The tower stood ten meters up in a stretch of Spain close to the Portuguese border so remote there was no cell signal to be found. Every twenty-four hours someone had to climb it, pull the memory card, and come back the next day. The reason? How much groundwater were the oak trees here actually drinking? Since the ecologists couldn’t measure it directly, they measured everything around it instead.
Over 10 years later, one of those ecologists, Leo Reyes, is Global Head of Data Science for R&D at WPP, where the measurement problem looks different, but is fundamentally the same. Identifiers are disappearing, client data will not leave client systems, and his organization has gone from one or two AI agents to nearly a thousand. He leads four hundred data scientists through it with an ecologist's instincts: think holistically, account for what you cannot see, and when the water keeps rising, stop building taller walls and go fix the forest upstream.
Leo brings:
- Why the fastest way to measure something is often to measure everything that it isn't
- What changes in AI governance when you hand teams a token budget instead of a policy
- Why accuracy is table stakes and transparency is the thing clients actually buy
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