Matthew Hough, VP and Chief Information Officer at Cintas, speaks with Tracy Ring, Chief Data Officer and Global Generative Lead for Life Sciences at Accenture, in a video interview about the Cintas business model, creating strategic foundations, leveraging AI for customer service, prioritizing the business, and partnering right.
Headquartered in Cincinnati, Cintas designs, manufactures, and implements corporate identity uniform programs, and provides entrance mats, restroom cleaning and supplies, tile and carpet cleaning, promotional products, first-aid, safety, fire protection products, and services.
Hough begins by stating that Cintas has a fantastic business model and runs a great playbook. He adds that as the organization realized the need for strategy, business, and IT teams came together to create a good strategy.
Next, it boils down to creating the foundations to enable capabilities to reach the strategic goals, says Hough. This is where AI comes in at Cintas, as generative AI supercharges what the organization already does.
Sharing an instance, Hough mentions developing AI models that align the most relevant prospects for a salesperson to call, which creates a higher sales probability. He notes that this supercharges the daily work and saves time.
In continuation, Hough states that Cintas also leverages AI models to align the best products to sell to relevant customers, which increases sales and enhances customer service. However, he affirms that the organization also takes a step back at times to align the business process and the data to create the desired outcome when exposed to large language models or AI.
Moving forward, Hough affirms having great partnerships, which become a differentiator in the business. He stresses that Cintas is setting new standards for business.
With better and repeatable usage of AI, the organization can use LLMs for better productivity. More importantly, he notes that whether it is through services or optimizing inventory, the benefit of AI is reaped by customers.
However, Cintas prioritizes understanding the business instead of putting technology at the top, states Hough. He highlights the critical need to understand the business roadmap and then accelerate it through automation, AI, or LLMs.
In addition, Hough maintains that applying AI to anything without having a broader business view of it will lead to inconsistency. Therefore, he advises practitioners to understand the business side which can then be supercharged to derive optimum value.
Delving further, Hough adds that applying technology to bad data and broken processes or giving its access to untrained individuals will amplify underlying foundational issues. Once the operations or customer service gets impacted by this, it is difficult to undo the impact, therefore Cintas takes a bottom-up approach to it, he adds.
Recalling a conversation with a fellow leader, Hough says that it is critical to understand the most consistent processes and then have partnerniships to have the right architecture. Furthermore, he asserts that organizations must decide on whether or not to share the data, but before sharing, they must assess the sensitivity of the data.
In conclusion, Hough states that many organizations can apply generative AI but the best ones are the ones that have a sorted roadmap for the next three to four years.
CDO Magazine appreciates Matthew Hough for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.
