Hi, I'm Bhavna Rishi. Welcome to today's discussion on how the AA has successfully modernized its identity platform and what lessons other organizations can take away. I'm delighted to be joined by a panel of experts, so let's kick off with some intros. Nick, let's start with you.
Thank you, Bhavna. Hi, I'm Nick Edwards. I'm the Chief Digital Officer at the AA. The AA is 120 years old this year, so big year for us. You probably know a lot about the AA. You're clearly on brand in the right colours. Thank you for that. But we have about 3,000 yellow vans on the road fixing cars at the roadside, but beyond that, we're also an insurer, we're the UK's largest driving school, we have a used car business and lots of other things that we do, so a holistic motoring business. We have now over 16 million clients.
Incredible. Alex?
Hi, so Alex Laurie. I'm SVP Global for pre-sales at Ping and also run our go-to-market programs. Ping Identity, a long-standing identity provider and the SaaS platform that the AA have chosen.
Welcome. Pinnak?
Hello, I'm Group Vice President of Technology for Publicis Sapient, focused on financial services and insurance as an industry. Also focused globally of other Gen AI propositions that we are building for our clients.
So if we start with setting the scene around the business challenges, what prompted the AA to embark on this journey of modernisation?
So the AA's been with Ping for a number of years, a very long time actually as their identity and access management platform. We were on an old version, self-hosted, I think it was 6.5 was the version we were on, which was coming to the very end of its life. So we were in a position of a forced need to make a decision about a move to a new platform. We also had ambitions to grow the business significantly in lots of those domains. So we needed a platform that was going to be fit for the future, not just for the current. We also knew lots of bits about the current platform that we wanted to stop doing, focus on the core of our business, helping drivers with their confidence and not worrying about management of the identity platform. So we set out to look at the market and in the end concluded we wanted to stay with Ping and move to their latest version of SaaS offering, which is exactly what we did.
And would you say it's a pretty complex programme for you, for AA, and the risks associated with that?
Yeah, hugely, because it is the tool that allows 4.7 million members in our case across B2C and B2B to access their digital offerings. So one, if you got wrong, you would know very quickly that you were denying millions of customers access to their digital platform that they'd used in some cases for decades. So very important to get it right and to make sure the migration was seamless.
So why Ping and why Publicis Sapient?
So why Ping? I mean, as I said, the incumbent. So we had the solution. Over the years, we'd heavily customised that. We used it for a lot of single sign-on activity, both in B2C to other parts of the business, but also with our B2B partners in banking and OEM car providers where we provide breakdown services. So Ping had the contract and had a whole host of capability we wanted. So they were a natural for us. As I say, we did run an RFP process to look at the market, but concluded Ping was the right solution. Why Publicis Sapient? I mean, they were, again, our incumbent. They'd worked with us for the last three years across our entire digital estate, also had deep expertise in the Ping products, engineers that had done this elsewhere. So the combination of a great product platform and a great partner to help us build it and integrate it was the logical conclusion we came to.
Brilliant. Alex, what are the benefits of Ping Identity's SaaS solution?
I think, well, in fact, talking to Nick beforehand, I think the biggest benefit is, and Nick's already mentioned it, he doesn't have to have a big team of people patching servers, doing security updates the whole time. So that operational benefit you get is huge. I think the other thing in terms of scalability, the ability to rapidly onboard new application services, business partners, sort of a flexible model to do that in a modern way and reduce the overall complication of the installation by going for more standards-based approaches. So I think that, combined with the fact that we have very similar customers solving similar problems, all those things together bring it to the right solution, I think.
So Pinnak, obviously it's a complex program. There's a lot of reassurances required from an SI. What approach did we take and how did we mitigate those risks and provide those reassurances to Nick and his wider team?
The whole goal was, like, migrate 4.7 million user identities and profile, like, from the old platform to the newer platform. This is across the AALNscape, as Nick mentioned, right? Like, right from home to motor, connected car, all of the B2B partners. Touches pretty much everything within AA as such. I think one of the big requirements which we had as part of that was user experience continuity, right? And if we have to have a user experience continuity as part of it, right? Like, designing our own AI algorithms was, like, interesting. Doing the quality assertions on that was, again, like, very, very interesting, like, leveraging, like, some of those AI as part of it, right? So I think doing that was, like, one of the big things that we brought, right?
So, Nick, outside of the successful outcome of this program, what's the additional value add to your colleagues as well as the end customer?
I mean, what we had before was something that we were self-hosting, self-managing, and had to have a bunch of, like, a group of people managing the platform on a day-to-day basis, including because we'd sort of capped our limit of users on the platform to manually deleting profiles every week. Like, just not really what you want your digital team focused on from a growth agenda. So we was very clear that we didn't want any of that in the new platform. We want to pick a provider who's going to provide us a great platform, but ultimately all that stuff you take away, including scalability. Like, if we want to grow the business, like we want to grow another 100,000 users, make that really easy for us to do. Let's contract on that because it's likely it could happen. So we knew what we didn't want. We didn't want to host. We didn't want to manage. We didn't want to deal with the scaling up or down of users. And that's ultimately what we've ended up. You know, now it's pretty much like a lot of our other SaaS tooling. It's plugged into our architecture and infrastructure, but it's not something we have to manage on a day-to-day basis, which I'm very happy about.
Brilliant. And Pinnak, for Publicis Sapient, what was the typical kind of delivery approach? I know we've worked with Ping before, but specifically for the AA. And what additional value add as an SI did we bring to this relationship and this program?
The first one is people. For us, it's all about how do we bring the right people to the pitch, right? Like, right deep engineering skills who has done this before for other clients, right? It's less about going and learning on the job. It's more about like bring somebody who's done this before. I think the second big important part is how do we leverage AI as part of this kind of ecosystem? Because we don't need to be just doing everything manually and trying to understand everything ourselves. It's all about how do we ask machine to help us as part of this process as well. We have this platform, what we call a slingshot, right? Which helps in decoding and constructing the entire thing kind of like from end-to-end perspective. So leveraging AI is like very, very important.
So Nick, were there any reservations from your side on embarking or bringing that element into your program or just into the business?
AI's moved on such a lot in the last six months since we did this work. But I was always very open to the team suggestion on use of AI to complement. But I was also equally clear at that stage that there had to be ultimately human oversight of all of that because for the reasons we've already said, this is really important work. Wanted to make sure we were seeing stuff in production-like environments as quickly as possible, making sure colleagues that were using the platform for some of our B2B clients could log on, could access, could get all parts of the portal they needed. So very open to AI and like the world's changed a lot since we did this work. I'd be much more open to elements of it now, but we were really clear up front that the team that you referenced had to ultimately be the guardians in the oversight. You know, was the testing sufficient? Were we happy with the results? Did we have credible new solutions where we found some problems with particular niche customer groups? So, I mean, I think it was AI plus humans.
I agree. And that's the fundamental premise of the approach that we have as well, right? I think the approach which is always the case is HITL, which is human in the loop approach, which is how do you design different steps of the process and after each step, you have the human in the loop.
Alex, what advice would you give other organizations considering such a migration program?
I think there's a couple of bits of advice. The first one is give yourself more time. So that's really managing your C-suite's expectations because especially in an