While these companies aren’t typically associated with digital technology, they’re pushing the limits of what’s possible within their own industries.
Source: Builtin.com – A recent tech industry axiom asserts that every company — whether it’s a fast-food restaurant or an industrial machinery manufacturer — is now a tech company. Every business is now data-driven, so the thinking goes, and whether they’re shopping as consumers or B2B buyers, most people expect some kind of digital interface or storefront for their favorite brands or vendors. As with most clichés, there is a kernel of truth there: All businesses really are becoming tech companies. Or, at the very least, they’re investing in building teams of data scientists, software engineers, UI experts and more to drive the next wave of innovation. For grocery chains, biopharmaceutical companies and banks alike, the next frontier appears to be in cyberspace.
Built In is constantly looking at where the tech industry is headed — and how it’s getting there. It’s become increasingly clear to us that the hottest new Silicon Valley startup or the latest exploits of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google only comprise part of the picture. Plenty of innovation is happening far outside tech media’s typical scope of coverage. We’d like to shift that focus.
As we leave the madness of 2020 behind and delve into 2021, we identified 22 large, established companies that are driving innovation in fintech, IoT, data analytics and plenty more. Some are businesses you might not associate with digital technology, like insurers, grocery chains and healthcare providers. Others are working on the kind of digital infrastructure that undergirds entire segments of the economy. To help highlight that work, we talked to their tech leaders about their teams’ achievements over the past year and the projects they’ve got coming up in 2021.
JPMorgan Chase
Who: Lori Beer, Global Chief Information Officer
Industry: Financial services company JPMorgan Chase works with corporations, governments and institutions in more than 100 countries. The company employs more than 50,000 technologists around the world, who work across a wide variety of technological fields including big data, mobile, electronic payments, machine learning, cybersecurity and enterprise cloud development.
2020 highlights: Beer said she was proud to have overseen an increase in the gender and racial diversity of her engineering teams last year.
2021 goals: JPMorgan Chase is looking for full-stack Agile engineers who are fluent with cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and analytics and blockchain. Beer said she continues to focus on cultivating a “learn-fast” culture, providing immersive technical training and building technical communities of practice across all of the company’s technology centers. She seeks to build upon her teams’ culture of innovation and collaboration using crowdsource and cloud parties, where application teams receive dedicated support for migrating workloads to the cloud.
What’s a project your tech teams worked on in the last year?
“Nearly two years ago we built our firmwide AI platform, OmniAI, on the public cloud. The technology enabled us to rapidly test and train machine learning algorithms, and ultimately run more experiments with more data.
“Over the past year, OmniAI went from its very first capability — single node model training — to hundreds of projects across every line of business using the platform for end-to-end capabilities, from discovery and model training through production serving on machine learning models. This evolution of the platform has been driven by our business, with every single feature we release having a business use case underpinning its prioritization. Today, our data scientists are leveraging our OmniAI to develop new capabilities. They include incorporating natural language processing to make client interactions more personalized, testing advanced machine learning models to have a more comprehensive view of risk and performing real-time coaching and recommendations for call center agents to help them better serve customers.”
IHS Markit
Who: Bethany Baer, Chief Technology Officer
Industry: IHS Markit’s data and information services help companies across industries — from aerospace and agriculture to maritime and retail — leverage data and make informed business decisions.
2020 highlights: This year’s stock market volatility drove new customers to IHS Markit’s digital solutions for the financial industry, boosting that segment’s importance among the company’s overall product suite. Baer said her tech teams also added more than 100 new colleagues worldwide this year.
2021 goals: Baer said IHS Markit has never stopped recruiting senior web developers, SQL engineers and C++ programmers, roles that she considers “evergreen.”
Tell us about the technology trends currently shaping your industry.
“Our technology platform has continued to expand and evolve over the last 28 years, and we expect that to continue in the decades to come. In the last four years, we moved our web architecture forward into a client-side rendered UI backed by a robust API gateway, all delivered within a cloud-native containerized infrastructure.
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