News UK sets out new data strategy: AI and data scientists

News UK CTO Christina Scott also discusses experimenting with data, and her use of Amazon Redshift and Google's BigQuery

News UK CTO Christina Scott has described her organisation's data strategy, which includes the use of artificial intelligence and data science teams.

Speaking to Computing recently, Scott explained that her firm uses both Amazon Redshift and Googles 'BigQuery' cloud platforms. However, despite describing News UK as "mature" in its approach to cloud, she admitted that there is room for improvement.

"There's more to be done to ensure that all the data management processes are in place," said Scott, who recently described the challenge of moving firms as a technology leader. "Sometimes it's a case of 'We've got this data, so what?' You need to prove the value of the data then built the technology, but so many firms do it the other way around, build the tech then try to prove the value."

She added that her teams are experimenting with data to see what value they can derive.

"We're making small experiments which allow us to test, for instance if we use data in a new way can we get more advertising revenue, can we get more people registering? We build these experiments into other products we're working on, then look at the results."

News UK is also using both artificial intelligence (AI), and data scientists.

"It's early days but we are using AI [for data analysis]. It's not that we have a huge data science team or a massive AI capability, but there's a lot of recognition that there are more things we could be doing, so we're just building up."

Scott praised Google's toolset, saying it is both cheaper and better than much of the competition.

"We're still looking at analytics tooling. I reall see Google doing great stuff in this area, for instance it's Google Vision API [for image content analysis], you can put articles through and it pulls out the metadata for you. I look back at the time I've spent on metadata products in the past, and then this thing just does it for $20 per month."

News UK was already a Google customer before using these analytics tools, having moved over to Google Docs and Gmail seven years ago. Scott previously explained that her firm is architecting its cloud tooling and applications to be able to switch suppliers at will, avoiding vendor lock-in.