When Prem Natarajan, Capital One’s chief scientist and director of enterprise AI, joined the company in May -after five years as the VP at Amazon in charge of Alexa AI organization — it was because he was interested. What was the DNA, he thought that of one of the most extensive banking institutions that are located in the U.S. and one with an established reputation for having a solid technological orientation, which could allow it to achieve success in the implementation of the generative AI as well as big language models (LLMs) in a sensible, responsible manner?
“Capital One was emerging in so many conversations as a big, forward-leaning investor in technology that was one of the first major companies to go all in on the cloud,” Natarajan stated to VentureBeat in an interview. Capital One “offered me a great balance for [the] next phase [of my career] — to contribute using my expertise but to learn about the new challenges that lie at the intersection of [generative AI] and the new set of customer and business problems.”
Natarajan is the technology director for development, strategy, and architecture for Capital One’s analytics, data, and machine learning programs explained that the dynamic AI potential for businesses is significant. However, it is even more significant for those companies that have already embraced an overhaul of their technology.
“They’re the ones that will be at the forefront of this,” said the scientist. “People who suddenly wake up and say oh, this is cool, they may not be in the best position to harness it as pervasively as we can.”
A shift away from AI technology to the industry
Natarajan began his career primarily in research in Raytheon BBN — a company that is well-known as a leader in DARPA-sponsored study (DARPA is a division belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense which is responsible for the development of new technologies to be used for military use). Following that, he had a lengthy time at the University of Southern California (where there is still a faculty appointment) in the Vice Dean of Engineering role, as well as the executive director of the Information Sciences Institute.
However, he added that he began to notice an alteration. Initially, he said that the gravity axis constantly shifted yearly between academia and industry. “I realized that this is where a lot of the new advances in AI were going to happen, because there was a potent combination of a lot of data — from serving so many customers on search, social media and ecommerce — and compute,” he stated. “I thought maybe I should go spend some time in industry — to take a peek into what’s going on.”
Capital One is the ‘kind of bank a technology firm would create’
After a couple of years working at Amazon, Natarajan said he thought about the areas that truly affect people’s lives, including education, healthcare, and, perhaps, finance. He explained that the company he was looking at in Capital One was an example of the “kind of bank a technology company would build.”
“When I look at the size of the technology workforce here — 12,000-plus people — and I look at the quality of the people I’m interacting with, this is certainly a technology company, at least in some sense,” the CEO explained.
However, Capital One, of course, is also an institution with all the required compliance and regulatory requirements. To combat the powerful combination of risk/compliance and technology, he added, the company needs a scalable new operating system.
(Capital One’s top executives are scheduled to speak at VentureBeat’s upcoming Transform event on July 11 and 12th in San Francisco, which focuses on the potential of AI that is generative. AI. Natarajan is also an active participant on the AI Innovation Awards committee.)
“When I talk about Capital One being ready [for generative AI], it’s not just that they have the artifacts or this expertise — in addition to the size of the investment, there’s also the maturity in how to operate the technology workforce that sets us apart,” said the CEO. The cloud is completely redesigning the data infrastructure the way he described. “These are not small tasks, these are multi-year journeys,” he explained. “We are so many years into what is a required part of the ML and AI journey.”
The implementation of AI in Capital One in a ‘responsible responsible, thoughtful’ manner
Of course, Capital One is a bank, first and foremost, but it is technologically modern. Natarajan also said that regardless of what sector it is, “there is a deep imperative to operate all of this in a responsible, thoughtful way — even more so for an organization like us, that is more ready technologically than most.”
For a long time, he claimed, AI was all about testing, like setting the right benchmarks. Capital One has to adopt an inclusive AI approach at the beginning of designing its apps.
“So, are we having a variety of perspectives? Are we trying to consider the various results?” he asked. Banks, he said that they have to think about this for different aspects of their business process for a long time. He believes Capital One has a “natural strength” to incorporate multi-dimensional thinking and look at the various ways issues can be addressed, from the design and implementation stages to testing and ongoing refinement and improvement.
“We’re building applications that should serve the maximum number of people in equally performant ways,” the CEO said. “To me, that’s the essence of a responsible portfolio.” Other people can make something work according to him, but it’s important to consider the security and security measures.
A ‘learning phase’ for generative AI at Capital One
Natarajan cautioned that even a large company such as Capital One is going through the learning and experimentation phase using generative AI and LLMs. “Everybody acknowledges, across every industry, that they are learning,” Natarajan stated. “Everybody is exploring.”
In the case of Capital One, customer service is an early possibility. “But even there, we have to go through the process to make sure it actually works,” He explained. “How does it improve the employee or customer experience?”
Natarajan declared that his primary goal is to build a “world-class” AI organization. “We have the framework; we already have a fair number of AI and ML people,” Natarajan said. “I hope to be the best destination for the best AI talent who are fascinated by these issues. I believe that’s the best way to prepare us for the future.”
He also said that he’s motivated by the company’s more than 100 million customers. “How can this world-class organization that we build accelerate the delivery of new experiences, differentiated experiences that make everybody’s lives that much easier?” the CEO asked. “Capital One already has a strong data and technology-oriented culture — but everything can be strengthened, especially as we introduce new disciplines.”