Key Moments:

• A journey from intern to CEO (05:10)
• Encouraging a harmonized relationship between humans and AI (09:58)
• Why embracing stress can drive urgency and effective change (17:18)
• Generative AI’s impact on the skills landscape (30:39)
• Fostering a data-driven company culture (36:41)
• Embrace change, and quickly (40:25)

Key Quotes:

• “AI does amazing things, like summarizations and semantic search. Humans do amazing things like curation of knowledge, making sure it's accurate, connecting the dots, and creating relationships. So bringing the power of humans-in-the loop, especially given a broader trust deficit, felt like the right thing to do at this point in time.”
• “I think ultimately what guides us is we want to be useful to our users and our customers. That's the guiding light. Because why do we exist as an organization or a community? We should all just go home. If we don't actually have a mission and purpose that adds value, then we don't have a purpose. So the question is, what is that? What is the highest purpose?”
• “When you think about the future of software development, there’s a lot of doomsdayers about job losses. I think it's going to be the opposite. I think AI reduces the barrier to entry. I think a lot of people will be “developers”, even though they may be doing very different things.”

Mentions:

• WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2023
• OverflowAI
• Overflow API
• Stack Overflow for Teams
• Amp It Up Book

Bio:

Prashanth Chandrasekar is Chief Executive Officer of Stack Overflow and is responsible for driving Stack Overflow’s overall strategic direction and results.Prashanth is a proven technology executive with extensive experience leading and scaling high-growth global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s Cloud & Infrastructure Services portfolio of businesses, including the Managed Public Clouds, Private Clouds, Colocation and Managed Security businesses. Before that, Prashanth held a range of senior leadership roles at Rackspace including Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s high growth, global business focused on the world’s leading Public Clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, which became the fastest growing business in Rackspace’s history. Prior to joining Rackspace, Prashanth was a Vice President at Barclays Investment Bank, focused on providing Strategic and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) advice for clients in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) industries.

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Key Moments:

• The emotional temperature for change in analytics (5:06)
• There’s no playbook for change management (7:53)
• Why Generative AI success requires a melding of expertise (17:20)
• Measuring the success of LLMs (18:58)
• How do you embrace the new when you’re facing technical debt? (33:27)
• How to fine-tune your career in today’s data and AI landscape (37:30)

Key Quotes:

• “Business intelligence tends to have this notion of looking backwards. It's not thinking about prescriptive or predictive analytics, or live analytics, powered by the new capabilities that we're seeing. I do think we're going to evolve to a new name.” (03:42)
• “You’ll find companies that were and are ahead of the curve will be able to take advantage of these new technologies, GenAI, LLMs, et cetera, much more quickly than other companies. So companies that have not invested the time, resources, money, attention, and prioritization into data governance, data use, and data literacy are at a serious disadvantage. And companies that have done the opposite, that have proactively invested, will be able to make significant gains.”
• “I think there's three pillars of success. One is understanding your data from end to end. What is it used for? What domain is it in? Understand it as much as possible. What is the product? What is the data product that you have in all aspects of it? Then, understand your business, right? How does data relate to your business? These people are going to be the ones that leverage the technology the most efficiently.”
• “Don't hesitate to take a lateral mobility move. I know people are always interested in going up, up, up, up, and up. However, you know, sometimes consider going sideways.” (40:46)

Mentions:

• Jamie Dimon Annual Shareholder Letter
• Data Literacy
• Data Storytelling
• Unfrosted Film
• Hacks TV Show
• Abraham Lincoln

Bio:

Scott Stevens is responsible for Intelligent Solutions, which empowers JPMorgan Chase employees through innovative data, Business Intelligence and low-code capabilities.

Scott has been with JPMorgan Chase since 2011 and has worked in Financial Services his entire 32-year career, with prior roles at MBNA, Bank of America and Sallie Mae. Scott has been in data and analytics roles since 1997.

Scott enjoys working with local universities on modernizing data science curriculum, guest lectures and coaching student teams on analytics projects. While at work, Scott enjoys mentoring and likes to help people advance their careers and skills. Scott serves on multiple non-profit boards, and Scott is the executive sponsor for the JPMorgan Chase Delaware Volunteer Leadership Group.

Scott lives in Delaware with his family. Scott’s personal interests include travel, wine-making, photography and rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles.

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Key Moments:

• Leveraging Generative AI for work? Start by asking the right questions (04:13)
• What’s in store for the future world of work (18:18)
• How Generative AI can expand humans’ divergent thinking (26:16)
• Taking people and culture along the Generative AI journey (31:20)
• The value of diversity in data (42:00)
• A tale of mentorship (44:20)

Key Quotes:

• “With Generative AI, now we have a command line interface that’s allowed us to converse, which is so core and essential to who we are as humans. The ability to be able to talk to one another. That's allowed us to survive for thousands and thousands of years and evolve.”
• “I think that there's a lot of greater potential in terms of expanding our own creativity and strategic thinking. So while humans have flexible and moldable brains and we have neuroplasticity that allows us to learn new things, we have to put ourselves in those environments. AI is really good at divergent thinking. So when we think about creativity, a core aspect of that is divergent thinking. What comes to mind when you think of a tree? Maybe leaves and fruit. Divergent thinking is thinking of all the outside things, like sunshine and soil, that may be associated with the tree or that tree growth. There's a lot more potential that we've yet to unlock in terms of updating our own thinking to expand our own divergent and creative thinking”
• “We know that when we have more diverse teams where everyone feels that they can speak up, and you get better ideas. You get more collaboration. So having that core vision of what is that culture and environment that you want to have is really key”

Mentions:

• Women in Data
• Human Machine Collaboration Institute
• Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?
• Dialect Prejudice Predicts AI Decisions About People’s Character, Employability, and Criminality
• AWS: What Are AI Agents?
• Women in Data Climate Sustainability Datathon 2023
• The Creative Way: A Way of Being

Bio:

Sadie St. Lawrence is on a personal mission to create a more compassionate and connected world through technology. Having grown up on a farm in Iowa she witnessed first-hand how advancements in technology rapidly changed how we work and earn a living, which in turn affected the overall success of a community. In addition, Sadie was homeschooled her entire childhood which led to a unique perspective in self-directed learning approaches and out of the box thinking.

Sadie holds a diverse education having degrees in piano performance, psychology, and data science, but at her core she has always been a teacher. In 2014 she transitioned from working in a neuroscience lab studying emotional learning and memory, to working in data science. During her time as a data scientist, she went on to lead data science teams and consult for Fortune 500 companies in AI. Through her work, she noticed that while many organizations and individuals have good intentions when it comes to D&I in data careers, there was a lack of progress.

Today, Sadie’s work is focused on educating individuals in technology, increasing access and pathways for all people and creating a more equal future for all.

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.