Headline Partner

Jon Francis, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, General Motors

Describe your career to date

I have spent 30 years in data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) across some of the best brands in world: Amazon, Expedia, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Nike. I have been CDAO at Starbucks and I am now CDAO at General Motors.

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

There are three areas where we are developing data literacy:

Create self-service data assets and user-friendly applications to get to that data.

Education and training means empowerment to the team.

Celebrate insights and learnings from data for the enterprise via videos, newsletters, and insights at meetings.

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

When it comes to AI solutions, we need to focus first on what business problems move and then what ML or AI solutions to utilize. There are too many shiny objects right now that are grounded in meaningful business problems, so we need to focus on our needs.

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

I believe a key challenge will be getting the organization to embrace data-driven decisioning, and improving our intellectual curiosity by what the data says to create a hypothesis driven culture.

Jon Francis
has been included in:

100 Brands 2022 (USA)
100 Brands 2024 (USA)

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