I joined Riedel Communications, the company whose intercom and video technology runs the world's biggest live events, as a Data Scientist in Digital Transformation. The title held; the job kept growing. Three years in, it spans 15+ digital products across three phases, and each phase only worked because of the one before it.
Phase one, make the business visible. Data lived across multiple ERP systems and every department saw its own slice. I built the BI layer across the full order-to-delivery chain and drove SAP master data from 70% of records carrying issues to 2% in a year, by fixing data at the point of entry instead of cleaning it downstream forever. Shared, reliable data saved €500K+, most visibly in procurement, and a product lifecycle report gave seven functions one version of the truth for the first time.
Phase two, digitise the processes. The flagship was the pricelist: three-plus months of Excel across seven silos, rebuilt as one transparent digital cycle that ships in under a month. The insight that shaped it: the bottleneck was coordination, not calculation. You don't digitise files; you digitise agreements. The seven-department alignment was the product, and the tool just enforced it.
Phase three, build AI on the foundation. With trusted data and digitised processes, GenAI stopped being a demo risk and became a portfolio. I collected use cases across every department, prioritised with leadership, wrote the PRDs, and shipped three products: a knowledge assistant that made company information a ten-second conversation, a multi-agent IT helpdesk on AWS serving 1,500 employees with 40% deflection and resolution down from a week to two days, and a tender bot that cut sales tender time from a month to two weeks. All of it inside a governance layer, GDPR, EU AI Act, works council, built during development, not after.
The sequence is the lesson. Companies that start with the AI and skip the foundation ship demos. The transformation worked because it ran in the only order that does: data, then process, then intelligence.