Tech is booming, yet according to a recent report by Tech Nation, women represent just 19% of the UK technology workforce. By not having women in tech roles, not only do we leave out half of our population from in demand, self-fulfilling, and well-paid jobs, but we also stifle economic growth and remove women from being decision makers in key global industries.

Whether it’s through our people or the products that we build, diversity and inclusion is at the heart of how we approach innovation in a fairer, more equitable way. As part of this, we wanted to ally with organisations who make gender equality their battle cry.

Code First Girls works with companies and individuals to help improve diversity in technology careers by offering free training to young women. Since 2013, they’ve helped teach over 20,000 women to code for free. Their programmes develop both technical and personal skills and connect young women to mentors within a range of industries.

Our teams in Consulting and Financial Advisory were eager to collaborate with Code First Girls on their mission. Together, we delivered an eight-week course, leveraging our people’s own skills and experience – including our UX designers and researchers. Over a third of the team volunteered in some way to run the course, upskilling 70 young women over 3 cohorts.

I’ve enjoyed challenging myself during the networking sessions and building up my confidence. Having gained basic coding skills thanks to this course, I’ve been selected to join a Python training programme run by my university. This will enable me to have a better understanding of data analysis, which has always been one of my main goals and hopefully my ticket to joining the UK's tech workforce.

- Antonella Amaccianti, Code First Girls Student

Sharing with young women, like Antonella, the knowledge that will help her make her mark in this world brings an amazing sense of pride and achievement to our Ventures teams. Our belief is that, with the likes of Code First Girls, we can close the gender gap once and for all. Because ultimately, we all know who really runs the world!

Manufacturing is a fine balance. Whilst on one hand sustaining the global thirst for a product is important, having too much inventory can eat into working capital and P&L.

This was one of the key challenges faced by Campari Group. And they were not alone, with many other consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses facing the same problem.

Traditionally, in this scenario, we put our supply chain experts to work. However, on this occasion, we wanted to infuse our expertise with technology to deliver a faster, more powerful and sustainable solution to clients. So that’s what we did.

Using Deloitte Ventures incubation capability, we began to experiment - pairing our industry experts with data engineers and advanced Formula 1 simulation technology. The result? SupplyCycle. A product that creates a digital copy of our client’s factory operations to test millions of possible scenarios without disrupting current production. It gives robust, statistically sound insights that perfectly balance consumer demand, production and inventory – before implementation.

Having tested this product with a number of clients, including Campari, we found that it not only achieves improved efficiencies but on average, saved €1m across P&L and €1.6m in working capital.

We’ve been working with Deloitte to optimise our supply chain operations, and implementing SupplyCycle was key to making the necessary improvements in the supply planning process. By making this change we now have much more control over our production planning processes and consequently vastly improved inventory management while at the same time balancing cost to serve. With ever changing consumer needs, increasing supply chain agility without compromising cost is a key component for a successful business.

- Dunc Lowe, Campari Group’s Head of Global Supply Chain

And importantly, for all the Aperol Spritz consumers of the world, growth in Aperol demand is consistently being met. Cheers to that!

Leaning on AI to ease the burden when your health care system is at capacity may not be a natural reaction. But by turning to it, and collaborating with a Scottish NHS Regional Authority, we were able to reduce the load on NHS Lothian’s doctors, and ultimately improve patient care.

The numbers don’t lie – there’s a growing challenge in healthcare. From December 2015 to 2018, one of the most pressured specialties was Gastroenterology with the total number of patients on the waiting list for a new appointment increasing by 20%. This area saw outpatient demand double over 10 years from 2007. Moreover, in December 2017, 30% of patients were waiting longer than the standard 12 weeks before seeing a doctor. These were the significant challenges faced by NHS Lothian.

Increasing capacity by employing more doctors might seem like the only solution. However, we sought to find an answer in an unlikely spot. Our AI Studio noticed that there were parallels between the way doctors review patient letters and how retailers review customer communications. Every day, customer service staff sift through customer enquiries to decide the priority and type of query the customer has. Not too dissimilar to what specialist doctors are doing when reading through patient referral letters to decide how urgently a patient needs to be seen and for what.

For Kishan Pattni, who works within the AI Studio, this was the lightbulb moment, realising that some of the techniques used in training AI to learn the meaning of customer service queries, could be repurposed to interpret medical referral letters.

It’s something that we knew we could help the NHS automate, having previously used AI to solve the same act of triaging in the retail space, but whilst we were confident in the concept, we didn’t want to underestimate the scale of the challenge. Our AI Studio ventured on, working in collaboration with doctors, hospital process experts, and regulatory specialists to build a solution.

The Referral Intelligence and Triage Automation tool has learnt from 20,000 referral letters. It can predict clinical triage outcomes and urgency status with up to 80-90% accuracy for patients referred for suspected cancer. It’s a tool that on average removes 2 days from the patient pathway, enabling quicker access to appointments. It also saves around 4 minutes of the specialist clinician’s time per referral. And when you’re receiving thousands of patient referral letters per year, those minutes add up.

Drawing similarities across industries to solve problems in unique ways is something that our Ventures Studios thrive on. And it’s easy to see why. Solutions like these can have a huge impact. Not only for the businesses seeking the solutions, but for their customers, patients and society at large.

It’s not every day that minds from across the globe come together to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, using space technologies and data.

But that’s exactly why we created Gravity Challenge.

By creating a coalition of organisations including start-ups, technology providers and pioneering clients, we’re helping to crack difficult challenges across society, industry and the environment. Originating in Australia and in its first year in the UK, Gravity Challenge helps our innovators solve real-world problems in new ways – using space technologies like satellite communications, high-resolution satellite imagery, and other geospatial datasets. Space technologies offer potential for solving challenges across a variety of industries – from helping financial services organisations to better detect fraud, to enabling air ambulance crew to make more accurate decisions using satellite and mobile data.

For this round of Gravity Challenge, we’ve been focussing specifically on an issue that impacts us all – climate change. Our planet is facing a critical moment in its changing climate, and the UK government has pledged to transition towards net zero agriculture emissions by 2040, while still producing enough nutritious food to feed a growing population. It’s an ambitious target and tracking our progress against that target will require accurate measurement and monitoring of carbon consistently around the world.

One of the organisations we’re working with this year to address this challenge is Bardsley England, a fruit farming business. Given orchards are natural storage places for carbon, Bardsley want to maximise the ways in which their orchards can have a positive environmental impact. As a first step, they want to find out how much carbon is stored in their orchards. From this baseline they want to increase the carbon stored in the orchards year-on-year to be able to run carbon neutral operations and support carbon drawdown, helping in the fight against climate change. Working with Treeconomy, this collaboration seeks to combine Light Detection and Ranging data with satellite data, to allow for the remote measurement of carbon, as well as sequestration and emissions.

Given the focus of this particular challenge, the team is also being supported by our specialist Climate Change & Environment Studio within Deloitte Ventures.

With COVID-19 causing a squeeze on budgets for technology experimentation, Gravity Challenge presents our clients with an amazing opportunity – to continue focusing on tackling climate change, whilst also de-risking the innovation process through exciting and collaborative ecosystems. Climate change is not on pause, and we must continue to accelerate innovation and solutions that serve both people and planet.

- Siobhan Gardiner, Climate Change and Environment Studio lead at Deloitte Ventures.

To find out more, pose a challenge or to help solve one, just drop us a line – helloventures@deloitte.co.uk

The tax landscape is changing at pace, putting tax departments under immense pressure. The increasingly complex regulatory environment is driving business leaders to look for tech-enabled solutions which meet these external obligations and at the same time deliver the cost savings, time efficiencies, and innovation that their boardroom demands. It’s a topic that’s generating a lot of conversation in the industry, and so we decided to take action. Why talk about the future of tax if you can build it instead?

Our Ventures team in our Tax practice have been on a quest to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform our business and the solutions we provide for our clients.

One of the ways we do this is by inviting the outside in, developing close collaborations with emerging technology businesses. These collaborations give us direct access to the best tech talent and cutting-edge disruptive technology.

An example of this is our teaming with Kortical, a ‘machine learning as a service’ provider, whose platform accelerates the creation of complex machine learning solutions from data to deployment. The models built on Kortical are powering significant operational efficiencies, automating key parts of labour intensive processes like tax returns. This frees up our people to deliver more high value work, and offers our clients a speedier, more streamlined service.

We’re committed to shaping the future of our profession, which is why we have also been working with Rainbird, a dynamic AI scale-up business to understand how we can automate complex decision making. Together, we are turning our tax knowledge into machine intelligence that replicates human reasoning, with more speed consistency and transparency.

We are always looking for new opportunities to expand our ecosystem so that we can continue to solve our clients’ biggest challenges. If you have a technology solution that could help build the future of tax, we would love to hear from you - helloventures@deloitte.co.uk.

Picture this. You’re receiving thousands of calls from your customers each day. Each minute of every call provides an opportunity for you to resolve an issue before it becomes a complaint. A chance to give callers the information they need quickly, or spot a vulnerable customer and make sure they’re treated with extra care.

Of course not every call will be handled perfectly, but that’s where the review process comes in – allowing you to identify those calls that perhaps shouldn’t have happened or customers who might need follow-up support.

There’s just one problem. When you’re receiving millions of calls each year, how can you find the time to sift through them all and spot those that really need a second look? It would take an army of reviewers, and businesses just can’t afford this. It’s why most organisations are actually only able to manually review approximately 1% of all the calls they receive.

When we were approached by one of our insurance clients to help them review over 2 million customer interactions and around 250,000 hours of calls, we knew that technology had to hold the answer. Using our venturing capability, we brought together our voice analysts, risk specialists, data scientists and developers to build a piece of software that helped deliver the project. We managed to achieve 90% accuracy with machine-learning when assessing customer compliance outcomes. We were also able to use the solution to run the data through 21 different review scenarios at pace, something that would have been almost impossible had we been tackling the problem with humans.

Fast forward 3 years, and that early piece of software has become TrueVoice – a sophisticated voice analytics solution, used by businesses across the world. It gives them a smarter way to listen to and review calls, going from a 1% manual coverage to a 100% automated coverage. And with machine learning models built-in to analyse customers’ behaviour and emotion, TrueVoice is able to quickly sift through millions of calls and identify the ones that need further attention. Whilst the original use case was all about highlighting potential non-compliance, TrueVoice has now evolved to help businesses also spot opportunities to improve customer experience, contact centre operations and call agent performance. Essentially, it finds the needles in the haystack, allowing our clients to focus their time on turning that insight into action.

If you think TrueVoice could help you improve your call centre operations, or if you’d like to collaborate with the team, get in touch - helloventures@deloitte.co.uk.

Pairing tech PhD students with leaders at Deloitte can, upon first hearing it, seem like a fairly unusual endeavour. However, when the collaboration bears fruit in the form of ground-breaking legal industry solutions, it no longer seems so strange.

One of the key challenges the legal industry faces is the adoption of new technology. This is mainly due to lawyers not being adequately prepared to evaluate technology, engage with start-ups or implement products.

Our new legal practice, Deloitte Legal, is set on addressing this. Earlier in 2020, we started working with Conception X – a deep tech incubator that helps PhD students from across the UK turn their cutting edge university research into viable start-ups. Through this collaboration, we are able to support PhD students with the commercialisation process and, at the same time, determine how innovative, new technology can actively shape the legal industry.

The commercialisation process is a comprehensive one. Over 50 of our industry, technology and venture experts come together to run the PhD students through business model canvas exercises, value proposition formation, customer identification and use case refinement. We also act as a sounding board for important milestones in a start-up’s journey, helping with investor presentations and new customer acquisition.

Working with members of the Conception X cohort helps us to futureproof our legal practice, leveraging tech breakthroughs, like how AI can be used to better understand and utilise data in contracts. When considering the sheer number of contracts impacted by events like a pandemic, it’s easy to see how nascent technology like this could free up a significant amount of lawyers’ time, but also provide benefit across all sectors where contracts are the cornerstone of business.

Laura Bygrave leads our venturing capability within Deloitte Legal, and has been collaborating with Conception X. She explains,

We’re able to look at how we can solve problems that are 5 to 10 years away. We’re actively getting ahead of the curve.

If you work in the legal industry and would like to hear more about how the use cases we’re developing with Conception X can benefit your firm, why not drop us a line at helloventures@deloitte.co.uk? We’d also love to hear from you if you’re running an AI or data analytics start-up that could help shape the future of the profession.