It often makes us wonder how much data and analytics can do for our world. We feel baffled by seeing so many new uses of data science pop up every now and then. To make sense out of this enormous progress of data analytics applications and to map out the future of the discipline, we have a thought leader in the data science and AI space, Pedro Uria-Recio, among us.
Pedro is an executive marketing professional with over 15 years of global experience in data-driven marketing, digital businesses, analytics, and AI. Pedro is well-balanced between forward-looking marketing strategy and hands-on digital transformation.
Pedro is currently the Group Head of Analytics at Axiata Group Berhad and is looking after data analytics operations and quantitative marketing for the telecom and digital giant operating in 10 countries with 320 million subscribers. He manages a team of 50 marketing specialists, data professionals and developers. Prior to this, Pedro was leading marketing transformation in the company.
With a track record of bridging the gap between business objectives and technology, his operations at Axiata are multifaceted and diverse. Over the course of his five-year tenure there, he has implemented quite a few technological marvels at the intersection of marketing and analytics through digital growth hacking, revenue management, and has explored new revenue streams with the use of data.
Before joining Axiata, Pedro helped numerous businesses across Fin-Tech, Banking, tech, and telecom verticals improve their business operations as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company.
Pedro is a highly sought-after speaker in the space and is frequently featured as the keynote speaker at major conferences around the globe. He also writes intriguing and thought-provoking articles on marketing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Additionally, he is the winner of the 2019’ Cloudera Data Impact Award in the industry transformation, category, which was granted in New York last year.
Academically, Pedro has a Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering and an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
In this episode, he shares with us his experience about Transforming Markets and Revenue Streams with The Power of Data.
You are sure to learn a lot of new things about business and marketing and gain deeper insights into using data and analytics.
Pedro shares all about how he has been operating such a huge multinational team at the Axiata Analytics Center and explains what has worked for him in building the centre of excellence across the distributed teams.
The approach he advocates is that of the hub and spoke methodology that implements centralised learning and a distributed execution. He explains this with a wonderful analogy of self-driving cars, where learning experiences of all the cars are shared from a central data centre to all others, but momentary situational decisioning is still up to the individual cars at the moment of driving on the streets.
He also delves deep into the strategies for creating new revenue streams for your business using data and analytics. Why it is important to look at the product through a different lens of marketing perspective and how you can develop such a perspective. Think about the use cases of your data outside your industry.
In explaining this process of creating new revenue streams, Pedro also provides a real-life example of how credit scoring as a service has been a great source of new revenue for the telcos and how he and his team have pulled this off.
In all the excitement, however, we should not forget about the importance of fostering a data-driven culture in our organisations and Pedro has to offer quite a few solid tips on this front too.
One of the novel approaches that he talks about is the automation and intelligence first approach or the AI-first approach, which resembles the on-going mobile-first approach, along with having data champions, data enablers, single and centralized source of truth or database, broad access with access control, and training and hackathons.
In terms of subject areas concerned, this episode really touches a lot of other bases too, including:
- Use of data in offline marketing campaigns and contextual or personalized digital marketing.
- Reinforcement learning models to minimize price leakage through optimizing prices for each one of your customers.
- The use cases of internal and external data and the power of external data for business growth and transformation.
- Future of work and how AI is going to affect the three kinds of works — repetitive, quantitative, and creative — differently.
- Creating a regulation (GDPR & PDPA) compliant service that is using your data for a use case in another industry.
And the list goes on!
More links about the guest
LinkedIn:
What is one book that you would gift to your younger self and why this book?
- Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, Or Trust Fund Required by Bryce Leung and Kristy Shen.
- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43345855-quit-like-a-millionaire
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10127019-the-lean-startup
Organisations:
Articles:
- https://medium.com/@uriarecio
- https://towardsdatascience.com/@uriarecio
- https://aiforceos.com/author/aiforceos/
In the News:
- https://www.vanillaplus.com/2019/05/14/46640-outsource-brain-asks-axiatas-analytics-chief/
- https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/axiata-urges-operators-to-be-realistic-on-data-analytics/
- https://www.nst.com.my/business/2019/09/522933/firms-must-initiate-data-governance
Videos: