How Grant Thornton Reimagines Core Processes in the AI Era

**Alpa Lally** (0:00)
If you're not overwhelmed in today's market, you're probably not doing something right. There is, for no doubt, a thousand different things coming at everybody in the pace of innovation. It's phenomenal.

**Cindi Howson** (0:22)
Welcome to The Data & AI Chief. I'm your host, Cindi Howson.
Imagine someone hands you a blank sheet of paper and says, redesign your most important processes from scratch. No legacy systems, no old mindsets or unchanged processes.
Where would you start? This is exactly the opportunity today's guest faces. Alpa Lally is the Chief Product Officer at Grant Thornton, one of the world's largest audit, tax and advisory firms. Alpa leads product strategy for the firm's AI transformation. In this episode, you'll learn how to reimagine old processes instead of just optimizing an existing legacy one. Also, has AI really killed product management and how to reinvent your career in the era of AI? Alpa, welcome to The Data & AI Chief.

**Alpa Lally** (1:23)
Thank you, Cindi. I'm so excited to be here.

**Cindi Howson** (1:25)
Yeah, we're excited to have you. I've heard so much and of course have been diving into all of your LinkedIn posts and articles.
Where in the world are you joining us from today, Alpa?

**Alpa Lally** (1:37)
Well, I'm joining you guys today from Orange County, California in the beautiful Sunshine State.

**Cindi Howson** (1:44)
Okay, nice. There's a lot of a talk about what you're doing in Grant Thornton, but I think you also just have such an interesting professional background. Tell us a little bit about yours.

**Alpa Lally** (1:58)
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm actually a structural engineer. I started my career off in getting a degree in civil engineering and specialized in structural engineering. But then I started practicing as an engineer up in Calgary, Canada for a number of years, shifted over to the California lifestyle about 20 years ago. Then in about 2008, the subcrime market crashed and so therefore, I decided to reinvent myself and went and got an MBA and then got picked up from another organization and started to transition into product. Product management and then the rest is really history. It's been an exciting journey and exciting times for sure.

**Cindi Howson** (2:40)
That is. So that's where some people would say there's an opportunity in every crisis. So it sounds like that some subprime mortgages where building starts were on the decline, was a forcing function for you to reinvent yourself.

**Alpa Lally** (2:58)
Absolutely.
I was fortunate at that time that I was still able to be employed, but you could see the writing on the wall. It was a massive devastation to the financial markets and building economy in general. So going through that journey, you really quickly learn to say, it's not like you're transitioning, you're just pivoting, you're re-engineering yourself. Like the cornerstone of my career and a lot of also the new AI capabilities that we see today, it's no different than it is now. You just got to find a way to pivot and re-engineer yourself to the new opportunities that exist around you.

**Cindi Howson** (3:40)
Yeah.
I think there are some synergies though. What are the elements that you would say you've taken from designing buildings to now product design? What are some of the elements there?

**Alpa Lally** (3:54)
I love this question, Cindi, because again, it speaks to how anyone can really pivot and where they want to be. But as you mentioned, my career started in engineering. I designed everything from single-family homes to high rises. If you look at how buildings are built, they need a vision, they need a strategy, they need a plan to execute. When you start to get those first set of architectural drawings from your client and the architect, you start to do simple load takedowns, right? Understanding what are the impacts to the building from a load perspective, a twin perspective, and then you start to design from the foundation up. Similar in product, you need to establish a vision, you need to have a strategy, you need to understand what are the foundational elements, you need to understand things of what's the market demanding, what is the product market fit. Those all areas are easily translatable. So for me to transition and having that analytical background, never so important nowadays, it was a pretty easy transition to start to take my core skills, as I'll call it, and transition them over to product and product management and product design. Then the rest is, again, in history, just fell in love with the opportunity to build. I got to build buildings before and now I get to build products. I get to build products for our clients, I get to build products for our internal teams.