It was a great event: On September 18, almost 30 CIOs, partners, and hosts gathered to talk about the progress of artificial intelligence and IT’s role on the board. Two companies had invited us – OTTO with CIO Michael Müller-Wünsch and his team, and Kuehne+Nagel with CIO Martin Kolbe and his colleagues.
As different as the two companies are, as different as their experiences are in implementing and working with AI, especially GenAI, they share the same challenges and similar approaches to solving them.
Müller-Wünsch, always referred to as “MüWü” in the CIO community, is not just an AI expert with a doctoral degree. Back in 2014, long before GenAI, MüWü and his team were already working with the wealth of data available to such a large retailer and one of the world’s largest mail order companies. MüWü also told the nearly 30 participants in Hamburg on Wednesday that working with data is actually part of the DNA of the retailer, which was founded 75 years ago and whose catalogs have been a fixture in German households for many decades. This is how OTTO laid the foundation for its dedicated work with GenAI. OTTO was one of the first companies to adapt GenAI and test it in numerous use cases – and continues to do so (see OTTO’s ogGPT). There is no final conclusion yet, but there are insights: One is that data is an essential basis for any successful work with AI. Without a sufficient amount of data of a quality that should not be underestimated, it is simply impossible to work productively with AI.
OTTO shares this insight with Kuehne+Nagel, one of the world’s most successful logistics companies, transporting enough goods by air, sea, and road and contract logistics to ship 16,500 standard containers (TEUs) and 80 Boeing 747 jumbo jets full of cargo every day. Data plays a fundamental role here, too, but as a service provider for more than 400,000 customers around the world, Kuehne+Nagel has to do a lot of groundwork, organizing digitization and automation in a world that is still largely an analog one.
What supports Kuehne+Nagel is: CIO Martin Kolbe is part of the strategic decision-making process where IT plays an important role as they are in the service industry. Kuehne+Nagel is also making good progress when it comes to innovation and AI adoption. Liis Kängsepp, member of Martin’s IT management team at Kuehne+Nagel, offered a fascinating deep dive into how Kuehne+Nagel envisiones the future with AI. We learnt from her that for Kuehne+Nagel, people are at the heart the AI adoption and the company wants to give AI to the hands of all employees, encouraging them to use AI in their everyday tasks and offering trainings.
It is clear that we can can only succeed with AI adoption if the people who work with it are better at their jobs, more productive at their jobs, and comfortable doing so without fear for their jobs and workplaces. Having said that, AI needs rules and regulations to make the tools safer and give its users legal certainty, it’s also important to decrease the risk of creating biased algorithms.
The third insight relates to the business case for AI: We should not use AI just for the sake of using AI. Before diving head over heels into AI adoption, we should really think about what kind of problems are we trying to solve and then analyze what kind of technology can help us get there. AI will only be successful if it contributes to the business and helps to create added value through new products and services that would not be possible without AI and the data it works with.
It was an exciting realization for all guests at OTTO and Kuehne+Nagel to see that both companies – certainly representative of the other companies present at the Double Feature CIOmove@Home in Hamburg – are facing similar challenges and formulating similar answers, which – last realization – are not yet final, but at best an interim conclusion. The discussion will continue, we look forward to it and thank our hosts at OTTO and Kuehne+Nagel!
Many thanks to MüWü, Martin Kolbe, their teams and all participants! See you at the next CIOmove in Barcelona, where we will visit eDreams ODIGEO on November 3.