The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Technology

Step Into My Office: Futurice's Tom McQueen on artificial intelligence and attracting talent

By Jessica Davis, Consultant Journalist

The Future Factory

|

The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

Find out more

June 29, 2017 | 6 min read

‘Step into my Office’ is a series of interviews powered by The Future Factory and The Drum Network, which investigate the details behind the office door. The Future Factory is a lead generation and growth consultancy that spends one day per week working from their clients’ workplaces, getting under the hood of agency life, ambitions and culture among all its idiosyncrasies and charm.

Tom McQueen

Tom McQueen, managing director of Futurice UK

This month Tom McQueen, managing director of digital innovation consultancy Futurice UK, discusses the importance of Artificial Intelligence and innovative techniques that appeal to budding talent.

What does your business do?

Futurice partners with Europe’s leading companies to help them build capability for the future through digital innovation, co-creating digital products and services and changing organisational culture. We started in Finland in 2000 and have since expanded to the UK, Germany and Sweden. We help organisations change by offering a top-to-bottom service from CEO and board level consultancy through to digital product and service development. In short, we are a modern digital partner.

Describe your office culture

Our Nordic roots mean that we embrace and grow a culture that is flat, autonomous and pushes responsibility to the people doing the work. They determine their tools, methods, work hours and everyone has a company credit card.

How do you attract and/or retain talent?

Our benefits are a bit unique – for example, we have a Spice Program where we pay employees to work on open source projects and other social impact programmes, in their own time, on top of their regular salary.

We also cover our people to spend a week each year working at a Futurice office in a different country. This is known as FutuHiking. Here in London, we have regular beer and tech/wine and design meet-ups which give people a chance to network and showcase work they have done. We also have a great space to work in, including a rooftop social space with an espresso machine and a barbecue, quiet areas and in-between zones.

Futurice has won awards for being a great place to work. This reputation combined with our emphasis on collaboration and trust is helpful in attracting and retaining talent.

Where are you located and why?

Futurist's office

We are based in Old Street. We moved here two years ago from Shoreditch, and it’s great because it’s in the heart of the tech scene – it’s important to choose a community you feel at home in. We want to be somewhere that is ever-changing, with new restaurants, new offices and new things to do. It’s also a convenient location to travel to our clients around London or have them come in to host events and workshops.

Name a project you were most proud of in the last year

We are really proud of Samsung Kick, an award-winning football app which uses live data to allow fans to compare players and analyse matches including each tackle and save in real time for major football tournaments. It’s great to have worked on a global app for such a well-known brand.

What is the best piece of agency marketing you’ve seen recently (yours or otherwise)?

That would have to be ad agency Lucky Generals, which does the advertising for Paddy Power and Premier Inn. It markets itself with a lot of verve and attitude; their website is fresh and uncluttered and draws you in to find out more.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for service design/digital transformation agencies wanting to grow and thrive both now and in the coming years?

All agencies need to get to grips with the opportunities that Artificial Intelligence (AI), emerging tech and data present. These emerging technologies are changing business models, industries and the jobs we do. In an AI-enabled workplace, decisions will need to be made faster, pushed out to the edges of companies, which means changing old, hierarchical ways of doing things. People and machines will need to be helped to work well together. New processes and tools will need to be developed to empower people nearest to the action to make decisions that are fast, transparent and good for the company and one other.

As consultants, we need to be ahead of the curve, challenging ourselves to embrace new thinking and helping our clients to do the same.

Describe the new business ethos at your agency

Fast-paced and strategic. We invest time in really trying to understand a client’s domain, objectives and needs before we meet them, so that when we do meet we can focus the conversation on what matters to them. We understand that businesses seeking to become future capable find the process daunting. We are on a mission to guide them through it, in a way that delivers for everyone involved.

The Future Factory is a new business agency based in London.

Technology

Content by The Drum Network member:

The Future Factory

With a mix of lead generation, board level consultancy and coaching, we help to make the future more predictable for agency Owners, Founder and Directors. www.thefuturefactory.co.uk

Since...

Find out more

More from Technology

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +