Talking Data and AI: Evolving Skills in a Data Driven World

TALKING DATA AND AI: EP 4 - Evolving Skills in a Data Driven World

Join as we chat to Elizabeth Hollinger, data and technology leader.

The pace of technology change continues to grow exponentially, and a challenge faced by most leaders is how to maintain stability across technology platforms whilst taking advantage of new features and functionality. This requires a targeted strategy for maintaining relevant technology skills, where the pace of technology development outstrips that of available specialist skills in the market. In this webinar, Elizabeth shared her experience of leading high-performing data and technology teams, and how to build adaptability as a core skillset.

About the speaker:
Elizabeth Hollinger is an experienced data and technology leader, passionate about talent and promoting the use of technology for good. She has almost 20 years experience working in technology across a variety of roles and industries, and currently works as a freelance consultant, helping organisations to get best value from their data.

This webinar originally took place in 2025, all information was correct at the time of recording. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everybody, welcome to the fourth episode of our Talking Data and AI webinar series. My name is Lyle Richie, and I'll be your host today. Today we'll explore evolving skills and the data driven world. I'm delighted to introduce today's guest, Elizabeth Hollinger. Elizabeth has over 20 years' experience in data and how data has budget roles across a range of companies, including Deloitte, Avanti, and Graphics. So you could say to note a thing or two about reading high performance data and tech teams. And I'll just talk about that in more detail and about how to build adaptability as a course culture. So before I hand over to Elizabeth, just a couple of quick points. Elizabeth will talk to all today for around 30 minutes, and then there will be 50 minutes for a QA. So if you could please use the QA box and the chat function, and if you could thumbs up the questions you would like the answers to, and we will get those answered for you. So really looking forward to this, and I will hand over to Elizabeth. Elizabeth, over to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Thanks very much, Lyle, and thanks for the invitation to come and present. I'm delighted to be here. Just before we kick off this afternoon, there's a quick poll that I wanted to kick off with for everyone that's on the on the call, just to get a gauge from you guys on how easy or difficult it is to recruit and to retain the right skills and talent across your teams. I'm assuming most people here will work in data and technology, and so keen to hear your views.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

And yeah, and as I say, delighted to be here today to talk about all things data, tech, and talent, my favourite topics. And I thought I'd kick off today with a quick quote from Chat GPT. So when I was preparing for this webinar, um I asked ChatGPT how did it see the evolution of data skills across the last decade or so? And this is what it came back with, with no other prompt than that. So sales have expanded from specialized tech tools to a comprehensive ecosystem that includes engineering, deployment, ethics comms, and domain fluency. Organizations are investing in data democratization and literacy, while the labour market increasingly values adaptability over formal credentials. And I promise I didn't prompt it with adaptability. But that's what ChatGPT came back with. And I think for all of us who are working in the data and technology space, that first part of the sentence, we have seen over the last certainly couple of decades that I've worked in technology. We are doing the same things, but with an increasingly more sophisticated tools and the ability to do more with the change and growth in technology. But I think what we've seen in the last particularly five to ten years is just the acceleration of the tools and technology that we have available to us and how quickly that just moves. And in order to be able to take advantage of those new tools and tech and the opportunities that they offer, then it's essential to have a team who are flexible and who are adaptable to be able to relearn new skills and then to upskill in the tools and tech that are available to them. So yeah, I just wanted to start with that. Um so ChatGPT agrees to um we we value adaptability overall.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Elizabeth, just sorry to interrupt. So 100% difficult came back from the poll. Which probably doesn't surprise you.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

It doesn't surprise me. I think it is uh Seth and Lauren touch on on some of that and my own personal experience with different domains um as I go through the talk today. Super. So before I start to talk about data skills and talent and what we need to do to kind of maintain the right kind of skills in the workforce, I wanted just to talk a wee bit just to touch on the evolution of data analysis itself. And that's really just to put into context and what that means for our skills that we need within the team. So all of these stories I'm certain will be familiar to you. But I wanted to start a way back in 1859 with Florence Nightingale and her radiant diagrams of cholera and how diseases spread. So super early example, there are many others, Napoleons, etc. O where we start to use data and visualization to understand patterns and to make decisions. So we've been doing this for a very, very long time. If we move on into the 1900s, into 1940, Alan Turing and breaking the enigma code during World War II, and really the first example of where we're starting to use big compute and to be able to solve those more complex statistical problems. So we've moved on from visualizing reams of data manually into how do we use big computers to be able to crack really complex problems, and we can program them to do that for us. Again, the first time where a computer was able to think critically and to use lots and lots and lots of rules to be able to beat a human being. And it really was a kind of pivotal moment in the tech world having the ability to do that. And then jumping to 2015, and Fan Wee, who was the world's leading alpha goal player, that super complex um puzzle game, and he was beaten by Deep Mind. So again, embedding deep learning, ML, AI, and the computer was able to beat him at one of the most complex or the most complex games in the world. There are lots and lots more examples that I'm sure that you're here all know over the last few years and certainly decades and centuries. But the reason that I wanted to put this up is to say that we have been doing data analysis for a very, very long time, for centuries, in fact. The way we have done data analysis has changed and evolved over time. And that's largely been driven by the tools and technology that we have available to us. And I think what we've really seen over the last couple of decades is the acceleration in the tools and tech that we can use, with the introduction, particularly of cloud computing and the ability to be able to run really large, complex models really quickly in real time, has just opened up a whole world of opportunity that we should take advantage of. So I wanted to start with that to say that actually we've been adapting, we've been changing over centuries and decades. I think this is just another period of change and one which our data and tech practitioners will continue to evolve into. So now I want to talk about a continually adapting team. So data analysis has evolved over time, and so have data teams in general. So what I wanted to touch on first of all are the types of roles and skills that are required across a data team and enabling them to do their job effectively. So I've just started with some of the really core roles that sit within the data team itself. So data engineering, bringing the data from whichever systems you own or have access to into a data lake, data warehouse, data mart, whatever it might be, to be able to carry out some data analyses. Historically, data engineering was carried out typically by BI developers and using ETL processes and has evolved in line with that evolution of technology and being able to build bespoke data engineering pipelines and think about the orchestration of data, particularly within cloud environments. Data analysis. So when we've got our data to where it needs to be, and what do we need to do to analyse that in either a simple or complex way? And that can cover all things from simple analysis, presenting that data through data visualization on the front end and for standard operational reporting, all the way into using the data for data science, machine learning, AI, etc. And I think the data analysis skill set itself can be one sometimes that's overlooked. That kind of business analyst, you know, simple analysis role, I think can add really key value into a team and being able to understand the business context and the data, and then being able to answer those kind of complex business questions. Then we've into data visualization, which is talked about, we've been doing this for decades and centuries, but now we can do it in a much more sophisticated way. So we've moved on in the last couple of decades from using PowerPoint and Excel to build out your bar charts and line charts into much more interactive tools through Power BI and other similar data biz platforms. I think the other evolution that we've seen though, particularly across data visualization, is the fact that a lot of these tools have moved from into low code or sometimes, in some cases, no code, like click, drag, drag and drop. So now our business analysts are able to pull together pretty good data visualizations with not very much coding language, and that's just really opened up the opportunity to be able to use those and also offered an opportunity for people to upskill and to start to utilize some of their skills through some of these database platforms. Then moving into data science, and again, that can be relatively simple data science, and from you know building out predictive models, using regression models, predicting what might happen in the future to some of our more complex models and touching on AI, using LLMs, deep learning, etc. And yeah, I think that's the area where we've really seen a lot of growth over the last decade or so and a lot of prevalence now in organizations where data science didn't always exist or existed in a very kind of small way in simple analysis, and we've now extended that out into building out MLAI models pretty much in most industries and most organisations. And then lastly, I've included a bucket for data governance. Nobody ever wants to talk about it, but it is really, really key to making sure that anything that you do build from your data can be utilized in decision making. The classic rubbish in, rubbish out, we need to make sure our data is governed, it's consistent, it's complete, etc., so that we are making decisions based on the right and complete set of information. I wanted then to touch on a couple of those which I see as actually being relatively new in the data space. Um, and first of all, touch on platform engineering. So platform engineering has existed for a very long time, particularly in the infrastructure space. But I think now we're seeing a higher demand for data-specific platform engineers. So people who know how to build infrastructure as a standard, who know how to scale models, who know how to optimize, how to maintain a low running cost for some of these things. And I think we're really starting to see that evolve as a skill set in its own right within the data team as opposed to something that could be thought about by the data engineers. And I kind of think that's where we were maybe five to ten years ago. Whereas now, given the level and the kind of scalability of cloud platforms for our data work, and platform engineering, I think, actually is a pretty important role, particularly for managing cost and scalability in the platforms. And then lastly, ML and AI engineering. So we've seen lots and lots of that um being talked about over the last few years, particularly, I think, with the release of Chat GPT to the general public way back, I think, in 2023. Um, it's become much more kind of common language now to talk about ML and AI, and where I don't think it was before. Um, and we're seeing then higher demand now for specific ML and AI engineering roles as opposed to just general data science, statistical kind of analysis roles. So it's really kind of evolving, and particularly thinking about MLOps as its own kind of skill set within its own right. So I'll pause there for just a second. Um, that's kind of my take on the types of roles and skills that you typically need across a modern data team. I think all of these roles, other than the couple of purple ones at the bottom, have existed over the last number of decades, but the tools and the tech that we are using have now changed and evolved. And I think um it'd be good now just to kind of understand from all of you guys where you see um, if at all, any skills gap across all of these roles um within the data team. So maybe just pause for a second and let you share that next poll.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Technology. Right, so um ML AI engineering fifty-four percent, and then platform engineering data science, data virtualization, uh data analysis thirty-one percent, and data engineering fifteen percent. So probably no surprise in the ML space, but uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

I think so and and yeah, it's uh it's actually really interesting because I think had I asked that same question, say five or so years ago, maybe five to ten years ago, I don't think platform engineering and ML engineering would even have really featured. And I think the biggest gap would have been within data engineering. And it's certainly something that I experienced um you know in recruiting for roles, and particularly in my my last role in industry in the GNECO, found it really difficult at a point in time to be able to recruit for data engineers. There was just too much demand and not enough supply. But what I think is just really interesting here is that that's obviously started to shift now. You know, we've started to get that kind of level of supply in the market, people have upskilled, reskilled, etc., within the data engineering space, and now we're seeing the next thing happening within AI engineering. So just think it's quite interesting, and it's almost an example of where the market moves with the technology. So I think that's just kind of called out really clearly that in actually in another five years' time, we are unlikely to see that same level of skills gap in ML and AI. Good. So thanks, thanks very much everyone for sharing your thoughts there. And as I mentioned, those are kind of the key roles that I would see across a successful data team. And actually, some of those roles might be the same person carrying out two roles and maybe smaller organizations with smaller data teams. You might have someone doing your engineering and your data science, may have someone else doing your data vis and your data analysis as a BA, but it's typically those kind of skill sets that we would look for across the team in general. But then to really make your data team successful, I think it's so important to remember the collaboration across the organization, both within your team itself and within the technology function, and secondly, across the actual organization who you're serving and supporting. Now, maybe just touch on an anecdote and taking that first path on collaborating across the technology space itself. And it's something actually I really experienced back in my time in Agreco and understanding the value of collaborating, of sharing ideas and of kind of building joint teams across the tech function. So while I was at Agreco, we implemented a modern data platform, so a single cloud-based platform to support all of our data work across the organization. That included sending messages from our AI and ML models to our in-house applications. It included producing Power BI or standard tabular extract data for our business, and it also enabled them to self-serve. So it really fed kind of all of the data needs that we had within the organization, centralized within this one platform. But in all honesty, we we struggled to implement it successfully over the first kind of 18 months. We'd aimed to have it in place, and around about 18 months, that was our project plan. But as we got to the kind of year point, we realized that actually it wasn't going to be in place, and we learned an awful lot along the way. But the real game changer for us and where we turned the program around and really accelerated the pace at which we were delivering is when we embedded one of our software developers within our data team, and we started to apply the principles of the software lifecycle development cycle. So, actually, we started to think about how do we think about this data platform almost as a software platform that we are then applying to data. And as soon as we started to apply those kind of rules and principles, and it was not overly complex at all, it was thinking about it in a different mindset. We really accelerated our delivery, we reduced down the number of defects, we got our code through much quicker, the quality was better, and it was just from thinking about blending all of our technology knowledge together in order to be able to get to that answer quickly. And I think that leads into what I was talking about earlier on with platform engineering and really thinking about the platform itself, its scalability, um the cost, being able to control that, the speed, etc. And really starting to collaborate across other parts of technology can help. And in really large organizations, you'll have a lot of opportunity to do that and by kind of tapping into some of the some of the apps teams, too. So that's just kind of one thing, and one thing that can really help also to to kind of upskill your data team and some of those tools, technologies, and processes too. And then the second thing I wanted to touch on in collaboration is just the collaboration with the business. So I'm not going to talk too much today about data strategy and how you make sure you're adding value and make that um make that impactful across the organization. Um but collaboration is absolutely key to make sure that first of all you understand the context of the data that you're working with, whether you're solving a simple or a complex problem. And then, second of all, that when you do develop a report, a dashboard, a model, that then the people within the organization utilize your output within their decision making because that is how we add value. So, although we're talking today mostly about data skills and how we make sure we're flexible, adaptable, and the collaboration across the organization is absolutely critical. And in every single one of these particular roles, communication and people skills are key because we need to make sure that whatever it is that we are creating is picked up, it's used, and it adds value to the organization.

unknown 20:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

So I'm going to move on now a little bit to kind of recruiting and retaining talent. So when we asked at the poll at the start, you know, how do people find kind of trying to recruit for the right skills? What does that look like? Um, everyone said that was difficult. And I think we we do see that, you know, there's a demand for data and tech skills across the market, and our supply has not caught up generally. So, what I wanted to do now was just to talk through some examples of where I've had success and being able to recruit, and then really crucially retain talent as well to make sure that when you get those right people in the door, that actually they're a good fit for the organization, a good fit for the role, and you can then retain them for a reasonable period of time. So the first thing I wanted to touch on were apprentices. We're very lucky in the UK that we are offered an apprenticeship levy and in UK organisations, which means that the cost of taking apprentices on to organisations is very, very low. We had an apprenticeship programme specifically within the software development team within Agreco that we had absolutely huge success from. We brought in two or three apprentices per year, straight from school, and who joined our team and then they kind of cycled through a number of different roles within the software, the software dev team, and they added an absolutely huge amount of value. So I know sometimes people are apprehensive and want to recruit recruit experienced hires, they want people just to hit the ground running and to get go. But I promise you, investing in that kind of pyramid structure where you have a lot of resources at that junior level that you're training up, that you're upskilling, um, can add absolutely huge value to the organisation. And also brought some excellent ideas that actually some of our experienced team just hadn't thought about because they were coming onto things fresh phase, you know, brand new and asking kind of the right questions. So I would absolutely encourage you to have a think about apprenticeship programmes within your organization. And there are also lots of third parties that offer kind of data-specific training programmes through the apprenticeships who can then really support. So the apprentices will go off, you know, every couple of months, do some kind of external training with your third party and come back and apply some of that within the organization. So it's a really excellent scheme, and I would really encourage thinking about apprentices across data technology dev teams, and they can add a huge amount of value, and we had really positive experience with them. Next one I want to talk about is graduates, which is where I think lots of people do and tend to recruit for their teams. So, and again, we have done that across all of the roles and in the data teams that I've worked in. One thing I would say is that I've not always recruited from technical um degrees. So I've recruited people before into technical roles who studied arts degrees, for example. And I think that's a really I think that's something to kind of be very open-minded about, particularly when thinking about those data visualization um roles or the kind of data analysis type roles, and where it's kind of light touch on technical skills, but they tend to be very, very strong on communication skills. So it actually offers a really nice blended feel to the team and again a different way of thinking, which can only add strength to the overall team and how the team makes decisions. So yeah, graduates kind of standard, I'm sure most people use them, but I would encourage you to think about um recruiting from non-technical backgrounds as well as STEM. Postgraduate too, so again, thinking about people who have come out from PhDs or MSEs, etc., and bringing that a little bit more, usually deeper technical knowledge within the team. Um again, would recruit for those across all of the teams and typically into, as I said, more technical roles and with a particular skill set so that they've studied something like LLMs or something like that, if you want to be able to introduce that into your team, and they can bring their academic knowledge into that business context. And then the last one I kind of wanted to touch on, and related to the last poll that we asked, is where have people started to see or started to think about upskilling their team members and across the organization into some of these data roles. And the reason I wanted to touch on this is I mentioned previously that in Agreco we really struggled probably seven-ish years ago to recruit data engineers. We were implementing this cloud-based platform. We knew we needed dedicated data engineering support because our data scientists were doing the data engineering work, but we just could not recruit the people that we wanted. So after about six months of trying, um, we decided to instead just upskill the existing people that we had within our team. People who had worked as DBAs before, who'd worked as BI developers, who had complementary skill sets and whose roles were naturally evolving. We were moving away from you from using on-prem into using cloud. And so they wanted to transfer those skills to upskill and to give them further opportunity. And so, what we did instead is we essentially built a data engineering team with no experienced data engineers, but we had the opportunity to kind of upskill them as we implemented that cloud-based platform. And I'll talk a wee bit about how we did that in a minute when I talk about learning. Um, and I think the real benefit for us in doing that is that these people were already very technically competent, and they understood our in-house systems and the data and how it worked, and they understood the context of the data too. So, really, what we were doing is just laying on an additional technical skill for them to be able to use. And I think that's just a really good kind of tangible example of the world is changing, technology is changing, you know, the tools and tech we have access to are becoming more and more sophisticated. So, how do we just make sure that we keep up with that? Just iteratively adding on skills and competencies as we go and to make sure we're kind of getting best benefit and that people are kind of evolving as the as the tools and the tech do as well. And then the last thing I wanted to touch on in recruiting and retaining talent is just being able to tap in and access government or vendor-funded programs to support and enhance innovation. And I just touched on a couple of examples of again where we did that within a GRECO. So many of you in Scotland will be familiar with the Data Lab and who support a number of students to be able to study data science and related topics across Scotland. And we supported a number of the data science graduates in their MSc programmes, and then went on to recruit some of those graduates after the MSc programmes within the team. And that was a really good way for us to be able to, first of all, test out some new and innovative ideas. We had over a six to eight week period of them carrying out their project with us, they got a bit of a flavour of what the organization was like, and so it was a really easy transition then when they completed their MSc and to offer them a role within the team, and they came and we had a great success of a number of people coming to join us. So it's a really good way of being able to kind of tap into different talent and also through those kind of MSc projects, six to eight weeks to test out some of the innovative ideas you have in the team, but without putting at risk any of the other operational delivery. And then the last thing I wanted to touch on was the was working with Innovate UK. So there's a number of government bodies that offer funding for innovation. So Innovate UK is one of them. You can apply for funding over a period of time, and if that is granted, you then work collaboratively with academia and with someone who is sponsored by Innovate UK to tackle an innovative problem that you have within the organization. And that again is just a really fantastic way of being able to, at very low risk and low cost, test out some innovative ideas that you have within the team. Maybe you've never tried to implement a GenTic AI before and you want to try that, you want to know what it might look like. So you come up with a kind of two or three year programme where you're going to do that, you select a university you're going to work with, it gives you that collaboration between public sector, private sector, and academia, and essentially delivers great value at very low risk for the organization. So if you're not doing so already, I would absolutely encourage you to have a think about any of those schemes and think about how you can utilize them, as I say, mostly for low risk and low cost to be able to test out some of new innovative ideas. Conscious of time, I'm going to say a couple more slides now in terms of keeping skills relevant and when you've got that team in place, what do you do to be able to maintain um to keep them within the team and for them to be able to maintain their skill set and to grow that through their time with you? And it's something we used to talk about quite a lot, actually, across all of the kind of data teams that I've worked in, where I think particularly at more junior grades, they were very keen to make sure that there was dedicated time for learning, what the learning program would be, how they were going to grow in the role, how they were going to develop, and wanted kind of very concrete answers to some of that. So I'm going to talk through how I kind of typically approach that. And often a lot of the ask was can we have structured time and dedicated time every week to be able to dedicate to learning? And so I'm quite keen to understand from this group on the call, um, is that something that you typically offer? Is that difficult to find time for within the organization? Um, so we can pop that next pull up, that would be great.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

So eighty eighty-seven percent know we struggle with that question.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

And and I think that's that's quite typical, isn't it? Like in organizations, there's always demand, there's always a deadline, there's always something that's really urgent that comes up. And it's always really easy to drop that thing which is kind of additive, it's learning, and then it might not be directly relevant to the deadline or the thing you're trying to deliver next week. And it definitely has been a challenge in teams that I've worked across and people just really wanting that kind of dedicated time and it being difficult to try and always, you know, ring fence those couple of hours a week or whatever it might be. Um so what I started to do was to encourage teams to think about learning in four different ways and to help them to reflect on how and when they are learning, particularly when that specific or bespoke time that was ring fenced just doesn't happen. So the first one I would talk about is on the job learning. So I've talked quite a lot about how data and tech world has evolved. There is no option but to learn on the job. You are either learning a new skill, you might be learning, you might already use Python, but actually you're going to use a new Python library for the new pro problem you're trying to solve. You might be working on a new business problem with new data and a new context that you haven't previously understood. And I think helping your teams to recognize that that is also learning, helping them to reflect through their personal development plans on what they know now versus what they knew six months ago. I think just helping people to understand that when we work in an industry like data and technology, you have to learn just a standard. So on-the-job learning absolutely counts and absolutely happens across all data teams. I have no doubt of that. The second one I think is the one that we're often asked about, which is like independent, or I've said here, or group study. So where possible, having weekly focus time to be able to meet some goals. And I think in particular, it's it's always helpful to target that against wanting to get, for example, another Microsoft certification or wanting to complete a course on Udemy or Coursera. So wherever I've granted that kind of weekly focus time to say, you know, there's two hours on a Friday afternoon, you know, spend it like this, it's with a target in mind. It's within six weeks' time, we want to have completed this course, we want to have completed this cert, and we're looking for an outcome at the end of it. So it's a really targeted and focused time. The other thing is that outcome should obviously in some way be related to the role that they're doing. So if someone in the team came to me and said, We used to use Azure in my previous role, I want to go and do this course in AWS, the answer would likely be that's not particularly relevant. Um so it should be focused on something that they're working on or something that will be of benefit in the near future. The other couple of things we that I've kind of explored in the past which have worked quite well are regular tutorials. So typically bringing people in and across your data and tech teams come from different backgrounds, might have studied different subjects. So getting people to carry out a tutorial once every two weeks, once every four weeks on something that they are an expert in, and that might actually be presenting back the output of the model they're currently working on within the business context. But just setting it up like a tutorial and really framing it like that because it's a learning experience really helps people to kind of link that learning with their role and kind of feel like they're they're still developing. Then the last thing is kind of hackathons. So I've included that within like groups, group study, if you like, as well. Um, and actually I've run a number of hackathons with peer groups, so there might be other organizations who are similar to yours with similar teams, tools, and tech, and getting together, setting up a problem, and then letting people go on and solve that. And so taking one day every six months or so and getting together to do that, and again, that just kind of really helps, I think, with sometimes with team building and with upskilling and really helping people to promote additional learning. Third thing in terms of learning is classroom-based. So I've typically employed that when we have implemented a new tool or technology that we need to learn about, and we want some dedicated and bespoke time on that from our vendors. So those could be through people like you know AWS, Google, Microsoft, Databricks, etc., dedicated sessions on their tool and tech and how to get the most out of it. Or the classroom-based learning could be on people skills. So we've got the output of our model, how do we influence the business, and really thinking about how to bring people in to support in that domain too. So another type of kind of learning that people can have access to. And then the last thing, um, conferences and peer connections. Um and I would always encourage people at every single stage of their career to keep up with their peers that they met at any stage and to keep in touch because you will always learn, be able to bounce ideas off each other and learn something new from what it is that they're doing. There are lots of local meetups across Scotland. Data Scotland is coming up, I think, again in September. Um, international events like Big Data London, um, Data AI Summit, etc., and lots of vendor-led forums. Um either recruiters tend to run lots of kind of roundtables, um dinners, meetups, etc., as do software providers. So I would just encourage people to think about what they have access to, either remotely, webinars like this one, and or in person, and where there are meetups that happen regularly. So yeah, I would just kind of I think that's always a challenge trying to carve out time for learning to keep those skills up to date. But those are the four ways that I would really think about learning reskilling and upskilling that can absolutely be embedded with relative ease within your day-to-day job. Conscious of time, last slide. Um, to finish on, I just wanted to pop on some helpful sources for leaders, and just in my experience, where I've really found it beneficial and to kind of keep up with the market and what's what's going on. The first, again, as I said, networking with peers. There are lots of senior data groups and roundtables, um, either that work remotely or in person, and those are usually invaluable for being able to share ideas, share what went well, what didn't go well, and learnings. Um so, yeah, that's probably my number one um tip is to always keep up with peers and what they are doing. Um it really is invaluable to learn from people who are doing the same thing as you. Maximising vendor support. Um, vendors often have some budget to be able to help you to do some of the things that you want to do, um, either in small projects or otherwise. Um so please do lean on vendors. I think there are lots of organizations who don't probably do that enough, and they're always quite keen to offer help and support. They'll often try to sell you something too, and but usually you can get good learning from them, and also it helps you to keep up with what's coming up next in the market and what other tools or tech might be helpful for your team. I plopped in your consultancy support, and I think that one for me is is quite an important one, particularly when trying something new, because consultancies have the benefit that they have already largely done the thing you're trying to do with other organizations and they've seen where it went well or where it didn't. So whether you engage with you know a third party to implement something, to get some advisory support, or even just to kind of keep up with what's going on, I would just always kind of keep some kind of connection to consultancies, particularly that operate in the data space, and to kind of keep ahead of where the market's at and what opportunities there might be. And then lastly, linked to that, and something I found hugely helpful in my time in Agreco was utilising the Gartner GTP license for technical professionals. And for me, that was really helpful, particularly when we were implementing the modern data platform. We knew what we wanted to do, but we were pretty agnostic about some of the tools and tech that we wanted to use. You can't ask the vendors those questions because their tool is always the best. Um so really kind of leaned on Gartner when we had short lists of vendors and saying, here's the things we're considering for these different um functionalities. What do you think? What would your advice be? What's going to work best for us or not? And we just got some really good sound advice. So for me, that was just really helpful, particularly when making big technology decisions to get a kind of software diagnostic view. So um that's been that's all I wanted to talk through today. I hope that that's been helpful and just have a talk through current data teams, skills, tools, technologies, and what you can do to maintain that high-performing um data team across the organization.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

Great. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. Thank you for that. Lots of uh hints and tips we can all take back to our visitors. I really appreciate it. I am cautious of time, so I'm just gonna go straight into questions. Um there is a couple of questions with regards to AI and the replacement of roles. So I'm talking specifically within kind of data teams and contact with adoption of AI within lower level roles. I know you spoke about uh kind of entry-level opportunities and new roles for graduates. How do you think AI is going to impact that?

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Yeah, no, I think it's actually interesting. I think for me generally, my view on AI is always this it's going to enhance and augment human decision making. So I don't think we're going to see AI take over everything. I do think we'll see the replacement of some of those kind of, you know, roles which can be automated. Um and I think we're seeing that already sometimes, you know, we're no longer right, and we've seen this for years, we're no longer coding out particular statistical models from scratch. You know, we pick up a Python library. We've been doing that for a very long time. So I think we'll start to see those kind of iterative things happening. Um I think yes, it has the there is, you know, the risk that it affects those kind of more junior roles because you automate some of those things. But I also think that organizations should be savvy in understanding that critical thinking is still a really important skill to have. And I think if we automate too much and too early, then people don't really understand all of the things that they are automating and can't really make kind of judgments based on that. Um, so I think we'll still see the opportunity for people to be able to do some of those roles. I don't think everything will be automated, and I still think we'll just still see a demand for any of the data and tech roles. Like I just don't see it reducing kind of over time.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Okay. Okay, no, thanks for that. Um, I think following on from that, you've kind of answered that question, but a little bit more on specifically the future. So within data and AI, where do you see the kind of most in-demand skill sets then within you know those areas moving forward?

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Yeah, so I think we we touched on it earlier on. I think the the demand and the shortage we're seeing just now is that kind of platform engineering and ML AI engineering space. I just don't think that we're quite caught up yet with the supply on that. I think there's a huge opportunity for people to upskill who are already working in data to be able to operate and start to move within that space. But the other thing I think that we absolutely can see, and I think, and I touched on it earlier too, is that people need to have the right kind of people and soft skills to be able to actually get the benefit of these AI models. People are always a bit frightened of what might be a black box, like how should we implement it, what is that going to mean. So I think really being able to explain what a model is doing under the hood at a very high level, how it can be implemented, what that value might be is really, really key to making sure you have a really kind of successful data team. So I think the two shortages for me on the tech side, look at that kind of ML, AI engineering, MLOps, how do you make sure your model's not going to drift? How do you make sure you can scale it in the right way? How do you make sure costs just don't become you know out of control? Um and then on the other side, actually, that kind of influencing, continuing to kind of promote the use of AI and help people to understand it and not be frightened of it too. I think there's those two elements.

SPEAKER_00 42:41

Okay. No, that's a good answer and uh lots to take away there. So thanks for that. I think we've got time for one more question. So somebody's um asked, how would you advise someone going about challenging or influencing instances where data is produced but potentially being ignored, misused, misinterpreted by management specifically?

SPEAKER_01 43:00

Yeah. Um I think it's a good question, and I think it's something that's just very common. Um, people often torture the data to get to the answer that they want to see. And for me, that's really just a question of leadership. Um, so there needs to be the right leadership in place to be able to promote the right use. And again, that comes back to the influencing, the tools, the tech, being able to explain what it is that they are doing so that people understand what's happening, and then they take the answer as being the accepted answer and not just something they want to torture to get to the right thing. So for me, that's just all about leadership and making sure that the person who understands the model has a seat at the table and is listened to.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Okay. Great. Thank you, Elizabeth. Um I'm afraid to say that time is up. So I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for joining the call today. Massive thanks to Elizabeth for delivering that presentation. Lots to take away um that we can all use into our businesses moving forward. So I really do appreciate it. Thank you. Um just finally from me, I We'll be hosting our final Dayton AI webinar um in a couple of weeks with Callum Sinclair from Burness Paul talking everything AI and legal. So look forward to seeing you on the call then. Okay. Have a great day, guys. Thank you. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_02 44:14

Thanks, Al.