Behind the Growth

Cigi Manning, VP of Digital Transformation and Customer Centricity at Manulife Canada, joins host Imran Mian to make the case that business is a team sport, a philosophy she traces back to a small farm in Paris, Ontario and years of competitive sport. Championship teams, she argues, are built intentionally: leaders hire people stronger than themselves, aim to build the smartest room rather than be the smartest person in it, and earn trust by genuinely knowing what motivates each person. Cultu...

AI often gets talked about as something for big companies with technical teams. Saima Malik, AVP of Enterprise Process and Automation at TD, argues it belongs to every single person, and that the five skills that matter most for AI are ones people already have. She has spent more than 25 years in digital technology and transformation, and now puts much of her energy into access for women founders, seniors, and community organizations. She names curiosity, courage, creativity, critical thinkin...

Kristin Milchanowski, Chief AI and Quantum Officer at BMO and author of Return on Intelligence, believes organizations need to stop treating AI as a tool and start treating it as infrastructure. In this episode, she talks about what that shift looks like in practice, why automation is the wrong goal, how to connect AI investment to return on equity, and what it means to be quantum-ready before most leaders are even thinking about it. Visit mlarteka.com/podcast to learn more about each ...

Praveen Kumar, Sr. Director, Data & AI at mobileLIVE, joins host Imran Mian on Behind the Growth for a candid conversation about why so many enterprise AI initiatives stall before they ever generate business value, and what it actually takes to move models from pilot to production. Drawing on two decades of leading data and AI transformations across Fortune 500 banks, telcos, and retailers, Praveen opens with a story from a previous role: a team running pilots for over a year with ...

Svetlana Makarova, AVP of AI Technical Product Management at IKS Health, joins Imran Mian on Behind the Growth to break down what’s actually happening inside organizations trying to adopt AI. She starts by outlining a fragmented landscape where some companies move quickly due to internal capability, while others struggle with change management and foundational readiness before AI can even be applied. From there, Svetlana challenges how AI progress is measured; while many reports highli...