Quantexa’s Jamie Hutton on the ‘data trust deficit’ experienced by most organisations and the importance of a strong data foundation.
Jamie Hutton is co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) at decision intelligence company Quantexa.
Founded in 2016, Quantexa recently formed a partnership with Microsoft, where Quantexa’s AI-powered data intelligence platform became available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Hutton has years of experience using big data technology to uncover complex criminal activity across the financial sector and before joining Quantexa, he was financial crime solutions Director at SAS and head of insurance fraud solutions at Detica.
In his current role at Quantexa, Hutton is responsible for the R&D teams that build the company’s decision intelligence platform, which he says unifies datasets to allow organisations to have a trusted data foundation to help them make efficient decisions. Among the various applications of the platform, Hutton says that it has been used to detect money laundering activity, large-scale fraud and human trafficking across both the public and private sector.
In his day-to-day role, he says he evenly splits his time between managing and directing the company’s engineering teams and meeting with clients, prospects and partners.
‘The reality is that most organisations are facing a data trust deficit’
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
The IT landscape is changing at an unprecedented rate, much driven by the world of AI which has really exploded over the last 18 months. Quantexa has been in the AI space since its inception, one of the most interesting aspects of generative AI – or large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT – is the ability to bring AI to the masses. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that my nearly 80-year-old father had a ChatGPT account before I did, but this goes to show how AI is being democratised.
As a software company we need to always be up to speed with the latest in the AI world and have been quick to adopt LLMs into both our platform as well as our developer workflows.
We are finding many of our customers are still in the early stages of leveraging generative AI and are struggling to realise value because LLMs are amazing at understanding language and the outside world, yet they clearly have no knowledge of your internal data. This is where Quantexa comes in. By unifying all of an organisation’s data and making this available to the LLM, the full power of generative AI can be unlocked.
What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry? How are you addressing it in your company?
All industries recognise the importance of using data to drive better business outcomes and realise actual business value. But the reality is that most organisations are facing a data trust deficit. This simultaneously undermines IT leadership’s best efforts to be data-led, but also causes problems for the organisation by driving up costs, increasing risk and indecision.
In 2022, we did a survey that found fewer than half of IT decision-makers believe that their entire organisation has trust in their data’s accuracy. One in four decision-makers (27pc) said that their organisations were not maximising value from their data. This is largely because they have an overwhelming volume of data to contend with that is often locked in silos. The metaphor I use is that there’s a river of data flowing through their organisation and all they have are oxbow lakes to siphon off small portions of it. It is clear to me that having a strong and trusted data foundation is critical to enabling effective decisions that allow organisations to operate efficiently, plan for the future and grow.
Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity and it is important to understand that computer hardware is a massive consumer of energy, especially with the advances in AI. At Quantexa, we look at this problem in two ways: we partner with cloud providers which use 100pc renewable energy to power their data centres and we also focus on our own software to ensure it is as efficient as possible with its use of hardware. This is not only good from a sustainability perspective but also reduces the total cost of ownership of our system as it requires less hardware to run than competing solutions.
‘CTOs and CDOs are wary of any suggestion that generative AI will be a silver bullet’
What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world and your industry specifically? Which of these trends are you most excited about and why?
Although there is a widespread acceptance of the importance of data to enabling the next generation of business decision intelligence, for most CTOs and CDOs [chief data officer] it can feel an impossible challenge. Everyone I speak to has at some point been stung by empty promises about the impact of every transformational technology. The biggest trend I see is vendors following through on their promise to digitally transform their client’s processes. A 2022 New Vantage study found that while 97pc of organisations invest in data initiatives, only 26.5pc report having successfully created a data-driven organisation. To reuse my river analogy, most organisations simply are simply siphoning off silos of data from that fast-flowing river. True data-enabled decision intelligence remains the goal of every organisation I speak to.
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly causing a huge change in our industry, and we will see widespread adoption of this technology in the near term. Generative AI specifically will drastically shorten the time across all business functions that it takes for professionals to get actionable insights from their data.
However, it will take time for organisations to see the impact on their balance sheet. It’s also true that CTOs and CDOs are wary of any suggestion that generative AI will be a silver bullet. The amount of data being created in the public and private sectors rises exponentially every day. Which means that despite it having the potential to act as an organisation’s greatest strength, data can also act as the greatest barrier to its AI and broader transformation efforts. The trend I’m most excited to see delivered in the near term is organisations cleaning and making sense of their data and breaking down silos to give organisational wide access to different business groups that can benefit from it.
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