Exclusive Interview with Matt Fairhurst, CEO of Skedulo

The cloud has grown in popularity among businesses in all industries. However, if you have not already transferred your business's data and operations to the cloud, you may wonder if this technology is really in your best interest to expend the time and energy you will need to invest to implement cloud computing. Skedulo's leading Deskless Productivity Cloud solution powered by AI and machine learning empowers organizations to manage, engage and analyze their deskless workforce, supporting the 80% of global workers who don't work in a traditional office setting. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Matt Fairhurst, CEO of Skedulo.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.    

Founded in 2013, Skedulo is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Australia, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom. Skedulo's leading Deskless Productivity Cloud solution powered by AI and machine learning empowers organizations to manage, engage and analyze their deskless workforce, supporting the 80% of global workers who don't work in a traditional office setting. Skedulo's platform helps enterprises intelligently manage, schedule, dispatch, and support deskless workers on the go, whether they are in fixed location facilities or mobile field workers on the frontline. Skedulo has enabled hundreds of organizations, including The American Red Cross, DHL, and Sunrun, to seamlessly schedule and service over 35 million appointments worldwide. The company has secured over $115 million in funding to date, led by Softbank, Microsoft's venture firm M12, Costanoa Ventures, and Blackbird.

2. What are the key trends driving the growth in the AI industry?

Responsible AI is one of the biggest trends currently driving growth in the AI industry. Across varying industries, we're seeing a lot of bias appear in AI code. What responsible AI is hoping to achieve is fairness – even though biases are baked into the data, gaining trust through the evolution of transparency and explainability methods and ensuring compliance within those codes that bias frequently appears in.

The second key trend we're seeing is how AI is augmenting the workforce. We've gone through several "Greats" in terms of talent attraction and retention these past few years. Because of that, the fear that "robots are taking away jobs" has inflated slightly more than usual. However, that couldn't be further from the truth. What we're going to see more of is working alongside AI and ML that uses smart and cognitive functionality to assist in boosting our abilities and skills. To visualize this a little more, AI tools can help us by providing things like predictive maintenance, sorting through data, and overall boosting efficiency.

3. AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

Skedulo MasterMind is Skedulo's artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) optimization service that enables organizations to optimize their workforce around the priorities and variables that matter most, including workforce utilization rate, and operating cost, travel time, and more. The most recent enhancement to the Skedulo Deskless Productivity Cloud, Skedulo MasterMind is powered by MasterMind Solvers, which are scenario-specific optimization algorithms.

According to research from Skedulo, 60% of deskless workers feel their job has become more difficult since COVID-19, and 72% of IT executives claim worker productivity is negatively impacted by their existing technology. The Skedulo MasterMind enhancements enable organizations to automate scheduling based on user-defined variables so scheduling decisions are made smarter and faster. MasterMind Solvers enable users to easily rank scheduling variables by importance and automate schedules accordingly, which can significantly reduce travel time, distance, and cost per hour for deskless workers and organizations while maximizing work capacity, increasing workforce utilization, and best matching worker and job attributes. Through machine learning capabilities, MasterMind Solvers will recognize patterns to make faster and smarter decisions over time.

Deskless workers who are not in a traditional office setting represent 80% of the workforce and 2.7 billion people worldwide. But the market is largely underserved, with less than 5% of software investments focused on this segment. And coordinating sophisticated deskless work, like vaccine administration or solar energy equipment installation, is only getting more complex. This challenge represents a perfect application for AI/ML technologies – to help automate the creation of sophisticated work schedules that balance organizational priorities, like reducing travel time, minimizing costs, and maximizing work capacity — and the unique requirements of individual jobs, and specialized deskless workers — all across multiple geographies.

4. Predictions for the future of AI /Big Data Analytics/ Machine Learning?

I mentioned responsible AI being a key trend, but I predict that it'll soon become a foundational requirement for many organizations as opposed to aspirational talk. The pandemic has highlighted AI biases immensely, i.e. hiring and healthcare, and the obvious next step is to move away from saying responsible AI should be implemented to implementing it.

5. How has the adoption of Skedulo in the US evolved over the last few years?

Skedulo was founded in 2013 in Australia, and the company has grown internationally, now including its headquarters in San Francisco, California. From there, Skedulo has been adopted by several different organizations in several different industries to become an all-in-one solution to managing the deskless workforce. When the pandemic hit, we shifted gears to help with high-capacity scheduling for COVID-19 testing and, later, vaccination rollouts in several U.S. states. Skedulo was even able to help the American Red Cross reduce scheduling costs by 30%, increased utilization, and made scheduling things like vaccinations immensely quicker.

6. Kindly brief us about your role at Skedulo and your journey in this highly promising sector.   

Eight years ago, mobility and cloud were everywhere, digital transformation was coming into full swing and I was shopping for a business process improvement idea. I had an "aha moment" when everyone I met was talking about the business challenges of a growing number of mobile workers all of whom were bringing their own devices into the field (BYOD). BYOD was wreaking havoc. Measurement of their productivity was limited to paper, excel, and whiteboards, it was ridiculous… all the other areas of their business were taken care of, but not the neglected mobile workforce. Even though the businesses were all different, the fundamental mobile workforce problems were so similar. So I got motivated, produced a product mock-up, and took it to four companies including solar, hot water, traffic management, and healthcare and they all wanted it. Two of those original preview customers are actual Skedulo customers today. Since then, we've begun adopting and implementing new technologies such as Skedulo Mastermind to improve the deskless workforce for the better.