Andy Biwer, 2024 RELX Distinguished Technologist, Tells Us What It Takes to Build AI Products Customers Love

You have recently become RELX’s twelfth Distinguished Technologist. How does that feel?

It feels incredible. I pay attention to this award when it is given out every year, and I am always impressed by the contributions of the technologists who receive this award. I feel proud and honored to be part of that group of people.

How do you make sure that the technology we provide for our customers is always relevant and useful for them?

At LexisNexis Legal & Professional (LNLP), we have a strong product team that is highly focused on what would be relevant to our customers. As a technology team, it's critical to build a strong partnership with our product experts. Together, we work to figure out how we can bring new ideas and new technology to the market in a way that meets customer needs. That's not always easy. It requires back and forth negotiations and a lot of creativity to figure out how we can deliver something meaningful. The more engaged in that process the technology team is, the better the end result is for our customers. This is especially true with Gen AI, as the technology team really needs to drive what is possible and how that could benefit our customers. .

You have been one of the key operational leaders behind Lexis+ and Lexis+ AI? How has that journey been for you?

It's been really exciting and honestly a lot of fun. The team launched Lexis+ US in an accelerated timeline. Almost immediately afterwards we started discussing how we could launch the product in the UK, and then other markets quickly after. That opportunity to be part of the global product rollout was truly exciting, and it presented opportunities to engage with and lead global teams. Then as we launched Lexis+ AI globally it was great to see that engagement pay off as we've been able to move very quickly. It has been exciting to see how successful the products have been.

Can you tell us a little about your learning and development journey at RELX?

There is always more to learn at RELX. I started at LNLP as a Senior Software Engineer. I put a significant amount of effort of my time and effort into learning our technology as thoroughly as I could. None of that would be possible without the strong technologists within the company who are happy to sit down and explain how things work and why. That technical learning continues to pay dividends as my role has expanded into other areas and other responsibilities.

I jumped into people leadership when the opportunity arose. Learning how to lead people and teams has been a challenging, but incredibly rewarding experience. That process has been enabled by other key leaders in the organization who have invested their time in helping to mentor me and help me learn how to be a good leader. That investment in me has been absolutely critical as I have taken on more responsibilities over time.

What is your proudest technology achievement at RELX?

In my time at RELX I have focused on driving architectural changes that would allow us to build and release products faster than before. That generally includes breaking down larger, monolithic systems into smaller more composable components. When we launched Lexis+ in the US that was our first application in LNLP that was in line with our target architecture. Then when we started initial development on Lexis+ AI, the team was able to leverage those architectural changes to go from prototype to customer-facing application in less than a month. This allowed us to start demonstrating the product to our customers quickly, which was a key component of the Lexis+ AI launch plan. I'm very proud of how the team has been able to move our technology forward, while providing clear benefits to the business and our customers.

What advice would you give technologists to help them build successful careers?

Find problems and solve them. Growing your career means learning how to solve many different kinds of problems including not only technical ones, but also process, organizational and even personal problems. Make it your mission to identify the biggest problems you see in your day-to-day job, figure out a solution and try to implement it. You won't always be successful, but that process will teach you so much about how the technology works, how the organization works, and will grow your abilities as a technologist and as a leader. This teaches you how to drive change and make an impact on the business around you.

If we asked you to predict one significant development in technology over the next few years, what would that be?

Obviously generative AI has been an enormous disruptor already, but we're only in the beginning stages of that technology change. Most generative AI implementations still center around a chatbot that can respond to prompts and perform tasks that were hard to imagine only a few years ago. However, constructing a good prompt to feed into a chat box can be really hard, especially for complex tasks. I predict that over the next few years we will see the chatbots start to disappear, and we will see more advanced agent-style workflow tools be created, still driven by generative AI, but that don't require users to manually type in prompts at all.