Temporall is an enterprise technology company that exists to deliver real-time Organisational Intelligence. Our aim is to ‘own’ the category of Organisational Intelligence and help organisations harness the power of their data. We use Workbench, our AI-powered data analytics platform, and human expertise to deliver critical insights to our clients, which helps them make faster, better-informed decisions.
Recently, our clients have come everywhere from the tech and media world to the public sector. Our clients span Europe, the US and Asia; from international enterprises like Google, to niche NGOs that do incredible work for local communities. I really believe in democratising Organisational Intelligence because all companies can benefit from it.
Our expanding partnership programme with world-class consultancies and systems integrators has been a huge help in accessing new markets; they have the unique industry expertise and local context, and we have the platform!
The really cool thing about our platform is our integrations with leading digital workplace tools including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Workplace from Facebook, with some other big hitters coming soon in 2021. We can perform relational enterprise analytics, which is where we combine data sets from different systems and unify them on one single platform. We think that’s pretty neat.
We can also help you answer questions like:
- Is Slack or Microsoft Teams more valuable to my company?
- Are my internal communications having an impact?
- How integrated is my new hire into their team?
- What networks are being formed
- How collaborative are we as a company?
It’s really unique: no one else can give leaders that level of augmented insight into their organisation and what they should do next to improve its performance.
How does Workbench work?
Workbench is our AI-powered data analytics platform that delivers Organisational Intelligence in real-time. It connects an organisation’s fragmented organisational data from enterprise systems, people and teams. Power-users then harness Workbench’s Machine Learning and data analytics capabilities, including sentiment analysis, classification, entity, and translation, as well as quantitative, qualitative, topic, and organisational network analysis to make sense of their data in real-time.
The real-time element is critical because it allows decision makers to respond to and answer questions way faster than they could before. This matters in the hyper-transient world businesses operate in.
Our technology is particularly exciting because of the feedback loop it enables: it is self-learning and improving all of the time. It is this combination of Artificial Intelligence and human expertise that makes Organisational Intelligence so powerful and transformative for leaders. The rapid decision making it allows our clients to make gives them a real competitive edge.
The evolution of Organisational Intelligence
Organisational Intelligence is critical because of the value it can bring in 2021. Companies are going to continue to be distributed, disconnection is really setting in and reliance on digital workplace tools is at an all time high.
Organisational Intelligence is the augmentation of analytics from these enterprise tools, compounded by human judgement to bring rapid, real-time insight. While it’s particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19, this need for clarity is timeless in many ways:
Data-driven insights become even more critical
The vast amount of data that organisations generate has only been increasing over the last few years. But this increase – like many things – has been accentuated over the last year or so, with the rapid adoption of enterprise tools. Millions of rows of data gets lost in these systems every day. The businesses that harness this data to better understand not only their customers, but also their own organisation and decision-making, are the ones we believe that will outperform everyone else.
Rapid move to asynchronous work, but there will be challenges
As we continue to rebuild organisations in a remote-first world, asynchronous work will increasingly become the defacto model. There are huge benefits to this such as a ‘work from anywhere’ sensibility, more time with loved ones and opportunities to design lives around when you are most productive – or not – with no pressure of the traditional 9-to-5 working day.
But the challenges are vast. How do you keep employees feeling connected? How do you portray constructive feedback via a comment on a document, without sounding rude? The sense of disconnection between the physical and the virtual is huge, so maintaining a feeling of togetherness and nurturing hybrid digital cultures will be essential, but no mean feat.
Leadership forced to adapt and respond faster
This is rather cliched, but in the ‘next normal’ or ‘future of work’, applying the same leadership decision-making methods simply won’t cut it. Using out-of-date data or going by instinct won’t help you make the very best decisions you can, nor help you understand the impact of these choices.
That’s definitely something to take advantage of in 2021: not just harnessing organisational data, but delivering real business outcomes that deliver incredible levels of value, every day.
Automation accelerates, driven by less human interaction
Another trend will be the acceleration of automation. There have already been quite a few shifts in this direction over the years in warehousing, supply chains and vehicles, as well as automatic customer service chatbots. I expect to see this ramp up in 2021 as lessened human interaction continues to be a normality.
More balanced perception of AI value and threat
We’re seeing huge advances in AI all the time. This is really exciting, but I’m also a huge advocate of balancing AI with human judgement and it’s what we’re all about at Temporall. This will be really important in 2021 because we’ve all come to value that human element of our work and home life so dearly, and to go solely down a tech-based, AI route is not what people want – and it’s not what really works.
I do hope that we start to see a more favourable view, however. Lots of people don’t seem to realise how ingrained it already is in our society and the huge benefits it brings to the way we live. Last year, there was great applied AI success in biotech, which I hope continues through 2021 and opens up more conversations about the benefits.
The impact of COVID-19
COVID-19 has already changed everything: corporate strategy, real-estate and property, the way we communicate, what people value, the necessity of being digital, the demand for different skills and – for many – lower revenues and a complete shift in consumer habits. It’s probably easier to ask what impact it won’t have!
I experienced first hand the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008, but the COVID-19 pandemic has been truly global. The shockwaves will continue throughout 2021 and likely well into 2022 depending on the ‘wealth’ of the nation that you reside in.
For the next five years, the future of work will be characterised by leadership teams being forced to make decisions on behalf of their companies with extreme levels of uncertainty. This continued ambiguity has and will continue to make or break companies of all sizes and market maturity.
Thomas Davies is founder and CEO at Temporall.
