Sharon Cooper of the The Economist Intelligence Unit on AI, building new products and taking Thursday night drinks global

Experimenting with new ideas inside one of the world’s most recognisable brands is never going to be easy. Enter Sharon Cooper; Chief Digital Office at The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Sharon has incredible foresight and a brilliant track record of experimenting and leading change with a clear focus on modernising forecasting tools and Ai capabilities to create digital products to enable organisations to grow. Interested to find out more Fluxx Managing Consultant Tom Whitwell, grabbed Sharon for a coffee and a chat for our latest Fluxx Book; Now what do we do?

I kind of fell into my career. I did a degree in chemistry but went straight into editorial. On the first day of my first job I worked with an elderly author to digitise his book, The Handbook of Reactive Chemical Hazards. He’d written it after he blew himself up in his lab when two chemicals reacted.

I’ve always turned things from one delivery format into another. Using technology to make things more useful; every job I’ve done has probably had that at its heart. I’ve been at The Economist Intelligence Unit for two years.

A lot of my day is about stopping us doing silly things, saying, “Do we really have to do this? Could we do something else?” The big question is how to make our data insights actionable for clients.

With Fluxx we developed a product that sits between what the EIU does and The Economist’s weekly journalism. On our own we’d have done a survey, made a nice pdf, and put it away in a folder. Fluxx brought in a different approach. We’ve created a thing that exists: newsletters and content, and customers.

It’s a difficult time to be launching products. People have got so much stuff in their inboxes. Will they open it because they like The Economist or think, “Not another newsletter”?

Remote working hasn’t been a huge change. EIU has always worked remotely, but we’ve gone from remote working in multiple offices to remote working in hundreds of individual spaces. That’s the thing that’s changed for us. Last year I realised we had a load of tech that wasn’t going to work if pushed to capacity. It took three months to replace it all. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to work from home at all. Oh my goodness, I’m very glad I did that.

I worry about picking up the signals that people aren’t coping, like starting to leave their camera off. I see cultural differences around the world, too: some teams don’t put their camera on as they just don’t want you to see them inside their home.

Our Thursday night Canary Wharf drinks have gone virtual and global. We’ll get people joining from Tokyo, where it’s 2am and they can’t sleep. They might be having a cup of tea instead but it’s really, really nice; a new kind of office ritual. It’s great to have our loyal users but it also makes the organisation nervous about doing anything different. You can’t dilute the brand. But there’s a risk of a brand becoming old and stale because of that thinking.

Our future isn’t necessarily mobile. I’m not sure people are really manipulating deep-dive data on a mobile. We need to make our tools interactive around data extraction and easier for people to do their jobs. If I had a magic button it would be AI to make sense of much more information and create insight. To read the client’s mind and quickly deliver what they want beautifully packaged, hugely tailored and relevant.

Sharon is joining us on Monday 14th December 16:30–18:00 for ‘Fluxx Talks; How successful leaders are looking forward not back’; the interactive launch event for our latest book #NowWhatDoWeDo? We’re bringing together our community of business leaders, innovators and change makers, to unpack the complex reality that many businesses are now grappling with. Book a complimentary virtual seat here.

Tom Whitwell is a Managing Consultant at Fluxx. Click here if you’d like to get your hands on a copy. For more info on the work we do check out these links or get in touch at Tom.Whitwell@Fluxx.uk.com.