Where does innovation come from? If you’re an Elon Musk acolyte or have a well-worn copy of Steve Jobs’ biography, you may believe it stems from bold visionaries that drive innovation through the sheer force of personality, or from behind the closed doors of-top-secret research and development groups. It’s a tempting narrative for business leaders to buy into, but it misses something vital—successful innovation is a team sport.
That’s why the right approach to digital transformation is so important. It’s not just about utilizing new technologies; it’s about ensuring all employees are empowered to make innovation a part of their daily interactions with one another and with clients. That begins with laying the right foundation to connect our people, encourage them to challenge the status quo and arm them with the tools needed to be successful.
The Power of Connections
Some of the most innovative ideas don’t come from the top – or even within our own organizations. That’s why it’s essential to strengthen the connections between our internal teams and our external partners to create a more collaborative environment that encourages innovation to thrive.
At PGIM, we’ve invested in a Data Analytics and Digital Transformation team that works in collaboration with PGIM’s independent asset management affiliates, acting as both a catalyst and consultant to inject innovation into our business models. This team is creating the data infrastructure that allows our affiliates to easily access, analyze, and generate insights from in-house and third-party data. In turn, this is used to improve personalization, help shape future interactions with our clients and support lead generation.
Aside from elevating and sourcing great ideas across our internal teams, this team is also responsible for bringing in new perspectives through our external partnerships. For example, we've partnered with universities, such as the University College London and University of Chicago, as well as venture capital firms we invest in, to form an incubator for innovative ideas that we wouldn’t have the time or resources to do alone.
“The best ideas envisioned GPT-3 as a tool that could help us make sense of the data we’ve aggregated about the market, our clients and our products, helping us understand how we can meet clients’ specific needs, while being faster and more efficient”
We’ve also promoted a culture of generating innovative ideas at our yearly Innovation Week, which brings together the brightest minds from both in and outside the business to discuss new ways of finding solutions for our employees and clients. We enabled employees to immerse themselves in innovation through interactive booths that spotlighted new technologies like 3D printing, augmented reality and AI. Employees also heard from innovation and digital transformation experts from some of our peers at Morgan Stanley and BNY Mellon to better understand how they’re using technology and digital transformation to differentiate themselves in the market.
These efforts and connections have already borne fruit. We’ve brought our marketing, technology and sales teams together to create more personalized experiences for our clients in several ways, starting with our digital touch points. When clients visit our website, we’re learning about their behavior and using it to deliver a more customized interaction– whether on our website, via email or in-person meetings. By understanding where our clients are located, the type of content they are interacting with and the events and tools they are subscribing to, we’re able to further enhance their future interactions with us by elevating content and subjects of interest to them.
Culture Is Key
The strong connections we have with our clients couldn’t be possible without fostering an inclusive and collaborative culture. To me, this means empowering employees with the technology they need to build better client and employee solutions in an iterative fashion, while encouraging them to challenge the status quo.
For example, we gave one of our summer interns the opportunity to explore a GPT-3 based AI tool – a cutting-edge model that can write anything from poems to scientific papers in response to simple prompts. Through testing and learning, she discovered how GPT-3 could improve her employee experience by naming and reviewing the densely written legal disclosures at the bottom of our documents. In the end, with the aid of an AI tool, she accelerated the disclosure review process by weeks.
AI’s Impact on the Future
As I’ve said before, innovation isn’t just one person or team’s responsibility, so we wanted to take GPT-3 to the masses at one of our hackathons that was open to all employees. Here, we challenged our employees to think big and put on their product development hats and brainstorm how AI could be applied to improving the client experience, our internal processes and our organization as a whole.
The best ideas envisioned GPT-3 as a tool that could help us make sense of the data we’ve aggregated about the market, our clients and our products, helping us understand how we can meet clients’ specific needs, while being faster and more efficient. Since then, we’ve started testing AI on additional use cases, such as creating summaries of lengthy documents, aiding in document reviews and automatically writing meeting minutes.
Ultimately, as more of our workforce uses these tools and digital transformation takes hold across our organization, we’ll be able to do more analysis and reporting faster with less manual effort – freeing up time for our employees to focus on higher-value, revenue-generating work for our clients. What could be better than that?
