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Professional human resources must be combined with technical capabilities. Colgate Palmolive focuses on human challenges and powers growth with AI. A strong foundation supports effectively measured exploration.
Industry experts regularly suggest that AI will augment, not replace, staff. An often-cited purpose is to help humans stay informed in the world of emerging technologies and to monitor and check the work of AIs and agents.
But what does it really look like to keep humans in the loop when you’re trying to drive business growth and innovation? After all, a focus on human checks and balances can feel like an unwelcome intrusion when you’re trying to move quickly to gain a competitive advantage.
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But for Diana Schildhaus, chief data and analytics officer at Colgate-Palmolive, there are no compromises. Professional human resources must be combined with technical capabilities.
“Humans are always involved in everything we do with AI,” she said. “This approach is how we create products that increase business value by making processes easier and faster for people, and ultimately better serve consumers.”
In a one-on-one video interview with ZDNET, she talked about five ways to support AI growth while keeping humans informed.
1. Focus on the business problem
Schildhouse’s team builds, deploys, and embeds AI-enabled solutions, including machine learning models and predictive and prescriptive analytics, across Colgate-Palmolive around the world.
She said her organization takes a human-centered approach to creating technological solutions to enterprise challenges.
“That’s how we work with companies to deeply understand what people are doing, what their processes are, and how technology can be applied to that effort,” she said.
“Our approach starts with that understanding. That could be through human-centered design. We do a lot of UX/UI research, right down to the visuals of the tools and interfaces we use, to make sure they’re intuitive and fit the way people work.”
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For example, the application of AI will give marketers faster access to better and more ideas, she said. They can test these ideas and become more confident.
“Humans in the loop are just part of how we structure how we use AI here,” she said. “People should be using AI as a tool to aid their processes, rather than just handing over the work to some tool.”
2. Work horizontally and vertically
Schildhouse suggested that the purpose of this exploratory study was targeted innovation. There’s no point in developing hundreds of different ideas if you can’t filter through them to find the gold dust.
Schildhaus: “Humans are always involved in everything we do with AI.”
colgate palmolive
She said Colgate-Palmolive is thinking about AI through a human-usable framework that includes horizontal and vertical elements.
Horizontal elements are the tools and foundations that her team provides to people within the company to help them be more productive and gain insights faster.
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Vertical elements, on the other hand, are priority areas of organizational exploration, including innovation.
“Both aspects are working at the same time. Things from the center are important and we want to pursue them methodically. We want to start with pilots and scale up globally,” she said.
“There are areas from the center that we have identified as being the biggest priorities for our company, such as innovation and demand generation, and those are the areas that we will focus more on from my team’s perspective and in terms of understanding and building solutions that can be applied across the organization.”
3. Let people explore locally
Importantly, local teams in global organizations are also able to develop and hone new use cases, Schildhaus said.
“There can be huge opportunities for team productivity and advancement in some of the horizontal tools we have available, so we want people to explore them as well,” she said.
Ensuring that humans are at the center of these technological experiments means establishing a safe and secure environment for exploration.
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At Colgate-Palmolive, this space is known as the AI Hub, an internal platform where employees can use and test AI assistants and apps.
“Very early on, our team created this hub, which was our in-house version of the Gen AI tool. We were one of the first companies to take this approach in a controlled way with guardrails. You had to go through training to access the AI hub,” she said.
“We now have a community of AI ambassadors around the world who stay connected and represent their departments and functions, and we’re seeing a lot of great ideas coming from people being able to safely explore within the sandbox and share it with the world.”
4. Establish a learning culture
Schildhaus said adopting governance is the best way to ensure business growth through AI innovation while keeping humans in the loop.
As other business leaders recently explained to ZDNET, governance, if handled correctly, can be a lever for successful adoption of emerging technologies.
“We’ve put guardrails and risk controls in everything we do to make sure people are using AI in a safe and ethical way that aligns with our values and internal guidelines,” she said, referring to Colgate-Palmolive’s approach.
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As mentioned in the previous section, employees who use AI in their business must undergo mandatory training programs. Mr. Schildhaus, who joined the company in April 2021, explained the benefits as follows.
“Colgate has a strong learning culture. One of the first things I observed when I joined was that people were excited to learn about new technology and how to develop their skills. So we mandated training, and everyone was up to speed quickly and excited about using AI,” she said.
“Training is one of the ways we think about managing governance, because you don’t want AI tools to be used freely and unsupervised. You also have to think about risk, so we’ve put good guardrails in place.”
5. Focus on measuring value
Schildhaus said the overall goal is straightforward: to enable business growth and innovation by blending analytics and AI with human understanding and insight.
“It’s about data-driven decision-making, helping business teams use analytical tools and AI to make faster and better decisions.”
When she joined the company, she needed to decide how to strategically achieve these goals and how to generate business benefits.
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Mr. Schildhaus asked important questions to determine how AI and data analytics can solve business challenges and created a framework that helps teams continuously measure the effectiveness of their solutions across several key areas.
“First of all, is what we’re doing driving revenue growth? For things like pricing analysis, those things are a little easier to measure because you can do the before and after,” she said.
“Of course, through some of the applications we build, we save time and improve time-to-insight and other general efficiencies. We also consider the creation of IP. So if we’re building the tools in-house, writing the code, owning the algorithms, that’s an asset for us. Then we consider whether to scale that approach across the market.”
