Making the board case for an AI venture

The challenge

The organisation wanted to know whether a spin-off in AI, machine learning and data science could succeed, and, if so, to secure funding for it from the board.

What I did

As the designated CTO of the new business, working closely with the Chief Digital Officer, the Chief Technology Officer and the Finance Director, I had the autonomy to drive the whole initiative:

• Represented the organisation with prospective partners and clients.
• Researched the market for offerings, clients and partners, and performed technical due diligence.
• Engaged in recruitment, strategy, product design, business development and financial planning at CxO level.
• Delivered time-boxed proof-of-concept projects and consulting engagements.

In parallel, as cloud subject matter expert:

• Coached distributed teams across multiple geographies on cloud automation and application modernisation.
• Built the base infrastructure (landing zone) for migrated applications, and authored migration guides and best practices.
• Designed the solution architecture for a modernised core production publishing platform and led its migration to AWS on Amazon EKS, covering digital asset management and digital and print publishing.
• Modernised a subsidiary’s Java applications and moved them from the data centre to AWS, then refactored them onto managed services.
• Architected the data lake and analytics platform for the new business (S3, Glue, Redshift, EMR, Databricks, Dataiku).

The outcome

A board-ready case for a new AI and data science business, built from a high-level idea: evidence base, products, service offerings, partnerships and execution plans, together with the cloud and data platform it would run on.