CDO Magazine Podcast Series · CDO Magazine

PODCAST | Start With Education, Not Algorithms: Inside TI Automotive’s AI Playbook

February 24, 2026·12 min·1 clip

Apoorva Vadodkar reveals her 5E framework for launching an AI practice, starting with education, not algorithms.

The episode is an interview between host Marav Yervlifker, Chief Learning Officer at Data Society Group, and Apoorva Vadodkar, Senior Director and Head of Data and AI at TI Automotive. The conversation focuses on how to build an AI practice from zero. Vadodkar opens by warning that AI carries a halo of magical thinking that must be addressed through education before any technical work begins. She describes the 5E framework she created when she first built an AI practice: Educate business partners on what AI can and cannot do, Engage them to surface use cases, Experiment to validate feasibility, Expedite by pushing the first success into production, and Effectuate by using that production win to fund and justify further investment. At TI Automotive, she started with a recorded education video followed by roadshows with finance, HR, and supply chain teams. The response was 80 use cases submitted by business partners. She then describes three filters she uses to select from such a list. The first filter is business case alignment — the use case must offer meaningful return on investment and practitioners should be willing to say no to requests that don't meet this bar. The second filter is full workflow feasibility: feasibility cannot be assessed in isolation. She gives an example of a predictive maintenance model that took six months to build and correctly predicted machine scrap, but had no mechanism for the operator to act on the prediction — the model was technically sound but operationally useless. Third, unless the company is a software product firm, the default should be buy over build — off-the-shelf solutions avoid long-term maintenance and upgrade costs. She transitions to chatbot strategy, saying she preempted chatbot sprawl at TI Automotive by mandating a single company interface before development began. The bot, named TIA, is hosted on Microsoft Teams and will serve as the unified front end through which all backend offerings — service desk tickets, approvals, leave applications — are accessible. She describes this as a microservices approach: individual teams build their own capabilities and expose them through TIA. She closes by calling agentic AI the next major wave and argues that Microsoft and similar platforms have democratized the building blocks enough that CDOs should be pursuing a unified chatbot strategy now.

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