This is Digital, Special Episode: Best of Season 2

In our second season of This is Digital, we asked our guests to share their digital transformation stories, tips, tricks, and advice on being more digital. We sat down with some fascinating and inspiring guests to discussed everything from AI to the current economy to applying a digital mindset in various industries and what that looks like. 

Enjoy some of our favorite moments from the show and see how you can apply being digital in your own organization. 

What are your thoughts on AI and its impacts on the workforce – for both employees and employers? 

Allie K. Miller, A top artificial intelligence leader, advisor, and investor: Companies that don’t allow workers to leverage technology are going to fall behind because AI is only growing. We’re entering a year I like to call digital whiplash, where in your personal life you are able to use Chat GPT for doing tasks like planning your day or taking better notes, enabling yourself to do highly productive and efficient tasks. But when you go into work, you’re using a spreadsheet that may not even be connected to the cloud – hence, digital whiplash

Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board: AI is both destructive and creative or additive and subtractive. It is beneficial in tasks where it helps save time. For instance, as economists we spend a lot of time researching and writing reports. In this case, it would be helpful to get AI to come up with an outline or direction of where I want to take the report. However, you also need the human component because AI is just using and pulling together existing content in a smart way – that's where it is additive. But it is going to put some people out of work. However, that would be the case if AI greatly advances technologically. There's always creation and there's always destruction.

How have innovators like Amazon changed customer expectations in all industries? 

Casey Foss, Chief Commercial Officer, West Monroe: Innovation and companies must span across industries, and they must think about their business in totality. You must look past your current competitor set and industry peers and look towards the best of the best. What are other industries doing? Customers no longer differentiate by industry, so businesses also cannot. Being on top no longer means you’re on top until you make a mistake, but rather until someone else out-innovates you. From an action-oriented approach, a macro-level change in the B2C industry is now forcing change in industries that are pro- originally B2B that didn't have to look into the B2C world. Innovators like Amazon have changed my expectations of how I can integrate with a provider across any industry. Therefore, it’s important for companies to take inspiration from market leaders like Amazon as they apply them to their industries, whether that be utilities or health care.

Mark Browning, SVP and Chief Information Officer, Exelon: Our customers are not looking to compare us to maybe the cable company or the phone company. They're comparing their experience and their interaction with Exelon to their interaction with Amazon, with Uber, with those tech giants – the bar is set high. We work hard to keep up with customer expectations. We've done a lot to put solutions in place to try to keep up with the expectations that our customers have of digital channels and engaging with a large corporation.

Tracy Saula, SVP of Product & Health Experience, Highmark Health: If we think about all the digital experiences we lean into, we do it because we like them. But healthcare is an industry where people have so many different avenues they would have to go through to engage digitally that it just makes it hard. We recognized that in order to transform health and leverage digital modes of engagement if you put the person at the center, you have to make it easy and you have to create a one-stop shop for all things healthcare. So, the origin of My Highmark is how do we take those disconnected point solutions single interface for health where a person can go and it's something that they can access all their health transactional needs.

We know that innovation is the key to unlocking great potential, but how do companies know what the right starting point is?

Janice Fraser, Author, Speaker, and Innovation Leader: One of the models that we have in my book (Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead) is that making progress is about getting from point A to point B. But even if you have a roadmap, it doesn't help if everyone's starting from a different place, right? You have to start from the same place. We have lots of frameworks for defining goals. We have very few frameworks for identifying where we are right now and what makes this moment complicated. And do we see it as the same challenge? And another crucial part is aligning against the problem, the starting place to move forward quickly.

Where should you begin when approaching a problem?

Tim Simmons, Chief Product Officer, Sam's Club: Initially, our mindset was ‘well there's a pain point, let's go do this solution.’ Instead, now it’s like ‘no, let's fall in love with that problem for a little bit.’ What is the pain point? Let's do the five why's. Why is it there? And then let's look at the data and let's get our UX research team and actually get into the field and gather insights around that experience. So that when we do shift from that sort of discovery after falling in love with the problem mode into design mode, we really feel like we've got a handle on what problem we're solving and that it's the right problem to solve.

What is a key part of shift left in your opinion?

Dana Twomey, Director, West Monroe: Collaboration. In my world, collaboration, when you're talking about risk, is absolutely key. The institutions that we work with in banking, as well as all the other verticals, have so much brain power in so many different areas but a lot of times the miss is not getting that collective brain power at the table early. What we see is if compliance or risk isn’t considered early to ensure right frameworks are in place, it just creates rework on the backend. You can compress the timeframe by just getting the right people on the table at the right time early on and do all the testing, so no rework is created, and it doesn’t eat into your ROI.