EP 6 — Penn State’s Bruce Desmarais on Social Data Analytics and Combating Misinformation

Lowe's deployed an AI companion across its stores and expected new hires to adopt it first. Tenured associates who spent years in a single department became the fastest adopters instead, using the tool to confidently serve customers across all categories in a 100,000 square foot store. Chandhu Nair, SVP of Stores, Data, AI and Innovation at Lowe's, walks Prat through the rollout of Milo Companion, the 60% accuracy starting point, the voice pivot that came from real floor feedback, and his new book's thesis that AI represents the third great enterprise decoupling. Topics discussed: The Enterprise Brain thesis on AI as the third decoupling

In this episode of The AI Data Fabric Show, Prat Moghe speaks with Andrew Clyne, former CDO at Comcast, Visa, Expedia, CenturyLink, and other large enterprises. Andrew traces how his career in data began not in Silicon Valley but in the US Air Force, where he discovered that the command and control systems for different military branches used incompatible data elements. Tail numbers had different digit formats across the Navy and Air Force. His solution was to push for a data dictionary and data standards, a problem that remains unsolved in most enterprises today. Andrew breaks down what he sees as the defining challenge for CDOs right now: adopting AI at the pace of AI. With board and shareholder pressure to deliver top-line growth while cutting costs and headcount, CDOs face a relentless multi-front battle. His advice centers on three things that will rule the day for the next five years: reading the RPM of the company and adjusting accordingly, leading with empathy under pressure, and keeping teams motivated when budget cuts are constant. Technical expertise, he argues, is now table stakes. Topics Discussed: - Building first military command and control data standards - How Visa's pre-IPO consolidation drove data governance - Influencing Cloudera's Impala to migrate off SAS - CDO role shift from cost center to top-line growth driver - Adopting AI at enterprise speed vs. board pressure - Reading company RPM to drive transformation without popping the clutch - Blockchain and agentic AI agent-to-agent payment authentication - K-shaped economy risk from AI and robotics displacement

Kjersten Margaret Moody's 4% sales uplift in Southeast Asia came from a data combination most CDOs overlook: cell phone movement patterns merged with internal distribution data. The insight was brutally simple yet invisible until the data revealed it. Convenience stores next to elementary schools were being restocked for night shift workers instead of parents picking up kindergarteners. Kjersten Moody, now CEO of North America at Elai and former CDO at Unilever, State Farm, and Prudential, walks through the mechanics of this win and why it represents a broader problem: most business strategies don't actually require AI to succeed, which means your data initiatives lack the forcing function of incentive alignment. Her governance framework from State Farm cuts through the bureaucracy paralysis: cars have brakes so they can go fast, not slow down. Topics discussed: Merging cell phone movement data with internal distribution systems to identify restocking mismatches by location type

At Generac, Neil Bhandar expans his 20+ year career into IT. Previously at P&G, JPMorgan, and other companies, he operated within business functions. He's a business executive who works in data, not the other way around. This explains how he sees the same sawtooth pattern in inventory replenishment and credit card balances, and launched Tide Coldwater to 4% market share gains in under four weeks.

Ajay Sabhlok made architecture the gatekeeper for every IT decision at Rubrik, not a review function that validates choices after they're made. This structural shift meant architects evaluated tools, processes, and vendor capabilities before budget conversations happened. The outcome: scaling from 700 employees to IPO without the shadow IT proliferation or rationalization projects that typically emerge when business units control procurement.