Winning the Innovation Game: Modernizing IT Without Disruption
November 14, 2024 | London
Executives across industries in EMEA are implementing groundbreaking AI, cybersecurity and data management technologies to transform their workplaces at a rapid pace. This event convened industry leaders to:
- Collaborate on new solutions to some of the thorniest technology issues facing the finance, insurance, transportation and telecom industries today.
- Spark new ideas by connecting diverse groups of executives across sectors;
- Amplify best practices to create a safer and more efficient workplace.
Speakers:
- Deepika Adusumilli, Chief Data & AI Officer, BT Group
- Ranil Boteju, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Lloyds Banking Group
- Federico Charosky, Founder & CEO, Quorum Cyber
- Sara O’Keane, Managing Director, Barclays Investment Bank
- Wendy Redshaw, Chief Digital Information Officer, Retail, NatWest Group
- Milan Shetti, President & CEO, Rocket Software
- Ming Tang, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, NHS England
- John Whitfield, Chief Information Security Officer & Head of Global Operations & Infrastructure, Howden Group
Bloomberg participants:
- Lizzy Burden, Anchor & UK Correspondent, Bloomberg Television
- Duncan Chater, Managing Director, Bloomberg Media Europe
- Tim Craighead, Global Chief Content Officer & Director of Research, Bloomberg Intelligence
- Jordan Robertson, Cybersecurity Reporter, Bloomberg
Event Highlights:
Sponsor Opening Remarks
Providing software to enterprises for mission critical applications in regulated industries, and working as an IBM partner for 35 years, means lots of experience to bring to market, said Milan Shetti, President & CEO, Rocket Software. It’s been a balancing act of meeting client demand for risk management while enabling them to safely respond to trends in the marketplace. “The art and science of doing modernization without disruption is what we, at Rocket Software, honed in on and sharpened over this period of time.”
Panel Discussion: AI for Transformation
At BT Group, broad investment in chatbots is aimed at providing the same personalized AI-driven online experiences to customers in their 450 stores. The telcom’s Chief Data & AI Officer Deepika Adusumilli said it’s also about bringing “efficiency to them in a wider state of understanding, either with the business customer or the consumer directly, to be able to say what are your options, where do you go and also provide a service that is quite seamless with the sales.”
Wendy Redshaw, Chief Digital Information Officer, Retail, NatWest Group talked about creating a safe space in which to experiment with AI, particularly in a regulated industry. “This is a thing that is evolving very, very quickly. You have to be thinking about evolution while you’re thinking about controls.” Their strategies include data and AI ethics principles that ensure there is human agency, that it’s free from bias, that it’s technically “robust, reliable and safe,” as well as looking broader to the potential environmental and societal impacts.
AI has been used in investment banking for close to 50 years, noted Sara O’Keane, Managing Director, Barclays, but Generative AI has brought usability to the masses and is even drawing in those who avoided technology. “We’ve never had a large language model made public previously. ChatGPT had over 100 million users in two months. We had CEOs going home at the end of the day, having dinner with their kids and they were talking about the same thing they were speaking about in the boardroom.” That’s the key to the fast-paced adoption. It’s why there are thousands of use cases across the bank, including investing, where GenAI is used to make market predictions and react to changes faster than a human ever could.
Bloomberg Intelligence Presentation: Pulse Check on Corporate Technology Plans
Tim Craighead, Global Chief Content Officer & Director of Research, Bloomberg Intelligence offered charts and insights from the recent Bloomberg Intelligence Chief Information Officer Survey that explored spending, priorities and implementation strategies around corporate technology.
Key takeaways are that Microsoft is gaining mindshare and wallet share across many elements specific to data query and inferencing. Cybersecurity has “jumped significantly in the prioritization of what CIOs are telling us. No surprise given some pretty high profile outages that have occurred over the course of the past 12 to 18 months.” And the shift toward deploying AI and technology in real world applications puts customer service front of mind. A copy of the presentation is available here.
Rocket Software Sponsor Spotlight
Rocket Software President & CEO Milan Shetti rejoined to talk about staying resilient with the transformative power of AI, but stressed that clients don’t want to lose the human touch. He sees AI’s role as helping to humanize the accelerator economy, workforce empowerment and natural engagement. It all has to be built on solid privacy and data security. “I can guarantee you that even ChatGBT cannot predict that the next trend is going to be.”
Ideally, staying both competitive and safe while modernizing means partnering with an external provider with years of experience. “If you start from scratch or do a plug and play you expose the data privacy, or you have to relearn everything which was done in the past two or three decades.”
Journey to the Cloud: A Fireside Chat With Ranil Boteju
“It’s hard work and incredibly complex,” Ranil Boteju, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Lloyds Banking Group said of migrating years’ worth of fragmented legacy data to the cloud. He spoke about a strategy of making networks less complex to make them more secure, which started with consolidating 17 data infrastructure systems when he came on board three years ago.
“Back then, our security team erred on the side of caution. Everything was very locked down. At one point, our platform was so secure, no one could actually access it.” It would become a cultural transformation. “As a CEO working with a cyber security team, basically, it should be antagonistic. When I started it felt like the security team felt their goal was to stop me from putting data on the cloud. But now it’s like, how do we do that safely. It’s about joint objectives.”
Panel Discussion: Securing Data to Safeguard the Future
When a pathology contractor for the UK’s National Health Service was hacked and patient data stolen across a large lab network, it was a wake-up call, according to Ming Tang, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, NHS England. Lack of security with the supply chain led to a lot of operational and human pain.
Lessons learned led to “working through those standards across the entirety of the supply chain more effectively, being a bit more proactive in terms of the way that we test and check and create audience around clients,” as well as doing their own testing of those networks. A lot is about education and identifying employees for mandatory training, which also applies to suppliers. As much as infrastructure is updated, “it only takes one person” to cause a breach.
Federico Charosky, Founder & CEO, Quorum Cyber jumped in to challenge that. “I think it’s unfair to place the burden of that moment on any one individual. So, if your entire security strategy is dependent on somebody not clicking a link, you’ve done something fundamentally wrong. In defense of the NHS, I think the complexity of the attacks that they’ve suffered are not due to one person not following training. If that was what we were relying on this would have been a disaster. I think it is more complex than just purely placing the blame or displacing blame onto the individuals. We have a job to do and if that’s what ends up being the dam, a lot of things failed upstream from that.”
Howden Group’s recent acquisition of 66 companies prompted a look at dealing with the dramatically heightened security risk during those transitions. Chief Information Security Officer John Whitfield described an integration process that begins with moving all of the acquired company’s data to Azure and then shutting down their infrastructure. He related their experience with the Crowdstrike outage, noting it took out 930 of their servers and 500 laptops. That was on a Thursday morning. After a hectic weekend, they were back up to speed by the start of business on Monday. Around the water coolers, workers were saying, “It didn’t touch us,” he recalled. “No, it did touch us. They just didn’t know that it touched us.”
This Bloomberg briefing was Proudly Sponsored By
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