Maybe* Transforming High Streets with AI - no fluff, just facts.

Foreign. Welcome. Welcome to September. Hope you guys too are all settled with children back at school and ready for this sort of the next flurry of activity that rather frighteningly will lead us through, I don't know, we've got Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night and then the Arsley thought that's Christmas. So it's going to be busy for us all. But hopefully you'll find this interesting and you'll get some value from it. And so I'm going to get started. My name is Sarah Bassett. I'm ahead of growth at maybe. I'm normally wingman for Polly, our CEO. She's away on business at the moment, but so she's left me at the helm. I don't know how, how sensible that was, but there we go. We should have some fun together, so maybe anything is possible. This is our new strap line, if you like. And this has borne around the introduction of AI into digital marketing and into so many different parts of our world. And I'm going to show you some interesting data and some interesting fact around AI and how it impacts our high streets and our communities. I just need to try and. Here we go. There we go. So last time we talked about. Hang on, bear with my slide deck. I'm in the right place.

It's the first one. No, bear with me. This is not good. Let's go back to the top.

There we go. Okay, let's get started. Ignore me. So our agenda today is to outline the opportunities that exist for you as local authorities or as placemakers and those for local businesses with AI, and how we can work together to bridge the digital divide that is ever growing. So we've gathered from our work with the high street Task force and lots of other local authorities, many of you I see on the call that we've also worked with. We've gathered the insights from over 3.9 million businesses in the UK and monitored the social media conversation and the digital activity of just over 3,600 UK high streets. And what we've learned is the pace of change outstrips the majority of organizations ability to keep up. I know that 82% of consumers spend over seven hours a week on social media. In fact, I had my phone ping up on Monday and I so slightly dread it. My iPhone tells me just how ghastly amount of time I've spent on social media and on my digital apps on my phone. And I've actually made a concerted effort recently to reduce my consumption by reading books instead. But I still managed to rack up an hour and 52 minutes on average a day. That's me, I'm in my 50s. We're supposed to be not as digital as everybody else, but there you go. My 27 year old, I would imagine, spends three to four hours a day. My 17 year old, oh, I tried to think at least four, maybe five. My 13 year old does not exist outside of Snapchat, Tick tock and his PlayStation. If I want him to get out of bed in the morning, I've got to send him a snap. I mean, it sounds an exaggeration, but apart from the odd human kind of runt, or can I have eight pounds to spend on something? That's that. That's how digital we've all become. And yet, critically, only 19% of UK organisations have a digital presence, whether that be, you know, digital marketing presence, that gives a massive opportunity for businesses and local authorities and organizations to engage with the consumer. Consumers up here desperate for information, to, to learn, to gather, to be inspired by looking for things, whether that be in our business life or in our personal life. And we're engaging with our communities much more through digital, not necessarily face to face as much as we used to. And it really is such a massive pace of change. And what we've got is, what we've taken from all of this research that we've done is that there are such huge knowledge gaps on how to maximize the opportunity that is out there that our communities and our consumers are dying to engage with. That's not just local communities, that's visitor economy. That could be inward investment or going out to wider worldwide markets. All of those different conversations, they're all happening in a digital space. But there is a hunger to learn more, there is a hunger to collaborate. People are starting to understand that if they work together, they get a much better result. But people want easy access to relevant information. We're lazy. We have all these amazing tools around us and more and more and more AI is being introduced into them and it's becoming much more part of our lives. But some of us are a little bit nervous about AI. What's it going to do? Is it going to take our jobs? Is it going to take over the world? I don't know the answer to that, but I know that if we don't all think about how we can keep up with this digital revolution, we're going to get left behind and that digital divide is going to get wider and wider and wider. And so we've been busy looking at how we can use AI in our day. To Day World and how we can help you as local authorities use AI in your digital world and how businesses can use it in theirs. And we're going to be talking a little bit more about that as we go through. So last month, sort of the theme of the last few months has been tell us what your big problem is. What is a local authority you're struggling with? And we showcased last month a project that we're working on with Birmingham City Council and one of their core problems, or their core pain points, if you like, was being able to deliver business support in multiple languages. So we're particularly focused on Chinatown and supporting businesses there. And there's traditional Chinese and Cantonese and all sorts of different languages spoken there. And then Soho Road, where we've got a large Urdu and Hindi population and the languages spoken there, and how to engage businesses from, you know, ever growing communities that, you know, enriched with so such diversity and so many ethnic minority communities and how we can engage with them and how we can include them in our business support. I've lost a little slide somewhere, but never mind, I'll talk about it. So we, we showed how AI and our platform can integrate, how you can actually ask in the platform and ask the AI in any language, it will respond in that language, you can translate to any language. It supports about 120 languages. And since that call, we've also been training our support to be able to deliver articles, training articles on digital marketing in all of those different languages. And it's been a really interesting project to work on and with the help of AI, we've been able to do that really quite effectively. In fact, I was on a call earlier today with the chap whose second language is Hebrew and he was absolutely blown away. He really wanted to understand how he could write blogs and social media content and web content and so on. But his, his English was not his first language and when I showed him how it worked, he was absolutely gobsmacked. So moving on to this, which is where we're talking about the digital and physical worlds, how they're blending together. You know, we've got all of these people coming into our places, whether they be local communities, whether they be national or international, or, you know, wherever these people are coming. We have access to so much data now, footfall data, so valuable. And pre Covid, we were all very reliant on it as a, as a measure of how our high streets were performing. And then sort of COVID came along. Post Covid, it's been a bit. Now it's Starting, we're starting to see people coming back to our town centres and our high streets and their dwell time. They're not so much coming with intent anymore, they're starting to come back to engage with events and communities, community events and perhaps going for lunch and then having the nails done or going to the barbershop or whatever it might be. So we're spending more and more time and it's understanding, getting an understanding of who these people are, where are they coming from? We've been working with companies recently where we've been helping them to overlay their shipping data. So if they sell online, where are they, where are their customers based? And how can they go and find more customers that look like them or that in their area? And then working with them again by putting footfall monitors at the front of store. Where are their, where are their physical visitors coming from? Are they local, are they regional or are they mainly visitor economy? And what do those people look like? What's the sociodemographic of these people? And there's so many different things and what, what influences whether people come to our place or not? Is it weather? Is it what events we've got coming, we've got on? Is it, I don't know, is it political landscape?

Could.

It could be a million and one different things. And we've got hundreds of data sets which we've got access to. But making sense of those data sets has historically been incredibly difficult and costly. Well, with the introduction of AI, I'm going to show you in a minute just how simple it is to make use of all this amazing data around us, especially as place makers. Well, and equally as businesses, you know, who is coming to my place, what are they interested in? What does, how does my offer reflect what they're looking for? How do I market myself so that more people that look like them come to my place? And then how do I engage with the collective conversation with other businesses? How do we, how do we create that lovely kind of visitor experience, whether that be local or, you know, people coming from further away? How do we make our places that unique blend of all the wonderful things that it has to offer and promote each other and support each other? And that's becoming much easier to achieve with the introduction of AI. Oh, here we go. Here's the slide I was looking for. There you go. So last time we were looking at this was the, the Chinatown one and we literally typed in Chinese with the help of, of Google Translate, because I don't speak Chinese, just in case you thought I was a genius, but no, I don't. But we asked it to write a blog about Birmingham's Chinese Quarter and beautifully and amazingly it wrote that blog and we were able to translate it back into English. So we've got all of this support that's all sat in here and that's all helped by AI. So that was our problem and our pain that we were looking at last time. So today we're going off on a bit of a journey and you'll have to, you'll have to bear with me because this literally is brand new and I've only had access to it since 9 o' clock this morning and it's absolutely fascinating. So this is about going to explore how you can. Excuse my phone, switch that off. How you can input multiple data sets both around footfall and perhaps socioeconomic data, but other data sets too, to get a clearer understanding of our place and how we can promote it, who we should be promoting it to, the differences that we can make in, in our, in our, our story, how we use places more effectively, how can we adapt our places to attract more footfall in those areas that perhaps aren't getting so much? So I'm actually going to go off live, which is always scary. Never work with tech animals or children, they say, into this new AI tool. And I previously uploaded a large amount of data based on a project, top secret, I'm afraid I can't tell you who it's for that we're working for, working on in Paris. So I have a whole load of Paris's footfall data and socio economic data. We're just going to go and have a look and a play with what some of that data can actually tell us, how we can use that to inform place making. So I'm going to escape out of here, I'm going to go into here and this is what we call your AI. This can be part of our. It usually sits as part of our digital marketing program that we deliver to SMEs across the UK. In fact, we've traded 25,000 of them. But actually we've now created a standalone version that placemakers can use to get some really great insights and to learn a little bit more about who's coming to place and how that data all fits together. So I'm going to go into, you'll see in my settings, in my knowledge base I've uploaded, this is so simple for you to do. You can upload as many documents as you like up to sort of 10,000. So I've got A whole load of penetration data, footfall data, sociodemographic data, visitor data and so on for this particular client. And so the AI has a really good understanding of it, but also has access to the wider OpenAI I.e. chatGPT4. The beauty of this piece of technology and what makes it really different is that everything you put in here and every output it delivers is completely secure. None of it goes back into OpenAI or machine learning. So I know a lot of local authorities or placemakers have found it really quite difficult to use AI on the basis that there's a lot of sensitive data and they have to be very careful from a security point of view. And this is exactly what this is. This is your walled garden, fully secure place to come and add data, make sense of it, create plans, create ideas, create, you know, marketing plans, all sorts of, you know, inward investment plans, whatever it might be that you can do in your AI. So AI being the snazzy tool that is. Are there any questions in the chat, Hannah, while I just go back to where I'm going?

We've had just a. Just a few comments, really not really questions.

Okay, I don't know if you can.

See those, but, yeah, I'm keeping an eye on it. So, yeah, if anyone does have any questions, please ask away.

Amazing, because I tend to rattle and then forget that people might be lurking with questions.

I'm keeping an eye, don't worry.

Thank you. Okay, so.

Let'S take me back into prompts.

Okay, so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to ask a question. I'm going to say what areas are.

Most of the footfall coming from?

Split between, Oh, I need music, don't I? Workplace and residence. Because actually understanding the difference in people that are coming to work in your place or whether they are based in your place is really valuable information. So I'm just going to ask the question of the AI. So I've literally just dumped all of this data into this account and I'm just going to ask, start asking lots of questions of it. Okay, the data footfall origins from residents versus workplaces at 2 Place de la Madeleine, then show notable distinctions. Okay, resident footfall. A significant portion of the footfall originates from various neighbourhoods within Paris nearby areas. The highest Percentages are from Madeleine 5, 15 and a half percent. That's 156,000 pedestrians. Interesting. Okay, so maybe we need to be making more effort to really engage with people in that area or find more areas that have a similar kind of sociodemographic other notable resident origins include Paris 16, 17, 15 and nearby suburbs. Okay. Workplace footfall origins. They concentrate heavily around business districts in Paris, contributing to. There you go. Another 156,000 pedestrians. There's a notable footfall from commercial neighbourhoods and the business centre of La Defense. Okay, that's really interesting. Let's say.

What are the socio demographic. Of the.

Visitor? No idea whether it's going to be able to answer this question because. But I'm. I'm guessing it will. Let's hope. Like I say, this is literally brand new. Look at that. Okay, amazing. So we've got income distribution, we've got age and genta. We've got age distribution, households, number of households, average household size, the purchasing power, average annual purchasing power per capita. So it's literally using the AI to take this data and give us really valuable insights into the people that are coming to our places. Okay.

So I would say how would I.

As a placemaker.

How would I use this information to target more of the.

Most. Higher. Income.

Visitor?

Actually let's get more people with more money coming into our place. So we can literally just take this and then how am I going to make most of it? How can I utilize this to really give me something of value? Okay. Curate premium experiences, enhanced services and amenities, marketing and partnerships, data driven personalization, infrastructure and environment, digital platforms and technology. Interesting. Now I can say.

Okay, okay, great. Can you now create a table that shows me the difference? Why can I never type when I'm talking? Create a table shows a difference in football and socioeconomic economic data pre Covid. And postcard picture.

I was amazed when it came up with this table earlier. Such so clever. When I was having a play around. There you go. That footfall data. Okay. January 2020, right. Tula plus socioeconomic data. Key insights.

Show me post.

And you just keep talking to it. Isn't it clever? Any questions around this? Anything you'd like me to ask it? Our data post Covid. Oh, all the way up to today. Amazing. And then data post Covid estimates.

What are differences pre and post Covid.

I've got one question here from Amy. Trip chaining. Can it link trips and over what periods?

As in. I'm not sure I understand the question fully. Are you meaning number of trips people take or different trips that they take repeatedly or I mean something else combining.

Activities.

So where they like following the journey, what journeys people take?

I think so. I think yeah, that's what she means.

Absolutely. I mean any data that you, you've got. I mean we used for this particular project, we used a third party provider for footfall. They have loads of different ways in which they can break down and they can follow specific journeys. How people use a place, walk around a place, and what those general patterns look like. And then you can also look at things like where that economic data, how that might the sociodemographic, how that might impact the way in which people are moving around a place. So no matter what data you've got, pop it in, ask the question, it can basically analyze any data you want it to and compare data across multiple data sets. It's so intuitive and so clever. So here's the comparative table. Okay. Oh, interesting. So we're down still down quite a lot. January and February, higher increase in March and April and May. That's really interesting.

Do you have any insights as to why May had such a boost?

Be interesting, wouldn't it? Because again, not only has it got this data, but it's also got access to OpenAI. So it's, it's taking the data that you know, but also layering it with, with more information. Okay. Easing of lockdown restrictions. Fair enough. Seasonal influence. Labor Day, Europe Day, reopening of businesses. Okay. Marketing and promotions. Fair enough. Key insights.

I just got another question as well.

Yeah.

Can this be applied to a small country town looking to stem the loss of retail businesses?

Honey. What? Sorry.

Can this be applied to a small country town looking to stem the loss of retail businesses?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You could do it as tiny as a street if you wanted to, or a marketplace. Just take that data from a much smaller set. We start to understand, you know, where are people coming from, where are the repeat journeys coming from? How do we then make sure that we go out and find people that look like them and market our place or our high street to more people? And the value of having that data at our fingertips is amazing. And on top of that, you can use the AI to build those marketing campaigns to actually curate all of the content that you need or the ideas that you would require for, you know, to actually negate that loss of high street, you know, those high street stores to try and bring in more business. So it's all about giving you the knowledge that allows you to understand your audience in a lot more detail. In some of this data that I was looking at earlier. Oh, here we go. 21, 21 versus 2023. Look at that. Amazing. That was post Covid and now we're pretty much 100% up in some cases. April was huge. Really interesting.

And then we've Just been asked also where does the data come from?

So third party providers in general or so you could go to, oh, I don't know, thinking off the top of my head, what they're called springboard or you know, there's so many different data providers you might have in house. Data you might have data around, I don't know, I mean you could apply it to anything. It wouldn't necessarily have to be high streets and footfall. You could think about. Perhaps social care. So any data that you've got around social care and areas where there are looking at areas where there might be high deprivation or high need for more social care and what you could do to, you know, all of those different things. Or it could be data around bin collections and how to make them more efficient, where are the missed collections going on, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. Any data you want to put into here to find out more about and to get some really good insights from you, just upload it. It's really very clever. So we've got key insights and so on here. We'll just do what else we got. One more thing. Okay, competitive, let's do a new chat.

That one. Thank you. Competitive.

Analysis. Of business metrics. It looks at the businesses in the area. And from there we'll go back into the deck. Unless there are any more questions around the data sets. But yes, any single set of data you want to analyze, you can literally upload it in 2 seconds flat in here and then you can start asking questions of it. Because that analysis that using all of that data and as placemakers and local authorities you have access to masses of it. We can look at. You could overlay the, the latest weather data, you could overlay, you could overlay event data so that you know, you can start to see well have the events made a difference in my footfall or and where did those people come from? How do I get retarget them to get them to come to more events and so on. So we've got dynamic footfall metrics. So it's against two different areas and we've got increase and decrease shared visitor metrics. So shared weekly visitors, shared monthly visitors. So over two different places. Analytics traffic comparison, higher visitor traffic compared to 52 Avenue. You might need to think about why visitor trends experience seasonal variations with peaks and drops from month to month. Shared visitors. A significant percentage of visitors from one location also to visit another. In fact, the reasoning behind this particular set of data that this company or brand have asked us to look into for them is around where should their flagship store be where, where should we locate and understanding what the demographic might look like. So you could then apply this, for example, this is their store in France and then they're going to be looking at potential locations that would share similar patterns in London for example, or in New York or in Singapore or wherever that may looking at where is the perfect place based on what I know about my current visitors. So clever. So for those people you're looking at inbound investment from perhaps, you know, organizations that are looking to settle in your area, to have that, to have all that data at your fingertips would be so valuable. You know, here is, this is the place that you should come to because this is what my socio demographic looks like, this is what my footfall looks like, this is what our housing looks like, this is what our average income income looks like, this is what our available workforce looks like, this is where our skills base is and so on. So the opportunity for this is absolutely vast and I'm very excited to have been able to show it to you and I'd like to have been slightly more articulate in demonstrating it. But as I say, literally 9 o' clock this morning, this, this launched and I was going to do something else on today's webinar but I was just too excited and I just thought you'd all find it really interesting. So I'm going to go back to my deck and find my little slideshow. Okay, so we've been live, I've done that bit. So the key takeaways, there's so many big knowledge gaps and there's so many data sets out there, but how do we pull them together and how do we learn? And going back to that point that we all want easy access to relevant information and certainly as placemakers, you know, we haven't got oodles of resource out there to be able to take all this amazing data and turn it into actionable insights that we can actually work with and bring positivity and drive footfall and understand how to market and how to support our businesses. So this is something that we'll be telling you a little bit more about over the next coming weeks as we, as we build on it as a, as a brand new product and anybody who would like to trial it, please email me sarahabytech.com um, we're, we're looking for local authority guinea pigs. Um, so it'd be really good to talk to you about it and see how we can help you pull some of your data sets together. So we're going Back to the state of the nation and back to our day to day world, which is around supporting local businesses, SME, solo entrepreneurs. This is our day to day world. We have 25,000 businesses that we've trained over the last couple of years through crf, spf and we're continuing to run programs in Birmingham and Buckinghamshire and North Stephen at the moment, with another couple of places soon to launch. And this is about addressing the state of the nation. So it's all well and good, talk about social media and all these people clambering for content, but who are we going to, who are we going to target as a business? Who is our ideal customer as a place? Who are the people that actually bring the most economic benefit to our place? And how do we then take that data and target them and give them the tools that they need to be able to fix that problem? And one of the pilots we did for CRF was in Herefordshire where we did exactly that. And this was really at the start of our AI journey for businesses. It was a little bit less sophisticated, but the work that we did with them and using AI and having that more informed idea for businesses, helping them to understand who is my customer, because 90% of them, you'll speak to the go, well, everybody. Well, it just isn't the case. Everybody needs a niche, everybody needs something specific. We all need to deliver value. We need to understand who it is we're talking to when we're creating marketing content, when we're talking to people and we're talking about our place. What is it that is our magic source and how do we go and find the people that are going to love that magic source and what are their values? What are their social values? What their values as far as ethics and sustainability or community or what are they, what are they interested in specifically? Is it, is it history or is it retail or is it, you know, or is it combination of those? But the clearer picture, we can use AI to help us get that clearer picture of exactly who it is we need to talk to. And it's going to bring the most economic benefit to our high streets and town centres, the more powerful place we can be. And in this particular project we were able to increase the footfall by 15% and this was literally just a six month pilot project with UKCRF. And that's the power of introducing digital into businesses. In fact, with AI being so rapidly growing on the horizon and we all starting to see it so much in our lives and I suppose I'm so engrossed in it. We are as a company, we've been working with it for five years. But actually only 6% of European SMEs use AI compared to 28% of larger enterprises. So more we can help SMEs use AI to take the heavy lifting out of their processes, out of their systems, out of their content creation, to give them more time to deliver value. It's all about use, saving time and then making sure that the time that you have got is invested in the things that are going to make the most impact in scaling business. So our experience has enabled us to help all these businesses and we've got some amazing testimonials on trustpilot and on our website which talk about not only the AI and the digital, but also about our team. Because AI isn't going to take over the world. We all need human and that's one thing that, that we know has made what we do particularly successful. It's a blend of all of these different things that has made this such a powerful program and such a powerful platform. And obviously we're building more and more and more technology in the background. But it is a blend, it's about blending all of this. We can't all just become digital, but gathering information to give us really good insights that we can use as humans to, to make a difference. That's what it's all about. So there we are, we're coming sort of to a close now where I just want to reiterate that anything is possible and it's going to become more and more possible the more AI starts to evolve. And I'm going to take this moment to see if there's any more questions.

Hannah, I don't think.

Oh, okay.

Oh, can you see them now?

Yeah, I can see them now. Location of cash points instead of removing them. Are the payment message that. Well, yes, I mean you could put all sorts of those different data in because you know a lot of them are being removed, these cash points. It's really quite concerning. I live in a small market town in Warwickshire and five years ago we had five banks. We now have have one and that's due to go next year and looks like though this like a co op type bank that has lots of little banks within it that's coming so it can be different. But how is that going to, how can we persuade those providers of cash points that they're vital to the, to the local economy? Other payments that more can access. Oh, other payment methods. Yes, well, exactly. And in a lot of the ethnic minority Areas certainly that we're looking at in Soho Road and so on. They're still in a cash only situation. Okay, that's interesting about taxes. Yeah, well, it all depends on connectivity, doesn't it, really, at the end of the day, I mean that if we can push, and I know that there's been huge infrastructure put in place around digital connectivity across the whole of the UK and the more we can help that then obviously like you're saying, Amy, that taxes so that digital isn't working and demand cash in an unfamiliar area. And yes, we do see a lot of that, but it is in the minority now. I mean, look at Uber. Uber's arrived in Warwickshire for goodness sake. It's like it's a thing. I worry slightly. It'd be interesting to see actually Uber data versus London taxi data or, you know, whatever that might be. What, what's happening in that world again, Put the data in, let's find out, let's see what we can do. Let's see how we can use data to concrete and evolve our place, making policies and ideas and plans. Because I think we're in a new era of being able to have all of these insights at our fingertips and being able to overlay all these different forms of data, it's just so extraordinarily powerful. Many of our, our, maybe our county Organisation of Towns need to hear more about what you could do for us and how much it would cost us. Richard. Absolutely do get in touch. I'd more than happily take you through what our business support packages look like and I can assure you that they are extremely good value. So if there's any SPF monies sitting down the back of the sofa, send me an email. I'm sarahabytech.com but yeah, I mean that there's that we can look at how we can help you with your own internal data, how you can help your towns, but also how we can help your businesses as well. One or the other or both.

Always good.

Okay, where have we got to on my slide deck? Yes. So my ask is, so we've had the Birmingham case of oh my God, how do we support businesses where English isn't the first language? And we showed you last month around how the AI has enabled us to be able to deliver that and we're adding more and more language and I know Hannah has spent quite some time with our AI translating all our knowledge base, all our articles, knowledge articles, multiple languages. Although the AI has taken the pain out, I think we might, it might not have even been an achievable feat without that. But we'd like to know what your impossible is so think about maybe some of those data sets that you've got access to. What are the things that you would like to know about your place or about a particular department or a particular demographic or area or high street and let's, let's see if we can get some data together and show you how we can use how you can use AI to to solve your problems, your pain points and don't forget the data in the platform is complete is kept completely safe and private so you don't have that risk like you do with chat GPT of of data going awry and back into the public realm is totally secure. So if you can do that either in the Q and A or by sending me an email I'm sarahabytech.com perhaps next month and we'll be same time same place we can look at how potentially the AI can solve your problem them it'd be really interesting so be as challenging as you like. It would be really useful to know how we could shape it for your benefit. So I'm going to round off I've kept you long enough. We'll see you next month same time, same place. Happy to stay here for a couple of minutes if there's any more questions otherwise you know where to find me. I'm sarah@maybetech.com I thoroughly enjoyed today. I know it was a bit of a a wing and a prayer job going in and showcasing something brand new but I hope you can see the the potential that is there and I'm looking forward to seeing if we can work together to to shape it a little bit more and also to solve any of your your pains your problems next time we meet in a month's.