How psychology is shaping better machine learning

Psychologist and academic and now BT head of customer insights Dr Nicola Millard explains why her skills are becoming increasingly critical in an age where technology is being trained to be more sociable

More psychologists are now coming the tech space because they’re trying to teach machines to become more social and sociable, according to BT’s head of customer insight and futures, Dr Nicola Millard.

“I’m not a technologist, I’m a psychologist – and it makes a lot of sense having me on-board because innovation in itself won’t work unless people adopt it,” she told CMO. “A psychologist in the team prevents us from getting carried away exclusively by the technology which often tech companies do.”

Leading the third largest innovation hum in the UK, Millard is responsible for tapping into the research and innovations that BT does for its global services clients.

“I used to have a silly job title as a futurologist, and I hated that job title because everyone assumes you have a crystal ball,” she said. “But I’m in global services so my clients are typically retailers, airlines and banks – big global corporates – and we often bring them around to our showcases of the retail store of the future, or the bank of the future, so they can have a play with our proof of concepts.”

While Astral Park in the UK is BT’s main research hub, the company also has other centres dotted across the world including Abu Dhabi, Singapore University in Beijing and MIT in the US. Millard said the company also has tech scouts dotted around the world bringing in new startups.

In her role, Millard looks the changing interactions between consumer and customer, and how customers’ demands and expectations on companies are rapidly evolving, particularly if the company is providing a service. The other element is the concept of the ‘digital employee’ and how the changing nature of employees relates to the future of work.

“From my experience, I see a lot of tech that allows us to collaborate, but there’s also too much tech, which opens up the risk of fragmentation, especially when we all have such diverse workforces,” she said. “Successful collaboration using technology rests on who is actually on it. Look at social media platforms for example.

“A lot of what I look at in that area is creating common ground, which I define as it has to be absolutely accessible to everyone and it has to be appropriate to the task.”

On a technical level, Millard sees common ground as looking at disparate technologies and getting them talking to each other in the cloud in an integrated way.

“But what I’m also interested in is how to get leaders to choose which common ground works better for them to communicate and collaborate – and that could actually be face to face, because that can be incredibly valuable,” she said. “At BT, we’re looking at how can the digital space, using tools like video, audio, chats, AR, VR, create as good an experience as that face-to-face interaction.

“We also look at who is using which technologies, what the trends are and then how can we then improve the technology and enhance the end experience.”

As a psychologist, Millard has undertaken a lot of academic work to understand how to make machines more natural to interact with and how to use technology to create better customer experiences – whether it is in the physical or digital world. As a result, she’s considered in great detail how machines and artificial intelligence (AI) can understand and communicate in natural language as part of an effort to create more seamless bot experiences for customers.

“The way language has evolved isn’t really about rules or process, which is what machines like,” she said.