Sync NI met Mark McNaughton, Belfast Site lead for FirstUp, a market leader in the employee communications space, to talk about how the business approaches innovation.
FirstUp established their new Technology Centre in Belfast in 2019 and have just recently announced further plans to expand its workforce. The Silicon Valley-based software firm creates technology that allows companies to communicate with their employees across all devices with targeted, relevant news, information and updates and its software is used by more than 40 percent of Fortune 100 companies.
FirstUp’s River House offices in the City Centre afford wonderful views across Belfast, a City that has historically been a global hub for innovation and the ideal backdrop to explore what innovation looks like within the company itself and what it means to Mark personally.
Mark starts the conversation by explaining that innovation is a critical part of FirstUp’s offering within Northern Ireland, so much so that all his teams are empowered to make use of 10% of their time for innovative purposes. This typically includes investing time to research and review innovative technologies and obviously more and more this means expanding AI capabilities. According to Mark, this approach has paid dividends and his people have shown great aptitude and have been able to really buy in, delivering things that have been hugely impactful for the business.
On a personal level, Mark has benefitted from exposure to a number of forms of innovation through the years. He recounts a number of approaches including product ideation and conceptualising unique problems with disparate user groups prior to applying innovative technical solutions. However, the core part of innovation that has always remained central to Mark is that innovation needs to be valuable for the business it's taking place in. The real sweet spot for innovation for Mark is having a business problem that he can apply a different solution, to be innovative and apply new technologies to solve that business problem. It’s all about understanding the fundamentals, whether the solution is both desirable and feasible as well as scalable to serve the needs of the business. As Mark states ‘’While Innovation itself is a hugely powerful thing, the practical application of innovation is where the value is and that's why we must make sure that we really benefit from the types of solutions we can achieve’’.
We asked Mark about the importance of environment for driving creativity and inspiring new ideas and for him there are two critical aspects to this. Firstly, the physical environment is all about ensuring the company offices are optimised for collaboration and secondly in the virtual environment, when working remotely, everyone has the right tools available to use in order to share ideas and work on the same solutions together. This means being able to work asynchronously if required with teams in the US offices or other partners across the world. So the ideal environment means not only having first-class local offices but also being supported by global capabilities while working remotely is a hugely important thing.
Coupled with the correct environment, the culture of innovation within the business clearly thrives when people are open and will freely listen to ideas that offer the ability to approach a problem differently or are happy to prototype solutions to learn more about the problem space. Continuous Innovation is ever present and recently the company ran an AI-focused hackathon, specifically focusing on large language models and Chat GPT. All the engineering teams were given a week and the freedom to work on a solution that they thought would add value to the business.
As pioneers of intelligent communications for the workforce, FirstUp is positioned at the forefront of the AI revolution. FirstUp believes that AI is a transformational business accelerator, which is why we’re excited to announce CommunicationAI, powered by GenAI.
By coupling insights from large language models (LLMs) with employee engagement data that flows through our intelligent communication platform, CommunicationAI will offer communicators streamlined productivity capabilities specifically designed to elevate the employee experience.
With powerful capabilities like generative content, predictions, and automation, CommunicationAI is a must-have capability for communicators, HR, and IT leaders, as well as employees who now have an AI-enabled interface to request and access information.
CommunicationAI empowers communicators to deliver personalized, relevant, and engaging experiences across every employee moment with generative AI and trusted employee data with the ability to:
This article appears in the summer edition of Sync NI magazine. To receive a free copy click here.
