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Ozge Yeloglu, Vice-President, Advanced Analytics and AI, CIBC: Every conversation about AI adoption turns into a conversation about people. There&#8217;s a projection that more than 90% of companies will face a serious skills crunch this year. Canada should be well placed for that, but only if we’re building for far more than the specialists. I&#8217;m Ozge Yeloglu, VP of Advanced Analytics and AI at CIBC, and I&#8217;m joined by Jaime Tatis, CIBC’s Chief Data and AI officer, and Glenda Crisp, President and CEO of the Vector Institute. Welcome. Where is the real bottleneck in there? Is it the supply of the specialist? Is it the change management? Is it helping people actually work differently? What do you think, Glenda?
Glenda Crisp, President and CEO, Vector Institute: So between those two I would say change management. And if I drill into that I think it&#8217;s around leadership. So we really need leaders. And I would say like Jaime, that understand the magnitude of the shift that we&#8217;re talking about and that have the willpower to see it through. Right. Because this is a massive shift and change and.
Ozge Yeloglu: It&#8217;s not overnight.
Glenda Crisp: No, it&#8217;s not overnight. And you&#8217;re going to try things. They aren&#8217;t all going to work, but they&#8217;re not a waste of effort just because they didn&#8217;t work. You should take learnings and say, okay, well 60% of that worked. The 40% that didn&#8217;t. Let&#8217;s try it differently and then get a benefit, right. And so I think what we need to see is organizations that put the value proposition to employees in a way that works for them. So there is a risk that companies make this all about replacing people, in which case you&#8217;ve created a lose lose proposition. So if I&#8217;m an employee, if I champion a model and it doesn&#8217;t work, is my job at risk? If I&#8217;m an employee and I champion and model and it does work, is my job at risk? And so that&#8217;s lose lose. You&#8217;re not going to get employees to engage in that. I think the better question is what is something that we could do. What&#8217;s a service we could offer product we could offer. You know, something we could do better that we could never do before. But AI lets us do that. And I think that engages your people. I think that actually helps you grow your business, grow your market share. And so I think taking that approach is a much better angle and really shows that companies are focused on the benefits to customer and the benefits to employees. So going back to the National AI strategy, AI for All, not just a few. And so keeping that principle in mind I think is going to be key.
Ozge Yeloglu: And maybe I&#8217;ll add to it from experience in the last year or so on. That is, I find the moment we give our employees space to think, because now they don&#8217;t have to be on this hamster wheel constantly and doing the same thing that they have to do to keep the lights on. I find the moment we do that, we create these efficiencies for our employees. We start thinking, yeah, because now we have actually room to think and actually pause and say, well, should I really keep doing it this way? Maybe there is a better way or should we, as CIBC, keep doing it this way? And maybe there is a better way. Right. And I and I kind of love that  we have time. Yes, we have more time to think.
Glenda Crisp: Right. And I think it&#8217;s also about ambition and growth. Right. And so I have the opportunity in my job to talk to many leaders in businesses, big and small. And I have occasionally not that often, but I have occasionally come across some large corporate leaders who tell me I don&#8217;t want to be leading edge, and nor do I want to be a fast follower. And to me, that&#8217;s an example of Canada’s AI adoption issue. But frankly, I worry for their companies because I worry that they&#8217;re not going to be around in five years. And I think your disruption for those companies will come not from your traditional competitors. It&#8217;s going to come from a 25 year old or an 18 year old that&#8217;s got maybe a few hundred agents. And I just I worry for companies that are not taking that. What can I do that I couldn&#8217;t do before approach because that&#8217;s a growth mindset, right?
Ozge Yeloglu: True. And it requires space to be able to do.
Glenda Crisp: Space to think. Space to be creative. Right, exactly.
Ozge Yeloglu: And permission at times. Yep. Not always, but times. Highway six AI platform went from a 500 person pilot to more than 50,000 employees, with tens of thousands of training courses completing completed along the way. What actually moved the needle and what carries over to the next shift? Because we said AI won&#8217;t be the last one.
Jaime Tatis, Chief Data and AI officer, CIBC: Of course. So I find it is a trifecta. One of them is the belief I always have had is the best ideas are all over the business. You just need to equip people with the right training, the right platform, the right tooling so they can put these ideas in motion and grow them from there. So you have to have the learning, the training to get people comfortable to use these platforms and tools. The second one is you need to ensure that there is enough bandwidth for curiosity and be able to challenge the status quo, and that&#8217;s a leadership conversation too. You need to have the leaders to actually own this and lead the way on the most effective way to do this. And the third one we have seen that the fast growth that we have had is because there&#8217;s champions in the business, in the teams that actually are leading the charge. It&#8217;s not just one voice, but it&#8217;s champions across the organization that are telling their colleagues, look, this is a really nice way to do this. Or have you thought about that? So having the mentality that the best ideas are all over the business, having platforms that actually allow people to experiment and productionize their solutions from it, and being able to reward champions and be able to have that organizational ability to challenge the status quo, the processes, how we can do things a different ways. Are key for success. Going to the platform side, what are the things that we&#8217;re really proud of? Is this is a CIBC 100% in-house built platform and it&#8217;s been growing into cycles. We have version one, version two. It will be version three, four and five as we go along. But we are in a world today that it has never been this easy to build. And when you look at what technology like AI provides to us right now, one of the main components is that you actually have far more opportunities to build your destiny, not to rent it out or buy it out every single time. I believe that, you know, you&#8217;re still going to procure and buy things that are commodity, but things that are going to differentiate you in the marketplace, that is going to make talent to be attracted to work in your company, clients, to be working with you. You want to really own that IP and build that. And for that you need to have the right talent. So that was the conversation, how Glenda talked about talent. Talent is always going to be critical because you need the talent to be able to do that, but also the change management component to be able to challenge the status quo and rethink how processes workflows get done today. I believe that the future is in the hands of who control it. You build it. You have a platform that you own. You own the futures that you want to create. Next, you know exactly what the line of businesses need. You are very close to your customer, to your client, to your stakeholders, and you&#8217;re going to be able to control your destiny more than hoping that you are in someone&#8217;s roadmap to be able to build that for you.
Ozge Yeloglu: Absolutely. I love it. I&#8217;ll I&#8217;ll go back to the adoption piece and how we work through that for our CAI platform. One thing also I would like to hear your thoughts, but what I noticed is senior leadership, buy in and sponsorship. But not just with words saying like, oh, let&#8217;s all go use it. But as an example, I recall this one time our head of technology at the time, we were in an informal gathering with our team members, and she comes in and she was like, how do you guys use CAI these days? She was like, this is what I did, and it was really good. But I did this and it didn&#8217;t work. She was like, just curious, what are some of the things that you&#8217;re doing? I don&#8217;t know if a sudden it makes you realize, well, okay, even the top of the house is actually in it. It&#8217;s not just the words.
Jaime Tatis: And I would go even further and say at CIBC we have Harry, our CEO, that as you said, we have different executives in our group who are using it. And that is really powerful because it showcases that these products, these tooling that we&#8217;re creating work at any level in the organization. You can be the CEO, you can be in engineering, you can be client facing. There&#8217;s always a role to play. Everyone has a role to play on this. If you are in any part of this organization, there will be a role you have to play in this transformation.
Ozge Yeloglu: Absolutely. Glenda, Canada does research, industry and application as well. But we typically do this in separate pockets. What would it take to connect those three across our country? And where do you think we&#8217;re being too humble about what we&#8217;ve already built together?
Glenda Crisp: So I would say we&#8217;ve already started and have built some of that connectivity. And that&#8217;s what Vector does. And so we&#8217;ve been around for nine and a half years now. We&#8217;ve had over 50 countries come and visit Vector, try to understand our model. And many of them have gone back and replicated the Vector model in their own countries. So we actually have built that. And if you look at the Vector ecosystem, we&#8217;ve got over 1400 researchers. Now we have 30 large corporate sponsors, of which CIBC, you guys are founding partners of ours. So you helped us build this ecosystem over nine and a half years, right. So we have about 300 startups and scale ups. We&#8217;ve got 60 health and life sciences partners. And I can keep rattling off data points. But I think it&#8217;s pretty impressive what we&#8217;ve built. But we can&#8217;t stop. Right. So why not a thousand startups, right? Why not 50 large corporates? Why not more health partners, more academic partners? So I think we need to do more at scaling it. But I also think we need to come together a bit more frequently. So we already do run demo days for some of the startups. And we bring in industry partners and we bring in, you know, VCs, etc. to try and not only help them find capital, but also help them find customers. So, you know, if CIBC is the first customer for a small startup in Canada, think what that does for that startup. And I&#8217;m not asking you guys to help a startup just because you&#8217;re Canadian. I&#8217;m asking you to help us startup that actually solves a business problem of yours and like look for ways to help them grow and become a new champion, right? We do run programs specifically for small companies. We have a fast lane program for companies less than 500 people. And again, we&#8217;re looking to help build those companies and scale them up and really get that backbone of the Canadian economy moving. So I think there&#8217;s a lot more that we could do as we kind of join arms and say, let&#8217;s really push on helping and backing our Canadian startups, but also learning from each other, you know, so you guys have done amazing work. I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s tons of other companies that would love to learn what CIBC lessons learned are. So that&#8217;s there&#8217;s more to do. You guys are with us on that, and I&#8217;m certainly open to ideas of what can Vector do to help convene more of that. But I would say we&#8217;re actually pretty good relative to the rest of the world. And I&#8217;m being Canadian when I say that, which means we&#8217;re actually very good. But I think we need to double down on that.
Ozge Yeloglu: Love it, that was a very informative conversation. Thanks for being here.
Glenda Crisp: Thanks for having us.

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CIBC × Vector: The people equation: Why AI adoption depends on leadership, champions, and building what matters

CIBC × Vector: The people equation: Why AI adoption depends on leadership, champions, and building what matters

CIBC × Vector: The people equation: Why AI adoption depends on leadership, champions, and building what matters

CIBC × Vector: The people equation: Why AI adoption depends on leadership, champions, and building what matters

Jaime Tatis

Executive Vice-President, Chief Data and AI Officer

Global Technology, Data and AI

Ozge Yeloglu

Vice-President, Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence

Global Technology, Data and AI