When determining where to make your key investments for the year, how do you factor in trends from the broader data and analytics sphere of business? Any examples of how D&A trends impacted your key investments for 2024?

The process in Arca Continental is to identify business opportunities and continuously evaluate technology to solve those problems.

Some of them are in the “freezer” because either the process or technology is not there yet, however the business case exists. This helps us “unfreeze” investments and start working on those when new technology arises.

For example in the case of GenAI we hired a new team to help us explore, test and deploy solutions for key processes and interactions.

D&A investment spend is only a small part of our overall annual investment decisions.  That said, within the IT area it is becoming more significant.  While a relatively small amount it has become a high priority area.  We are taking more risk on the expected returns, though we remain focused on AI and ML applications that can generate a real return. We have applied the Gartner AI four quadrant framework with a focus on the internal productivity zones.  We don't plan on one or two big bets but we see the trends leading us to making many small bets.

You've got to stay current without losing sight of what actually matters for your business. It's a constant juggling act, but when you get it right, it's pretty rewarding.

For 2024, we've been particularly influenced by a few key trends:

--AI and Machine Learning
--Data Mesh Architecture
--Data Governance and Privacy
--Cloud Data Warehousing
--DataOps and MLOps