CDO Magazine Launches Southern California CDO Forum: Execs Exchange GenAI Insights

CDO Magazine’s first Executive Boardroom Dinner in Los Angeles set the stage for the launch of its Southern California CDO Forum on November 7.

A core group of Southern California senior data, analytics and AI executives came together to kick off the newest CDO Magazine community. The leaders connected, shared their experiences and benchmarked against their peers on the topic of “GenAI: How You Are Exploring or Using It.”

Matt Topper, AHEAD VP, Client Services, moderated the conversation that covered generative AI strategy and use cases across the financial services and health care domains.

Sharing his take on the event, Patrick Chen, Scripps Health Sr. Director of Business Intelligence, Growth and Accountable Care Enterprise says, "One of the most valuable aspects of being a part of this community is being able to share cross-industry insights on artificial intelligence in a forum with fellow leaders in data and analytics.”

“A particularly interesting point of discussion that we came across, is managing the risks of AI within our respective industries, and the diverse representation across backgrounds and industries allowed for us to quickly identify areas in which we can support one another. Being able to candidly share our experiences and envision an AI-empowered future together was easily the highlight of the night," Chen adds.

Summarizing key takeaways from the discussion, Purvi Ramchandani, Pacific Western Bank SVP, Data Governance Officer, shares: "Gen AI is a transformative force with successful proven use cases in several industries but successful implementations of AI typically require availability of high-quality and trustworthy data to perform optimally."

"Deficiencies in either data quality or governance have proven to be a significant barrier for AI adoption in many organizations, within and beyond the financial services industry. Effective data governance holds the key for organizations to successfully navigate this hurdle and make data and organization ready for AI."

James Lin, Experian Head of AI/ML Innovation highlights crucial points for CDOs to keep in mind about Gen AI:

1. The general media hype cycle would lead most people to believe that the core asset is the model that businesses will need to build to capture market share. While this is an important part of the value chain, what CDOs will discover is that the core asset for LLMs is actually the data or corpus of these models.

   It is not realistic to expect most businesses to build large monolithic models that can solve every single problem like ChatGPT, but what is achievable is smaller and more specialized deployments. These deployments will be serviced by LLM data pipelines, and agility in this space will likely lead to greater success.

2. For 2024 investments: 2023 was a “catch-up” year where most businesses were reacting business forces. In 2024, we will begin to see more well thought out plans around generative AI, and most of them will likely include some form of retrieval augmented generation (RAG). 

   RAG is a cheaper (than fine tuning) method for embedding a business’ domain specific knowledge into an LLM deployment.

   However, it is a tool which can be used to overcome some compliance hurdles as well. It would not be surprising to see some (regulated) industries ditch the transformer models entirely and deploy their generative solution entirely on RAG.

Steve Wanamaker, CDO Magazine Publisher concludes, "We are thrilled to launch the CDO Magazine CDO Forum in Southern California. It's an opportunity to collectively explore and navigate the forefront of data-driven advancements, unlocking insights that can propel organizations forward in today's dynamic business environment."

Executives attending the Southern California Executive Boardroom Dinner included:

Savitha Anantharaman, Bank of America SVP, Data Analytics & Reporting; Myra Chen, Capital Group VP, Head, Sales, Marketing & Digital Analytics; Patrick Chen, Scripps Health Sr. Director, Business Intelligence, Growth & Accountable Care Enterprise;  Kiran Kanetkar, Pendulum Therapeutics VP, Technology, Data & Analytics; James Lin, Experian Head, AI/ML Innovation; Prachi Priya, former Team One Chief Data Officer; Purvi Ramchandani, Pacific Western Bank SVP, Data Governance Officer; Greg Townsend, AltaMed Health Services SVP, Chief Data Analytics Officer; Dan Flood, AHEAD Vice President of Sales, Digital Solutions; Matt Topper, AHEAD VP, Client Services; Brian Raposo, AHEAD EVP;  Steve Wanamaker, CDO Magazine Founder & Publisher; and Camille Prado, CDO Magazine Global Editor.