Question Time

1) Dr Nicola Millard, BT customer experience futurologist

Question.

How will customers change in the future?

Answer.

The customer of the future is likely to be multi-tasking, multi-cultural and multi-channel, they have more power in their back pocket than they have had ever before with devices that enable them to be both in the physical and the virtual world at the same time. And they are comfortable with doing that, those scary 14 year old co-horts, that basically don't use there mobile phone anymore for talking, they use it to go online, they use it to text their friends and they expect to be able to do that to companies in the future.

2) Adam Oliver, BT head of CSR and age and disability research

Question.

What is inclusive innovation?

Answer.

We live in a world where everyone is different, and at BT we use our research to create products and services that help all of the community. So for example, if people have hearing loss, we create telephones that help them hear better, if people have Cerebral Palsy we help them communicate independently. See what we've done with the charity SCOPE to help Natalie Sides. We need to keep innovation simple so that everyone can communicate in the best way possible.

3) Lesley Gavin, BT futurologist

Question.

Can we predict the future?

Answer.

Yes we think so, we have developed a technology timeline that helps us to predict the future. In ten years we have been 86% correct. Weâre looking for when technology will make a significant impact on our lives, to do this we look at economic and social influences. Economic is simple, is there a business case? Social drivers are more complex, because people are much more unpredictable. Are you ready for a robot to look after you child? What if the same robot was a world chess champion, or an Olympic athlete?

4) Jonathan Mitchener, BT futorologist and research scientist, devices

Question.

How do mobile phones find us… and what else will they do in the future?

Answer.

It's a partnership between the phone and the network, the phone tells the network where it is from time-to-time. And the network asks the phone where it is. But in the future it will be much more than that, the phone will know much more about you, it'll be able to offer; where you are, what you are doing, it will be able to react accordingly and it will be able to give the answer that you want to people who call you, and perhaps you won't be interrupted as often.