Kshitij Jain

Kshitij Jain, Head of UK/Europe Analytics and Global Chief Strategy Officer, EXL Analytics

Describe your career to date

 

I joined EXL in 2006 as a founding member of the data and analytics practice. EXL is a NASDAQ listed firm, which provides data, analytics, and digital operations services to its clients globally. The organisation has an annual revenue of approximately $1.6 billion (2023 guidance) and a market cap of approx. $5 billion. 

Since joining the organisation, we have managed to grow the data and analytics business from scratch to what is now a $500 million-plus and 7,000 professional-strong entity. I have had the privilege of taking on different roles throughout, and have worked with clients in the US, UK, Europe, South Africa, and Asian markets.  

In my current capacity, I lead the data and analytics business for UK and Europe; a team of 700-plus professionals solving complex business problems for our clients across banking, insurance, utilities, retail, media, and hi-tech industries. I am also the chief strategy officer for the business globally and am responsible for charting the future course to ensure a high growth and high impact trajectory.  

Before EXL, I worked with Bank of America within M&A banking.  

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your clients and on the industry as a whole?  

 

The industry will need to do a balancing act between the risk and opportunities that generative artificial intelligence (genAI) presents. There is no denying the opportunity that AI in general and genAI in particular presents – across efficiency, process transformation, and customer impact.  However, it also presents risks – reputational and regulatory exposure, technical redundancy if you back the wrong stack, customer impact, and more. From a data perspective, this is an opportunity to fix the foundations – data and model governance, infrastructure, and machine learning operations. One more challenge I foresee is increased scrutiny on energy consumption by data centres and cloud spend management in the enterprise. 

How are you developing the data literacy of a) your own organisation and b) your clients?

 

In my experience, data literacy improves meaningfully and sustainably, once perceived as being key to both personal and organisational success. To achieve this in our client organisations, we spend conscious time and effort linking data concepts to business outcomes and demystifying the data jargon in general. The less esoteric we make it, the more likely the adoption and buy-in. Within EXL, our team consists of cross-industry and cross-functional data and analytics professionals; we keep abreast of the latest data trends, regulations, use cases, and technology, but most importantly we create a mechanism for knowledge sharing and learning from success and failure. 

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

 

The introduction of genAI has been a watershed moment for the world in general, but in particular for AI and data professionals. In the enterprise context, we are at the top of the genAI hype cycle, and the adoption curve is fraught with challenges. We are treating is an opportunity to invest in the right ecosystem (partnerships), organisational guardrails (model and data governance), and foundational elements (such as data infrastructure) to set up for long term success. We are also focusing on reskilling our own employees (and helping our clients) with the demands of the future, such as prompt engineering. 

 

Kshitij Jain
Kshitij Jain
has been included in:
  • 100 Enablers 2023 (EMEA)
  • 100 Enablers 2024 (EMEA)

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