How to Make Enterprise AI Adoption Successful: Inside the Chief AI Officer Role with Denis Romanovskiy

Chris Daigle (0:00)

Hey, before we start the show, I got to tell you, most executives I read into, they're using AI, but they're writing emails and summarizing documents. But I only see a smaller group doing what I call thinking in AI.

They see a decision in the business, and they already know where AI fits. So if you're using AI most days, and you suspect you're getting 5% out of what's possible from the models, that's the exact gap that my private practice handles.

In my private practice, you and I will work together one-on-one throughout the month, using AI to handle real decisions in your business, build custom agents that you can start delegating to, and save you from making 6-figure mistakes when it comes to budget decisions for AI software services. Now, my private practice is limited to 10 executives only. If you're interested, go to chrisdagel.com and find out more. You and I can jump on the phone, we can see if it's a fit, and I can give you a clear idea of the impact it would have on your business. Now, let's meet our guest.

Denis Romanovskiy (0:51)

You can lose your job if you will not learn how to use AI properly.

Chris Daigle (0:55)

How do you encourage or educate them on what human oversight looks like beyond just, oh, it looks good, let me send this e-mail, let me send this board deck?

Denis Romanovskiy (1:05)

You give your work to AI and it executes for you, but you're still responsible for what you're doing, and you're responsible to validate it after the work is done.

Chris Daigle (1:15)

I got one more question on the hackathon concept. What surprised you most about the non-technical participants?

Denis Romanovskiy (1:21)

People themselves didn't believe that they can do something. As soon as they just started, they started to believe.

From boring and confused faces, after just a couple of hours, I saw the entire company in the office with excited faces.

Chris Daigle (1:37)

Nice.

Denis Romanovskiy (1:38)

This is really new territory. What can happen, we don't know.

Chris Daigle (1:43)

Everybody, welcome back to another episode of Using AI at Work. My name is Chris Daigle, I'm the host. Before we get started, I just want to let everybody know that over the past two and a half years we've been running this podcast, we've had a certain format that's been a little loose and organic, and me just kind of exploring conversations with AI experts, AI professionals around the world. Starting with, I guess, maybe in the next couple of episodes, we're going to have a very set format that I think is going to make a lot of sense to all the listeners. We'll be revealing more about that in upcoming episodes, but I want you to know that the show is in our effort to always improve the show. We're going to continue to bring on fantastic guests like we have today, but also improve our format. Speaking about our guests today, our guest today is Denis Romanovskiy. He's the actual Chief AI Officer at Softswiss, which is a B2B iGaming software company that serves sportsbook, casino, and online gambling operators.

Denis is a rare type of guest that we have on the show because he's a real-world example of a Chief AI Officer and the role of business transformation that he's playing, not just a technical or a data science role.

From our earlier conversations, Denis has indicated that he explicitly says that adoption, change management, security, literacy, and department by department enablement are central to the job. That's what we're actually going to be diving into today. The types of questions such as who owns AI adoption? How do we control cost? How do we prevent data leakage? The types of questions that I get regularly when I'm on-site with clients. Denis, before we get started, I'm kind of interested in the journey that whatever you're... We could do it briefly, but whatever your background was that's resulted in you now becoming a chief AI officer.

Denis Romanovskiy (3:22)

Hi, Chris.

Chris Daigle (3:23)

Hi, Denis.

Denis Romanovskiy (3:23)

It's a pleasure to be here. Right?

Chris Daigle (3:25)

Yeah.

Denis Romanovskiy (3:26)

Quickly jumping into the questions. I'm an engineer, yeah, and I spent maybe like 20 years in software development. But, you know, my background is financial accounting. So it was kind of fun that I was programming, but I studied finance and accounting. And because of that, you know, I always work a lot with the clients. I understood the pain from IT technologies. Yeah, and when the era of AI came, and we understood that it is a little bit different, yeah, we saw that, you know, we need a person who can understand the technical side, but who can clearly talk to people from, you know, from business, from services, from operations.