Anna Baird

What makes a company’s culture innovative? Is it the poolhall environment packed with snacks, or is it the processes in place for making employees’ ideas implementable and scalable? Anna Baird, chief customer officer for Google Cloud’s Global Generative AI Go-To-Market team, is an expert on employee engagement, leveraging data and AI strategy. An upbeat and memorable speaker, her frameworks for innovation in today’s technology heavy world of work are giving companies a powerful strategic advantage.

An executive advisor at Google, where she has held multiple roles for innovation, ethical AI and work transformation, Baird has a talent for communicating in ways that are clear and digestible. With more than 15 years working for leading technology companies including LinkedIn, she provides leaders with powerful examples of what a culture of innovation looks like and how it can efficiently bring projects from ideation to proof of concept through talent, structure, strategy, environment, empowerment and innovation – tenets of transformation learned in her tech experiences.

A featured speaker on stages from South Africa to Saudi Arabia, all throughout Europe and across North America, Baird is known for her storytelling and approachable frameworks for growing innovation and data literacy muscles.

How to Build a Culture of Innovation

Highly sought-after by Fortune 500 companies, hyper-growth startups, public sector organizations and boards of directors alike, Baird illuminates how a culture of innovation functions, including innovating in the age of AI, utilizing data well, identifying the pillars of organizational change and defining an ethical AI strategy. This knowledge equips CXOs and boards to identify behaviors and practices that can impede or empower creativity within their organizations.

“Leaders at a manufacturing or insurance company can build in a lot of these cool cultural ideas that the tech industry has leveraged – from the cheap and cheery things in meetings to adding experiences to the office or virtual environment,” explains Baird. “Through small scale deployments that utilize these essential tools, you get more ideation that turns into innovation and are better able to process that innovation into proof of concept. The big idea is to borrow tech companies’ structure with pride and then adapt it to the company that you are.”

A guest lecturer at Stanford, MIT, the University of British Columbia and more, Baird brings technology and the customer experience together to craft captivating narratives with data. With a deep expertise in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and customer experience programs, she shows leaders how the treasure trove of data their organization already has can be strategically applied to reach a variety of novel outcomes. From customer experience to learning technologies, Baird helps leaders build cloud computing skills and figure out how the data that comes into their business can help explain the needs of customers and the business. A skilled advisor, she leads executives through the process of creating practical, tactical data strategies that can be implemented as soon as tomorrow.

Discover a Common Language to Tell Compelling Stories With the Data You Already Have

As AI is being deployed across companies, from the C-Suite to the front lines, Baird’s research has found that silos often prevent people in different departments from speaking the same language. Data around generative or agentic AI that’s important to the CTO and CIO may not be innately understood by HR and marketing executives. With unique expertise in translating CRM data into actionable strategy, her candid presentations offer leaders a common vocabulary and show how employee-facing executives can lead the charge of finding a unified language for telling a compelling story with the data they already have.

“When you have access to great data, you can better understand your people, their productivity, what they’re doing well and where they need support,” says Baird. “Similarly, you can collect all the customer data you want, but if you don’t use the data on a regular basis, you’re never iterating off what it can build towards. In short, the quality of your data is essential to the quality of your AI.”

Equipped with a bespoke “company dictionary” that clarifies important terms, leaders are better able to identify what their “North Star” of good data looks like when addressing employee and customer issues. She helps executives understand the steps to building a data literacy program and how to create good data for working with AI.

Rallying the Organization Around Digital Transformation

“Why does the CHRO or the CMO care about artificial intelligence and generative AI for employee experience? Because of all the great data,” concludes Baird. “Access to that data will help you make the most of your people and speak more effectively about and measure productivity. I speak to them so that the CIO, the CTO, or the CEO can get those people on board. At the end of the day, you can buy as much technology as you want. If your data is trash, you aren’t getting anything out of it.”

Fusing data intelligence and employee engagement, Anna Baird powers her talks with 15 years in consulting and technology to help “make data loveable again” in an era of rapidly advancing technology and concern about the place for people in the adapting working world. She is engaging, cites digestible examples and brings the crowd on the journey of mind shift from dreading data education to embracing the ability to be that much more informed and empowered.

Baird’s work at Google includes her advisory work for CXOs and boards around transformation and particularly through culture of innovation. She has also spearheaded significant initiatives for Google Cloud to educate and build cloud computing skills amongst students, corporate professionals and founders. Baird has held multiple roles in Google in an executive advisor capacity for innovation, ethical AI and work transformation. Her previous roles have included an executive advisor role at LinkedIn and a number of director roles in consulting. She is also a guest lecturer for a number of executive education programs.

Anna Baird is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.