Business leaders offer insight in new Tees Business venture
EVENTS
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VIEW FROM THE BOARDROOM
Business leaders offer insight in new Tees Business venture
Tees Valley Business Board chair Matthew Ord( centre), of LV Shipping, shares a joke with fellow delegates.
WORDS: DAVE ROBSON PICTURES: CHRIS BOOTH
The advance of AI and how firms can beef up their cybersecurity were among topics discussed at a new business forum. The Teesside Boardroom is a new event, organised by Tees Business, that brings bosses together for lunch and a round-table discussion about issues affecting their organisations: in this case, Adapting At Pace – how businesses are embracing change without losing focus.
The inaugural gathering took place in Wynyard Hall’ s Londonderry Room and was attended by an array of Tees business talent.
Stockton-based razorblue was sponsor of the inaugural event. And with the IT specialists’ expertise in the building, it was natural to discuss AI and cybersecurity.
Tees Business director Dave Allan posed the questions …
Q: With many companies investing in AI, automation and digital systems, how do you decide what’ s genuinely transformational versus just the latest hype? Rachel Burke: It’ s whether it adds real value to your business. We used to send people up in towers, on offshore platforms or in oil refineries, and they would travel to the site, do the scan, come back, write a report and email it to the customer. Now, using data and AI, we’ re giving real-time results to the customer. We’ re saving days and it’ s on a digital platform, so that’ s adding real value to our business. But there’ s a difference between that kind of value-driven data and someone saving half an hour by writing a report but it reads like it’ s been written by AI.
Nikki Sayer: We built our own automated process because we had to – it was a necessity for the business. But it needs senior management – there needs to be a strategy within the business instead of everybody just doing their own thing.
There needs to be a strategy within the business instead of everybody just doing their own thing.”
20 | Tees Business