Navigating AI Projects With Khrystyna Sosiak from TomTom

I’m excited to share this conversation with Khrystyna Sosiak. Khrystyna is a product manager at TomTom. Before that, she was a lead AI coach at Intel and a senior data scientist at mBank. During this conversation, Khrystyna shared her approach to navigating the complex landscape of AI projects, which includes investing in research, strategically placing bets, fostering stakeholder support, and embracing transparency. LinksKhrystyna On LinkedInTranscript[00:00:13] Himakara Pieris: I'm, Himakara Pieris. You're listening to smart products. A show where we recognize, celebrate and learn from industry leaders who are solving real-world problems. Using AI.[00:00:25] Himakara Pieris: Khrystyna welcome to smart products.[00:00:27] Khrystyna Sosiak: Thank you. I'm super excited to be here. Thank you for having me. [00:00:30] Himakara Pieris: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about your background, um, what kind of environments that you've worked in, and also what kind of AI projects that, that you've been part of?[00:00:39] Khrystyna Sosiak: Yes. So, uh, currently I'm a product manager at TomTom. I'm working on the external developer experience and uh, and analytics and billing topics. And in past I was working on the machine learning operations platforms and, uh, in my previous experience was a data scientist. So I was actually working with, [00:01:00] uh, with machine learning and with artificial intelligence before I moved into product.[00:01:05] Himakara Pieris: What would be a good example of an AI project that you worked on? [00:01:10] Khrystyna Sosiak: Probably one of the most, Exciting and interesting, , products that we've been working on that was very powerful is, , understanding the customer's behavior and, and the patterns.[00:01:22] Khrystyna Sosiak: And then based on that ing uh, the right products. So I was working in banks, so we would analyze. All the data that we can find about our customers, right, of course, with two G D P R and making sure that we only use the right data, but, and then making sure that all the communication that goes to the customers is the right communication about the right products and in the right way.[00:01:46] Khrystyna Sosiak: So really understanding the customer needs and, uh, the stage of the customer life and saying that's, that's what the customer need at this point, and that's how we. Understand that and how we can communicate and [00:02:00] sell it to the customers. So it's not about only making money, but it's understanding how we can actually.[00:02:06] Khrystyna Sosiak: Go through this journey of life with the customer and supporting them. So, and understanding that by the data that they're generating and by the insights that we can find in this data. And sometimes, you know, and like data that you have like that generated by your transactions and by your history, like, It's a really specific data that show a lot about the person that probably some people even don't know about themselves.[00:02:33] Khrystyna Sosiak: And the real goal is how we can use it for the benefit of the customer and not to harm the customer, right? And, um, we really change the way that we approach them. Uh, we approached the, the marketing communication with the customers, what was very interesting and transform transformational to see how very old fashioned organization would really move in direction into the [00:03:00] AI and making sure that all the decisions and the marketing strategies are powered by ai.[00:03:06] Khrystyna Sosiak: So yeah, that was very interesting. It took us a long