Team Profile: David Tingle

What do you do for Georgian?

I work on the Applied Research team, which is a team of machine learning research scientists and engineers who work with Georgian’s customers on an array of high-value projects to help bring AI products to market. As the Engagement Manager, I’m involved in all of those projects, from the very first scoping meetings through to product adoption. 

A big part of my role is building and nurturing strong relationships with our customers and ensuring that we’re working with the right partners and champions within those organizations. There’s also a lot of product strategy involved as well as a fair amount of coordination and logistics to ensure that everything is happening on time and according to plan. I also collaborate with our customers to measure the value of the work that the team delivers.

When did you join Georgian and what were you doing before?

I joined in January 2022. Prior to that I worked at Google helping support the relationships Google has with some of its largest advertising and cloud computing customers, like The Home Depot and Best Buy. My role was to help them and other big retailers execute on technical projects such as running experiments and integrating first party data into Google’s platform products. There, as at Georgian, this involves hands-on technical work, as well as coordinating between various technical and business teams on both sides of the relationship. 

What kinds of projects do you and the Applied Research team work on?

The mission of the team is to work with our companies on applied AI problems that generate high return on investment (ROI) and value for the business. We do both advisory work with companies that are early on in their AI journey, and deep engagement work with more mature companies. For example, we have recently been working with Beam Benefits, our customer in the insurance industry. Predicting claims volume is a key part of their underwriting process, and we have been working closely with them to build a fully automated software pipeline that will allow Beam to keep its core underwriting models accurate all the time, with a lot less costly manual effort.

How many projects does the team work on in a year and how do you decide which ones to take on?

We work on around 6 to 10 deep engagements in the course of a year and another 10 to 15 advisory projects. In each case, we always try to play to our strengths, which from a technical standpoint are in artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically computer vision, natural language processing, and MLOps. 

The most important criteria for any project we take on is ensuring that it’s going to deliver meaningful business value for the company. That means that every project either needs to help the company generate revenue or increase profitability. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to do it.

And how do you measure the impact the Applied Research team is having?

As we’re scoping any project, we build a business case and ROI model in collaboration with the company that we hold ourselves accountable to throughout the engagement. If a new product should help reduce a team’s time on task, for example, then the metric we’ll use to measure our success is cost savings driven by how much less time the team spends on the task after we’ve rolled out our solution. Ultimately, we try to be very specific about success metrics and the criteria we use to evaluate success, focusing on those things that we know are measurable and testable. 

What do you like about working at Georgian?

It’s a really interesting place to work and I appreciate that our leadership lives by the values that they’ve set for the organization. That sets the tone for everyone else and helps ensure that we’re all being our best selves every day at work. 

What do you like to do when you’re not at work?

I spend a lot of time chasing my three young children around fields and playgrounds. When I’m not doing that, I love to read and be on the water sailing or paddle boarding.