Unleashing the Power of Digital: Igniting Transformation in the Modern Era

Tanya Beckett: Well, we're going to be bringing you more real-life examples this morning. We're going to be talking about sustainability, resilience, and also strategy. But first, let's talk about the power of the cloud, unleashing the power of digital igniting transformation in the modern era. Please welcome Paul Dillon, Head of Infosys Consulting in Europe, Adele Ara, who is CTO at Lightsource bp, and Vlad Galu, who is CTO of Bupa, who will explore this dynamic landscape. Please welcome them to the stage.

Paul Dillon: Hello. Can you hear me? Is that on?

Tanya Beckett: Yeah.

Paul Dillon: Yeah. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the beautiful Hurlingham Club. My name is Paul Dillon. I have the pleasure of leading Infosys Consulting in Europe, and we have an action-packed agenda this morning on the latest stop of the Infosys Cobalt world tour. I'm also praying for the English summer weather to hold so we can enjoy a little bit of tennis later on. But before that, I want to introduce the panel, which is unleashing the power of digital igniting transformation in the enterprise, which is a big lofty title. But to help me explore this complicated topic, I have two luminaries from the technology business world. I'd like to introduce Adele Ara, Chief Technology Officer of Lightsource bp, and Vlad Galu, who's the Chief Technology Officer of Bupa.

So thank you for agreeing to be grilled by me this morning in this panel. So Adele jumping right in. Lightsource bp is doing some fabulous work in sustainability, renewable energies, solar, that kind of thing. How does your organization create a digital ecosystem to propel your business ahead in these uncertain times?

Adele Ara: Thank you Paul. Good morning everybody. Do you have to do anything else?

Paul Dillon: I think.

Adele Ara: Thank you. Change. Good morning. When technology doesn't help you very much. So thank you for having me and for giving me the opportunity of sharing a bit of our journey when it comes to digital transformation. Maybe a couple of words of what Lightsource bp does for those of you who don't know us. So we are a 50/50 JV with BP, 50% BP, 50% management and employee of the organization. A company founded in 2010, six people. Today we are 1,100 approximately and operating in 19 different countries. What we do is we develop, we oversee construction and we operate solar farms. So we are very much at the forefront of the energy transition. And I think we looked at, we started looking at technology with a different pair of lenses around 2020 and it's when we realized that actually there was a lot of value that we were not harvesting from the time series data that were coming from our operating sites.

So the first question we asked ourselves was, is there value there? Can we do something with the data that is coming from our site? Can we educate better, new efficient projects? Can we generate more solar by leveraging the intelligence we can get from the data that we have available? And that was a trigger for our data strategy. What became obvious quite quickly was that once we were looking at what is the data we can extrapolsate and how we can monetize the value of our time series, there was a much more philosophical conversation behind it. There was actually how can we use this to make life for our employees better. And I think we quickly pivoted and shifted our digital strategy to let's put people first and data to follow.

What we have done was building up a team that now comprises 23 people in the space of 18 months. And we brought on board a very different set of skills that we didn't have before, that we never thought we were needing to hire in solar. And that is a composition of data scientists, data engineers, and very importantly, data governance specialists. So I suppose our first approach to the entire transformation was, we really need to start very, very small. And so we really looked at resolving practical problems. So we never went out saying, and this is the future, right? This is the roadmap. You guys will all follow through and we will all go through step by step in the next five years. It was very much around what is the business problem we can resolve today, and then when is the next one tomorrow. And it's all bite-sized, right, that's the way we can get people by in and get them behind us. So small but frequent is how we're going about it.

Paul Dillon: Perfect. I think it's a very practical lesson for a lot of people in the room. But Vlad, jumping into the insurance space, so Bupa had a long history of providing healthcare and insurance in the UK and globally. What's some of the unique challenges that you see in your industry about harnessing the power of digital and some of the lessons learned that you've seen in that industry and other industries that you've worked in previously?

Vlad Galu: Morning, Paul. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me. Finally, you should say jumping into the insurance space. I have, this is my first insurance stint as CTO. I have a background in cybersecurity and digital identity and telecom. So I have a fair share of experience in highly regulated sectors, but this is fairly new. So I can speak as sort of an outsider insider. Bupa is a complex business in the sense that we have a healthcare and an insurance arm and the regulations that dominate those two industries can sometimes be at odds with each other. So when you build digital products, you have to find that sweet spot that marries both of those spaces together.

On top of that, you have the challenges of any large globally distributed business, trying to come up with a global technology strategy that caters to the needs of market units and business units that operate at different speeds so that no one is left behind. So those two things combine the general risk adversity that comes from two sets of regulatory requirements and the nature of the business can sometimes make for a low of entropy environment. So you have to create space for innovation to happen. It's not unlikely to happen organically, but probably a bit less so.

Paul Dillon: Very good. Thank you. And Adele, jumping back to you, I mean, I think we'd all agree that there's a constantly changing emerging tech landscape. You pick up the newspapers, Gen AI is going to transform the world, unleashing the power of data, unleashing the power of the cloud. How is a leader in the tech space, do you keep ahead of all these changes and how do you bring that to bear in your organization?

Adele Ara: Oh, I thought I was supposed to rely on you for that. And that was kind of, isn't that?

Paul Dillon: Yes, yes.

Adele Ara: No, but joking aside, it's...

Paul Dillon: That's on Monday.

Adele Ara: But no, joking aside, so we are, so renewables are a very low margin industry. We cannot afford having people that spend their time just fully dedicated to looking at the market and looking what's up there and what can be an interesting technology. So for us, it's really leveraging our technology partnership. We are not a technology company. We don't aim to be a technology company. We aim to be very educated users. And so I think we need to start with a very humble perspective to things and leverage on the network of partners and suppliers that we have and being able to create a level of, I would say, confidence and trust whereby you guys don't sell us everything that is possibly under the sun, but really understand what our need is. So our level of maturity needs to be good enough to articulate what our vision is for technology to be embedded in our organization. But really, for us, is making sure that we work with the lack of yourselves to make sure that we are abreast of what's happening.

Paul Dillon: And maybe a follow-up question. How do you keep your business folk up to date with the latest trends and what's going on in the market? Do you have forums to do that or how does that work?

Adele Ara: So we have two ways. One is a bit more formal or institutional. We have our internal communication strategy. Our internal comps team is amazing. We go out with very company-wide updates on the new tool that we are delivering. But actually, we have developed a community of practice more informally, and that is the most powerful way for us to keep everyone informed internally of, oh, look, this is coming up. And actually, for them to come and say, oh, I was talking to a friend who works in, I don't know, Bupa, and they are doing these amazing things with AI, why don't we do the same? Most of the time, they say, let me go and look at the budget for that. But actually, a lot comes from the new talent that gets into organization, and that is a very important connection. But community of practice of the guys who will be in the future, our citizen developers, when we have the right framework in place, it's very, very powerful.

Paul Dillon: Thank you. It's clearly a complicated topic to keep everybody abreast of the latest technologies. And Vlad. Back to you. The topic de jour around cloud. So it's clearly playing a major role in your tech transformation. Why is it so essential in driving your business forward, and how are you leveraging the treasure trove of data that Bupa sits upon using the cloud?

Vlad Galu: So we're looking at this through, well, four dimensions. I'll talk about the fourth later on, but the first three are sophistication. So with the cloud, the technology that becomes available that has been democratized for everyone and made put within everyone's reach is amazing. So we have general and highly specialized compute technologies for general computing, machine learning. Then we have this globally distributed databases with subsequent replication and latency. And then you have event systems that can scale to tens of millions of messages per second. All of that is readily available. So for the large majority of companies, that would be way outside of the remit to even operate, let alone design and build. So that is absolutely fantastic. The second dimension is the usage model and the way you can spring cloud infrastructure into existence in a matter of minutes using code. So your innovation, your cycles from prototyping to full blown product is massively reduced and such as your time to market as well.

And the third dimension is the elasticity. You can scale infrastructure up and down. You can have points in time workloads, for instance, you run, let's say, you're a big marketing agency. You run a campaign. You expect the spike of traffic that will last for a few days. You spin up some infrastructure to support that and you spin it down. And that comes off of your monthly bill and that reduces your carbon footprint as well.

Paul Dillon: And I suppose a follow up question in your industry with sensitive patient data, having security around that is a key component.

Vlad Galu: Absolutely. I'd save the answer to that for the last question.

Paul Dillon: No problem.

Vlad Galu: We'll touch on that.

Paul Dillon: Yes.

Vlad Galu: It's a big, big --

Paul Dillon: Big, big topic. And we'll come to that in a second. So Adele back to you. So I mean, as I mentioned earlier, you pick up any newspaper, you watch the news, Gen AI, chatGPT, it's going to make everybody redundant, it's going to end mankind and womankind. What opportunities and what impact do you see of that in your own business and also in the wider utilities industry?

Adele Ara: So I think I'm going to set aside the moral question. We definitely can think about that --

Paul Dillon: I think that's a good idea today.

Adele Ara: On a pragmatic basis, I think what I'm interested is how I can leverage the excitement that this brings and how that excitement can get people to be more willing to adopt change and more willing to embrace different technology. What we have done very recently was people are getting a bit lazy when it comes to read documents. So we launched 10 days ago our very own version of chatGPT internally, if you like. And we have this amazing tool that look at our internet, we call the source. You ask a question and magically it gives you an answer. So if somebody doesn't remember our ATAS and safety golden rule, they don't need to dig into a very complicated website to go and find the information. They can just ask, oh, what are the eight golden rules? And very quickly, on a very chatGPT type of interface, you get your answer, it's contextualized. So it's a very pragmatic and limited, though, use case of how we can use generative AI for accelerating, if you like, some of the work that people do on a daily basis and reduce the feel of bureaucracy. The concern we have, though, is to what extent you then prevent people to learn how to do their job. Right? Because at the end of the day, it works, why is this accelerating and helping you be faster and cheaper? But we really need to be careful that the key skills and talents that we have don't get lost in the translation. So we are very cautious in doing small use cases of this type to see how it lands and get people excited. But we are very cautious about it.

Paul Dillon: I think you, like many of our other clients, are dipping their toe in the water, trying to find pragmatic use cases to test the power of Gen AI, and we look forward to seeing that scale over the coming months and years. Thank you for your insights. And Vlad, back to you on the topic of digital healthcare. That's the direction we're moving in as a society. How is Bupa trying to overcome, and it's sort of related to my follow-up question earlier, the inhibitions of folk to protect their data, nervousness around sharing too much with the state and into the cloud. How are you overcoming that at Buba?

Vlad Galu: So with, well, since the pandemic, we've seen a general uptake in people's appetite for sharing data if it leads to a tangible direct benefit to them. We've seen that with the track and trace programs all around the world. And that raises our obligation as healthcare and health insurance providers, raises the honest hope for guarding that data. We spoke earlier about how quickly we can build new products leveraging the cloud. We can also shoot ourselves in the foot equally quickly if we operate in haste. So with those two things in mind, we've created a two-tier operational model for the cloud in a layered fashion, where at the bottom of a central platform, cloud platform team operates with the slower-moving, but wide blast radius concerns like data protection, cybersecurity. And together they create a set of guardrails on top of which we build anything and everything else. And then on top of that, we have product and business unit-aligned teams that innovate in the context of their respective business construct on top of that joint set of guardrails. So everything they do is in a safe, contained environment where all of the hard questions have been answered, where data residents, encryption, who gets access to what, both from within the business and outside the business.

Paul Dillon: Thank you. It's clearly a sensitive area, and it sounds like you're making great strides. So that was all we had on this topic this morning. We could talk about some of these subjects all day. I would like to thank my panelists, Adele and Vlad, for their insights. And I wish you a really great day at the tennis. Thank you.