Powering the Markets of the Future amidst Rapid Developments in Technology and Rising Customer Expectations

For the 2018 Milken Institute Global Conference, we asked speakers to identify one event that has changed their industry and the world in recent memory. See their insights and share your thoughts using #MIGlobal. See more coverage on the Milken Institute LinkedIn page.

Traditional business models in most industries have followed a linear path with respect to human capital required for expansion – companies that wanted to expand hired more people. One of the challenges for companies that achieve scale but unavoidably see revenue growth slow is the eventual pressure on operating margins. Inevitably, innovation takes a back seat. On the employee side, there is not enough investment available for upskilling staff, impacting morale. Only the ‘chosen few’ are involved in innovative, high impact projects – many employees are engaged in lower value, mundane tasks and their skills are not fully utilized.

Due in large part to the impact technology has on our global economy and the ways businesses must adapt in order to thrive in this increasingly digital world, this paradigm must change.

Amidst these rapid developments in technology, rising customer expectations and fundamental changes in the nature of financial markets, S&P Global sees a global economy full of opportunity. To capitalize on these exciting possibilities, we know that the intelligence we provide—our data, benchmarks and analytics—needs to be relevant and delivered in a way that makes it essential to our customers and to the markets. With this understanding, S&P Global is creating a path to tomorrow’s future by harnessing the power of leading-edge technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics. We are committed to driving unparalleled value for our customers and giving our all of our employees the means to have a profound impact on the world.

While we continue to build and advance our digital capabilities at S&P Global, we strongly believe that the most pivotal component of this evolution is our people. S&P Global is committed to ensuring our employees have every opportunity to grow in a dynamic technology environment. We are investing in new programs and resources for increasing employee technology acumen and enhancing the digital workplace. At the same time, we are also being mindful of consistently attracting, recruiting and retaining high-quality and diverse technologists in order to forward new perspectives, ideas and skillsets to complement and elevate the current capabilities of our data scientists, engineers and other leading-edge professionals. 

Across the globe, technology increasingly augments and elevates our employees’ work. We’re keenly interested in exploring the promise of AI as a brain extender for our employees. What that means is that AI is not something that replaces them. It's not something that substitutes them. It actually accelerates our collective intelligence, and helps our people do what they are already doing but faster and more efficiently, and that’s very exciting.

Today, we have hundreds of software robots working alongside our employees – the robots do the mundane rule-based tasks taking the “robot out of the human.” For example, in the past employees would have to clean and assimilate millions of data items, but today we have robots which do that. In many cases, our employees are doing higher value tasks like providing interpretation and analysis on top of the assimilated data. Our journalists and news writers are supported by cognitive agents using natural language generation tools that cater to ‘plain vanilla’ reports like earnings news reports. This frees up our news writers to do more investigative and higher value stories. Classification algorithms help us scan millions of articles and financial documents for relevancy and also extract key data items. The employees do not do these tasks anymore but they pass on their knowledge to the models and train them – putting the “human into the bot.” All of this ensures better quality, higher efficiency and a happier & engaged workforce.

By fully embracing the latest technology advancements and augmenting our in-house capabilities with strategic partnerships and acquisitions, we will drive our insights further, accelerating how we operate, how we deliver value for our customers, and how we power the markets of the future.