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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Professional talent must be allied to technological capability.
- Colgate-Palmolive drives AI-enabled growth by focusing on human challenges.
- Strong foundations support explorations that are measured effectively.
Industry experts regularly suggest AI is about augmenting talent, not replacing staff. The oft-cited aim is to ensure humans stay in the loop, overseeing and checking the work of AIs and agents in a world of emerging technology.
But what does keeping the human in the loop really look like when you’re trying to push business growth and innovation? After all, focusing on human checks and balances can feel like an unwelcome 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’s no compromise: professional talent must be allied to technological capability.
“The human is in the loop in everything that we’re doing with AI,” she said. “This approach is how we can drive business value through making people’s processes easier and faster and ultimately create products that serve our consumers better.”
She told ZDNET in a one-to-one video interview about five ways to support AI-enabled growth while keeping humans in the loop.
1. Focus on the business challenge
Schildhouse’s team builds, deploys, and embeds AI-enabled solutions, including machine-learning models and predictive and prescriptive analytics, across Colgate-Palmolive globally.
She said her organization takes a human-centered approach to creating technological solutions to enterprise challenges.
“That’s how 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,” she said.
“Our approach starts with that understanding. That could be via human-centered design. We do lots of UX/UI research, even on the visuals of the tools and the interfaces we’re using, to ensure it’s intuitive and fits with how people work.”
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For example, through the application of AI, she 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 just part of how we’ve structured AI usage here,” she said. “People must be using AI as a tool to help them in their process, versus simply offloading work onto some of these tools.”
2. Work horizontally and vertically
Schildhouse suggested that the aim of this exploratory work is targeted innovation. There’s no point developing hundreds of different ideas if you can’t filter them and find the gold dust.
Schildhouse: “The human is in the loop in everything that we’re doing with AI.”
Colgate-Palmolive
She said Colgate-Palmolive considers AI via a human-enabled framework that includes horizontal and vertical elements.
The horizontal elements are the tools and foundations that her team makes available to people across the company to help them be more productive and get to insights faster.
Also: 5 ways to prevent your AI strategy from going bust
The vertical elements, meanwhile, are the organization’s priority areas for exploration, including innovation.
“Both aspects are working simultaneously. The things from the center are important, and we want to go after them methodically — start with the pilot and scale globally,” she said.
“There are areas from the center we’ve identified that are the biggest priorities for the company, such as innovation or demand generation, and those are the areas where we’ll put more focus in terms of my team and understanding and building solutions that can be applicable across the organization.”
3. Let people explore locally
Crucially, Schildhouse said it’s also vital that local teams in a global organization can develop and hone new use cases.
“We want to let people explore as well, because there can be great opportunities for team productivity and advancements in some of those horizontal tools that we make available,” she said.
Ensuring the human is at the center of these technological experiments means establishing safe and secure environments for exploration.
Also: This company’s AI success was built 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 created this hub, which is our internal version of gen AI tools. We were one of the first companies to adopt this approach in a governed way with guardrails. People had to take training to access the AI Hub,” she said.
“Now we have a community of AI ambassadors around the world that stays connected and who represent their division and function. And we’re seeing lots of great ideas coming up, just from people being able to explore safely in their sandbox and then share those across the world.”
4. Establish a learning culture
Schildhouse said embracing governance is the best way to ensure AI innovation delivers business growth while keeping humans in the loop.
As other business leaders explained to ZDNET recently, governance, when handled correctly, can become a route to the successful implementation of emerging technologies.
“We’ve put guardrails and risk management around everything that we’re doing to make sure people are using AI in safe, ethical ways that are consistent with our values and internal guidelines,” she said, referring to the Colgate-Palmolive approach.
Also: Dreading AI job cuts? 5 ways to future-proof your career – before it’s too late
As mentioned in the previous section, employees who use AI in the business must take a mandatory training program. Schildhouse, who joined the company in April 2021, explained the benefits.
“Colgate has a strong learning culture. One of the first things I observed when I joined the business was that people are excited to learn about new technology and how to grow their skills. So, we mandated training, but everyone took to it quickly and was excited to use AI,” she said.
“Training is one of the ways we think about managing governance. Because you don’t want to have a free-for-all, ungoverned use of AI tools. We do need to think about risk as well, so we’ve put in place great guardrails.”
5. Focus on measuring value
Schildhouse said the overarching aim is straightforward: to deliver business growth and innovation by merging analytics and AI with human understanding and insights.
“It’s about data-driven decision making and helping our business teams be able to use analytics tools and AI to make faster, better decisions.”
When she joined the company, she had to determine how to achieve those aims strategically and how to create business benefits.
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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 her team’s solutions on an ongoing basis across some key areas.
“First, are we driving revenue increases by what we’re doing? Those things are slightly easier to measure when it comes to things like pricing analytics, where you can analyze before and after,” she said.
“Then, of course, there are general efficiencies, such as time saved and faster speed to insights through some of the applications that we build. We also consider IP creation. So, if we’re building tools in-house, writing code, and owning algorithms, then that’s an asset for us. Then we think about whether we’re scaling that approach across our markets.”
