At the AI Summit London, experts from leading companies in energy, healthcare, and telecoms discussed the challenges and opportunities of leveraging big data. Panelists highlighted their use of data to personalize customer experiences and make informed decisions but noted significant issues around data security and privacy.
Elena González Garcia, Lead Operations and Maintenance Engineer at Scottish Power, pointed out the difficulties her company faces in integrating data from third parties like contractors. “We may be receiving information from my contractors, but there's nothing I can do to improve the quality of this information or the accessibility to this data simply because I am constrained by a contract,” Garcia said. She emphasized the need for businesses to agree to better data-driven contracts to improve data quality and accessibility.
Speakers underscored the importance of maintaining data platforms for experimentation, allowing teams to safely interrogate data. They suggested businesses explore using sandboxes and separate environments for experimenting with data before moving to production.
Jamaria Kong, Managing Director of TowerBrook Capital Partners, whose portfolio includes companies like TXO, AA, and Maxor, shared that each company has separate environments to test new capabilities. Kamal Jain, Principal Data Engineering Manager at BT, noted that their sandboxes provide a platform for testing and experimenting with relevant data, ensuring it is rigorously checked for quality by in-house tools.
“Ensuring that it's a safe environment for the teams to experiment out, but also underline having a single source of truth into the production environment, helps build the different AI use cases,” Jain explained.
Pavithra Rajendran, Senior Data Scientist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, discussed the complexity of cybersecurity in handling patient data. “It is very sensitive data; the cyber [considerations] are much more complex compared to other trusts,” Rajendran said. She shared that their proof of concept with a cloud provider revealed that their security requirements were too stringent to explore cloud options initially.
Another key issue addressed by the panel was data quality. Panelists emphasized the importance of training staff to understand and improve data quality. “I want to emphasize the importance of people,” Garcia said. “Sometimes it's not about having a super fancy algorithm, [instead] implementing guidelines that can make sure the people that interact and create these things are part of the loop.”
Kong mentioned her firm’s exploration of generative AI to enhance data quality, while Jain shared that BT has tasked hyperscaler partners with performing data quality checks.
Overall, the panelists urged businesses to prioritize data security, quality, and effective staff training to fully leverage the potential of big data while addressing its inherent challenges.
