Harriet Green is in charge of the future. As head of the internet of things for the global computer giant IBM, the diminutive, hyperactive 55-year-old is busy wiring up everything from self-driving buses and pollution detectors to oldies and hospitals, in an effort to make the inanimate world more responsive, or, as she puts it somewhat paradoxically, “more human”.
Green’s new role makes her queen of artificial intelligence (AI), a concept we’ve been living with for decades now, but which is finally being rolled out to every aspect of our lives. IBM Watson is a super-powerful computer that guzzles data (which Green pronounces “darda” with a transatlantic twang that belies her Gloucestershire roots) at the rate of a million books a second and that Green predicts will be used by a billion people by next year. More than that, this intelligent machine communicates with its users in normal speech, a Socratic dialogue of question and answer. So a city planner could ask it, “What about a roundabout here?” and Watson will crunch the data, model the traffic flow and respond in words in real time.
Watson is already being used in 20 leading cancer institutes in the US, where its capacity to digest the thousands of oncology papers that are published every day — an impossible feat for an individual doctor — is helping oncologists fine-tune treatments for patients on the very latest evidence. Green insists AI isn’t replacing doctors but helping them work smarter. “For each wave of work that is done by a capability, there is new work created.”
“Cognitive [the IBM research department that deals with AI],” Green confides, “are making things more human, bringing things and human beings together — smells, sounds, data — it’s a totally new kind of interface with technology. It will become ubiquitous and make the world more personal, more interactive and responsive. Watson is really helping us to understand and act on brontobytes of data [a brontobyte is 100m times more bytes than there are grains of sand on the planet] from millions of connected devices and sensors embedded into offices, factories, airports, cars, trains and even our homes. What I love about Watson is its ability to consult with humans to help us to make more informed decisions. Because of artificial intelligence we can have relationships with infrastructure that we never could before.” Her vision of a hyper-connected society in which we speak to machines Star Trek style and our every movement is tracked is delivered in a girlish lilt at warp speed. It is sci-fi made flesh, but Green, a grammar-school girl from a tiny Cotswold village, has always dreamt big.
She did not, however, spring to national attention as a tech supremo, but as the CEO who saved the high-street travel giant Thomas Cook from bankruptcy. She got that job by cold-calling the chairman, saying bluntly, “You need me!” and taking charge in 2012. Under Green the share price increased tenfold; Harvard Business School still cites her work as a textbook case of business transformation.
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As one of only 10 women to lead a British FTSE250 company at the time, she was hailed as an icon, won the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year award and talked frankly about her prodigious work ethic (emailing underlings at 3.30am, training with a former marine and weightlifting before work — she even posed in the gym with her kettlebells for the media). She added that people “generally eat and sleep too much” and, as an example of her swift decision-making, said she chose her husband in “about seven seconds”.
Her fall was perhaps as inevitable as it was swift. In November 2014, shortly after saying her work at Thomas Cook was not yet done, she was out. Officially it was described as her moving on to “fresh challenges”, a mutual decision. But her exit excited much comment about women at the top and whether they were judged by different standards to men. Tales abounded of her brutal management style; how she “used her stilettos very effectively” and was too hot to handle. Her defenestration was not the end of it. After she left, news broke that she was to be paid a performance-related share bonus of £5.6m at the same time that an inquest (which the company, while she was in charge, was accused of attempting to delay) found that Thomas Cook had breached its duty of care in relation to the tragic case of Bobby and Christi Shepherd, two children who died while on a Thomas Cook holiday in 2006 in Corfu from carbon-monoxide poisoning. There was an outcry at how the company had handled the case, particularly the way it treated the bereaved parents, and as a conciliatory gesture Green pledged to donate a third of her bonus to relevant good causes, only to be accused of “abhorrent” and “appalling” behaviour by the parents.
For a while, a curtain fell over Green, but she wasn’t idle. She filled the time talking to kids on the Speakers for Schools programme, “skilling up” (she thinks we should all be in a permanent state of learning) and by lecturing at Harvard — the course was called How Star Women Succeed — as well as looking for another job (never an easy task for a CEO after such a public exit).
TWO YEARS on, though, Green is back, giving her first newspaper interview since all the drama. We meet in her office at IBM HQ, a vast concrete bunker in London next to the National Theatre on the South Bank. Today she is poised and focused, clad in discreetly expensive black silk, enthusing about Watson, but also about how Brexit is “a huge opportunity for the UK to innovate. It is a time for business to be stepping up, taking the call to arms. We have to be faster and better.”
IBM is a company with 377,000 employees all over the world. Will Brexit make it harder to manage them? “No, not at all,” she insists. Is IBM having problems getting visas for overseas workers? “No — I sponsor new intakes from all over the globe and it’s not harder. The youth … my children [she has two grown-up stepchildren; she came along when they were 11 and 15] are bemused by Brexit. They think it is one global world they should be able to move freely around. But from my own experience here, I’m not sure that there is any sense that the UK is becoming more closed.” She asks for hot water for a cup of green tea, confessing she is so naturally wired that she never drinks coffee (or has breakfast: it is 9am and this is the first thing to pass her lips).
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What about her own troubles? Does she have any regrets? “No,” she says smoothly. “My great pride about Thomas Cook is that not one single shareholder, bank, pension holder or any other individual was negatively affected.” I doubt the parents of Christi and Bobby Shepherd would agree with that, although the children died six years before Green took the helm. “There was a huge amount of support for me around saving 44,000 jobs and 25m clients. I’m very proud that the company exists and [in 2016] celebrated 175 years: that was pretty heavy lifting. That said, I’m the sort of person who every day thinks there are things I could have done differently and better.”
What does she think of the negative comments about her management style? She sighs. “Whenever you are in a minority and you do something bold, the reactions are interesting … And then of course when you say, I’m going to do something else now, people are like, ‘I didn’t expect that!’ So it’s about taking risks. Maybe women are expected to be less risk-taking and less bold and to be slightly more predictable.
“I like to do bold things, different things and I like to see that through. It was inevitable it would polarise when I wanted to do something different. The irony is, we all get better by a mixture of great successes and things that don’t go as well.”
This is the only concession she makes in our conversation to what must have been a bruising time. Success often makes driven leaders omnipotent. Look at Thatcher. Was posing with those kettlebells perhaps a mistake?
“I did it out of a sense of authenticity; fitness and strength is an important thing. As a leader you always need to be authentic, you should not pretend to be someone that you are not, you should not have a sort of outer sense and an inner sense because the people you lead will see that. There are so few of us women leaders, we should just be who we are.”
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Green is a great champion of diversity, passionate about the benefits to business mixed teams bring. That sense of everyone being included and being able to offer their best in a corporate culture comes, she believes, from “the will to listen. The genuine authentic desire to hear what other people have to say, including honest direct feedback about yourself; not just listening to what people say, but how they’re saying it.”
She describes how her (female) boss, the global CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, not only listens, “but can be hugely moving in the sense of her emotional range, it’s a type of gentle power, not the win-win, hierarchical, testosterone power — it’s making extraordinary things happen, but in a way that is about building relationships... it’s more long term.”
Women leaders, she observes, “have a different way of thinking. She talks about how the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “really leans in and listens, there aren’t many people like that”. For this reason she sees Theresa May’s arrival in Downing Street as a boon. “May is exciting, a grown-up, the right person at the right time to negotiate with Europe. Negotiating means you win something then you lose something — you have to get the best deal for all parties.
“To lead you must have the ability to connect a vision to what people need to do; that practical sense of getting stuff done. So everyone, however lowly, needs to know exactly what they need to do to carry out the vision when they get to their desk on a Monday morning. Theresa May strikes me very much as that kind of leader.”
Green admits, however, that the Government needs to “make decisions” particularly around “infrastructure and innovation and around Trident too [Green is a non-executive director of BAE Systems] … what businesses don’t like is uncertainty, and May is trying to make what she can more certain. She’s been reaching out to a lot of business leaders. May is listening.”
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CHATTING to Green about female leaders and their communication techniques, I realise that she is operating some of them on me. She is disarmingly warm, even maternal — at one point she gently bustles about, unbidden, to find me tissues for my cold — and uncannily clued-up about my life, flattering me with her own research to the point that I reckon I’ve been Watsoned. There is also a flick of steel: she deflects tricky questions like a politician, refusing to engage on the Big Brother side of AI and moving on as quickly as possible from the past.
Another tool in her considerable arsenal is a disarming modesty. At one point she says: “I was just with the Watson team. Every time I’m with them, I enter the room and I lower the IQ by half and double the average age.” This is rubbish, as she is ferociously bright, her degree was in medieval history but she insists anyone literate and numerate can flourish like she has in tech and is desperate to get more women to join her there. She says Britain is perfectly placed to cash in on the business opportunities the new generation of computing is creating.
“Cars will use conversational interfaces.” Like Kitt from Knight Rider? “Exactly!”
“At IBM we now have 6,000 clients using this data and mining it for new products and services.” These range from start-ups such as Blubel (a smart bicycle bell that uses sensors to help riders avoid pollution and congestion) to megabrands trying to make their products more responsive, such as Whirlpool, Panasonic and Nokia (which has given up on mobile phones to focus on the internet of things, particularly in the field of elder care). Green was photographed for this article on the roof of 122 Leadenhall Street — the Cheesegrater building in London — which has Kone lifts that run on IBM Watson to increase efficiency.
“This is such an opportunity for Britain to innovate — just think about DeepMind [the pioneering British artificial intelligence company bought up by Google]. We have very clever people all over the UK, in Manchester, Birmingham, Scotland, all the relevant verticals in skills, academia, manufacturing, this is a perfect area for Britain to excel in.”
Last month, Green announced a deal with BMW to explore the role of AI in its cars of the future. “They will use conversational interfaces and machine learning to personalise the driving experience — so drivers can communicate with their cars more naturally and cars get to know their drivers.” Like Kitt from Knight Rider? “Exactly!”
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It is not all so glamorous. At one point in our conversation, Green gets super-animated about how ball bearings can become “self-aware, self-determining”, by which she means ball bearings being given little micro sensors so they know if they are no longer performing as they should be (this means complex machinery never having to be shut down because the component parts can fix themselves, in what she calls “self-healing systems”.) But whether we like it or are aware of it or not, AI is upon us. Google will be testing self-driving cars on British motorways this year, Amazon is already delivering goods by drone and, thanks to Watson, the new Alder Hey in the Park building in Liverpool has become the UK’s first “cognitive hospital”: need the loo, just ask the app (it knows where you are and where the nearest facilities can be found).
Do we really need any of this? I was underwhelmed by Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. Why say out loud, “Alexa, turn on the lights and play Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees,” and wait for the AI to slowly whirr into life when it’s quicker just to turn them on and select the tune on Spotify yourself? More than that, with the constant stream of stories about hacking, why wire up our kettles, fridges, bicycles and cars when that just means more loopholes through which we can potentially be cyber-attacked?
Green isn’t having any of that negativity. “These cyber attacks are a good example of why all of us need to take IT security seriously. We all remember the early days of the home PC, which were a bit like the Wild West: low levels of protection led to big issues with hacking and viruses regularly affecting millions of users. Today people are more savvy about their PCs, but less so about all the other devices that they choose to connect to the internet. Manufacturers need to improve levels of security, educate consumers on the importance of changing default passwords as well as enabling devices to easily receive critical software updates. To reap the benefits of the technology we will first need to trust it.”
That will take all her undoubted energy. But like it or not, the future is connected. We will all have to learn to deal with it.