Choreographing Human-Machine Collaboration: Spotify's Sidney Madison Prescott

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Engineers are not stereotypically known for their dancing prowess, but increasingly organizations need to choreograph how humans and machines work together. In this episode, we chat with Sidney Madison Prescott, Global Head of Intelligent Automation at Spotify, about the dance between humans and machines that improves business processes.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:43)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:12)
Today we're talking with Sidney Madison Prescott. She's the Global Head of Intelligent Automation at Spotify.
Sidney, great to have you. Thanks for joining us.

**Sidney Madison Prescott** (1:20)
Great to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:21)
Well, the title of our podcast is Me, Myself, and AI and we tend to focus on you as an individual. So maybe let's start there.
Can you tell us a little bit about your current role at Spotify?

**Sidney Madison Prescott** (1:32)
I currently head up a global team. We are primarily within the US and the UK, European areas, and we are working towards modernizing and really improving the efficiency of the workforce within Spotify. So this is looking specifically at all of the processes across many cross-functional teams to ensure that whether we're working with the UI of the application, whether we are talking about the finance function, that we are being as efficient as possible in the ways that we go about our daily routines as Spotifyers.
And really we're taking that on by looking very closely at ways to leverage intelligent automation This is in essence a tool stack where we combine robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to really facilitate that digital transformation. And our team is working very closely primarily right now within the finance function. However, we have branched out to our ads business operations as well, really looking at again that digital transformation and how we can really unify the front office and back office processes that our spotifiers work on today.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:52)
So your degree is a, you have a major in philosophy with a double minor in political science and ethics from Georgia State University.
Go Panthers. So that's certainly not a typical connection to artificial intelligence. Can you make a connection between your background and your path to get from there to your current role?

**Sidney Madison Prescott** (3:11)
I agree. It's not the traditional trajectory of someone who would work specifically within these really kind of emerging and innovative technologies. I would say my degree really prepared me to think critically about various tasks, various responsibilities and to identify a business problem, potentially pitch a solution to that business problem that was technical in nature. And I really do rest very firmly on the critical thinking and the logic skills that I received out of my philosophy degree. Those really helped facilitate my growth and really amplified my strengths in terms of process reengineering and really being able to think outside of the box when it comes to how we are translating business problems into business efficiencies through technology.
My career path really began with an internship, and I was specifically working with configuration and asset management. And so I was actually a pre-law concentration and I wanted to become a lawyer. I began working on software contracts, and that really was my first foray into technology. I began to understand business law and business contracts. However, I really started to see the amazing contrast between how we think about what technologists do and the reality of the work that is done around the world. Once I started diving into the software contract and the true up aspect of the business, and that's really where I moved very firmly into becoming a technologist. Once I made that transition, from there, I was really diving very heavily into the connections between the disparate systems and the challenges that we have with those configurations and the outputs or the quality of the data that comes from those various configurations and integrations with different systems.
Through that, I really started to hone in on a passion for data quality and governance and really looking at data as an asset. This is where I began to firmly understand the correlation between process efficiency, process automation, and moving towards a more automated business provides you with greater data insights and better, really executive decisions that you can make based off of those data attributes. I started that journey within Fiserv, and then from there, I had an opportunity to dive into a proof of concept on robotic process automation. This was relatively early on, so I would call myself basically an early evangelist of that technology.