Time to reflect and recharge: The Very Group Chief Data Officer Steven Pimblett departs for new challenge

Steven Pimblett is leaving The Very Group, a multi-brand online retailer and financial services provider in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where he held the role of Chief Data Officer.

In a LinkedIn post, he said: “After 3.5 years at The Very Group the time has come to move onto a new chapter. I have loved every minute of it! I prompted an LLM to create a leaving note Not perfect but not bad!)”.

The note, in all its glory, as follows: “After 3.5 transformative years as the pioneering Chief Data Officer, Steve will be departing in the summer. During his tenure, he has spearheaded remarkable advancements across all four pillars of the data strategy.”

“In the DATA arena, Very have successfully migrated from on-premises infrastructure to a modern, cloud-based Lakehouse architecture, positioning them for agility and scalability.”

“The INSIGHT pillar has witnessed a surge in self-serve analytics, with over 1,000 colleagues now regularly leveraging the power of PowerBI.”

“Under Steve's leadership, the ACTION pillar has embraced AI's potential, leveraging it for retail pricing, promotions, clearance activities, and forecasting. Moreover, Very have recently harnessed the capabilities of generative AI to automate product description content.”

“In the realm of TRUST, the implementation of a Data Catalog has empowered our data stewards to effectively manage our vast data estate while ensuring compliance with privacy and security regulations.”

“Steve's visionary approach has established a brilliant hub-and-spoke operating model, laying a robust foundation upon which we can continue building in the years ahead. His contributions have been invaluable, and we wish him the very best in his future endeavours.”

Pimblett added that he starts a new CDO role in September, and will reveal more on that in the coming weeks.

He concluded: “Now time to reflect and recharge. Thanks to everyone at Very and in my network, who have made the last 3.5 years fantastic.”

AI

In March, The Very Group brought the entire company together for an event entitled, Very Con: AI in Action.

Matt Grest, CIO at The Very Group, said: “It’s always going to be a big call to bring the whole company together for an AI immersion day, but as a business we have made huge strides over the last 12 months in powering the business using genuine AI and I really wanted to keep up the momentum and bring more colleagues into the fold.”

He added: “We had a fantastic day where we were able to outline our strategic ambitions, we had colleagues demonstrating how we’re already leveraging genuine AI across the business and saw many great demonstrations from our valued partners in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Samsung Electronics, Meta and Multiverse - great energy in the office all day from everyone.”

The big reveal of the day was the launch of VeryGPT, a generative AI chatBot that will be available to all employees.

Grest said: “This gives everyone access to a new tool that they can use to support their daily activities, in a safe and secure environment with appropriate guardrails.”

“We’ve already been able to demonstrate some amazing productivity gains from colleagues using VeryGPT during our internal trial, and I can’t wait to see what colleagues are going to do with this now that it’s rolled out to all.”