Chief Digital & AI Officer Summit

The tenth anniversary of the Chief Digital Officer (CDO) Summit and the first annual Chief AI Officer (CAIO) summit coincided last month in Northeastern University, the best university in the US Northeast. I was fortunate to open the conference and share the 5-star rated DATA Initiative's book on Break the Wall: Why and How to Democratize Digital in Your Business. This book combines conceptual frameworks with executive advice on how to succeed in digital transformation - one of the 7 big problems identified by the American Marketing Association. I also showed the previous books in this 7 problems series, tackling how to build organic growth and how to create insights:

One key point of discussion was Data Quality.

Data should be RAT:

Rich: data I want and trust

Actionable: relevant to decision maker: action is the end of the story

Timely: on time

The cost of bad data is billions per year according to Gartner, but conference panelists agreed that is an underestimate. One anecdote: a customer service rep just put her daughter’s birthday for each customer to ease the check-in process, messing up the system. To counteract such data quality drains, you need not just training on data ownership and importance, but also incentives eg

?1) Gamify it: ‘if all of your customers are 16 years old, you lose’

2) Allow for unstructured text so customers are not forced to fill out the field

CEO David Mathison next presented the Chief AI Officer Talent Map:

1) who currently holds the title of CAIO?

2) what are their responsibilities?

3) where do they work?

4) how to get a CAIO for your company?

5) how to become a CAIO

Drawing laughter, David admitted to his failed prediction a decade ago, believing humans would always be needed to create:

Over the course of the 2-day event, delegates and speakers together built Job Descriptions specific to their sectors. The urgent need is clear, because just the US Federal Government needs hundreds of Chief Artificial Intelligence Officers:

Next came general and sector-specific panels on the Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO), whose role has been expanding. The CDAO is often responsible for delivering business value from data and AI investments, while ensuring their ethical use. The general panelists included CDAOs from Verizon, Sanofi, Estee Lauder and Thrivent. Diving deeper into healthcare and medical tech were Peggy, Jason, Shahidul, Yazhene and Phanii:

?Key advice included:

1) structure your unstructured data

2) start small with great data quality

3) keep track on how environment is changing while you are building it

4) leverage how can AI help in data quality

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The first afternoon keynote showed how digital analytics and technologies are reshaping the customer journey. DATA Cofounder and Faculty Director Yakov Bart introduced a novel framework to help various stakeholders understand the impact of current and future analytics and technology advancements from a consumer-firm perspective.

As to practical know-how, Bob Howland, CDO of Dawn Foods global showed how leveraging customer voice, change management, and composable commerce can lead a digital transformation:

He manages e-commerce for 26 companies/ distribution centers, none of which had documented processes or shared a system. Instead of digital transformation, he first needed to fix the company problem. When hired, he gave the Board these options:

1) 3-5 year plan, listening first and building slowly for little money

2) full digital business model within 12 months, costing lots of $$

The Board chose the latter, and he launched 11 months 15 days later, on time, on budget, and on strategy. The key premise is to let experts be experts, with three job descriptions: analytics, product/pricing (how to calculate right price and product catalog), and most importantly:

Sales and customer service: to win hearts of sales people, get a former sales person on the bus, get sales to be consumers of data. Every week, the dashboard showed the most digital adopted sales rep and least sales rep. To improve performance, he gave sales data and training office hours.

?Finally, the Panel on Data and Analytics: an AI playbook, discussed how for 20 years, CDOs were just expected to reduce risk by protecting data. But now with genAI, CDOs need to identify and go after revenue opportunities, aligning business objective with technology strategy.

Who needs to be on the team?

1)??? Data product manager: owns data from collection to authorization

2)??? UX expert: best UI is no UI (think Chat-GPT): build product for adopters

3)??? Project manager: project delivered on time

4)??? Data engineers: very complicated: data scientists no longer sexiest job

5)??? Chief Data Officer: mandate from CEO: the currency now is data

With limited resources, it is key to give people what they NEED, not what they want. For instance, business owners may say ‘give me new customers’, but what they really need is ‘new small business customers with China links’

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Finally, DATA Executive Director Kwong Chan closed the CDO Summit explaining how Northeastern's Digital, Analytics, Technology, and Automation (DATA) initiative brings together the best students, faculty and companies. In our hands-on experiential courses, we hone targeted skillsets needed in the interface of technology and business:

In our research labs, companies present to the best technical students and entice them to solve specific, urgent problems for them, such as the reducing the racial pay gap in influencer marketing, identifying problematic gamblers, or improving building energy efficiency:

And even though It's Not the Size of the Data, It's How You Use It, we are pretty happy with how DATA has grown in the past years:

Would you like to contribute? Please contact me directly at [email protected] !

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