Visionary leaders are playing a crucial role in reshaping the future in 2023 in the constantly changing economic sector. To guide their organisations and sectors into uncharted territory, these creative leaders are embracing innovation, sustainability, and digitization. They are leading the charge in adjusting to shifting consumer demands, new technology, and international difficulties.
In this article, we’ll look at how these forward-thinking company leaders are shaping the future while navigating the challenges of today’s competitive business environment, setting new standards for success in the process.
Featuring for The Enterprise World’s this issue of Most Influential Business Leaders To Watch Out For is this conversation with Mr. Walid Abed. Let us find out more about Walid Abed’s company and his journey.
Brief us about your journey at the company, what inspired you to start the company?
I am a French linguist and computer scientist, and I am known for the proposition of a new model called the Semantic Meta Model (SMM) (Meta Modèle Sémantique – MMS). I am the founder and CEO of Global Data Excellence. I am a worldwide renowned expert and visionary in AI and data-related topics, with 30 years of on-field experience across various sectors.
The communication between the human and machine was really difficult. Being a multicultural person made me realise that there is a serious problem in the sense when communicating with languages. Il fallait les compétences linguistiques.
To be able to establish the dialogue between humans and machines, I had to understand both human language and machine language. When I arrived in the corporate world, I noticed that everything revolved around value. However, value is ambiguous. Value has two meanings: qualitative and quantitative. These two meanings overlap, which is why there are economic systems that lean to the left, favoring qualitative value, and others to the right, favoring economic value.
As a result, I wanted to create a governance system that can govern according to the two values phases.
First phase includes rights, ethics, standards, rules and regulations.
Second phase is money, which represents value.
It’s too complicated for humans to make the link between rules, data and value. There is a loss of meaning at every level, which is why I decided to link everything together and set up a governance framework based on everyone’s language and context, with a verbatim, to avoid any ambiguity. Only an AI is capable of neutrally calculating the context and anticipating because the data is disparate. Data is everywhere, and it’s difficult to discern which data is good. As we move towards a paradigm shift, history, statistics and past transactions do not represent the future.
Only linguistic and semantic AI are capable of resolving this equation and this paradox, because the AIs that exist to date take no account of value or context, nor of rules on past transactions which represent nothing for the future. If we want to get into the future, we have to create it.
What are the initial challenges you faced and what are the reasons behind company’s long-standing success?
The digital world and its complex interactions create new challenges for data governance, and more broadly, for the Digital Enterprise making it difficult for Humans and machines to interact. The knowledge required for human activity in the value creation is fragmented and dispersed across systems which in their turn are not normalized, siloed and inconsistent. Moreover, the language problem inherent to the organisational complexity of humans and machines’ ecosystems, combined with the tsunami of regulation and data, makes it impossible to connect the knowledge together and link it to be used wisely for the organisational value outcome.
Many platforms and solutions exist. However, most of these, if not all, are disconnected from knowledge and human wisdom ignoring the social contexts as witnessed Big Data Analytics, IBM Watson, Palantir and other technologies in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). This type of AI (machine learning, analytics and statistics-driven) enables us to understand approximately the world we created, and by extrapolation, it can project us with probabilistic predictions into potential futures, it does not enable a real constructive and transparent human-machine dialogue. In today’s complex, and fast-changing environments, a global, systematic, and prescriptive data-driven governance is now needed to execute and proactively operationalise business strategies execution and value generation.
Thanks to GDE, organisational complexity, and cost are solved. Value is accelerated. There are no more siloed and instinctive decisions leading to considerable money, time, and trust loss. There is no loss of translation since DEMS-NIXUS integrates semantics. Privacy is guaranteed as there is no need for data integration as data stay at the source. Ownership and ethics and human rights are respected.
What are the products or services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
Our solution, Data Excellence Management System – Natural Intelligence eXpanded Universe System (DEMS-NIXUS) is an integrated and multilingual web-based solution (on-premise or in the cloud) that enables modern organisations to create a cohesive governance environment capable of aligning and governing all business units. DEMS-NIXUS embeds a semantic and linguistic Artificial Intelligence to translate human language business rules to machine code.
The AI is capable of integrating the existing infrastructure and all databases and their senses instantly without human intervention while respecting the data ownership, leaving them at their source. It is a multilingual system for the interrogation of databases in natural language. DEMS-NIXUS integrates linguistics and encapsulates ChatGPT, Wolfram ALPHA, and other AI. It also processes and decrypts over 1000 file formats and connects to any public or private data source and social networks.
DEMS-Nixus is the complete solution that works in any IT environment for automated Data Integration, Data Cleansing, Business Intelligence, Data Governance, and Data Sharing. DEMS-NIXUS consolidates resources and builds on the extensive investments already made by companies. It also forces a factual value-driven collaboration that engages end users from all levels in the ultimate value creation.
This web-based application supports an integrated, customised management and governance framework empowering the enterprise’s shareholders, employees, and partners. It establishes accountability and responsibility throughout the organisational structure. DEMS-NIXUS precisely links the data asset to the value flows to prescriptively govern and sustain business strategies. Once fully deployed, DEMS-NIXUS provides the enterprise with the combined forces of a cohesive work structure and a governance framework that for the first time in history synchronises data, policies and business transactions.
Moreover, DEMS-NIXUS integrates DeCRIPT which is used to analyze textual data (private or public data – emails, social networks, files…) according to business needs using the semantic meta-model. Textual data represents about 80% of the data of a company that is not automatically exploited compared to the 20% that represents the structured data (in databases).
The information obtained from the texts enriches the existing structured data to have a more updated vision in an automatic way. The result of this analysis can be used to enrich the meaning of a database and is stored in the database. Once in the database, this result can be queried in natural language.
The implementation of DEMS-NIXUS accelerates the ability of your organisation to maximise the business value of enterprise data while minimizing your operational cost. Within less than one year, your teams are enabled to embed a “govern by value” culture across your organisation.
The singularity of DEMS-NIXUS lies in its Dynamic and Prescriptive Governance Model: a top-down management approach driven by a systematic valorisation of the enterprise data asset and proactive control of current and forecasted business transactions and objectives.
This model enables leaders and managers to anticipate the impact of non-compliant data assets on the ultimate business value and in turn, to adjust the resources’ distribution to maximise current and planned business operations.
Ultimately, DEMS-NIXUS enables business executives to anticipate the impact of deviations from business policies and their impact on the business value.
It allows the company to single-mindedly focus on the objectives to be reached and the most efficient journey to attain them.
How do you decide to take the company a step further?
Our company keeps pace with changing times and trends by collaborating with a complete ecosystem that include customers, partners, institutions, academies, European Commission, ECCMA, INTERREG, and INNOSUISSE consortiums. We constantly work on R&D. We also work on different special projects.
Can you please brief us about your professional experience?
Dr. Walid Abed is a French linguist and computer scientist, and is known for the proposition of a new model called the Semantic Meta Model (SMM) (Meta Modèle Sémantique – MMS). He was born on September 20, 1968. He is the founder and CEO of Global Data Excellence. He is a worldwide renowned expert and visionary in AI and data-related topics, with 30 years of on-field experience across various sectors.
He started his career in 1995 in the automotive industry before moving to the IT sector in 1998 and then to the financial and business consulting sector in 2001. After diverse missions for large financial, manufacturing enterprises and governments, Dr. Walid Abed joined the food & beverage industry at Nestlé headquarters as a Business Excellence Manager driving the data strategy for the group.
In 1996, he created the first human-computer dialog in natural language: Nixus (Natural Intelligence eXpanded Universe System) when the idea of a dialog between humans and machines was in its infancy.
Since 2000, Dr. Walid Abed has introduced and taught the Data Excellence discipline at the Tesnière Centre specialized in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing at the University of Franche-Comté and also at the CNAM (Centre National des Arts et Métiers) and Paris Dauphine University, and finally at the Fribourg University of Law as a philosophical, economic, political and organizational model.
In 2007 Walid Abed founded Global Data Excellence (GDE). GDE is a Swiss ICT company based in Geneva. The entire philosophy of the sustainable business of GDE relies on a new discipline, the governance by value allowing perpetual excellence. This innovative discipline is made possible by a holistic framework embedded into a software system : DEMS (the Data Excellence Management System) with the vision to elevate data to excellence empowering a data-driven society governed by value/ or objectives.
Dr. Walid Abed has given lectures at several data conferences. He is a co-founder and board member of the French association EXQI (Excellence, Quality, Information) that groups several scientists around the Data Excellence discipline. Walid Abed is also one of the scientists involved in the creation of the IQCP (Information Quality Certified Professional) certification established by the IAIDQ (International Association for Information and Data Quality). Dr. Walid Abed is the founder of the Scientific Society PEC “Perpetual Excellence Community”, a Swiss non-profit organization, based in Geneva. Walid Abed has published several articles and book chapters.
What are the key achievements of your business journey?
- Customers include the 20 most prestigious corporations in the world more than 30 000 users, 3 000 managers & leaders worldwide race with DEMS towards continuous excellence over 50+ countries in almost every industry (Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Consumer Goods, Pharmaceuticals, Finance…).
- DEMS allowed our clients to make 8 trillion € turnover and it is still growing every day
- DEMS cleaned up approximatively 100K million € which correspond to only a small percentage of the world economy which can eradicate poverty and align all the SDGs
- 10 Out of the box semantic knowledge models and verbatim packages ready (ERP, HR, Person, Procurement, GDPR, CORPORATE DATA MODEL, SAP Master Data Model…)
