Andreas Welsch: 0:30

Welcome to What's the BUZZ?, where leaders and hands-on experts share how they have turned hype into outcome. Today, we'll talk about establishing a strong governance between technology and business teams, and who better to talk about it than someone who's actively doing that in their business. Maxim Ioffe. Hey, Maxim, thank you so much for joining.

Maxim Ioffe: 0:49

Thanks for having me.

Andreas Welsch: 0:51

Wonderful. Why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, who you are, and what you do?

Maxim Ioffe: 0:56

Sure. My name is Max and I drive Global Intelligence, center of Excellence for is a Fortune 200 wholesale distribution company. It's about 20 billion dollars annual. We are partnered with 50,000 suppliers, hundred thousands of customers, and that's millions of products. With that scale, there is no shortage, automation, and my mission is to help everybody and anybody to be more effective and more efficient.

Andreas Welsch: 1:22

That's awesome. I love that. And you've been on the show before and we talked about a pretty similar topic, but not quite the one about governance. So we wanted to make good on, on that now as well. Now, Maxim, what do you say in good old fashion, should we play a little game to kick things off?

Maxim Ioffe: 1:37

Sure.

Andreas Welsch: 1:38

All right, so let's do this. If AI were a, let's see. If it were a plant, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock. Go.

Maxim Ioffe: 1:52

All right. It's probably going to be something from a cacti family. It's going be difficult to climb. It's gonna be d difficult to handle, but if you handle it just right, the Greek pears are pretty delicious.

Andreas Welsch: 2:07

Wonderful. I love that. Really good answer. And there they're all these little spikes if you don't know, that they exist, it, it can get pretty interesting. Speaking of interesting and some of the spikes that I think business and technologists. Feel on a regular basis, how do we even work together, right? We want to do AI, we need to do AI, but how do we actually get everybody around the same table and move in the same direction? I keep hearing these concerns from IT leaders when it comes to adoption. We need to look at the data. We need to mitigate risk, we need to keep an eye on our costs and how can I become an innovation engine rather than being the braking pads if you will. I'm curious, what are you seeing in your role? How can IT/ AI automation leaders become an innovation engine while still keeping all these things in view.

Maxim Ioffe: 3:02

That's a great question. And I don't think there is one size fits all answer that would cover every use case, every possibility, everybody and anybody. That's just not realistic. But I think fundamentally we have a couple of pillars there that needs to apply to building a successful model. Just one is definitely strategic and the strategy starts with something as basically as a mission. What is the mission of AI? And broadly speaking, the animation program that we're trying to run. And I'll do a simple example. And a lot of missions seem to be going about, let's build a autonomous enterprise. Let's build some sort of a fail driving engine. And then you turn around at the company and that corporate values are talking about people as the greatest asset. And how do you think our greatest fail? If we say our mission is to build an autonomous enterprise, right? So crafting that mission, crafting of golf that resonates with business, that resonates with employees, that resonates with everybody and makes sense is a big part of the strategy. The other part of the strategy is defining what are we after, what kind of, how do we calculate value? I don't wanna use the word ROI. ROI seems to be a little bit limiting to some of those things, but at the end of the day, it is a financial calculation. How do we bring the financing and tell us, Hey, help us to define the appropriate levers, and how do you cal calculate us? So you have the strategy around it. And then the other part of the strategy is probably the, process selection and event evangelizing. So you keep the stream of the processs, right? It's probably not that hard to find the first pro project to work on. Maybe first 2, 3, 4, how to get into hundreds. In our program we had a small milestone. We have one in 500 ideas in the. Automation hub that are either implemented or being worked on. And 500 ideas is not a end to the game. And just the beginning, we're gonna keep growing, we're going to keep more, adding more and more. And frankly, that's 500 is what's live now. There is a number that were already automated and archived because they outlive their usual lifespan and there is nothing wrong about that as well. So that's your strategy piece, right? The second pillar is probably, funding. How do you go around funding? Because frankly, strategy without funding is more about dreams than reality. You can dream up whatever strategy, but if you don't have the budget to build it, it's not gonna build. And then on top of that, they're interconnected. You have the budget and a lot of time the budget is this. Yeah, you might have a strategy that requires many millions of dollars, but the budget is much smaller. So be it. You got to adjust the strategy to meet the budget. And I think the third pillar is governance. How do you build a framework where every idea becomes handle as a factory? It's not a one off. I'm trying to approach this idea this way, that idea, that way. Back to our plant analogy. There are a lot of spikes and a lot of turns that if you are not building that process where you drop each one of them in a consistent manner and you know exactly how to do it so you don't run into those objects, life is gonna be a lot easier. And to me, those retailers that make a difference between a program and a science exercise or a one up attempt.

Andreas Welsch: 6:20

That's right. Great point. Especially around making it a program and, not just a science experiment. And, I feel in many cases we're likely going to see more of these science experiments if people are not yet following that, that three step approach because. Hey, here's a new technology. We need to try that out. We've seen that with Gen AI. We're now seeing that with agentic AI, although I think that's still in it in its infancy when it comes to evaluation. Your words of wisdom definitely are important here now. I also think it's harder than ever to put a proper governance around using AI in, in a business. You have team members that might already use AI apps on their phones. They might be putting confidential data in there and what have you. Especially if you try to clamp it down from a corporate point of view. And you say you're not allowed to use gen AI because we're afraid you put data there. Chances are people are starting to use apps on their own phones and they're still going to put company data in there. And, training can be an effective aspect to, to raise that awareness. But how do you see IT leaders handling, that part of AI adoption or reckoning that it's here? How do we deal with that now?

Maxim Ioffe: 7:29

That's a great question. And again, I if one size fits all, but I would start with something basic as employee. I just hang up the phone, right? Prior to this when I was talking to new employees and I was talking about the drop of the future, I was talking about, Hey, here's what we can do. Here's how automation can help you. Hopefully those bits of education coming from me, coming from my peers, I'm definitely not the only one in the company doing that. Should help the employees to understand where it is coming from, where business is coming from, where everybody's coming from, and the lines of caution. Yes, there are tremendous benefit to AI. Yes, there is significant risk to AI and there is security, there is compliance, there is biases. There is that availability. But as you educate the employees, couple of things happen. One is the pipeline of the opportunities become more realistic. How often do we get approached by an employee saying, I. I want to build AI model that will do something. And you start asking the questions, do we have the data? No, not really. Do we have the process? No, we don't really have a process. Do we have good understanding of how things connect? Your AI guy, you should be able to figure it out. Oh, it doesn't work that way. On the flip side of it to your point, cannot be. So they need to be the, that, in my opinion, at least, they need to be a very consistent framework. Here are the things that it is looking for before they allow an AI solution. And it has to do with security. It has to do with privacy, it has to do with handling data, has to do with every aspect that IT and security and infrastructure are concerned about. It also has to do with tool proliferation. How many IDP software programs can we have everybody? Seems to have an IDP solution. If we have 30 companies doing intelligent document processing for us, are we gaining anything or do we wanna standardize the mechanical? So all those different things are important. All those different things come from it. The financial calculation needs to be, again, the same yard stake. This is back to my governance standpoint. If you have that yard stake that says this program, if we do this project, we're going to save X. That kind of determines the budget for building the implementation. The implementation should not be more than that. Otherwise it's a negative ROI implementation right there. And then if you get all those pieces together, you have the IT government saying, here's what we need in order to allow it. You have business employees who are educated enough to bring the real examples and to be able to separate the high from reality, and you have the consistent metrics on the value that it brings problem becomes a little bit easier. Again, it's the difference between the science, exercise and yelling and the loudest voice gets the project versus we approach it methodically. We know the ROI. We know the governance, we know the strategy, let's go build it. And if it all fits together, it becomes that factory setting.

Andreas Welsch: 10:30

So how do you do that? How do you get into that rhythm? Do you set up a formal program? Do you meet on a regular basis? Who do you invite? What do you review?

Maxim Ioffe: 10:39

I don't know if our example would work for every company. What we do is we do meet on regular basis. We do. Yeah, prior to intakes worked very diligently and very hard to build a role of engagement, and I will speak from my experience on intelligent animation program. What on the RPA side, since I've been doing that since 2019, we met with Build the Framework. We tweak the framework, we got the framework. Every new idea I can get it through approvals in a matter of minutes. Literally, we're not there with AI yet. It takes longer, but that's the aspiration. There got to be that matrix that you need to populate to say, does it fit? And if the answer is yes, it fits on every account, it just goes. If the answer is yes, except for this one point. We need to discuss just this one point, but you got to make sure that the boundaries are set. The boundaries are don't move, and the boundaries are the boundaries. Business needs to respect the boundaries. I'm not IT security person. I may not understand all the implications. I cannot speak to everything around security. So I trust the professionals to do that. They tell me what needs to happen. I make it happen in order to move forward. That's part of the governance framework.

Andreas Welsch: 11:56

And how high do you bring that transparency in the organization if you collaborate with your business stakeholders to also show and demonstrate the value that, that your teams are bringing from an automation, from an AI point of view.

Maxim Ioffe: 12:08

I think that there are two answers here. One is top down. I do use every opportunity. I direct reports to talk program our existance and what we can deliver. I do the same thing, bottom up approach, where most of the ideas come from the employees. And I want the employees to be our investors. I want the employees to go to their managers, to their executives and say, look at the cool automations we built. Look at this cool agent or whatever solution it is that we implemented. Look how it helps us to hit the goals. I will not be able to speak the language of every executive that just not in the car. I'm not an HR professional. I'm not a legal professional. I'm not a sales professional. I'm not a supply chain professional. I know enough to be. Somewhat tender, but I'm not a professional there. So let the employees who do the work give my spoke people, they will use the right language, they will communicate the ROI much better. My work is to provide the governance, the framework, the training, the implementations, and the support. But let the others do the sale. I think that's a lot more efficient and effective. But again, I might be in a unique position when I'm able to do it that way.

Andreas Welsch: 13:20

Yeah I really love it, especially the part about empowering employees to identify where the opportunities in our business process, in the area that I'm deeply familiar with, and I remember last time you were on, on the show, we talked about from a center of excellence point of view, what do you need to do? So your pipeline of ideas, that doesn't dry up, that kind of goes hand in hand with that topic. Absolutely. You mentioned governance and who should own that AI governance and what other teams do you need to have around the table? I think you already mentioned a few, but are there others in finance or HR that you have in your business program?

Maxim Ioffe: 13:55

Right there, there are many players out there and I don't have a good answer. Who should own it? I think it depends on the company. Some companies it's better with IT, some companies it might sit better with some sort of a value realization office and CFO organization. It might be the executive branch. Doesn't really matter where it sits. It's all about that collaboration.'cause ultimately there is a lot of input from the it's the infrastructure, it's the security, it's the data. But there is also input from the data governance and data modeling and people that build AI models and. People who understand the data and the technology and there is input from the business. And ultimately the ideas have to start from the business. Business need to want to automate. Coming to the business saying, Hey, from ITM here to automate your work is probably not ideal. Business is going very apprehensive. A lot of fears of job protection are out there and a lot of them are probably unfounded, but it doesn't matter. They're still figures and we still need to deal with change management. And I choose to deal with change management from the bottom up. So if the business brings the ideas to us and we want to do it, not the business leader, but the employees within the business line, I know that they don't need to change management employees already happy to do it. Maybe we can steer it, maybe we can help them to scale it. Maybe we can help them to think bigger. But to me that's how do you record the value in a consistent manner so you don't have an AI project that saves millions of dollars, and those millions never hit the p and l. They never hit any financial statements. So those are. Imaginary dollars. It's fine to report it that way if that's what the fellowship organization wants us to do. But most of the time they want us to report on the real dogs and let's report within the numbers and the guidelines that they want us to report. Within. Saves time save frictions makes life easier. And employee education. It might be sitting within a business within it or somewhere else, but to me it's one of the staples. If you don't have employees know what to ask for, they will not ask for the right things. If you don't have the employees who know how the technology works, they will come with unrealistic expectations. Asking for the wrong thing, having realistic expectations is never useful.

Andreas Welsch: 16:08

Wow, there was so much good information in there. Let me let me pick out a few things. What I heard you say was, we need to report on hard actual savings, not just the funny money that we shift around between business units but how are we actually making impact to the business, to the P&L that's what our business wants and we can report it and we should. So we showed the real impact. I love that because I think too many times we still see the sandbox projects or pilots. Let's figure out what we do with AI and then maybe we roll it out and it's actually not that easy. But to your point, if you start with that from the very beginning, align it with your business strategy. Take something that's measurable, that solves that problem, right? You don't even run into it. The other part I wanted to ask is, how do you get employees to that point that they are aware of? What can the technology actually do? What is available at our disposal? And could this even be something that we can solve with technology? How do you do that?

Maxim Ioffe: 17:05

It's all about that continuous education. I'm not a marketing person, but I've heard something talking about pre attaches to the person. You need to pass that information at least three times before it ings. I took that to heart and I tried to do it more than three times. Every opportunity I get to talk to employees to present, it could be a lunch and learn, it could be five minutes. During the town hall, we have automation minute, if you will, where I just go in and present. I offer it every call, everything I do. Hey, if you want to do targeted presentation for your employees, happy to do it. It's up to us who understand the technology and can speak speak about it not in the IT language, but in the language that business can relate to and understand. Be the ambassadors of the technology. It'll not happen on its own, and employees have bombarded by advertisement and that advertisement with all the right intentions. Create a very unrealistic picture. We are going to put AI in place for your organization that will reconcile every invoice. We're going to put AI into the your organization that is going to take care of all the recruitment. P two P is going to be handled by our AI agent. How often do we see that on LinkedIn feeds? How often do we see that during the presentations, equipping the employees about it? Talking about it? And I, again, just right before this call, I was talking about Gartner's hype curve to new employees. And we ask, say, look, when you get a new presentation about technology. Think where it falls into that hype. Is it on peak of the inflated expectation or is it within the trout of disillusionment? It doesn't have to be that terminology, but it gives you some sort of a framework to talk about, look, this is what is needed. This is how you identify the reality versus hype. By the way, employee, if you bring to me something that sounds great, but we can never implement it. Nobody wins, right? So if you know that it all logs, let's talk about it upfront and see how we can deal with it. There's no magic in that technology. Again, a lot of folks try to pretend that AI is some sort of a magical tool that does a lot of things. In a way it is. But the reality. Teaching the employees to check for that foundation is very effective from a standpoint that, again, we're not experts. Typically, the people who implement AI are not experts in the business problem. Yeah. So we cannot say if that foundation is solid, we need employees to help us with it.

Andreas Welsch: 19:31

That's awesome. Maxim, there's been so many great pieces of information, so many nuggets that you've shared in the last 20, 25 minutes. And I was wondering if you can summarize the key three takeaways for our audience today.

Maxim Ioffe: 19:44

I wish I had your LinkedIn post from yesterday open. You summarized it really well. Where the technology is going and building 10 bots is not a good strategy. Three enough, 10 is not a good strategy. The strategy needs to be about the technology, measurable impact of that technologies and the strategy needs to be something that you are willing and going to execute and include at North Star. Where do you see it going and how do we get there from where we are to where we wanna be within that strategy? We wanna make sure that we are supported by funding and we know how to be funded, how to execute it. And then the governance. The governance is a key from a standpoint that you cannot treat each project as a one up. It has to be an autopilot. And if it's an autopilot, there is no friction between it and business and everybody else. Everybody expects and respects those boundaries and follows them. Why become easy? You spend less time arguing, more time doing, and that's the goal. And the last thing I will say, maybe it's number four, is measure twice. Cut once. Prep, the prep, all the things. Figure out the strategy, the governance, everything else before you buy the licenses, before you sign the agreement, before you start implementing. It makes life a lot easier and a lot less mistakes are again, getting made. So thus would be my summary.

Andreas Welsch: 21:00

Fantastic. Thank you so much folks. We're at the end of the show. Thank you so much, Maxim, for joining us today and for sharing your experience with us. It was a pleasure having you on again.

Maxim Ioffe: 21:10

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Andreas Welsch: 21:12

Wonderful.