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Harish Rao, Vice President, Data and Analtyics, Costco Wholesale

Harish Rao, Vice President, Data and Analtyics, Costco Wholesale

Describe your career to date

I started my career as a software engineer working for IBM and developed an interest in data and applying statistical methods to finding patterns and uncovering hidden insights. I have spent more than two decades helping companies create value using data and more recently leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning methods to solve complex business problems to drive revenue growth, manage margin, and improve member experience.

How are you developing the data literacy of your organization, including the skills of your data teams and of your business stakeholders?

My data team goes through regular training to keep up with the industry including how to narrate stories using data. We leverage multiple learning platforms to ensure every team member goes through 40 hours of training every year. We leverage data governance as a venue to drive increase literacy of data around data quality, how to build reports to answer business questions, and more.

What role do you play in building and delivering conventional artificial intelligence solutions, including machine learning models? Are you also involved in your organization’s adoption of generative AI?

My data science team. is responsible for building AI and machine learning-based solutions to solve business problems. We start by doing the analysis to quantify the opportunity, then we build ensemble models and show the best value based on outcome. This is typically run in parallel for a period with the business to ensure accuracy; model and data drift is monitored before it is signed off. This brings the business into the process and ensures a smoother deployment of solutions. I am looking at ways to adopt generative AI (genAI) to solve business needs and currently doing multiple evaluations to determine the value.

What are the key challenges to your data function that you are facing as its leader?

We are at the transition point to move away from generating insights into implementing data products that are AI enabled to support operational needs. This will be hugely impactful as it fundamentally requires a mindset shift of our users to lean more on data and insights to drive operational processes. Capturing the new solution’s value is imperative as the expectations are to measure and present value on an ongoing basis. Training is foundational to ensure adoption and drive successful outcome.

Harish Rao
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (USA)
100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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Harish Rao, Vice President, Data and Analtyics, Costco Wholesale

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.