Champions of Data and AI

What happens when the data being used to improve customer experiences has unknown or inherent biases? JoAnn Stonier discusses the ethical use of data when implementing machine learning and AI use cases. She also shares her perspective on the steps that organizations can take to eliminate bias from showing up in the data.

Champion: Stuart Hughes, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Roll-Royce

Data democratization starts with disruptive leadership. When data leaders simplify the data architecture and empower data teams with the right tools and creative freedom to do their best work, they unleash data's true power. Join us to hear from our special guest, Stuart Huges, Chief Information Digital Officer at Rolls Royce, talk about his mission as a disruptive leader at this venerable company.

In this episode, we explore how Jack’s technical and product background is helping him lead and execute on the ADP data and AI strategy to bring more awareness to pay equity and build new services and products beyond payment processing. He will also share his views on creating a data strategy centered around defensive use cases first — in other words, how to protect your data and your brand before tackling the offense-based ones — the ones that make you more money and reduce cost.

Data teams can sometimes get too focused on feature engineering and model performance without fully understanding the use case context and its business impact. In this episode, Sanjeeva Fernando, Senior Vice President at Optum, explores ways data and technology leaders can keep their data teams focused on delivering business value by working backward and deconstructing the use cases.

Yanyan Wu joins the Champions of Data + AI podcast to dive into the importance of having large amounts of diverse, clean and high-quality data to drive new insights. She also discusses how modern cloud data architectures, like the Lakehouse, make it easier than ever to combine data sets, structured to unstructured, to execute algorithms in near real-time. We’ll also explore how the work she and her data team are doing is helping oil and gas companies run more efficiently and generate more energy to help fill the gap brought on by current global events. If that wasn’t enough, she’ll also share the role Canada geese play in aircraft safety.