Ex-Amazon Business Leader on Data Culture | Liz Gebhard

In Episode 1 of Data Chatter Season 2, meet Liz Gebhard, the Interim Transformation Officer at World of Books. She previously spent a decade in leadership roles at Amazon.

Liz shares her storied experience with data, beginning her corporate career at Target in supply chain and technology development during the early 2000s era of nascent online retail. Her move to Amazon marked a significant shift, requiring her to learn SQL and self-serve data due to the culture’s reliance on data-driven decision-making and data-backed arguments. There is a lot for you to learn from her effort to build the first Business Intelligence Engineering organization within her business unit at Amazon.

In this podcast, she explains how effective teams are inherently part of the organization, focusing on solving tough business problems rather than maintaining transactional relationships.She also discusses the criticality of having diverse perspectives - in terms of gender, ethnicity, and skill sets - to improve business decisions and mitigate risk, especially when building products like healthcare solutions, and addresses the necessity of auditing generative AI outputs despite its role as a powerful enabler for efficiency.