BRANDI CORBELLO: It's not about taking everything away,
but it's really augmenting or accelerating
their time of value, and speed of delivery.
Brandi Corbello, VP of Transformation
at Cushman Wakefield really leading our automation efforts
internally.
TOM WILDE: And I'm Tom Wilde, the CEO of Indico Data.
Well, Brandi it's great to chat with you here at the show.
We've heard a lot about Cushman's journey
around automation.
When you had those early wins with RPA,
you began to look at unstructured data
as the next challenge.
What were some of the things you were trying to solve
with unstructured data?
What challenges did it present as you were trying
to gain these efficiencies?
BRANDI CORBELLO: Yeah.
It's a really good question.
As we looked across our use cases that Cushman Wakefield,
we have a ton of documents.
So thinking about VISAs, we have certificate of insurance,
we have bank statements, we have invoices.
Thousands of documents all varying,
and we really needed something that
could solve all of those use cases
help us with change management, and really give us this really
great user experience.
But also allow us to start tapping
into the unstructured data.
Specifically on the leeside because it's so rich for us,
and we haven't really been able to use it.
TOM WILDE: When you started to look at unstructured data
and talk to line of business about those opportunities,
given that this is an artificial intelligence approach,
did you have to sort of train them, or reset
their expectations around this notion of accuracy, automation,
augmentation?
How did that go?
BRANDI CORBELLO: Yeah.
It's also really a question.
As we thought about like business expectations,
you know they hear automation and they think,
it's going to do everything for me.
So we really had to level set, and change the word
to augmentation.
Because it's not about taking everything away,
but it's really augmenting or accelerating
their time of value and speed of delivery.
TOM WILDE: When you look at the scale
of the impact at a place like Cushman
when it comes to these unstructured data flows,
give us a sense of how many people does this touch,
and how big an impact and potential in the future
do you see it.
BRANDI CORBELLO: Directly, it impacts probably a thousand
people in the Americas.
But if you think about it, actually
impacts our entire population.
Because the least data that we have is so rich,
it helps our brokers, but it also helps us internally.
Because we can start understanding what's
going on with our clients, which helps
Cushman really make decisions as well.
TOM WILDE: When you look a bit into the future,
and try to weave this into some of your existing systems,
talk a little bit-- if you could about the sort of Cushman,
you know broadly technology stack,
and how you see these pieces coming together
between RPA with UIPath unstructured Indico,
and some of the other enterprise systems
you already had in place.
BRANDI CORBELLO: Yeah.
Stock technology is really important
because we have these enterprise applications that
really host our data.
But we really like-- we need things sitting over top of it,
right?
To really like perform the processes for us.
So we think about unstructured really like the inputs, right?
And then the outputs of that.
Like being able to like normalize it, right?
And be able to do something with.
That's when we bring RPA in to really
like have that repetitive rules-based approach
for those native applications.
TOM WILDE: When you talk to senior management
about building the business case for this,
how do you-- how do you talk upward into the c-suite
to say this is something we need to invest in,
and how do you show that tangible result?
BRANDI CORBELLO: I would say it's twofold.
The first is operational efficiency.
So ours back to the organization.
But then also we're starting to talk about like, now
that we're structuring this unstructured data we've never
had access to, what kind of value
does that bring to our business, and how does that
differentiate us in the market?
TOM WILDE: Do you see that as new intellectual property,
or those opportunities to actually compete differently
in the market?
Because you can suddenly take this unstructured
and create value from it
BRANDI CORBELLO: 100%.
We've been talking about it from a revenue generating
standpoint, and really thinking about products
embedded in our services because we're people business.
TOM WILDE: And any thoughts on--
what do you see around the corner?
What's over the horizon a little bit in terms of unstructured,
and the data opportunity?
BRANDI CORBELLO: I actually talked about this a little bit
yesterday.
It's going to be really important for COEs,
it's really like governance, and like connectedness, as well
as like explainability, and monitoring of AI, RPA,
and all the things that bring process automation together.
TOM WILDE: Do you-- on that topic
do you see the compliance folks internally
scaling up there, or upskilling around things like AI?
Where do you see them relative to where you guys are as a COE?
BRANDI CORBELLO: I think compliance
plays a really important role for us
because they allow us to understand
what we can do with the data, and how we can access it.
But really like our team is there to understand the value
to the business.
TOM WILDE: Awesome.
Well, I really appreciated talking to you here.
And have a great show.
BRANDI CORBELLO: Yeah.
Thanks.