AiThority Interview with Dounia Senawi, Chief Commercial Officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Dounia Senawi, Chief Commercial Officer, Deloitte, covers the importance of leveraging AI and machine learning to drive customer-centric transformations, addresses Deloitte’s strong partnerships with tech leaders like Google Cloud, AWS, and NVIDIA to advance AI innovation and predicts that AI will remain a key driver of commercial growth and industry solutions in this Q&A:

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Dounia, could you walk us through your career from the financial services industry to assuming the role of Chief Commercial Officer at Deloitte Consulting?

My career in banking taught me the value of putting the customer first and forging relationships through connection. I became a consultant after leading a Salesforce transformation at a regional bank, where I was a Deloitte client. I wanted to help other banks transform the way that Deloitte and Salesforce had helped my team.

In the 10 years I’ve been at Deloitte, I’ve been lucky to work with and connect engineers, creatives, technologists, storytellers, business strategists, and more across our multi-disciplinary teams. I’ve led businesses including Deloitte Digital’s Digital Customer offering and served as its Chief Commercial Officer before my current role as Deloitte’s US Chief Commercial Officer.

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Today, I have the thrill of leading our go-to-market efforts for our Deloitte US Ecosystems & Alliances, supporting our team’s collaboration with the world’s leading technology organizations, and creating innovative solutions for our clients across industries.

What are the key components of your commercial strategy at Deloitte, and how do you ensure it aligns with the evolving needs of your clients?

Today’s market – and tomorrow’s – demands that every business adapt to the continuous evolution of technology. We help our clients meet this moment by combining our deep industry expertise and our wide Ecosystems & Alliances network.

For me, it all comes back to the progress we make together – with our teams, our alliance partners, and our clients. When we come together, we’re able to help organizations navigate the unexpected with agility and create solutions that make an impact.

How is Deloitte leveraging AI/ML technologies to address the ever-changing needs of customers?

At Deloitte, we use AI/ML technologies to transform our own business and how we deliver services to our clients. We’ve embedded Generative AI across our organization to support market research, write and test code, generate and summarize content, develop use case-specific pilots, and launch new products and services.

Our use of AI and machine learning has our clients at the center: How can we help them harness the power of this tech to drive trustworthy AI-powered transformations? These capabilities help them navigate complex implementation with our team’s global engineering scale.

Can you highlight some partnerships Deloitte has engaged in to advance AI innovation?

Since the meteoric rise of AI, we’ve continued to strengthen our long-standing Ecosystems & Alliances collaborations with tech leaders including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), NVIDIA, ServiceNow, and SAP to help our clients implement AI as a growth catalyst.

A few examples:

• With Google Cloud, we’re bringing advanced Generative AI capabilities to businesses in every sector, including a co-innovation initiative to integrate our ConvergeCONSUMER solutions with Google Cloud’s top-tier AI technologies and a groundbreaking sustainability initiative. An awesome instance of our longstanding collaboration was helping Kroger build a new task management platform that transformed Kroger’s associate experience with greater productivity and data-led decision-making.
• Alongside AWS, we launched a multi-year collaboration to create a new AI and Data Accelerator Program to scale AI capabilities for our clients and co-fund an Innovation Lab where our engineers can co-create solutions. As an example, our Deloitte Digital team collaborated with AWS to build a virtual community for Sinclair, one of the largest TV station operators in the US, and reinvent their digital fan experience.
• We’re collaborating with NVIDIA to help our global clients implement Generative AI solutions. A favorite example of this collaboration was a solution to help Exelon, one of the nation’s largest public utility organizations, use synthetic data to quickly detect infrastructure defects and keep homes powered. Our collaborative solutions cover a range of applications including Deloitte’s Quartz AI™ suite of offerings, which is powered by NVIDIA, and Quartz, which added Atlas AI™ to accelerate drug discovery innovation.

How does Deloitte’s Middle Eastern North African and Allies Community contribute to your DEI goals?

My family and I are Chaldean, and my parents immigrated from Iraq to the US. When I was growing up, differences were not celebrated in the same way they are today, so I’ve really cherished the intentional conversations and connections within and across the diverse communities that make up our organization.

What role does data analytics play in Deloitte Consulting’s approach to helping clients make informed decisions and drive business performance?

 Data is everything – especially when it comes to digital transformation. Robust, clean, and useful data equips organizations to generate greater ROI on their tech investments and digital transformations.

To help clients make informed decisions, our AI and Analytics services focus on:

• Leading in ethical AI implementation. We help clients enhance their performance and controls while protecting their reputations.
• AI’s potential as more than just function. We help organizations create and implement trustworthy AI solutions.
• Technology as just one facet of AI’s potential. Our integrated perspective on market demands and opportunities helps clients understand the wider implications of AI on business performance, strategies, customer relationships, products and services, talent, and culture.
• Industry- and domain-specific assets and services to deliver effective solutions and successful outcomes for a broad range of clients facing similar challenges.

What major trends do you see shaping the consulting industry over the next few years?

I see our industry continuing to create client solutions by collaborating with multiple external organizations. We often team up with leading tech organizations like AWS, Google Cloud, NVIDIA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Oracle, SAP, and more. Our engineers, data scientists, strategists, technologists, creatives, and more come together to build and implement solutions that create agility for our clients to adopt and scale.

As AI continues to radically change how businesses operate, it will remain a huge priority. Our fifth edition of Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise reported 94% of business leaders believe AI is critical to their success strategy over the next five years, and the Generative AI market is expected to double every other year for the next 10 years.

Looking ahead, what are the key areas where you believe AI will create new opportunities for Deloitte’s commercial growth?

I see AI continuing to play a crucial role in every aspect of our growth and our client services. As clients are in different stages of their AI journeys, we must continue to lead the way in tackling these complex challenges.

Organizations rich in data will be the fastest to adopt, scale, and see the impact of AI and Generative AI. We see this already with our clients – for example, those who are generating natural language customer service interactions with AI-powered chatbots and accelerating pharmaceutical drug discovery.

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