PageGroup invests in Microsoft Azure to build a platform for innovation using responsible AI

“AI has the potential to be a really significant gamechanger for us,” states Bev Nicholas, Managing Director – Adoption & Success at PageGroup, one of the UK’s largest recruitment businesses. “There are elements of a consultant’s job that are really quite admin intensive and anything we can do to minimise this and enable our consultants to spend more time engaging with customers is clearly an advantage.”
 

On the sharp end of the changing world of work

PageGroup helps companies to find the talent they need to build their businesses in more than 37 countries around the world and across 25 specialist areas. Its nearly 9,000 employees support candidates to change their lives.

“There’s no question that the world of work has been facing some fundamental changes,” acknowledges Eamon Collins, Chief Customer Officer at PageGroup. “Recruitment companies have a whole bunch of challenges that we’re facing. For our clients, there’s an ongoing scarcity of talent, besides changing attitudes and patterns of behaviour for candidates.” 

To meet these challenges, PageGroup has invested in developing a global data platform that can serve as the basis for further innovation which draws upon leading-edge capabilities including artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI.
 

A secure, scalable and robust data platform built on Microsoft Azure 

To build a comprehensive and scalable data platform, PageGroup has partnered with Microsoft for many years.

“We’ve been leveraging the power of the Microsoft integrated Azure environment that brings together our globalised enterprise data into one place and it’s scalable as we grow,” explains Alex Bates, Managing Director – Group Data, Insights and Activation at PageGroup.  

“We use our entire Microsoft data platform to ingest, store and process data,” he continues. “We started off by putting in global systems across the business, really focussing on data quality, definitions and building out the taxonomies. Having that solid, secure, scalable, robust cloud infrastructure is necessary for, I think, anyone looking at how they can leverage AI.” 

Now that the data platform is in place, says Alex Bates, “we have the opportunity to benefit from the latest advancements in Microsoft technology, AI and RPA.”
 

A launchpad for innovation

PageGroup can innovate with new Microsoft technologies, including generative AI with Azure OpenAI. One early win has been to use Microsoft’s responsible AI tools to help consultants create job postings and adverts. 

“The work that we’ve done with generative AI around the creation of adverts is really a considerable timesaving for the consultant,” reports Bev Nicholas. “We can save up to 75 percent of a consultant’s time when writing an advert.” 

Opportunities for further innovation and leveraging of AI capabilities abound. “I’m hugely excited about this technology,” enthuses Alex Bates, “I think it is going to bring a huge amount to our business.”
 

The importance of responsible AI solutions 

For PageGroup, a key consideration when choosing a technology partner and suitable technologies has been data security and governance. Microsoft’s commitment around responsible AI has been pivotal. 

Alex Bates explains, “One of the reasons we’ve done this work with Microsoft is its focus on and commitment to fairness, reliability, security and privacy – and having that kind of responsible approach and being very accountable for the output of what we’re doing with our AI programme and, specifically, around generative AI.”