Investing in the Insights Transformation
All Things Insights: We’re here on the first day of TMRE 2025, and we have the pleasure of sitting down with Amir Akleh, VP, Business Strategy, Analytics & Insights, First Citizens Bank. You also participated very generously with our Next Era of Insights Report that debuted at the show, and I’d love to touch base with you a little bit on that. The speed of business seems to continually accelerate. What are your thoughts on how AI is transforming the insights community?
Amir Akleh: AI is definitely a fascinating topic. It seems like every single week, there’s some software solution or platform related to AI where it’s completely transforming the industry. But it’s good to see everybody here and to see how receptive the insights professional is to AI, of how much of a proponent they are to AI, and how they’re looking to champion it and ultimately bring it to their workload and to make insights more efficient, scalable, impactful and effective at their own roles. It’s good to see everybody very excited about it and looking to roll it out at their firms.
Of course, with any new technology, there’s also a lot of change management with it. There’s a lot of concerns in terms of people thinking it may replace their jobs, but it’s interesting to see how people are balancing that with leveraging and implementing new technology at their firm. And leveraging it with their human intelligence too and overlaying anything with AI with their own human insights being key.
Measuring the Speed and ROI of Insights
All Things Insights: Our Next Era of Insights Report talked a lot about AI but not everything is about AI transformation. There’s this aspect of the business strategy transforming, the speed of storytelling, advancing ROI in the industry. How do you think the pace of change affects your role?
Amir Akleh: In terms of the ROI component, initially, we talked about how hard it is to really quantify that, and typically, executives want to see a hard number. If I’m going to invest a million dollars, I want to see 50% ROI over the next X amount of years.
With AI, it’s a little different. It’s not only simply just the quantitative aspect, but you need to look at the whole picture in terms of increasing the effectiveness of people not only on their team, but in tangential teams and leveraging new technology to make them smarter and more efficient. As you alluded to, there’s the speed and time to market of getting insights out, of getting insights as well that we, who are in the weeds, may not have necessarily thought about ideas outside of the box that AI could bring to the table. Those are a few aspects that I see in terms of AI helping with ROI and speed to market of insights.
Is Qual Having a Moment?
All Things Insights: You also attended the executive retreat yesterday, and now here we are at the full TMRE show. Are there any takeaways or trends that you see in the industry? For instance, it seems that I’ve talked to a lot of people about qual and the impact that AI is having on qual research. What are your thoughts?
Amir Akleh: AI is definitely going to have a huge impact on qual insights, specifically with helping people think outside of the box, brainstorming, talking about different types of strategies and initiatives that may not necessarily be in front of our eyes, because AI has the unique ability to consume a ton of context, institutional knowledge, and background that humans just simply can’t compute. It’ll allow us to completely think outside of the box and bring new ideas and insights to the table that we may not necessarily have thought of. That’s exciting in itself.
Just from my standpoint, when I get together with my senior leaders, we probably come up with about one, two, maybe at most three ideas that we want to build out proof of concepts, check out the business value, and actually pursue in terms of launching either a new product or a relationship pricing model for our clients. But leveraging AI, probably within five, ten seconds, it could come up with maybe five, seven, ten ideas that we could pursue and implement and research. Versus humans, it would probably take us an hour of a whiteboarding session to come up with at most two or three impactful ideas. So it’s definitely exciting to see the qualitative insights and ideas that AI could help generate for us.
Assessing Risk & Value
All Things Insights: All of these new solutions, as you’ve alluded to, all these tools and solutions from vendors, what is something you look for in your position now? You’ve mentioned that banks are a little more conservative, the financial world’s a little more conservative to implement these tools. What is a concern or an opportunity that you see going forward?
Amir Akleh: In terms of a concern, it’s essentially feeding nonpublic information or confidential client information into some model or to some platform, and then ultimately, it being leaked. So that’s really the only risk or concern that I could foresee.
But in terms of what I’m looking for, I’m looking for solutions that are able to consolidate and streamline data for multiple disparate solutions. I’m a data visualization analytics guy, so a solution to help me build out the visualizations based on the underlying data, to then streamline the data driven insights that I could extract from the underlying data, that will ultimately help me determine what’s contributing and detracting to growth within specifically our private bank, and then figuring out from there ultimately what’s working, what’s scalable, where we could use those contributors to grow and to help with other areas of the business that are lagging. Just decreasing all of that time, making it more efficient, basically 10x-ing myself to make myself more valuable within our organization.
All Things Insights: Amir times ten!
Amir Akleh: Yes. I like it. Maybe I’ll rebrand myself as that.
Editor’s Note: The next TMRE will take place on October 5-7, 2026, and will be co-located with Content Marketing World at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO.
