S4 | Ep 24 | GenAI: From Use Case to Production in 8 weeks with Chris Bannocks, Group Chief Data Officer at QBE Insurance

Driven by Data: The Podcast

In Episode 24, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Chris Bannocks, Group Chief Data Officer at QBE Insurance, where they discuss how they are productionising GenAI use cases from scratch within 8 weeks, which includes;

• Being a CDAO/Group CDAO in multiple organisations/sectors
• The importance of international experience
• Being allergic to the term ‘data strategy’
• The impact that Gen AI will have on business
• Why GenAI/AI isn’t the solution to every problem
• Harnessing the value that GenAI can bring
• The top and bottom line opportunities of GenAI
• Why GenAI raises the stakes further for D&A teams
• The requirements of the semantic understanding of your data organization
• Going fast and hard on one opportunity to prove it could be done
• Using different mediums to gather 300 potential use cases
• Building things to be reusable and scalable
• Measuring the addressable opportunity
• Why they didn’t have to quantify the value before they got started
• Standing up a technical spike within 6 days to show what could possibly be done
• Having a 12 week deadline to get it done from a standing start with no capability
• How that capability has now reduced time to production to 8 weeks
• The collaboration needed with each leader from different business units
• The importance of creating a working product in production
• Why they avoided focusing on efficiency and focused on increasing revenue instead
• Avoiding enthusiastic experimentation
• Why tight deadlines helped to make decisions quickly and focus on scope/MVP
• Why you should never start a piece of work without input from business stakeholders
• The challenge of ethical and bias considerations
• How they tackled GenAI education across the organisation
• The importance of having a human in the loop
• Building a team that can deliver
• Top pieces of advice for anyone about to embark on this journey