'Make it Happen' Innovation Workshops: PandoraBot AI

Story

Technology can be a great enabling force. Yet, if imposed in too austere ways, it can also be a tremendously limiting force. At Your Favourite Story, one of our major clients had developed a global CMS for their website, which provided the brand and UI consistency they sought. But the system also stole the freedom to test and deploy new ideas and utilities for customers. This is often the case when nascent tech collides with legacy systems, and incompatibility kills off concepts in the bud. Yet, a bi-product of this problem became a greater concern: the hearts and minds of those at the agency were becoming worn by the limitations. The words "it can't be done" became uttered too often. With this, the YFS Strategy team set about creating a format -- one that would unlock existing, nascent technologies at speed, by throwing them at the problems around us. This was 'Make it Happen'. 

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Approach

An overview of the format itself and one of the marque sessions: 

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Make it Happen Innovation Workshops (Format) 

The key tenet to this was speed. We needed to instil belief that prototypal products could be built very rapidly, whilst being light on agency resource. The sessions were limited to an hour, and chopped up into tight blocks of time -- context of the problem, a one-line creative brief to tackle, a crash course of the tech platform to be used that day, a collaborative devise & build section in teams (the bulk of the time), concluding in a 30-60 second elevator pitch of the results back to the group. From this, our guest judges or moderator would determine the day's winner against a scorecard -- adherence to the brief, creativity, usefulness and inventiveness. 

 

The sessions were fast and frenetic, but packed with energy. By design we would pull in creatives, developers, UI designers, PMs, strategists, account managers and the exec, bringing together minds of all types and seniority. Problems would always be niche in-agency issues so they were quick to relate to -- a tool to help budding grads find the right team to join, or a platform for agency content -- whilst the technologies would vary to help teams to become au-fait with emerging fields such as Artificial Intelligence, decision trees, Alexa skills, or UI/UX. 

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PandoraBot AI

We posited the problem to our teams that the agency website needed a refresh of personality and purpose. To tackle this problem, we set them the task of building an AI Chatbot using the platform PandoraBot. With the natural constraints of time, this task threw the teams straight into strategic-concepting, mapping out what the agency's personality is, and how this is characterised. Further, what does the website serve to do -- land new clients, find new talent, or other?

 

These thoughts were immediately drawn up into prototypal decision trees, each team taking a different tact. Barely 10 minutes later, with the assistance of our Tech Angel (the Head of Interactive Development), teams were coding their imaginative systems into the bot builder. Out the other side came creations of witty ripostes, GIF packed navigation of the site, a choice of personality tones and even recommendation of where to eat in Japan (a wonderful, if totally off-brief, creation). It rapidly taught the teams that paper to prototype can help ideas manifest and mould with greater fidelity, but also the all important need to remain true to the problem at hand -- we must always solve real problems for real people. 

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Outcomes

After a pilot session, this became a regular, once-a-month format in the agency. After the first quarter of running the innovation sessions, half the agency had had the chance to partake and produce a prototype. By the next quarter, we had worked the MIH sessions into our plans with two key clients, becoming the cornerstone for quarterly innovation sprints as part of wider test and learn programmes.

 

From internal hacking to client paid for programmes in 6 months. 

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