Hosting a large event in the back end of London Paddington on the nicest day of the year and coinciding with an England football match probably isn’t taught in most event management courses.
However, the cracking team at greyhairworks! haven’t built their reputation on observing conventional norms. Even so, I was still pleasantly surprised to find the room completely full on my arrival.
After some networking, we were treated to a very well-curated and thought-provoking set of sessions over two hours, from large B2C corporations through to the most innovative technology solution providers in the retail, brand, and consumer sectors.
No doubt everyone will have their highlight, but personally, it was the practical application of AI.
What does this mean? It means AI that benefits the customer (without them knowing AI is involved – of course, they shouldn’t and don’t care about AI – so, no need to even mention it). AI that effectively performs basic but time-consuming work and expensive tasks when undertaken by homo sapiens. This frees team members – real people not machines - to perform higher value and more meaningful work and removes some of the drudgery.
Whilst we were encouraged to embrace positive disruption too, retail is detail, it’s tough, ultra-competitive, fast-changing, often fickle, and usually low margin. Disruption can’t be frilly in this environment - it has to work. It seems to me like a great place for AI to genuinely prove its commercial chops in the real world.
The other timely reminder was to go where your customer is. No point being trendy and hanging on TikTok or Insta if your customers aren’t there!
What do I like about greyhairworks! ? They are entrepreneurial, hard-working, and authentic. The core business model is simple and compelling: leveraging a 120+ international team of portfolio executives (“Grown Ups”) to best match large consumer organisations (“Corporates”) with innovative technology ventures (“Solution Providers”).
The value to the corporation is that they get efficient access to specially selected digital solutions presented at a senior level by someone from the GHW team with whom they already hold a trusted relationship (and isn’t a salesperson) - and the solution provider gets access to a senior global team at scale, to take their proposition to the market. This reduces their GTM risk.
If this sounds like you, then I’d actively encourage you to contact the team directly, or I can introduce you if you prefer:
Alex Meisl Andy Tait Ben Cheston Nicholas Taylor Robyn Muckle
