Guest Lecture at Reykjavik University's Executive MBA

Last week Ólafur Birgir Davíðsson invited me to speak at the Data Analytics for Management course at Reykjavik University’s Executive MBA programme. I don’t take these invitations for granted. A room full of working professionals asks different questions than a research audience, and I find that much more interesting.

I talked about what it’s like to work as a statistician at an insurance company: who relies on the work, how AI has changed the role, and how managers can get more out of their analytics teams. On the AI side I had something concrete to say, because a lot of my current work involves figuring out where these tools help and where they don’t, and how to build something reliable enough to trust in production.

The point that gets pushback: the quality of a data analysis is determined more by the person asking for it than the person running it. Leaders who know what they’re looking for get better answers than leaders who hand off a vague question and wait.

The questions went straight to the practical tensions, the gap between what managers want to know and what the data can tell you. This audience had workplace experience. They’d hit these problems before, so the conversation was more useful than a typical university talk.

A write-up of the visit was posted on LinkedIn by the Executive MBA programme.