Consumer Goods Industry Masterclass Insights

Nuno Gonçalves: In any case, welcome everybody. And welcome again to the Skills masterclass. It's, as you, some of you, keep on coming, which is great. I love, the, some of the questions that you're putting here and some of the interactions that we have even before and after, which is good.

I always have the pleasure of being and sitting here with Mike Reed. He is the, chief Product Officer and one of the co - founders of re jig. He has a wealth of knowledge, as you all know about the industries and how the industry is evolving, has evolved, somehow a foresight of what the industry will be in the future.

Although I would say maybe this one specifically where we are right now, it might be a little bit hard to predict. Anything, Mike? So let's see where we end up. One way or the other. My name is Nuno Al. I had a workforce strategy for Reejig, as this is a place where we unbundle work, and in one industry at a time.

And we'll start with this consumer goods industry today. And I think, sit tight as Mike says, buckle up because I think you're gonna go for a treat, because we'll tackle many different things today, Mike.

Mike Reed: Yep. And, usually I feel pretty comfortable in the detail, but I reckon, I should consider myself the underdog here based on we, so I'm super interested to listen to your perspective practitioner in these spaces, with some of the biggest players in consumer goods.

Super exciting. I don't, I don't think you're ever

Nuno Gonçalves: the underdog in any conversation, Mike, but that's something for another conversation. Let's go. So if we go to the next slide, let me give you a little bit of structure of what the conversation will hold today. We will start with the industry insights and the best, that we know of the signals and the data that we're seeing in the market and some of the trends, knowing that, as we all know, that all of the political and socioeconomical, changes are driving costs, in and inflation one way or the other.

So there's, I think for most of these numbers, it'll be directionally correct. We'll be talking about directions and not necessarily about finite numbers, but we always start with the industry and I think it will be important to spend some time there. We'll talk about ai. It's disrupting all industries.

This one in particularly in many different fronts as well. We'll, as, we don't all only, talk about conceptual and foresight. We then start going more in the details of what does this mean, from an impact on your, on the industry, on and on the companies of some of you that are listening to us.

What are the roles that might be more impacted than we're seeing more impacted by ai? And then how can we, ultimately, reinvent work? We talk a lot about reinvention of work, Mike, and I think it might be overused, but the reality is that, the way that you've been doing work will not necessarily be the way that you'll be.

You'll have to do work. In the future. It's not the recipe that I got you here that will get you to a successful place in the future. And that's, and there it was always true, but it's even more right now. So if you don't reinvent yourself, others are doing it and then ultimately will become faster, better, than you are as well.

But then what does that mean At the work level, we were gonna talk about this. You'll hear us a lot of talk about tasks. 'cause for us, the unit of work is, the task is one part of the work that needs to be done. So we'll talk a little bit about this, because, as I said, we want to make sure that we talk about how do you need to reinvent, the way that you work, then the, it's not the impact only at an organizational level, it's also the impact at an individual level.

So if you are reinventing yourselves, then that means that you'll probably stop doing work, parts of work, you'll start doing some new work. What does that mean for people? And how you need to, think about reskilling and upskilling your talent. That, Reejig is also, all about a zero wasted potential movement because we believe there's a lot of potential in the organizations.

As an organization. We need to have the responsibility to steer the upskilling and reskilling of our talent in, that has been with us for many years as well. So that's the intent of the agenda today. Mike, anything that you want to add or that I've misrepresented there?

Mike Reed: No. I think you nailed it.

I think, as you said, the other storm that's boiling behind this is changes in the macroeconomics. So I think if you'd asked me a month ago, a very different conversation than the one that this mar this, industry is having today around what the implications are of the, of tariff schemes and macroeconomic conditions.

But that doesn't necessarily change anything that we're talking about. I hate to think that, we're month too late in the conversation, but I think the AI and the transformation, discussion is as relevant, under the current conditions as they were, after we started about this episode.

Wonderful.

Nuno Gonçalves: Let's go. So if we go to the next slide, then, typically, we'll you, we start with a size of the industry and this is a huge industry, and you'll see that there is a lot of subsegments in the overall consumer goods industry, right? We're talking about FMCG, the fast moving consumer goods as well.

Durable goods, apparel, and footwear, which I also was, had the pleasure to be part of luxury goods. So it's, it actually has very, it's the same industry, but very different complexities and very different types of work and marketing and also impacts on manufacturing as well.

But it's a 7.5 trillion, dollars, industry, that is growing and has been growing also, and especially since covid to, with a, with an inter at an interesting rate. You have a 5.8 KR, over there. And for those that are less financially savvy, KR is the compound annual growth rates.

So what are we expecting of growth moving forward? It's still significant. It's still, above inflation. This gets us to the conversation that we were just having. It's still about inflation today. So let's see how inflation will eventually continue to grow because, what we were seeing for this 2025 is a lot of impact on the cost, moving forward.

it's unbelievable from a tra, from a terrorist perspective and knowing that the complexity of the, some of the supply chain of these companies and the companies in this industry, you can imagine that every single place that you have, a piece of your, value creation of your manufacturing, of your, when you're, when you're building or buying some of the ingredients or some of the materials that you'll need for, your industry, if that passes through three or four countries, it'll be the impact of the terrace will be com cumulative.

So imagine what will, what is the impact that this is having on. Entire companies changing their supply chain strategy, their supply strategy so that they can start minimizing some of the impacts that we're seeing on these tariffs also, in the US and in the rest of the world as well.

So really big. Very challenged, from a cost perspective, today, not only because there's a tremendous amount of competition there, but also because cost is increasing exponentially, not on cost, only on people, but also cost on goods or, in the different subsegments of this industry as well.

US is not, is the largest market. It's not surprising that it's the largest market for consumer goods. It is known as a country where there's a lot of consumption as well. And it's valued o only here in the US and to 2 trillion annually, which is an important one. It's also one of the reasons why some of these, big companies are also headquartered here and where, they have the majority of their business as well, Mike.

Mike Reed: Yep. Interesting. Thinking about the players in this space, that it's the boundaries around consumer goods may as an industry maybe aren't so black and white as in some others. It's interesting when we're, when we're trying to unpick and get a bit of focus around this, where's the boundary between consumer goods and retail?

Given that a large part of f cji and apparel foot, footwear, for example, are also pushing out into that retail space, whereas the boundaries between health and pharma, particularly looking at over the counter and health supplements that sit in that FMCG, but also strongly aligned with healthcare, clearly as a different industry.

And then you've got technology with consumer electronics. You've got, automotive could be considered consumer goods and you've got food and beverages alongside CPG quite often. So there's a number of industries that are strongly adjacent and manufacturing is another one we've touched on. So manufacturing is key to the performance and productivity that's needed to deliver success in the.

Consumer goods consumer, but manufacturing also, it has its own industry off to the side. So in interesting in trying to unpick this one specifically, seeing a lot of overlaps, but it's clear that the players that you're looking at here, whether it's Nike or Levi Strauss, whether it's Apple or Samsung, whether it's, LVH, whether we can see the who's in the consumer good space.

Nuno Gonçalves: , the complexity actually, and we always go and see what the, some of the senior leaders, some of the CEOs of these companies also talk about. And actually it's reflected on the next slide as well, that, where, we have three different concerns or focuses coming from very big players also of these.

of these industries as well. So you have, Fabrizio from SL other that are talk that is talking about is going to a path of digitalization where a path where many companies in retail also went to, right? Because we saw the increase or the decrease of physical stores to much more, focus on digital, which is, which was the right thing and is the right thing one way or the other.

Not all companies were able to do that transition either though. So it's, some companies just went and actually bought, hired, tons of digital, savvy, marketeers and try to in incorporate that in their own DNA of their organization. But it's, there are some other companies where.

The in store, experience is part of their culture as well. So making that shift to digital or rebalance, because it doesn't need to be a complete shift. It doesn't need to be a 180, but to rebalance the online and the physical presence as well is something that is really important for some of these companies.

And that's what Fabrizio is saying there. If we then go to the CEO of Philips, which is a company that I've grown to admire as well. I love the fact that he's talking about the focus on people. And, as I know, as, I also had this past in pharma, in which we were always very patient centered, right?

And pharma wanting to be very patient centered here, Roy, talking about being very people centered and what does this mean? And there's a method that sometimes people confuse or that sometimes that being that people centered or business center, they're not polar opposites. Right. And that's the, that's what the CEOs are re recognizing right now, is that ultimately becoming a people centered doesn't mean that you're not a business centered, organization either.

So love to see his comment, over there. There's another piece that we haven't talked yet about, which is around sustainability and some of the good that these, industries are, these companies are trying to bring, not all certain, but certainly the companies that I know and that I've worked for.

if there is a place where I see, and I can say it here because it's a beautiful and phenomenal company where Mars, for example, is doing, great job is on sustainability and making sure that there's a sociological impact, positive impact, but also environmental impact on everything that they do.

And here it's also where, the CEO, the chairman, the CEO of PepsiCo is talking about this, the, it's written pep. But it's actually pep positive. It's their strategy to ultimately, leave a better place and minimize as much as possible the footprint that they have, and that ultimately some of those businesses have as well, billions of dollars of investment going in this industry.

Also from a sustainability perspective, not only for the quality of what they're producing that will ultimately end with the consumer, but also on their manufacturing process and on the societies and on the places and countries that they are ultimately, do businesses, with as well.

So a lot of different complexity. And I think if you can see here, we see different strategies, that these, CEOs have demonstrating also the complexity of what needs, what is happening in the industry, Mike.

Mike Reed: Yep. And amongst our customers and amongst organizations in general. I think you get a clear sense of culture when you're in an organization.

Sustainability and impact towards the top of the legacy that they wanna leave. Interesting. Looking at these quotes that we grabbed out of the, research, they talk to digital transformation. They talk to people center and high quality. They talk to sustainability. But the common thread, my route of a common thread through that is innovation.

It's mentioned in Roy KO's quote, but it's a common thread in digital transformation and the nature of change. One of the ones we didn't put on there was from Marco Ti, who's, CEO at Burberry and his call out was, innovation is about ensuring longevity and relevance in a rapidly changing world.

And I think that's the key that un underpins all of these conversations that we're having. One of the studies that focused us around innovation was that it. Indicator of value generation. So there was a Bain study that we're looking at that companies who have an innovation budget that's increased increasing annually by 15%, are growing their market share by more than 4% compared to their competitors.

So innovation is an indicator of a growth company. So the, so maybe you don't get everything right, but if you don't have a visible commitment from outside to innovation, and that's digital transformation and, AI implementation is one marker for that. But if you don't have a visible external, if you haven't committed budget, if I can't look at your budget and see that innovation is part of your strategy and I can't expect you to have those growth.

So it's been really interesting to look at those vertical threads through the different perspective. Yeah. I

Nuno Gonçalves: love that, and I think it's a great segue to what the next slide, what we have there. But, and for those that are with us, then what we are trying to do is to give you, a lay of the land of the industry and the, some of the complexity, but also the size of the industry, and then where some of the leadership and where some of the directions, strategic directions that these, industries have in this one in particular.

but, and as Mike was saying, ultimately we're talking about innovation, and we've been talking about innovation since ever. Right. But the question is, and I love, I think it was the Canadian Prime Minister, this ultimately said, listen, it's, it was never this fast, and it'll never be this slow.

So it's brace yourself because you need to ultimately be able to reinvent yourself and continue to deliver value one way or the other. So it's, when you talk about innovation, for me it's also about reinvention, right? It's innovating on what you do, but actually reinventing the, your business model and in the value that you deliver to your customers, whatever the business you are.

But you need to understand, and this is where we then say, okay, if you need to reinvent, you need to reinvent in an industry that is very complex. In a, in an environment that is very fast and very complex as well. 'cause there's this big part of AI transformation that we're seeing all companies having, doing, whether it's ai, assisting, the, your employees or ai augmenting, which allows its augmentation of whatever you do.

not necessarily yet on trying to replace, jobs, but augmenting and becoming better on what you do. This is a path of redesigning. There's a path for re - engineering, a path to reinvent yourself one way or the other. But it's in a, it's in an environment where there's you, most of us are in organizations where we don't, they're so complex and so big that there's so much work happening that we don't know.

Ultimately what's where to start and where could we eventually automate faster or augment faster one way or the other. There are some companies that are more prone to risk than others. Some others that are more early adopters than others. There's some leaders that are also more knowledgeable about, the potential of AI one way or the other.

So we are all, not only in an industry that is moving very fast and is very complex, but the reality is that we have organizations that were set up for legacy. For the legacy environment. And right now, this legacy environment didn't require you necessarily to have, a lot of visibility of work.

Didn't require you to move as fast as you right now have and, need to. And the reality is that it's not only about the advent of AI that ultimately we haven't sorted out, we don't know, enough about our organization, whether it's the organization itself or the work that we actually do. And that's why typically a lot of the work, the transformation projects that I did was always a 12 to 18 months, to two years to three years projects.

right now you cannot afford to do that. So how do you map that out? How do you actually, what's the path? Good data and good decision making so that you ultimately have the confidence of moving fast in your transformation. Is the question and the cost of inaction as it says there, it's obsolescence.

I would say it's that if you don't do anything and if you believe that whatever, brought you here will be what will lead you to the next 10 to 15 years, I think you're in for a big surprise, Mike

Mike Reed: Ab Absolutely.

Nuno Gonçalves: One of the things that we say and, if you go, we double down on work and on workforce as well.

there's, we've been,. Changing work in the past decades and before, maybe on our parents' time, you were a worker on one organization and you started there and you ended there. But then people starting to understand, okay, what are the careers and what can I do to ultimately have a better life?

But then we say, well, but we also need flexibility. So we started having this fixed agile flex. Because there is need for flexibility at an organizational level, but also at an employee level. And right now we have this massive impact because for the first time ever, we have this new player in the workforce that is called this digital workers, that we're trying to understand how to, use them in the best way.

How to have this digital worker in the workforce in a way that actually augments the way what you do, so that you're again, so that you're better, faster, more precise, and ultimately create more value to you, to your stakeholders, your shareholders, and the people that ultimately you serve one way or the other.

So, this, bringing this new player will mean that you need to adjust everything else. The question is then how you do that, and that's what I think we've all been thinking about in the past year and a half, two years, when especially Genis is increasing exponentially the impact on work.

but that's what we need to do. So if we see this industry complex, if we see speed, if we see the need to reinvent, what we are suggesting is that for you to reinvent, you need to understand what work do you do, so that then you understand how you're going to evolve the work moving forward as well.

So we're trying to give you some tips, for those of us that ha that China some tips on what is the thinking, what is the rationale for you to get to a place where you can be successful and you could be successful transforming your organizations in every single industry and in particular in this one on, in.

So the question now is, do work, do, in your company, in the your industry, do the roles that are most critical? Do the role, the roles that will ultimately need to be, I call it sunset, that ultimately will disappear in the future? Do the roles that will need to be augmented?

Do, what is the impact on those roles and on newer people? That's where Mike will come and give you a little bit more, perspective on the industry, layout of roles and then ultimately what we're seeing from an impact on roles and on skills and people as well,

Mike Reed: Mike. Yeah. Yep.

And the question here is no different to anywhere else. Who do we have and who will we need? And they're not in the same point in time. So there's a, how do we get to where we need to be in order to remain market competitive, to deliver the value that we want in the future? And some of the value may be materially different, the outputs that are possible through technology.

New manufacturing processes for consumer goods, new mechanisms for 3D printing and other means of developing products that have, could never have existed before or be marketed in a way that could never have been, have existed before. This is a different landscape. So I think it's understanding what's the most likely path to that future and how do I get my people ready or which, who are the people that I need in order to be successful there?

And you made a really good point that as industries we need to transition from thinking about our, just our people to our people and the resources, the digital workers that they can be working alongside, either as assistance or as a effectively a coworker for some of those element. Super exciting time.

Every industry

looking at, the breakdown of the workforce, particularly in consumer goods, it's pretty clear that there's a huge footprint around the sales and retail. There's a huge footprint around. Manufacturing and production. There's a huge footprint around supply chain and logistics. And we've touched on these in a number of other areas.

This is in the order of 85. 87% of the workforce are in those three key areas. We look at the job, these job families and how they're changing. We know from previous conversations that logistics is, logistics can become along as they're manufacturing. That farm to fork aspect. How quickly can I get a product from concept into the hands of the consumer, and reduce all of those costs of logistics and storage on the way through.

How much can I make this process efficient so that it's no longer just in time? It's much tighter than that. The view here, I think, and again thinking back about the research that when we look at the roles that consumer goods is advertising at the moment across industry. I think it was a Deloitte report saying that in the next couple of years, so we're talking about 2028, they're expecting that 40% of roles in this industry will be seeking some level of digital and AI literacy.

So it's not a, it's not becoming a niche and a delivering a SaaS platform to support. It's gonna be intrinsic to the nature of consumer goods. This is the workforce that they're looking for. And we can see what we will see when we look at a couple of roles now that is a requirement that these roles are starting to play in this digital transformation in, say, literacy world in order to remain competitive and push the barriers.

And we can see also one of the benefits here is there's some pretty big chunks of the workforce. So we've got a lot of space to focus and achieve some real benefits of scale.

We start. By looking for some bold decisions that organizations can make to start a real transformation of their workforce, to ready their workforce for an AI power future. As, Nuno said, and as we all, we will also look at both sides of that coin. So what are the bold decisions you can make, but also how do you act responsibly in order to ensure that you are delivering, for your people as well as for your customers?

What we're looking at here is that, as I said, that bold side. So what are some of the headline roles that sit inside consumer goods where there is a clear argument today for a step change, delivering value in the outcomes of these roles? So how can I get more productivity? The, some of the headline areas that align strongly with this industry, were the supply chain analyst and planners were customer service and retail support, and were in the man manufacturing elements of it, around the quality assurance.

So I'll just jump into those. Supply chain enhancements with AI forecasting both for the logistics and the storage. Significant, improvement in, the work around inventory management, around demand forecasting and around, operational logistics. Reduction of inventory requirement, significant impact on a positive impact on the bottom line.

So it's talking about reducing your costs 20%, which effectively flows straight through to your bottom line. So that's a savings that's reflected in profit above revenue. The technologies which exist today across a large number of the segments in this industry, can be deployed today, can have a negative impact on the number of, employees required in this element of the workforce.

So what we've seen at the moment, is that increases in productivity and the way that the work has been done often has in order of a 5%. Reduction in the headcount required. But again, there's growth in the horizontal scope of these roles. So we see these a, these hybrid roles extending their ai literate planning skills out across slightly adjacent areas.

So while there's a reduction in requirements here, there's the opportunity to be reshaping these roles with the new skills that they're requiring. As I said, logistics, and supply chain are a quite broad scope here. So in order to deliver maximum benefit, there's a lot of integration points across the systems that we're talking about.

So that complexity can introduce a six to 12 month timeline. And then we're looking within that timeline, we see the skill requirements as being achievable. We see skills around the familiarity with the tools and skills around under standard data analytics, both to the level which supports functional performance.

Being achievable inside that 12 to six to 12 month timeframe. So it's not that we'll have the technology and then have to go and find a new workforce. We can take our workforce to this future along with an implementation process. So that was really interesting to work through there. Customer service and retail support is not dissimilar to a lot of the other customer service functions we've seen across industries.

We see a real and maturing set of tech technologies that are taking on the tier one conversations, and freeing up existing customer service staff to be focusing on escalations or finding a way to deepen relationships, significant improvement in inefficiencies through automated handling of those lower level, interactions to the order of 50 to 60%.

And again, this flows through to customer service cost reduction while maintaining quality. So that's, we might see velocity as an outcome where we're seeing a lot of these issues are being resolved more quickly. Emails are being sent, or messaging is being sent more quickly in response. Velocity is one part of the equation.

But if there's a quality issue where these same issues are being reopened again and again because they're not being accurately closed, then we've got an issue. So we need to make sure that we're maintaining the NPS, the net promoter score, the customer's experience with the increases in velocity.

But where we are doing that, we're seeing order of 25, 30 5%, reduction in costs. So again, straight to the bottom line. This has the potential for a much more, noticeable reduction in the workforce. So 30 to 40% if we're delivering in the same level of customer experience. And this is one of the really interesting conversations we've had with some of that, some of our customers who are trying to understand, is this just a cost reduction operational efficiency exercise or do we need to chart, a chart our path to a future where the business value, the business differentiation that we're delivering is intrinsic to our people so we can look at the AI parts of their job and reducing those.

Something that we've started to do recently to look at those elements of their role, which are not easily linked to AI potential. And how do we focus on those human elements at the same time? So yes, there's optimization, but how can I leverage the expertise that the individuals bring? And it may be to create deeper relationships with your consumers to be the differentiation so that if everybody else is under the rest of the bottom, your customers are choosing you because you understand them better.

So I think in consumer and retail, this is an opportunity for business differentiation, which may offset the natural response of being able to reduce your costs. Talking about these platforms over the chat bot and c, automations, they're reasonably mature in terms of AI across a bunch of technologies now.

So we see reasonably accelerated times to deliver time to, deliver benefit different from ROI, but we should expect within three to six months that we are seeing them embedded in your teams and delivering value. And,. The skills around that, around scripting or around, configuration, can sit within these roles or adjacent to these roles and are reasonably easily acquired in that same timeframe.

Just touching on the last one, again, quality assurance. We've seen this in a number of areas, but also noting that quality insurance, for example, in healthcare, has a different level of, oversight and obligation than it may in consumer goods. Not to say that there isn't regulation, but there is distinctions between industries.

Again, there's, particularly on the manufacturing side, we see a lot of tooling and opportunity to use, technologies to improve the QA in the process of work. So using, visual automation, visual inspection in improving the consistency and improving compliance, reducing the number of defects. So having, again, reducing defects of direct line to cost, the cost side of the equation, and reducing the requirement for manual inspection.

But then we're giving, we're looking for how can we ensure that we've got a path for those people in a responsible way, into model supervision and, system calibration. So we do see a potential 15 to 20% reduction, but we also see that the requirements to understand the existing processes in situ in factory and how do we use that knowledge to train and continue to reinforce the performance of the systems is material.

We're talking now about real systems, hardware systems, that are interacting with your manufacturing facility. So we're talking about some level of physical implementation, and coordination with your site, your facility. Which has some impact on the time to deliver. So we've seen that there's generally a nine month from delivery time to iron out the bugs in that and achieve value.

Is there anything, from your perspective and in some of that, from your background in learning that you've seen could impact on across any of these roles?

Nuno Gonçalves: Yeah, I think one, I think from a supply chain and, I'm, the more we do these industries, Mike, the more we see that there's a consistent impact on supply chain.

And I, as you were talking about this, I was actually thinking, but what is, could we instead also sometimes of having only an industry perspective, can you have also a functional perspective? 'cause from a functional perspective, we'll give you a little bit of the, we can go a little bit more on the skills, but the reality is one, is that I think supply chain is one.

Yes, quality assurance on manufacturing and, the customer representatives and the retail. So we, those are places that are very specific to some, industries. The supply chain though, is the one that is very intriguing for me because I think it has been, a function, if you want to call it this, that has been impacted by a lot of, upgrades from a manufacturing perspective and from an indu, from a robotics perspective.

So it's not new. It continues to be, and now it's taking a layer on top of it, of the robotization, a layer of automation and of the roles also there. So it's intriguing to see how, not only an industry but a profession, if we want to call it ahead of a supply chain as a profession, will continue to evolve, and will need to upskill and reskill quite significantly as well moving forward.

Mike Reed: Yeah, really interesting. I do.

Is super valuable. I think that's it. Maybe in the future time we could think about focusing in on that and trying to have a conversation across markets about drilling in detail on the specific role in the supply chain, for example, how would, how do, what do we see in this role?

Where do we see it being dealt with differently across industry? Where do we see them coming together and consolidating approaches. Where is technology, applicable and where is it not? I think that's a really interesting, the function perspective is a really interesting link, and we could make the same comment, as you said about customer service around data entry, around business administration, data analytics, maybe around quality assurance.

Recognizing that I do think that functional lens could be a really interesting opportunity to drill in detail and relevant across industries.

the podium, Andel, it's not clear from the slide. What this is trying to unpick is how do we think about prioritization? Because there's, it's clear that things changing. Things are changing everywhere and there's opportunity everywhere. And what we see, across market is, a lot of uncertainty about where to which way to step.

Do I step left or right? What we don't wanna be doing is to see our customers who are responding to the squeaky wheel or the shiny new toy. So I think what we're super keen on doing is ensuring that we've got a consistent framework for understanding how we can value and measure these opportunities and use that as, at least as a first guide to prioritizing where an organization can invest their effort to maximize return.

and the couple here that were, that came out of those three were supply chain and customer service, supply chain analysts. I think because of the scale of impact, while there's a lot more complexity to the solutions here, but they are getting more mature. There's a number of significantly mature, platforms already in this space.

But just the raw opportunity for farm to fork for reducing that in inventory overhead, and speeding the whole delivery process, had that ranking ahead of customer success, customer service, and retail support, which is again, very, it's getting standardized across platforms and could become a differentiator for an organization.

But again, in that second tier of opportunity. So yep. If I was gonna pick a winner, without knowing anything about else, about your individual organization, that's the way we would've been. Recommend that you consider, prioritization.

Nuno Gonçalves: Love this. And I think there's, so a lot of the, a lot of the questions that we get, about this is then one, what, how do you get to these numbers and how can we understand it better?

Can we do the same thing in your organization? Yes. And yes, you can. So that's the answer. But there's work that you need to do. Right. And what Reg started doing two and a half years ago was to start mapping work because the re we then realized at that time that ultimately the skills and the upskilling, it's a means to an end, right?

And we only need skills because there's work to be done. So if work that the work to be done changes, then there will be an impact on skills. And that's why. For you to understand and to be able to have the clarity that Mike is showing and showcasing here of one, understanding what are the roles that are more exposed?

What are the roles that will give you more opportunity? How, what will be the impact if you automate, what will be the impact if you change, if you merge roles, if you create new roles? 'cause typically it'll, there will be an impact also on the skills because you may need to create some net new skills or eventually sunset.

Some skills that you won't need, more in the future. So. To your questions for those that are joining us, for, to your questions of how do you do this, for you to understand what are the skills and impact on people you first need to understand the work. And that was the realization that Ji did, he had two and a half years, ago and we're, we continue to be very obsessed in my, in mapping work and very obsessed on what is the work and how can we reinvent ourselves?

and then of course, what's the path for upskilling and reskilling? So if there's anything that you need to do is that you need to make work visible. You need to understand what work is done is being done. You need to understand what work will be done in the future that will give you a gap. If you understand what, how, if you understand that gap you'll need, you'll be able to start, prioritize, prioritizing.

you'll be able to start aligning your AI strategy. With your business priorities as well, and then ultimately shape the work that you need to do moving forward. I've been using this analogy of the Lego, and, this Mike, where I see an organization a very big, Lego ship, right?

And what we do and what we need to do is actually to understand what are, and to map every single one of those pieces of the Lego and de deconstruct the ship into different Lego pieces. Then as you do that, then you need to understand where you're going to go and what do you need?

You can build a faster, better ship. Because you are redesigning and you want to be better as an organization, or you can come to the realization that ultimately what you need is one aircraft. And you don't need necessarily the ship 'cause you still need, a means of transportation, but something else even.

So how do you redesign and re - engineer your job and your, the work that you do, will require that visibility and that ability to understand interconnect to your strategy. Once you do that, you have the pillar. You understand that what needs to be done to build a faster ship or what needs to be done to build an aircraft.

And once you do that, then you understand what will be the impact on the skills that you'll need one way or the other. So that's work That, and this is not rocket science, Mike. It was always done this. The what? The biggest difference is that ultimately, right now, the AI data allows you to map work and make work visible much faster so that you can have the tools and to redesign and re - engineer yourself also much faster as well.

If you do that, then. You're able to, lead and guide your employees to upskill and reskill in the directions that you're going, your strategy in your organization, and make sure that no one is left behind. Because organizations have a tremendous amount of talent and a tremendous amount of potential in their organization.

So how can you create the conditions of clarity of what will be the work and the skills that you'll need in the future versus those that you won't need in the future? And be very proactive in this. So that's the directions. That's what you need to do. We're gonna show you in the next slides, a little bit more detail of how we do it.

and if you get inspired of how we do it, then reach out and we're more than happy to actually guide you through your journey as well. Mike and the team and what Rigid Team built, in the past two and a half years is these correlated data pieces. If I'm trying to simplify where we correlate for every single one of these industries, 23 different specific, ontology, industry specific ontologies that correlate on say this a lot because it's really important.

This correlation correlate all the roles that exist in, each of the industry. All the tasks because it's the unit of work, all the tasks that exist in every single one of these industries. To the skills that are needed as well. The reason why this correlation is so also important because what will happen is that if you do what we're saying that needs to be done, you will have to reshape your work, which means your tasks will defer, will change.

You'll probably give tasks to your digital workers, but what does this mean? What does, what's the impact on your roles? What's the impact on the skills? That's where that correlation you understanding if you remove tasks, you're probably removing skills. If you add tasks, you're probably adding skills.

What are those tasks? What's the impact on the roles? That's the power of re - engineering and having the perspective of how, in which scenario, your roles will be impacted and the skills that will be impacted as well. So, that's what we also have and what we've built and that ultimately we can put at the this, at the work of many different organizations as well.

That triangulation for me is beautiful, Mike. And the fact that people need to understand that typically there's a lot of organizations that have skills, ontologies and skills frameworks and all of that, but completely detached from roles or completely detached from work.

It's, it makes a tremendous amount of difference because if they're detached, it means that if you change work, then you will have to rebuild your architecture. You don't know, it'll have to be most likely from scratch as well. That dynamic correlation is critically important for whoever wants to reinvent themselves.

Yeah, for sure.

Mike Reed: , the two key realizations that I've had is that when I started my work, the work that I was doing was crystal clear and it was not too dissimilar to what had been happening the year or five years before. So it was well documented and well understood and it was easy to onboard.

And I think as I started my career,. Computa computational support started to become a real thing, whether it's email communications or whether it's programs to support in finance for a starter. And the nature of work changed so quickly that it became about less about the actual process and more about having people who could respond to the scenario.

So I think over time, just the rate of change has meant that we've lost that level of transparency to the atoms of work, to the things that needed to happen in the order just because they were changing so quickly. It is only now that we have the capability with platforms, AI platforms, Rigi to catch up at that velocity with what's happening and what's changing.

So there was this 30 year period where it was moving too fast to maintain accurate documentation about exactly what work has been done and what the tasks are, because it was, by the time you press print, it was different already. We're now at the point where we can manage that dynamically, and I think.

The second key thing in my head is I love your Lego analogy. And that's the one that resonates here is now we can take that what was always a toy ship on the shelf, we can now take apart and we can now decide that I need to get from A to B, but it doesn't need to be a ship anymore.

So that, not so much the, what is the Henry Ford quote that people, if I ask people, they just want me to build a faster horse. That's not the solution that we need anymore. I need to be, and this is the challenge side of this equation. We're not just about going faster. We need to do different.

And that's when I talk about customer success, not reducing your head count by 90%, but finding with that head count that you have, what's the business differentiation that's gonna, is gonna mean that customers remain in general and remain loyal to our organization and our offering compared to others.

So what is, what does this new velocity allow us to do differently? 'cause if it's just to deliver on the same thing, faster race to the bottom. Pretty good idea how that ends. So I think that the real challenge for organizations in consumer goods and others is what are we gonna do differently to capture value and experience for our customers so that we now have something unique?

And that's not just fast, not only fast services. If there's,

Nuno Gonçalves: if there's anything that would love people that are watching us to take back to their homes and offices. Is the following, is that ultimately we've all been in this. Journey to try to understand what will be the skills of the future, right?

And especially, in learning and talent and HR and even with the business leaders, you see that in every single trends. And that the having the right skills, to actually deliver on what you need to deliver in your strategy is at the concerns of the, one of the top concerns of every single CEO, right?

So, but what we are still, what are we saying is that we need a mindset shift. It's, the skills are means to an end. And if you want to understand what are the skills that you're gonna need, you first need to understand what is the work that you do, and what will the work that you need to do in the future that will give you the skills.

If you only look at skills in isolation, it'll be as I've been in many of these conversations, Mike, where there, it's a, we are in a rooms full of senior leaders sharing opinions and not data, not facts. Oh, I think this will be more important. Oh, I think it's not about thinking, it's actually about understanding and correlating the evolution of your strategy with the revolution of your work and the evolution of the skills.

That's the path that you need to go. And what? You can't just, you will not be able to understand what are the skills of the future without understanding how you're transforming yourself. That's it. It's a statement out there. If anyone that is listening doesn't agree, reach out.

Let's have a conversation. Love to hear your thoughts as well.. If we're giving you a little bit of a perspective of what this is, then we're saying, listen, the realization is that ultimately the impact, and you see here the impact is on work. If we talk about the impact of AI is on the work, is on the task and not on the skills.

So therefore you first need to understand what is the impact on task and, to understand what will be the impact on people, on jobs and so on support. So that was, a great insight that Rigi had two and a half years ago that I think is very valid and most companies are right now waking up to this.

Rigi was very just premature on the thinking, two and a half years, ago as well. If we go to the next slide, you'll have a little bit of a perspective of what this is. And again, we have. I think, what is it, 250, 000 jobs and we map those 250, 000 jobs. So imagine the millions of data points that we have, right?

So not easy to showcase here, but what do you see there is that for every single job, we map work, which is the tasks we map, the amount of time that every single part, that these tasks will take in these jobs will map every single skill or the skills that are needed for these tasks. By the way, people, and again, the importance of correlation, people believe or sometimes don't realize that for you to do one task, you need three to five skills.

Right. People think, oh, maybe one task, one skill. It's not the case. You need three to five skills for one task. So how do you map that? And that's what we do at Reejig and ultimately had the pleasure to build in the past two and a half years to understand if you remove one of the pieces of one of the tasks, then what is the impact on skills moving forward?

So if we do that per role, then we can start understanding, because again, we're obsessed by work and obsessed by tasks. We understand what those tasks are, what are those that are more, exposed to automation. If we see an entire organization in all the roles of an organization, we also see the tasks that are being duplicated in different places.

So we start giving you intelligence and places and opportunities for you to improve, whether it's reducing duplication or actually augmenting your workforce one way or the other, if you decide to do so as well. So it is for me, the first time in my 25 years of experience in HR where we finally have the tools, Mike.

To actually do what the business does. Marketing, they understand customers to, they're obsessed with customers supply chain. They're obsessed with, everything that is around quality of their supplies and robotics and manufacturing, industrialization as well. In HR or any organization, whether it's in HR or not, you need to be obsessed by work.

And that's where I think right now, we have the tools to be able to understand, highlight work, make it visible and play and understand what is, a very intentional path of development in your design and your people as well. So that's what our, ontology is a big word, but it's what our work ontology brings to every single organization is that visibility and that intelligence of, and highlighting some of the opportunities that you'll have to streamline and optimize your organization as well.

And here it's just a screenshot to show you a little bit of what this could eventually be.

Mike Reed: Yep. To help you if we go to

Nuno Gonçalves: the last slide.

Mike Reed: Yeah, go ahead. It's a, it's, there's a lot, right? There's a lot to visualize. So I think having a, having somewhere to ground your thinking, how can I think about a role?

How can I think about a person? How can I think about us? I think it's material. Just jumping onto the next slide and conscious of time. The other side of bold and responsible, as we said, is to be, to have a strategy, to be responsible. So that's identifying those roles which are likely to be, most significantly impacted.

And what could we do with people with that skillset to ensure that they continue to have a sustainable path, a meaningful career, and also leverage the investment that you've made in them. And the capability. The three of the roles which appear to be the most impacted in consumer goods are customer service, quality control, data entry.

and it's, we see a path from there to support around chat bot training and supporting the new infrastructure of service for customer service re reps in quality control, into that QA supervision role. And then from data entry into,. Automation workflow analysts. So as opposed to just entering the data, it's, well, what's the process for which this data delivers value?

What we've seen is that customer service and data entry featuring a lot of these industries, and you made a really good point before, and, I think there is value in us considering do we take a functional lens and start to deep dive in particular functions. But for now, if I'm focusing on the consumer goods industry, I think that quality control inspector is the one that's worth diving into.

And so what we see there is that quality control inspector has an understanding of the, both the process and the process controls and how to identify defects. What's the nature of a defect and what's the impact of defects. So they've already got this understanding. They have understanding of the manufacturing process, they un have understanding of the safety requirements.

So this already sits inside the skillset and the knowledge and beha, capabilities to quality control inspector role. So this in this background is valuable if we flow it forward into a, an AI powered role QA process supervisor. So you're no longer on the control, inspect, quality control inspector line, you are now managing the process, which is effectively supporting what you were doing previously.

And that will require some experience and expertise to be gained with the tooling that's gonna do that, whether it's computer vision or others, and understanding what a d how do dashboards work in this new environment and what is it telling me and what is the feedback loop? How do I make sure that it's reinforcing based on quality of out outcomes?

How do I use the new tooling in order to deliver on the promise of ai? So how do I take what I'm already good at and apply that in this new role? And we also see that this is an area while the, I think the,. The onboarding time for platforms in this space, I think was six to 12 months from memory.

The onboarding time for skills in this workforce is, you can see significantly inside that. So within three months, there's enough familiarization that we should be able to deploy people into these roles. So it's not a question of having to find a new workforce. You've got time to upskill the workforce that you have into this new capability.

The space for learning here strongly tied to the tools and the platforms that you're using. So, while, Udacity and others general platform tool have training around the fundamentals of AI and quality AI in manufacturing, it will come down to the infrastructure that you are using, whether it's Siemens or others, just to look at those vendors of those platforms and the training there about how do I bring this into my work stream.

So there's no shortage of capability, acquisition available through learning. Retention impact, is not significantly different to others. Although cost of turnover, I questioned the data on this. I think it's probably a bit higher or more related to the overall cost of the individual. I think this may be downgraded because we feel that this is a role that bys nature is gonna reduce the cost of reskilling.

When we look at the number of courses that are required to move from the left hand side to the right hand side is super achievable. 5, 800 includes estimates per time alongside the cost courses. And the return on investment is very quick. So that aligns with a really strong increase in revenue per employee when they're moving along this path.

And that increase in revenue per employee is reflected in increasing value in the employee themselves. So we also see this new role as a higher price point, as a resource compared to the current quality inspector roles. So the way we look at this generally is, as I explained it's a plus it's delivering.

Increased, performance that the organization is looking for. It's leveraging the capabilities that you already have and transitioning them to the new roles, but it's also delivering value for the employee. Not only do they have a continuing career, a valuable career, but they're also in a career that's more valuable to them as well.

So I think that we're looking at these the responsible side to try and identify those opportunities for win.

But it's not,.

Nuno Gonçalves: And I think it can be, yeah, it can be overwhelming sometimes. And we're now saying, oh my God. It's not only about skills, it's also about work. But now we need to map work. Yes. But think about, the consequences of not doing and not doing this in a journey run one way or the other.

Right? So, what we wanna say, and what I think is one of the values that we bring to the industry is that we give you a path. And in this it's a sequential path. Sometimes it can be overlapping, but there's a, there's, there is a sequence. You, it's, you cannot be a re - skilling powerhouse without understanding ultimately the work and the evolution of work.

So, for those of you that have been, as I've been a chief learning officer that have been very focused on skills and building portfolios and all of that, think about what we're doing and where we're investing your money. Is it worth it? Yes or no? What we are suggesting, and it there is a lot of evidence here, is that for you to understand what are the skills that you need, you first need to understand what is the work that you do and the work that you're gonna do moving forward.

So, it is a journey. We show this journey here, whatever you are in phase one, phase two, phase three, great. Know that there's work to be done. But start with understanding work. Start understanding what, how the work will evolve, may bring and understand what is the impact to your worker.

it's what's, it's the work to work or how can you start feeding, nudging your employees to roles and that, and careers that will be more sustainable, roles that will exist in the future versus those, and actually move them away from the roles that you see that are very exposed to automation that might not exist in your industry or in your company from the next 12 to 18 months.

And then start building the skills, because then you'll realize. If you understand work, you'll realize what is the content, what are the skills that ultimately, you will need to upskill in your organization one way or the other. And of course, as you do this, as do you transform yourself, as you bring AI into your workforce, DNA, then you'll have an organization that will have, upskilled individuals, upskilled, digital workers that ultimately work together, in a place where you understand that you need to continue to deliver, the value, of your company.

So that's the journey that we have, and giving you a little bit of a roadmap, for you to act on as well. Time goes fast when you're having fun. That's always what I hear, Mike. So, we are getting to the end of our conversation about this very exciting industry. If you that are listening, if you have, if you want to have, more personalized skills masterclass for your organization that is not only industry specific, but more specific to your organization, more than happy to set that up.

For you, there's a QR code. Just go follow that QR code and we'll be there. We'll show up and we'll set that up for you. And you tell her to your organization as well, a big thank you to Mike. It's been always a pleasure. It's, I learn a bunch, as always. If we will see each other, and we'll be focusing and deep diving on the environmental services industry, which is also really interesting, on May 1st, on Thursday, May 1st at the same time, so that hopefully we can have everybody from all, latitudes, being able to join and listening in and contributing as well.

Mike.

Mike Reed: Yep.

Nuno Gonçalves: Thank you

Mike Reed: to do this again, Nuno. I'll see you on May 1st, but I'll see you before as well.