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It’s already a busy day and you were suddenly given the opportunity to meet a Fortune 100 Global CDO (Chief Digital Officer) tomorrow. Once in a lifetime opportunity to pitch your proposition but you have no time or bandwidth. How will you prepare for it? We are entering the age of AI… is there a different way to prepare given the time crunch?
Unlike the past, today there is a huge data footprint available of people and companies.
Here is a framework to help prepare…
Level-1: You can expect the CDO to think like other CDOs… so let’s crunch what CDOs are thinking. 1000s of CIO/ CDO magazine articles cater to their thought process and one can vectorize each article and figure what are the themes
Level-2: Top CXOs leave a big footprint of their thought process via interviews, earning transcripts and speeches. Let’s crunch 100s of these to understand what are the key priorities of the particular individual. This would also give you a sense of what topics is the CDO focused on from the Level-1 list
Level-3: A CDO will act on direct customer issues. Customer feedback is available in plenty across multiple platforms (ex: Twitter). Leverage the APIs and classify the issues raised using machine learning techniques. This would point to a list of urgent issues facing the CDO
Here is how it would look like simplified into one chart for quick consumption. This is for the CDO of a top US airline.
The CDO has a priority to build a personalization and travel analytics app but seems to be grappling with issues like lack of communication on flight delays, waiting times for premium customers, confusing website and wifi+cabin entertainment problems all of which are closely tied with personalization. Bingo, is that what one needs to bring up in the conversation?
CDO was used as an example but the framework works for any CXO. Below is an example for the CEO of one of the fastest-growing fashion retailers. The focus here is to understand what is the company’s focus on AI.
The CEO is focused on leveraging AI to build new designs and Virtual Reality for changing customer experience. They have even set up partnerships to reskill the company’s engineers with AI/ML.
Here is another example of understanding what the geographic and thematic priorities of a global healthcare major are leveraging earning transcripts.
The CEO has always talked about healthcare but increasingly “Digital” & “Robotics” are coming into the conversation. China continues to be a major focus area.
You would surely hit occasions when such a data footprint doesn’t exist or the company is B2B and not consumer-facing. In such cases...
Level-4: Every CXO wants to know what his/her customer’s consumers are thinking as this will impact his/her customer. So do a “Customer’s Consumer” view. Below is what an Automotive Parts Supplier CXO would want to know basis his customer’s consumer feedback. Continued engagement of people with SUVs and increased interest in Hybrids is something the Parts Supplier CXO would like to know but may not have direct access to.
There you go you are ready for the meeting and now you have a massively scalable, unbiased insight assistant that can do all of the above whenever you want it without any ego or laziness in a matter of hours.
In conclusion, a mix of AI techniques when assembled together can augment your capability & intelligence to prepare for a task that we all face regularly in work life.
By decluttering the deluge of data using AI tools and decoding them for insights very useful decision making interventions are possible. The power of AI is when it seamlessly mixes with our life as a massively scalable personal insight assistant.
(Note: AI tools used include but not limited to vector space intersections, attribute models, classifiers, theme identifiers, etc. The focus here is to show an AI use case. The methodology is covered in various other blogs of the author and not covered here)