Why AI adoption is a movement, not a mandate

As the chief AI officer of Rokt, Claire Southey's job is ruled by a central guiding principle: Context is key. 

Rokt, an ecommerce tech company focused on the checkout experience, has taken that principle heart, garnering insights from millions of checkout interactions to continually refine and improve the experience. 

As the company's first chief AI officer, Southey's role at Rokt involves using relevant signals available within the transaction context to continuously improve decisioning, aiming to make advertising that "doesn't feel like advertising anymore," she said. "It actually feels helpful to the consumer." 

Taking on the role started off the goal of simply making their predictions better by using AI to leverage its well of consumer data, which Southey said is garnered from more than 10 billion transactions per year. 

• However, it quickly became about "the sense of urgency that is happening everywhere right now," she said. "The uncertainty about what the future of technology looks like, the uncertainty about potential disruption for our models." 

• An additional layer of the role is navigating data responsibility and ethics, she said. With so much consumer data, much of Southey's job involves leveraging that data to enable the most business value without sacrificing trust, she said. 

• "We're constantly balancing the long-term trust of consumers and ecommerce partners against short-term revenue opportunities," Southey said.  

While implementing the technology in Rokt's product has been relatively straightforward, the harder part of Southey's job has been figuring out where it fits in organizationally. The bigger challenge is helping an organization adapt when technological change is continuous rather than "episodic," she said.

"The way we work, the way we structure things, the skills that we value are shifting quite quickly from hard skills to soft skills," Southey said. 

Southey is encouraging employees to utilize AI more by setting AI-specific goals, such as setting up milestones that could only be achieved using agents, she said. Utilizing AI also allows employees to develop their soft skills, she said, such as adaptability, curiosity and comfort with ambiguity. "We've also been really passionate about using a movement, not a mandate, which is to say making the tools available and encouraging people to feel empowered." 

And if there's one part of the organization that was most comfortable grabbing hold of AI, it was the engineers, she said. Initially, the company kept cost controls light as a means of encouraging employees to experiment and use AI to the fullest, allowing them to understand where the tech could create the most value.

Though the company intends to optimize on costs and create "golden paths" of usage, Southey said the initial investment set the company up for success. 

"We want to take everyone on this journey," said Southey. "We're starting the journey early because we want to give people as much time as possible to experiment, learn and build confidence as AI becomes increasingly important to how we work."

Learn more about Rokt