“ADAM, IT’S TIME FOR YOUR MEDICATION”

Adam Starkey is the founder and Executive Chair of Green Gourmet, a Gloucestershire food company that holds a Queen’s Award for Innovation. He is Vice-Chair of the Gloucestershire Local Enterprise Partnership and is forging a new career as a futurist. We asked him what could threaten the way we are doing business.

Will the pace of technical change bring new risks to your business, or is that still years away?

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying “Your margin is our opportunity” and most high street retailers now understand what he meant as they gradually go out of business. But which other industries should be seeing tech companies like Amazon as a threat to be reckoned with?

One of the many at risk might be the health industry after Amazon’s intentions were made clear by its purchase of online pharmacy PillPack.

If you join this up with the, as yet unused, patent for Alexa to hear you coughing and therefore discern that you are unwell, it begins to look, well, joined up.

Maybe Alexa books an online GP appointment with the rumoured Amazon Prime Health.

Next comes automated issuing of a prescription via PillPack and if you are close to a distribution centre, then just a 30-minute wait for a delivery by drone.

Would that beat trying to get an appointment at the GPs and waiting in line at the chemist?

Disruptive technologies changing our lives

Brainomix helping to save lives

Spun out of the University of Oxford in 2010, Brainomix has developed award-winning stroke imaging software, helping physicians make better lifesaving decisions. The company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and ‘deep learning’ technology has the potential to improve the consistency of physician’s interpretation of images.

As we all live longer and take more medication, PillPack can sort them all for you and then send packets with all the pills you need at 8am on Thursday. No more tricky pill bottles to deal with, or tiny writing to read. And Alexa can remind you whether you are at home or on the go: “Adam, it’s time for your medication.”

Whatever your company does, spend a few minutes considering how technology might threaten you, or even your whole industry. These disruptive innovators often don’t do everything that we do, but they might do 20 per cent of what we do for half the cost. Would that be a big risk to you?

All this blockchain, artificial intelligence and self-driving stuff might be years away and we will all have retired before it reaches Coventry, Gloucester, Oxford or Worcester, but what if it comes quicker?

To appreciate the potential risk to your business you should suspend disbelief for a while and ask yourself the question: “what would it mean if....?”

Dr George Harston, Brainomix Chief Medical and Innovation Officer & Consultant Stroke Physician, Oxford University Hospital said: “Brainomix has shown once again the value of AI to augment human performance.”

Drive like a machine or a human?

The future is autonomous vehicles. So are you confident enough to travel in one?

Researchers at the University of Warwick took volunteers into a warehouse laid out to resemble a town centre pedestrianised area. Half were given journeys around the route in an autonomous vehicle using all its capabilities.

The others did the same journeys in autonomous vehicles programmed to emulate average human driving patterns.

The result was the efficient machine method was slightly favoured, but the gap narrowed over the four runs.