We are delighted to have launched and presented our White Paper: ‘The Future of Guest Services in the Workplace’, in our first Dublin based Portico & Friends! Taking place in AIB’s beautiful central offices, our insightful discussion overlooked the rooftops of Dublin.

In this installation, we explore emerging technology in guest services and the workplace.

Q: What emerging technologies or tools do you anticipate will be most effective for productive workplace in the future?

Giles G.S: Our focus as a company is never really technology. What we hope is that the technology exists and it sits in the background and enables a high quality experience. No initiative or incentive should be driven by technology. The main focus should be on what we are trying to do as a guest service function, what our ultimate goal is, and integrating these great tools to enable that experience.

How do you want to make people feel, and can the technology serve you? The people – the intentional design – has to come first.

Oliver Hiner: For us, there’s technology we use internally, and technology we use as an organisation.

Going back to 2019, there were some awful attacks on London Bridge, and we quickly realised we need a better way of contacting all our people in an emergency. We used an app solution, which we call Heartbeat, and have since gone on to develop Heartbeat as an internal sense of community. It’s a bit like Facebook, but with much more to it. It’s a way of quickly contacting everybody, and a tool for our teams to communicate and share things across the company and innovate together.

As contractors, our teams have expanded, employing over 1000 people across 250 buildings. So, our people are dotted around the country and if they can easily talk to each other, that really helps. From an operational perspective, I can pull off my payroll report and get a snapshot of how a location is operating. I can efficiently see the amount of overtime, staffing, maternity or sickness levels, allowing us to consider issues with things like sickness, or well-being.

It’s very simplistic, but technology helps with this, and it highlights how people management systems are important.

In terms of technology in our guest services, we’re very much at an exploratory stage. We are quite close to trailing use of holograms, which would see us centralising a number of service points into just one person. Something we are very likely to see in the future is the ability to provide a service without actually being there.

Chris Moriarty: AI is sometimes helpful to talk about it. The simple way I talk about AI is essentially quantum computing, which, in a sense, means high quality programming that is very accessible. We can now do things that we couldn’t do before. Our system can take millions of words worth of feedback and turn it into some neat, tiny summaries telling you how your workplace is operating it – which is pretty cool!

In terms of general technology, Giles is onto it with that human element. If you start with the technology and think about how to use it, you’ll end up doing something for the sake of doing it. Instead, let’s design an experience first and question, what do we want to happen? What do we want to feel like? And then, how does technology make it better?

I get to visit lots of workplaces and there’s two reception experiences that stuck with me. One of them was Bloomberg in Finsbury Square. After the usual wait and photograph taken, they directed us to a lobby area, which was like a huge sweet shop where we could essentially help ourselves! I then wondered who we were meeting and how they’d know we were there… Out of nowhere, someone came and found us – they get the photo of us straight to their phone and lets the team know we’re here and what we look like! Pretty impressive.

I went to UBS for a meeting and they were lovely! I wondered how everyone knew my name and where I was going, but of course it had all been programmed through the teams iPads, phones, doors and elevators, just for me! I didn’t walk away from that experience thinking about the technology, but it was clearly a designed experience that uses the technology to make it slick and seamless and thoroughly enjoyable.

I think that’s the key. There’s so many toys out there. We can play with lots of different things, but it doesn’t mean we should, right? We should take a step back and design the experience first.

Our blog series and White Paper delves into our thought-provoking conversation, exploring the evolution of guest services in the workplace, and the changes we must make to meet the growing demand and shift in employee demand and values. We’ve picked out the hottest topics for you to take away innovative information to apply within your own teams! Read more here.