Heroes in Business - Experians Insight on Generative AI with Shri Santhanam EVP GM Global Analytics and AI Products

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Experian’s Insight on Generative AI with Shri Santhanam, EVP & GM, Global Analytics and AI Products. Listen as David Cogan, Host of the Heroes Show and Founder of Eliances entrepreneur community learns all the facts about this important topic. 

Now, here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Eliance's. That's right. All right. I'm really excited about what we've got going on today. And thank you again to all of our viewers. Thank you for the previous feedback we've gotten on amazing shows. We've now done 1,800 plus interviews. Make sure you go to Eliance's.com.

That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. Well, I'm very excited today. Are you ready for this? All right. I'm thrilled to cover the key considerations that companies should make when balancing the use of generative AI to drive innovation and the risks associated with technology. Very important subject. And to help us better understand this, I would like to welcome Cherie Santanum from Experian. Cherie is the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Analytics and AI in Experian's Global Decision Business Unit.

Make sure that you go to, also to, make sure that you go to Experian.com. That's E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N. So welcome to the show, Sheree. Thank you for having me, David. All right. Boy, very hot topic now. So please share with us about experience working with AI. us about experience working with AI. Great. Well, as many of you may know Experian as a credit bureau, but we're also more broadly a big data company, which has among the most valuable data sets on the planet. And our focus has been on improving the lives of businesses and consumers for decades now using the power of our data. Now, particularly in the last 15, 20 years, AI has been an important topic really towards that mission in maximizing the impact we can have on improving the lives of businesses and consumers.

And AI more broadly, which includes areas like automation, machine learning, has been something we have utilized in our business for quite a long time now. At the core of it, we use our data to improve risk underwriting, and we use machine learning and advanced techniques to better improve financial inclusion for customers. Our belief is that the traditional lending instruments and underwriting instruments were, for the most part, blunt instruments. So artificial intelligence really helps you be more surgical about underwriting and improves financial inclusion. And at the same time, it results in much better outcomes for businesses as well. So artificial intelligence has been key to that. We've also had products like Ascend Intelligence Services, Experian Boost, things of that nature, which have really leveraged the power of artificial intelligence to improve financial inclusion.

Experian Boost, for instance, is a product where consumers can provide their credit scores and get access to more credit. So it's been a key part of our agenda. In the last 12 to 24 months, the topic of large language models, generative AI has become a key and integral to our agenda. So we've also been involved in looking at a number of ways in which generative AI can help us with our objectives of financial inclusion and driving impact with businesses and consumers. That's great to know. And again, we've seen such a dramatic growth, though, in the awareness of generative AI. Talk to us about the specifics of the impact,

though, it's had on experience in its business, because it is a hot topic. It's what's happening. Indeed. And I think since since CHAP GPT came out with their product about a year and a half ago, which really brought this to the world stage and the attention, there's been a lot of activity, but even prior to that experience has, in our data lab, has been experimenting and using techniques like transformers, large language models to drive impact. What we have done more broadly is we're starting to focus on three critical areas

as it relates to generative AI. The first is products. We're starting to look to see where in our existing products we can leverage the power of generative AI to improve impact consumer engagement. For instance, we've got products today which support consumer credit education and we're looking into ways in which generative AI can really improve the impact of that engagement with consumers and helping educate them better on topics like credit education. The second area we're looking at is just in terms of our internal impact and productivity. We have large engineering teams.

We have large teams engaged in customer service and customer operations. And as you know, generative AI provides some very powerful capabilities to be able to do a lot more in a shorter span of time and really impact consumers and drive efficiencies. So we're starting to look at that. And third, more fundamentally, we believe that generative AI is going to be almost as impactful as the internet or technology in itself. So we believe it's really important for us to educate our 20,000 plus employees globally in the use of generative AI in managing all of the things that they're doing on a day-to-day basis and really unlocking grassroots innovation. So a big part of our efforts are also getting open access in the hands of a number of access to this technology in the hands of many of our employees, as well as unleashing that grassroots innovation here. Excellent. Boy, you've got, this is just great information.

And again, you're watching and listening to me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure that you go to Alliancer.com or Alliances.com. Click on radio to learn more and to catch past interviews of various executives at experience. So make sure, again, you go to experience dot com because we have with us. Sheree is the executive vice president and general manager of global analytics. And make sure that you, again, go to experience dot com, E-X-P-E-R-I-A-N dot com.

Now, Sheree, here's the thing is, is that whenever new technology enters the market, you mentioned about, you know, chat GPT and stuff. You know, at first we think it's a new shiny object that captures people's attention. How has Experian, though, balanced the exploration of generative AI with everything that it's already on your corporate roadmap? That's a great question, and I think quite an appropriate one, because there's always the risk of being infatuated with the new technology and chasing a number of threads which might ultimately end up being fruitless.

We have a core underlying principle governing our program, which is working backwards from impact. And right at the very beginning, as we launched our program, one of the things we did was conduct a number of workshops, worked with many of the business and operational stakeholders across our business, and both simultaneously educated to help people understand this technology, but really asked the question, where is the impact? Where can this drive impact for our clients, impact internally, where can it drive productivity? And we assembled a long list of use cases, if you will.

And while it does require some healthy estimation of where the impact will be, that's served as a pretty helpful foundation on why we devote our efforts. And working back from that, a lot of our efforts have been focused on the areas of most tangible impact. We've also had to balance this notion of harvesting and exploring. There are certainly a couple of areas where we're seeing this technology prove out. And one choice might be to just default all of our efforts into those areas. On the other hand, we might make a choice which just involves exploring and trying out a bunch of things to see where the value is. which just involves exploring and trying out a bunch of things to see where the value is. And we're making an intentional choice on how to both harvest the areas we see value as well as continuing to explore areas where this technology can drive value. How does Experian ensure that the data that it holds and its operations remain safe?

That's a particularly relevant question for us. Data privacy, consumer privacy, and the consented use of data is top of our mind. This has been a core part of our fabric right from the founding fathers of Experian when they set up their first credit bureau to today where we feel very, very comfortable and stand behind our brand and reputation of really protecting consumer information and managing it with the appropriate guardrails and safety.

We're applying those same guardrails and principles and methods as it relates to generative AI. This involves first putting in place some of the right governance and policies around the use of generative AI. So we look very carefully at the applications they're used for and who has access and how we can manage that. Second, we also use many of the techniques that are out there like retrieval augmented generation for instance is a technique which really allows us to manage this carefully. And then finally creating the right policies and governance layers around it. So it's an important topic for us one which we're taking very seriously. Thank you again to Sheree, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Being Here Today and sharing about what's going on with generative AI.

Don't forget you can go ahead and go to Experian.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com. Thank you again for being here, Sheree. Excellent. Thank you for having me, David. It's a pleasure.