AI is everywhere in business conversations, but turning it into impact is a different story. Many leaders struggle to move from curiosity to clarity when it comes to AI.
In this interview, Gayatri Pandey, Strategic Product Manager, at Ericsson, reflects on her experience in the AI for Business Leaders program. We discuss the practical insights she gained, how the program shaped her thinking, and what other business leaders should know before starting their own AI journey.
What's your background, and how does it connect to the AI for Business Leaders program?
I work as a Strategic Product Manager in Ericsson. I'm a part of a centralised team which is the Automation Transformation Office. This team is supporting business customers from the Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions. We are a central hub team and have a vast network of customers. We support their custom business requirements, and our team is actually responsible for creating. I am responsible for the entire analytics area. This is what I led into to drive the analytics vision, its strategy, its future and my main goal to get from this program was how do you leverage AI in the world of analytics.
Why did you choose this program?
I chose this program because while I have a deep technical background in distributed systems data engineering, and I recognise that successfully scaling with AI, within a global organisation like Ericsson, requires a different set of strategic rules.
What would be the most important insights that you walked away with from the program?
The most important insight from the program was that only 20% of AI success is about the algorithm you apply in any AI-related world, and 80% is about your strategy.
What did you think about the structure of the program?
I found this format very well structured because it provided sufficient time to go through the training along with my day-to-day work, and it also has the encouragement of groups that were created for promoting continuous learning to share.
What do you think others need to know and learn from this?
What I have learned and understood from this overall program, which I feel is very important, is about the foundation of AI, learning about the base foundation before you go for an application of AI. I feel that this is something that every industry misses in its strategy, especially investing in the AI foundation.
And have you already or what have you applied in your work that you learned in this program?
After this program, I applied the strategic roadmap framework to my work at Ericsson. I specifically led the transitions of analytic estate from dashboarding-driven to a Gen AI-driven, especially the application of AI and adoption of AI into analytics.
I have created the strategic road map for my own product to apply AI and transition analytics into more AI-driven end-user value generation.
How do you foresee the knowledge and the skills that you gained, and that you will continue to help you in the future?
I have now understood how the industry as a whole is talking about AI, how the industry is taking their own use case and how AI is being applied to different areas. This gives you a holistic view, which I would definitely take in future roles in my job.
Read more about the AI for Business Leaders program.
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