Hello $Firstname AI Edition, Chapter 21: Governance and Processes

In Chapter 21 of Hello $Firstname, Yogita Wadhwa reads ‘Governance and Processes’.

Yogita Wadhwa works in what she calls the messy middle, where strategy, technology, data, and execution have to come together for things to actually work. She has spent more than 25 years working with large enterprises across the US, Australia, and the Middle East. In this chapter, she reads the third deep dive into the back end of the Pyramid of Personalisation.

The chapter opens at Matas, the Danish beauty and health retailer, where a customer club of two million members has become the foundation for a profitable retail media business. On any given day, five competing messages might be lined up for the same customers: supplier campaigns, private label offers, helpful advice, and company news. Technology is rarely the bottleneck. Agreeing on the rules for who gets what is.

The chapter frames governance around three questions: what is governed, who governs it, and how it is executed. It then works through three categories. Governance imposed by law covers data processing, privacy, and consent, from GDPR and Schrems II to double opt-in in Germany and the growing push for EU-only data storage. Governance imposed by other departments covers IT, procurement, HR, and brand guidelines, including who should own a brand LLM. Finally, governance you should impose yourself covers personalisation accountability, marketing data operations, your marketing operating model, contact and suppression policies, retail media policies, and martech governance.

A recurring piece of advice is to involve legal, IT, and procurement sooner rather than later. Another is to take charge of how personalisation is measured before someone else does, using control groups and preparing senior peers for the shift towards journey-centric metrics such as customer lifetime value.

In her reflection at the end, Yogita singles out one principle: only what is described can be repeated, whether by a colleague or, increasingly, by an AI agent. Before you automate a process, you need to understand it well enough yourself. Where are the handoffs? Which decisions require judgement? Which exceptions matter? If ownership is vague and knowledge lives in someone’s head, AI does not make that complexity disappear. It simply scales it. That, she argues, is why governance matters more in the AI era, not less.

More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe

You can buy the physical book here: https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT

If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalisation, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.

You can download the illustrations and models from the book here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources

You can also learn more about the Personalisation Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalisation into practical use cases, here: https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards