Ryan Swann, Vanguard’s chief data analytics officer says the mutual fund giant is using data and AI not only to gain insight, but also to build enterprise-wide agility and accelerate value creation for itself and its clients. Data and analytics have a seat at the C-suite table at Vanguard, a shift that Swann said enables the company to embed intelligence into decision-making at all levels. “It is allowing us to bring insights to all of our executives about what’s happening with our clients. “It allows us to inform and influence the strategy and what we should focus on next. It also allows us to accelerate our business strategy. We’re a digital organization; we don’t have bricks and mortar, so the majority of our clients interact with us through data, through transactions, through clicking around on our website, maybe calling our call center, which is just another type of unstructured data. That data allows us to understand what our clients need and how we should respond,” the executive said. Swann’s office oversees the entire data lifecycle — from engineering and management to advanced analytics, machine learning and behavioral science. Central to Swann’s approach is a hub-and-spoke model that bridges the technical and business sides of the company. To foster cross-functional collaboration, Swann said sitting together and sharing the same objectives and key results (OKRs) matter. For example, Swann said an AI model could look through the data to coach the sales team into performing better. It could recommend the three best actions to take, the next three people to talk to, and the three topics they should talk to them about. By A/B testing these recommendations, the team tracked the performance improvements and worked with finance to quantify the gains. These and other initiatives have brought value to Vanguard. “Last year alone, we were up over $300 million of incremental value” across revenue generation, cost efficiencies, cost avoidance and risk reduction, he said. As for agentic AI, Vanguard is deploying agents that let users do things like pull data from databases in natural language and conduct data lineage checks, which avoids a costly undertaking. Swann said Vanguard has data processes going back decades, and the company must now create lineage to trace where the data comes from and where it goes.