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Vikram Mahidhar, Operating Partner, Data and Digital, Apollo Global Management

Vikram Mahidhar, Operating Partner, Data and Digital, Apollo Global Management

Describe your career to date

My career is in three chapters – management advisor, entrepreneur and investor.

1) I spent a decade in management consulting advising the c-suite on advanced analytics and data. I was part of the data analytics leadership team leading the AI business.

2) I built an AI company and successfully sold it to Genpact. Our platform automated complex business processes.

3) Today, I lead data and digital investments and value creation for Apollo’s private equity funds’ portfolio companies. I am also a member of the board of one of these companies.

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey?

Apollo funds own a diversified set of 40-plus companies – from digital-focused companies like Yahoo! to manufacturing companies like Tenneco. So, there is not one consistent answer; however, our goal is to drive data-driven EBITDA value creation in each company. I believe we are consistently doing this across over half of these companies. Use cases vary from loyalty to advertising to demand forecasting.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

I have a small team of direct reports within Apollo, but across my sphere of influence we have over 1,000 data professionals across the globe.

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

The biggest challenge I see for the industry and our companies is around data privacy. With the rapid adoption and promise of ChatGPT, companies will use internal data to train ChatGPT models. It is critical to understand and layout data privacy guidelines for the use of large-scale hosted models like ChatGPT.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

Our vision is to drive focused value creation across 15 specific growth and performance areas, as applicable in each portfolio company. We have developed a central data function at Apollo PE that creates playbooks and executes them across portfolio companies. In addition, we centrally aggregate operational data to identify trends.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organization, particularly with regard to data quality?

We have established a playbook for fixing data foundation and data quality. It is implemented across 15 portfolio companies, but data governance is always a work in progress.

Vikram Mahidhar
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