Amin Venjara, Chief Data Officer at ADP, speaks with Brian Boxman, VP of Sales at Incorta, in a video interview about the company and his role, leveraging customer value through data, the importance of data connection and record, tackling entity resolution, and building trust through data governance and compliance.

ADP is a global provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions, offering services such as payroll, talent management, HR, and benefits administration to businesses of all sizes.

Venjara reflects on his early days and shares how he learned the art of sales and making connections by selling greeting cards and gift wrap papers. Over the past decade, he has made a significant impact at ADP, where his work has been broad and influential. Speaking of the role, he mentions working with a great set of clients.

With ADP now serving over a million clients and covering nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, his role has been critical.

Additionally, Venjara has contributed to the company’s upmarket product strategies and has been instrumental in developing new data products. These include analytics and benchmarking tools to innovative solutions that simplify income and employment verifications, thereby improving the financial lives of workers.

As ADP’s CDO, Venjara’s responsibilities are threefold:

1. Building a central data platform
2. Ensuring data and AI governance
3. Driving customer value

Elaborating on the central data platform, Venjara states that clients’ data, internal systems’ data, and external data come together into a central platform. This is followed by ensuring that all use cases align with the highest standards of trust and responsible AI through strong data and AI governance. Then, it boils down to leveraging data to create products that generate customer value and can be successfully brought to market.

Speaking of creating data products, Venjara reflects on how his passion for data has evolved over time. Highlighting ADP’s vast reach, he notes, “Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a hundred million unique people in the U.S. that have come through our systems.”

For Venjara, the scale of this data presents an exciting opportunity to harness that data in ways that meaningfully impact the evolving world of work.

Creating customer value through data — easy, smart, and human

Speaking of leveraging data for customer value, Venjara emphasizes a clear and thoughtful approach to understanding the existing data and what can be done to drive value for customers.

At ADP, Venjara explains, the work is centered around supporting companies throughout the entire human capital management lifecycle — from hiring to retiring. “We help companies throughout their human capital management lifecycle, from hiring to sourcing and recruiting. So we kind of say, ‘From hire to inspire, to retire,’” Venjara shares.

ADP’s mission is to assist companies and their workforces so they can focus on driving their business and serving their customers. To accomplish this, Venjara highlights a simple but powerful framework: Easy, Smart, and Human.

To make things easy, Venjara stresses that systems must be intuitive and remove unnecessary administrative burdens. “Nobody wants to spend a bunch of time handling administrative processes around their people or anything like finances or whatever. So we’ve got to make it very easy in the system,” he says.

With an example from payroll processing, Venjara illustrates how, instead of forcing users to search for errors, the system should automatically surface them. Examples include flagging an hourly worker with no recorded hours, spotting negative PTO balances, or detecting mismatches between pay and tax jurisdictions. These proactive alerts, known as payroll anomalies, allow users to quickly resolve issues during the payroll process without unnecessary hassle.

The next element, smart, focuses on using AI and data insights to guide HR practitioners where it matters most. As Venjara points out, “HR departments run lean. They don’t have the time to be able to do all the things, to look into every single nook and cranny. They need to be able to service my entire organization.”

He elaborates on how smart systems can:

• Surface key issues like turnover spikes or overtime surges.
• Identify areas of high employee engagement where leaders deserve recognition.
• Help HR teams prioritize actions without digging through mountains of data.

Despite the increasing role of AI, Venjara strongly believes in preserving the human aspect of HR systems. For him, it is about recognizing that every data point represents a real person. For instance, he says, there are milestones in a person’s life, and systems must be empathetic, especially during difficult moments like bereavement or medical leave. “Those are things that data and AI can really make a difference and really make an HR system human again.”

Importance of data connection and building a golden record

Building on the topic of creating seamless customer experiences through data, Venjara highlights a common challenge that many organizations, including ADP, face: Having a lot of systems. He points out that, even after users input large amounts of information into a system, those systems do not always act like they know the user.

Addressing this issue, Venjara states that ADP has developed a central data platform to bring together information from various systems. However, he cautions, “Just because you bring the data to a central place doesn’t mean the data is connected.”

The first step was heavy investment in ingestion, ensuring that all pipelines could consistently and reliably feed data into the platform, says Venjara. But ingestion alone is not enough, and true value comes from connecting the data, a much more complex task, he adds.

Tackling entity resolution

Furthermore, Venjara stresses that connecting disparate systems hinges on solving the issue of entity resolution of matching and mapping information across systems without relying solely on primary keys.

Therefore, ADP focuses on similarity-based identity surfacing and creating what Venjara calls the golden record — a single, unified view of the client or worker drawn from multiple sources.

This work involves building a client graph, aggregating information across services, products, finance, and billing systems, and a worker graph, consolidating data related to employees across various systems. The result is a single, reliable data set that all internal stakeholders, from product teams to sales, finance, and service organizations, can rely on.

“We’re on the journey towards that,” Venjara acknowledges. However, he maintains that this effort is critical to creating the seamless and informed experience customers expect. 

Building global trust through data governance and local compliance

Moving forward, Venjara states that as a global company, ADP carries a profound responsibility towards its clients, one that goes beyond simply complying with regulations. Trust, he says, is the foundation of the relationship.

To manage this responsibility, ADP has implemented a global standard for data governance while also adapting to the specific legal requirements of the different jurisdictions in which they operate, says Venjara.

For instance, in Europe, where GDPR and data residency requirements are critical, ADP has established a central data lake with regional nodes. These nodes ensure that data remains in the locations where it must be stored, providing the flexibility to scale systems up or down while maintaining compliance with local regulations.

Beyond regulatory compliance, ADP has created a data governance process that evaluates every proposed use case for data access. This process ensures that any request for data is reviewed carefully, aligning with a strict data minimization policy. Only the data necessary for a specific, clearly defined use case is made available, maintaining a high standard of responsibility in how information is handled.

Concluding, Venjara notes that the company approaches internal data products with the same rigor as external offerings. Whether the client is internal or external, he affirms that the same principles apply: the solution must be easy to use, intelligent in design, and human-centered in its execution.

CDO Magazine appreciates Amin Venjara for sharing his insights with our global community.