Intelligent Business Productivity Accelerator - phase 1

An AI-driven personalised productivity accelerator for every business in the UK Businesses in the UK economy are unevenly split between a small number of high productivity 'frontier firms' and a large tail of low productivity 'laggards', according to the Bank of England's Chief Economist, Andrew Haldane. The Government has identified five key drivers of productivity growth that can turn a laggard into a high performer: investment, innovation, skills, enterpriseand competition. Knowing which productivity lever to pull next, and how to move it, is the insight that separates high-performing firms in each sector from laggards. It's typically been the job of management consultancies to supply this insight. But good consultancy is out of reach for many smaller UK firms, and recommendations are notoriously hard to execute and extract value from - the 'report on a shelf' syndrome. Frustratingly, the best method to help a business in a given sector to transform its productivity has often already been applied elsewhere - the challenge is to find it and put it into practice. The platform we will build can overcome this challenge. It will be a free, online benchmarking and recommendation engine, coaching the skills and linking in the services that will allow each business to identify and act on the best opportunities to close their specific productivity gap to the best in their sector. By combining recommendations to boost personal skills drawn from a library of carefully curated high-quality learning content with prioritisation based on robustly-assessed business requirements, we will create a platform that is both personally engaging to its individual users (for whom it can become a one-stop-shop for productivity supporting skills) and which demonstrates impact for the businesses they work in. The technology we employ will make the solution sophisticated, scalable and engaging: underpinned by econometric analysis, survey work, and iterative prototype-led development; driven by machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence; and presented in an engaging consumer-grade flexible interface featuring chatbot interaction and an intuitive dashboard of recommendations. Not only will the platform be free to use for UK businesses, but also free and open to suppliers of training and other productivity-enhancing services. In phase 1 of the project, the feasibility stage, we will build a fully-working (beta) version of the skills recommendation engine, prototype the business-benchmarking tool and design its integration into the recommendation platform, and explore the use of the platform for services beyond training by researching the supply market for the example category of digital collaboration tools.