💬 “McKinsey has done some intriguing research showing that the early adopters of artificial intelligence are reaping outsized benefits from it in revenue, customer retention and efficient operations. But the laggards say there is little to no benefit to using AI. So we’re seeing the leaders accelerating and the laggards falling further behind in AI because they're trying to justify their lack of engagement and investment.”

This is a conversation with John Thompson.

🎙️ John is an international technology executive with over 30 years of experience in the business intelligence and advanced analytics fields. Currently, John is responsible for the global Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence team and efforts at CSL. Prior to CSL, John was an Executive Partner at Gartner, where he was a management consultant to market leading companies in the areas of digital transformation, data monetization and advanced analytics. Before Gartner, John was responsible for the advanced analytics business unit of the Dell Software Group. John is the author of the new book – Analytics Teams: Leveraging analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement. The book was published in June 2020 and outlines how to hire and manage high-performance advanced analytics teams.

🎧 In this episode, John talks about the failings of country leaders to understand and interpret COVID-19 data and the impacts of this. I asked him to compare country leadership to company leadership on data literacy. We talk about data collection devices related to COVID data and John talks about some success stories. Our conversation moves to business and how in some cases the line of business managers are moving faster and smarter than corporate leaders to find ways to make better decisions based on data. John shares the processes he used to write his bestselling book and is very open and honest about what it took to write it quickly and efficiently, but also how he used social media to crowdsource ideas and sense check some sections with the analytics community. Finally, John shared his thoughts on some of the failings in how we are educating our youth and how this is a shared issue for all leaders in society that needs to be solved through collaboration and fresh thinking.