S&P Global’s Chief Data Officer on Turning Data into Business Outcomes

**Saugata Saha** (0:00)
We don't want everybody to become 10% more productive, because that's a little squishy. We want 10% of the people to become 100% more productive, so they can go do other things.

**Cindi Howson** (0:21)
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Welcome to The Data & AI Chief. I'm your host, Cindi Howson.
One of the person accountable for your data strategy was also the person accountable for the business results that depends on that data strategy. For most organizations, it's two different people. For Saugata Saha, it's one in the same. Today, we're joined by Saugata Saha, president of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and S&P Global's chief enterprise data officer.
Saugata is one of the few executives who oversees both a major business division and the entire enterprise data strategy behind it. In this episode, you'll learn what it actually takes to turn a vast data estates into connected AI ready intelligence, and how to turn AI investment into measurable business impact, and why the Data Foundation remains the make or break challenge for every data leader right now. Saugata, welcome to The Data and AI Chief.

**Saugata Saha** (2:27)
Cindi, delighted to be here and thanks for having me.

**Cindi Howson** (2:29)
Yeah. Now, we'd like to give our listeners a possibility to travel around the world with us. So where are you joining us from today?

**Saugata Saha** (2:39)
Today, I'm here in our offices in downtown New York. And it's really nice and sunny outside.

**Cindi Howson** (2:46)
One of my favorite cities in the world, of course. But I hear you also made a trip to Davos recently.

**Saugata Saha** (2:52)
Yes, I was there earlier this year, which feels like a distant memory at this point. It was, you know, exciting as it always is. It was a great learning experience hearing, you know, people talk about everything that matters in the world.
And I will distinctly remember it for being the coldest Davos I've ever been to.

**Cindi Howson** (3:11)
Oh, boy.
Well, I used to ski in Davos way back when. It was definitely not the coldest Davos, but for sure, it was super cool and meaningful to see for you and me who have been in this space a long time, that AI is a headline. It's no longer an afterthought. And so if we look at your career, a fascinating background, you spent a long time at McKinsey, giving people advice, co-developing strategies. What sparked you to make the move to be an operator, let's say, at S&P Global?

**Saugata Saha** (3:53)
To get the full gist of that story, we'd have to actually go back to my pre-Mackinsey career. So I was born and raised in India. After college, I spent about seven years working for a large industrial conglomerate where I essentially had operator roles. I did sales, I did product development for one of our B2B e-commerce products, and I spent some time doing business development and strategy for the chairman of the company. Then a little late in life, I decided to go to business school and move to the US. After that, I went to work at McKinsey & Company where I was having a blast. I was serving financial services companies and also fintech companies. One of the fintech companies I was serving back then was a small company known as, it was relatively small back then was McGraw-Hill Companies, which was a predecessor company to S&P Global.
While working with the company, I got to know the management team pretty well. Jack Callahan was the CFO, Martina Chung who had multiple roles including head of strategy, and then of course, Doug Peterson who was the CEO back then. I made the transition from McKinsey to S&P Global mostly because of Doug's vision of what he wanted to do with the company. Just for scale and reference, when I joined the company about 12 years ago, the market cap was probably $15 to $18 billion, something in that range.
A little over a decade, the company at one point was $150 billion in market cap. Quite a transformative journey and that's what was exciting that we can transform this business, realize its full potential, and that's what got me from McKinsey to S&P Global.