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Sanjeevan Bala, Group Chief Data and AI Officer, ITV

Sanjeevan Bala, Group Chief Data and AI Officer, ITV

Describe your career to date

I worked in management and strategy consulting; spending time in America and Asia Pacific in consulting firms gave me a strong foundational set of skills that I have developed as part of a toolkit. You learn to shift contexts across industries, spot patterns that cross over, and take a more holistic approach to creating growth opportunities.

I then worked for start-ups and scale-ups. Working in scrappy, funded start-ups and scale-ups broadened my expertise as you need to traverse every aspect of a business. Leading highly diverse, cross functional teams, there is no playbook to follow, so you learn to assimilate information quickly and evolve your approach to what you are seeing in the market. The entrepreneurial opportunity to scale across multiple territories in months develops skills in agility and adaptability. Constantly iterating and evolving how you operate. You develop a delusionally optimistic mindset and become skilled at focusing on where the market is going compared to where the market is today.

During my time working client-side, I learned to develop compelling visions and strategies but also to have direct responsibility for delivery. My experience in consulting and scale-ups helped tremendously, but perhaps the biggest learning from this phase is the value of executive and board storytelling to help create consensus and take people on the journey. The industry often talks about digital literacy, but I think it is far more important that transformational professionals hone their business literacy and are able to communicate and operate with the executive committee and boards. After all, securing funding is one thing, carefully sequencing and managing expectations is another skill needed to successfully pull off a transformation.

I learned that, in my roles working for advisory and NED, sitting on a FTSE board provides you with a 10,000ft view of a business and a more nuanced understanding of the increasingly complex stakeholder ecosystem businesses operate in. These last two phases have helped refine purpose and the need to develop next generation talent.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

As a creative integrated producer distributor, data literacy was never going to be something the organisation readily engaged in. We took a value-based approach to our data strategy and, in doing so, could map the benefits directly to revenue and EBIT. This created the catalyst to develop stories with different business stakeholders on the benefits of improving and learning new skills (with data) and how this can directly help them create a greater impact in the organisation. With every team different and being a highly creative organisation, we set about developing role personas that the business co developed, each role persona allowed us to map and create a development plan that would help upskill colleagues.

We banned the term data literacy as no one wants to be labelled illiterate and instead focused on upskilling and development. The training was then rolled out by taking a point department problem (with value associated with it) and partnered with ODI to develop bespoke training associated with the business units to make it relevant and applied. This created a deeper level of engagement as business users found direct value in the training and development focused on their needs and value cases. Our tag line was the triple win: A win for the strategy as we could demonstrate our contribution to value, a win for the stakeholder as they were empowered and able to deliver initial value but then continue to map and drive a value based approach, and a win for the executive committee as they were able to see the strategy through the lens of the profit and loss.

How are you preparing your organisation for AI adoption and change management?

With our creative focus and culture, we set out a three-stage approach to artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular generative AI.

Education: With so much hype and near-daily new widget launching, we created a series of education events to help colleagues across the global business understand the opportunity and threats posed by AI. We took this development across the entire business from our board to new hires. This created a foundation level understanding that balanced the opportunity with the risks.

Empower: Given Content IP is the core of our business, we worked closely with General Counsel to establish a set of guardrails and considerations that we socialised with the business. This empowered colleagues to embrace AI opportunities, whilst protecting our IP and becoming more aware of the risks associated with bias, leakage, misrepresentation, and black box issues with vendor solutions.

Experiment: By running business unit level workshops, we started to map business drive use cases for AI to help focus on. We prioritised these based on value and ease to help hone down our investments on opportunities that had the potential of ten times returns versus wasting resources on projects that would render marginal results and value.

Parallel to this, we have a group change unit that has adopted the PROSCI method to change which focused the approach through the eyes of the stakeholder first. This unit is called upon as we implement, now we are in the experiment phase of prioritising proof of concepts to help understand and quantity the potential benefit.

Sanjeevan Bala
has been included in:

100 Brands 2019 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2022 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
No. 4 100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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Sanjeevan Bala, Group Chief Data and AI Officer, ITV

Join our membership network of over 250 global senior data and AI leaders.

The trusted global collaboration and intelligence platform for data leaders.

Join our membership network of over 250
global senior data and AI leaders.