David Cushman — HFS Research[00:10]
Hi Lawrence, thanks for joining me today. Just tell the audience your full name, your role, and where you work.
Lawrence Ampofo — Vodafone Intelligence Services (_VOIS)[00:10]
No problem, thanks very much for having me. So my name’s Lawrence Ampofo. I’m at Vodafone _VOIS, which is an acronym for Vodafone Intelligence Services. And I’m part of the commercial service tower. So in there we have B2B and B2C, and what I’m responsible for is the technology hub within that particular service tower. So that’s me at Vodafone.
David Cushman — HFS Research[00:25]
So we’ve been talking about generative AI, and particularly about how you govern it within the organization — lots of talk about responsible AI, and so on. What are the differences with this arrival of this strange Gen AI thing versus any other technology that an enterprise has had to handle?
Lawrence Ampofo — Vodafone Intelligence Services (_VOIS)[01:02]
I think with generative AI, the difference that I’m seeing internally — and also with the work that we’re doing looking at the market changes as well — is that Gen AI really is a general-purpose technology. Very different to other large technology waves we were speaking about, like, for example, cloud. Generative AI really permeates all of our business operations. So I think that’s really causing us as a business to think more deeply about, number one, how do we operate as a business? What are our operating models, and what are the core processes that are going to be touched or could be enhanced by generative AI? We’re starting to think a lot about our customers as well — so what challenges are they facing into, what processes and different business operations does generative AI affect for them, and how can we best support them? And then I think also, from a different perspective — not from an inside-out but from an outside-in perspective — so from a regulatory perspective, how do we then need to orient our business to better face into maybe some of the headwinds, some of the opportunities?
David Cushman — HFS Research[02:17]
And so from a current-status point of view, do you have the kind of governance in place to handle that?
Lawrence Ampofo — Vodafone Intelligence Services (_VOIS)[02:17]
I think as a business — we were talking in the green room about governance more generally and about generative AI — with general-purpose technologies, it’s over and above, say, RPA, it’s over and above automation. Of course it’s part of that artificial intelligence strategy, that artificial intelligence stack. But generative AI, and particularly when you’re starting to think about agentic workflows, these different bots that can start to make decisions by themselves — of course with a human in the loop, but they can start to make decisions — that governance layer, how we start to think about governance, is incredibly important. Whereas in the past we would have very strong… and of course, you know, we’re critical national infrastructure, so we’re part of a highly regulated industry. So the way that we would think about, number one, for example, how we capture, how we handle, how we deal with customer data, business data, and data of all kinds across all of these business operations — we would have very strong governance layers across those to be able to support them. With Gen AI now, and of course the way the speed of the market is moving, we have to think about: OK, not only do we have the governance in place, but how do we operationalize that at the speed of the market? So it’s certainly something that we’re facing into and that we’re thinking about very, very strongly, but it’s also something that we are actively operationalizing — so bringing in technologies and working with our partner organizations, both academic and external, really working with them to think about, OK, how can we do almost like a crawl, walk, run approach? How can we start off slowly, but also learn very quickly from other use cases and from our own data? So it’s very much an incremental approach while we look in the market, but very much it’s a shift in landscape that we’re dealing with in terms of governance.
David Cushman — HFS Research[04:19]
OK, thank you very much.
