In case you were not able to attend last week’s Avaus Expert Talks 2023 or if you want to remind yourself, we have summarized the key takeaways from all the speakers for you in this blog post to a coffee cup sized compilation.
The first speaker was our own CEO, Emma Storbacka, giving both the guests and the speakers a warm welcome. Her impressive story of the first, most hard and also last grueling hike she did as a teenager got us into the main subject – why is Europe falling behind in business growth? AI will not take your job, but someone using AI will, unless you organize your team, so that it can keep on going. Having an AI strategy is crucial and should be based on the data that is collected. Eldar Terzic, CTO, and Eric Hörberg, Senior Data Scientist, joined Emma on stage to announce avausGPT.
Our first guest speaker was Kim Bagdonas Jørgensen, Nordic Head of Media & Digital Customer Experience at McDonald’s, taking the stage on the subject of data-driven change management. His story starts with a very needed question that has to be addressed – why do we need to change? And when you have the answer that applies to your specific industry, the shift in the mindset should be, not about optimizing the current state, but instead building the future state, without forgetting that there is always “the next mountain to climb”. Meaning, that development never stops.
Ph.D. Oskar Korkman, founder at Alice Labs, had an inspirational statement in his speech. Embracing user unpredictability being the overarching theme, he emphasized that there are a lot of problems concerning being algorithmically aligned with users. His very well put point was that any consumer in any market is not as passive and predictable as companies might think. Users and consumers are relating to products in various ways, not least because we are living in a time of massive uncertainty.
The second Oscar on stage was Oscar Rundqvist, Global Digital CX Lead at H&M. He addressed the most fundamental questions right off the bat – how to get consumers’ attention and how to have relevant content. Simplified, the answer is in the sentence “the power of the creator”. The ingredients that go into the soup are many, but most are built on the fact that platforms, where people spend their time, need to be on their feet with their offering.
Our own Head of Insights, Ph.D. Peter Vaigur, discussed the Avaus Data to Value Barometer with Jonas Karlén, CEO at Adlibris. They stressed a couple of crucial points – more capabilities are needed than just technical, and aligning resources and challenges is a key action in order to make progress in your business.
Last, but definitely not least, we had a profoundly inspirational speech by Laila Pawlak, founder at Rehumanize Institute. The bold and much needed thought she presented was, throughout all businesses, the prominent sentiment is that legacy businesses can’t adapt to the past change of the world today. It is evident that the world will never be as slow as it is now, as terrifying as that may sound. What does that mean for data-driven businesses? It means that you have to also look beyond data, because there lies the signals we should not disregard, if we want to understand the future.