During her more than two-decades-long career in technology, Danielle Brown has only worked at multinational companies that are at least a century old.
Brown spent 16 years at chemical giant DuPont before joining boat manufacturer Brunswick in 2016 as chief information officer. Wanting to work for a larger company, she left that role in 2020 to take on a similar position at household appliance maker Whirlpool.
“You need to know IT, but you also need to know the business,” says Brown.
At DuPont, Brown learned to connect the dots between IT and the more than 10 business sectors the company operated in at the time, ranging from agriculture to paints to electronics. At Brunswick, she was more narrowly focused on maritime technologies and expanding the company’s e-commerce business. At Whirlpool, she says technology and data underpin all of the company’s strategic initiatives and is therefore a big part of her job.
Before Brown joined, Whirlpool was caught up in the Internet of Things (IoT) hype cycle. It was a period when many manufacturers were attaching sensors to products like household appliances, automobiles, and exercise gear, in an effort to collect data that could be used to help consumers and spur future innovation.
Whirlpool followed the trend. It added Wi-Fi-enabled water leak detectors to appliances that it pitched as being able to lower a customer’s water bill and “smart” ovens that could get software updates automatically, like the newer “air fryer” mode, to go along with traditional baking and roasting settings.
Many manufacturers, burned by a consumer pushback against IoT, have since become more pragmatic. Brown says Whirlpool can learn from the shakeout as it now bets on generative AI technologies, such as when to use AI and how to organize and cooperate across business units.
Whirlpool is still mostly in the “discovery and piloting” phases of generative AI, Brown says. That means focusing on a few key areas, including helping software developers write code using Google’s Gemini and GitHub tools.
Whirlpool is also testing using large language models to digest its trove of text-based product information that customer service representatives rely on to handle customer inquiries and make recommendations. Brown is also looking at new ways to organize structured and unstructured data from a variety of departments—legal, finance, marketing, and communications among them—and create summaries and insights from that data.
For generative AI, Whirlpool’s tests mostly rely on Google’s tech products, including the tech giant’s BigQuery data warehouse, which has some AI tools built within it.
Brown is more cautious about deploying generative AI to customers, partly due to concerns about governance and ethics. Another worry is costs: Whirlpool operates in a sector with low profit margins, which means tech spending must be kept under control. For customers, who pay a lot of money for Whirlpool appliances, cost is also at play. If a customer’s refrigerator is broken, and the company’s AI chatbot fails to give accurate advice about how to fix the problem, customers can quickly grow frustrated about the food inside spoiling.
“We want to make sure we’re making it better, not harder, for the customer,” says Brown.
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
Waiting for gen AI to get sector-specific. CIOs and CTOs who are cautious about expanding their deployment of generative AI often say they are waiting for foundation models that can offer sector-specific knowledge, such as about health care, finance, and retail. The Wall Street Journal dives into the limitations and the ability of these models to handle more complex corporate problems, like advising farmers about how to grow crops or process mortgage applications. Generative AI vendors say that as more customers come into the fold, industry-specific models will emerge and help address those complexities.
Comcast and Truist Bank customers stung by debt collection company’s data breach. Telecommunications and media giant Comcast and financial firm Truist Bank separately disclosed that a ransomware attack on a third-party provider of debt collection services, Financial Business and Consumer Solutions (FBCS), resulted in hackers accessing the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and other private information of their customers. Comcast gave more details about the breach, warning that the stolen customer data was from “around 2021” and that more than 230,000 people were affected. No major ransomware group has claimed responsibility for the FBCS attack, which occurred in February.
Meta’s new AI video generator takes aim at OpenAI and Google. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company last week debuted a new AI tool that can generate or edit videos based on a text prompt. The tool raises the competitive stakes with rivals like OpenAI and Google as they look for fresh ways to use massive amounts of data to train tools that can create text, audio, and video content. For now, the AI video generator is only available for some internal employees at Meta, as well as select outside partners, including some filmmakers. Some snags that Meta still needs to work through are that it still takes the technology too long to generate a video—”tens of minutes,” Meta has admitted—and there are concerns about using the tools to create misleading or harmful deepfakes.
ADOPTION CURVE
AI initiatives on mainframes are mostly in the pilot phase. New research from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 78% of IT executives say their organization is either testing or implementing projects that incorporate AI capabilities into mainframe applications and transactions. The data aligns with what most AI surveys have shown the past couple of years: Few remain on the sidelines, and most have also moved past the “considering” phase. But the majority of businesses aren’t yet seeing the full ROI on AI projects.
The IBM survey, based on more than 2,500 responses from global IT executives, also highlighted that the AI-mainframes relationship is expanding beyond business innovation-focused use cases. Nine out of 10 executives say they are testing or implementing AI-powered cybersecurity initiatives, and 74% say it’s important for them to integrate AI into mainframe operations for automation, predictive analytics, and other system management needs. IBM, to be sure, has a huge financial interest in promoting a stronger interplay between mainframes and AI, as the tech giant controls over 96% of the mainframe market.
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
– San Diego Metropolitan Transit Systems is seeking a CIO, based in San Diego. Posted salary range: $201.6K-$286.3K/year.
– Mary McDowell Friends School is seeking a CTO, based in Brooklyn, New York. Posted salary range: $200K-$220K/year.
– BilliMD is seeking a CTO, based in Doral, Fla. Posted salary range: starting at $200K/year.
– RBC is seeking a U.S. CIO – IT operations, director, based in Jersey City, N.J. Posted salary range: $160K-$250K/year.
Hired: