IFGlobal in focus - Antony Vickery, Head of AI and Data

Welcome to IFGlobal in Focus, our series spotlighting the people driving our business forward. In each edition, we chat with key team members about their careers, industry insights, and what’s next for IFGlobal.

In this edition, we speak with Antony Vickery, our Head of AI and Data, about his journey at IFGlobal, the role of data and intelligent technology in modern fulfilment, and how he sees the relationship between people, technology and business growth evolving.

From building the foundations of our data platform to exploring how machine learning can support our customers, Antony has played a key role in helping IFGlobal make smarter, more informed decisions.

With a strong belief in empowering people through technology, he shares why the most valuable applications of AI might be the ones you barely notice, and how IFGlobal can help brands get more from their own data.

Antony Vickery, Head of AI and Data

How long have you been at IFGlobal? What initially attracted you to the business, and what made you want to be part of the journey?

I’ve been with IFGlobal for 2.5 years now, having previously run the data and analytics function for Currys Business.

I was drawn in by the entrepreneurial spirit of this business, which starts at the top with our Founder and CEO, James Bartlett, and flows right the way through to everyone making the contributions they make to enable the business to function.

It reminded me of my early career when I worked for a similar type of business. At the time, we didn’t realise we were on a journey towards achieving quite big things. Those were probably the moments of my working life that I enjoyed the most, without realising it at the time.

Getting to relive that experience here while supporting, inspiring and leading others through times of growth and change gives me an incredible amount of self-worth.

As Head of AI and Data, what are your main areas of focus day-to-day, and how has your role evolved as IFGlobal has grown?

My role has evolved from pretty much day one.

When I joined, the business was acquiring huge amounts of data and making its best efforts to use it to steer decisions. But the data wasn’t organised in a purposeful way and the people using it were limited in the tools available to digest it at speed.

The business had arrived at the “data frontier” and I took it upon myself, as a Data Analyst at the time, to create a foundation that organised our data and encouraged users to embrace it through market-leading business intelligence tools.

I felt my role was to “liberate data”. That meant building trust in the accuracy of our data, improving the speed of access, and giving every user the confidence to access and use data on their own terms. Where the complexity of a request required it, we could also bring that data together for them.

With that confidence came the maturity of our data platform. Real business decisions, efficiencies and optimisations began to emerge, benefiting not just our own operations but also our clients’ bills.

Machine learning was added into the mix well over a year ago, before everyone started using the term “AI”, because we recognised early on the value it could offer us, particularly during our peak periods.

That work has continued to grow. As our data platform and intelligent tools, which the world now calls AI, have continued to show value, I’m incredibly proud to have been promoted and trusted to lead our Data and AI strategy.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about continuing the journey we started more than two years ago; empowering the people who use our business, both internally and externally, and liberating their data for mutual benefit.

We might not be the ones shouting from the rooftops and waving our latest AI around in your faces. Instead, it’s about using intelligent tools and well-organised data to make something faster, cheaper, better, or all three at the same time!

Then we pass and share that benefit with our clients.

It’s smarter data with smarter tools, working to create better outcomes, with our humans always kept in the loop.

Data is becoming increasingly important to how ecommerce businesses operate. How does IFGlobal use data today to make better decisions and improve the fulfilment experience for our clients?

I could write a very significant piece on this if we were to discuss everything in detail!

Broadly speaking, we measure and collect data inside BladePRO at every point - from a shipment making its way to us, right through to goods-in, storage, picking, dispatch, shipping, delivery and returns.

There’s so much data generated, and so much insight and information available. We’re expanding and enriching that almost daily to improve the analytics we can create.

That data comes together in so many ways.

It helps ensure our clients’ goods check in with as little friction as possible. It helps us make sure products are placed in the right locations and kept in the right places within the warehouse to meet forecasted demand.

That then enables us to pick and dispatch efficiently and maintain the incredible SLAs we operate within.

It genuinely blows my mind how incredible our operations teams and warehouse colleagues are at meeting those SLAs, particularly with the volumes they’re dealing with!

We also use data to hold our shipping partners accountable on behalf of our clients. This gives our Account Management team and clients the information they need to review performance and agree on strategies to make things better.

I think the best example of our data, intelligent tools and colleagues working together as one incredible, augmented machine is our performance during our last two peak trading periods.

It feels like everything is now measured, monitored and used to make ourselves better, both internally and externally.

And we’re adding to and enriching that almost every single day.

AI is moving quickly. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for AI within ecommerce fulfilment, and how is IFGlobal using it?

When people think about AI or promote AI, it always seems to be a “cool chatbot”.

But business isn’t about making pen pals with technology. It’s about scaling, saving, and efficiency.

We’ve already been using AI in the form of machine learning, training and operating models that have helped us become what we are today. They’ll continue to underpin what we become tomorrow.

The biggest opportunities with AI (which really should stand for the much less cool, or marketing-hyperbole-friendly “Algorithmic Intelligence”) are the quietest ones. The small changes in how goods are stored that reduce our clients’ bills. The improvements that speed up picking. The processes that help us operate more efficiently. Those are the things that excite me.

There are also huge opportunities in international growth as our fulfilment centre footprint continues to expand and our clients enter new markets.

But the collaborative opportunities to enrich and empower our clients’ data are particularly exciting to me, and they’re a key focus for the coming years.

I want our clients to experience and access the tools we’ve been using, the tools we’re developing and the tools we’d like to explore further. Tools that can help them understand their businesses better, forecast more effectively, grow, and feel more integrated into their journey with us by their side.

What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to using data effectively across a growing, global fulfilment operation?

I’m always the guy that wants more, so my natural response is probably all of the challenges you can ever imagine!

But it’s also important to take stock of where we are and what we’ve achieved today.

We have a solid foundation of data availability, accuracy and compatibility, which enables us to do what we do and operate in the way we do today.

We’re open and honest with each other when things are great and when things are “sub-optimal”.

Our weekly departmental meetings with the BladePRO leadership team, along with our incredibly strong working relationships across the business, enable us to deal with challenges and explore solutions with an openness and robustness that I don’t believe every business has.

The challenges tomorrow will be much the same as the challenges today, but with one additional element - expanding the data points we capture.

With every development or new feature, we need to ensure that we capture everything about why BladePRO did what it did, how it did it, and what the outcome was.

That means understanding the billions of decisions it makes each day so we can calmly measure, model, understand and improve them.

How do you balance the opportunities AI presents with the need to make sure the technology is secure and adds value for our clients?

Data security is a top priority. I have no interest in ploughing ahead into this exciting new horizon without carefully considering what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and who has access to our data along the way.

Our platform and agreements with Google Cloud ensure that the methods we use today are private to IFGlobal and BladePRO, with no training permitted on the data we process. That data stays within our agreements with our providers. It’s our data and it’s for our eyes only.

It’s an exciting time for data and the opportunities are vast. But we must be careful when using products from these very new and rapidly evolving big tech companies. Proper agreements need to be in place to protect how your data is used and who has, or might have, access to it - both today and in the future.

Our development path might not be the most exciting or draw the biggest headlines, but I’m pretty confident it will be the most effective.

It will be the most secure and it’ll be the best protected from the war the big tech companies are engaging in with each other over these AI technologies.

Looking ahead, what do you think fulfilment will look like in the next 2-3 years, and what role will data and AI play in that evolution?

I don’t think it’ll look massively different from the outside.

There’s a lot of hype around robotics and the amplification of those technologies through AI. I’d love to write some fiction here and pump that narrative harder because it would be more fun to read! But the reality is that the humans we employ and select are incredible.

When we benchmark their output against these types of technologies, we see that while those technologies might look and be great for marketing pictures, sometimes keeping a process simple, efficient and controlled - while augmenting a human with intelligent decision-making - wins by quite a margin.

Will we have drones flying out of our fulfilment centres, or robots stacking, picking, packing and dispatching? I doubt it.

Instead, I think we’ll have groups of people who can engage with clients as humans, providing the “human touch” while being supported by stronger, more intelligent processes.

People capable of doing much, much more. People who are better informed about your business today and its trajectory tomorrow, who are even more agile when things change.

And these people probably won’t even realise that this transformation has taken place.

Because the most effective application of any technology will always be the most frictionless application and adoption of that technology.

Can you give us an insight into any exciting data or AI developments we’re currently working on or exploring at IFGlobal?

GIANT MEGA ROBOTS THAT ARE ALSO DRONES!

No, that’s obviously a lie.

Seriously, it’s probably really boring to read but we’re working on a few things that are as far from a chatbot as you could possibly imagine. Although if you want a BladePRO pen pal and you petition us, I’m sure we could build you one...

We want to continue expanding our machine learning capabilities beyond internal use and make them available to our clients.

I want our clients to be able to access our Data team as a service.

For brands that want to collaborate closely with us and experience a genuinely integrated working relationship, we want to work with them as if we were their own Data and AI team.

We can use our technologies and expertise to help them forecast, market and grow, while enabling them to build a richer relationship with their own customers.

Reflecting on your career so far, what achievement are you most proud of, and what have you learned along the way?

The achievement I’m most proud of is having the courage and encouragement to start and run my own business.

I think that puts me in an incredibly unique position when it comes to really feeling what other people running their own businesses are going through. The emotional, physical and mental rollercoaster that comes with it.

It’s taught me how to walk a mile in another business owner’s shoes; to empathise with how scary that last mile might have felt and how daunting the next one could look.

It’s also taught me that, although you can’t change the past or adjust elements that might have been sub-optimal, you can still benefit from them in the future. You just have to allow yourself to be as proud of your failures and the lessons you take from them as you are of your successes.

Reflection is an important skill.

What’s one misconception people have about AI that you’d like to clear up?

Wow. This is quite hard because I think there are loads.

I also think the companies leading the “AI race” are stoking some of those misconceptions to inflate their bank accounts and market opinions of them.

Personally, I’d like AI to stop being referred to as “Artificial Intelligence” when it really isn’t. Not yet, anyway.

Certainly a version of artificial intelligence is probably possible. But right now, what we’re talking about is essentially an ingestion of human ramblings, carefully organised and optimised into a network of probabilities that produces outcomes based on your inputs.
With an insane amount of precision, to be fair!

It’s super impressive, clever and fast. It reminds me of when search engines started organising the World Wide Web. But it isn’t intelligence as we understand it in humans.

As I’ve said before, augmenting an intelligent being, a person, with this kind of technology gives us a genuine opportunity to evolve our businesses at significant pace.

What excites you most about the future of AI and what it could mean for IFGlobal?

I feel that it gives us a genuine opportunity to be better tomorrow than we are today, every day.

The technology is evolving in its capabilities and speed, and the frameworks that the various models operate within, which allow for a huge amount of automation, are developing at an incredible rate.

But the most exciting part for me is the open-source side of AI development.

Models that we can fine-tune and train ourselves could allow us to become the best version of the functions they provide to BladePRO.

Ultimately, that could help IFGlobal become the best third-party logistics partner you could ever wish for.

Quick facts

• What’s one skill you’re proud of that helps you excel in your role?
  I got called a “tornado of energy” when I walked into work today. I’ll take that as a skill I’m proud of bringing to the table!

• If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
  Probably my Dad. He died before I was an adult and I’ve always envied those who get to experience their adult lives, and all the dynamics that come with them, with a Dad who’s still around. I’d just love for him to know who I am today, and to know the grandchildren he never got to meet.

• What’s one thing your colleagues might be surprised to learn about you?
  That I do actually sleep. I’m constantly trying, experimenting with or building something, and I quite frequently get asked where I find the time for it. But between the hours of 11pm and 5am, you won’t hear a peep out of me.

Antony’s work sits at the intersection of data, technology and the people who make IFGlobal what it is.

From strengthening the foundations of BladePRO to exploring new ways of helping clients understand and grow their businesses, his focus remains on making technology work more effectively.

As IFGlobal continues to evolve, Antony’s vision is for smarter data, intelligent tools and human expertise to create better outcomes for our clients, today and tomorrow.