Sitting in a comfortable seventh-floor meeting room in the shimmering, glass-fronted Dublin headquarters of EY, Tim Bergin looks every inch the partner of a Big Four accounting and professional services firm. And, as he begins to explain the “three layers” of digitally enabling a worker, Bergin sounds like one too. 

But the more he speaks, the more Bergin has the capacity to surprise. 

For a start, he is a former professional rugby league player, making 50 appearances for the Sheffield Eagles across four years while picking up 15 international caps for Ireland. 

Plus, he is a psychologist, not an accountant, who spent the early years of his career analysing business leaders in an effort to spot patterns in their thinking and behaviour.

Growing up in the small midlands town of Abbeyleix, his father asked him how a degree in psychology (he also has an MA in the field) would help him get a job. In fact, it’s taken him to boardrooms and workplaces in Ireland and right around the world. 

As a partner in EY’s People Consulting division, he describes his job as being at the “intersection of people and technology”.

Companies want to adopt cutting-edge new technologies such as Generative AI (Gen AI), automation or digitalisation. But that requires buy-in from their people, many of whom are initially sceptical.

Bergin’s role is to bring a deeper understanding of people’s work habits, behaviours and motivations to bridge the gap. 

“We tend to have a lot of psychologists (in People Consulting)  because we need a deep understanding of how people operate in the context of an organisation, in order to understand how to change it for the better,” he says.

Increasingly, much of his work has been helping companies digitise their workforce through technology and AI. The process, he says, is as much about changing mindsets as implementing technology. 

Overcoming hurdles

The way Bergin sees it, there has never been greater pressure on organisations to digitise the experience that their people and the wider workforce are having.

And, he argues that is no longer just digitising the experience of those in the technology or software departments, but embedding it across the whole organisation. 

“There’s opportunity – top to bottom – to digitally enable the workforce,” Bergin says. “Everyone from corporate workers who are office-based, to field-based workers, sales teams, operational workers, factory workers; throughout our organisations, there are opportunities where we can and should be seeking to digitally enable our workforce.”

But there is also uncertainty – both in companies and for the employees who work in them. In many cases, Bergin argues, this is because individuals have not been brought on board with efforts to fundamentally change how they work, leading to resistance.

Global research by EY finds that 70 per cent of digital transformation programmes fail because of a lack of a human-centric approach. Meanwhile, 62 per cent of surveyed employees are worried about the “potential biases and lack of transparency” in AI-driven decision-making in the workforce.

“Employers are far more likely to want to adopt and deploy Generative AI in the next year than employees, so there’s a big delta between the appetite of employers and the appetite of employees,” according to Bergin.

Even without his background in psychology, Bergin understands why. 

“There’s an understandable worry and concern from the employee perspective. ‘What does it mean for my job?  What does it mean for my future? Is my job going to change or is it going to be gone?’ All of these thoughts come to mind and must be addressed to build support for the positive transformational opportunity that Gen AI represents. Employers instinctively see the opportunity and the potential around productivity, cost saving, efficiency, but must think more expansively,” he says.

“The truth is that there is a positive opportunity for both, certainly in the way we approach it. We’re focused on a more rounded view of value than simply efficiency or productivity, because that’s not really capitalising on the full opportunity.”

Bergin says companies have to “recognise” the potential fear, anxiety, and worry caused by the introduction of new technologies like Gen AI.

“The barrier for technology has always been the adoption,” he says. “When you’re doing a large technology implementation or transformation, the technology never fails. It’s often your ability, or inability, to drive adoption and usage of the technology that impacts the value created and realised.

“If you don’t address the emotions first, people aren’t capable of consuming the rational logic or the argument, so it’s always important to focus on the emotional side of things first.”

“You end up deploying a very expensive technology that sits on the shelf because nobody is using it, because people are worried about moving away from the way they work right now.”

According to Bergin, this failure is grounded on what he describes as “loss aversion, which is one of the strongest cognitive biases, and means that we have a tendency to cling onto what we know, rather than move towards something new or different,” he says.

Bergin argues that the way to overcome loss aversion is to address the fear of what is being lost, whilst also highlighting the potential value – to employees of what is to come, and to the companies they work for.

Bergin gives several examples of how companies are using AI and digitisation to unlock creativity and efficiency while freeing up employee time for complex, value-driven work.

“We’re working with one of our clients who have a very large field-based workforce who are technicians,” he explains, adding that EY has created a digital twin of the physical assets that the technicians spend most of their time working on. 

Using the assets in a “metaverse-based environment” – where all of the body of knowledge on a subject has been uploaded into a digital and fully immersive training environment –  Bergin says the company can make training new technicians much more effective. “That’s a massive step change for your ability to use technology in a very practical way, and what’s really interesting about that the solution is a combination of emerging technologies; metaverse, Generative AI, augmented reality, and when you bring all of those together, that’s where the real power is,” he says.

Again, he stressed that the project had to be embedded across the organisation in order to harvest results. 

“There’s no value to an AI-based solution that sits adjacent to your core work. It doesn’t create any value. If anything it’s a gimmick, it’s a distraction. It has to be embedded within the core work that you do to deliver any value, and that means you’ve got to work with the business and business leaders to understand where the opportunities are,” he says.

“One of the key learnings for us is that we have to bring all of the business into this discussion.  It can’t be the sole purview of the IT department, it’s got to be an agenda that’s owned and it’s felt to be owned by the whole business and the CEO onwards.”

From top to bottom

On October 10, EY is hosting a ‘Digital Workforce Client Event’ focusing on “Digitising the workforce through technology and AI”. Catherine Doyle, the General Manager of Microsoft Ireland, and Ashling Sheridan, Data Science and Engineering Lead with Kerry Group, are both speaking. So too are Sarah Claxton, Senior Manager, Organisation and Capability with the ESB, and Fiona Kearney, Laboratory Manager in St James’s Hospital. 

Bergin says the evening is designed to show how companies can digitally enable their employees’ working life from top to bottom.

Based on EY’s experience, there are three layers in the process. The bottom layer is what he calls “digitally enabled performance”. 

“That can be different for different workers depending on the setting they work in, but the base layer is all about digitally enabling your core performance, so the tasks that you do most frequently day-to-day,” he says. 

The second layer up is digitally enabling the experience. “From the time when you first see a job opportunity, the whole way through the hiring process – you get an offer, you join, you get on-boarded, you start working in the organisation, and then you get exposed to the full extent of the value proposition across every element of your work.  That’s how you can use technology to enhance the experience that we have day-to-day,” Bergin says.

He said the final layer is digitally enabled support. “So, when you have a problem, how do you go about accessing support?” he explains, adding that there are now a host of platforms that facilitate digitally enabled support.

The three-layer approach was designed to be practical and accessible, he says.

“There’s no point in talking about things that are inaccessible or very difficult to understand or too ethereal to even pin down. That’s not really of any value to anybody.  We first and foremost take a value-based approach:  Everything that we do has to deliver some value, whether that’s a value-based improvement for your performance, a value-based improvement for your experience, or a value-based improvement in the way that you receive support,” according to Bergin.

I ask Bergin about the cost-benefit analysis of implementing a major digital transformation project, and how it can be measured.

“Done correctly, a major digital transformation project can transform an organisation’s business model and value proposition,” he says. “There are many different forms of value that you get back and we would typically assess value delivered against three metrics – time, quality and experience. 

“If you’re getting time back, you’re improving the productivity and efficiency of your workforce and your overall organisation.”

From a quality perspective, he said there is also a huge opportunity for technology, data and AI to improve the quality of the work.

Finally, the overall experience for customers and staff can’t be ignored. “There’s a great cost that comes with a poor experience in the form of turnover.  So, if you have very high turnover within your teams, the cost of losing people, the cost of rehiring people is very high,” he says. 

As manual tasks become automated, Bergin says that it frees time and attention for the workforce to redirect their focus to other areas. He gave the example of sales teams.

“For your sales teams, particularly in a B2C environment where it’s person-to-person selling, there’s a great opportunity to enhance the capabilities that humans have; emotional intelligence, empathy, the ability to read how somebody is receiving your message and tailor your approach or style to make you more effective at doing your job, selling a product.

“There is a great opportunity to look at proactively designing what you want the human differentiator to be for any role, and that’s a cause for real optimism in all of this. It’s not about a drive for the bottom line.”

Once you create that free time, he argues that it is crucial to utilise it appropriately. “The first hurdle is to create that value.  The second hurdle is being able to release the value. If deploying a solution can save your people half a day a week, for example, you’ve created value, but what do you do with that?  If you don’t have a plan for releasing that value, it disappears; and remember, this opportunity is not only about transforming the working lives of our people but also about transforming a company’s whole value chain or business model.”

To ensure this does not happen, he says any new system needs to have full organisational buy-in.

“The whole concept of a digital worker is for everyone – whether you’re working in the field, whether you’re working in an operational setting on a factory floor, in an office, that digital experience is for everybody,” he says.

“And it’s the same with Generative AI – it’s for everybody.  It’s in your pocket now, on your phone, whether you’ve got ChatGPT or engage with apps with embedded AI, it is fundamentally transforming how we engage with information. That’s the biggest transformation to come with Generative AI; the fundamental transformation of how we all engage with information.”

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The Currency is the media partner for EY’s Digital Workforce Event, which takes place on Thursday, October 10 at the Wavespace at EY, Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, and runs from 17:30 – 20:00. More information is available here.