AI Special 2#: Catriona Campbell, CTIO @ EY:  Human-centric AI and Diversifying Technology

0:00Generative AI that we're now seeing will absolutely transform the work of today, tomorrow and the future. I think that's where I'm getting most excited. I'm getting most excited about the concept of being able to deploy generative AI to take the mundane out of some of the jobs we have.

0:20Welcome to episode two of the Tech Leaders Podcast AI series. After an amazing conversation with the brilliant Priya Lakhani, how on earth are we going to follow that up? Well, luckily, we have another amazing guest lined up today. We have the brilliant Katrina Campbell, the UK Client Technology and Innovation Officer at Ernst & Young, one of the world's leading consultancy firms. Katrina is on an amazing trajectory, I think it's fair to say, having founded and led one of Europe's largest tech and services design agencies and then went on to become the first female client tech and innovation officer for EY.

1:01and also played a pivotal role, quite notably, in launching the Neurodiverse Centre of Excellence, one of the first of its kind in the UK, which we unpack at length. Katrina was also part of Tony Blair's Task Force for Inclusive Design of Government Services, which created the standards for UK government's online presence. Katrina is also the author of AI by Design, a book that explores the importance of artificial intelligence in our future and predicts future scenarios in light of advancements in AI tech using behavioral psychology, technology and real life examples. Katrina brings so much to the table, a wealth of knowledge and experience.

1:48Carenza and I are just so excited to unpack her amazing career and get her extremely well-informed thoughts on this hot topic. This is going to be a good one. It's Katrina Campbell.

2:04Katrina Campbell, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast. Carenza and I have been so excited about this one. It's a pleasure to get you on and have a chat as part of this AI series. How are you today? Great, and thank you. I'm just honored to be here. It's lovely to meet you both. Lovely to meet you. So let's start with a bang then, Katrina. I want to sort of ask you just outright, what excites you most about the evolution of AI technology? I think that's a great word to use, evolution, because, you know, AI technology really started appearing in the 1950s. So it's actually been a technology, a transformative technology.

2:47It's been around for some time. I think that evolution, though, has sped up remarkably just in the last year. And I think with that speeding up of technology has become this massive democratization. So really, the GPT platform has become available to all to use. their previous versions of technologies that deployed AI were held in-house in organisations. This one has become available to the public and it's an incredibly easy to use interface. Much like in the start of the dot-com days, there were lots of search engines out there, lots of them. But Google became a vastly superior one because of its simplicity to use.

3:30And that's what GPT has created for us. So I'm excited about the evolution. I'm excited about democratization. A little bit nervous, Gareth, Carenza, a little bit nervous about the application of it, but very excited about the possibilities. Yeah, absolutely. Very good answer. Is there a particular area in the various fields of AI that are evolving that excite you in particular? Or are you driven more by the innovation and the use case potential of how it makes things possible for people all over the world? You couldn't say it more eloquently, I think both are incredibly exciting, but I think that the generative AI that we're now seeing will absolutely transform work of today, tomorrow and the future.

4:14I think that's where I'm getting most excited. I'm getting most excited about the concept of being able to deploy generative AI to take the mundane out of some of the jobs we have. So a good example is the legal profession. I'm very excited about the concept of the legal profession being able to use past precedents and built into databases where they no longer need to have associates lease through massive tombs, massive books to understand what it is that makes a good case in that particular field. But being able to just search through a database and find the winning argument for a case. I mean, that is taking the mundane out of that jaw and improving the job for those individuals.

4:56Now, it's also fair to say, I think, Carenza, that we'll see some jobs disappear as a matter of course, this, but we'll see new jobs. And I mean, I refer to a number of historical technologies that were transformative like this one. You know, when James Watt, that great Scott, designed the steam engine in the 1770s, it meant that carriage drivers no longer had roles, no longer had jobs, but there was a new job for a steam engine driver. So let's just hope that we have the clarity of thought around the new jobs and taking the mundane out of some of the more boring jobs. Yeah absolutely and do you have a sense of what are the types of skills that human beings will need to be developing over the next few years and really dying up to in the face of both the opportunities and the challenges of what's happening in AI?

5:51So I think really interestingly my background is psychology and human computer interaction and the field of psychology human computer action that I specialised in you need to be slightly creative to be able to design technology, but also equally, you need to understand technology and you need to have a mathematical mind. So by merging the creatives with the technologies, I think that's where we need to look at building new skills. It's no longer sufficient for a coder to just be able to code. He needs to be able to be a prompt engineer. He needs to be able to think outside the box around what it is that needs coded, how we will code that in the future.

6:29And I think our creatives need to understand more about technology. So I think creativity is one of the skills that we're all going to have to increase our knowledge around. Yeah, for sure. And you've got quite an exciting job at EY. Tell us a little bit about how you bring that to life for your clients. Sure. So my role is twofold within EY. I'm the first CTIO, female CTIO in EY globally. And my role is to look after the technology that powers our services that we deliver for our clients and also to create services that make our employees roles easier now i do that by providing an innovation service so the technology and the innovation go hand in hand in eY it's not done in a bubble innovation it's done with our clients it's done with our staff and we follow the double diamond innovation method.

7:26So everything we do is done with researching with our users. It's testing and learning with our users. It's then deploying with our users. And so it's a very human-centered design approach. So when I talk to clients about the technology we're designing for them, I'll say this was built with clients like you. So this is a very user-centered piece of technology. And unfortunately for me, the business operates with that kind of remit that we will build, we will collectively collaborate on new technologies with and for clients. Very well said. And there's a number of things there I'd like to unpack.

8:05I wanted to cast your mind back, Katrina, right to the beginning of your career. What did you want to be when you grew up? Okay. And talk us through the main milestones of your early career, which set you on the path that you ultimately ended up following. Well, I love that question because it wasn't dissimilar from what I'm doing now, to be honest. So when I was 10 years of age, my father, who worked for IBM at the time, came home to the household in the evening and said, we're moving, kids. To my mum, he said, we're moving to France. Now, for a wee Glaswegian girl, that was really quite exciting.

8:40I ended up in an international school in Paris, where the European headquarters of IBM was located at the time. And it was whilst I was there, and I was 12, 13, I met the teacher who taught psychology at my school. Now, in Glasgow, previous school I'd been at, you wouldn't have had psychology, sociology, even computing in those days. But this was an international school with an IB format, international baccalaureate. And of course, psychology was just one of the sciences that was taught. He was just an exceptional teacher. And I got a real interest into understanding mental models, how people think.

9:20I then went off to university and having done an undergraduate in psychology, I decided that the field of human computer interaction, that field, that spur of psychology, was absolutely going to meet my needs of both being excited about technology, but excited about the mental models that people have. And so the combination of tech and psych is absolutely where HCI meets. And so I started working in the city in London as soon as I graduated. I was delighted to be offered a position to join Barclays. At the time, Barclays Bank was in 54 Lombard Street in the city of London. and their CEO was the youngest CEO in the bank's history.

10:03His name was Martin Taylor. And I don't know if that guy had a crystal ball, but within about a year, he'd said, listen, this internet thing, and this was 1997, this internet thing that's happening just now is going to be incredibly important for financial services. What I would like us to do is I'd like us to set up a website. I'd like us to ensure that we have some level of services for clients on it, for customers on it. And Katrina, you seem like someone who could do that for me. So I was very fortunate to be in the position that nobody else kind of wanted to do it or had the skills to do it.

10:38So they gave it to this very, very young 24-year-old wee girl and said, off you go. What was it about you that made him have that faith and confidence? There's this young woman, obviously very much with drive and vision, but he's seeing something really special in you at that point. I think I have to thank the global head of communications was where I sat. I sat in that part of the business. And it was him who said, listen, this is something we need to do. It wasn't part of the strategy of the bank at the time. It was more about the PR. It was more about, well, I'll tell you a really interesting fact.

11:14We didn't even own our own URL. We didn't own Barclays.com or Barclays.co.uk. In fact, there was a cyber squatter on both those sites. And the cyber squatter had added a picture of the CEO with devil horns coming at his head and had a bit of a beef with the bank at the time. So my task was to go off and find out how to get that off that cyber squatter. So that was my first job. Then my second job was, well, we've got these sites now, what do we do with them? And he said, listen, I think the banking of the future will be done here. Let's start building it out. So that's where the strategy started, it was a happy coincidence that I was there, I was available, I was in the right place at the right time.

11:53But boy, did it teach me a lot. It was a phenomenal start to my career. Having realised that the way we were designing systems within Barclays with humans at the centre and using user centre design was really quite unique. I decided that I would be best off, and with the support of my now husband, then fiancé, of starting my own business. So at a very young age, I decided that I would walk the city in London to try to raise finance to do just that little business case around creating an agency to do what I'd been doing at Barclays. And after a very short period, I realised that going to all these VC meetings just wasn't working.

12:34Unfortunately for me, the VCs were really only interested at that time in investing in male-led businesses. and the reason I knew that was because after one meeting I took a very friendly VC aside and I said to him listen what is it about this business the business case is good money is freely available just now it's the dot-com boom where am I going wrong and he said listen Katrina you're too young you're too female and it wasn't a desirable trait so I reflected on this and in conversation with family and friends we decided I decided to go in there with a couple of people who quite frankly were acting a role, a couple of males and another excellent female.

13:15So we were four of us who went in. And within the first meeting, we had an offer of a million quid in cash. Within the second meeting, we had another equally good offer. And when it came time to choose the right VC, I selected the VC and then I walked in and I said, unfortunately, they're no longer joining the business. And the VC said, well, at this point, we're so bought in to you, we want to proceed. That is brilliant. So are you ever tempted to switch your name around, Nicole or Sarah Campbell? Exactly. That is a great story. And congratulations on playing the game. And I'm so glad that it's not like that, that people need to do that these days.

13:55But that's fantastic. I think 20 years has seen some fantastic changes. And actually, you know, when I look back, only 4 % of VC investment was going to tech female entrepreneurs at that point. 4%. And, you know, I was very fortunate to be one of them and very fortunate to be a successful entrepreneur who then went on to sell the agency successfully because that was also not a very good statistic. Successful exits were not common in those days. Let's run with that for a little bit then, Katrina, because about this period in the early 2000s, obviously it was the dot-com boom followed by a rise in these online companies, online offerings, online technology.

14:34What parallels do you see between the dawn of the e-commerce.com world with where we are right now in terms of the evolution of AI? Brilliant question, Gareth, because so much is similar to what I lived through in the early noughties. I mean, in the year 2000, the democratization of software that could help you build websites had really just happened. Anybody could build a website. and because anybody could build a website there was a proliferation of really dreadful websites out there i remember asking one bc when i was going for funding i said listen my business is all about designing and building effective efficient and satisfying digital media and technology and he went well there's plenty of agencies out there doing that i said well no there isn't actually there's lots of agencies building technology not necessarily with user center design at the heart.

15:27So they're not being successful. So what I did at that point was I realized that we needed a set of standards in order to govern how users would be delivered services and solutions from government and indeed from the private sector. And so very fortunately for me, I was able to be part of the large UX UI community that was set up in the UK at the time. And we worked on some standards and collectively we created what now has been adopted as international standards for web design. But the really interesting point that I wanted to raise was the government websites at that point were all entirely different, incredibly unusable.

16:09So Tony Blair, who was the PM at the time, decided he wanted to standardize the experience of his government services via the web. and so he created a task force which I was very fortunate to join and on that task force we had the RNIB, the Royal Institute of the Blind, the RNID, a number of other charities and our job was to ensure inclusive design of government services and so we created the standard for the UK government's online presence across hundreds of websites and made sure they were accessible by all, and they delivered a good experience. And I'm really, really, really proud of that period of my life, that year where I did that pro bono work for the government, because it then led to a European standard.

16:56I was asked to go to Europe and present to the European government around how we had done this in the UK. So it was an incredibly good practice. Now, moving on to AI now, the same thing is happening. People are building AI without regulation, without standardization. People are building in, I would say, on occasion, untrustworthy, unethical and biased data. And I am nervous at the moment that without regulation, like we did for the internet with the Disability Discrimination Act and Section 508 in the US, which ensures that online systems are accessible. I'm nervous and I'm worried that the same thing is happening now to AI systems.

17:37And I'd very much like to see more regulation. Are you excited about some of the clauses in the SPART data policy and the new data protection and information bill, for example? Absolutely. But I think, Carenza, it's even more, we need to go further than that. I think we need to make sure that we have some global governance and that we have some global common regulation. I think GDPR, just to get technical for a moment, GDPR was incredibly well adopted and has been adopted by a huge amount of countries around the world. It gives citizens a sense of their privacy and their data and how data will be used.

18:15I think we need exactly the same thing. We need some international policy and regulation adoption, not just here in the UK or the EU AI Act, or indeed what we're doing in the UK with asking our current regulators to monitor and govern AI. I think we need to go one step further and create some international regulation in order to make sure that safety for all is considered. Absolutely. And, you know, I'm very inspired to hear about the journey when you worked with the UK government, but you're now in charge of the whole of the AI strategy for an entire country. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

18:50So I was recently appointed the chair of the Scottish AI Alliance. And in 2019, the Scottish government decided that AI was incredibly important to get right for the economy, for its citizens, and for the country as a whole. And so what they did was in 2019, they decided to put in place a number of individuals who would work to create common strategy for Scotland. So public sector was involved, private sector, third sector, academia. and it was launched in March 2021. I joined the board at that point and over the last two years what we've done as a collective team is we've created a one-stop shop for everything you need to know about AI.

19:32We have got access to an incredible course which is called livingwithai.me. Living with AI is a free course for any citizen to take in Scotland from child at school all the way up to your granny. Wow. When that launches, that will ensure that everyone understands their rights. Everyone understands 101 around AI. I'm really excited about that. It also has convened a thing called our AI Playbook. And our AI Playbook is a central resource for everything about AI that's going on in Scotland. So I'm very excited about that, Carenza. The Living With AI course, is that going to be rolled out nationally, like UK-wide then?

20:14Or is it a version of it in England and Wales? It's something that the Scottish AI Alliance has come up with, Gareth, and has created and developed with Scottish government funding. It's not to say that we couldn't explore that more broadly, because I think that a 101 for everyone is a really good idea. I think that's so right. I mean, just talk a little bit about for real people going about their day to day lives and thinking, particularly in this context, the people of Scotland, wide variety of different people going about a wide variety of different jobs and wide variety of different backgrounds.

20:48What are the kinds of considerations that you're thinking of in your position, whether that's thinking about the standardizations we were talking about or regulatory landscape or the enablers that need to be right so that everybody can take advantage of the opportunities this presents? There are probably three things that are incredibly important to our AI strategy. Ensuring that our AI that is being designed, is being deployed, is being developed, is ethical, inclusive, and that it is also, I guess, easy to use. So when I think about the ethics of AI, it's really important that the Scottish AI Alliance allows individuals to understand what people can and can't do with data.

21:35The Scottish government has recently opened up a site to enable any citizen of Scotland to go in and see how their data is currently being used by the Scottish government. Opening up what we're actually doing with our citizens' data has been incredibly powerful. Offering up the opportunity for citizens to understand more about AI through our course, but also equally the talent and retaining that talent in Scotland is really important. So those three things I think are really, really essential to successful AI in Scotland. Brilliant. Can I ask you about, obviously, you work in the world of consultancy.

22:08I'm keen to understand what type of advice you give to businesses who want to incorporate AI into their operations and want to benefit from AI technology. So I think I'm in a very fortunate position to work for a company like EY, which has an audit heritage, because we're very, very, very good at assessing how people are doing things against rules. So if I look at some of the ways we help our clients, we have a core set of services, which is all around responsible AI. And I'll give you a really good example. We've recently worked with AstraZeneca. Their global leader is a lady called Cindy Hoots.

22:48She's just amazing. She's the CTO of AstraZeneca. And what Cindy Hoots was very, very keen to do was make sure that any AI that was being deployed in AstraZeneca kept their employees safe, their customers safe, and kept the board safe. Okay, so that they were deploying it in the right manner. Now, when you think about AI in the pharma sector, I mean, it's advancing at a rate of knots. People are moving away from 10 years of drug discovery work into 10 months. They're going from wet labs where they used to have to test everything with special pharmacists to now software designing and developing that.

23:25And I think the appropriateness of AI has to be assessed. So what we do is we do an AI health check. We'll come into an organization and we'll go, tell us everything you're doing. will take a moment in time's understanding of their governance of AI. We'll help them understand the explainability of the AI they're using. And we'll also help them educate internally, educate the board, educate their CEO, educate the staff who are managing all of this. But also what we do is we'll help them find the right talent to continue on that AI journey. So a whole bunch of responsible AI technology support services that we provide.

24:07And with our audit heritage, I find it's a great conversation starter to just say, listen, let's just check what you're doing against some of the standards we're seeing. We really need to get this right. Yeah, absolutely. Is there an appetite for this stuff? Are you seeing a reaction from businesses? Gareth, I mean, honestly, to have an organization like us come in and say, you're doing everything right, gives them a sense of relief because you're almost working in a vacuum at the moment with AI. AI is... It's FOMO, isn't it? AI FOMO. Yeah, totally. That's brilliant, Gareth. Brilliant. And so I think that organisations need that level of comfort from an external source to say, you've got this right, you've got your governance right, you've got your management of this right, you've got your talent right.

24:53And by the way, here's a few more opportunities to use it that you haven't thought about based on all of the great work we've done with other clients, this is some of the best practice. So yes, I think, Gareth, it's important to have that spread of best practice because we don't have the standardization, the regulation that we need. In the absence of that, I think best practice is something that we can certainly support. Yeah. Would you second that, Carenza, in terms of what you're seeing? Yeah, I absolutely would. I mean, I think thinking about the whole scope is so exciting and thinking about how you zero in, how you support people who have the appetite, but not the knowledge, how you think about making the conversation accessible as well in terms of the language you use.

25:38Because, you know, whether it's the technical side of it from a technology perspective, or the technical side of it from a regulatory perspective, there's so much that's actually quite baffling if it's not your field. And actually, I would go so far as to say, and I don't know if Katrina will share this with me, but I work in data and AI, and I absolutely would not consider myself to be an expert in all aspects of it. And so there's so much I'm still learning as we go through all of this. And there's new things that are evolving all the time. So I think it's partly an education piece, and we can walk hand in hand.

26:11But where we do have specialist knowledge, I think it's really important to lean in and help others. Brilliant, you said. And I think, Corinne, on that point, you said it's such a broad field, absolutely vast field and then you've got to consider the additional technologies that are that are coming to the fore like quantum we did a fantastic project with bt around quantum and deployed a quantum key distribution system within ey between our two offices a qkd line with you guys yes um and uh and that's gone really well i mean it's it's quite remarkable ai and the overlap with other emerging technologies and i think no one person could be an expert in all of it but you can be an expert in governance you can be an expert in the talent around it you can be so so i i think we're seeing a lot of different specialisms there within the field of ai in business yeah that's true i've been thinking about data quality for example and and how you actually make sure that you have that at the fore and how you actually help people understand what they can and can't use and breaking down the regulations and you talked about that gdpr is a great enabler and it's actually working really well for us and it's been adopted far more effectively than I think anyone might have thought before it came in.