Vivek Bharadwaj, CIO at clothes producer Pleased Socks, is an government with an expansive portfolio. Along with main enterprise-wide expertise technique, IT transformation and digital advertising, he oversees the corporate’s back-end techniques, e-commerce roadmaps, cyber safety measures, and knowledge engineering and evaluation.
Briefly, Bharadwaj has to put on a number of hats – or, as Pc Weekly suggests to him, a number of socks. It’s a sentiment with which Bharadwaj concurs: “I can look throughout our completely different capabilities, pull up the crimson threads as and after I see them, and discover commonality in processes.”
Bharadwaj beforehand held senior knowledge and advertising roles with Canadian retailer Hudson’s Bay and better training specialist Basic Meeting. He joined Pleased Socks as head of information in August 2023 to ascertain the corporate’s knowledge foundations. He turned chief knowledge officer in January 2024 and was promoted to CIO in Could 2024.
“My function now spans the whole tech stack,” he says. “That accountability stretches from the info infrastructure to e-commerce experiences. I see synergy throughout all these areas, and in the best way that, for instance, we run a lean, data-driven advertising stack to handle advertising optimisation.”
Strolling the stroll
Bharadwaj’s function at Pleased Socks is his first CIO place. For somebody with a background in knowledge and advertising, how has he discovered taking accountability for enterprise expertise? The reply is: thus far, so good.
“It’s been an exceptional studying expertise,” he says. “I nonetheless delight myself, a lot to my crew’s chagrin, that I like to enter the pull requests that my crew wants to repair. However the worth I convey is that I can see the panorama from the next perspective. I’m capable of make cross-business connections.”
Palamon Capital Companions acquired a majority share of Pleased Socks in 2018. In the present day, Bharadwaj says the manager crew has a transparent sense of course. He works in live performance together with his friends to think about how knowledge, expertise and digital companies will help assist enterprise operations and buyer companies.
“Every government comes into the function with an current deep skillset, however then that functionality is adopted by saying, ‘Right here’s what else we are able to do’,” he says.
“We’re operators at our coronary heart; we wish to stroll the stroll. The thesis I got here in to Pleased Socks with was the concept entry to data is what breaks down silos within the enterprise and may result in higher decision-making processes.”
As Bharadwaj moved into the CIO function, he began to consider broad, tech-enabled targets. Somewhat than simply responding reactively to enterprise calls for, he has tried to create a proactive strategy that focuses on growing an built-in expertise stack. He says that strategy requires solutions to some huge questions.
“My function now spans the whole tech stack, from the info infrastructure to e-commerce experiences. I see synergy throughout all these areas”
Vivek Bharadwaj, Pleased Socks
“What can we take into consideration the build-versus-buy state of affairs? What work ought to we do in-house and what applied sciences ought to we purchase from exterior? How can we handle the conundrum of being a service-oriented expertise accomplice to our enterprise models however, on the identical time, additionally implementing sure core concepts round safety, governance and knowledge transparency?” he says.
“These types of concerns are essential within the privacy-aware, GDPR-first world that we function inside. So, these are the pushes and pulls we take care of – progress versus effectivity, safety versus enablement, empowerment through self-service versus serving to the enterprise with greatest practices. It’s these trade-offs that make this function fascinating.”
Establishing AI tips
Considered one of Bharadwaj’s greatest achievements has been establishing a synthetic intelligence (AI)-powered enterprise course of transformation unit to spice up operations throughout gross sales, logistics, advertising and planning. He says this new unit is proof of the corporate’s aware want to spend money on accountable AI.
“Now we have correct guardrails in place,” he says. “We concentrate on these key human-in-the-loop elements and guarantee we’re concentrating on bettering our enterprise processes, fairly than exposing AI options to our clients, which is a extra unsure space, as a result of issues hold altering on a regular basis.”
Rising expertise is already being utilized to back-end processes. The corporate’s customer-facing web site makes use of AI-powered suggestions. Pleased Socks additionally works with expertise firm Snowflake, utilizing its knowledge capabilities, together with the Cortex AI suite of instruments and enormous language fashions (LLMs), to spice up search engine optimisations (Search engine marketing) processes.
“We’re robotically producing and bettering our product descriptions, and including meta data utilizing Search engine marketing-rich key phrases, utilizing a Streamlit app that we constructed on Cortex,” he says, suggesting the expertise has helped enhance the breadth of key phrases that the corporate makes use of and has elevated natural search efficiency on the net.
Bharadwaj says Pleased Socks is open to utilizing different AI fashions. The corporate works with a number of suppliers and LLMs to run AI-based suggestion companies, reminiscent of for e-mail advertising to clients. All these initiatives run on standalone stacks.
“The great thing about our strategy is that the apps are hosted inside our techniques,” says Bharadwaj. “That strategy makes the method of take a look at and study a lot better. We are able to contemplate the completely different fashions, reminiscent of fascinated about whether or not we wish to transfer, for instance, from Llama to Gemini. Our entire strategy is platform-agnostic.”
Bharadwaj goals to make sure that the corporate’s AI insurance policies present constant solutions to the build-versus-buy query.
“The entire concept is that we’re operating Snowflake Cortex and creating Streamlit apps, and we wish to hold that factor as an important a part of our AI technique, reminiscent of for enabling fast product descriptions,” he says.
“Nonetheless, we have now different initiatives that we’re engaged on. Every of those initiatives is an iterative experiment, the place we begin with small pockets of worth supply. Then, as soon as we begin delivering measurable enterprise worth, we find yourself making this mission into an even bigger service.”
Constructing knowledge foundations
Past the realms of AI, Bharadwaj says his greatest achievement as CIO has been eliminating the silos of information held in enterprise enterprise models.
Pleased Socks migrated to the Snowflake AI Information Cloud in 2024 to assist the enterprise turn out to be extra knowledge pushed. The corporate has constructed a greenfield knowledge platform utilizing Snowflake and a bunch of related applied sciences, together with dbt, Airbyte and Sigma.
Earlier than implementing the platform, the vast majority of the corporate’s reporting was accomplished in Excel. Bharadwaj says utilizing Snowflake and an built-in knowledge stack has helped encourage a step change in decision-making processes and enabled self-serve analytics.
“Our digital groups had been doing handbook reporting for years,” he says. “They’d be taking a look at uncovering a number of knowledge sources and placing that into an Excel spreadsheet at eight o’clock within the morning earlier than the management crew arrived. Now, with Snowflake, that course of has turn out to be a real-time report that’s up to date each quarter-hour. That, to me, is a hit.”
The corporate continues to discover potential use instances. A few of the precedence areas for the following 12 months will embody predictive analytics, stock administration and personalisation, significantly for e-mail communications with clients. Bharadwaj says the excessive degree of visibility into data makes it a lot simpler for individuals within the enterprise to make selections.
“When our management groups in gross sales and finance come collectively to take a look at knowledge and inconsistencies in how they’re reporting explicit numbers, the insights are simply bubbled up – the data is now very simply uncovered. That perception permits the groups to go additional of their processes,” he says.
“Our digital groups had been doing handbook reporting for years … uncovering a number of knowledge sources and placing that into an Excel spreadsheet. Now, with Snowflake, that course of has turn out to be a real-time report that’s up to date each quarter-hour. That, to me, is a hit” Vivek Bharadwaj, Pleased Socks
“After we can enhance decision-making speeds with higher entry to knowledge, that could be a direct consequence of the upside of this work and is certainly one of our greatest successes. We nonetheless have a number of work to do on this journey, however we wish to rejoice our successes. I encourage our groups to take pleasure in all of the little wins.”
Assembly new necessities
Bharadwaj says his crew’s efforts to construct an information platform can pay dividends in the long term. Whereas many individuals fixate on the potential advantages of rising expertise, CIOs should be sure that robust underlying foundations are in place.
“After I joined the corporate, as a result of I’ve a background in knowledge, lots of people requested me about my plans for AI,” he says, referring to when he began working for Pleased Socks.
“I mentioned, ‘Nothing but as I’ve obtained to start out with the foundations’. And that has turn out to be a giant motivation for me.”
Bharadwaj and his groups proceed to refine their strategy and are keen to make sure applied sciences are applied rigorously and efficiently. He refers, as soon as once more, to accountable AI and the significance of checks and balances.
“One of many expertise insurance policies that I’ve enacted throughout the firm is that we’ll not launch AI apps with out human guardrails,” he says. “So, a human have to be within the loop if our expertise crew launches an app. A human must have the ultimate say.”
With these guardrails in place, Bharadwaj’s crew will hunt down new methods to take advantage of AI and knowledge. He says the final course of journey for the expertise crew is to create as many insights as doable to assist the enterprise higher perceive its clients.
“In retail, we’re seeing a commoditisation of manufacturers, so it’s getting tougher to distinguish and go away an influence on clients,” he says.
“So, a giant factor for us is to have the ability to take heed to the client – and it’s not simply once they discuss, however in what they do as effectively, in order that’s about understanding their behaviour, fascinated about their necessities by insights, and tying all the things collectively in a single unified buyer journey.”
Within the aggressive world of retailing, Pleased Socks should discover new methods to shock and delight the individuals who purchase its merchandise. Bharadwaj says the deployment of rising expertise will assist the corporate to react extra successfully to clients’ fast-changing wants.
“These sorts of insights are a giant enabler for us to be extra agile,” he says. “We wish to be nearer to the market and ship the correct of merchandise and experiences that clients are on the lookout for.”
