Tech talent key to AI success

It starts with the company’s leadership.

Companies must take time to go over people strategies to ensure an effective rollout of digital and AI ambitions, according to an executive.

"The most important thing to get right about technology is understanding that it’s never the technology itself. It’s the people. While I think a lot about the tech strategy, I also spend a huge amount of my time thinking about the people strategy," Diogo Rau, chief information and digital officer and executive vice president of Eli Lilly and Company told McKinsey.

Rau noted that it starts with leadership. For instance, he and their chief executive officer did an artificial intelligence course together. The company’s CEO coded in Amazon’s SageMaker Python SDK notebook and built a Hugging Face machine-learning model.

The second thing is getting the right leaders in the right places to shake up the thinking. “One thing I’ve done is move every single one of my direct reports around so none of them is in the same role they were three years ago,” Rau said.

Doing so helps generate new ideas and spot new challenges, he added.

The third thing is growing the talent base and getting the right kind of talent. 

In the company, Rau said they focus on technical hiring and bringing in people with real hands-on technical skills. He said about 90% of their recent technology hires are those who have the skills to code and develop.

"You need an engineer who asks why. The best engineers are the ones who always want to understand why something is the way it is," Rau said. "The best engineers are the ones that are going to figure out how to automate things and how to use things such as generative AI so they can write code—or have it write the code for them and manage that."