Building Global AI Capability

Historically, the international fundraising group has been organized in a very decentralized way, with each local entity operating more or less autonomously. While this has allowed for a highly adaptable approach to local market conditions, it has limited the ability of the wider group to derive optimal benefit from certain economies of scale, especially around sharing best-practices, insights, tools and expertise. In addition this led to the challenge to attract (international) top talent, especially in Data, AI & Analytics.

Together with all market organizations, we helped build the organization’s International Analytic Hub, a true Center of Excellence for Data, AI, and Analytics to leverage the best models, insights, tools and talent across the group. The solution is designed to accomplish three core objectives:

1. A global organization, including governance, ways of working best practices and value tracking
2. A shared Data & AI technology platform to rapidly scale and share best-practice ML models and data across the group
3. A common capability for recruiting, training and upskilling data scientists, analysts, business leaders and marketing teams.

Roll-out is ongoing, but already the group has outperformed a number of KPIs within the core objectives. Common global governance standards have been established, including ways of working, best-practice sharing and international value tracking. We’ve built a powerful international data and machine learning platform to pool assets, standardized definitions and developed best-practice models at scale. And a number of market organizations have recruited and trained talent to work at a higher international level and provide training in Data & AI for business leaders across markets.