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Mike Hyde, Chief Data Officer, Trainline

Mike Hyde, Chief Data Officer, Trainline

Describe your career to date

Having started in applied data science around the turn of the century, I rode the wave of the “big data” revolution during the early 2000s as a Strategy Consultant. Since then, I have taken on leadership roles in various tech companies, building out data teams and infrastructure across the whole data landscape. This has included building data at Skype as it went through the mobile revolution, building Data Teams for Teams at Microsoft, and leading the data function for Facebook (now Meta) during its massive growth and expansion in London. I now sit on the Executive team at Trainline, helping to run the company and building a state-of-the-art data capability which underpins our European expansion and UK customer innovation.

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

Building data literacy is an always-on activity. As part of a tech organisation, we have a range of existing skills, with some very highly skilled technical engineers who are looking to learn new tools and techniques, through to regular business professionals who are looking to self-serve. We have rolled out on online training platform in the last 12 months and delivered over 5,000 hours of data training. We are continuously building out our data tool set to make it easier for everyone at any level to self-serve data and analysis.

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

The rapid changes in artificial intelligence (AI) have created amazing opportunities for businesses of all sizes to innovate and apply the new capabilities. As breakthroughs in the underlying research continue at pace, more new innovations and applications for our users become possible, allowing us to address more ambitious and complex customer needs. In these very rapidly evolving situations, I think it is important to experiment and learn fast, as it is the best way to discover what works for any one company. At Trainline, we moved quickly to create an internal AI-lab last summer and have created frameworks to allow us to deploy large language model (LLM)-based solutions in our infrastructure. This lets us experiment with new user experiences in a privacy-first way, while controlling the flow of data and the underlying costs and processing. While it is still early days, we have live LLM solutions in production, and a vision for how AI will help to shape the future of rail travel.

Mike Hyde
has been included in:

100 Brands 2023 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)