TI's deputy editor, Ann-Marie Corvin, interviews Bud's VP of engineering and data, Michael Cullum. From personalised banking to AI solving all of a business's problems, this TALKS:TO episode covers the whole gamut of data-led banking and finances.
Understanding customer transactions is the holy grain for financial service companies. For Bud Finance this involves turning ‘dark’ data into usable data which it is doing by developing domain specific, custom-trained large language models.
Last year we wrote about what the fintech doing with AI .In this follow up podcast, Bud’s VP of engineering Michael Cullum shares exactly how they are doing this and explains the advice he has for others who are earlier on in their AI journey.
“They key thing is to validate as quickly as possible: exactly what makes sense and what doesn’t so you can take those learnings into your processes as quickly as possible,” he says.
“There have also been times we’ve gone and built something and then someone else has built a tool to do exactly that.
“It would help to have some kind of crystal ball to look at general AI infrastructure and tooling because I don’t want our team doing too much outside our particular domain or our focus because takes away from understanding our customers better.”
More broadly, we also ask Cullum whether he thinks that all business problems can be solved through code and algorithms now.