Dan Francis is Chief Innovation and Digital Officer at BDO. In this Q&A, he explains how the firm’s focus on people-centric innovation operates in practice, discusses its in-house AI platform Personas, and examines his own career.
Tell us a little about your role at BDO.
My role is about creating change in the organisation. That involves turning ideas into practical innovations and then delivering on that through digital technologies, products, apps and new tools.
Everything my team does is driven by our people at BDO. As a professional services organisation, we are fully focused on our people and the way they operate with our clients. So, with any innovation, we’re looking for a people-shaped outcome. We’re finding a problem, looking at technologies that can fix that problem, then solving it. We never build technology for technology’s sake.
When I started in the role, I was a team of one. We decided to start small, build proof of concept and solve some early challenges. Five years on, my function has 120 people working across a variety of disciplines.
How does innovation work at BDO?
BDO has four main areas of the business – tax, audit, deals and client consulting. We provide a dedicated innovation lab for each of those practices, each overseen by an innovation manager. These labs have squads of developers that work with the practice teams to experiment on ideas. Those experiments that are successful are built out into products that can be run out at scale across individual practices or the organisation as a whole.
Our process is designed to be very collaborative and is led by the requirements of the individual practice. Take audit as an example. Audit Labs is shaped by the lead audit partners and their teams. Problems and potential solutions are triaged to align with overall organisational strategy and those of audit, before audit select the ones they want to take forward.
My team then works with the auditors. If an individual auditor has an idea put forward, they get to go into the Audit Lab and help build and then launch the idea. Individuals can be taken off their team for a couple of hours – or even weeks or months – to build a solution, experiment on it and then have it launched back into their own teams with name against it. It’s a really powerful people proposition to be rewarded and recognised for a new idea or product.
This is something that has worked really well across our organisation. Everybody has ideas, but delivering on them is hard when you have a day job to deal with and you don’t have the technological knowledge to build apps or AI systems. We’re giving our people the ability to practically deliver and develop new solutions.
What are some solutions your team has delivered?
We have built more than 30 products over the past five years. Some are fairly niche products that meet a specific requirement, while others have been delivered across the entire organisation. One example of the latter is our enterprise-wide AI platform, Personas.
With Personas, we felt we couldn’t meet the needs of the organisation by buying in an AI platform. We wanted a tool that was safe and secure, but also scalable. Personas operates in a way that is fairly unique to BDO. As a people-centric organisation, we wanted our AI platform to reflect this.
Our platform allows employees to create an AI persona that is prompted to behave like they do in their role. It takes on their characteristics and can mimic what they do. For example, it can behave and output work like an auditor, someone working in risk or an HR manager. It streamlines day-to-day tasks such as drafting content or analysing documents, allowing our people to focus on more complex, strategic work. It’s a good example of how we want to use technologies like AI to augment our human capabilities.
Since rolling it out 18 months ago, we’ve had great success with it, supporting thousands of our people in their every day work.
How does BDO support a culture of innovation?
BDO has a very strong digital mindset and is one of key pillars. It runs through the organisation from top to bottom. Our culture is one where anyone can have an idea, build and experiment on it, and then deliver it back to the firm or our clients. It’s the job of myself and my team to help our people make their ideas a reality.
How has your own skillset evolved as your career has progressed?
I’ve been interested in technology from very early on in my life and have been lucky to combine that with a career. I started out as a project manager but quickly moved to managing technology products and then working in innovation, which I’ve done for nearly 20 years now.
Part of it is about remaining curious and ensuring you solve real problems. Very few technologies have been created for the sake of it. Almost all meet a human need, so it’s vital to keep that in mind.
One thing I learned early on in my career was to focus on the commercial aspect of my work. Being commercially successful allows you to do a lot of good things in your organisation and helps make the case for further investment. It’s ultimately how decisions get made.
Has the profile of innovation in professional services changed?
Innovation was always a technical function when I started out – it wasn’t really its own role 20 years ago. We’ve seen digital roles increase over the past 15 years, particularly with the rise of the Chief Digital Officer. Now, we’re seeing the move towards much more strategic and commercial alignment.
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