Industry Panel Discussion with CCB, Dentsu & National Grid [Integreat 2025]

Transcript:

All righty. All righty. Welcome back. Whoa, whoa. Well, that was kind of quick. Usually I have to say that a few times. Thanks for coming back. I know the people in this room right now, you are the hardcore. People that come back, you are the hardcore integrators or you’re the raging alcoholics waiting for the drinks. One of the two. Look, I appreciate everyone sticking around. You know, when we put these kind of events on, we’re always looking to, you know, we want you to know what we’re up to. That’s important. You know, we have this vision. We’re spending a lot of time with customers and in trying to have the right product innovation to meet the demands of what you’re all faced with. So you can listen to us, but as you saw with Ralph and you’re going to see now, it’s actually what carries a little bit more weight, I think in our minds and hopefully with you, is what customers are doing. And I’ve spent a fair bit of time with all these customers, as Jeremiah have. They have amazing stories. They’re doing, they’re being very innovative, particularly in industries that, you know, you might not necessarily feel like they’re at the cutting edge, but I think you’re going to really take some lessons and really look at what they’re doing and be able to put it into practice in your own businesses.

So CTO will run the session, but please welcome to the stage Alex from Dentsu, Richard from National Grid, and David from Cambridge’s and Counties Bank. Thank you very much for sticking out. For my money, this is the marquee session of the day because it is definitely a high audience participation and it’s as much a discussion, a debate, you know, a check-in on how things are going. So, you know, for those of you that, you know, aren’t aware, each industry we have represented on the panel today is undergoing massive transformation.

Dentsu is one of the world’s leading creative agencies, advising everyone from BMW to small local houses on managing all of their creative communications. And if there are any industry that is, you know, more or less threatened by AI slop in the world than the creative industries, I don’t know what it is. So very, very challenging world. I think there is not any other one. Well, certainly, you know, at least we heard earlier from Ralph that the AI agent still can’t get the words and the colors right on his generated slide, but he was still using generated art. So, you know, we’ll see on that.

You know, from a national grid perspective, just the entire shift and move towards a much more dynamic, challenging world from an energy infrastructure perspective. You know, we have, you know, the incoming renewables, you know, Drax, for example, with, you know, the range from biomass to, you know, wind, solar, batteries coming in, you know, incredibly challenging systems that were built and architected and designed by people at the time that thought they were building forever infrastructure in the built world, and it is not forever infrastructure. It’s getting evolving very, very quickly, and that can’t be done in a central, you know, way as well. So very interesting, you know, data challenges as well.

And then, you know, banking, I mean, there’s a tremendous opportunity for innovation and change, you know, from a challenger banking point of view. So I think it is really interesting that each industry representative of the panel is undergoing, you know, tremendous transformation and looking to gain competitive advantage or, you know, the ability to do better for their constituents in other cases.

But I’d like to open it up just sort of at the top there. I can only assume, because people corner me often at these events to say, it’s great that you have these leaders up on the panel or you have speakers, but how does that get started? How does leadership participate in transformational change? And I think that’s distinctly cultural and local, but I’d love to get, you know, your perspective, gentlemen, on leadership and the role of transformational change and how you think about the technical, financial, and social dimensions of actually creating lasting and meaningful change in your organizations. Anybody want to kick us off?

Go on then.

I’ll kick off. I think you’ve got to strive to get the balance, like you say. So trying to think through what’s going to excite people in the organization to get behind something, right? Because I find quite often you’ve got a lot of really good ideas coming in and part of our role is to sift those into what can be delivered, right? What can you actually get into production? What can you make a reality? And then most of our job in there is then to try and inspire people to get behind the good ideas and, you know, the balance of trying to make sure you’ve got the right investment, trying to make sure you’ve got the right returns, navigating whatever political situation all of our organizations have because, you know, there’s hierarchies beyond hierarchy beyond hierarchy in some organizations. Some of them are a bit more agile, et cetera, but there’s still the politics of the organization to play through. And I think our role is to help our colleagues navigate that and hopefully to inspire them to think that it’s achievable and then to try and break some of the opportunities down into constituent parts where people can actually see delivery, see something happening and then move on to the next thing. That’s probably the hardest when you see some of these bigger transformations.

I think my perspective is that the job is co-designing what a transformation looks like, so very privileged to work for an organization full of engineers who love to solve problems. That is a blessing and a curse sometimes in as much as people arrive with a perceived solution. Actually, the combination of business expertise, technical expertise, the experience you have generally gets you to a better outcome. So a lot of what we do at National Grid on the transmission side is about thinking how are we going to deliver net zero over the next, more work in the next five, ten years than we’ve delivered in the last 40 years. That’s the scale of the challenge, not just net zero. Energy source is a reconfiguration of the network. We need to think radically differently about how we deliver, how you spec engineering solutions, how you enable people to have the time to be engineers. That’s a combination of business expertise, digital expertise, good storytelling, focus on value, focus on core IT stuff. So, yeah.

Yeah, well, very similar but also very different. So I guess the, I think the, I don’t care about my own success in transformation. It’s all about empowering the rest of the leaders so that they can drive that transformation because I’m going to be humble. I cannot do that myself alone and I think nobody can. So it’s about a lot of education, a lot of empowerment and making sure that people are co-leading with you those transformations. And very important for me, the biggest ideas are more coming from the ground than from the top. And there’s a tremendous work on trying, I would say, to break the silos everywhere in the organization. So to your point, bringing the teams together, cross-functional teams, generating ideas, making things happen, it’s for me the biggest challenge but where you get the most impactful results, obviously. Not easy, specifically, when you are operating cross-cultures where people have very different approaches. But it’s only when the other leaders and the people feel that they can make an impact and be part of that journey that you are moving the needle. That’s my…

And you struggle to get people to coalesce around what the right idea is. Because actually, when you get competing thoughts on, well, I’d like to go in that direction or I actually think that’s the best technology to use, that’s when it’s difficult to get cohesion in an organization, isn’t it?

It is very difficult and I think we are… I don’t know if it’s the same for all of you but we see more and more technology popping from everywhere. You know, the consumer space is really contaminating in a positive way, I would say, the enterprise world, if I can say it this way. That brings new ideas, new challenges and I’m personally a big fan of giving a little bit of funds to an idea, let the people try it, test it and sometimes it comes with tremendous results and people feel really empowered, you know, you’re given your confidence. Maybe there were 10 other ways of doing it, okay, but the time you might have spent selecting the right approach technology, you’ve already delivered which is for me a step change.

How do you create that environment, Alex? Because you’ve told us previously that you almost operate as an internal VC, you have almost a strategic reserve but you’re, in order for that to work, you need to have courage and engagement from across the organization to say, hey, Alex, I’d really like 10K to pursue this idea. How do you create that kind of environment where people have the courage and then accountability to deliver on that?

I think the courage is easy to get when you come with the money. Okay, the accountability might be… Once people hear your funding stuff, suddenly the courage goes up dramatically. It’s not open by either but I guess, well, I guess as you spotted in the introduction, our industry is under massive disruption. So I think we shouldn’t forget that I’ve got an ally in the transformation journey which is basically the burning platform. We need to change things, you know, we need to think differently and I think we have a very interesting organization because it was built about many, many acquisitions. We acquired like 183 businesses the last 10 years. Not all integrated, so it’s… On one side, you’ve got a chaos, if I can say it this way, but it’s also a very good playground for innovation because there’s already that culture of innovation in the company. So I’m going to be humble. I have not built that. I’m just exploiting it somehow but I’m trying to break the barriers so that people can trial, test and our teams are really here, I would say, to, again, acculturate the people. Like you, we’ve got a lot of engineers in the company also. So I would say those are both very easy and very difficult people, I would say, to manage when you are running a central technology function but they are really… They have a strong appetite for training, I would say, to test any new kind of technology. So it’s just about connecting the dots basically and making sure it’s happening.

The big word you said there though is culture, isn’t it? Because I think if you look, there’s something about creating a culture where colleagues feel empowered to come in with ideas, right? But if you do that, you’ve then got to help deliver on those because the first time they have idea and idea, idea and it doesn’t go anywhere then that stops and actually that becomes a negative piece in there. I like your story about the, you know, someone was asking for 10k and therefore I’ll give that. That’s so powerful because people will see that and think, well, I’ve got an idea and maybe I can go and do that and that then breeds a culture of innovation and when you’ve got that culture of innovation, I think as a leader, it’s therefore easier then to inspire and then find the right ones to take forward and take through the big sausage machines of some of these companies.

I think the counterpoint to that is, so we have the same thing, right? So you want to see bottom-up innovation, you want to see people experimenting, you also want to see coalescence around strategic ambitions and go for the big thing. Sometimes people doing bottom-up innovation identify the same things at a strategic level that you’re going after. I think that is part of the art, being comfortable with some of the chaos that reigns here, tapping into it, getting the right people into the strategic initiatives. That’s definitely what we’ve been trying to do.

We see some challenges because what we all strive for in chaos is clean data, a level of harmonization, commonality, and those challenges are not vanishing somehow, they are still there. So I think that’s very important also, and I think that’s part of our conversation today, that it looks very easy. Some of the leaders think it’s super easy that AI is available, it’s not that expensive, I doubt, that’s not our point, and we can solve all of the problems with AI. So that was a lot of leadership education that yes, maybe, but don’t forget about the basics, the legacy, we still need to put the house in order, we need, I would say, to even be better than before on the way we are managing data because we’re going to more and more handle the data to the end user, more federate things, so it needs to be more structured, cleaner, more documented. That’s a big pressure on my team who are managing that, by the way, they know it. But I think it’s really a prerequisite that many organizations forget before jumping into that next revolution.

I have a follow-up to that, but I will mention this is meant to be audience participation as well, so if any of this is triggering a follow-up question or something in your mind, go ahead and raise a hand and we’ll get mic runners around the room as well. I do want to follow-up on that notion, though, of really empowering the organization through good managed data, and I think, Richard, this is crucial and core to how National Grid is approaching doing more in 10 years than you’ve done in the last 40. Do you want to talk a little bit about your fabric mesh, your technology strategy and your human strategy around unlocking the value of data for your transformation?

Yeah, so part of an industry that is being pushed to digitalize by the regulator, some very prescriptive guidance on how we should go about doing that in terms of the kind of standard of data that we should have as an organization, how we describe that, so data nerds amongst you just kind of doubling core metadata standards. It’s that kind of territory as a level of detail, so this kind of federated industry only works if you have a common way of talking about things, circuit breakers, transformers, energy. That needs to be universal across the industry, so the NISO is the energy system operator is pushing for kind of a virtual energy system, a spine that connects everybody. Internally within electricity transmission, we have a federated data and digital model, so we have discrete parts of our business, an asset part, a customer connections part, an infrastructure part doing major capital builds, some of which are five to eight years, some of which are longer. Each of those business units has responsibility for its data, it has digital product managers, data product managers, it is responsible for the quality of the data that comes out of it, it must produce data products that are used by the organisation. This is an agreement we had with Ofgem. The point is that gives you a common taxonomy across your organisation, a common understanding, so when you say circuit breaker, it means these nine fields from this system. It is described perfectly. That is foundational because that information model is kind of the foundation for how we move forward with AI, so if you start to plug that into your large language models, that becomes context, so it understands what a circuit breaker, a transformer, an overhead liner tower is. It’s really fascinating and really difficult because obviously the problem with a federated model is you then, as well as everyone coming up with ideas of innovation bottom-up, you then have to manage discrete teams, or manages the wrong words, to work alongside discrete teams who are developing data products which sometimes intersect, share, duplicate, all those things, so, but that is the only way you get to delivering what we need to deliver over the next five to ten years, like spreading that work out, allowing people to be empowered to develop and contribute, but it’s sometimes chaotic, but we’ve been doing this model for about two years now and it’s started to bed in and it’s starting to pay dividends in terms of data quality, in terms of access to information, but yeah, definitely a challenge to work in that environment.

Yeah, we’ve got a similar challenge on consistency of data because a lot of the data we need to be able to do, the processes that we do, especially if we’re thinking about AI, some of it comes from customer direct, some of it comes from brokers, some of it comes from colleagues, some of it will be from validated third-party sources like Companies House, Experian, et cetera, and trying to mesh all of those together to get one version, a correct version of the truth to then go through the process can be quite a challenge. So we’re looking at how can we validate the data with third-party as much as possible and then look for if three of the fields match and one doesn’t, well, the one is probably incorrect, can we go back and check or do we drive that forward? But that’s going to be a big risk for us, I think, as we look to try and automate as much of the, say, onboarding of a new customer, for example, to try and make sure that data is right and is validated because if we get things wrong, then, similar to you, the regulator gets very interested in things like anti-money laundering and other things like that where we’ve got a legal obligation to do certain things and get certain things right. So that, I think, will have a real big influence on how much we decide to push through genuine full automation and how much we decide to keep that human in the loop and therefore, what does that do to the return on investment and other things like that? Those are some of the things that we’re dealing with at the moment.

Yeah, and I think, so we run assets that have lived on the grid for 40 years or will live on the grid for 40 years. So our insights come from a combination of humans going out to a site to inspect a thing and capture data about it. They come from an increasing amount of IoT telemetry that’s being deployed onto the network to return condition information about our assets, how they’re performing. They come from SCADA, which means, for those not in industry, supervisory control and data acquisition, which is the control system. So that is your, kind of how your assets are how you operate your assets and then there are, kind of, just general inspections that happen on a frequent basis. So bringing all that information together to make sound judgments about your assets and how you intervene in them. There are opportunities for automation. We will, like humans, are a key part of that and the data quality of the data we capture is a key part of that. That probably is one of our biggest challenges.

Interesting. I want to dive down. Any follow-up questions from Nerenz? Yes, here in the center.

This is the question for National Grid, representing SGN right here. It’s interesting that you support the federated way of working. Is it because it’s a happenstance or does it actually work? Because I’m trying to do the exact opposite. There are too many data silos that exist and I want to bring that together to have the governance and standards and things like that and get out of this cottage cheese sort of thing that’s going on in every corner of the company. How does in National Grid the opposite, the federated structure work and how do people not step on each other’s toes and how does it work cohesively?

So, it’s federated in as much as we have business so we call them delivery vehicles but delivery vehicles with specific data product teams inside them. I look after platforms centrally which means our data fabric platform lives in my world. We have information modelling and governance in there as well. We use a guild structure to bring all of our data product managers together to identify commonality in the products we’re developing, approach. so it is, there’s an overhead to making that work I think. The benefit is diversity of opinion, diversity of approach, you can go faster, it can’t be fully federated, you still need some kind of centralised governance structure for decision making, control quality but we’ve done the central thing before. We’ve had kind of big information management governance, data delivery teams, centralised data platforms and there are parts of our business that still do that and that works for them. It’s a bit of a journey. I’ve been around long enough to see the industry flex in and out of kind of push it out, bring it back, push it, it’s like it just, it is a cycle. This allows us to go faster but it does require more coordination.

So, when you say IT do you mean the platform, sorry, it’s just me and her now, that’s it. Beat IT was the point. Our platform teams run our data fabric, they manage the infrastructure that underpins it, they sort the networking out, we still take core IT services from Group who provides the kind of the underpinning Azure infrastructure that we use but my team runs the platform, sorts the plumbing out, plumbing is a derogatory term of policy, you know what I mean, network connectivity, my platform manages the audience somewhere so, but yeah.

But I think there’s no good or bad model by the way, you can have a fully centralised model, a federated model but that needs to align to your organisation and to how your overall leadership wants to go. If your company wants to keep a very central control on everything, don’t try the federation. Definitely, because then you will be, to my point, sitting in the middle just receiving IT. If it’s the opposite and you get a strong buy-in that this is the right thing to do and again, to your point, the main, I would say, difference here is timing. It’s much faster. I would say, you can really, I would say, demultiply the efforts across the organisation and you can get far more throughput, far more results to the cost of a little bit less standardisation, okay? Again, that’s a choice. So it’s not good or bad but my always recommendation is try to align with the way your company wants to operate or the way your company wants to transform. Otherwise, you will be swimming in the opposite direction and good luck.

You mentioned in this discussion between federation centralisation and development. I think you talked about a common information model, a taxonomy across all of the different equipment. You also talked, David, about the different pieces of information from external providers, internal providers, from a content perspective. Are you investing locally in building your own ontologies for managing across those different domains? Do you expect that that should come externally from a strong third party like a regulator? What I’m seeing much more across our community is leaders are taking accountability for this and building locally the metadata interoperability and ontology to use a $10 word but really just the meaning to you said like what does a breaker mean in the context of my, you know, SCADA layer? What does a breaker mean in the context of my, you know, distribution system layer? What does a breaker mean in my transmission layer? Those are very different things but if you invest in that metadata interoperability it can mean the same. I’m sure similar situations exist from a content management perspective from your entire creative supply chain and in the bank as well but it only, we get these huge benefits if you can cross the domains but crossing the domains requires normalizing the data across them. How are you dealing with that?

It’s difficult first of all and I think you are spot on at least in the overall media and creative supply chain there is no standard but you have a bunch of standards. A country could decide that to work on that network you need to respect that taxonomy etc. So we try to have our own taxonomy but it’s always a combination of several taxonomies with a lot of mapping it’s a lot of work a lot of mapping exercise continuously evolving so I don’t have a magic receipt to be honest. It’s only a lot of work. But to your first question I guess that can this be managed centrally when it’s so different I don’t think so. You need to empower I would say where the knowledge is but you need to try to keep that shared taxonomy somehow where you can have when it makes sense a level of alignment mapping but it needs to be a strong business I would say requirement to make it happen.

I’ve heard the term folksonomy where it’s folks creating the taxonomy that has to be managed. I don’t know if that works either but it gets back to this federation or governance is required whether governance is a distributed governance centralized governance you still agree how to work with one another throughout the process across the business and technology. How do you deal with it in the financial world?

It’s getting more and more important isn’t it as well because I think everybody’s looked for a long time about data quality is really important and most people have thought about that from a reporting point of view so I know from the bank’s consideration we do regulatory reporting and we need to get that right obviously and you’d be surprised at how something going through sales into credit and then into operations the concept of what a liability is can mean different things to different people and it’s fairly standard so people bring their own personal interpretations into that which isn’t helpful so we are spending a lot of time at the moment trying to build out those we probably call them data dictionaries and that taxonomy of what all these things mean what they do how they flow through the system and get that education to everybody because you could probably get away with saying data was something that a team over here ran and managed in the past you’re not going to be able to do that in the future especially as you look to try and automate more especially as you look to bring in things like agentic AI you’ll have more users of data in the future than you had in the past in my view and I think therefore the work needs to happen now before we go too far down the AI route in that

Outstanding. Pause for any independent follow-ups anyone from there we have one over here that’s Mark hi how do you balance innovation with compliance because you don’t want to block all innovation but you work in regulated businesses so what are the best practices I think it’s for you yeah thank you

I know Mark very well I feel like I have to say compliance wins so that’s my that’s my standard first it’s on video it’s very difficult and again without sounding like a cliche I think we need to engage compliance teams really really early my view is and this is a non-technical view this is this is more a commercial view you’ve got to lead with the customer you’ve got to understand the proposition you’ve got to understand the customer need you’ve got to understand what you’re trying to achieve you then mix that we were talking earlier on you then mix that with the strategic direction of your organisation to make sure that the plans work and effectively your compliance teams are there to help support you achieve the goals you’re trying to achieve in a safe way so as long as you’re not trying to do something that is you know illegal or going to get you into trouble with a regulator you should be able to influence those teams to go along the journey with you it is a huge cost to innovation but they’re there for a reason so my balance kind of comes in with the it’s almost a necessary tax to innovation to make sure you’re being very cognisant of that compliance piece the best compliance teams that I’ve worked with also have a good commercial understanding and aren’t just actually that’s written down and therefore that’s what I’m going to do can understand the legislation and can try and help you understand how to get through something so what I don’t like is bringing something to compliance and getting told no what I prefer is I can’t let you do that but if you did this then that might work so they become I can’t remember who said it on the stage later on but that core design piece with your compliance team is absolutely essential

I think that’s a mindset thing as well so like no but is the phrase you’re looking for so I think have some game conversations with compliance teams I think there’s a challenge we take compliance we layer on internal governance and compliance on top of it so actually sometimes there’s a bit of conversation and negotiation to be had about what is the actual compliance requirements versus whatever weird thing we’ve put five layers deep on top of it so I think there’s a bit of kind of interpretation yeah yeah and it changes with kind of teams and attitudes but I’ve had some generally you can reach some kind of pragmatic solution with compliance teams I think providing a safe space to innovate secure walled garden territory is vital for some of this stuff so we work quite hard to provide those environments for our data product people so it’s easy to get access to infrastructure that’s secure that’s hived off that kind of isn’t going to bleed into the rest of the network so but yeah compliance ultimately wins tragically

Building on that in my experience it’s also good to sit down with the compliance team from the outset and agree on what the mental model is that we have you know to your point I recall you know having a conversation with the compliance team and I asked them is our compliance process because we have we believe that we have malicious and stupid employees and we need to protect against the malicious idiots or do we believe we have creative people that need to be nudged down the happy path to getting stuff right and I mean maybe that sounded like a bad way to start the conversation but it’s a great way to start the conversation because you think about are you building a policing approach that you’re sort of catching the crimes before they damage the company or are you taking a guidance and supporting approach where it’s coaching and you can’t do it that way you can do it this way where it’s a collaborative effort to be successful but if you don’t ask up front what is our compliance mindset is it be you know that we believe that employees are going to put the firm at risk every day or we believe that employees want to innovate and create and they just are ignorant of the things they might run afoul of I think that matters and are there insider threats are there bad actors absolutely and you have to understand that and be aware of that as well but at least in my experience having that base like what is our mindset about this is helpful at least in my experience

I agree I think that would be lovely I think the challenge that we face is when you work in an organisation that has multiple styles of delivery going on fully outsourced deliveries internally developed deliveries which is generally true of quite a lot of us designing a one size fits all approach to compliance is difficult so the tendency tends to be to make it towards lowest common denominator to go towards command and control present your evidence like it’s that I think that’s difficult and that’s that’s some of what I think large organisations generally struggle with this like you over correct in one direction to introduce more audit and control and then you spend some time unpicking that to make it easier for smart people to take stuff through and be unconstrained but it’s a constant push-pull of kind of posture that for us probably depends more on how much we insource how much we outsource generally

Any thoughts on compliance Alex from your world I mean you have all this copyright stuff with models I can imagine it’s a big deal

Yeah but I think I’m very lucky I’ve got very agile legal and compliance team who are very commercial savvy to your point and I can’t remember an instance where we were blocked they’re always supportive they’re getting in the right direction and again it’s not so highly regulated industries like banking or energy etc so it’s more about how do you manage your own company’s risk generally speaking more than external factors I would say slightly different depending on the markets some markets have specific regulations but again we let them treat with that but compared to other industries I’ve been working on I don’t see that as such a big barrier and I’m lucky I think

Audience participation opportunity any hands that was an awesome question thank you so much did not have that on my cue cards we have one back here yeah it’s a bit of a follow-up on the compliance question actually so Tom Haywood from Secure Trust Bank probably a question for you David so how have you found in that kind of compliance and kind of your second line journey of having the kind of explainability of the decision making process of the agentic AI and really being able to kind of articulate what those risks are yep

So I’d probably start by saying we are we’re at the start of this journey rather than at the end of it yep so a little bit like Richard’s point about the safe space to try some of this kind of stuff so we’ve got we’ve got a number of proof concepts on the go at the moment and we’ve had compliance and second line in those to see how they’re operating we’ve you know the concept of human in the loop I think with agentic AI is really important so for example we’ve got a we’ve got a good proof concept on the go at the moment about trying to speed up our asset finance business okay because in AF it’s more about speed back to the broker we generally take days to get back and we’re looking to try and reduce that to hours and we believe agentic AI and some of the things we’re seeing will get us there genuinely transformational in terms of a step change there so some of the things we’re looking to try we’ve got in smaller parts of the bank that’s fairly ring fenced so we can start seeing that our view is we will have the human in the loop and the agent effectively saying we recommend this course of action rather than the agent taking that course of action for a period of time and then over time we’ll be looking at that to say let’s say it was in underwriting for example how many times has the underwriter disagreed with what the agent has recommended and at some stage we’ll get to the point where from a credit risk point of view and also from a model risk point of view we’re comfortable saying you know it’s 90% gets it right actually that’s within our cost of risk therefore we’ll turn that on that will be a decision we take probably side by side with compliance it’s not just the commercial decision to take so I think you know it comes back again to that that co-design because the the really interesting and exciting thing about this technology is it’s emerging nobody’s got the answers yet you know some people are reading two paragraphs ahead of everybody else but nobody has the answers and actually we’ll get through it by test and learn in safe environments but I think that human in the loop piece is going to be really essential for quite some time does that answer your question?

I really love what you said at the end there that anybody who tells you they’re an expert at agentic AI is lying to you because we are all experts at the same we all this emerged into our world simultaneously and anyone can get there but as Dale you know said earlier it’s you got to get in the game you got to work on it you have to develop you know I think similarly from an investment innovation point talk to us a little bit about Dentsu Connect and the work you’re doing

Well yeah you know we are and that’s a good illustration of how do we try I would say to orchestrate a little bit a complex world and maybe that opens many other questions you know back to my story many acquisitions many different businesses we never invested to fully harmonize and integrate everything so we took a different approach saying now okay let’s first of all because sometimes it’s just not possible even when it’s possible then you you look at the magnitude of the investment and the time it will take so we rather took a data approach to build what I call the marketing operating system so it’s like an end-to-end orchestration I would say a platform that helps us to abstract the complexity which is a reality in the marketing world towards our clients so for our clients we get something which is standardized which has I would say end-to-end workflows and it manages with all of the back ends all of the complexity and it’s pretty powerful to be honest so we invested and we continue to invest a lot on the technology but what is interesting here is that we obviously did put an effort in building products seven digital products but there’s a huge continuous effort on the data layer again how do we I would say source the data from the various systems all that heterogeneity and that that’s a work in progress to be honest and it’s a journey

And is that like continuous A-B testing on the creative content and refining campaigns or how does that show up in most

Yeah we’ve got many well we’ve got the basic I would say more media I would say cycle from planning I would say to buying execution then we are measuring the performance of media we are I would say now linking that with asset creation watermarking doing some live A-B testing on the result on social networks invest in some AI capabilities to predict I would say what will be the best marketing mix and yes we see some massive I would say improvement in how we can do I would say very very very targeted marketing more and more and I think we talk about compliance and something I didn’t mention I thought it from a regulatory angle but there’s another element where I think we are all now interested is that we need to develop responsible usage of this technology more and more for I would say for many reasons first to protect the resources of the planet because people get bored in my industry by receiving tons of emails every day we need to so that responsible use which means the right usage the right balance and making sure what we are doing is compliant more from a societal point of view more than a regular point of view is for me very important and we do a lot around that in terms of training our teams explaining the do’s and don’ts to try to be as good as we can in the overall I would say environment and society but also because we are getting prepared for regulations there’s one in the EU that came which is super unclear but very tough there’s one or two in the US emerging it will pop up every year so we need to be prepared and it’s more again a mindset of our teams who are developing the technology but also from the wider user community who are consuming the services that’s an endless subject for me

So if you have a mindset of having a responsible development of analytics or artificial intelligence and you can kind of get ahead of data residency or privacy regulation or the shutdown on the social networks for example of blocking having any of the tracking keys that kind of thing you can design it in a better way we try to be as flexible as possible because we don’t know what the future will be like we discussed sovereignty yesterday it’s one of my watchouts not concerned yet we don’t know it could happen very quickly it’s very likely in China it’s already there I would say what’s going to be the EU position in the next month is unclear the only thing I know is that we need to have the flexibility and the agility to react because there’s no way we’re going to interrupt our business operations and we need to be able to switch things very quickly

I mean I guess that then goes into your entire business network if you have this philosophical approach and you all have very unique approaches how do you think about that in terms of your supplier relationships does that get into the way you think about where you invest in collaboration how you think about is somebody transactional versus strategic I mean all of us are in the product space and we say we’re partners with our customers but it seems to me that this now transcends that doesn’t it where you’re almost creating a shared destiny decision of if you’re going to tie with a certain provider or not

Yeah it’s a very good point and I think it’s not a black and white answer here sometimes you have no choice if I need I would say to leverage social media postings I have to work with Meta I have to work with Google you’ve got no choice there when you have a choice yes it becomes now for us kind of a selection criteria or at least a screening criteria it’s about getting visibility on your overall supply chain and I think that’s common to all of the industries to be honest we try to get more transparency more understanding and somehow for me it becomes a selection criteria when I can

I think talk about this as well yeah I think we’ll have we’ll quickly get to the point and we’re doing this now where some of your suppliers some of our suppliers will be more commodities so we need you to do A B and C and do A B and C really really well and that’s enough and then a select few who you need to partner with and again back to what we were talking about with the agendic AI and anything in that space it’s so emerging we need somebody who’s willing to come on that journey with us nobody can necessarily lead you through that particularly it’s going to have to be something that there’s co-investment there’s co-design that idea that you’re doing it actually with a partner becomes far more important than it probably was even just a few years ago but you don’t need every single supplier to be like that because then you’d never be able to manage it let’s face it so I think selecting the right ones to go on that journey with is part of our job in getting that right

Is it similar for you Richard or do you find in your heavily regulated procurement enviroment that you don’t have much flexibility there

So I think it’s a mix I think there is some commodity IT that will always be more transactional that you’re just going to go out and buy and you want people to do what they say they’re going to do I think agentic is the two paragraphs ahead thing is brilliant so I think that’s more of a journey I feel really lucky in as much as I do a thing where I can draw a direct line to the enabling of net zero energy sources and the kind of the connectivity of hyperscaler AI data centres onto the network I challenge anyone in the AI industry to not want that to happen faster so therefore everyone should feel a compelled sense of purpose to help us do our job better because that makes the industry move faster so I think there’s always going to be a mix of commodity and then in this slightly uncharted world people who you’re willing to partner with who are invested in your mission who flex more

But we more and more leave what I call the partnership economy where you see more and more and a good illustration of that is where you see how all the AI dollars are flowing through with those co-investments between Nvidia big hyperscalers and it’s like a closed economy we start to see similar I would say funding mechanisms arising across companies where it’s a partnership so some of my vendors are also clients I’ve got that very often that relationship so that that brings that builds very strong relationships co-investment capabilities and that’s something I think is very powerful also

Challenge back to you Jeremiah actually because I think just because we can I think your part of the industry is going to have to shift as well when you look at what customers need because the days of PSX and we’ll deliver you why people for Z amount of time may not work in the new world and I think there’ll be a lot more sharing of business outcomes and commercial outcomes if you want to be that partner and I think my experience of what we’ve done with SnapLogic is exactly that which is great but I think you’re going to see more and more of that becoming the norm and the expectation from various customers who go I need somebody who’s going to almost share that upside but also share that risk as we go through

Building on that for any of you to close us out here what can we do better to be a partner I did not tell them asking this question and I did tell them feel free to be rude in all honesty what can we do better to be customer obsessed to be a great partner

For me it’s care about context so care about the industry you’re working in we only do what we do because it enables our business to deliver the network that’s it we’re here for we only exist for that purpose and be honest so that kind of it’s really interesting I’ve got a thousand people who will tell me they can do X for Y with absolute certainty in a world where people are just reading two paragraphs ahead that is scary so I place a lot of stock in hey we can’t do that or hey we don’t know or hey  let’s work it out together and we’ll figure out a pricing model that works rather than lying to my face. That’s not what you do, but there are a lot of people who will. You said be controversial: don’t lie to face. That’s table stakes, right?

Alex, what can we do better from your perspective?

I think you’re doing pretty well, to be honest. You can always be better, but I think I like the relationship we have, which is really… and I told you, knock again on my door many times if you want to try all things, start things, crazy stuff, we love it. So being the first one to test things is something I really personally enjoy, and we can co-develop the products. That’s what I do with many, because this is how we are collectively solving problems. So extreme ownership and be willing to be dynamic in a business way about outcomes, shared risk, shared outcomes. “No” is your second favorite answer and innovate in the open and really be earlier stage in the earlier life cycle of things we’re doing about and pressure test it earlier.

All right. Well, I’ve got my notes. I hope other people on the SnapLogic team are taking. Amazing. Thank you all very much. Really appreciate your time.