanted to deliver dance and training sessions, with augmented reality dance lessons for dancers wearing headsets, and partnered with BT and Condense Reality. She said: “What we did know was that we wanted to reach as many young people as we could with brilliant arts opportunities, and remove the physical barriers of in-person practice. We certainly didn’t know at the start of the project what 5G would enable us to do.”
Lucy Bayliss, head of creative programmes at DanceEast
“We will be looking to introduce AI to help us with an improved online customer service for book buying and to automate some (but not all) workloads in terms of book picking. We want more intelligent algorithms to show products on our website to meet customer needs – especially seasonally, where we see spikes so we can react quicker.”
Jasleen Saran, Books2Door
Why we are adopting new tech
When adopting new technology, the most important thing is to have the right company culture, says Harry Chapman, portfolio development director at Digital Transformation EXPO and UC EXPO. “The most immediate thing businesses need is a data-led culture,” he says. “Having a real-time view on business performance through analytics helps organisations to make faster, safer decisions. VR and AR could soon play a big part in the future of work – UBS was trialling it to imitate trading floors and PwC has been examining this technology for remote training sessions.”
A third of business leaders believe that AI could be key to improving productivity (31pc) while another third believe it could help to optimise customer experience. More than a third (35pc) of businesses believe 5G could be an important tool to enable hybrid/flexible working.
For businesses in the UK, “as a service” solutions (where companies pay for software by the month, rather than buying it outright) are among the most popular technologies. Around 77pc of UK business leaders either use “as a service” solutions already or plan to in the near future, according to BT’s survey.
Such solutions offer a good way to maximise return on investment, says Venu Lambu, executive director and president, global markets at Mindtree. “With ‘as a service’ solutions you can quickly ramp up your IT capabilities to the size and capability needed without burning through a lot of cash building them from scratch,” he says.
During the pandemic, UK companies enthusiastically adopted technologies such as virtual meeting software and cloud solutions, with more than half of respondents saying they had used such technology. Research by Accenture showed that companies that increased technology investment during the pandemic now have a growth advantage over competitors, growing up to five times faster.
In BT’s survey, 36pc of UK businesses said they plan to invest in digital transformation in the next five years.
Challenges faced by businesses
In order to use technology to achieve business success, company culture needs to change too, says Professor Shrier of Imperial College Business School. “First and foremost, business leaders need to inculcate a creative, flexible, risk-taking mindset,” he says. “They need to incentivise trying new things and de-risk failure. Innovation science will tell you that 90pc of truly revolutionary projects will fail, but those 10pc that succeed end up being transformational.”
Mauro Mortali, a Senior Strategy and Innovation Manager at BT, says the solution is to put a well-defined strategy in place. “This starts with assessing your current situation, look at what’s happening in your market and what your customers are demanding, understand what works in your organisation, what doesn’t and why,” he says. “You can then set clear objectives, such as what problems you want to solve, which will help keep your transformation on track. Building a solid business case will also help you overcome objections you may face from key decision-makers.”
Find out more from BT’s Future in 2021 survey at
business.bt.com/insights/the-future-in-2021
Business leaders are concerned that their tech is not being used to its full potential, with up to 36pc of business leaders feeling that their 5G deployment is not maximising results, according to BT’s survey. Overall, just under a third don’t feel that their technology is being successfully used.
Is tech being used to its full potential?
UK companies believe that resistance to change is the single biggest challenge they will face in terms of their technology goals over the next five years, according to BT’s research. More than a third (34pc) of business leaders say resistance to change will present a challenge.
Resistance to change
Other challenges business leaders are concerned about include legacy technologies (29pc). But dealing with legacy technology offers an opportunity for providers as businesses upgrade their systems.
Legacy technology
“Smart” objects that gather data which is then sent to other systems – for example, sensors underground that can monitor water levels
Internet of things
1989
Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web
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BT is dedicated to digital transformation and wants its customers to be ahead of the game when it comes to tech. Find out more from BT’s Future in 2021 survey at
business.bt.com/insights/the-future-in-2021
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Hyperconvergence combines storage, computing and networking into a single system to reduce complexity
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Potential solution: partnering with an organisation such as BT can help companies to choose the right technology investments
Potential solution: a comprehensive IT audit and full upgrades to software and systems
Potential solution: listen to employees’ problems to find the “pain points” new technology needs to address