Interview with Pete Hanlon, CTO of Moneypenny – Combining Humanity and Technology to Power the Future

We spoke with Pete Hanlon, the CTO of Moneypenny to get his views on combining humanity and technology and its role in the future.

Over the next decade, technological advancements like AI and NLP, will have the most significant day-to-day impact and AI is already playing a massive role in the workplace, with ever faster innovation.  Pete Hanlon, CTO of leading outsourced communications company Moneypenny, has a wealth of experience in identifying innovative customer centric technical solutions, having previously been CTO at Moneysupermarket for six years and Autotrader for 10 years.  He is developing communications technologies including AI and deep learning technologies to increase the efficiency of Moneypenny’s teams who handle calls and live chats for thousands of companies globally and across multiple sectors.  For example, Moneypenny is working with tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, AWS, Google, Twilio and Jabra to enhance the customer communication experience for both employees and clients.

AI is embedded within the organisation, but Pete believes the future is for AI to augment humans, not replace them, allowing them to have great conversations. Marrying tech and people is the gold standard, but Moneypenny only uses AI technologies that improve the customer experience, or create a more efficient service. AI and Deep Learning is therefore being used to help the company scale. NLP (natural language processing) enables better conversations using technologies allowing Moneypenny to develop solutions that provide an understanding of intent and sentiment and can propose best actions for the PAs to use within live chat, for maximum efficiency.

 Moneypenny products are tailored specifically to what a business needs and 90% of its clients would never have access to this communication technology on their own, but Moneypenny is providing them with access every day.

Pete believes the future for business is about embracing and harnessing technological advancements, enabling staff to deliver seamless customer engagement, which means using your data to make informed decisions. For example, Moneypenny discovered that despite a boom in the use of social media to contact businesses, the telephone remains the most important communication method for customers to connect with businesses, so the customer service offering should include many alternatives, from phone and email to 24/7 Live Chat.

Pete comments: ‘The challenges of the last year have highlighted that we crave human interaction facilitated by technology, and together these two elements will shape the way the world communicates in the future’.