Shiraz Amod tapped as new chief executive of Quantium Telstra

McKinsey alumnus Shiraz Amod has been appointed as the new chief executive officer of Quantium Telstra, the joint venture between the data & AI consultancy and Aussie telco established four years ago.

Based out of Sydney, Amod steps up from his most recent role as an executive manager, having joined Quantium Telstra upon its formation after spending the previous five years at McKinsey & Company and its AI wing QuantumBlack in the United Kingdom.

Itself formed in 2002, Quantium has quietly assembled a team of more than 1,200 data scientists, AI experts, and advisors across over a dozen locations worldwide, and has further partnerships with the Commonwealth Bank and now majority owner Woolworths.

“Shiraz has been with Quantium Telstra since its launch, shaping work across its programs as executive manager of Transformation AI, from Telstra’s transformation portfolio to products serving Australian banks and consumers,” the consultancy said in offering its congratulations. “We’re looking forward to seeing what Shiraz and the team build from here.”

Despite Amod’s obvious expertise and pedigree, it’s fair to say his appointment as CEO represents a pretty rapid ascent from interning at an IT consultancy in Cape Town a little over a decade ago to now be leading a data & AI joint venture with Australia’s primary national telecommunications provider, albeit with a stint at McKinsey & Company in London in between.

A business science and information systems graduate of the University of Cape Town – class of 2013 – Amod started out as CTO for a South African travel company before soon joining Johannesburg-based tech consultancy BSG. Next stop was as a senior data scientist at McKinsey, and then deployment to QuantumBlack’s global UK headquarters prior to joining Quantium.

Now, backed by a cross-functional team of data science, network, and cloud experts, Amod is responsible for overseeing the design and delivery of AI products that can transform CX at a national scale, such as Quantium Telstra’s previously developed ‘Customer iQ’, which uses daily predictive AI to provide for more personalised service, proactive remediation, and network optimisation,

“There’s not much else like it in the market,” Amod said in respect to the decades of Quantium data & AI expertise combined with the scale and reach of Telstra, before concluding; “What we do matters; making customers’ experiences better, keeping people safer from scams and fraud, and building digital infrastructure for AI – while using artificial intelligence to do it.”