Walgreens
A complex AI system, translated so a Fortune 20 CEO could decide on it.
The insight
Translating Project P, a complex AI system, so executives and boards could decide on it.
Our team worked with Walgreens' CTO on Project P, a new AI-assisted technology: a complex data-and-recommendations system. Patient records, pharmacy visits, consent preferences, and third-party clinical research fed a personalized recommendation engine that learned continuously from its own output.
The CTO, the Capgemini engineers, and the business consultants all understood it. We worked with it every day. But we needed the CEO's approval to explore the idea further, and if that went well, a comprehensive case to sell it to Walgreens' non-technical decision makers.
Employment: frog, a Capgemini Invent company. Deliverables: pitch explainer video · data visualizations · pitch deck.
Challenge
The constraint
A proposal and an executive pitch share the same constraint: a technical argument, a reader with no time and no engineering background, and a decision made on whatever they can grasp quickly. In this case the reader was internal: the CEO.
Solution
First the CEO green light. Then the full case.
CEOs have limited time, and they want the shape of a technical idea rather than its mechanics. So I made a short, high-level explainer video: enough to understand what Project P was and why it mattered, and nothing beyond that. The restraint was the craft. Everything I left out was something the engineers could have defended and the CEO didn't need.
With the green light, the CTO and our team of engineers, strategists, and business consultants developed the why, what, when, and how of the project. My job was to translate that for people outside the project. I built the deck as a narrative arc, opening with the question an executive actually asks first: why do we need this technology, and why now? From there, data visualizations carried the What and the How in a form a non-technical decision maker could follow.
Some slides argue. Some slides prove. Each visualization was made for a different job, and deciding which slides argue and which slides prove is a different question for every audience.
Result
Outcome
The CEO understood Project P from the video and greenlit further exploration: a decision made by the highest authority in the company, on the strength of one deliverable.
The full presentation then carried the idea to Walgreens' non-technical decision makers. The technology was still under consideration when our engagement ended.
Next
Project.
Each project shows how I make complex technology clear to the people who decide.
