What industry executives can expect at Analytics Experience 2019

We’re counting down to Analytics Experience 2019! In one week from now, 1500 people (give or take a few) will be joining us at the MiCo Milan, in Italy, for this annual flagship event. It’s great to play a role in the team working on the project.

I’m particularly looking forward to day one, Monday October 21. For the first time, we are organizing six 'Executive Experience' industry sessions for that day, hosting about 500 executives.

Why industry sessions?

In the world of analytics, there are many critical trends and relevant topics to discuss, hence by nature the AX agenda is easily filled up with exciting content every year. For example, next to the various keynote presentations at AX2019 there are also more than 50 break-out sessions scheduled!

However, feedback showed that we could still improve by adding (or consolidating) specific industry expertise. Last year, we already tested this with a couple of industry sessions. Executives found it very valuable to hear from their peers about how they were handling common situations or deploying analytics to add value to operations.

With that feedback in mind, we decided to put together support and resources to run six different sessions this year, all taking place in parallel on the same day. Key industries will be covered as follows:

• Specific topics in banking will be discussed in the Risk session
• In the Insurance session, the main focus will be on digital transformation
• Government and healthcare will be combined in the third session
• Telco and media companies will find relevant content in the Comms session
• Retail is another key industry with its own session
• The sixth session will focus on the Energy and utilities industry

Customer cases

A proven concept, especially appreciated by an executive audience, is to have customers on stage speaking about their business cases and deployment of analytical models inside their organizations. During the industry sessions at AX executives will be able to hear from Sky, Gazprombank, Generali, Eon, Federale Overheidsdienst Financi?n (the Belgian tax authority), Adidas and many more.

For a complete overview of the different session agendas, you can check the AX website.

What to expect

Each session is being led by industry experts from SAS. I asked a few of them about their expectations for the day.

Alena Tsishchanka, expert on the insurance industry, sees that insurers all face similar trends & challenges, many of which will be discussed at AX:

“Insurers are faced with societal changes, think a sharing economy and an aging population, which will affect their business models. Also, in terms of digitalization, companies need to be able to experiment, fail, innovate and exploit new technologies. This can be particularly challenging in the insurance market.”

The retail industry is another market faced with change driven by digitalization. Antonio Calvo visited more than fifty retailers in over a dozen countries, and often hears about the same challenges:

“Retail keeps becoming more and more customer-centric. Also, pricing strategies continue to vary by sector. The most successful retailers are often using advanced analytics to cope with such challenges. If there is one thing I have learned though, it is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ for retail.”

In the Risk session, banks will be talking about the ever-changing regulations and how deployment of analytics, and technologies like AI and Machine learning, can help to cope with it. Our expert Anselmo Marmonti explains:

“IFRS9, Basel IV and stress testing are common topics for any bank. Change is constant, including for regulations. At AX, we’ll not only look at the situation today but also how any new regulations (and technologies) might affect the industry in the future.”

AI naturally will be a topic of discussion in many AX sessions. For example, in the Comms meeting the role of AI will be discussed in ‘self-optimizing networks’, as industry expert Matthieu Joosten explains:

“Telecom networks produce enormous amounts of data. When we apply machine learning and AI techniques to uncover ‘hidden’ connections and relations, we can predict the behaviour of a network in future states. As such, networks could become ‘self-optimizing’. This will be one of the topics we’ll deep-dive into.”

Andre van der Meer, industry expert for the public sector and health care, ends with sharing his expectations of AX in general, and the industry sessions in particular:

“The main insight I expect people will leave Milan with is that it is not only technology that makes your organizational data and analytics mature. It is also about people, processes, data, and having a digital strategy in place. What’s more, this is not just a nice story, it really works and SAS can help. All the exciting use cases on stage during the event will prove it.”

A full house

To end on a personal note: it has been a pleasure and honour to work in the project team for AX 2019. I would like to thank all the people involved in the preparations. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at AX this year! If you are going, make sure you say hello!

And as I posted previously on LinkedIn, the room might be empty at the moment, but:

At AX, we will certainly fill it up again! :-)