A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.

SP Group

Jingting Cher, Deputy Director, Data Science

From Code to Impact: Leading Enterprise AI With Purpose

Jingting Cher

Jingting Cher is Deputy Director of Data Science at SP Group, where he leads enterprise AI strategy, generative AI implementation, and AI governance. With a First-Class Honors degree in Electrical Engineering from NUS and deep expertise in analytics, he focuses on unlocking business value through responsible AI. His leadership bridges technology and strategy, driving impactful digital transformation across energy, operations, and customer engagement in Singapore’s utilities sector.

From Code to Strategy: A Data Leader’s Journey

I am responsible for driving the enterprise AI Strategy and Governance, which includes identifying, prioritizing and delivering key AI use cases, ensuring organization AI readiness through AI literacy and competence development, and establishing AI Governance framework for responsible AI.

Unlocking Enterprise Value Through AI

Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Generative AI has been progressing very rapidly, and increasingly powerful AI models have demonstrated the potential to impact the enterprise in almost every function and role, from software development to HR and customer service. We

have seen how AI can uplift operation efficiency through optimizing information retrieval, drive business decisions through generating real-time insights, and increasing user engagement through natural language interaction. The next frontier for AI would be Agentic AI, which will further drive up operation efficiency through automating complex business processes.

Data science leaders must own the business engagement, aligning AI with real value, not just emerging trends.

Talent, Trust, and Teamwork in Data Science

The Data Scientist role is also shifting due to the Generative AI landscape. The scope of a Data Scientist now goes beyond statistical analysis and model training, as many pretrained Gen AI models, both open and closed source, are now capable enough to be utilized without further fine-tuning. Therefore, Data Scientists should focus on identifying business opportunities for AI and implementing AI at scale, and the additional qualities that would be essential are soft skills such as business engagement and communication, and hard skills such as AI engineering, evaluating AI tools and implementing AI governance.

Strategic Vision in a Noisy AI Landscape

It is important to ensure that our AI strategy is mapped to our business priorities and goals, and to be able to measure the value of AI through business outcomes. Focus on standards and frameworks that allow flexibility such as switching to new models and adding new tools. Lastly, ensure that AI Governance framework is in place to minimize risks when accelerating AI adoption.

Guiding Data Science with Vision and Value

It is an exciting time to be a Data Scientist in the era of Generative AI, but it is easy to get stuck in the hype and evolving landscape. The enterprise attention and expectations on AI has never been greater, and data science leaders need to step up, own the business engagement to align business value and lead the adoption of AI within the organization.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.