In this week’s episode of Masters of Max, Tom Butta welcomes Harry Parkes, VP of Product at OVO, a major energy supplier based in Bristol, England. Harry brings a wealth of experience from the product and design fields, and is at the forefront of boosting consumer engagement and facilitating the transition towards sustainable energy use at OVO.
In this week’s episode of Masters of Max, Tom Butta welcomes Harry Parkes, VP of Product at OVO, a major energy supplier based in Bristol, England. Harry brings a wealth of experience from the product and design fields, and is at the forefront of boosting consumer engagement and facilitating the transition towards sustainable energy use at OVO. Founded over a decade ago, OVO emerged as a challenger in the UK energy sector and now boasts 4M customers.
The conversation dives deep into the philosophical and practical aspects of product design and management. Harry underscores the importance of understanding the user’s context when designing a product or service, drawing parallels between product management and the design field. Both disciplines, he argues, revolve around problem-solving within the situational context of users.
A significant part of the interview highlights OVO's innovative approach to engaging customers through its mobile app offerings. With the energy sector’s shifting landscape, OVO has benefitted from their customers’ newly sparked interest in conserving energy. The company has invested in app features that allow users to check their energy usage, understand how energy flows through their homes, and offer insights to reduce their carbon footprint and save money. The app plays a critical role in getting customers to engage with their energy and start thinking about where it comes from, fostering an ongoing relationship to advance the decarbonization agenda.
For businesses looking to enhance their mobile engagement and app offerings, Harry provides valuable insights. Emphasizing the significance of understanding customer behaviors, perceptions and profiles, as well as using AI to add real value to customers’ experiences. Harry also highlights OVO’s focused approach to becoming net zero by 2035.
[00:00:00] Harry Parkes: So I think the challenge for us at Ovo is how do we maintain that sort of entrepreneurial challenging spirit, whilst at the same time releasing regularly to 4 million people. It has a different cadence to it. And certainly when we look at monthly active users, app is a much more engaged base for us.
[00:00:22] And these are customers who are really engaging with their energy, they're checking out their usage. We invest a lot. On helping customers understand how much energy they're using and where they're using it in their homes, and we've got some really nice features launching later this year that will be only on app and helping those customers who've got a smart meter and want to go down that decarbonization pathways with richer insights and some data and more kind of offers and incentives to start looking at decarbonizing their home.
[00:00:55] Voiceover: Welcome to Masters of Max. A mobile app experience podcast. [00:01:00] Please welcome your host, Tom Buda, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Airship.
[00:01:09] Tom Butta: Today, it's my pleasure to welcome Harry Parks to Masters of Max. Harry, welcome. Thanks, Tom. Great to be here. We've had a number of folks who have come out of the product and also the design field as guests on the podcasts. And, um, you're currently the vice president of product at OVO, but you've also had an experience in UX and design.
[00:01:34] Can you tell me about, you know, that experience? That sort of duality seems like, for example, someone who's had a product needs to have technical capabilities, but also a management skill set, right? Because, well, you build in the product to serve a market, to create some kind of a return, right, for the business and the customers.
[00:01:53] But on the other hand, with, from a design perspective, you're actually more focused on the experience. I think it's really interesting. [00:02:00] Duality, if I'm not overstepping it here.
[00:02:01] Harry Parkes: No, no, not at all, not at all. Um, I think the fundamentals of products and design are, are similar in terms of you're solving a problem and you're solving a problem within the situational context of the user of that product.
[00:02:16] That service, and you can't design a chair if you don't understand who's going to be sitting on it, the materials you're going to be using, the context in which the chair is going to be utilized. And so whether you're, you know, there's a lot of similarities in terms of products. Obviously with software product management, you've got to consider the life cycle of software development, including the eventual demise of that thing.
[00:02:43] Um, and how you remove it from the system, either replace it or it becomes redundant and no longer used. So I think it, you know, there's a lot of similarities. Although, funnily enough, I didn't really start out in design. I started out in startups in the late, uh, mid 90s, really, at the sort of dawn of the, [00:03:00] the web.
[00:03:00] I remember getting very excited about animated GIFs and frames a long time ago. And, um, I started out on the agency side because that was the only way at the time, because this is pre e commerce, there was any way of making any money was selling what we were doing to advertising agencies, et cetera, initially.
[00:03:19] And then eventually we went direct to the clients they were introducing. Sometimes they were happy about that, sometimes they were less happy about that. And then as I transitioned more to client side, I'd always been really fascinated around the design aspects. I sort of naturally gravitated towards that.
[00:03:36] The concept of products in a number of companies using digital at the time, if you think about, let's say, the Mid 2000s wasn't as established as it is today, the role of product management. And there was still a lot of companies who thought, you know, if you think Agile was really starting to go mainstream, starting to emerge.
[00:03:54] And then I think the, the thing that really accelerated it was mobile and app. [00:04:00] And then obviously the iPhone as a sort of really pivotal moment in the sort of, because I think suddenly software and mobile, the level to which we engaged with the device. And with software suddenly transformed. And you can see it just extending ever since that.
[00:04:21] I've recently signed up for the Guardian's How to Stop Using Your Phone So Much 5 Weeks Coaching Course, because, you know, we're now at the other end of it, where it's actually problematic. You know, as a parent, I'm, you know, trying to work with my kids to say, don't spend so much time looking at these things.
[00:04:39] You know, so I think that was kind of a slightly sort of convoluted way in which I worked my way into product management. It didn't really exist as a thing in some of the companies I was working at. And I was sort of, it was really sort of, it was me creating it as a thing within the company and then it sort of grew out of there and I think taking on, again, also me sort of moving from the UX side more back into the, the [00:05:00] commercial foundings that I had at the beginning of my career as well.
[00:05:03] Did you find that your studies, didn't you go to London school of economics? Yeah, I did anthropology, so not economics. Banterpology was hugely interesting and, um, the thing I think I still found so valuable today is it completely grounds you in the idea that all perception is culturally, culturally influenced.
[00:05:25] And everything we think of as normal and natural and the right thing to do is entirely a product of our culture and the culture that we have the chance to be born into. So understanding how people perceive things or don't perceive things, and even when you get into the design side of things, like, well, what looks logical to me may be completely illogical to you.
[00:05:46] You process information in a different way. If you look at stock charts, for example, China versus the UK or the US. You know, the green and red is inverted because obviously red is lucky in China, so red is good. So [00:06:00] simple things like that where you just go, you've got the colors wrong. It's like, no, you've got the colors wrong.
[00:06:06] So you have to, have to kind of work it around that. And then obviously as we get into different places, different modes of interaction and, and, you know, whilst I'm pretty comfortable with technology, given my role, what I do find if I look at my 13 year old son is, He engages and utilizes technology in a way that even I don't really fully understand.
[00:06:30] So I understand how the technology he's using is working, but I don't really fully understand or appreciate the way he's woven it into his life and the way his friends weave it into their life. You know, for me, taking a break from my phone is actually quite a welcome experience. For him, it's almost traumatic.
[00:06:47] Uh, it's so integrated within his social circle, his, the way he connects with his friends and the way he kind of creates interactions. And I think it's going to be super interesting to see what AI and Gen [00:07:00] AI is going to do that. And I think we're seeing another iPhone moment.
[00:07:04] Tom Butta: Yeah. Well, there's so much in all of what you just said.
[00:07:08] There's a lot of paths we can go down. I'm kind of fascinated, um, your statement here about your study of anthropology and the point of, you know, perception is, is entirely culturally influenced. What that leads me to ask is, is there original thought? And if so, you know, where does that start? Uh, now we're getting to philosophy, a little bit of philosophy here, but I feel like, uh, you know, my philosophy teacher, you know, opened up the conversations like, is the chair really there?
[00:07:45] Like, what is the chair really there? Well, of course it's
[00:07:47] Harry Parkes: not. Reality, as Einstein said, reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. Yeah. So I think you get down to that level. No, it doesn't exist. But on the other hand, it's kind of. What we are is reality making [00:08:00] machines, I think, as humans. Your experience of my, me as a, as a person, you're making it up.
[00:08:07] If you see what I mean, you're, you're, you're transmitting onto me, and I'm doing the same to you at the same time, all of the perceptions that we have around each other. And so when building, you know, on the product side, building products and services that get cut through, you've got to understand the perspective, the context, the situational, Awareness in which you're delivering this products and service and what people might be wanting to get from it.
[00:08:33] And actually it's, it's, it's very relevant in the energy space. I mean, I think some of the things I, I often challenge our teams around is we're obviously really super engaged with energy. And energy supply and decarbonization. And we think it's fascinating. And I often have to kind of sort of play the role of most of our customers don't even want to know about their energy supply.
[00:08:55] I just want it there. They just want the lights to come on when they [00:09:00] turn the switch. I don't really want to know where it comes from. I don't really want to have to engage with it. And actually, so the big challenge we've got, particularly around our decarbonization agenda around net zero is to get customers to engage with their energy, to start thinking about, you know, where it comes from.
[00:09:15] If you don't care about what heats your hot water, you will continue using oil and gas. So maybe if you do care about you will The carbon impact of what heats your hot water, you might be wanting to engage with an air source heat pump, but then you've got to engage with the, the friction of swapping out a heat source, and you've got to understand the ongoing running costs.
[00:09:36] So there's a huge challenge we have to take people through. But first of all, waking them up and getting them to engage with a supplier that historically, they've just gone, I'll just choose the lowest price.
[00:09:46] Tom Butta: Yeah, so we haven't talked about OVO yet, so maybe just for the listeners, just tell us a little bit about OVO, the agenda, you talked about, you know, Net Zero.
[00:09:56] OVO
[00:09:58] Harry Parkes: started a little over 10 years [00:10:00] ago, and it was really, I think, started, and I was one of its first customers, funnily enough. It was rather like the sort of neobanks in the UK like Monzo, Starling, etc. are to the energy sector at the time. It was new, it was exciting, it was representing a different opportunity to the incumbent suppliers within it.
[00:10:20] Uh, and it really embraced technology and has continued to embrace technology all the way through. It then grew and then about, uh, three years ago now we acquired the energy supply business from, uh, an established firm called Scottish and Southern Electric SSE, and then the last few years we've been working on integrating those, those customers over and merging SSE into OVO, uh, which we completed at the end of last year.
[00:10:44] So we're now, all of those customers are on OVO platforms and systems. And that gives us around four and a half million customers in the UK now. But I think our whole ethos as a company is about helping people get a great core energy supply, [00:11:00] gas and electricity, and then to help them understand how they move on what we call their, their path to zero, how they decarbonize their home.
[00:11:08] Whether you be living in a studio flat on the 13th floor, or you've got a four bedroom detached house. With their own driveway, then we want to be able to help those customers understand this is what you can do to either use the energy that you've got more efficiently or to state steps to moving away from oil and gas.
[00:11:26] So it's a sizable thing, but you know, within that different, I was working at HSBC, um, you know, one of the biggest global banks out there at the time when those neobanks were emerging within the UK. And, um, you know, you could see some of the executives within HSBC frustrated at the pace at which they moved.
[00:11:46] But then again, at the time, the regulator didn't really have the same. Eye on those customers that did on HSBC. I mean, HSBC, if our, if our login went down for more than X seconds, it was a reported [00:12:00] event to the regulator. You know, we, we, we, we, uh, a very sizable proportion of the UK's adults bank with us, but when you're developing a neo bank from the start and you don't really have any assets under management, you can take a lot more risks, you can move them up faster.
[00:12:15] So I think the challenge for us at OVO is how do we maintain that sort of entrepreneurial challenging spirits whilst at the same time releasing regularly to 4 million people is um, yeah, it has a different cadence to it.
[00:12:30] Tom Butta: Yeah, I mean I expect that you're, so I would classify OVO as a classic, you know, challenger brand, but I would say that what you're challenging is not only the established ways of consuming energy, purchasing energy, but also the mindset of, right?
[00:12:48] Harry Parkes: Yeah, it's challenge the mindset, get people to think differently. You know, I think there's a degree to which when you start out as a small challenger and you become a big established player, Novo is a very [00:13:00] big established part of the energy supply market. The challenge is always. Don't become the company you set out to disrupt.
[00:13:09] And there are those that have become that. I think it's, I, you know, I've worked in a few places that have gone through that. JustEat became very big in the UK, still is very big. I think one of the things that are consistent is going through, I mean, I think disruption is always happening. So sort of worked through JustEat when delivery was arriving on the scene.
[00:13:29] That was really interesting. HSBC. Your
[00:13:31] Tom Butta: CEO, your CEO is from there, right? Yeah,
[00:13:33] Harry Parkes: our
[00:13:34] Tom Butta: new CEO is
[00:13:35] Harry Parkes: from JustEats, so it's great to be back working with him.
[00:13:37] Tom Butta: Yeah, that's cool. You guys worked together before? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh,
[00:13:41] Harry Parkes: cool. It was a great announcement. It was
[00:13:43] Tom Butta: fantastic. That's great. So what's your primary vehicle for interaction with your customers?
[00:13:51] Yes, we run
[00:13:52] Harry Parkes: web and app. So if you look at the number of customers, we have slightly more using our web platform. So a lot [00:14:00] of our SSE customers were not digitally active. Is there a
[00:14:03] Tom Butta: difference
[00:14:03] Harry Parkes: in
[00:14:04] Tom Butta: the
[00:14:04] Harry Parkes: demographics of those? Slightly older base within SSE, but I think in terms of app usage, etc. I mean, the thing I often say to people is the idea that your age Excludes you from using digital technology, I think it's gone now.
[00:14:21] You know, the grandparents use it to FaceTime the grandkids, etc. We're all really, I think it's more, it's a bit like, you know, if you want to work out which leg is dominant, give someone a push from behind to see what's the first one they push forward. It's like, do you pick up the phone or do you reach for the app?
[00:14:36] You know, what's your preference for like, how do I resolve this? And obviously a lot of the contact we get mostly is driven by. Something's not working in the way they expect or they don't understand it, etc. as well. So what's the channels they tend to pick up? On the baseline energy side as well. So we've, we've got a fairly high digital penetration now and it's growing all the time.
[00:14:57] More customers now are using the app. [00:15:00] And certainly when we look at in terms of on the sort of monthly active users, app is a much more engaged base for us. And these are customers are really engaging with their energy. They're checking out their usage. We invest a lot on helping customers understand how much energy they're using, where they're using it in their, in their homes.
[00:15:18] We sort of pioneered a lot of, call this a disaggregate, aggregation of energy usage. So we can look at an energy profile and we can say, that's the fridge. That's the car charger. That's the heating. It's not perfect because it's sort of like if you think about looking at the Savannah analysis on an audio track, it's trying to pick out different sounds in the background.
[00:15:39] If you see it on their profile and say, Oh, that's this, that's the dog barking or that's the car starting. And so obviously sometimes, you Maybe a car starts like a dog barks, I don't know, the profile looks the same, but we've spent a lot of time on that, and it really is a way of, again, getting people to say, think about what's flowing through your home.
[00:15:57] When we went through the energy [00:16:00] crisis after the Ukraine war started, that obviously really engaged people with their energy because of the price rise. And people who saw energy as just a thing that ticks along in the back at a price it's always been and had it factored into their budget. Obviously it was, you know, an exponential rise in the cost and that really engaged people with it.
[00:16:20] And it was a really difficult time for our customers, um, across the board, really. So those times, those kinds of features and services were really Highly used features that we had, like this is where Inge is going and this is how you could use less.
[00:16:36] Tom Butta: How are, how are people discovering you? I see that in like, for example, I know in the app store, you have a really high rating.
[00:16:43] Um, 4. 7, you've got like 15, 000 reviews just in the iOS store. Do people discover you because of like offline type of, as it were, uh, marketing you're doing or?
[00:16:57] Harry Parkes: The app is a thing you use after you join, so we don't [00:17:00] yet acquire people through the app, and we don't market directly into the app store. We, um, uh, our sort of wider marketing and brand activity is the main way in which they discover us.
[00:17:10] Tom Butta: So the call to action is to download the app? Yeah. Yeah,
[00:17:13] Harry Parkes: I mean, pre Ukraine, there was a lot more price comparison, and subsequent reforms to the energy market within the UK means there's more, uh, the price differentials they were. Yeah. But then those price differentials also led to us going from over 70MG suppliers, down to around 20 that we've got now.
[00:17:34] Tom Butta: How do you distinguish your customers in terms of the platform in which they're mostly engaging with? So you said your app customers tend to be more engaged, but are people typically one or the other? They're either You know, mostly web versus mostly app for this. Yeah,
[00:17:52] Harry Parkes: good question. They're kind of, they're sort of 50 50 with a small crossover between people who use both.[00:18:00]
[00:18:00] I think the differentiating factor between them is the level of engagement. And are the experiences similar on both? Broadly, broadly. We're tending to favor app more and more and we've got some really nice features launching later this year that will be only on app. And helping those customers who've got a smart meter and want to go down that decarbonization pathways with richer insights into data and more kind of offers and incentives to start looking at decarbonizing their home.
[00:18:34] Tom Butta: So tell us about Plan Zero. You mentioned it a couple of times. It's a pretty big initiative and a bold initiative, frankly, and thankfully welcome, in my view.
[00:18:44] Harry Parkes: Well, it's always been, I think, I mean, the, uh, clean, affordable energy for all as a mission's always been, you know, there as a core of what OVO is about.
[00:18:52] It's one of the reasons I joined. I'm very passionate about what we're doing, about what we need to do around climate. I've taken it, [00:19:00] I'd already, before I joined OVO, having moved out of London with my family, started taking some steps to, you know, Uh, get to the situation we have, we're lucky to have here at home now where we've disconnected gas entirely, it's entirely electricity run with a sort of battery and solar setups.
[00:19:16] And as I went through that process, I realized, God, it's really complicated. It's hard to know where to go to, um, you need 15 different suppliers, you need 15 different apps. You know, it's a little bit as you go through sort of the smart home, there isn't really a, you know, a smart home is a complicated home and a decarbonized home today is a complicated, uh, a complicated system.
[00:19:40] You've probably got apps of the battery, apps of the EV charger, apps of the EV, apps of the solar panels. Apps for the energy supplier. And you know, I quite like that, you know, I'm sad enough to, I have my own spreadsheet, I can download the raw usage data into it, I can complete the [00:20:00] analysis. But again, you know, that's just the thing that I recognize that most people in the country probably got better things to do with their time and aren't that, that isn't what they want to do with it.
[00:20:10] So I think a lot of what we're trying to do with OVO is to try and take away that complexity and that friction from making that journey. Providing a single source of, these are the steps you can take. This is how you can pay for it. You can pay for it up front, you can pay for it in installments. We now offer three years interest free.
[00:20:31] On a lot of our big ticket decarbonization items as well, you know, which is a fantastic deal, um, and, and really good deals if you want to pay for it longer. So really we're trying to get to that point and I think you can see us starting to move into that really successfully with the new heat pump tariffs where we can say, we can take your gas boiler out, we can give you a heat pump, you can amortize the payments over a year, over a number of years and you will now, month by month, be paying less than you were with the gas boiler.
[00:20:59] [00:21:00] And here you are, you've got a brand new heat pump and you're fit for the future. But it's not easy. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, I think, again, the big, the hard thing is you're taking some cases, a customer who's never really had any reason to engage with their energy. So then take them on to kind of engage them and ask them to think about it.
[00:21:18] I think climate is definitely a tailwind for us. A lot of people are starting to think about the energy they're using because of their concern about the climate. And I think if you look at a lot of the studies in the UK, the majority of the UK adults are concerned about climate. And they want to do what they can, but they don't know where to start.
[00:21:37] And then they've got barriers like price and other sort of, uh, other sort of adoption friction that's in their way. And the fact that, you know, we've been going through a difficult time in the UK for the last few years with, with things like cost of living crisis, et cetera. So people are just trying to do their best to find their way through it.
[00:21:54] But they've got, you know, they've got the day to day challenges they've got to get through. And what we have to do as an energy supplier is try and help [00:22:00] them through that journey.
[00:22:01] Tom Butta: And one of those challenges, of course, has a lot to do with, like, data and how well people trust your use of data, and especially their data.
[00:22:13] I think that's one of your pillars, right? To be the most trusted. company as it relates to data sharing. Maybe, can you talk to that a little bit?
[00:22:22] Harry Parkes: I think we, we're lucky in terms of we have a fantastic data science team. We also have a fantastic InfoSec team. Like any large company, you know, uh, it's a pretty interesting environment in terms of the one we operate right now.
[00:22:36] And, um, uh, we spend a lot of time looking at both the data that we utilize for our customers and how we help them use it. Uh, there's equally the same amount of investment in how that data is. Secured how it's allocated, et cetera, into the right systems and also the data that we don't collect.
[00:22:56] Tom Butta: Yeah. I, and I imagine that, yes, there's, there's the [00:23:00] application of the data to help people customize their own path and understanding, but then there's the aggregated data, which is probably good, which is probably fascinating.
[00:23:10] Harry Parkes: Yeah. And, and it's, it is fascinating and obviously the advances in the last 12 months or in the AI space are making it more fascinating by the moment. You know, AI is fundamentally changing the way we think about what we can do and what we can do for our customers.
[00:23:25] Historically, when you quote a customer for energy, you've got a model of the house they live in.
[00:23:30] Essentially, you've got a proxy for saying, okay, you live in a three bedroom house, you're probably going to use X. But if you say, well, if you live in a three bedroom house, if you've got solar panels, do you have a battery, do you have an EV, you get a very different profile. Because we sell energy on type of use, so we give different prices depending on if you're putting the EV into your car and if you're putting it into your oven.
[00:23:51] We have to then start thinking about more sophisticated ways of creating a better model for the customer. So when we say your energy is going to cost you X of the year, that's really [00:24:00] what we want to try and give you. As precisely as we can, say, this is how much we think you'll use for the next year.
[00:24:06] That's also important for us in terms of we're then buying and selling energy based on that profile, but it's also very important for the customer. They want to know that if they join OVO and we say it's 1, 500 a year, it's 1, 500 a year, hopefully 1, 450.
[00:24:21] Tom Butta: Right, interesting. First of all, congratulations on all the good work that you're doing and the impact that you're having.
[00:24:28] I think this is also an interesting example of um, You know, they say, if the work you do is also the things that you're passionate about, then you're in a really good place, and so it's like, you found that for yourself.
[00:24:40] Harry Parkes: It's fascinating, you know, it's um, both one of the simplest sectors I've worked in, but it's equally one of the most complicated, and it's a head hurtingly complicated challenge.
[00:24:49] It's head hurtingly in a good way, when you try and think about like, how do you help customers navigate through this? And also, the transformation for the business, you know, historically, [00:25:00] Obviously we, we install 600, 000 smart meters a year that will dwindle off as, as we, we replace all of them within the UK over time.
[00:25:10] But moving from effectively a relatively remote relationship with the customer to putting scaffolding up. Is quite different. So the operational challenges around it as well, and, and, and, and how do you build the systems and software to support the customer, the suppliers, the installers, the operations teams as well has been a fascinating journey.
[00:25:32] Tom Butta: Yeah, I'm sure. And I'm sure a lot of it has to do with like, strategically we could do this, but then operationally . Yeah. How can we actually do this? Do we , do we want, can we do it well? Yeah. Yeah. You
[00:25:43] Harry Parkes: know, and if you, you start putting up scaffolding. Uh, and taking it down, you know. Tens of thousands of times a year that creates a separate set of operational challenges.
[00:25:53] Tom Butta: Yeah, well, this has been a great conversation and um, I'm really [00:26:00] impressed, you know with with what you all have done and I think anyone who has interest in understanding actually how they can have an impact on personally on on the climate You know, this is an example of a company that stands behind that.
[00:26:13] And what'd you say, 4 million?
[00:26:16] Harry Parkes: Yeah, 4 Yeah, that's fantastic. There'll be more coming, I hope. Um, we've got some pretty active plans for it. Thanks, Tom. Yeah, it's a fascinating sector. You know, domestic energy consumption is a You know, what we use in our homes, and really it's heating and hot water that's most of it, is, is, it's a big impact in terms of what we consume.
[00:26:38] And the nice thing, actually, if you look at the UK, within all of the negative news you see around climate, the UK is, there's still a lot more we can be doing, is actually one of the standout examples of a relatively sophisticated economy that's made a big, big impact on its consumption. That's
[00:26:56] Tom Butta: great.
[00:26:57] That's great. All right. So we're just going to [00:27:00] come to the end here and I'll do some sort of rapid fire questions Android or iPhone? iPhone. Um, is that because of your Orientation towards UX? Yeah,
[00:27:11] Harry Parkes: you know probably a bit and I'm so embedded now.
[00:27:17] Tom Butta: Yeah
[00:27:17] Harry Parkes: to move just feels so difficult
[00:27:21] Tom Butta: Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:22] Harry Parkes: Um, is there an app you can't live without outside of OVO?
[00:27:26] There are hundreds, but I'm British, so it's my weather app.
[00:27:30] Tom Butta: Weather, yeah, there you go. Are there any new features, uh, or trends, uh, you're currently, um, paying attention to as it relates to, say, mobile.
[00:27:39] Harry Parkes: I think come back to AI, Gen AI, and how it will integrate. And I think it'd be interesting to see. Um, I'm certainly looking at this, uh, new device, the Rabbit R1.
[00:27:49] Tom Butta: Ah, I don't know that.
[00:27:50] Harry Parkes: It's a large application model. I think it describes itself, but what it looks like is they've been quite, um, closed about giving information out. I think it's [00:28:00] starting to ship now, but effectively a device that sits on top of your app. And it'd be interesting, I think, to see iOS 18, when that comes out, how they're going to integrate large language models.
[00:28:12] Because I think in some ways, actually, the app model is now so congested, you know, remembering which app you've got to use at which time, even the navigational interface, the colors are so, you know, is it the green one or is it the red one?
[00:28:25] Tom Butta: Right, right, right, right, right. Interesting.
[00:28:28] Harry Parkes: I often get confused because the two travel apps I use are one for booking my train tickets, mainline train tickets, and then one for navigating the subway.
[00:28:36] So they're like the underground system in the UK when I, when I, um, in London. And they're both green. And so logically they sit side by side because they're, they travel, but you know, you just find yourself like, Oh, right. I'm in the wrong one. And I think it's, it's, it's so actually, I think it'd be interesting to see what's going to happen next.
[00:28:53] That system is going to go away. It will be supplanted. And I suspect it's going to be through a more [00:29:00] conversational interface that comes up. Interesting.
[00:29:01] Tom Butta: Natural, natural language. Yeah. Yeah. That's not the first time I've heard that. Yeah.
[00:29:07] Harry Parkes: I was listening to a podcast a while back and somebody said, I think we're seeing the last of this of fully biological humans.
[00:29:13] And if I looked at my son's constant, um, he's always wearing an ear pod. I think if I said to him, I could just embed it in you, he'd go, yeah, I'll take that. It'd be a lot easier.
[00:29:25] Tom Butta: I could sleep on it. Yeah. No, it's, I mean, I live in a big city. I'm one of those rare people that actually is not walking around with something plugged into my ears.
[00:29:37] Well, um, Harry, thank you so much for your time and, uh, congratulations on all the good work you're doing. And I, I look forward to, uh, to hearing more about, you know, the progress that you make. Thanks, Tom.
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