Regulating AI Innovation: Aboitiz Data Innovation’s David Hardoon

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Concrete production, livestock, the Socratic Method? Somehow we talk about all three.
Find out how these connect with AI in today's episode.

**David Hardoon** (0:13)
I'm David Hardoon from Aboitiz Data Innovation, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:19)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Welcome. Today, Shervin and I are excited to be joined by David Hardoon, who holds several senior positions at our Aboitiz Group.
David, thanks for joining us.

**David Hardoon** (1:13)
Thank you very much, Sam. Shervin.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:16)
Can you first tell us a bit about our Aboitiz Group? Where do you work?

**David Hardoon** (1:19)
The Aboitiz Group is 100 plus year old conglomerates originated, started in Spain, Catalan, kind of relocated into Philippines and started in the hemp business, but now quite diversified from the main business being power, generation and distribution across the Philippines, financial services, cement, construction, utilities, estate, airports, food, agriculture. They're now going through a transformation and becoming, I love this term by the way, a tech conglomerate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:48)
What is Aboitiz Data Innovation?

**David Hardoon** (1:51)
About seven years ago, give or take, the bank started with the whole digitalization of the banking services.
And what that had resulted in, as you would imagine, a tremendous amount of data. The more you engage your consumers digitally, the more you have digital services. Well, surprise, surprise, the more data you have.
And the question came as well, how are we really using it? Are we using it? What's the best way to put it to good use? And that question kind of went also beyond just the bank into the rest of the business, because you can imagine power has a lot of data, agriculture, airports, et cetera, has a lot of data. We were born with a very kind of on-point mandate, operationalizing data, operationalizing AI. Really, how do we put it to good use?

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:36)
What are some of these uses?

**David Hardoon** (2:39)
I mean, there's the usual financial side where we all learn from hyper-personalization, financial crime, and don't get me wrong, that stuff is the things that always gets me all excited. I spent a few good years in the financial regulator here in Singapore. But let me give you an oddity.
Cement, an industry that you wouldn't really associate with data or AI. We sat down with the CEO at the time and we said, look, even in the world of cement, you have a lot of data.
How can this work? So let me give you a little tidbit of how the world of cement works. And this something was new to me. Cement is actually like baking. I don't know if you bake, but it's like baking. It's basically you have mixtures, you have these kind of formulas and you end up with cement, which will have different types of properties.
And these properties is what's absolutely critical depending on what you're planning to build. Whether it's a mall, a high-rise, a low-rise, a residential, et cetera and so forth.
Having said that, as with baking, you kind of need to do a bit of trial and error. You need to try out these different mixtures to make sure it produced the right one. That results in operational overhead. It results in wastage. I mean, and as with baking, you stick this stuff into keels. Literally, it's a furnace is to bake it using data, using the information that's coming from all the devices, the IOT, using AI, being able to actually tell the bakers or in this case, the chemical engineers, what is gonna be the outputs of this mixture before they even start. While at the same time maintaining that quality control which is absolutely crucial. Now this is, by the way, this is not just hypothetical. This is already operational for the last year in all the plants, about six plants in the Philippines and results in operational efficiency, results in reduction in number of wastes, resulted in what I like to call quantifiable ESG, 35 kilotons reduction of CO2 emission. So that's a nice unusual example I like to give in terms of how data is used.