Finance Upturned Podcast

with Kayode Odeleye

Helping private equity and investment banking executives make the transition to AI native organisations. Conversations with regulators, innovators and AI officers kayodeodeleye.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Jul 21

    Why 95% of AI projects fail: Accenture's David Hardoon on people over technology

    David Hardoon is today one of the best known names in AI, but it all started from detention, 3 decades before AI became a buzzword. As punishment for being an errant teenager, he was sent to the school library, where he found a book on Prolog which piqued his interest in technology. After an undergraduate degree in computer science with AI and a PhD in machine learning, he worked in data, analytics and AI, before being appointed as the first Chief Data Officer of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. A long stint in charge of data and AI followed at UnionBank of the Philippines and the wider Aboitiz group, and more recently as Global Head of AI Enablement at Standard Chartered. Just last month, he was appointed Managing Director and Head of Advanced AI for Southeast Asia at Accenture. He’s also the author of The AI Failure Handbook. For someone with his profile, you’d expect a textbook or a treatise on AI adoption. Instead, David published a satirical guide fashioned after a 1944 wartime sabotage manual. Which fits how he thinks about AI: start with the people. In this conversation, that thread runs through everything. His answer to why most AI initiatives fail is that leaders treat AI as technology, the CEO turns to the CTO and says make it happen, and nobody thinks about the people who have to live with the result. We talk about: * Why his AI strategy is the business strategy, and what that means in practice * The financial crime deployment that worked because the team designed it with the domain experts, down to what happens when a customer’s account gets flagged * Layoffs and the boomerang: why he thinks firms that cut for efficiency will rehire, and what Klarna’s reversal signals * Keep the people, do more: his case against using AI to do the same work with fewer staff * Gen Z, graduate hiring and the succession problem nobody prices in when they automate junior work * What Singapore’s government is doing about workforce readiness that other jurisdictions could copy * His advice to a 21-year-old: the thinking process matters more than the tools, and read philosophy * Using AI to write when you’re dyslexic, and the question that settles whether it’s cheating: whose idea was it? * Whether the data centre buildout is a bubble David is the author of The AI Failure Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Screwing Up Your AI Transformation, available on Kindle and in paperback. Get full access to Finance Upturned at kayodeodeleye.substack.com/subscribe

    Why 95% of AI projects fail: Accenture's David Hardoon on people over technology
  • 1 Episode

About

Helping private equity and investment banking executives make the transition to AI native organisations. Conversations with regulators, innovators and AI officers kayodeodeleye.substack.com

Information