Tag: AI

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How Mindbeat is helping British retail to ease the squeeze

20 March 2025

How are retailers adapting to change and using AI to support the tools required to build resilience and navigate increased financial pressures? 

Changing market conditions and operational challenges are squeezing popular UK high-street retail brands. Many feel compelled to choose between shutting stores or restructuring their senior leadership, with some even opting for both. 

The situation hasn’t been helped by UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to raise employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) from 13.8% to 15%, effective next month (April 2025). 

The increase in NICs, revealed by the UK Government during its last Budget, has added substantial financial pressure on retailers, who are already grappling with rising operational costs and shifts in consumer behaviour. So much so that 81 retail CEOs wrote to the Chancellor in November to warn that her NIC hike would cost the retail sector an additional £2.3 billion.

However, the dam holding back the tides of change for high-street retail started leaking long before Reeves took her seat on the front bench of the House of Commons. 

Several of Mindbeat’s retail clients have been restructuring their UK operations since the end of the Covid pandemic in a bid to cut costs amid uncertainties around trade recovery, supply chains, and inflation. 

According to Mindbeat’s Partnerships Director, Val Kessell, retailers understand that they can’t keep shutting stores because they remain key revenue drivers. So, cost-cutting measures need to be part of broader organisational change instead. 

But what does that involve? And how can coaching help?

For one retailer, it may mean re-shaping functional structures, like combining digital teams with IT and giving senior leaders broader responsibilities outside their fields of expertise. This strategy asks for more multidimensional leadership. 

For others, it could see brand portfolio consolidation or transitioning manufacturing abroad to benefit from the diversity of labour and associated cost savings. 

The common theme, however, is ‘change’, and in times of transition and disruption, retailers require the tools to build resilience, support teams, and return their businesses to high performance. 

Val explains: “Coaching provides a vital holding space to emotionally work through what change means to somebody facing significant role changes or redundancy. It also helps those with new roles to reconnect the organisational dots and understand the new company landscape. 

“If onboarding new talent is taking place outside of the UK, coaching can help induct someone into a British company culture. We support both staff being outplaced, the onboarding of new hires, and those remaining team members who may feel insecure, demotivated, or unclear of the pathway back to high performance.”

A cost-effective way of helping financially-strapped retailers through organisational change is to blend one-to-one and group sessions with AI coaching support. 

AI-powered coaching allows for questions with non-judgemental responses and for leaders to role-play difficult conversations or scenarios anywhere, anytime and on any device. 

For example, AI coaching could help a senior leader practice a difficult upcoming redundancy conversation. By role-playing different scenarios with AI, the leader is better prepared for how the realm conversation may play out, leading to a more empathetic and productive exchange with the affected team members. 

By including AI coaching tools as part of modules designed to ‘Build Resilience in Times of Change’ or ‘Navigate Change within Teams, ’ Mindbeat empowers retailers to provide broader support and undivided attention to more people over longer periods – benefitting their wellbeing, retention and engagement. 

“It sends the right signal to leaders that despite the transitional change, the retail organisation is investing in the future of their professional development, getting them back on track, and supporting them for the way forward,” Val concludes. 

So whether it’s supporting an organisational restructure, managing redundancies, talent retention, or just providing a holding space for clear strategic thinking, Mindbeat is helping British retail beat the financial squeeze – ensuring it’s fit for a future, which has AI embedded at its core. 

If you’re a retail leader looking to navigate change and build resilience within your team, reach out to our Partnerships Director, [email protected] to learn how we can support your journey.

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News

AI-powered coaching trials get underway

4 December 2023

As part of Mindbeat’s drive to make digital coaching accessible to all, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve begun trialling an AI-powered coach.

Our fully automated coach is designed to support individuals on a day-to-day basis, helping them to reflect on experiences, set goals, tackle challenges and explore different perspectives through incisive questioning and intuitive, personalised content, designed to provide guidance and support. 

We see the combination of human coaches with AI coaches as potentially a powerful solution, ensuring that employees at all levels feel supported for personal growth during the moments that matter.

Further updates will be available in 2024. 

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Blog

Adapting to the unstoppable march of AI

20 November 2023

How will leaders adapt to workplace cultures ruled by AI? Mindbeat’s Head of Client and Product Development, Jessica Bellwood offers five adaptation strategies for leaders to thrive in an AI-empowered world. 

During an interview at the closing session of the UK’s AI Safety Summit this month, Elon Musk described a world in which AI would be able to do everything and could cover every job.

Many professions have taken umbrage at Musk’s suggestion that all workers can one day be replaced by robots. However, the role that we as humans play, the way that we connect with technology, and the value that we bring will change so we need to be on the front foot.

As humankind continues to evolve AI’s exponentially increasing power, workplace productivity will naturally accelerate. Leaders therefore need to focus on how to adapt to this transformational change while developing their team’s softer, more human skills in readiness for a brave new fully-automated world. 

Here are Mindbeat’s five leadership adaptation strategies for an AI-empowered world

1. Think future first

What can be automated will be automated in an AI-empowered workplace. So leaders need to embrace new skills, expertise and judgement in areas such as data tracking, simulation, virtual modelling, programmatic and other fields where AI will reign supreme.

Technology will close the data-insight gap and improve decision-making capabilities, especially in time-critical, high-pressure situations. However, the resulting deluge of data will only turn up the volume and intensify the pressure to make the right choices. This will require you to retain your focus and surround yourself with trusted ‘human’ experts.

2. Assess current workplace skills and the shift needed

Hard skills can make you and your teams good at one job, but soft skills can help you all excel at many jobs.

Professional development in an AI-dominated world will require an enhanced ability to capitalise on the serendipity of human interaction that machines cannot emulate. So recruit people with strong social skills, encourage in-person interactions with clients and colleagues, and find ways to build your brand in the real ‘in-person’ world.

3. Don’t let your teams become predictable

Remember that Generative AI (ChatGBT and other AI-powered language models) responds with crowd-sourced wisdom and predictive answers. Its workplace adoption is, therefore, more likely to homogenize and standardise, rather than individualise your team’s output.

Written and visual content (marketing, advertising, digital etc) still needs to stand out and cut through in a noisy environment where everyone is in danger of sounding the same.

So, encourage creative individualism and nurture human values, tone of voice and original thought. When everyone else is turning to AI-driven solutions, creative, human uniqueness is what will set you apart from the competition. 

4. Equip your people for the future

Standard Chartered’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Tanuj Kapilashrami told the One Young World summit in October that it had analysed those ‘sunset’ jobs that will disappear over the next three to five years and those ‘sunrise’ jobs, which are likely to replace them.

The findings spelt alarming news for female professional development since more women currently work in ‘sunset’ roles and fewer women work in STEM, data science and technology.

AI therefore has the potential to undo all the hard work done to ensure positive gender balance across the workplace. To avoid this, focus on reskilling and forging new professional development pathways. Encourage a diverse workforce to develop new workplace skills as well as adapt those skills they may already possess from side hustles and outside interests.

As Kapilashrami says: “In an AI-powered world, skills will become the currency of work. As leaders and organisations, we stopped being the custodians of jobs a long time ago. We’re now the custodians of skills.”

5. Build a culture open to experimentation and personal growth

Leaders who regularly stray outside their comfort zones and refuse to shy away from bold and disruptive thinking are better prepared for adaptation or pivoting to new business models.

Encourage your teams to view challenges from new perspectives, be more agile and experiment with AI tools to assess potential and competitive advantages. This may require some unlearning as new ways of working come to the fore, so ensure staff are open to progressive ideas and not tied to ‘how we’ve always done things’.

Look for alternative ways to develop your personal growth as well. Our digital coaches encourage leaders to maintain outside interests, speak at conferences, mentor emerging talent and engage in other activities that will elevate their humanity in an increasingly automated world. 

Be prepared

Elon Musk’s futuristic view of where the workplace is heading was certainly short-sighted but it did serve as a timely reminder to leaders that as the influence of AI increases, human values and the importance of diverse skills are vital tools for professional growth.