"AI, applied to contact centre and customer experience, is going to massively increase productivity: maybe 30, 35%."
Every year, Computing hosts the Digital Technology Leaders Awards: a celebration of the professionals and projects, not products, that make IT the innovative and lively place to work that it is.
This year we celebrated a range of finalists and winners at the awards show in central London. Post-show, we caught up with Martin Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Content Guru - a finalist in Best Public Sector Partner Project and Machine Learning / AI Project of the Year - to learn more about the company's work that got them to this point.
Computing: What makes Content Guru different from other companies?
Martin Taylor: Content Guru is that rare thing: a large British tech firm operating in the cloud and still led by its founders. We operate in the field of customer experience, or CX, and we're also leading in the artificial intelligence revolution, so we like to say that we're big in CX and we lead in AI.
Our systems and services are trusted to run critical national infrastructure - in fact, we're the only people in that CCaaS and CX field who are in the cloud running emergency services: 999, 111, 101 and all of these big critical infrastructure services.
Resilient, scalable - that's what makes us different.
CTG: What's your proudest company achievement in the last 12 months?
MT: In the last 12 months we were most proud - quite aside from our work in emergency services - of winning the largest contact centre as a service, so cloud contact centre, piece of business of the year, possibly of all time. It's a huge multi-national rollout, 70 countries, it's a nine-figure sum, so a really big contract; a testament to how cloud is really transforming the contact centre space. It's going to involve tens of thousands of contact centre workers across 70 countries - that's massively exciting, very proud of that.
CTG: Why are events like the Digital Technology Leaders Awards important to the IT industry?
MT: Events like the Computing Digital Technology Leaders Awards are massively important for our industry. Largely, IT is carried out in-person, in quiet conditions. It's a kind of heads-down type of sector, but its impact is enormous, and it's changing the world, so this is one of the few opportunities where we get to come out of the shadows and celebrate our success as an industry.
CTG: What have been your biggest challenges of 2024 so far, and how have you overcome them?
MT: 2024, like every year, has its challenges, and I think this year it's all about expansion: further expansion after 15 years of straight, profitable growth. That means a new headquarters: we're looking Down Under at a new place in Sydney for our business that's growing down there, we've got a new Glasgow headquarters for our Scottish business, we've got a new development centre in Porto, and we're expanding in the US, which is of course the largest market, and always a tricky one for UK exporters. So really, it's about continuing that growth into a 16th straight year.
CTG: What do you see as the main opportunities for the IT industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on them?
MT: The next 12 months are all going to be about more AI, just as generative AI has been the theme of the last 12 months. In our sector, AI is already being applied in customer experience, and we've seen customers like DVLA already ranked as the most improved public sector organisation - that's a massive achievement.
So, AI is already helping, and now generative AI, applied to contact centre and customer experience, is going to massively increase productivity: maybe 30, 35%. I think the big challenge over the next 12 months is how we're going to apply that in this very real-world application.
And then the second one, I would say, is the Internet of Things. So, it's bringing in all of these connected devices and really putting them to work - again in very practical, unglamorous ways that are going to matter to millions of people.
