Paul Neville, director of digital, data and technology at The Pensions Regulator (TPR), is building strong IT foundations as part of a five-year strategy to help transform the organisation from a compliance-based to a risk-based regulator. He explains what that change will mean in practice over the next few years.
“As a regulator, we’ll obviously still have specific processes we expect people to follow, but we’ll be much more concerned about the outcome that we’re trying to achieve, and we’ll make decisions based on that demand,” he says.
“To make that shift, we need to understand our data. We need to have the right level of automation to explore information, measure outcomes, and deliver those outcomes with industry and other government bodies interested in pensions. We imagine a future world in which information flows between organisations.”
A historian by education, Neville entered the world of business as the internet boom gathered pace in the 1990s. Describing himself as a self-taught digital leader, he developed his skills in the commercial sector at blue-chip companies such as Sky and BT, and with startups and smaller businesses.
His transformation work in larger firms focused on delivering big technology-enabled change programmes, centred on boosting customer experiences. Mid-career, he decided to apply those skills for public benefit and worked as a consultant for two major charities, Marie Curie and Macmillan, helping those organisations to transform digitally.
Neville then turned to the public sector to apply his skills in another for-good area. He worked in digital leadership roles at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, UK Export Finance and Enfield Council, before joining TPR in October 2023. Neville reflects on this final move.
“It was the opportunity to take all of that experience and deliver on a national scale and impact everybody, because almost everyone has a pension, and the opportunity to make that process work for the citizens of this country, and make a difference for people in retirement, is a massive issue,” he says.
“Secondly, the chief executive, my boss, Nausicaa Delfas, was setting up an opportunity to change, not only TPR, but the pensions industry, so the role felt like a chance to be a central part of that journey, because not every CIO gets to sit on the board of an organisation.”
Transforming processes
Neville reflects on the transformation journey at TPR, saying it’s been an exciting ride: “Everyone on the executive board is aligned on the fact that digital, data and technology are the key enablers for helping us change as an organisation, and also helping the pensions industry transform.”
Late last year, Neville launched a digital, data and technology strategy, a set of missions over a five-year plan to renew TPR’s capabilities, embracing new ways of working, driving efficiency, automation and innovation. In March this year, he launched the data component of the strategy, which establishes a collaborative plan to drive adoption of new data technologies and standards.
“I am proud of that strategic work,” he says. “That effort includes strengthening our technology foundations, improving our capability in terms of automation, and making sure we have the skills in my team to develop the future. We’ve hired quite a lot of people and also consolidated similar skills across the organisation, and that’s enabled us to deliver more and save money on suppliers, because we’ve done a lot in-house.”
Neville says the projects his team has worked on include delivering artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help increase automation. They’ve also focused on improving cyber security and data governance to ensure safe and secure access to high-quality internal information.
The team also recently launched an innovation service to foster conversations with industry stakeholders. Neville says TPR is encouraging and enabling people and organisations to think differently about the services they deliver to their customers and the benefits they provide.
“That’s just a small selection of the things we’ve done so far,” he says. “We’ve got just under four years left of the plan. There’s a lot more we want to do, but we have built the confidence, both internally and externally, that we are a different TPR and we can deliver. That encourages everyone in our industry to think differently as well.”
Building foundations
Neville says the transformation work enabled through the strategy so far is focused on building the right technological foundations at TPR.
In addition to cyber security and data governance projects, his team has focused on service management initiatives that help TPR rationalise its application estate. The organisation has adopted an agile, product-based approach to deliver reusable capabilities for flexible services in key areas related to pensions governance within the organisation and externally.
TPR is also making progress on automation, including in case management. He inherited a situation where cases were often managed on spreadsheets or via one-off technology solutions. In short, nothing was joined up. Neville is using automation, via Microsoft Dynamics 365, to take a different approach.
“Everyone on the executive board is aligned on the fact that digital, data and technology are the key enablers for helping us change as an organisation, and also helping the pensions industry transform”
Paul Neville, The Pensions Regulator
“We’re delivering a single case management system,” he says. “We are working to make sure the process is streamlined, so we’re thinking about the business process first. By taking that approach, we can deliver in an agile and iterative way. Where we’ve already rolled that technology out, we’ve delivered productivity savings of around 60%.”
Neville expects the progress made through case management automation to be repeated in other areas. As automation takes hold in the organisation, he anticipates people will spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering better services.
Given the developments in the technology sector during the past few years, AI is playing a key role.
“We are deploying AI to specific use cases,” he says. “I’ve got a fantastic data science team, who are developing lots of very clever tools for us.”
Embracing AI
Neville says the next two years will be spent honing these technology initiatives and delivering tangible results.
Critical projects include implementing organisation-wide access to data via Dynamics 365 services and completing transformation projects in core areas, such as cyber security and data governance. It’s these foundations and the application of emerging technology that will help TPR transform from a compliance-based to a risk-based regulator.
Two years from now, Neville expects all foundational work, from case management to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, will be embedded within the organisation. On these foundations, employees will use AI-enabled tools to boost their working processes.
“That preparatory work will enable us in the future to create more customer-facing digital capabilities,” he says.
One example of where TPR is applying AI is analysing online news sites to scan for potential risks in pension schemes. Neville saw AI could provide a helping hand to what is currently a manually intensive process.
“That’s a great example, because many pension schemes don’t have the same name as the provider,” he says. “The technology does quite a lot of joining up behind the scenes to make that process work.”
Another example is using AI to analyse Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) statements, which organisations must submit to comply with legislation. Once again, generative technology – in the form of OpenAI and Microsoft Azure technology – is helping TPR staff summarise lengthy prose and create insights as a basis for intervention when required.
“Those are just two examples,” says Neville. “We’ve got other risk tools that we’re using. We are also rolling out Copilot internally, and we’re in the middle of our plan for that technology. We’re trialling GitHub Copilot for our developers, and they’re starting to write test scripts, which is fun. We’re still at the beginning of this work, as are lots of people, but these projects are a taster of what we want to achieve.”
Solving challenges
Neville says the result of this work will be that the future TPR will have an operating environment that differs greatly from its traditional, manually intensive processes. Today, the organisation maintains a digital portal, where people send, for example, pension scheme returns as part of a large, intensive data upload. Neville foresees a better approach.
We need to understand our data, and so does the industry. The firms need to provide better customer experiences for people, like you and me, who have pensions Paul Neville, The Pensions Regulator
“There won’t necessarily be a scheme return like you see today, because we will have the information we need, and organisations across the industry will be more digitally enabled, so they’re able to drive the kind of innovation and competition in the market that will benefit savers, people with pensions and employers that offer pensions,” he says.
This new level of digital interaction will make it easier for TPR and organisations in the pensions sector to tackle some of the thorny issues of the day. One of these issues is adequacy, or the extent to which people save enough money in pension schemes for their retirement.
“We need to understand our data, and so does the industry. The firms need to provide better customer experiences for people, like you and me, who have pensions. By driving a customer focus, we think the industry will perform better,” he says.
“We may even feel a bit like a fintech as an organisation, because we’ll be enabling innovation. Technology will produce the insights we need to work with the industry. So, we could be operating in a completely different world, which drives innovation and change for everyone.”
Neville continues to seek ways to push transformation forward. He recently helped launch the Pensions Data and Digital Working Group, which will help ensure TFP and the pension industry work together to embrace digital, data and technology and achieve the digitalisation and automation aims outlined in the five-year strategy.
“The working group has 15 members,” he says. “It represents a cross-section of people from different parts of industry, so trustees, actuaries, lawyers, but also people from more technical backgrounds as well. It’s about getting all kinds of people involved to help solve the problems and move to this new world.”
Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup. Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch Fix, and founder of a personalized shopping platform acquired by Pinterest. Fashion has been her obsession since she was a Syracuse high schooler inhaling spreads in Seventeen and hanging out in local malls. So she felt well-positioned to create a company for customers to discover the perfect garments using AI.
The reality was much harder than she expected. I had breakfast recently with Bornstein and her CTO, Maria Belousova, to learn about her startup, Daydream, funded with $50 million from VCs like Google Ventures. The conversation took an unexpected turn as the women schooled me on the surprising difficulty of translating the magic of AI systems into something people actually find useful.T
Her story helps explain something. My first newsletter of 2025 announced that it would be The Year of the AI App. Though there are indeed many such apps, they haven’t transformed the world as I anticipated. Ever since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, people have been blown away by the tricks performed by AI, but study after study has shown that the technology has not yet delivered a significant boost in productivity. (One exception: coding.) A study published in August found that 19 out of 20 AI enterprise pilot projects delivered no measurable value. I do think that productivity boost is on the horizon, but it’s taking longer than people expected. Listening to the stories of startups like Daydream that are pushing to break through gives some hope that persistence and patience might indeed make those breakthroughs happen.
Fashionista Fail
Bornstein’s original pitch to VCs seemed obvious: Use AI to solve tricky fashion problems by matching customers with the perfect garments, which they’d be delighted to pay for. (Daydream would take a cut.) You’d think the setup would be simple—just connect to an API for a model like ChatGPT and you’re good to go, right? Um, no. Signing up over 265 partners, with access to more than 2 million products from boutique shops to retail giants, was the easy part. It turns out that fulfilling even a simple request like “I need a dress for a wedding in Paris” is incredibly complex. Are you the bride, the mother-in-law, or a guest? What season is it? How formal a wedding? What statement do you want to make? Even when those questions are resolved, different AI models have different views on such things. “What we found was, because of the lack of consistency and reliability of the model—and the hallucinations—sometimes the model would drop one or two elements of the queries,” says Bornstein. A user in Daydream’s long-extended beta test would say something like, “I’m a rectangle, but I need a dress to make me look like an hourglass.” The model would respond by showing dresses with geometric patterns.
Ultimately, Bornstein understood that she had to do two things: postpone the app’s planned fall 2024 launch (though it’s now available, Daydream is still technically in beta until sometime in 2026) and upgrade her technical team. In December 2024 she hired Belousova, the former CTO of Grubhub, who in turn brought in a team of top engineers. Daydream’s secret weapon in the fierce talent war is the chance to work on a fascinating problem. “Fashion is such a juicy space because it has taste and personalization and visual data,” says Belousova. “It’s an interesting problem that hasn’t been solved.”
What’s more, Daydream has to solve this problem twice—first by interpreting what the customer says and then by matching their sometimes quirky criteria with the wares on the catalog side. With inputs like I need a revenge dress for a bat mitzvah where my ex is attending with his new wife, that understanding is critical. “We have this notion at Daydream of shopper vocabulary and a merchant vocabulary, right?” says Bornstein. “Merchants speak in categories and attributes, and shoppers say things like, ‘I’m going to this event, it’s going to be on the rooftop, and I’m going to be with my boyfriend.’ How do you actually merge these two vocabularies into something at run time? And sometimes it takes several iterations in a conversation.” Daydream learned that language isn’t enough. “We’re using visual models, so we actually understand the products in a much more nuanced way,” she says. A customer might share a specific color or show a necklace that they’ll be wearing.
Bornstein says Daydream’s subsequent rehaul has produced better results. (Though when I tried it out, a request for black tuxedo pants showed me beige athletic-fit trousers in addition to what I asked for. Hey, it’s a beta.) “We ended up deciding to move from a single call to an ensemble of many models,” says Bornstein. “Each one makes a specialized call. We have one for color, one for fabric, one for season, one for location.” For instance, Daydream has found that for its purposes, OpenAI models are really good at understanding the world from the clothing point of view. Google’s Gemini is less so, but it is fast and precise.
Generative AI and robotics are moving us ever closer to the day when we can ask for an object and have it created within a few minutes. In fact, MIT researchers have developed a speech-to-reality system, an AI-driven workflow that allows them to provide input to a robotic arm and “speak objects into existence,” creating things like furniture in as little as five minutes.
With the speech-to-reality system, a robotic arm mounted on a table is able to receive spoken input from a human, such as “I want a simple stool,” and then construct the objects out of modular components. To date, the researchers have used the system to create stools, shelves, chairs, a small table, and even decorative items such as a dog statue.
“We’re connecting natural language processing, 3D generative AI, and robotic assembly,” says Alexander Htet Kyaw, an MIT graduate student and Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) fellow. “These are rapidly advancing areas of research that haven’t been brought together before in a way that you can actually make physical objects just from a simple speech prompt.”
Speech to Reality: On-Demand Production using 3D Generative AI, and Discrete Robotic Assembly
The idea started when Kyaw — a graduate student in the departments of Architecture and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — took Professor Neil Gershenfeld’s course, “How to Make Almost Anything.” In that class, he built the speech-to-reality system. He continued working on the project at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), directed by Gershenfeld, collaborating with graduate students Se Hwan Jeon of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Miana Smith of CBA.
The speech-to-reality system begins with speech recognition that processes the user’s request using a large language model, followed by 3D generative AI that creates a digital mesh representation of the object, and a voxelization algorithm that breaks down the 3D mesh into assembly components.
After that, geometric processing modifies the AI-generated assembly to account for fabrication and physical constraints associated with the real world, such as the number of components, overhangs, and connectivity of the geometry. This is followed by creation of a feasible assembly sequence and automated path planning for the robotic arm to assemble physical objects from user prompts.
By leveraging natural language, the system makes design and manufacturing more accessible to people without expertise in 3D modeling or robotic programming. And, unlike 3D printing, which can take hours or days, this system builds within minutes.
“This project is an interface between humans, AI, and robots to co-create the world around us,” Kyaw says. “Imagine a scenario where you say ‘I want a chair,’ and within five minutes a physical chair materializes in front of you.”
The team has immediate plans to improve the weight-bearing capability of the furniture by changing the means of connecting the cubes from magnets to more robust connections.
“We’ve also developed pipelines for converting voxel structures into feasible assembly sequences for small, distributed mobile robots, which could help translate this work to structures at any size scale,” Smith says.
The purpose of using modular components is to eliminate the waste that goes into making physical objects by disassembling and then reassembling them into something different, for instance turning a sofa into a bed when you no longer need the sofa.
Because Kyaw also has experience using gesture recognition and augmented reality to interact with robots in the fabrication process, he is currently working on incorporating both speech and gestural control into the speech-to-reality system.
Leaning into his memories of the replicator in the “Star Trek” franchise and the robots in the animated film “Big Hero 6,” Kyaw explains his vision.
“I want to increase access for people to make physical objects in a fast, accessible, and sustainable manner,” he says. “I’m working toward a future where the very essence of matter is truly in your control. One where reality can be generated on demand.”
Like cold plunging, sauna use isn’t suitable for everyone, however. If you have any heart, kidney, blood pressure, or respiratory concerns or are pregnant, you should avoid the sauna, for example. If you are unsure, you should always consult your doctor before use. And regardless of your level of sauna experience, if you feel lightheaded, nauseous, or uncomfortable in any way, you must leave the sauna immediately to avoid overheating or dehydration.
Traditional Sauna Vs. Infrared Sauna
How long you spend in a sauna also depends on what type of sauna you have, be it a traditional dry sauna, infrared sauna, or perhaps a steam sauna. The temperature of your sauna also matters, as the higher the temperature or humidity, the less time you can safely stay inside.
The two most popular sauna options include the traditional Finnish-style dry sauna that functions on high heat with low humidity at around 160 to 200 degrees Fahrenheit (70 to 100 Celsius). A typical session can last around eight to 10 minutes and is widely recommended three to four times a week for general health and relaxation. Pure Saunas suggests capping your sauna session at 20 minutes. Longer than that can lead to dehydration or overheating.
Meanwhile, an infrared sauna uses infrared light to heat the body at lower temperatures between 120 and 150 Fahrenheit (50-65 C). As the heat feels milder, Pure Saunas suggest a time range between 20 and 30 minutes. While experienced sauna users may be able to go to 30 minutes, it’s safer to keep to sessions under 20 minutes.
The Benefits of Heat and Movement
Aside from counting down the minutes on the sand timer, there’s another way to “be” while in a sauna. Space may limit you, but gentle intentional stretching in the sauna not only feels great but can be beneficial. A study by Harvard Medical School found that a hot yoga flow may even ease depression, for example, which is an indication of how well heat and movement go together.
“Learning to move and breathe calmly in heat teaches you to self-regulate and to stay centered when things feel intense,” says Nick Higgins from Hotpod Yoga. “It also elevates the heart rate and circulation, giving a gentle cardiovascular boost even during slower, more mindful flows. Whether you’re flowing through yoga or sitting, that mindful relationship with heat can be both grounding and transformative. Warmth encourages muscles to soften and lengthen, supporting flexibility and joint mobility while reducing the risk of strain.”
Your fellow sauna buddies may not appreciate you attempting a full-on sun salutation in such a tight space, but there are a few subtle yoga poses you can try.
“Certain stretches feel more accessible when the muscles are warm and supple, such as hip openers like Pigeon Pose, gentle backbends like Cobra or Bridge, and hamstring stretches like Forward Fold,” says Higgins. “The heat helps you ease deeper into those postures with control rather than force, which is key to safe, sustainable flexibility.”
Sports5 days ago
Tech5 days ago
Fashion4 days ago
Entertainment4 days ago
Politics5 days ago
Tech4 days ago
Sports5 days ago
Entertainment4 days ago