Portrait of an AI Leader: Piyush Gupta of DBS Bank
Brandon McGee
“Early on, one of Gupta’s strategies for AI was simply to start with the technology early and try a lot of different things. One of the bank’s key performance indicators was based on conducting a thousand experiments a year, many of them involving data and AI.
At DBS, Gupta has led a major transformation in data management. Like many companies, DBS has moved much of its data from traditional warehouses to data lakes; the latter are much cheaper and better suited to less-structured information.
DBS created a new structure for its metadata, cleaned up 80 million incomplete records, developed new protocols for who could access data and what customer data was suitable to capture, and introduced visualization tools to make trends more apparent.
The bank also follows the mantra of PURE — that data collected should be purposeful, unsurprising, respectful, and explainable. These are all somewhat common data actions for organizations that embrace AI, but it is rare for CEOs to be heavily involved in them.
The bank has also trained over 18,000 employees in data skills, creating a company of “citizen data scientists.” About 2,000 employees are proficient in advanced areas of data science and business intelligence, and another 7,000 have been identified to be upskilled in disciplines such as the use of data”
