Guest Lecture at Reykjavik University's Executive MBA

I was genuinely honoured to be invited to visit the Data Analytics for Management course at Reykjavik University’s Executive MBA programme last week. Being asked to share your experience with a room full of working professionals is not something I take for granted, and I’m grateful to Ólafur Birgir Davíðsson for the invitation.

The session covered what it’s actually like to work as a statistician at a modern insurance company — who relies on our work, how AI has transformed the role, and how managers can get the most out of their analytics teams. On the AI side, I was able to speak from current experience: a large part of my work right now involves AI integration, figuring out where these tools genuinely add value and how to build reliable workflows around them.

The last point is probably the most important one: the quality of data analysis is often determined not by the statisticians, but by the people who request it. Leaders who understand what they are looking for get better answers.

It was a great group to talk to. Executive MBA students bring real workplace experience to these discussions, so the questions tend to go straight to the practical tensions — the gap between what managers want to know and what the data can actually tell you.

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