Navigating Modern Friction with AI

Ryan Purvis: Hello, and welcome to the Digital Workspace Works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host, supported by our producer, Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field, stories from the front lines, the problems they face and how they solve them, the areas they're focused on from technology, people, and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts for the Digital Workspace inner workings.

Hello.

Heather Bicknell: Hello.

Ryan Purvis: How are you?

Heather Bicknell: I am good. I was just setting up.

So I had to, redo, Authenticator and all that good stuff.

Ryan Purvis: Microsoft. Making your life more difficult every day.

Heather Bicknell: How goes?

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, all good, all good. Although I'm struggling with my bank that I use. And a couple years ago, in fact 20 years ago, there was a bank in South Africa called 20 Twenty. So the number 20 and the word 20. And I was one of their first clients and it was the first bank that didn't have a brick and mortar building like there was no way to get in.

Everything was handled via it was it was backed by a bank called Saambou, S A A M B O U and everything was handled through email and phone call to a call center. And it was fantastic. If they did mortgages, I would have done my mortgage to them. That's how good they were. My credit card, my bank account, it just operated.

And they had cool snazzy cards, see through orange bank cards. I didn't get a very good credit card amount from them, but it just worked. And it was simple and, it was highly effective. And, if you had a check, you know, you take the check to any ATM and you put the check in with the amount with your card, and then we get banked and because they had a good network and it just worked.

And I mean, I do find the South African banking system still to be streets ahead of the rest of the world in a lot of ways. It's because you've got to deal with a lot more stuff in SA. So, innovation's high, a lot of things. Anyway, the bank that I'm dealing with at the moment. I got a check in April, beginning of April, which was bigger than their cap.

They could only handle a certain amount, through the app, which I don't understand because it's, because what they want you to do is send it, is post the check in, which I did first class. So it arrived the next day. So it arrived the 9th of April they couldn't find the check for a month.

Heather Bicknell: Oh no.

Ryan Purvis: And then it didn't, it wasn't very clear in the instructions, but you're supposed to write your account number on the back of the check, which I didn't do.

So my fault, but I still sent them a picture of the check because I took a picture and the back is blank and the front is thing. So in the end, I've given them the check as a photographic check anyway. And I suppose they want the check physically so they can validate that it's a real check, etc. But I'm now still struggling with them.

It's now, it's now been a month. And their app is telling me that the check will be banked on the 7th of May. But that obviously hasn't happened. And I'm going backwards and forwards with their guys via email. And no one can actually tell you what's going on, why it's taking so long. And then they also try, because the check is from the HMRC, basically from the tax man, they now need to validate it additionally with extra information.

And I'm thinking if the HMRC is sending me a check to pay me, you know, the rigmarole I had to go through with HMRC to get this done was bad enough. Now you're checking it, but you're taking, I mean, I sent the stuff on Monday. Okay. Monday was my work holidays. I sent it. So they got it on Tuesday and it was blank.

So I had to send it again. But it's been three days to read two documents, to bank it. And I was just thinking, you know, for this neo bank, you know, online only bank that with all the rest of it, it's such a poor experience. I could have opened a bank account with my local high street bank, good old brick and mortar walked in, giving them the information I already banked with them so they would have KYC'd me and KYB'd me straight away because my other business is with them.

And I can probably bank the check and got it in seven days. And now I can't get the check back. Because it's with them. And it just, as much as modern technology has improved things. It still fails because of bad process. You know, and that's what, what fascinates me. So anyway, I'm a little frustrated today.

Heather Bicknell: Rightly so. Yeah. I feel like, there's still needs to be, fallbacks in a lot of digital models. I feel even, going through some of the grocery self checkouts has definitely become a, more mandatory thing around me in terms of there are fewer, workers. So, it's sort of not optional, depending on what part of the day and and whatnot.

But I think about, like, some of the systems that you need to, you know, swipe something immediately and have it on the, the tray beside, where you're scanning things immediately or the weight is off and it will, you know, do some sort of alarm. But if I, you know, was 80 years old or, you know, had some like whatever going on where I was a little bit slower, which it would be actually impossible to use that kind of a system.

So it's like, yeah, there's still value to having that other options I guess.

Ryan Purvis: I'm smiling at that because I went and bought something yesterday, the day before yesterday, and I was putting this stuff onto the scale. And I bought two because I'm on a carnivore diet. So I've got these two, I buy these big things of meat and I put them down.

And for some reason the weight was slightly different. So, even though, even though I put down the item, it probably was just outside of the range of what it was expecting the weight to be. So, it says, take the item off. So you take it off and you put it back on again. And then it can't tell you that it's off by 0.01 percent or whatever it is.

So, now I have to call someone over. So, she came and she's like, put I don't understand what the problem is. Now she tried to override it, but the override wouldn't work. So, we had to move to another machine. Now, thankfully there was another machine available there, but now, you know, no one can, there's no way to troubleshoot that issue as an operator to basically say, okay, well, you know, you need to recalibrate the machine or whatever it is because it's now off by, it can't pick up the weight difference.

And I find that often also happens when you, like we buy like paracetamol boxes, little 16 tablets at a time. Those things are so light. That

Heather Bicknell: yeah, they don't register that a

Ryan Purvis: register. And I think the scales do get out of calibration and I don't know. I mean, you know, having built self healing machines, I don't know if that, machine is sophisticated enough to self heal itself to realise that its measurement is off by, you know, 0.01 percent or whatever the thing is that it needs to recalibrate. So as much as the modern stuff saved time, I think it's created more friction. And then I find this other irony that every time I go and do, because we have, I don't know if you have this, you probably have in the States as well.

So you have like a few choices. You have the choice of your, fill your trolley or your basket and go to the till. Then you have, fill your basket or your thing, and you go to the self scanning section. And then you have this other option where you can take the radar gun, the barcode scanner, and you can scan as you shop.

And then basically go to the thing at the end, just pay. And then what they're supposed to do is, from a security, you know, from a theft point of view, is that they randomly will ask you to, out of your trolley, take 10 items and re scan it. And the person comes and does it, and then if you scan everything fine, then they let you go.

And if they don't, then they have to re scan the entire trolley. But I can't tell you the amount of times that I've gone through the whole process of barcode scanning everything, getting to that part of just, Scan and go. And I've had to re-scan the entire trolley. Not for the 10 unit check, but they've, they basically wanna re-scan the entire trolley, which is always like a whole trolley.

And you're like, well, what is the point? I might as well just go back to the, the teller to scan it once. And yes, okay, fair enough, there's been one or two times, 'cause I have my headphones on that I might have not scanned the two bags of nuts or my favorite one is I took, I grabbed two boxes of pizzas and I didn't realise that the second pizza was in a Hawaiian and the top one was just a margarita.

So, I've scanned the pits at the top twice thinking they're the same and they're not just messed up the whole stock thing. I mean, I can understand those things, but I just find it so fascinating how the one thing that's supposed to, especially for someone like me, who's, is there to be quick, always ends up with this, additional friction, you know, because of, the process.

Heather Bicknell: Well, speaking of clunky. Devices and, process, you want to talk about the rabbit R1 AI device? Sure. The orange box. I watched a review.

Ryan Purvis: I watched a review. Yeah.

Heather Bicknell: MKBHD review. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah. Look, I'll say this for the price tag, it's probably okay, because for 200 dollars, you know, you kind of would take a punt on it and see how it goes.

But after watching the review, I just thought it was hilarious. Like, I don't know how much they spent building this thing.

Heather Bicknell: The four apps, I liked when he scanned his coffee plant and they told him it was a Monstera. So that, like, just the fidelity of AI accuracy is not maybe there.

Ryan Purvis: Well, I mean, I think you could probably build something better with a Raspberry Pi.

I mean, if

Heather Bicknell: someone has,

Ryan Purvis: well, yeah, maybe it's worth even just looking around and seeing what people have done. But mean, if you think so, so I go back to my sort of experience of building self healing machines. I know what we had to do in order to make the end point smart. To self heal itself. And we never got to the vision, but we got pretty, pretty much on the right track, I would say.

And when I look at these devices, and, the thing that worries me about them is the knowledge that that device has to have in order to recognise something or process something locally. It's just not going to have it. So until you have the 5G networks out and 6G probably, which is going to be like really low latency, you're delayed to get the information.

And you're learning capability. Oh, I'm going to have to compensate for each other. And I just caught, I mean, these are good. These are great prototypes and their toys. I mean, I wouldn't even give it to my kids to play with. I mean, my favorite thing that really put me off is when he was trying to do the brightness thing and he had to hold it with one hand to use the dial to scroll up and down to get the brightness to change.

And I just thought, really, this is what you came up with. And it's just missing. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you're better with your phone. And and having an app like if I was if I was doing product for these guys, I would build an app on the phone to use the phone device capabilities. Until it works so well on the phone because you're then you've got, you know, you've you've taken out constraints of building a hardware thing because you'll be given hardware like only work on iPhone only work on Android of a certain or Samsung's and get the app working right.

And then go and build the hardware. Because I mean, how much money would they have wasted on building some hardware for something that just looks cool and orange?

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, just to make it look cool. I think to get it some attention. It looks like a toy, but then the use cases are, you know, very adult, right?

It's Uber. It's, what is it, DoorDash. It's Spotify So it's not a kid's device. Well,

Ryan Purvis: well, so for double the price. Roughly 200, let's call it 400, 350 pounds. I can buy my Ray Ban sunglasses, which will pair to my phone, which I can make phone calls. I can listen to music and I can take video and I can talk to Meta, and Siri through and it's immediately functional, immediately useful.

And it's not. It's not a sophisticated piece. I mean, it's not a piece of engineering. It's a really great piece of engineering. This is falling flat on so many things because they just don't have a clarity to what they're trying to provide. It's pretty clear. And if I look at the spec, you know, two and a half gigahertz processor, four gigs of memory and 128 storage.

That's a Raspberry Pi. So for 70 dollars, You can get the Raspberry Pi, the top of the range one, I think, with a case, and you could probably add the camera for another 20 bucks. And you could probably, you know, you'd have to probably make a button, or plug a button onto it, but you could build this then, with a bit of Python.

Heather Bicknell: Sounds like a fun weekend project for you. At least at the end of the day, you know, your sunglasses are still sunglasses, right? They hold another function as well.

Ryan Purvis: Well, this is a paperweight, an orange paperweight.

Heather Bicknell: It's a toy. You give it to your toddler.

Ryan Purvis: But it would worry me giving it to a child because it would be wrong.

And that's the problem with generative AI. It's always, it's mostly wrong. I don't most of it's, you know,

Heather Bicknell: It's frequently wrong. I would say the hallucinations are bad. I don't know.

Ryan Purvis: But I mean, if you look at Google, Google has that image search, which you can take a picture of something and put it through and it does find it. Like you don't need an AI for that.

You just need a good search. And that's the thing a lot of these things are, are AI, but they're not. And someone's, yeah, someone's got to do this stuff for it to be, you know, to pave the way for someone to do it properly. And at least they're not charging 800 bucks for this

Heather Bicknell: with a

Ryan Purvis: subscription fee.

But, I still think you need, I mean, I would see, I think it's a wearable that has to be developed. I think you need the sunglasses or you need the glasses to come or you need the watch to become more sophisticated. That's where it's going to be. I'd love to, in fact, my next watch will be a, will be, with the phone, so that I don't have to carry my phone with me anymore, so that I've decided on.

In fact, I was watching a review, yeah, I was watching a review of a guy when I was in Sri Lanka and, he spent the entire day using the Ultra 2 as his device. So replying to messages, replying to emails, doing phone calls, all that on his Ultra. And I think there was only two .Use cases he couldn't do.

And I thought that was pretty powerful. Like he could listen to his music, you could do phone calls, you know, he replied to that message. You couldn't do WhatsApp. WhatsApp didn't work, but that's not a big thing in America anyway. And you could, and you could do payments, which for most part is what I use my phone for.

Generally, I carry around to tap and to read my book. So the only thing you couldn't do, yeah, there's no Kindle for a watch. So that's a, that's a bit of a problem, but I've actually been using my Kindle now a lot more. So that probably would be a fine exchange. But I just love the idea of him just using a watch, and that was it, and his headphones.

And that watch, the Ultra 2 lasted almost two days doing that, which is phenomenal, compared to your phone. My phone doesn't even last three hours.

Heather Bicknell: Did he say how old his, his Ultra 2 was? I wonder.

Ryan Purvis: I think it was a brand new one. Relatively, I mean, I would buy a secondhand one.

I wouldn't buy a brand new one, but you know, the thing is with the watches, I find they just, you can get more time out. The biggest problem with the watch is not the battery dying. It's actually that the software runs too slowly over time for what you want to do. So it's performance degrades, but the battery actually lasts.

You still have a pretty good batch about time. It starts to fail, but I've had watch twos and watch threes that don't update anymore, but the battery still lasts, you know, 16 hours, 18 hours. So they become my sleep watches.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah. I find it last mine, will die if I have an activity going much faster.

so yeah, it was the GPS

Ryan Purvis: for sure.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, every time I go on a hike, for instance, I can't record my whole day hiking. My Apple watch always dies.

Ryan Purvis: Oh, you need an ultra.

Heather Bicknell: I did look at it when I was getting my new one. I was like, I really can't justify it as a cool device. It's just, it's a big screen. It's a clunky thing.

but yeah,

Ryan Purvis: I missed it. I read an article that was comparing the Garmin's, Listen to the Polar and the Ultra and I would probably say that I can't remember exactly the outcome, that the Garmin was still the better one for the proper hiking that you would do.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: But as an all round watch, the Ultra 2 was still the best option.

And I've seen, it's funny, I've seen recently a lot of people wearing the Ultras. So I think they're starting to become more common, but I think it's also a status symbol cause you're going to spend a lot more money on an ultra than you would on a, on an eight or a nine or 10. I don't even know what watches out there at the moment for Apple.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah.

You'd send me another article about, I think it, what was the title remote work husbands or something like that? Yeah. From home husbands. Did that resonate with you? Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: And it's, and it's so funny because, and I just from the headline, because we were having this conversation yesterday with our therapist and her daughter is an academic and she moves around wherever her grants are. And her husband just has to basically pick up and go, you know, wherever that's going to be.

And I've kind of seen it with my wife as well, because she's in a much more corporate job, we have to be more located to where the clients because I'm more nomadic, you know, as long as I'm connected, I can do my work. I tend to be more housebound and do the house stuff. And my, and my diary is a lot more flexible, but I can move a lot more with what's going on inside the house to compensate for her being, you know, in London or whatever it is.

And I think it's just, I don't know, I can't remember the entire article now, but I just felt like that's a trend that I'm seeing more and more most of the roles are kind of switching again. And maybe it's a case of more opportunities now for a woman, specifically like my wife's come back from having two kids.

So, you know, now she's, she's firing to get a career off the ground. She's finding those opportunities. And I'm hearing it from other people where the men have kind of established themselves so they can be a little bit more housebound or work from home and do the odd day in the city or day in the office.

The women are more driven. I don't know. It was just, it was just a weird thing. Cause it's come up a few times in conversation. And, I think there's also a large level of support or progression of putting women into much better positions than they were. You know, more opportunities to, to have more diversity, more inclusion, and that kind of momentum is not caught up.

I don't know,

Heather Bicknell: I think what I like about, you know, the modern kind of flexible work, especially full remote, if 1 partner in a relationship can do that, you're not making as much of a sacrifice, right? Imagine, like, the old way, it's like, 1 of you could get the best job you possibly could basically.

Right? And then you move to that area. And then the other person has to find, like a job that would suit it's it's, you know, depending on what your profession is, you're often live, like, where you live is determined by one person's vocation. So having someone have that flexibility of being, you know,

totally it doesn't matter to. You know, within some degree of reason, maybe like you're bound to your particular country, for instance, but, that flexibility gives both people, I guess, the option in, in the case that someone has a profession that, you know, needs to be done in person, like being a doctor, for example.

Ryan Purvis: Maybe it's a case of just by career trajectory, it just happens to be that certain roles have become, I don't know, empowered more than they were before. So, you have more of a choice to where you work, what you do. And traditionally, you know, maybe pre COVID even that was the reason is that in order to do that role, you had to be in the office every day and you had to be located close to the office, which made it very difficult for a working mom, to do it because the working dad was doing whatever his role was.

But now because everyone's transitioned into this more hybrid way of working, because I don't believe it worked from home is the only option. I think it's got to be hybrid, it's opened the door to working moms to have careers remote as well. And because now you have this joint flexibility. As I say, I spend a lot of time at home, so I can do a lot of home stuff.

My wife could go do a lot more corporate stuff. And it's just interest balancing out naturally. Yeah.

Heather Bicknell: Well, flexibility makes a big difference. well have a good rest of your day.

Ryan Purvis: Thanks. You too. Good to catch up. Bye.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Heather Bicknell is our producer editor. Thank you, Heather, for your hard work on this episode, please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes at the Google Play Store.

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