Gabriella Frick: Hi, I'm Gabriela Frick, and I'm
here with Andi Karaboutis. Andy is the group Chief
Information and Digital Officer at national grid.
And she will be speaking at this year's MIT Sloan
CIO Symposium on a panel about accelerated digital
transformation and where we will land. Today we'll
be discussing how the pandemic has impacted
enterprises, and how CIOs are adapting to what is
dubbed the new normal. As a next step to this
interview, click the link above to read more about
how CIOs are helping their companies come out
stronger after the pandemic. Now, let's get
started. So where do CIOs get the training? They
need to take advantage of the new normal of for
example, how do CIOs attain sufficient competency
for utilizing AI in an environment where machine
learning is central to IT systems?
Unknown: Yeah, so Gabriella, you know, it's
interesting, the first thing that CIOs have had to
really have a broader perspective of are what are
the use cases? And what are the challenges and the
outcomes we're trying to achieve? And so there's
been a widening aperture, on really understanding
what's needed and you know, by our customers, our
consumers, our employees, and all the constituents
of the company. Artificial Intelligence is a means
that provides much more insight into our
customers, our employees, our products, and our
assets. And CIOs have realized the bigger call to
getting trained on these to your question of where
do we get it? It is through experiential through
learning, through training and through
understanding the power of frontier technologies.
So my organization at National Grid, we think
about digital success in three ways, frontier
technologies, reimagining the future, and what it
could be with Paramount a ton of data, if you
will, and delivering work differently. And so by
doing that, we've realized we really do need to
all understand the power of data. And ultimately,
artificial intelligence, which is large data sets
diverse data sets, reading them, understanding
them to achieve outcomes. So again, experiential
training and learning and actually learning from
other industries and bringing into your own.
Gabriella Frick: Wow. and so as you said,
technology is playing this vital role in order for
for businesses to deal with the effects of the
pandemic, and many are undergoing digital
transformation. But how attainable is this? For
example, each enterprise has specific and unique
goals for what it would look like for AI to
accomplish them? Do you envision a future where
companies will be able to tailor AI to their
purposes? Or is it likely that most enterprises
will have to conform to what commodity AI offers?
Unknown: Those industries and more specifically,
those companies that do tailor for their business
and for their customers set, or the customers they
want to win will absolutely win, and they will
have to tailor to it will require understanding
your customers and having a desire to get more and
more insight into their buying patterns, their
viewing patterns for us and in the utility
industry. It's understanding how they use energy
down to the appliance level. And if you if you
have the right questions, and you have a set of
questions that are key to the answer, or you have
a plethora of data that can surface insight you
didn't you didn't think you could get that's where
you will win. If you just go to standard packaged
canned questions and insights from standard AI
packages or standard machine learning packages
without differentiating it for your industry in
your company, then you won't win. So it's
critically important.
Gabriella Frick: Are there any other technologies
you've implemented over the last year that you
have found to be a value within your organization
at National Grid?
Unknown: Yeah, great question. Gabriella. You
know, data is everything and it's the heart of
everything and getting the insights from large and
diverse data sets in order to be able to you know,
feed machine learning and artificial intelligence
through outcome is also about those channels from
which you get data. And I'm really proud of the
fact that we have done everything from internet of
things. So sensors and reading sensors for the
stability and for the health of our our our
assets, whether they're substations or poles etc.
geospatial geolocation to be able to help our
field for workers to go to the right location,
etc, but then also stream data back about, you
know, the state of, again assets there. We've
leveraged in our leveraging edge computing, which
again, allows us to be in multiple, multiple
places and do fast amount of data crunching and
processing closest to the physical site where it
can be beneficial to get responses. So all of
those technologies that create curate, stream in
develop and help us bring insights and train
models, right in order to understand our
customers, our assets and our employees and you
know, the world if you will, better it are all
helpful technologies and we've leveraged a number