David Friedman

Director, Intelligent Automation CoE Ryder System

David Friedman is a 25 year veteran of it management, continuous improvement efforts, and product ownership. After earning his MBA at the University of Southern California, he delivered numerous multi-million-dollar cost saving initiatives for American Express, as well as leading large-scale product evolutions in workforce management, multi-market global customer servicing tools, and enterprise case management.  His experience in using agile / scrum delivery methodology to combine end user teams business tools with it development efforts naturally led to his appointment as RPA lead for American Express back-office and new accounts processing divisions.  The American Express COE, combined with federated teams across the globe, delivered over $30MM in cumulative savings and revenue generation using process redesign and RPA.  In 2018, David joined Ryder System to establish their internal RPA capability, establishing. COE and governance across IT and operations groups.  The Ryder team has identified opportunities across all major departments of the company, and delivered 40 process automations centrally, with over 200 launched by federated RPA teams across the Enterprise.  David is most interested in using RPA as a key intermediate step toward fully digitizing legacy operations.  Optimizing and automating internal front-office and back-office processes is a necessary first step to building digital self-service and proactive-servicing capabilities.  Outside of work, David does research on the long-term macroeconomic impacts of the digitization and automation on middle income and middle skilled workers in modern economies