Chief Digital Officer, WEX INC
How to get your organisation on board with GenAI - Karen Beck Stroup (Chief Digital Officer, WEX)
In this conversation, Karen Stroup, Chief Digital Officer at Wex, discusses her experiences with building an AI strategy at WEX, ...
About Karen Stroup
Karen Stroup, Chief Digital Officer at WEX, has spoken publicly about the company's approach to generative AI, describing it as a "once in a generation shift" comparable to the internet or mobile. She stated that WEX's CEO decided the AI initiative would be "a business and customer-led transformation, not just a technology-led transformation." Stroup noted that in 2023, the company set a goal of 12 AI experiments but completed 60, which she said set the stage for scaling in 2024. She added that WEX formulated an AI governance policy early in 2023 to prioritize "safe, secure, and compliant AI use." Stroup also said the board encouraged the company to "think 10x bigger" with AI goals, emphasizing bold targets over incremental ones. Stroup has discussed employee engagement as a key component of WEX's AI strategy. She stated that in 2024, the company aimed for 100% of employees to be trained in AI and "inspired not scared" by its potential. Stroup reported that three out of four WEX employees use generative AI tools regularlychers. She described the creation of a group of 100 "AI accelerators"—mid-level employees tasked with experimenting with and advocating for AI. Stroup cited an example of a junior designer who used synthetic AI to gather customer feedback, increasing feedback volume tenfold with 70% accuracy. She said WEX set a goal of 10% productivity improvement per function, with monthly progress reports to the CEO to build accountability.
Transcript (14 segments)
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Narrator0:00
You have a choice to make: you can either be the disruptor or be the disrupted. This is the opportunity to dream big, and we have to give ourselves and our teams room to experiment and learn about what's possible, because if we don't do it, someone else will.
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Host0:07
This week I talked to Karen Stroup, Chief Digital Officer at WEX. We had a great chat about how to get buy-in for AI up, down, and around an organization, and how to prioritize an AI-powered strategy that fits customer needs while maximizing CEO, board, and employee engagement. Hi Karen, welcome to The Product Experience. How are you doing today?
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Karen Stroup0:35
I'm great, thank you for having me.
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Host0:41
So we're going to talk about AI today, and in particular how to get your board aligned and on board with your AI strategy. But before we get stuck into that, it'd be great if you could give us a real quick intro to who you are and your role in product, although your job title is Chief Digital Officer, is that right?
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Karen Stroup0:55
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I would say digital encompasses product but is broader. I actually got into product management about 20 years ago after a career in strategy consulting. At the end of my consulting career, I was working in California and San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to work with a lot of tech companies that really focused on the customer and deeply understanding that customer experience, but used technology to reimagine new solutions to long-standing customer problems. I thought the intersection of the two—the customer and the technology—was absolutely fascinating, and that led me to my next step in my career, which was going into industry where I was a product leader for about 10 years. Since then, I've gone to some other companies where I've driven a lot of change management around becoming product-centric companies. So I'm currently the Chief Digital Officer at WEX, which is a B2B payments company that focuses on making it easier to pay and get paid, simply put. And you asked about digital: I am the Chief Digital Officer, which means I have a purview of not only driving the digital transformation and product transformation, but really thinking about the experience end to end. I'm the executive sponsor for AI, as well as leading data and analytics, design, and product marketing.
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Host2:20
Oh interesting. Executive sponsor for AI—I love that. How does that kind of come to life? What does that mean in reality? I guess that's how we are now talking about alignment with the board, so that sounds very aligned with that role as executive sponsor for AI. But yeah, tell us a little bit about what that means and also how you came to get that role.
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Karen Stroup2:37
Yeah, so at the end of 2022, obviously the world changed with the announcement of ChatGPT. As we were preparing for 2023, the board, the CEO, and I and our CTO were all talking about, 'Okay, what does this mean for us?' We fundamentally believed that this was going to be one of those once-in-a-generation shifts—like the internet, like mobile—something that would fundamentally change how we do our business. The decision that our CEO came to after some conversation was that this is really a business and customer-led transformation; it's not just a technology-led transformation. So in asking me to be the executive sponsor for AI, it was really an endorsement that this is broader than just the technology. It is actually doing a lot of what we do in product management: starting with what's the problem to be solved, both from a customer and a business perspective, and using AI as the how—the technology to help us reimagine those new solutions to long-standing problems.
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Host3:34
And so it sounds like you had board alignment from the beginning, or is that more like board buy-in?
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Karen Stroup3:47
I think we had a spectrum on our board. One of our board members is an HBS professor of AI, so he was certainly in the camp of 'the world is changing and we want to be part of that change.' He really brings a fantastic external perspective to our board that helps us think big and bold. Then we have other board members who represent different perspectives. There was a lot of openness to what AI means and advocacy from one of the board members. The general perspective that we held was we would rather lean in and believe this is going to happen. It's going to change how we deliver products, services, and experiences to our customers; it will change our cost structure. We'd rather lean in and assume it's going to happen than lean out and wait for it to happen to us. Even if it takes longer than we expected, we'll gain more by being on the early adopter side. Of course, we want to be safe, secure, compliant, and protect our customers' data, but we were in the camp of 'we want to be the disruptor, we want to lean in.'
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Host4:44
So what were the next steps? You get this new fancy job title and responsibility—what happens? What's your first steps?
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Karen Stroup5:01
Yeah, so I got the phone call right before the holidays, the Christmas or December holidays, and it got my mind spinning over the break. I was like, 'Okay, I really need to lean into this and understand what is happening, what are the technologies, what are the problems to be solved, what are the approaches.' Of course, it was goal-setting season. When I came back, the board and my boss Melissa asked me, 'Okay, so what are your goals going to be for AI?' In the first year, 2023, our goal was really around experimentation. We said we want to test and learn, and it's really about understanding what it means in the art of the possible, as opposed to having to find business impact. Not knowing what sort of goal to set, I set a goal of saying we want to do 12 experiments on AI this year—one a month. It feels like a reasonable goal, but we ended up doing 60 experiments, so we blew away our goal. It really set the stage for 2024, which was around scaling that experience. For 2024, we had three bold goals: one was to unlock productivity at the company; two was to reimagine our customer experiences and our products from an AI-first perspective; and three was to inspire and educate our employees on AI so that they believed in the art of the possible, as opposed to being scared by what AI might do for them. So 2024 was really around going from experimentation to going to scale, and 2025 will be around value realization.
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Host6:30
That sounds like a very well-considered strategy. Sounds like product management, right?
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Karen Stroup6:36
Exactly, exactly.
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Host6:43
Let's just take it back into 2023, where you're kind of at that experimentation stage. Also, going back to what you were saying around this being very led by you as a Chief Digital Officer rather than by a CTO as a technical solution—leading with the technology rather than leading with the customer—how did that come about? And how did you then experiment and bring everyone along on the journey? Because we're using AI in its broadest terms, but I guess the biggest leaps that we've seen recently is more with generative AI.