Louis DiCesari, global head of data, analytics and AI, Levi Strauss & Co

What has been your path to power?

I joke that my path to power started with being the annoying child always asking “why?”. Many people get into analytics through tech and engineering backgrounds, but I came into the field through the consumer behaviour path. I’ve always been fascinated by why people make the decisions they do and what brands can do to influence those decisions, making life better in the process.

As my career grew, I started to realise that “how” is just important as “why”. Working for big companies – Prudential Financial, Vodafone, and now Levi’s - I’ve had to figure out ways to operationalise change at scale. Whether it’s recommending the right alternative when a life insurance policy is coming to an end, crafting the right retention offer for a customer who is leaving for another telecommunications provider, or figuring out which inventory to ship to what store in what quantities, the analytics are only as good as the organisation’s ability to implement and act on them.

I’m proud to have led teams that have driven lasting change: injecting behavioural economics to actuarial projections; freeing up tens of millions of dollars per year in capital reserves; optimizing retention offers to profitably retain millions of customers worth billions of Euros during some of the most serious competitive threats in telco; and now helping an iconic brand come out of the pandemic a stronger company with profitable price increases, less discounting, a stronger assortment, and more advanced eCommerce capabilities, including AI-based recommendations and visual search. We’ve been successful because we’ve stayed close to the business problems, nimble in approach, and relentless in focus.