Witad Awards 2023: Technology innovator of the year (end-user)—Gayathri Khanna, Standard Chartered Bank

Gayathri Khanna, head of enterprise business intelligence acceleration, artificial intelligence and machine learning engineering at Standard Chartered, is passionate about making the use of data within the bank easier. “My passion is to make data ubiquitous in Standard Chartered and to enable the consumption of data through actionable insights,” she says.

She helps the bank to democratize the use of data through self-service reporting and the implementation and adoption of business intelligence (BI), AI and machine learning tools.

When she took over BI and AI at the bank, she supported and managed the analytics needs of around 2,000 colleagues. Now, over 50,000 colleagues use the data capabilities Khanna manages. “I am passionate about bringing data to every colleague’s table by choosing the right industry-leading capabilities that fit our use-cases,” she says.

At the bank, she and her team introduced a set of AI and machine learning capabilities that help Standard Chartered’s business analysts and data experts with modeling without needing in-depth statistical knowledge. “With these tools, our teams can quickly paint their predictions around campaign management and client profitability at the stroke of a mouse, drag and drop. This allows our teams to adapt our services to fit our client needs,” she explains.

Other examples of Khanna’s work include promoting responsible AI from conception to inception and taking data virtualization and in-memory data acceleration tools from ideation to implementation. She is also aligning the bank to a unified data reporting landscape with augmented analytics and actionable insights. This will simplify and rationalize how teams consume data, create new efficiencies, and improve the experiences the bank creates. So far, she has implemented operational reporting and dashboarding across 90 sites and 2,000 dashboards.

Whether for work or any physical challenge, Khanna always tries to push herself. She often reflects on an abseiling trip with her management team that features a 30-foot vertical drop. While she initially backed out in fear of falling, she decided to go for it and became one of the fastest climbers that day. “I always remember that whenever I face a challenge at work. We can’t be afraid of failure, or else we’ll never push our boundaries,” she says. Khanna approaches mistakes as a way to learn and improve and sees them as “bitter pills” she takes to get better at what she does.

Looking ahead, she says, “One day down the line, I’d love to be able to be asked a simple question on any data in the bank and get an automated, actionable insight as a response to it.”