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At the recent Gartner CFO & Finance Executive Conference in National Harbor, Pigment’s Jay Peir sat down with Kevin Snyder, Director, Data Science, at DIRECTV, to discuss finance transformation, AI, and more.
At DIRECTV, Kevin leads the development of forecasts on churn KPIs, to understand customer behaviors and leverage those insights to improve profitability.
He doesn’t describe himself as a ‘finance person’, but his experience gives him a unique and interesting perspective on how finance operates today - and how it might do tomorrow.
Below is a summary of the conversation.
What is your advice for people looking to drive finance transformations in their own organizations?
Kevin’s message is just go.
While you should be focussed on results, the journey is equally important. You’re going to make mistakes, and nothing will be perfect out of the box - but that’s a good thing.
There are any number of vendors that you could choose to implement at your company. The only way to make a success of a new tool is to properly dive in - and try and have fun while you’re doing it.
On this topic, he called out Pigment specifically - DIRECTV is a customer. When Kevin’s boss mentioned they’d be implementing a new platform, at first he rolled his eyes.
But once he got his hands on the tool, and understood the different ways of working it was going to enable, he got excited.
He developed a proof-of-concept that, while imperfect, was impressive enough to secure buy-in from DirecTV’s leadership to roll Pigment out across the whole finance department (and potentially functions beyond, like marketing).
How are you thinking about incorporating AI into your roadmap?
Kevin wants to leverage AI to help DIRECTV understand what they’re missing in their plan. He thinks the key to doing that is having all your data and planning done in one platform - like Pigment, for example.
Once you layer AI on top of that combination, you can start asking questions about data and performance.
Also - start small. You’re not going to automate everything right away, but that’s OK. Focus on small, quantifiable gains first.
Data is going to be the first thing you need to focus on.
Who is going to be working in finance moving forward?
Already, finance departments are changing to take advantage of what newer tools and technologies can achieve.
Kevin spoke about the value of embedding IT and data science/analytics talent within lines of business - it makes for a much more effective way of working.
The shift isn’t happening overnight, but it is happening. Those with long careers ahead of them should be thinking about digital upskilling - it’s going to be a real competitive differentiator.
Kevin also mentioned that with more of the ‘routine’ tasks finance fulfils being automated, there’s going to be increased weight placed on those who are able to think creatively. Thinking ‘outside the box’ isn’t a strength of AI systems, so if you can do it you’re about to get much more valuable.
What are you excited about?
DIRECTV’s leaders are all-in on AI, and share Kevin’s ‘just go’ attitude - and that makes going to work exciting.
They’re not a startup, but they have a startup attitude. Instead of throwing bodies at a problem, they try to figure out how to just do it better.
