Using AI to Revolutionize CX with Michael Olaye, EVP & Managing Director at Hero Digital
01/08/25 • 39 min
Any digital marketing leader will tell you that data and marketing strategies go hand-in-hand. In this episode, Michael Olaye, EVP and Managing Director of Hero Digital, shares his journey and practical strategies for success, drawing from his career path that began with door-to-door job hunting and led to spearheading major digital initiatives.
Michael emphasizes the central role of data in digital marketing, from informing internal business decisions to enhancing customer experiences, and discusses the dual focus of AI in driving internal efficiency while offering robust public-facing tools.
He highlights the critical interplay between data governance and AI ethics, stressing the importance of businesses being 'AI ready.' By exploring customer journeys and leveraging data for innovation, Michael demonstrates how insights can shape product development and business strategies.
As a forward-thinker, he shares his enthusiasm for emerging technologies like learning agents and multimodal models, envisioning a transformative future for business operations. Through candid anecdotes and expert advice, Michael delivers actionable insights on harnessing data and AI to drive innovation and customer satisfaction.
--------
“Some clients do not know that they're sitting on gold, they do not know that. They have tons of data that they've never done anything with and then they focus on the most simplistic things: media, SEO, social media content, website content. Then you come in and you're like, ‘Hey, we can help your customer service be more efficient by understanding how the data, how long it takes a call to go through. We can help you process products more better by understanding the transaction from seeing something online to going in store, to buying it, to returning it.’ Looking at those data sets and seeing patterns or bringing them together to see journeys, that's where the secret lies.” – Michael Olaye
--------
Time Stamps
*(03:37): How Michael uses data for customer experience
*(11:39): AI in marketing today: The role of data
*(20:54): The dangers of bad data in AI
*(23:30): How do you find high-value data?
*(30:17): Understanding data and the brand-loyalty debate
*(38:16): David’s takeaways
--------
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Alation.
Learn more:
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.alation.com/podcast/
Alation’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alation/
David’s LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwchao/
--------
Links
Any digital marketing leader will tell you that data and marketing strategies go hand-in-hand. In this episode, Michael Olaye, EVP and Managing Director of Hero Digital, shares his journey and practical strategies for success, drawing from his career path that began with door-to-door job hunting and led to spearheading major digital initiatives.
Michael emphasizes the central role of data in digital marketing, from informing internal business decisions to enhancing customer experiences, and discusses the dual focus of AI in driving internal efficiency while offering robust public-facing tools.
He highlights the critical interplay between data governance and AI ethics, stressing the importance of businesses being 'AI ready.' By exploring customer journeys and leveraging data for innovation, Michael demonstrates how insights can shape product development and business strategies.
As a forward-thinker, he shares his enthusiasm for emerging technologies like learning agents and multimodal models, envisioning a transformative future for business operations. Through candid anecdotes and expert advice, Michael delivers actionable insights on harnessing data and AI to drive innovation and customer satisfaction.
--------
“Some clients do not know that they're sitting on gold, they do not know that. They have tons of data that they've never done anything with and then they focus on the most simplistic things: media, SEO, social media content, website content. Then you come in and you're like, ‘Hey, we can help your customer service be more efficient by understanding how the data, how long it takes a call to go through. We can help you process products more better by understanding the transaction from seeing something online to going in store, to buying it, to returning it.’ Looking at those data sets and seeing patterns or bringing them together to see journeys, that's where the secret lies.” – Michael Olaye
--------
Time Stamps
*(03:37): How Michael uses data for customer experience
*(11:39): AI in marketing today: The role of data
*(20:54): The dangers of bad data in AI
*(23:30): How do you find high-value data?
*(30:17): Understanding data and the brand-loyalty debate
*(38:16): David’s takeaways
--------
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Alation.
Learn more:
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.alation.com/podcast/
Alation’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alation/
David’s LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwchao/
--------
Links
Previous Episode
From Statecraft to Codebreaking: The Big Data Origin Story with Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times
If you’re a history buff in the data world, you know that there’s a complex interplay between data, statecraft, and machine learning. The history of data visualization is entwined with societal governance and technological advancements, starting from the usage of statistics for statecraft in the 18th century to the transformative innovations during World War II that birthed computation and data science as we know it. And because of the subjective design choices that underpin data gathering and analysis, there’s an inherently political nature of deciding what data to collect and how to utilize it, which is critical in understanding both historical and contemporary data practices.
As we move into the modern applications of data science and the advent of AI technologies, deep reinforcement learning and the integration with generative AI models, these technologies are reshaping the field by enabling computers to process and interact with unstructured data in unprecedented ways. Satyen and Chris discuss his book How Data Happened, the origins of data science and the role of Alan Turing in the creation of digital computing, and the challenges generative AI brings around model interoperability.
*Satyen’s narration was created using AI
--------
“In the last two years, one of the major techniques for advancing the most eye-popping products has been RLHF, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. There's innumerable subjective design choices happening there, which eventually become encoded in a product. But, the presentation of it as though it's somehow unbiased and free from any subjective design choices is illusory.” – Chris Wiggins
--------
Time Stamps
*(01:36): How did Chris come to write How Data Happened?
*(10:33): World War II as the springboard for data science and digital computing
*(18:37): The tension between objectivity and subjectivity in data today
*(25:36): What is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)?
*(36:03): How has Gen AI impacted data science?
*(44:53): Satyen’s takeaways
--------
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Alation.
Learn more:
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.alation.com/podcast/
Alation’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alation/
Satyen’s LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssangani/
--------
Links
Next Episode
Empowering AI Practitioners with Wendy Turner-Williams, CEO of TheAssociation.AI
There’s a digital revolution happening – and it’s poised to impact data leaders across all industries. During this time of never-ending change, it’s crucial to have data practitioners at the center of holistic AI transformation as regulatory compliance and ethical standards come into the fold.
Businesses of every size will encounter these complex regulations. Learn about these challenges and how connecting practitioners across fields can create more compliant and trusted AI environments.
This episode is packed with practical guidelines and future-focused strategies designed to empower data leaders with the insights they need to build effective, ethical AI.
*Satyen’s narration was created using AI
--------
“ Each state or each country having their own AI policies or privacy policies, frankly, doesn't make any sense. Because, most people, especially if you're on cloud, you may not even know where your data sits. There's basic principles and there's basic practices that you can define that are tech agnostic, that you can still have your own tech stack and your own tools. There's lots of solutions and players that work in those components, but you can give basic guidelines to say, here's the steps and the processes and the pieces that you need to put in place. Here's how they form together to create an encapsulation of trust.” – Wendy Turner-Williams
--------
Time Stamps
*(02:20): Enabling the AI community
*(13:49): How does The Association.AI put regulatory theory into practice?
*(21:01): Why AI practitioners need places to knowledge share
*(34:23): The rise of the CIO: Risk talks
*(39:46): AI predictions: What will change? What won’t?
*(50:30): Satyen’s takeaways
--------
Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Alation.
Learn more:
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://www.alation.com/podcast/
Alation’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alation/
Satyen’s LinkedIn Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ssangani/
--------
Links
Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/data-radicals-217063/using-ai-to-revolutionize-cx-with-michael-olaye-evp-and-managing-direc-81362856"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to using ai to revolutionize cx with michael olaye, evp & managing director at hero digital on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy