Todd Randolph is a Principal in KPMG’s Advisory Services practice. He has 25 years of experience in business analysis and transformation across various industries focused on implementing leading practice solutions to improve profitability, efficiency, and effectiveness. We had the opportunity to catch up with Todd to hear his views on AI and Oracle’s recently launched AI Data Platform (AIDP).
KPMG Smart Data Platform
“The team I lead at KPMG focuses on harnessing the value of enterprise data to assist business leaders in incorporating that data into their decision making. To me that is and has always been key. The world has changed a lot over the last decade, and one of the most significant changes has been the explosion in digitized data. Oracle has played a large role in that period, with the development of the first Autonomous Database in the cloud, now called AI Data Lakehouse, to which more and more AI capability is being added. Now, as Oracle’s latest AI technology is brought to the market—Oracle AI Data Platform—we are excited to collaborate with Oracle to deliver innovative AI solutions built on a foundation of trusted data.
“A lot of our work is helping clients take their data, minimize the movement, and make it accessible to decision makers and AI Agents in the most relevant format. At KPMG, we developed an offering called Smart Data Products, which is designed to help organizations leverage AI, automate processes, and derive actionable insights from their data. Underpinning the products is the Smart Data Platform. AIDP is a significant enabler for that solution, and we’ve been working in close collaboration with Oracle Development to adopt the technology as a foundational layer.
“We are targeting Smart Data Platform for clients who use Oracle Fusion Applications but have data they wish to exploit which is not in Oracle, but in other technologies, whether it’s multi-platform, multi cloud, or both. AIDP has enabled us to make that data accessible in a single marketplace for users to exploit, without physically moving it. The data doesn’t have to live exclusively in Oracle any longer, that’s a huge advantage. The whole idea of having our partners—Oracle, Google, Amazon, etc.—working together to allow access across clouds is very beneficial for our clients.
“We’ve had the opportunity to work with AIDP directly with our clients, and the real-world experience has helped us evolve our thinking in how best to help them get the most from Oracle’s emerging AI technology.” [Editor’s note: you can read about KPMG’s work with one of their key clients, Lowe’s, in this blog.]
Trust in data
“By the time data gets to the marketplace, we want to ensure everyone can trust it. On every client project, there is a data governance track where we work to ensure the data on the marketplace can be relied on. We have a methodology supported by Oracle tools like AIDP that makes it much easier to maintain and govern all data in the marketplace. We also see a huge role for agentic AI in curating data, by validating data, augmenting data, or finding and fixing issues with data quality.
“The maturity of our clients’ ability to harness the growing volumes of data for decision making varies a lot. That being said, most clients have an opportunity to improve in getting their data in order, figuring out what data is useful, and how to incorporate AI capabilities. AIDP is going to help this process significantly.
“Fusion application data is already curated in a pre-built layer with Fusion AI Data Platform (FAIDP). This makes it easier to make available in the marketplace with minimal effort. We don’t have to curate it; we know it’s going to be accurate and complete.”
Exploring business information with AI
“With the emergence of AI, we are evolving to the point where the need for the creation of core transactional reports is being minimized and replaced by the ability to interrogate data using natural language and conversational interfaces, regardless of your role—CFO, VP, director, manager or analyst. So long as the data is in order, the request will no longer be ‘I need a new report’ to be created by an analytics specialist, but ‘tell me what I need to know.’ Or even following a prompt like ‘your gross margin is lower than it used to be. You need to look at your discount structure.’
“In the past, our tendency was to build dashboards with charts for the metrics we believed business users needed to manage their business. With AI, that has evolved. As a starting point, we often build with a simple dashboard containing some of the most important metrics a specific client or industry requires to manage the business—for example, gross margin, markdown percent, top product sales performance. Then prompts, powered by AI, natural language queries and conversational interfaces allow users to explore the data to find out what’s really happened, and what to do next. Ask a question, then the next question, and continue drilling down in context following any given path of analysis. For example, ‘my margin was low for the last quarter, what are the specific products that are driving that lower margin?’ That may be your first question, automatically creating an analysis giving you an answer. Next question, ‘Did we run any specific promotional programs to sell more of this product?’, and so on. You can continue to drill down or sideways, using natural language to analyse your data.”
New approach, new skills
“Such a new approach is a paradigm shift for most users. They’re bound only by their curiosity, their creativity and, crucially, their data. I think most people who understand their business are going to very quickly adapt. AI is allowing them to ask any question they want, and if the data supports it, it’s going to respond in kind and quickly. Users will quickly learn how to switch a visualization, add a filter, or change a data sort as they explore their data. This will also increase collaborating in real time, ‘ look at this insight I just found—I just sent you the link—what do you think?’ The cool part about that is you’ve got other colleagues who will think differently from you and give fresh perspectives, or new ideas to explore.”
Looking to the future
“Throughout my career, accurate, timely, and accessible data has been key to understanding and improving your business. I typically start client conversations with exploring the business problem and then how technology can be applied to solve it. So often it comes down to the data. You’ve got to have good data. Over the years that data has grown dramatically in volume and type—structured and unstructured—and comes from many disparate sources. That’s why it’s so exciting right now with the addition of tools like AIDP, where we can combine the idea of data and AI to help clients find answers that improve their business.”
Learn more
Find out more about Todd, KPMG, and Oracle AI Data Platform, and ask any questions you have in the Oracle Analytics and AI Community.