Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Welcome to another episode of The Data Debrief, the companion show to Driven by Data: The Podcast, where hosts Catherine Dowden-King and Kyle Winterbottom unpack Tuesday's episode, share what's been on their minds, and explore the realities of leadership, culture, and capability across the data and AI landscape.
This week, Catherine returns from a two-week break to catch up with Kyle on the conversation with Joanne Riseborough, Group Data Management and Culture Director at Lloyd's Banking Group, alongside a wide-ranging catch-up covering AI ethics, the future of education, and why context is everything when it comes to new technology.
They cover:
- Why Joanne's willingness to repeat the same simple truth throughout her episode, rather than apologise for it, was itself the standout takeaway, and why data management has long been the least glamorous but most under-resourced part of the data value chain
- How the AI boom has quietly made data management one of its biggest beneficiaries, as businesses scramble to build the foundations needed to use their new tools effectively
- Why a job title that puts "management" and "culture" side by side gets to the heart of why the two are inseparable, and can't succeed without one another
- Catching up on two episodes missed while on holiday: Priya's candid take on the CIO-CDO relationship, and the idea that failing to draw clear lines of accountability creates "competition for relevance" between the two roles, not collaboration
- A conversation with Vin on turning AI into revenue, the value of concrete company examples over abstract theory, and how his "information flywheel" concept has moved from a future prediction to something organisations are now actively chasing
- A detour into Meta's AI glasses, why the debate over them (cool or creepy?) is really about context and nuance, and why platforms like LinkedIn struggle to hold space for anything in between
- A tie-back to Catherine's own past research using facial recognition technology, and how the same tool can be a public safety asset in one context and deeply troubling in another
- Whether AI ethics has a genuine seat at the boardroom table, or whether "activity as the barometer of perception" makes leaders reluctant to be the one applying the brakes
- Andy Burnham's call for parity between university and vocational routes, what it might mean for how people enter data careers, and the idea (borrowed from a recent Taylor Culver conversation) that data is a skill rather than a career path in its own right
- Why the debate over LLMs in university coursework mirrors the harm-reduction argument in sex education: teaching safe, responsible use beats an outright ban
Programming note and community shout-out: Catherine's back from a two-week camping-and-patio-laying hiatus (send help, or bricklaying tips), and registration for Driven by Data LIVE is officially open, with a growing list of bespoke, invite-only events also on the horizon. Make sure you're on the events list to hear about them first.
This episode is a reminder that the unglamorous, unsexy fundamentals, data management, clear accountability, honest conversations about ethics, are usually what make the shinier stuff actually work.
