Day-1: Highlights - Gartner Data & Analytics Summit

The Gartner Data and Analytics Summit, is taking place in Mumbai on 24th and 25th April. This year, the theme is Collective Intelligence and Generating Value Together. It's about teams and entities in the ecosystem working together to generate value from data.

In a video testimonial, Mallory Freeman, VP, Enterprise Data and Analytics, United Parcel Service said they "cracked the code" and found out that it is all about having "the right data at the right time, in the right quality for the right problem, and with the right people."

"My PhD years were spent in solving supply chain engineering problems with the UN World Food Programme. I was fighting hunger worldwide, swooping in with data science and AI ready to optimize everything … and I learned some lessons the hard way early in my career," Freeman said.

The result of that UPS-sponsored research was an award-winning global supply chain optimization engine for food assistance. It's been in production for nearly 10 years and is impacting more lives for every dollar.

"It's my belief that these big tenacious problems, they're only solvable with a combination of public and private operating models working together," Freeman said.

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"Mallory's story with UPS shows how collective intelligence spanning the public and private sectors enabled by data can tackle the very biggest challenges that we face. The point of the story: collective intelligence allows us to have big aspirations," said Debra Logan, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner.

Alluding to Microsoft's Advantage India program, and SAP Labs India's partnership with IIT-Bangalore, Gareth Herschel, VP Analyst, Gartner said, "This is collective intelligence in action. We have unleashed a new era of collective intelligence, one that combines human and machine intelligence, and it is this new partnership that inspired our collective vision, or a confluence, generating value together."

UPS is a company that understands the fundamental role of data, analytics, and AI as a core pillar of its organizational and business strategy. However, this is not true for all organizations.

"If your leadership team does not understand the value of data and analytics, you will not get the support that you need. And you will be viewed as a cost center and not as a value creator," Herschel said.

Gartner analyzed the earnings calls for over a decade of companies in the S&P Global 1200. It found that those who described data analytics or AI as strategic outperformed their peers 80% of the time over the past nine years.

In another study just published this year, Gartner analyzed the data and analytics maturity of over 300 organizations against their financial performance. It found a 30% difference in net incomes positive difference.

"So the correlation between high levels of D&A and AI maturity and superior financial performance is there," said Logan. ?

These studies are affirmations for business leaders about the value that is being generated from data and analytics maturity of the most successful D&A teams and what their leaders are doing.

D&A leaders are spending their time changing culture, creating strategy, managing the D&A function, and governance.

While they spend a lot of time on changing culture and creating strategy, their governance efforts often fail, Herschel said.

Governance has been largely misunderstood as it is too broadly defined. Internally, it has been associated with control or something too restrictive and difficult to do.

"In order to succeed, we must be clear about which specific governance related activities we need to focus on, because those are the ones that have been proven to create value, Herschel said.

In another session, Sarah Turkaly, Sr. Principal Analyst at Gartner, said, "When done well, governance can contribute to your organization's success."

A Gartner Chief Data and Analytics Officer Agenda Survey for 2023, revealed the top three critical enablers for success. Data, analytics, or information governance, or master data management top the list with 36% of the respondents saying it was their number one priority. Organizational change management and culture support was also highlighted by 26% of the respondents.

In other sessions that I attended, there was talk about AI and generative AI.

During my interactions with Sumit Agarwal, VP, Analyst at Gartner, I learned that the majority of organizations are still in the exploratory stages of AI adoption. He calls this set of companies "Defenders". They use copilots or business assistants for task-specific improvement and competitive parity. Typical applications are coding assistants and marketing copy generation.

The next level is a group called "Extenders" as they extend an existing process for differentiation. They use GenAI for customer support, sales applications, and for document search and summary.

The most progressive group are the "Upenders" who use Gen AI to create new products, markets, and core processes. They have learned to tune gen AI for industry or domain-specific applications and have created custom foundation models. An example is Insilico Medicine which used Pharma.AI to create the first drug discovered and designed with GenAI.

My interview with Sumit will appear on the CIO Inc., website shortly.

Look out for my Day-2 report tomorrow (25 April).

Ciao! (Be happy) / CAIO (Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer)