Introducing the Dow Jones AI Center of Excellence
By Kabir Seth and Alex Siegman.
Dow Jones has one of the world’s most comprehensive and respected collections of industry-specific content and data.
This data can help us paint a picture of the world. Of its markets, its history — and its potential. This data allows us to build new products and tools that our members and our clients and members find not only valuable, but necessary.
This data is the door to the future, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key to unlocking it.
And, with that in mind, we are pleased to formally introduce the Dow Jones AI Center of Excellence (AI CoE)!
The AI Center of Excellence (CoE) is a resource designed to spur growth and help Dow Jones reach our potential as an industry leader by helping teams successfully leverage Artificial Intelligence to suit their existing needs, roadmap, budget and OKRs.
Before we move on: Please do not hesitate to contact Alex Siegman or Kabir Seth with any questions or comments about the AI CoE. We are always happy to hear from you!
What Is AI CoE?
The AI CoE is built upon three pillars: AI Sprint, AI Education and AI Evangelists.
The AI Sprint is part design thinking, part agile sprint, meant to help any given team successfully evaluate and implement an AI related project.
AI Evangelists, recruited from across Dow Jones, are meant to gauge their respective team’s knowledge, educate their team as to AI capabilities, get them thinking about how they might leverage AI in their domain, and encourage collaboration with the Center of Excellence company-wide.
Our AI education efforts provide various channels by which we aim to educate Dow Jones employees, meeting them wherever they are in their AI knowledge.
How We Got Here:
There was never any doubt that AI has wide-reaching implications for Dow Jones, but there was a lack of cohesive process with regards to evaluating when, where, why and how AI might prove advantageous.
Whereas for other areas of the Dow Jones business there is a standard and rigorous process by which we evaluate what products or projects are to be designed, developed and deployed, AI was often considered a perpetual moonshot — exempt from traditional program, project and product management procedures.
As a result, we saw countless AI-powered work being done in silos across the company, seldom reaching their full potential.
That realization ultimately spurned recognition for a need to increase collaboration (via our AI evangelists), embrace customer advocacy and design thinking (via our AI sprints) and encourage greater understanding of what AI can and cannot do (via our AI education initiatives).
Where We’ve Been:
To date we have initiated a host of discussions across various teams and departments at Dow Jones, examining when, where and why AI might be appropriate. Areas of engagement thus far include AdTech, internal operations and our consumer content management systems.
Where We’re Going:
In the coming months we will proceed with our ongoing engagements. In particular, we will be working to leverage ML to join disparate data sets for our AdTech department and with our Editorial Tools team to uncover the power of image recognition in investigative journalism.
We also look forward to commencing new opportunities to drive AI adoption and further Dow Jones as a data organization, and we look forward to sharing more information as the CoE begins its work in earnest.
Alas, we are pleased to formally introduce the Dow Jones AI Center of Excellence!
Again, please do not hesitate to reach out to Alex Siegman or Kabir Seth.
