Author: Henry Pepper
Henry Pepper
Senior Staff Writer, CXFocus. Henry Pepper is a journalist who reports on business and technology in Australia, Britain and Japan. He has reported for ABC TV, The Independent of London, The Bulletin and edited Dynamic Business magazine. Henry worked as an (Communication and Public Relations Australia) award-winning Senior Writer for Stratcom Communique in Sydney on accounts including Alcatel, the Australian Bankers Association, Honeywell and Qantas.
When Michael Chen joined premium Australian mattress manufacturer Sealy Posturepedic nearly 7 years ago, centralising the fragmented CX function was his first priority. Laying the right foundations with the CX team, before introducing process automation tech, was most important. “People, culture, processes, come first and then and only then the technology. If you have people problems, gaps in your existing teams and culture, AI will only help you to experience those things faster,” says Michael Chen. Sealy’s Head of Digital and CX. “But if you have helped your team to understand that the technology will help to make them more…
Emotional media headlines about AI replacing the jobs currently done by people may be common but they are not supported by history. Technology and labor markets have been constantly changing since the 19th Century but “we’ve never had a tech revolution where there were fewer jobs at the end of it,” according to Martha Gimbel, Director of Yale University’s Budget Lab. Modern administrative offices, for example, are so different to the workspaces of 50 years ago that a white-collar employee from half a century ago would not recognise the typical 2026 office and the tools and processes that make it…