How have you approached training your employees? What percentage of your workers have been trained on AI? “You can think of it as like concentric circles. We have a relatively small group of researchers who are super deep in generative AI, machine learning and all of that. And then we have a set of users that are in our product organization, and they’re thinking about how to leverage it. And then we have the general staff.
“At the broadest level, training right now is on the usage of Copilot and some of the general tools associated with it. And then we’re training on data protection and those kinds of things. So we’re focused more on general consumption and the actual usage of the models and the development of applications, and they’re in there running the pilots. We have folks that are that are really deep in the technical mathematics of it, all the way out to folks that are general users. So we’ve had to kind of think about it in different layers.”
Have you trained a large percentage of your users, or are you still in the process of figuring out who needs that training? “We’re still in the process of figuring that out. There’s an Advanced Analytic Resource Center or AARC. This is the thing that we did in downtown Chicago, where we’re taking early-in-career, out-of-college new grads and bringing them into the company through a structured training program around the tools and technologies we need, and then accelerating them through like a two-year development cycle. Then we place them in the business. That’s becoming one of the areas where we’re incubating knowledge around machine learning and generative AI.”
Have you discovered where the greatest ROI in genAI may be? “In some sense it’s the classic Gartner Hype Cycle. We’re in the trough of disillusionment. I think we’ve been pretty sober about the implications of it, and we’ve been very deliberate. There’s certainly some companies that have really gone all in, but they’re in less regulated industries; they have the ability to do that in a bit more of a unconstrained way.
“Given the nature of banking, and especially direct-to-consumer credit card lending and so forth, we just had to be really deliberate and thoughtful.”
Where do you see the big areas that genAI and agentic AI will be of most use in the future — say two, three or five years down the road? “It’s a call center, and then the other parts of the customer experience. So, the blending of the mobile app, the mobile experience, the web experience, and then the call center experience.
“I don’t think the call center experience is going to completely go away. Financial products are just too complicated, and people just need to talk to somebody to engage with that. So, first, I think it’s call center. Second is the full customer experience. And third, it’s the brand and marketing space.
“Discover is a big brand, and we spend lots of money on marketing, advertising and so forth. And the content around brand and media is ripe for improvemnt with generated data.”
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