Diana Schildhouse, chief data and analytics officer at Colgate-Palmolive, describes herself as a data storyteller – but what does that mean in terms of day-to-day delivery?
“To be successful in roles like this, you must have a deep connection with the business and understand what you’re trying to solve, what their questions are, and then devise solutions,” she says.
“Those solutions could use advanced analytics. Sometimes, it’s about creating simpler solutions. But success is always about solving that business need.”
Schildhouse joined Colgate-Palmolive in April 2021 as chief analytics and insights officer. She was previously at Mattel for eight years, latterly as senior vice-president for global strategy, insights and analytics. Schildhouse has also worked for Westfield, Merrill Lynch and Disney.
“Most of my experience has been in consumer-facing companies,” she says.
“In terms of my career, I’ve always been in functions like advanced analytics, insights and strategy. When I saw the opportunity with Colgate-Palmolive, I thought about the breadth and scale of the company. It was an exciting opportunity for me to come in and build from the ground up, while leveraging the scale of the business.”
Schildhouse joined the company in a newly created role to develop an analytics and insights strategy for an organisation that operates in over 200 countries and territories globally. After proving her success in this role, she assumed her current position in June 2025, where the breadth of responsibilities increased to include oversight for data and artificial intelligence (AI).
“I had already been running some of those areas, but it made sense for us to bring everything together,” she says.
“You can’t build and scale all the exciting, advanced analytics solutions and everything with AI unless you have data foundations. Many companies are on this journey. They recognise that gaining value from all this data-enabled technology depends on key elements like data strategy, data governance, and a series of related topics.”
Supporting growth
Schildhouse reports to Colgate-Palmolive’s chief growth officer. Her peers include executives responsible for digital transformation, supply chain, innovation, research and development, global marketing, strategy and sustainability. She says the organisational structure makes it easier to tie data to long-term aims.
“The farther away you are from the business, the harder it is to make connections and drive impact,” she says.
“What appealed to me here was the fact that analytics and insights were part of the business and growth area of the company. I thought that would position me well to drive value through the work that I’m doing.”
“You can’t build and scale all the exciting, advanced analytics solutions and everything with AI unless you have data foundations. Gaining value from all this data-enabled technology depends on key elements like data strategy, data governance, and a series of related topics”
Diana Schildhouse, Colgate-Palmolive
Almost five years into her work with the company, Schildhouse says it’s been an exciting and enjoyable ride.
“We’ve had lots of success in what we’ve done with our analytics and data transformations here,” she says. “It’s fulfilling to see that my amazing team is driving a lot of that success.”
Joining the company in a new role meant she had a blank page for analytics and insight strategy. She began by asking the business about its major challenges and exploring the potential of technology to help solve those concerns. As part of her efforts, she tracked and traced performance to ensure success.
“That’s something I’m obsessed with, because if we can’t show the value and impact we’re getting, then we could be building the most brilliant solutions and passing them over the fence to the business, but if they don’t actually use them, then we didn’t achieve what we were trying to do,” she says.
Whether it’s for pricing analytics, revenue generation, cost optimisation, or intellectual property creation, Schildhouse has developed frameworks that ensure the solutions her team creates can be scaled globally to deliver value. She says the general direction of travel for data-led transformation at Colgate-Palmolive is about giving the people in the business tools to make better decisions quickly.
“We want them to have information at their disposal,” she says. “Some of the things we’ve built internally can compute billions of scenarios. So, it’s not just a matter of changing where teams spend their time. Some of the things we can do now, you couldn’t have completed a few years ago. Our work is about helping business teams use data and analytics in predictive, diagnostic and then prescriptive ways to make faster, more informed decisions.”
Embracing AI
Schildhouse’s team conceptualises, builds, deploys and embeds AI-enabled solutions, including machine learning models and predictive and prescriptive analytics, across Colgate-Palmolive globally. One example includes revenue growth management (RGM) analytics, which covers key concerns such as pricing and trade promotions.
She says RGM was identified as one of the areas where her team could have the biggest impact when she joined the company. They developed an in-house diagnostic and predictive tool that helped staff on the ground understand scenarios and make faster pricing decisions. That tool was scaled globally. The team also tracked usage to ensure the technology was effective.
The team used successes in RGM as a platform for developments in other areas. Schildhouse refers to promotion and calendar optimisation technology, which business users suggested was an area that could benefit from better analytics. They piloted, tested and refined this tool and are now pushing it out globally to boost pricing and promotions analysis.
Schildhouse’s team is also exploring generative AI (GenAI) in product innovation. Guided by a business-first approach, her team assessed potential technological solutions. They mapped out how the company’s marketers create and test new product concepts, and considered how AI could be deployed to make that process faster, easier and more effective.
Along with technology partner Market Logic, the data team created an insights hub. Marketers can use natural language to query data and receive instant insights from the hub.
“That was the first step that helped us understand unmet consumer needs,” she says.
As a second stage, they developed a tool to help support the creation of product concepts that fit these consumer needs. As part of an innovation funnel, Schildhouse says marketers can test their ideas rapidly in a digital twin. Developed in-house, the twin allows professionals to test their concepts cost-effectively for specific demographic groups.
“This multi-stage approach has been one of our most successful applications of GenAI to an important business area,” she says. “It’s about ensuring there’s a human in the loop and helping our innovation teams get to faster insights and to develop many more concept ideas.”
Establishing priorities
Schildhouse says one of her team’s main priorities is to innovate in an area known as omni-demand generation, which she explains is an approach that helps the company meet its consumers with the products they need. This work will incorporate progress in key areas, such as RGM, plus media, marketing and e-commerce analytics.
“We have some exciting things planned there,” she says, referring to her team’s aims. “Then I would just definitely say AI – so, continued experimentation, and moving to scale on many of the things that we’ve already piloted within that area.”
Schildhouse says her team considers AI initiatives via a framework that explores both horizontal and vertical elements. The horizontal elements are the underpinning tools and foundations that allow the company to scale its successful AI initiatives globally and effectively. The vertical elements, meanwhile, are the company’s priority areas for GenAI.
“Our plans for the next couple of years are very closely tied to that framework, but innovation always starts with our strategy – that’s key in helping us know where to focus,” she says.
Over the next 24 months, her internal team will continue to focus on the data strategy and governance foundations that she says are crucial to scaling analytics and AI initiatives.
“We’ll be putting a lot more focus on data transformation, and we’ve already made really great strides in that area, as well as building and launching data products that are reusable and governed. We’ll also be looking at AI and what’s the next generation for us,” she says, including developing data-enabled services for the company’s customers.
“There’s always a portion of what we’re doing that’s focused on exploring those edge cases of what could be the next most impactful area for the company. We want to create products that delight customers, meet their needs and provide the benefits that they’re looking for.”
Learning lessons
Schildhouse feels positive when she considers the future of the data leader role. There’s no doubting, she says, that information and insight continue to be increasingly important for modern companies. However, she reasserts that data leaders must ensure their AI and analytics initiatives are built on strong foundations.
In a world where companies are looking to get actual, tangible value from all their analytics and AI solutions, if your data is not in the right place and it’s not organised, and you don’t have the right datasets, that slows down the whole process Diana Schildhouse, Colgate-Palmolive
“In a world where companies are looking to get actual, tangible value from all their analytics and AI solutions, if your data is not in the right place and it’s not organised, and you don’t have the right datasets, that slows down the whole process,” she says.
“One of the reasons we were able to scale the RGM analytics tool that we built in-house is because, at the same time as we were creating that, we also started working on the data foundations.”
Schildhouse says her team consolidated and harmonised data from 500 sources in a global view for the RGM project. Lessons learned in this initiative have helped inform others. Yet, regardless of the project, she says one thing remains constant – data leaders must be guided by enterprise demands rather than technological features.
“You must have a business lens,” she says. “Data leaders need to bring that focus and understand how the work of their team translates to something meaningful for their organisation and their industry. That awareness is so key in the role, and that’s where you see the more successful data leaders when I look at some of my peers.”
Consider the chief difference between living systems and electronics: The first is generally soft and squishy, while the latter is hard and rigid. Now, in work that could impact human-machine interfaces, biocompatible devices, soft robotics, and more, MIT engineers and colleagues have developed a soft, flexible gel that dramatically changes its conductivity upon the application of light.
Enter the growing field of ionotronics, which involves transferring data through ions, or charged molecules. Electronics does the same, with electrons. But while the latter is well established, ionotronics is still being developed, with one huge exception: living systems. The cells in our bodies communicate with a variety of ions, from potassium to sodium.
Ionotronics, in turn, can provide a bridge between electronics and biological tissues. Potential applications range from soft wearable technology to human-machine interfaces
“We’ve found a mechanism to dynamically control local ion population in a soft material,” says Thomas J. Wallin, the John F. Elliott Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and leader of the work. “That could allow a system that is self-adaptive to environmental stimuli, in this case light.” In other words, the system could automatically change in response to changes in light, which could allow complex signal processing in soft materials.
Although others have developed ionotronic materials with high conductivities that allow the quick movement of ions, those conductivities cannot be controlled. “What we’re doing is using light to switch a soft material from insulating to something that is 400 times more conductive,” says Xu Liu, first author of the paper and former MIT postdoc in materials science and engineering who is now an incoming assistant professor at King’s College London.
Key to the work is a class of materials known as photo-ion generators (PIGs). These can become some 1,000 times more conductive upon the application of light. The MIT team optimized a way to incorporate a PIG into polyurethane rubber by first dissolving a PIG powder into a solvent, and then using a swelling method to get it into the rubber.
Much potential
In the material reported in the current work, the change in conductivity is irreversible. But Liu is confident that future versions could switch back and forth between insulating and conducting states.
She notes that the current material was developed using only one kind of PIG, polymer (the polyurethane rubber), and solvent, but there are many other kinds of all three. So there is great potential for creating even better light-responsive soft materials.
Liu also notes the potential for developing soft materials that respond to other environmental stimuli, such as heat or magnetism. “We’re inspired to do more work in this field by changing the driving force from light to other forms of environmental stimuli,” she says.
“Our work has the potential to lead to the creation of a subfield that we call soft photo-ionotronics,” Liu continues. “We are also very excited about the opportunities from our work to create new soft machines impacting soft wearable technology, human-machine interfaces, robotics, biomedicine, and other fields.”
Additional authors of the paper are Steven M. Adelmund, Shahriar Safaee, and Wenyang Pan of Reality Labs at Meta.
A recent cosmological model combines two of the most eccentric ideas in contemporary physics to explain the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe. To understand it, it’s necessary to look beyond the Big Bang we all know and consider two concepts that rarely intersect: cyclic universes and primordial black holes.
A Different Kind of Multiverse
There are different versions of the “multiverse.” The most popular model—that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—proposes that there are as many universes as there are possibilities and that these versions of reality are parallel. Physics proposes something more sober and mathematically consistent: the cosmic bounce.
In this model, the universe is not born from a singularity, but expands, contracts, and expands again in an endless cycle. Each “universe” is not parallel, but sequential—that is, one arises from the ashes of the previous one.
Is it possible for something to survive the end of its universe and endure into the next? According to a paper published in Physical Review D, yes. Author Enrique Gaztanaga, a research professor at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, shows that any structure larger than about 90 meters could pass through the final collapse of a universe and survive the rebound. These “relics” would not only persist, but could also seed the formation of giant, unexplained structures observed in the early stages of the present-day universe. Moreover, they could be the key to understanding dark matter.
For decades, the dominant explanation for dark matter has been that it is an unknown particle or particles. But after years of experiments without direct detections, physicists have begun to explore alternatives. One of them proposes that dark matter is not an exotic particle, but an abundant population of small black holes that we overlook.
The idea is appealing, but it has a serious problem. For these black holes to explain dark matter, they would have to exist from the earliest moments of the universe, long before the first stars could collapse. There are indications that these objects could exist, but a convincing physical mechanism to explain their origin is lacking.
A Universe Born With Black Holes
This is where Gaztanaga’s newly proposed model shines. If cosmic bouncing allows compact structures to survive the collapse of the previous universe, then the current universe would have already been born with pre-existing black holes. They would not have to have been generated by extreme fluctuations or finely tuned inflationary processes, but would simply have been there from the first instant.
The assumption has the potential to solve two riddles at once: the origin of black holes and the nature of dark matter. If this model is correct, dark matter would not be a mystery of the early universe but rather a legacy of a cosmos that predates our own.
“Much work remains to be done,” Gaztanaga, also a researcher at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, said in an article for The Conversation. “These ideas must be tested against data—from gravitational-wave backgrounds to galaxy surveys and precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background.”
“But the possibility is profound,” he added. “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded. And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang.”
This story originally appeared inWIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
The app works with passports or ID cards, is built to be “completely anonymous” for the people who use it, works on any device (smartphones, tablets, and PCs), and is open source. “Best of all, online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app, so there are no more excuses,” said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a press conference on Wednesday. “Europe offers a free and easy-to-use solution that can protect our children from harmful and illegal content.”
High Expectations
“It is our duty to protect our children in the online world just as we do in the offline world. And to do that effectively, we need a harmonized European approach,” von der Leyen said at Wednesday’s press conference. “And one of the central issues is the question, how can we ensure a technical solution for age verification that is valid throughout Europe? Today, I can announce that we have the answer.”
This answer takes the form of an open source app that any private company can repurpose, as long as it complies with European privacy standards and offers the same technical solution throughout the European Union. The user downloads the app, agrees to the terms and conditions, sets up a pin or biometric access, and proves their age through an electronic identification system, or by showing a passport or ID card (in which case biometric verification is also provided). The app does not store your name, date of birth, ID number, or any other personal information, according to the European Commission—only the fact that you are over a certain age.
After that, when a person using the app wants to access a social network (minimum age: 13), pornographic site (minimum age: 18), or any other age-protected content, if they are logged in from a computer, they need only scan the QR code shown on the site they want to visit. If, on the other hand, the person logs in from a smartphone, the app sends the proof of age directly. The platform does not access the document with which the user proved it in the first place.
Adoption Event
The need to introduce a common system for the entire European Union has been discussed for some time, and according to commission technicians, the technical work is now complete. Of course, it will still be possible to circumvent the system—all it takes is for an adult to lend their phone to a younger friend—but the technological architecture exists, and it will be up to EU member states to decide whether to integrate it into national digital wallets or develop independent apps.
“No More Excuses”
For the app to really be effective, platforms must be obligated to verify the age of their users—that’s where things get tricky. The Digital Services Act, which went into effect in 2024, requires “very large online platforms”—those with more than 45 million monthly users in the European Union—to take concrete steps to mitigate systemic risks related to child protection, with heavy penalties for noncompliance.
“And that’s why Europe has the DSA: to call online platforms to their responsibilities. Because Europe will not tolerate platforms making money at the expense of our children,” European Commission executive vice president Henna Virkkunen told a press conference. She added that after an investigation into TikTok, the European institutions plan to take similar action against Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, as well as four porn sites. “Since the platforms do not have adequate age verification tools, we developed the solution ourselves,” he concluded. In short, as von der Leyen also remarked, “there are no more excuses.”
Bare Minimum
So far, this is the European framework that sets the general rules. On this basis, member states can consider more restrictive measures. Italy was among the first to discuss how to regulate the use of social media by minors but has so far not landed on anything concrete. Elsewhere in the EU, France’s Emmanuel Macron has been a trailblazer on the issue, pushing France to discuss a rule to ban social networks for minors under the age of 15 entirely. So far, this measure has received broad political support—but the outcome depends largely on compatibility with the Digital Services Act and the availability of effective age verification systems like the app the European Commission just released.
This article originally appeared onWIRED Italiaand has been translated.
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