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The Data & AI Chief

How Grant Thornton Reimagines Core Processes in the AI Era

Wednesday · 42 min · Episode 142 · 41.2 MB
0:00-42:59

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Imagine redesigning your most important processes from a blank sheet of paper, with no legacy systems to hold you back. Alpa Lally, Chief Product Officer at Grant Thornton, shares how the company is transforming into a frontier firm by reimagining core processes instead of automating them. She unpacks how embedded analytics reshapes client conversations, why AI governance is what helps you move faster, and how to reinvent your career in the age of AI.

Key Moments:

  • From Structural Engineering to Product Leadership (01:36): Alpa explains how designing buildings taught her the vision, strategy, and foundation-up thinking she now applies to product.
  • Becoming a Frontier Firm (06:27): Rethinking how work gets done for 13,000-plus professionals means recognizing that automating a broken process just does the wrong thing faster.
  • Embedding ThoughtSpot Analytics (14:57): By putting insights in auditors' hands on day one, Grant Thornton shifts client conversations from data gathering to strategy.
  • The AI Proof Gap: Governance Enables Speed (19:32): Alpa reframes governance as what lets you move faster, sharing that 78% of firms doubt they'd pass an AI governance audit.
  • Is Product Management Dead? (24:33): The role is evolving, not dying, and AI raises the value of deciding which opportunities are actually worth pursuing.

Key Quotes:

  • “A frontier firm uses AI not just to improve how work gets done, but fundamentally rethinks how the work gets done. It's moving beyond productivity gains and creating entirely new ways to deliver value.” - Alpa Lally
  • “The challenge is if you simply automate a broken process, you end up doing the wrong thing faster.” - Alpa Lally
  • “What ThoughtSpot has done is [give us] our ability to embed them immediately into the flow [which] has opened up a whole level of different insights that we can offer, not to our practitioners only, but imagine an auditor showing up on day one to your client and having these insights already calculated, already delivered.” - Alpa Lally

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Guest Bio

Alpa Lally is the Chief Product Officer at Grant Thornton. Alpa is an experienced product management executive with several years in designing, developing, and launching consumer and business products for large to mid-sized to small organizations, fintechs, startups, and Fortune 500. She has led global cross-functional teams to drive high growth targets while staying laser-focused on solving customer and consumer problems. Alpa leverages data and analytics to drive successful business outcomes that deliver results and achieve corporate growth goals.

Hear more from Cindi Howson here. Sponsored by ThoughtSpot.