Follow ZDNET: Add us as a favorite source On Google.
ZDNET Highlights
- Business talent should be linked to technical ability.
- Colgate-Palmolive promotes AI-enabled development by focusing on humanitarian challenges.
- Strong foundations support explorations that are measured effectively.
Industry experts regularly suggest that AI is about enhancing talent, not replacing employees. The often cited purpose is to ensure that humans continue to monitor and scrutinize the work of AI and agents in the world of emerging technology.
But what does keeping a human in the loop actually look like when you’re trying to drive business growth and innovation? After all, focusing on human checks and balances can feel like an unwanted intrusion when you’re trying to move quickly to gain a competitive advantage.
Also: 5 Ways Rules and Regulations Can Help Guide Your AI Innovation
However, for Diana Schildhouse, chief data and analytics officer at Colgate-Palmolive, there is no compromise: professional talent must be linked to technical ability.
“Everything we’re doing with AI involves humans,” he said. “This vision is how we can drive business value by making people processes easier and faster and ultimately create products that better serve our consumers.”
He told ZDNET in a one-to-one video interview about five ways to support AI-enabled development while keeping humans in the loop.
1. Focus on business challenge
Schildhouse’s team creates, deploys, and embeds AI-enabled solutions, including machine-learning models and predictive and prescriptive analytics, across Colgate-Palmolive globally.
He said his organization takes a human-centric approach to creating technological solutions to enterprise challenges.
“This way we work with the business to deeply understand what people are doing, what their processes are and how we can apply technology to that effort,” he said.
“Our approach starts from that understanding. This can be through human-centered design. We do a lot of UX/UI research, even on the tools we’re using and the visuals of the interface, to make sure it’s intuitive and fits with the way people work.”
Also: 5 ways Lenovo’s AI strategy can drive real results for you, too
For example, through the application of AI, he said marketers get access to better and more ideas faster. They can test these ideas and feel more confident in them.
“The human in the loop is something that is a part of how we structure AI use here,” he said. “People should be using AI as a tool to help their process, rather than offloading the work to some of these tools.”
2. Work horizontally and vertically
Schildhouse suggested that the purpose of this exploratory work is targeted innovation. There’s no point in developing hundreds of different ideas if you can’t filter them and find the gold dust.
Schildhouse: “Everything we’re doing with AI involves humans.”
Colgate Palmolive-
He said Colgate-Palmolive considers AI through a human-enabled framework that includes horizontal and vertical elements.
Horizontal elements are the tools and foundation that his team makes available to help people across the company become more productive and gain insights faster.
Also: 5 ways to keep your AI strategy from going haywire
The vertical elements, meanwhile, including innovation, are the organization’s priority areas for exploration.
“Both aspects are working together. The things at the center are important, and we want to move them forward organically – start with a pilot and scale globally,” he said.
“From the center we have identified areas that are the biggest priorities for the company, such as innovation or demand creation, and these are the areas where we will focus more in terms of our team and understanding and creating solutions that can be applied across the organisation.”
3. Let people explore locally
Just as importantly, Schildhouse said, it’s also important that local teams across the global organization can develop and improve new use cases.
“We also want to let people explore, because some of the horizontal tools we provide may have great opportunities for team productivity and growth,” he said.
Ensuring that humans are at the center of these technological experiments means establishing a safe environment for exploration.
Also: This Company’s AI Success Is Based on 5 Essential Steps – See How They Work for You
At Colgate-Palmolive, this space is known as the AI Hub, an internal platform that allows employees to use and test AI assistants and apps.
“Very early on, our team built this Hub, which is our internal version of the Zen AI tools. We were one of the first companies to take this approach in a controlled way with guardrails. People had to go through training to access the AI Hub,” he said.
“We now have a community of AI ambassadors around the world who stay connected and who represent their division and their work. And we’re seeing a lot of great ideas coming out, just for people to explore safely in their sandbox and then share them around the world.”
4. Establish a culture of learning
Schildhouse said adopting governance is the best way to ensure that AI innovation delivers business growth while keeping humans in the loop.
As other business leaders recently explained to ZDNET, governance, when handled correctly, can lead to the successful implementation of emerging technologies.
“We’ve put guardrails and risk management around everything we’re doing to make sure people are using AI in safe, ethical ways that are consistent with our values and internal guidelines,” he said, referring to the Colgate-Palmolive approach.
Also: Fear of AI job cuts? 5 Ways to Future-Procure Your Career – Before It’s Too Late
As mentioned in the previous section, employees who use AI in business must take a mandatory training program. Schildhouse, who joined the company in April 2021, explained the benefits.
She said, “Colgate has a strong learning culture. One of the first things I noticed when I joined the business was that people are excited to learn about new technology and enhance their skills. So, we made training mandatory, but everyone adopted it quickly and was excited to use AI.”
“Training is one of the ways we think about managing governance. Because you don’t want free-for-all, uncontrolled access to AI tools. We also need to think about risk, so we’ve put great guardrails in place.”
5. Focus on measuring value
Schildhouse said the overarching objective is straightforward: to deliver business growth and innovation by merging analytics and AI with human understanding and insight.
“It’s about data-driven decision making and helping our business teams use analytics tools and AI to make faster, better decisions.”
When she joined the company, she had to determine how to strategically achieve those goals and generate business profits.
Too: Cloud-native computing is set to explode thanks to AI inference work
Schildhouse asked key questions to determine how AI and data analytics could solve business challenges and created a framework to help measure the effectiveness of his team’s solutions on an ongoing basis in a few key areas.
“First of all, is what we’re doing increasing revenue? When it comes to things like pricing analysis, those things are a little easier to measure where you can do a before and after analysis,” she said.
“Then, of course, there are the usual efficiencies, like time savings and faster speed of insight through some of the applications we’ve built. We also consider IP creation. So, if we’re building the tools in house, writing the code, and owning the algorithms, that’s an asset for us. Then we think about whether we’re extending that approach into our markets.”
