By Peter High, published on Forbes
ADP has been referred to as one of the original cloud companies, as it has long run other companies’ payroll off-premises as a service. Now, the $12 billion human capital management company has become colossus in the industry. It does not lack for competition, however, both among traditional players like Paychex, and among digital native companies like Workday and Zenefits. ADP still enjoys the advantages of scale, producing one in every six paychecks for all non-governmental employees in the United States.
Stuart Sackman has spent the past 25 years at ADP, running various businesses within the company. He has spent nearly two and a half years running Global Product and Technology for the company. In that role, he has enormous influence over the company’s products, but also the methods of delivering them to an increasingly technology savvy customer base.
Sackman also leads an innovation lab that has been branded Lifion. The lab was founded in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, 15 miles east of the company’s Roseland, New Jersey headquarters. Sackman explains the rationale behind the branding of the division, the advantages of its geography, its path forward, and a variety of other topics in this interview.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
07/03/17
Ann Kono wears a lot of hats at Ares Management, the $1.2 billion alternative asset manager. She is a Partner and Chief Information and Risk Officer of the company, and she is a member of the Management Committee of Ares Management. She also serves as Vice President of Ares Dynamic Credit Allocation Fund, Inc. and CION Ares Diversified Credit Fund. She additionally serves as a member of the Ares Operations Management Group and the Ares Enterprise Risk Committee.
Kono’s ability to push to other areas beyond IT can be traced to her roots in Finance (she has a BA and an MBA both with Finance as the areas of focus), and in consulting, where she became passionate about solving difficult and varied problems for clients. Her financial acumen and customer focus have served her well in building an IT team that adds to both the top and bottom lines of the company. By having responsibility for innovation activities while also serving as the company’s first ever risk officer, she helps ensure the company balances both perspectives well.
During her more than ten years with Ares, she has helped usher in remarkable growth, moving the company an order of magnitude forward from a revenue perspective, and ensuring that technology remains modern, reliable, and flexible. She shares her perspectives on her journey, the many hats she wears, and more in this interview.
Peter High: Ann, you are a Partner, the Chief Information Officer, and the Chief Risk Officer at Ares Management. Please describe your responsibilities.
Ann Kono: My responsibilities have evolved over my last ten years at Ares. I started off managing technology and then quickly took over the investment operations functions. My risk responsibilities began about seven or eight years ago, when we developed an enterprise risk function during the financial crisis. We started with operational risk to create the business resilience that was needed for a large-scale multinational firm. Then, we added information risk, which encapsulates information security and cybersecurity. Finally, we added investment risk, which is core to our offering.
In the last three years, I have also taken on responsibility for what we call the “middle office,” which is the bridge between our investment professionals and our operations professionals. Within our industry, the role of the middle office is to enable the transition of assets between the two parties that are buying and selling transactions and assets within the marketplace.
My most recent set of responsibilities resulted from us brainstorming how to optimize high scale, high volume, operational processes. We developed a group called Global Shared Services. The first function within that is Accounts Payable. As we begin to talk, you will see how technology enables all the functions within this group and how we leverage technology to make these functions more efficient.
High: What is the rationale of having IT and risk together?
By Peter High, published on Forbes 06/19/2017
As the Chief Operations and Technology Officer of $94 billion Bank of America, Cathy Bessant has tremendous influence in the technology ecosystem that surrounds the financial services industry from fintech start-ups with which she partners, from the war for talent with the would be employees of the company to the vendor partners that she engages to the rising influence of artificial intelligence (which she prefers to refer to as “responsible automated intelligence”).
It had been three and a half years since I last caught up with Bessant, and she had mentioned that she had rethought a few things. She used to refer to Bank of America as a fintech firm. She has come to realize that it is not a fintech firm, but that fintech firms are an important part of the ecosystem that the company has built. In fact, she highlights the advantages a company with the scale that Bank of America has relative to the fintech companies who compete with aspects of what Bank of America does. She also used to note that Bank of America would never be involved in public cloud solutions, but she now foresees a day when that will be possible. She explains these changes of heart in great depth herein. She also covers the boards that she has joined in recent years and the value she has derived from them and vice versa among a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Cathy, several years ago, we spoke about your purview over both technology and operations at Bank of America. Since our last conversation, the trend toward the intersection of these two disciplines has become more profound. We see it with a number of executives who have taken on both sets of responsibilities, walking in your footsteps, if you will. We see it even at a more granular, technical level with topics like DevOps, which combines the two. Having owned these areas for such an enormous organization, what new insights do you have regarding the advantage of having them together?
Cathy Bessant: When we combined the areas seven years ago, even our own people thought we were crazy. Today, the intersections are becoming increasingly apparent. Everything we do in operations, from the most manual to the most sophisticated task, is better when it is automated. It is better, cheaper, and safer when it is digital; and it performs better for customers. For a classic operations organization, technology is not just nice to have, it is a requirement. By the same token, technology is nothing if it does not perform. The intersection of the operations team’s contributions to platform stability and to ensuring that there is not only a technological experience, but a human experience, is what today’s customer expects.
High: The rise of artificial intelligence has been profound in recent years. You prefer to refer to it as “responsible automated intelligence,” rather than artificial intelligence. Can you define the term and share the reason for your preference of that specific terminology?
Bessant: I do not like the term artificial because by definition it means fake, so it is partly a linguistic preference. More importantly though, intelligence is created by humans, even if it is run on an automated basis. We can think about artificial intelligence as algorithmic intelligence, as well, because what takes data and produces an outcome are algorithms that are written, overseen, governed, and managed by people. Automated intelligence is often better, more predictable, faster, cheaper, and has a lower error rate – as long as our algorithms work. There is no doubt AI is the term of the day, but we have been using automated intelligence for a lot longer than people think. For instance, we have been using models to create credit scores for 25 years. You can go through a lot of different elements of banking and say, “This is a more sophisticated or more tech enabled deployment of automated or artificial intelligence,” but it is not something we are not used to, which is an important point.
High: You use the word responsible when referring to automated or artificial intelligence. How do you think of the responsibility aspect?
06-06-17
David Steinberg is a serial entrepreneur. In 1999, he founded Inphonic, a company that would reach a billion dollar valuation, and had a successful IPO. The company grew too quickly and with too much debt, and Steinberg resigned in 2007.
He immediately got to work on his next venture, a data drive marketing company called XL Marketing Corporation, and he leveraged the good of his past ventures, including collaborating with former Pepsi and Apple CEO, John Scully, who had been a part of the founding team at Inphonic, while learning the lessons of the trying times. This time around, they would self-fund the company, and do something that was anathema with many start-ups, especially at that time: it would grow profitably.
The caution paid off during the economic crisis the year after its founding, as Steinberg was able to assemble a world class team, and he was able to shop for many companies to fill out its portfolio of offerings on the cheap. When Steinberg initially sought venture funding, he heard many complaints about how the company was “too profitable.” Some VCs indicated that the company needed to put more money into sales staff and marketing campaigns.
Fast forward a few years, and the company, now called Zeta Global, recently announced a $140 million funding round led by GPI Capital and Blackstone’s GSO Capital, elevating the company to “unicorn” status as a venture funded company with a valuation above $1 billion. In this interview, Steinberg talks about the evolution of the company, the role that machine learning will play in the future, the value in having developed a 20 year partnership with one of the leading marketers in the world, as well as a variety of other topics.
Peter High: David, please provide a brief history and overview of your organization.
David Steinberg: We started out as a customer acquisition vehicle named XL Marketing. We recognized that to increase our success and help our customers, we needed to add customer relationship management to our services. This led us to buy a small company called Zeta Interactive. We broke up this company quickly. In fact, we sold off two-thirds of the business. We kept and ran the platform and it became one of our most important products. That was the first big step in our pivot from being a customer acquisition company to being a software-as-a-service company. As we continued to grow and move more into data and analytics, in addition to software-as-a-service, we thought the word interactive pigeonholed us, so we changed the name to Zeta Global to represent who we are today.
High: Zeta Global has grown considerably through acquisitions. A key success factor of your organization is how well you integrate businesses post-acquisition. Is there a playbook that you use when integrating acquired companies?
Steinberg: Acquisition and organic growth are mission critical to the growth of the business. Last year, the company grew almost 50 percent; half of our growth was organic and half of our growth was through acquisitions. We use four specific criteria for acquiring a company:
Most of our competitors think of their marketing cloud as a container. They buy businesses and put them in there, and it certainly works for them. We think of our marketing cloud as a fully integrated software solution. Full integration has been critical to our success. We have been successful in eight of our nine acquisitions. We have a campus in Hyderabad, India and another growing campus in Chennai, India. At these locations there are 600 to 700 full-time engineers and data scientists; over 75 percent hold a PhD or a graduate degree. At these campuses, we scale up operations as we buy companies. This allows us to dramatically increase profit, workflow, or, in most cases, both.
Over the last four years, our compounded growth rate was just under 50 percent, on average. Zeta Global is also profitable. Our profit is higher than most software companies that have grown at our size and scale. Part of our success is due to the fact that we have run companies before that were not profitable, and none of us wanted to do that again.
High: It is interesting to hear you say that your past entrepreneurial experiences of growing without profit, understandably, color the way you manage Zeta Global. You co-founded this business just prior to the worst economic downfall of either of our lifetimes. Did beginning a business during an intense and suboptimal business climate affect your entrepreneurial journey and choices, as well?
Click here to read the full article on Forbes
05-01-17
Trevor Schulze has been an information technology executive across a number of major technology companies. When he joined Micron Technology as Chief Information Officer two years ago, the company, like others, was in the midst of defining its big data opportunities. Schulze, recognizing the tremendous growth and productivity potential that could be derived from better insights from the data, developed a dedicated team to champion these opportunities. Thus the Enterprise Analytics And Data IT Group was born. As he notes in this interview, the results have been tremendous, and for that reason, Schulze is a recipient of the 2017 Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Schulze contribution, Micron Technology Chief Executive Officer D. Mark Durcan said, “We are supplying the new data economy with innovative technology that helps our customers take full advantage of their data assets. We are doing the same within Micron. The innovations that our CIO Trevor Schulze and his team are delivering provide Micron the insights we need to drive our business forward.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued. Please be specific, including the steps you undertook to implement the idea.
Trevor Schulze: Although localized point solutions will remain important to creating incremental value, integrated insights across the enterprise will be the competitive advantage we all chase in the years to come. Building this capability is a multi-year effort. Over the past year, we have put in place a few key practices to drive this idea forward and deliver tangible insights.
When we created our enterprise data science team, we intentionally placed this team within our Enterprise Analytics and Data IT group. This gives our enterprise data scientists direct access to our business intelligence teams that have invaluable experience working with the company’s most important data. The synergy between these teams decreases the time to locate and understand relevant data across business areas. Because data preparation is also time consuming, we chose to embed architects and data engineers directly within the team, working shoulder-to-shoulder to deliver quick turns through the highly iterative data science process, reducing data acquisition and preparation time by up to 50 percent. As we near solution deployment, the embedded architecture and data engineers take the lead to deliver solutions to decision makers and to embed algorithms into enterprise systems, while our data scientists begin working on the next business problem. This close collaboration allows us to deliver solutions at a faster pace.
Next, we wanted to bring the power of data science to areas of the business that lack data science expertise but that are data-rich and ready to drive change. Our supply chain and procurement organizations have been ideal early partners based on their extensive data, history of data-driven processes, and their position in the company’s value chain–it is hard to find other functions with the same degree of impact. In just its first year, the enterprise data science team has delivered machine learning solutions that create new insights into product availability, robust forecasts of customer demand, optimized raw material inventory, and many others. Each solution reveals new connections between complex business processes and their supporting data. This uniquely places our enterprise data science team in a position to deploy their deep technical skills across the wide and deep network of Micron’s processes and data.
Lastly, we knew that a truly integrated set of predictive models and insights would require all areas of the company to trust the methods and understand the insights. This step cannot be overlooked, as black boxes are rarely blindly accepted by the business. As a result, our enterprise data science team has been delivering a variety of education sessions explaining fundamental data science and machine learning concepts to stakeholders at all levels. These sessions range from department-tailored presentations to data science book clubs to detailed demonstrations of data science techniques. We have found that awareness and education is essential to driving adoption of data science solutions, building confidence with the insights they produce, and ultimately gaining support for further investment.
High: What opportunity or issue to be resolved led to this IT-led innovation?
Quest Diagnostics Chief Information Officer has never thought of IT as a cost center. She knows that there is gold in the data that the company collects, and synthesizing it better so that the company and its customers can make better decisions ensures better healthcare outcomes ultimately.
She has been a driver of the company’s Quanum suite of technology and data analytics solutions, which provides clients with a better understanding of how the company can provide critical insights in healthcare and help the healthcare community overcome pressing analytic, clinical and financial challenges. As she notes herein, “Ultimately, Quanum strengthens the overall Quest Diagnostics brand promise of Action from Insight with a robust suite of technology and data analytics tools that allow patients, payers and providers to better analyze, connect and engage.” This has led to a nearly nine figure revenue lift of the company, and for that, Fonseca has been awarded a 2017 Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked for comment on Fonseca’s contribution, Quest Diagnostics’ President and Chief Executive Officer Steve Rusckowski noted, “As the leader in diagnostic information services, we are in a unique position to connect patients, providers, payers and ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations) with actionable insights based on lab, clinical, quality, claims and other health data.Our Quanum suite of solutions reflects this new way of thinking about Quest and our broader ability to harness insights and technology to deliver better healthcare. With our national connectivity, big data, technology and clinical expertise, we’re able to provide the kinds of technology solutions that will improve quality, lower costs, engage patients and optimize financial performance.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
Lidia Fonseca: The innovative concept our team pursued was an end-to-end digital experience for our customers with our comprehensive Quanum suite of technology and data analytics solutions. Launching Quanum in early 2016, our objectives were to make it easy for customers and consumers to select solutions that are beneficial to them. The new Quanum brand provides our clients with a new way of thinking about Quest Diagnostics. It offers a better understanding of how we can provide critical insights in healthcare and help the healthcare community overcome pressing analytic, clinical and financial challenges. Ultimately, Quanum strengthens the overall Quest Diagnostics brand promise of Action from Insight with a robust suite of technology and data analytics tools that allow patients, payers and providers to better analyze, connect and engage.
By Peter High, published on Forbes 4/24/17
NetApp is in the throes of a major transformation from a data storage company to a data management company. The implications are profound, and the company’s chief information officer Bill Miller is at the center of a lot of the change. As the CIO of a company that serves many IT departments, he and his team have multiple programs that impact and influence product and service design, from being customer one to running the NetApp-on-NetApp program to helping evolve what the company refers to as the Data Fabric, which is a set of solutions that allow NetApp’s customers “to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments,” as Miller notes in our interview. His IT team tests the new utilities and provides feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions. Miller also notes that his team operates as a bit of a talent factory for the product development organization, for as his team develops insights into the product, some of them are logical candidates to fill needs of that team, either temporarily or permanently.
Peter High: For the past six months, you have been the senior vice president and chief information officer at NetApp. What is in purview of your role?
Bill Miller: I was attracted to this position because it provides me with the opportunity to contribute at the strategic level as NetApp continues to evolve. The reshaping involves functional organizations such as information technology, as well as product lines, product offerings, and how we offer solutions to our customers.
I play two integral roles as the CIO of NetApp. First, I am helping to retool the business as we move toward more cloud offerings and software enabled solutions around data. While the first 24 years of the company were focused on data storage, we are shifting to data management and helping our customers do more with their information. The opportunity to help transform the company and its systems, particularly in the go-to- market space and how we bring those solutions to our customers, appealed to me because it would not be business as usual as a CIO.
The second aspect of the position that intrigued me is that NetApp can utilize its own systems and run its own solutions in its own IT shop to leverage increased productivity, performance, uptime, and a variety of other desirable characteristics. NetApp shares these outcomes not only across the business, but also with customers.
High:Part of the retooling at NetApp includes the programs NetApp-on-NetApp and Customer-1. What role does your team play in these initiatives?
Miller: The two programs that you mentioned and a third that we are spinning up align with our core mission in IT. We relish our roles in all three. In the Customer-1 program, the IT team beta tests our solutions, our products, our software, and the workflows before we introduce them to our customers. The process starts when the Engineering and Product Development teams envision and develop new technologies. The IT team then deploys the product or solution in our hand-crafted, exquisite, global data centers using the latest technologies and NetApp platforms. We provide early feedback to the Product Development and Engineering organizations about how to tune and optimize the products and solutions. IT’s role with the Customer-1 program, however, is not only to be the pre-release customer, but also the early post-release customer. It is a valuable internal feedback loop that optimizes the products by utilizing the partnership, or handshake, that NetApp has between Engineering and IT, which is not the case in every organization.
The second initiative is NetApp-on-NetApp. We run our new products and capabilities in our own operations for a period of time and gather statistics and information such as uptime, availability, change control, and restoration processes. Then, we share what we have learned about best practices both within the company and with our customers through executive briefing visits, roadshows, and through collegial relationships with our peers. We enjoy it because while we are trying to sell a solution to our customers, we also bring information technology and real world experiences to the table which allow us to share the true flavor of what it takes to run the equipment, the platforms, and the software, as well as to discuss the benefits gained by running those solutions.
Our third initiative, the Data Fabric, has evolved from our shift toward becoming a high end, data management solutions company and away from our legacy as a superb storage company. The Data Fabric is a set of solutions that allow our customers to gracefully, securely, intelligently, and quickly move information across their on-prem and off-prem environments. The IT team’s role in this initiative is to test drive the new utilities and provide real time feedback on NetApp’s tools and partner solutions.
High: Are there organizational adaptations that are necessary for accomplishing these new initiatives and having IT more involved in the strategic planning process? Or, is success dependent on the culture and the expectation that this is part of everyone’s job?
Peter High
11/21/16
This is one in a series of interviews with financial services CIOs conducted in collaboration with CIO Straight Talk magazine. Read additional articles by other technology executives at www.straighttalkonline.com.
Susan has been the Chief Information Officer of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2012. As CIO she is responsible for the provision of information technology services and leadership in the application of technology to the mission of the IMF. Prior to joining the IMF, Susan served in the U.S. State Department and was its CIO from 2008 to 2012, leading the delivery of IT services to 280 Embassies, Consulates, and offices in 185 countries.
Susan holds a graduate degree in National Security Strategy from the National War College and an undergraduate degree in Management Information Systems from Virginia Commonwealth University.
I recently caught up with Susan in Washington, D.C. and our conversation covered World Class IT Principle One, People, as we discussed recruiting international and local talent and the organization of IT within the IMF, and Principle Five, as we discussed the development of engagements with new business partners. We also discussed items on her strategic roadmap and future trends, her path to becoming a successful female CIO, mentoring programs committed to creating more gender diversity in the organization, as well as a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Susan, you are the Chief Information Officer at the IMF. Can you set the stage and talk about some of the priorities you have on your strategic roadmap heading into 2017?
Susan Swart: Some of the priorities we have at a strategic level are to change the way IT delivers its services to the institution. We generally have positive feedback from our users on the basic services that the IT organization provides to the broader organization. However, the way we deliver some of those services is going to result in our inability to do new things in direct support of the business because we are crowding out our ability to invest in new technology. With that in mind, we evaluated what we were doing and how we were doing it. We came up with a series of initiatives that we are calling Transform IT that will cause us to deliver services differently by making space to do more of the things that will provide technology to the business. That will mean the business will do what it does better.
We are looking at moving to managed services for our infrastructure. We are changing the way we do some of our contracting—doing our projects with statements of work, as opposed to hiring individual people; focusing on what we are supposed to be delivering to the business, as opposed to how many people we need to hire. We are looking at knowledge management at a more specific level: how do we provide better knowledge management capabilities to the institution? It is a knowledge-based organization. How can people create knowledge and then find that knowledge and re-use it across the institution? Also data management and analytics: how can we take advantage of the data that we already have and use that more effectively across the organization, breaking down some of the stovepipes? And also new analytic capability and AI: how could that potentially be used to further the work of the Fund? Those are some of the high priorities.
High: As you think about more innovative, forward-looking type topics, how do you and your team carve out the time to think about those versus more business type activities?
Swart: Obviously, there is a lot of interest in doing new, innovative technology within IT. There is the realization in the business that new technologies can change the way they do what they do internally in the Fund, and also in Fintech. We need to understand how Fintech is operating in the world because it impacts some of the core functions of the Fund, that is, what is the impact of technology when looking over financial markets? We are involved in that area because we bring some technical expertise.
When you look at something like AI, how could we use AI and Big Data to better understand things that are happening in a way that we do not understand today? We are using a couple of methods to bring the business idea and technology together. We are implementing a series of challenges around Big Data where the business or IT could put forward some projects that would take advantage of Big Data, whether internal or external, using new technologies, for delivering a business value. They are small projects to start with. We have an innovation fund, so we are allowing minimal investment, and we are allowing them to fail, which I think is very significant in how we get more innovation into the organization. It takes some of the risk proposition out of it. We have a series of those going forward that are in the process now so we do not know the outcomes. We are also looking for other opportunities, even in our normal investment processes, where new technology could bring some value.
High: Given the scope of the IMF, a global organization, how do you organize IT to support such a broad purview?
Click here to read the full article
8/15/2016
Earlier this year at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company revealed three innovation pillars that make up the company’s ten-year vision: connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR). Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is responsible for leading each of them. Despite the fact that the vision is ten-years in duration, the company has made significant progress in each.
Facebook’s progress in AI can been seen in everything from the company’s news feed to the way in which people are tagged. The virtual reality innovations are best demonstrated through the Oculus Rift, which I demo’d last Thursday. More recently, the company made a great flight forward on the connectivity pillar as Acquila, a long-endurance plane that will fly above commercial aircraft and the weather, took flight in Arizona. The goal is for this v-shaped aircraft that has a wingspan longer than a Boeing 737, but weighs under 1,000 pounds to bring basic internet access to the developing world.
I met with Schroepfer at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and we discussed these three pillars and a variety of other topics, including the company’s recruiting methods, how the company maintains its innovative edge, and the logic behind its headquarters – one of the largest open-space offices in the world.
Peter High: Earlier this year at F8 2016, Facebook’s developer’s conference, you introduced three innovation pillars. Could you take a moment to highlight each of them?
Mike Schroepfer:We have been, I think pretty uniquely in the industry, very public about our ten-year vision and roadmap, and we have broken it down into three core areas:
High: With the abundant resources and brain power at Facebook, how did you choose those three as opposed to others?
Schroepfer: A lot of this derives directly from [Facebook CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg], and comes from the mission, which is to make the world more open and connected. I think of this simply as using technology to connect people. We sit down and say, “OK, if that is our goal, the thing we are uniquely suited for, what are the big problems of the world?” As you start breaking it down, these fall out quite naturally. The first problem is if a bunch of the world does not even have basic connectivity to the internet, that is a fundamental problem. Then you break it down and realize there are technological solutions to problems; there are things that can happen to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying infrastructure, which is the big limiting factor. It is just an economics problem. Once people are connected, you run into the problem you and I have, which is almost information overload. There is so much information out there, but I have limited time and so I may not be getting the best information. Then there is the realization that the only way to scale that is to start building intelligent systems in AI that can be my real-time assistant all the time, making sure that I do not miss anything that is critical to me and that I do not spend my time on stuff that is less important. The only way we know how to do that at the scale we operate at is artificial intelligence.
So there is connectivity and I am getting the right information, but most of us have friends or family who are not physically next to us all the time, and we cannot always be there for the most important moments in life. The state of the art technology we have for that right now is the video camera. If I want to capture a moment with my kids and remember it forever, that is the best we can do right now. The question is, ‘What if I want to be there live and record those moments in a way that I can relive them twenty years from now as if I was there?’ That is where virtual reality comes in. It gives you the capability of putting a headset on and experiencing it today, and you feel like you are in a real world somewhere else, wherever you want to be.
High: How do you think about those longer term goals, the things that are going to take a lot of stair steps to get to, versus the near-term exhaust of ideas that are going to be commercialized and commercial-ready?
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a series focused on artificial intelligence. Advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly redefining everything from how we work to how we learn to how we treat diseases. The expertise and background of the individuals interviewed in this series is varied, ranging from startup founders and corporate executives, to academic researchers and leaders of not-for-profit organizations. That said, they share a commonality: they are the world’s foremost leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.
