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Zoher Karu, Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Blue Shield of California

Zoher Karu, Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Blue Shield of California

Describe your career to date

My career has not followed a straight path. I have been fortunate enough to work in multiple jobs in multiple industries in multiple countries. However, the common theme over has been problem-solving and driving organizational change and improving consumer experiences through data and analytics.

My educational start was a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, with an emphasis on biomedical research. However, I never worked in engineering but instead my first job was consulting at McKinsey & Company. Then, wanting to get my hands a bit dirty, I worked in several startups ranging from tracking customer shopping paths in store environments with video analysis to driving growth through better branding and marketing to unstructured voice analytics in call center environments.

I then took on more enterprise-wide analytics leadership roles in retail, e-commerce, and banking with Sears Holdings, eBay, and Citi where I had the chance to implement large-scale analytical solutions such as real-time predictive models and personalization in digital channels. Recently, I joined the data-rich world of healthcare in a mission-driven effort to apply data and analytics to improving people’s lives. Sitting at the intersection of business, analytics, and technology has been extremely rewarding.

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

Data literacy can take many different forms, but at its heart is the ability to democratize the access and use of data to help drive decision-making. One cannot become a data-driven organization if the insights or data is holed up in just one part of the organization.

In my current role, we are pushing to put data in people’s hands largely, initially at least, through a carefully curated set of well-designed interactive dashboards. Success is measured entirely by usage. If the information is valuable and easy to use and addresses key business needs, it will be used. Lack of usage suggests either tactics like open office hours to drive usage, or a miss on understanding the business needs. A curated set of information helps drive a single source of truth and eliminate what another person termed as internal “data brawls”.

Recent advances in large language models and generative AI open new unstructured ways to get access to information. The key, no matter what technology is in place, is to ask the right questions.

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?

My vision for data and analytics consists of two primary pillars:

To partner with business stakeholders to accelerate meeting their business goals and objectives by bringing the power of data and analytics to the table; and

To continue to build new data and analytics capabilities that could be applied to future problems.

For the first pillar, my team shares goals with business partners to best align incentives and outcomes. For the second pillar, we are continuing to build new capabilities in:

Data management and governance such as lineage, quality, definitions, ownership;
Creating single views of customers through data ingestion and integration;
Opening access to key insights through self-service dashboards or other tools;
Setting up AI and ML infrastructures and;
Focusing on driving automation on insight generation or decision-making

We take a business-focused lens to everything we do, recognizing that applying new data and analytics techniques is much more of a change management exercise rather than a pure technology exercise.

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

I am leading the coordination and development of our conventional AI solutions, including machine learning and natural language processing. I am also leading an overall governance process for generative AI which includes guiding principles, policies, and stage-gate approvals. I work in partnership with several other functions such as privacy, compliance, security, and architecture. I am also aggregating the status of adoption of our pilot and production AI initiatives.

Zoher Karu
has been included in:

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

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Zoher Karu, Vice President, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Blue Shield of California

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.