Capital One’s Prem Natarajan Shares How AI Can Enhance Financial Services and Customer Experiences - Ep. 253

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. The financial services industry has long been on the forefront of technological innovation. Today, generative AI is redefining financial services from customer service agents to AI factories enabling the next wave of industry innovation. As organizations move beyond testing and experimentation to successful AI implementation, these new technologies and ways of working are driving business results. Our guest is working on the leading edge of bringing the power of AI to financial services. Prem Natarajan is executive vice president, chief scientist, and head of AI at Capital One, where he leads the technology strategy, architecture, research, and development for all AI initiatives, as well as all data technologies across the company. Prem, welcome, and thank you so much for joining the AI podcast. Thank you for having me on the podcast, Noah. Can we start with a little bit, kind of an overview of your role, and then maybe you can talk about your approach, Capital One's approach to using AI? Yeah. Delighted to. You You know, I started my life, my professional journey, after finishing graduate school in a DARPA sponsored world. It was a company called BBN Technologies, which was, one of the pioneers in speech and language technologies at the time Okay. Which was really the big application of AI and machine learning if you think about it back. Like, you know, it was all tied with speech, language, and computer vision. Right. These are the three modalities that humans interact in. And it was also big on Internet working, but my my area was always in AI and machine learning. Right. So after about, like, two decades in this DARPA sponsored world, and back in the nineties and, the first decade of the February for much of it, DARPA was probably the biggest sponsor of, research and development in AI and machine learning. And we're standing on the shoulders of the outcomes of many of those programs Mhmm. That they sponsored. I then went to, USC where I was for several years, University of Southern California. Mhmm. Then I took a leave and I went to Amazon to be part of the Alexa organization. And at some point, I led the Alexa AI organization for a while Okay. And then came to Capital One. So throughout my professional career, though, I've been very close to the intersection of research and transitioning or translating those research advances into products and capabilities that benefit users in their everyday life because DARPA itself is very mission focused research. Sure. You're making fundamental advances, but you're also making advances that take that technology towards solving a set of needs Right. Right. In real life. The real world use. Yeah. The real world use. And so I've always been inspired by being at that intersection. Right. Right? Like, advancing the state of technology, but then advancing it in a way that then humans and other users can benefit …