Understanding Place Sentiment - February webinar for The High Street Task Force

Foreign. Hi, I'm Polly Bonfield. I'm the CEO of maybe. I'm delighted to be running the Understanding Place Sentiment webinar with you this afternoon. There's quite a big crowd coming to join us, so I'll let everybody have time to come in and join us just as you're gathering. It'd be great if you can drop where you're from in the Q and A. We tend to run the sessions used with the Q and A rather than the chat, so that your questions remain anonymous. So you can ask us anything you like. And we will. We will answer questions live as we go along, but we won't call you out. So if you want to ask a question that you want to reveal who you are, then that's fine too. And we find we get more people engaging the chat that way. So be love to know where you're from. And I'm on my lonesome today because all of the other team are rushing around doing other exciting things. So be gentle with me if I don't get your question straight away. And yeah, it's great to see so many people join. It's fantastic, fantastic, brilliant. So just give it another two minutes and then we'll get started. What time are we? We are one minute part. So I think we did. Yep, more people coming. So people just arriving. Just drop into the Q A. Nobody can see your conversations in Q and E only. Only me. So please feel free to ask questions as we go through and it'd be lovely to know where you're from. As I said, quite a lot of people expected today, so please just keep dropping in on the chat where you're from. Okay. I think. I think our headcount is quite good, so we'll get straight to it. So thank you all for joining us today for the Understanding Police Sentiment webinar that we run on behalf of the High Street Task Force. I'm Polly Barnfield and I'm the CEO of maybe. So today's webinar is very much about unlocking the power of AI. Now, actually, the reason we're working with High Streets Task Force is because five years ago, they asked us to look at place sentiment using AI. So as a tech company, we've been using AI for ages. But actually, over the last two years, and particularly the last 12 months, something absolutely extraordinary has happened and I'd like to share that journey with you. And also I think the opportunity that stands in front of all of us right now, whether it's good or bad, it's here and we need to embrace it. So our agenda today is to really look at the speed of AI disruption, to look at some AI in action and also some of the opportunities that I believe AI presents, particularly around the high street and local business support. Sarah sadly couldn't be with us today, but her diaries are open to all of you after this, as is mine, and she'll be here same time, same place next month. So our reason for being here today is that five years ago the High Street Task Force asked us to be a partner to say, could you help us power a dashboard for local authorities across the UK that looks as another value other than just footfall. So footfall is really the benchmark measure of many high streets because it tells you how many people are physically there. And as we all know, there are lots of lovely discussions that rage on about different ways to measure it, but fundamentally it's a really sound way to measure footfall or, you know, measure the success of a place. But what's interesting with digital is that, you know, and what we've really explored with the High Street Task Force is how, you know, being as we've all got a phone in our pocket and we're spending increasingly more and more time on social media, how can the conversation within a place start to help you to understand how a place is performing? So we've done is gather together data from when we started, the project was 150,000 businesses and now we gather the data from 3.9 million businesses every day and then divide it up into 3,600 places across the UK. And that enables places to understand what's being said. So we group break it down by local and national businesses into topics we. We look at digital participation. So what percentage of national versus local organisations are engaging in a digital conversation, as in using social media in the place? And staggeringly, I mean, this percentage is very low here. And this is not a graph mistake. It is about 19% of businesses are acting on social media on a daily basis, particularly when you look at local SMEs, which is quite scary. Digital activity against footfall. I think this is a fascinating graph and we've got lots of data around how increasing digital activity increases footfall. And we'll talk about that in a moment. And then digital engagement, which is the platform that's working hardest. Again, this is dummy data and Twitter would be now X and we're seeing a massive drop in dip and a huge rise in Instagram. We can talk about that more another time. So, as I said, any questions that are going through this, please just shout, you've all got access to that dashboard. I've just merrily gone past through the Hyute task force and if you want anything out with that, please do let us know. So that data has really helped us understand that across the UK, only 19% of UK businesses have an active presence. It's the same in America as well. So it's not, it's not, it's very, it's a very similar story. But in contrast, 82% of consumers say digital communications has a huge impact on what they're purchasing, what they're doing. So fundamentally, that device we all have in our hand is, is a really important guide to where we go and spend money. So, so we believe, and the data bears it out, that digital activity is very closely linked with footfall. But it's AI that's helped us get to this point. You don't have to stop and think for a minute if you only look out of your window. If you're in, if you're in an urban area right now and everybody's walking down the phone, walking down the street on their phone, either communicating or thinking about what they do next, or being interrupted with messages about what they do next next. Increasingly, advertising is getting very smart about what they show us. But actually, you know, if you're just searching Google my business, if a business isn't there, they're not found and it's as good as them not having a signpost to show you where to go. So it's, it's so important that businesses know how to do this. But AI is going to mean that as a consumer, you get to see the right content faster. Because even if you're saying I'm not going to use AI at all, I guarantee you that Bing, Google, Facebook, Instagram, they are all using AI more and more in their applications and they're making them smarter and smarter and smarter. But as I'm going to show you in a moment, AI is only as good as the content you give it. So the key thing as we start to live in an AI fueled world is that if the content about your place isn't available for AI to understand, you'll be less and less discoverable. So that what worries me most about that 19, only 19% of businesses being access to, having or being active on social, that all of that kind of data is what will fuel the AI conversation going forward. And if businesses aren't creating content, they'll become less and less visible. It's really good. Great question here from somebody Loving AI and it's such fun to use. However, using the AI picture is quite a lot. Quite a lot. I wonder if there's work option to ask you to recognize specific hex numbers so that it's keeping branding. Yeah, it's a really good question. So somebody's asking actually about you Jumping way ahead of me. Brilliant. About, you know, how smart this is, a real image. But if you wanted to build this image with AI, for example, you could do, and I believe absolutely, to the lady that's asking this, you can give the AI a hex code to say, I would like this jumper to be in this color. There's some. I've seen some incredible AI art recently and absolutely you can give it, you can give it absolute guidance about colors you use. Happy to take that more into another session. But 100% you can create images really to the button of exactly what you want. But yeah, the point I'm making here is that it's so important that places and business, and local businesses in particular, understand how AI actually runs the risk of making this gap that we talked about a moment ago even bigger. Because if you haven't started to embrace the conversation in that way, in a digital way, and you, you miss the boat with AI, you're gonna. The gap's gonna get even bigger. Because consumers, you know, as consumers, we want to be served faster and faster and faster, and AI makes it possible. We're all active across multiple platforms, and if the content doesn't exist, the AI can't consume it, and then you're just left off the map, literally. So the requirement for local businesses to become a digital doesn't go away. But as I'm going to show you, with AI, I think the requirement for us all as employees and as people running businesses to be able to use AI as a tool, the gap between those that do and those that don't is going to get bigger very quickly because this new baby on the block, ChatGPT, has changed the rules completely. It's blown my brain, which enabling us to do incredible things as a company, but it scares me, too. Let's look at some of the data behind it. So the time it took ChatGPT to reach a million users was five days. You see here, ChatGPT in 2022 got to a million users in five days. It's since been surpassed by Threads, who got to a million users in one hour. That's just incredible. But looking back, Instagram got to a million users in 2.5 months. And they're the reason the threads got to a million users in one hour because it's basically the same audience. But look at the, look at the, look at the growth thereafter. Spotify took five months to get to a million users. Dropbox seven months. Netflix, it took Netflix three and a half years to get to a million users. So the speed of change and the speed of disruption is extraordinary. I'd be love to know if everybody that's on this call how many of you have used, knowingly used AI. So how many of you have taken ChatGPT for drive or used another AI product? I'd love to see some. Just, just drop me a yes if you're you, you've taken a, you've taken Chat GPT for a drive because we're going to do that in a minute. But going on from there, the level of awareness of ChatGPT I've used to generate text for myself, but it is broken down by age range. 18 to 29, 15%, 30 to 44, 17%, 45 to 65 year olds and 9% and 65 plus 5%. I feel quite proud because I'm in that middle bracket and I'm, I'm an absolute yes. So yeah, matters of yeses on the call, it's great to see because I think with, with, without if you're not adopting it as a business tool. Yeah, I just, I, I want each of my, my team to be able to be an expert at driving it because it make it enables you to do your best work faster. We'd love to know feedback whether you've enjoyed the experience, whether you think it helps you do your best work faster. Just drop that in the chat as well. So I've never, never used it or seen anyone using it. 20, 31, 55%, 59%. So a large percentage of the population still not. Still not experienced it? Not sure. 17, 6, 8 and 6. So this, and this is YouGov data from earlier this year, sorry end of last year. So there's still quite a lot of people that haven't even have seen it. This data I thought was interesting too. So this is looking at the proportion of chat GPT users. So as a proportion of their 100 million users or it's 180 million users they've got now. What. Where are they in the world? The UK doesn't. It doesn't. We're bundled into that 66.28% of other users at the moment. But I did find some lovely data on which, which areas of the UK are using it and how they're using it. So the percentage of respondents who have used AI at work is actually highest in the North. So Yorkshire and the Humber is the highest percentage of respondents that have used AI at Workshire and Humber the highest. Wales, southwest Scotland High as well and so big. Obviously London's the highest, but I was surprised by how high some of the Lord regions as well, which I thought was very, very encouraging. And. But, but yeah, still not huge proportions. We see how the gap is but, but better than the overall digital number that we saw earlier on. Now, something that caught my eye early on last year and I think it really changed the direction of maybe as a company in many ways is that I don't know if everybody else saw this, but Octopus Energy in It was March last year Ask times that somebody shared with me that said that they had switched to an AI first approach to customer service so that all of their customer service is now answered by AI. And that has had an impact on doing the job of 250,000 employees. But they weren't, they weren't. The AI wasn't going out straight away, so the AI was writing it and then a human was saying, yes, that's okay, we're letting it out. But what was really interesting is that the artificial intelligence output scored 80% of customer satisfaction compared to a trained work as a 65% result. I thought, I don't believe it. That's just incredible. Now we've been using AI to sort of build technology and help us internally score content for sentiment, but we hadn't used it externally. I'm sharing with you our journey with AI because I think it is very interesting from a business support perspective. So question is, what can AI do for you? And I was thinking about what's the, what's the best way to do this? I can't see a clock. I don't really know if you can. Right, so what can AI do for you? Has anybody of any of the yeses used AI for a council application? Would love to. I won't, I won't reveal names, but I'd love, I love, love people to let on. Have you used it at work? And if so, for what? Because I've done a little project that I'd like to share with you to do a live demo today. So, you know, how can, how can you use AI in work Now? I see it as just a flipping amazing assistance in the sense of it, how it works here and I'm going to show you an example in a moment. Somebody opening their hand, hang On a second. Is somebody raising their hand? If somebody's raising their hand, would you mind popping it in the Q A? Yes. So you've got somebody saying here. I love the fact that although you give it. Give it the parameters you want to say, it still comes back and make you think about an aspect perhaps you've not recognized. Absolutely. And I think it's going to go very much to the demo I want to do right now, which I was quite excited about. So I was going to do a demo of creating a sort of a thought piece around High Street Regenerative Regeneration. For those of you who don't know me, I am a hopeless dyslexic and a pretty appalling speller. And since I haven't got a wingman today, I only copy and paste things. So I think about saying, well, you know what would happen if we. And I literally just did this before the webinar. So it's not. It's not pre rehearsed and chat GPT always gives different answers, so it could be amazing when it does. So I'm going to ask it to please recommend a way to help our local businesses in Ipswich increase footfall. Very benign question and it was interesting. When I started this, planning this demo, I was thinking I'd have to do something else because I didn't know what it would give me back. So please recommend a way to help. Our local business is in Ipswich and I picked Ipswich completely out of the blue. It is actually my birth city, so I've got a reason for doing that. But if anybody wanted to do it somewhere else, we could do that. So please recommend a way to help our local businesses increase. Increase footfall. I had no idea what it would give me back and it starts to give you an idea. So it's taking all of this from all of the knowledge it has from all the data it's collected up until last year. It does always use American Z, so apologies for that. You can ask it not to. And actually one of the courses we've run at the moment, which I can talk to a moment, is all about how you seed AI so that it doesn't give you the wrong answers. So here it's talking about local SEO and online presence, community engagement events, local loyalty programs and promotions, improved accessibility and convenience, local media and advertising. I was pretty stunned actually when I asked it this question and got this response. It's not what I expected. It's much more detailed than I expected. Now, caveat. You have to treat it like it's an Intern and read its work and say is it correct? Do not take anything it says as gospel. But I think it's so much better looking at staring at a blank sheet of paper. So you've now got local SEO and online presence by that community engagement events, local loyalty programs, promotions, improve accessibility and convenience, local media and advertising feedback and improvement. All very valid ideas. So I thought, well what I'd love actually is to be able to put some footfall data in here. Now I haven't got Ipswich's foot for data to hand and we will have foot for data for all of the UK to ham shortly and we could have done something exciting with it. We're going to do. I googled football the train station and found they had too many visitors. So I then asked it. I just needed my. My cheat. We know Ipswich has 2.125 million train visitors. How could you weave this into strategy? So we know they've got 2 million train visitors. How can that weave it in strategy? Is this good? Is this good for everybody? Maybe this is helpful. So with over too many visitors coming to switch by train, leveraging this influx of potential visits and significant impact local businesses, here are ways to weave this information to comprehensive strategy to increase footfall from train visitors. Now this I am on paid GPT, I'm on the slightly more expensive version, it costs £20amonth. But this isn't the strategy. These are the ideas for you to go and create the strategy or thinking through or you know, but this is so much better than a blank piece of paper right now, I think. And that's one tiny bit of data. But you can upload a whole load more and we're doing a large piece of work for another local authority where we're doing a. We're building a bespoke application around footfall and looking at where people come from and we'll be sharing that with you in a few months time. So here is now looking at it. So organised welcome events, community market time with popular trendseason think these can create welcoming atmosphere that encourages train business to explore local businessing. So this is again from the. From the train perspective. So I thought that's good. Now what about if we wanted to say, well actually we want to put, put more sustainability in this. It hasn't talked about sustainability at all. So I said to acting as a place expert, we want to put sustainability at the heart of our plan. Taking ideas from what you've recommended about. Please draft a plan discussion. But actually what I want to do is I did some research and found a couple of articles around and these aren't, these aren't huge. You can find much bigger ones. I wanted to ask you to take feedback from recent articles. Now let's say you've done a big piece of work locally around people's thoughts to sustainability. You could then feed that in as well. So imagine this is your local sustainability report. You can come back to here and you can put the report, this is an example but this is a report in here and you could then say acting as a place agent we want to put sustainability at the heart of our plan. Taking ideas from what you recommended about. Please draft a plan for discussion. Here we go. Take that, I'm going to put that in there and we're going to say. Update a plan for discussion and include. Thoughts from this report below. Now there are limits to how long you can put in but I think we put a 40 page document in the other day for something so pretty extraordinary what you can ask it to do and it's literally reading what you've given it plus what it's got all above and it's going to spit you out another answer here. So all the time you're refining what you've been asking and this is what I think so great. And also I said to acting as a well the asked IOTA to act so acting as a place expert if anybody if you're using chat GPT already and you're not saying to who to act as if you know, you know if you've got a renowned person for a certain topic if you ask it to act as that renowned person who has published works that ChatGPT knows about it will then behave as that person. So to integrate sustainability into the core of Ipswich high street retail experience in response to increasing environmental awareness demand for eco friendly community consumer options this plan aims to leverage Ipswich's significant trained business numbers to promote do you see how it's weaved everything that you've thought about into the answer? It's giving sustainable transportation incentives, green welcome parks, eco friendly business sophistication, sustainable products and services and promotion eco friendly store design, digital engagement sustainability. Now I'm not saying this is the plan but I'm saying what a fantastic way to start discussing the plan and I what I what I sort of I'm on a bit of a mission at the moment to say to everybody look AI and ChatGPT is not the enemy. It is something that can absolutely help you do your best work faster and you know this is as a discussion document if you then decide what you want to do is extraordinary. If they went and said well I'm actually going to that meeting or whatever, whatever you're going to do with this document you then said well actually I want to. I'd love to have a thought around based on this. So implementing this plan involves close collaboration. So so based upon they going to ask how it implements the. Let's see, finish it off Conclusion this comprehensive plan. Yeah okay by embracing. So based on this, based on this plan can you recommend an approach? If we were to adopt the can you recommend a rollout approach for example now again it's not going to give you all the answers but it will give you some things to think about you possibly haven't thought of before and it just stretches your brain the whole time and gets you further ahead quicker. I think that's the key message for it for me. I hope you'll find this interesting. I think it's fascinating. So based on this plan can you recommend a roll out approach? As if we were to adopt this plan Obviously my terrible spelling but it has worked that out for it. So implementing a sustainable high street retail strategy in Ipswich will require a phased collaborative approach to ensure successful adoption and long term impact. And here it's starting to list everything out. Now this is an off the shelf thought around how you know a project it is I, I now call it my, my my my work buddy because wherever I've got a question I go and ask it something. Now this isn't the answer to the question but it means you can start answering the question much much faster. I hope that's valuable to everybody but there you go, that's chat GPT providing a, a plan and a rollout suggestion. I will if you'd like it and hit save. I'll hit save on this and I'll share it with the recording later. So here you go, it's got your rollout plan of planning and partnerships, infrastructure resources, pilot and launch initiatives, full scale implementation, expansion, optimization, cross phase activities. We could ask you one more question which is how would you measure the success. Measure the success of this plan? Fingers on the buzzers if you want an answer. So how would you measure the success of this plan? And it will then give you some measuring success st Here we go. Here are the key metrics. Environmental impacts, carbon carbon reduction, waste reduction, sustainable. Now if you disagree with any of this and want to go back and say but we'd like to measure carbon output or whatever it is, how could we think about that? Again it's Just giving you expert support really, really fast. I'm not doing anything magic here. My hands are here. I'm not touching anything else. It just keeps answering you. I hope it's been valuable. I will, I will print this out, I'll put this on a document and send it around afterwards. But literally any of anybody can go and do this. But most importantly, if you want to put in your own data to it, you can do that too. If you, if you create a team account, you, you can see maybe workspace. This is a, maybe a workspace one, maybe workspace. Chats aren't used to train our models. So if you're putting any of your report data into it, I would recommend you do it in a workspace, not in a public space. And as it says, ChatGPT can make mistakes. So take this as a first draft. Do not take it as gospel, but it will get you to something somewhere faster with any kind of project, much, much quicker. I love it. Hope you, hope you do too and would love your feedback on that when I send it around. So that's a little demo on how you could use GPT as a local authority. And I'm going to dive through how AI has helped us because it's changing our business very fast. For those of you who don't know us, we've worked in many local authorities delivering digital local business support and tools. So we've had, I think we've, I think the latest headcount was about 202,220, 25, 000 businesses. Outside of that, we work with a range of clients from SMEs to PLCs. But the thing that we know, no matter how much technology we develop, develop, it's always the human element that works. So one of the things that we're doing this year is we've got, we've got a bible of prompts that we've been using for our business. We've gathered and shared with other businesses. I'll share it with you after this call as well because AI, as I've just shown you, is only as good as the questions you ask it. That's the value of being a human being. And to use it well, you need to ask it well. And we've got a prompt bible that we keep growing. I'm very happy to share. If you're not on the High Street Task force, you'd have to pay for it. But because you're in the High Street Task force, you get given it. And we're nice, but from our perspective, our contract with the High Street Task Force was all around play sentiment. We have always used AI for that and I recently wrote an article about how it sort of set our business on a very new path because the AI we were using for place sentiment has enabled us to think really deeply about how we can then use it for customer support. And that is what I think is the opportunity for local authorities because, and I'm sure there are many more as well, but I've seen, you know, we have seen how much impact you can deliver locally if you can improve the skills of local businesses. We know there's an enormous gap with use of digital and reaching customers who are increasingly digital. But if we can in any way help any of you to think differently about local business support, I know how hard it can be to deliver it. But I think there's a huge opportunity with AI. So I would love for our legacy with the High Street Task Force to be that we've gone for place sentiment increasing because you're enabling places to deliver better communications both for businesses and for local inhabitants. Our customer success has transformed out of all recognition. So we took the lead from Octopus and last year took all of our customer support articles and there are hundred, well, probably thousands of them now, both articles and videos for all the training we've delivered up and down the country and we've fed it to AI as a knowledge base and we weren't quite sure what was going to happen. But in the same way that Octopus have said that they are having 80% customer satisfaction with their AI answers, we are seeing 89.5% of people asking questions around when they're stuck on doing a business problem being sold by AI. And the average time to resolution is 11 seconds to get an answer and then it's nine minutes to get to the point where they go, yeah, I've solved my problem now. I think that is extraordinary and I think for growth hubs, I think for LEP's and I think local authorities trying to deliver local business support, thinking about how AI can help the people you've got do the job even better is extraordinary. I'm going to show you actually in action. I'm going to go there. So this is sort of one implementation that we've done where we are using AI to answer questions, particularly around digital support, but it can be any subject matter you like. So if we say to the AI, I need some told you couldn't write, need some help with my Google, my business account now, in the good old days, you'd either have to get to a webinar or training session or you'd have to wait for somebody to answer it. But with AI, that person's got a very specific problem right now they probably need. They probably sat there trying to work out how to fill in their Google my business account. Oh, it's thinking I'm continuing a question. Hang on. So because I'm continuing an answer, it's asking me to hand off which is nice thing. It does actually let you hand off to a human being. Let's start, start a new message. Sorry, not Democrat property. So first time customer ask a question and it will go and find the answer. It does. If you keep, keep answering, asking. It does actually. Then say as you just seen, would you like a human being? Which is a good thing because otherwise you can get stuck and get stuck in a loop. So in within 11 seconds it takes forever. 11 seconds when you're on a call. Oh, oh, I copied the question. Excuse me caller, I'm being very stupid, right? Ask question please can I have some. This is when you don't have a wingman helping you. Please can I have some help? Sorry everybody. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Please can I have some help with my Google Google my business listing. Please don't have something to do with my business. Listening. Okay, really common question. So business is stuck not being able to use Google my business. So they're sat trying to fill the form in. Can't do it. What do they do? They Google some stuff. Probably spend half an hour watching some videos that may or may not help them and they then give up or think oh I'll book in for some training. But it's not today. Oh, it's because I've got help. I'm sorry, I'm being really stupid here. This is a, this is a nightmare demo. I hate it when this happens. How can I say it? How, how, how I set up Google my business. We're just testing human handoff the moment because I put. I said we, we're. What we've discovered is when people say they need help, what they're saying is they'd. So we're looking, we're looking at the word help as a trigger. She says with her fingers crossed as I think that's what they're doing to just to identify that you want human handoff right now. Here we go. So do you see how. How do I set up my Google business? To set up Google our business, you can follow the initial steps in an article. Get list of Google business. It then gives you the list the linking to that. So if I, I go, I. You can go, great. And it takes you there. Um, now, despite my few moments of failure, had I been sat stuck and been. I've been told I needed to go to a training or wait to speak to a person, I can solve my problem. I've now got an article that's got how to set up my Google business listing. I've got a video, I've got another one about another video that's showing me more on it or. And I can book a call now if then said, great. How do I run Facebook ads? Now remember this, this is about digital but it could be about when are the bin, how do the bins work or when, when the bin men come next coming or when anything you like. It's about giving the AI the knowledge and then the AI delivering the answers. So now we hit a group. Now to run Facebook ads, you'll first need to create a Facebook ads account and it can link to the actual article or web page that's relevant to that. Do you see how quickly I'm now being served? And this I believe is the future of local business support. I think it's the future of many other things. I just know, I know a lot about that vertical and we've spent a lot of time making this work. So if anybody's looking to understand how they can use AI to deliver customer service, please pick our brains because we'd be very happy to share what we're learning because it is extraordinary how fast you can get information to people using AI. Really, we're really excited about it. We're very interested to hear if anybody else has experienced it, whether good or bad. Good or bad. I have to say I tried FedEx's the other day and their parcels and it was a, it was a phone one. It was horrific. But we are really excited by how it works. So yes, developing a project and understanding risks associated with a great process automation, understanding more risks may not have considered. So anybody looking at a project, so the gentleman saying they are developing a project and understanding risk associated with it. EEG process automation, understanding more of the risks we may not have considered. So one of the things that I would say to anybody thinking about an AI project is make sure that you've got somebody very good looking at the responses and making sure that whatever solution you're using lets you see, still see the questions because you still need to see what people are asking and understand where you've got gaps in knowledge and under and look at the responses you're Giving because the system is only as good as the, the knowledge you give it. And actually what you start to understand is you much better understand what people are asking for. And you need to change your knowledge base because often you've got huge, you think you've created the right content but there's a huge gap in what you're delivering and then also making sure the AI agent has the right specialism. So when you build systems like this, it's all about saying what does the AI know about and what don't you want it to know about? So a little bit like we're testing the human handoff at the moment, so we're using like as a trigger word because sometimes sentiment doesn't work. It's understanding what, what, what, what pleases people most and being really all over those metrics that let you understand how happy is the customer, what's their, you know, what's the rate to close and all of those numbers are critical KPIs to ensure the system's delivering what you want. But really happy to share our learnings on that. We're really, really excited about it and I think it does offer a massive step forward. So yeah, AI and help. Extraordinary. It really helped us understand how we could scale up what we're doing. You know, over the last few years we've delivered some massive projects quite manually in towns across the UK and in order to make that bigger we wanted to know. So for example in Ledbury, I think I can't remember the numbers now but we, we had 15% increase in footfall from businesses that started getting better at social for want a better word. But we trained 1700 businesses, 1700, 1757 businesses. And we had a little bit of AI then but not lots and it nearly killed us, but now we can automate it completely and it is just extraordinary watching those businesses now self serve because they're getting to the questions they want much, much faster and, but, but what, what Critical as a gentleman of course just to ask is, is making sure you get that blend of human and AI right. You want the AI to service people as fast as they can, but then when people want more, they can get to you to ask for more again. Remember we're this talking about a digital, digital marketing training, customer support. But it could be for anything, it could be for an event, you know, anywhere where you get big peaks and troughs, you can have an AI assistance help you and you teach it once and it's really, really good. So as I said, we're increasingly looking at projects with growth hubs and things around that same same thing. And the world is moving so fast in that space. And part of that, we believe that also AI has a massive plot to play in how you can help businesses get past that 19% gap that we talked about at the beginning. I think it's the next slide, actually. So we know that I'm just whiz down, actually. We know that 19% of businesses aren't only 19% are active. And we look at the businesses that are doing really well. There's some amazing case studies. The reason they did well is because they asked lots of questions and they got greater content. But the big barrier to that is that businesses really struggle to create content. So we're adding to all our tools the ability to use AI as the brand, to create content, to help brands, when I say brands. So let's say an independent business to help you create a brand, to help you then storytell to help you create content. That. Because that's the block. If you can't create content, you can't be active and people get stuck in that loop. So we're using AI to create those tools. But the message really for you is how can you know, how can you use AI as local authorities to make services possibly more cost efficient, but better using AI? And yeah, we're really excited by what we're seeing with it. It's extraordinary how you can ask for an expert to lean over your shoulder. You can say, acting as Steve Jobs, renowned for his emphasis on immunot, review my social media copy and boom, just like that, you've got Steve Jobs in the room telling you what to do. And helping businesses get to that point where they can have, you know, immediate answer those questions and they can get, you know, learn how to get an expert leaning over their shoulder. You can change their business future really, really easily. Equally important is AI compliance. We did a lot of work around how, you know, what are the policies you need around AI. There are, you know, it's a. It needs careful thought and again, happy to share if anybody wants some advice around that because it's, it's really important that you've got all the right frameworks in place. We publish ours. It's public, it's a public document. But if you haven't got that yet, please make sure you do. Yeah. The point here really is that businesses that we've seen, and each of these businesses have an impact on footfall locally, they have an impact on local economic growth. But of all the thousands of businesses we've trained the ones that have really sort of what I call Escape Velocity and Broken Free. These, the two on the outside are both businesses that didn't do digital and now doing over 100,000amonth through digital. It happened because of support and it happened because of constant support. They really leaned in and used the support. But AI lets you scale that support. And I think that's my learning, is that you, AI and support have to be closely linked going forward. Let me check. Lots more Q and A's coming in. Tricky driving both sides. Here we go. Yeah. Another few more questions around the risk. Yeah, so I think, I think AI is interesting and the risk piece, you know, our team were very nervous when we started doing support through AI. And I said, look, you know, if I've got to hire another 10 people right now, I've got no guarantee those 10 people will do support well either. So, you know, the ones of you that are great with support already, you'll still be vetting their results and vetting what they say. So an AI doesn't mean your people vanish, it means your people do something different or better. So we are able to support more businesses, but our team now creates more content to make sure those businesses get the right support. So I think we're actually delivering better support to our customers and our team have got a better job because they're, rather than repeating the same question over and over again, they're creating more content to deliver more value. So it's all about a shift in perception. Integrating AI in your business is about a shift in perception of what's valuable for people to do versus what the AI can do really well and how you can get rid of bottlenecks and how you can help people quicker. I think is where I am really excited about AI. I hope this answers questions quite a lot around that, which is, is there a risk to workforce? No, I don't. There's a risk to the workforce at all. You know, if I, if I needed to employ as many business, if I had to employ customer support for as many businesses as supporting right now, our prices would have to go up and possibly our business would be much harder to run. So in, as a business owner's perspective, I think we can deliver a better product with AI. And from our team, I think they get a better job because of AI, but it's knowing how to deploy it. So, yeah, as we said, only 90 of business are active. I think AI can help, help us get those, those that aren't active, but if those that aren't active, don't embrace any of this. I think we've got a very, very big problem because the customer is becoming more and more digital by the minute and AI is only going to increase that. So bluntly, AI offers the most incredible accelerated learning experience, full stop. I just think that is a. Is a killer sentence for me. What I'm intrigued about is how schools and universities are right now very much AI is the devil and we can't talk about it because of the risk of students using it. But let's, let's talk about the world where we're all trading in and working in. What I've seen over the last year and every. I talk to AI offers the most incredible accelerated learning experience and really happy to talk to anybody who wants to think about how they, how they can deploy it. I think there's an opportunity for each one of us to do at least twice our work. If you get really good at it, you can do five times your work. But most importantly, it's knowing that you can ask an expert to lean over your shoulder without having to at work expose the fact you're asking somebody something. So I, when I write the email, for example, that gets sent out to you, the email that you sent out to invite you to this webinar today, I will have said to ChatGPT before I send it, how would a local authority worker who's short on time view this email and would they think it's worthwhile? The AI then rewrites it for me. So this is how you want to say it. So any important email you write right now, my top tip for you is give it back to ChatGPT and say, as the person I'm sending this to, brackets who's possibly busy having a bad day and hasn't got time for it, what would they say? Any report you're writing, anything you're writing where you want to influence people, ask ChatGPT to review it as the person you want to influence and see what you get back. And you will look at it and think, my word, that is actually exactly what that person has said to me. So you can basically get through two rounds of review before you even send the thing out. Just imagine that. It's incredible. So yeah, my word is as an ambitious team member, no matter where you're working, you want to be able to be consistently amazing in less time because then we all get to have more fun, right? And I think that's what AI does for us. I use this on lots of webinars. I talk on which is that I think this is as important as inventing the wheel right now. And we are at a moment in time where you're being offered wheels for your organization, whether it is a local authority, whether it's a local business, it really is like the wheel and you can either say no thanks, we're too busy, we're going to carry on doing it as we are or what I hope you're doing is saying what type of wheels are we going to put on? One of the things that we're delivering at the moment is a six week business intensive online course where we hold businesses hand through creating digital sales process. We have live weekly training sessions and specialist catch ups. We enable businesses to learn how to use AI and automation to transform their business and how to access all the tools they need all in one place. And they get access to the 24,7 help that I showed you. But I managed to fail to drive very well. Apologies for that. But for all local authority members we're offering one person for your team can join this course free of charge. We charge businesses, I think it's 1,950 for this but by virtue of the partnership task force, we'd love to invite one local authority member to come and experience this per local authority. So I won't remain this generous forever. So please do. There's a link at the end of the thing. Please do feel to jump on but we'd be really delighted if you'd like to come and join the business intensive and learn how AI can be used for for you or your local businesses. One person for each local authority you get access to. All our lovely team who are all steeped in AI or getting more steeped. We all feel quite slight, slightly squared every day, scared every day because there's something new to learn. But we're all learning to learn to be masters of it all of the time and they're a great team and we'll be really happy to share our knowledge with you. So thank you for being such a great crowd today. I've got quite a lot of questions to go through so if you're happy to stick around, I'll keep going through them. Now as I said, Sarah sadly couldn't be on the call today but please do book in on www.maybetech.com forward/High Street Taskforce HSTF so maybetech.com HSTF or email Sarah, book in a meeting with her and if you want to jump on that AI business intensive, it's six weeks worth of content. It's a Two hour session on a Thursday, you get access to all the recordings. I think, I think it's already started. I think we did the first one last week, but you can jump on now, but it won't be open for much longer. But it gives you a really good deep dive taster into the ways that AI can be used and as I said, by virtue of our High Street Task Force partnership, would like to invite one member from every council onto it. Really thrilled to do that. Some questions around that coming in actually. So shall I just dive into those? And if you, if you keep jumping your question, dropping questions on here, I will keep going through them. So somebody's asking about does would AI help them help their council respond to multilingual questions? Yes, absolutely. We've got a number of local authorities already doing that. So where you have to for example respond in both English and Welsh as an example, the AI does that incredibly well and we've integrated that within the maybe platform itself, which again all local authorities can have a one seat license for which enables them to respond and create content in any language you like. Does your platform have AI for images? Yes, it does. Um, so the actual main maybe platform itself, which again all local authorities have access to by virtue of our relationship with Task Force. If you haven't got it yet, please do jump on a call by clicking on the link or emailing Sarah. I'll leave the link up. Just jump on the call, jump on and book yourself a meeting. You can book yourself a meeting from this Hashtute taskforce link that you can have access to maybe account where you put all of these goodies in. It's all in there question here around how creating content and how you solve that for local businesses. Yeah, so with local businesses we, we know that one of the biggest challenges for them is time and how, and how they, how can they, if they're not social first in their way of thinking, it can be really daunting creating content all the time. So we both provide them the tools. We now built the AI that automatically personalizes their content for them and we've integrated an events calendar. So whether it's Valentine's kiss a ginger day or it's it's national take your dog to work day, all of those days are there ready for them. And with content pre written for their business with AI to create the images for them as well, they've got 247 support. They've then got daily sessions that they can go into. And you know what's important with this is this is about Helping them have a voice in your local conversation. Because the bigger your local conversation is, the more footfall your place attracts. You know, each business is a signpost for your place. I might come because I see the beautiful boots that somebody sells, but while I'm there I buy coffee, I meet a friend and I, I walk past a shop and see the beautiful thing that my, my daughter wants, whatever it is. But, but content is becoming the signpost of place and AI is the secret to deliver delivering more content. So using AI both as a local authority to be more efficient but also thinking about how you can use it to deliver customer support I think is really interesting both as you know how you can support your local community from a. All of those questions that your team possibly have to answer on social. Repetitive, repetitively. AI can do it as well. You'll still need some of the team to make sure that the AI is staying on track and all of the team to create more content so that the AI knows more about the events locally. But it literally will help you do things better and it can help you translate everything. I've got some more questions coming in around the business intensive. So yes, it's a six week course run on Zoom and it provides an insight into various ways that you can use AI in your organization, how you can automate processes. So for example, you know, you might book in via calendar. How do you then ensure that the person turns up for a meeting what you do if they don't turn up, how to use, excuse me, ads, how to integrate the, with all of the data with the CRM, how to build pipelines. So yeah, every, everything you can imagine around building a digital business is including the business intensive and it's designed to give everybody a real inspiration around how AI and automation can change the way you're doing business, drive efficiency and deliver results faster. And we've got some rave reviews on it already and you would be delighted if you'd like to join us. So I'm conscious on time. Got some more questions coming in about the daily support sessions that we provide. Yep, our team are available every day at 11 o' clock and we have businesses come and bring their problems and, and again local authorities are welcome to do the same. So if you've got, you know, if you, if you have a team member that has a challenge, you can come and use that service. I think you're limited if you don't have an account so you need to make sure you set up account. You can do one session to try it out and then you need to make sure you've got account but as I said, all local authorities get a one seat license account and maybe as part of the High Street Task Force project. Would love to see another question here. Oh, somebody saying loving the image creation tools within maybe thank you for that. That's, that's really great to hear. And somebody else saying that yes, they're scheduling their little authority, scheduling everything through the scheduler. Thank you, that's great to hear. Question here around how we tracked the footfall for the Ledbury project. Yeah, that's great. Question. So for the Libri project we had all of the mobile phone data from all of the visitors in the town and we plotted the thresholds of each store so that we could know how many people went in basically over that threshold. And that's what gave us the variance between those that we were working with and those that we weren't. We're increasingly using mobile phone data to start to build audiences for advertising. So for any of that you are sort of running events and looking at how to attract more people to them. There's some really work, interesting work that we're working on with other local authorities, one local authority and landlord actually around looking at where their customers have come from and we use mobile phone data for that and then plot the sociodemographic of the visitors to see where are the likely places in the UK to find more of them. It's worked incredibly well for retailers and we're really excited about the opportunities of doing it with place. And again, AI is helping us massively with that and we're looking at how we can use different data sources to really drive that forward. But again, without AI, none of that is possible and I'm hoping we can share a lot of the results from that as they start to be revealed in the coming months. So don't miss out. Got some more questions coming in around when do we do this again? Yeah, every, every Wednesday, first Wednesday of the month and everybody's welcome. You should, if you clicked on the, the diary, it should be in your diary for next month but we'll also drop you an email to invite you in. And it's a question here. A big one for councillors this year is attracting people to be counselors. Adulteers. Oh, that's really interesting. So that's an interesting project, I would say. Question here around a big wife council is attracting people to be counselors or, or so I'm going to send you. In fact, do you know what the, the, the, the, the person that said that question I'm going to suggest that next that's going to be the topic of next month's High Street Task Force is how can councils attract people to be counselors at all tiers? I'd like to go and think about that and I'd like to address that on next Months High Street Task Force and look at how we can get AI to help us with that. Does that sound like a good idea? Not they haven't got masses of people left on the call now, but would that be a good idea? Drop me a yes. If you'd like to explore that one in the next months, we'll definitely make that up. I promise you we'll do that. Next month's topic. Thank you all so much for coming. You've been a great crowd. Please make sure you've put yourself into Sarah's calendar to make sure you've got all the goodies you're owed. It.