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and emotion analysis in many
different languages quickly and
easily, rather than having to build
support for each language one at
a time.
What changes to your job
role have you seen in the
last year and how do you see
these developing in the next
12 months?
One great thing about my job
is that we haven't run out of
interesting new ways to identify
consumer insights from different
types of data. That's also
challenging to prioritise as we have
to balance short-term improvements
versus long-term vision.
What do you currently identify as
the major areas of investment in
your industry?
The AI trend has affected our industry of
consumer insight by making it possible to
“
AS THE PACE OF
TECHNOLOGICAL
ADVANCEMENT
CONTINUES TO
ACCELERATE,
WE’LL
INCREASINGLY
BE SURPRISED
BY WHAT’S NOW
POSSIBLE AND
THEREFORE
THERE WILL
BE EVEN MORE
THINGS THAT
WE’LL CALL ‘AI’.
102
INTELLIGENTCIO
get more and more useful insight
from unstructured public data, like social
media posts. For example, advancements
in Machine Learning have made it possible
to analyse images and recognise objects,
scenes, activities and logos, with pretty good
accuracy at a high scale. A large amount of
investment is taking place now to continue
these types of AI advancements and
connect them to useful products.
How do you deal with stress and
unwind outside of the office?
I bike to and from work every day and I also
play the keyboard in a couple of bands.
If you could go back and change one
career decision, what would it be?
In 1997, some friends suggested I join an
online book company called Amazon – that
might have been a good call.
What advice would you offer
somebody aspiring to obtain C-level
position in your industry?
There are different types of CTOs. Some
are very externally focused and spend a lot
of time explaining the company's vision
and technology to customers and analysts.
Others are product and technology focused
and work closely with the internal teams on
architecture decisions.
And finally, others are delivery and process
focused, working on the team structure
and mechanics of software development.
(In other companies, the latter role may be
filled by a VP of engineering, not the CTO).
I've been fortunate to be able to spend
time in all these areas, but people keen
on being a CTO someday should consider
which of those roles is the best fit for their
interests and skills, and conversely how
they can improve their capabilities in the
other areas. n
What are the region-specific
challenges when implementing new
technologies in Europe?
The data landscape can be different. In
the US, you have Twitter and Instagram
for example, but those platforms aren't
universally popular in all countries. Also,
text analytics can be more challenging
when there are many different languages
in use. We're doing a lot of work on
Machine Learning advancements to make
it easier to deploy things like sentiment
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