And Vijay Says…

Ever since ChatGPT became a thing – I haven’t had a week pass by without having GenAI conversations with clients. It’s truly been a fascinating time to be a technologist.

There have been 3 times in the past 25 years when I have seen this kind of massive interest in being a first mover

1. When ERP helped consolidate applications

2. When Datawarehousing became mainstream

3. When mobile and cloud converged

I work in Financial Services – which adds it’s own layer of flavour to make all opportunities and challenges a bit more spicy 🙂

Here are nine broad themes that I have noticed so far from the conversations I have had with FS companies.

1. Risk mitigation vs First mover

FS companies pride themselves as primarily being the best risk managers (which is a very good thing for consumers). So “what can go wrong” has been front and center for GenAI plans. FS companies also know that their primary competitive advantage is in data and they want to be the first to capitalize on it. This push/pull tension is common in how they operate even for mainstream innovation – but GenAI has taken over as the lead theme for now, with public cloud adoption perhaps as the close second.

2. Privacy

All FS companies handle highly sensitive and personal data. There are tight restrictions on what can and cannot be done – and thankfully this industry thinks through this carefully. Between legal and ethical issues at play – the risk of getting this wrong is apparent to everyone and hence a lot of thought goes into mitigating it. How they solve it is not consistent across the industry – and a unified approach with is both efficient and effective is much needed. Otherwise a lot of GenAI innovation just won’t happen at scale.

3. Buy vs Build

The larger Banks (all kinds of banks) all have hired great tech talent including in AI. While this is obviously great to have such great people – it also means a lot of time and money is spent on building everything in-house. This is less common in insurance – but Banking and Capital markets companies generally love to build more and buy less. I know companies who have tried and failed to build their own equivalent of commercial CRM systems. Open source software has made building systems much more possible and many times it’s a good thing for the companies. But again – these debates do take away a lot of time from having innovation at scale. You can’t extrapolate time and budget from POC projects to full enterprise implementations.

Buy is not an easy option either given the tech is so new. Every large tech vendor has a platform offering and evaluating them takes time and money. The usual checklists for build/rent/buy is not enough for emerging tech, and needs to be extended. But that extension needs a level of knowledge that they don’t have today.

4. Skills

To begin with – most companies don’t have enough people with solid knowledge of AI. GenAI has an even smaller talent pool. Upskilling is totally possible – but takes a lot of time. I have lost of count of how many hours I have spent in the last three months reading papers to get the basics right. I am grateful that my employer has a lot of experts in the field who can clarify concepts for me when I run into confusion, but that’s not a luxury every company has. It’s not just great AI talent that you need – you need all the usual things that go with it ( architecture, engineering, UX ….) which means you have to deprioritise other projects. That disruption is not pretty

5. Intellectual property

One of the offshoots of GenAI is it’s use with developer productivity – code generation type usecases . Everyone – me especially – got very excited when we saw the possibilities for the first time. But that doesn’t naturally translate to the enterprise world – IP problems come into play very quickly. GenAI is only as good as the training set that was used in its creation. Have the solution providers done the work to make sure copyleft and copyright issues are addressed before a client generates code ? Otherwise it’s a massive risk that the companies carry. I just used code generation as an example – it applies across the board for GenAI ( well for all AI really )

6. Environmental impact

Greenhouse Gas emissions is something to think about upfront. GenAI is compute intensive to train given the size of the models – and while inferencing is not similarly intensive on a unit basis, a wide deployment will make sure the units add up. Also remember that GPUs consume more energy than CPUs. Between primary and secondary factors – the environmental impacts are a factor to be thought through before large scale work happens. Only a subset of companies seem to have made it a tier one criteria though in my limited view.

7. MLOps

While most of the attraction of GenAI is in the actual “generative” aspects, the enterprise attention is quite high on operations. There are big problems to tackle – how do you detect and prevent models from drifting ? How do you prevent degradation via AI learning from synthetic data created by AI itself? What are the most trustworthy watermarking approaches ? And so on . I think GenAI will be the shining moment for all the research going on in MLOps which will help across the board .

An excellent side effect of this attention to ops is that it has highlighted the need for investment in foundational data management which often gets ignored in the enterprise world.

8. Quality control

Similar to the point on MLOps – companies will have to rethink how QA is done. Software is built in layers – LLMs can affect the quality of layers above them that use them. There is a lot of work going on in academia and at all the big tech companies on improving accuracy, consistency, performance etc of LLMs. I have a strong feeling that these studies will probably result in alternate approaches to GenAI fundamentally . I will write another blog later to expand on my thinking – I am still organizing my thoughts on the matter.

9. Trust

GenAI has rekindled this important topic and put some urgency around scaling it. It’s invariably the first question in every meeting that I hear – “can we trust this thing?”. The question is simple – but the answer is quite complex in the capabilities needed to ensure trust. We need to know how AI arrived at the decision, what data was used to train it, what has changed over time in both data and the model and so on.

This is perhaps the most common question I get asked by people in their early years in the workforce. I have asked some version of this to my seniors too when I was starting out.

Someone asked me this today morning and I figured maybe it’s a good idea to put this into a post.

Fair warning – My answer might not be the most helpful 🙂

And that answer is : Nothing !

I of course learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way . But looking back – I highly doubt my younger self would have acknowledged or acted upon any of those things because it would have been so counter intuitive, and I would have fought it will my energy 🙂

That’s the honest truth in my case. I am not saying young people today can’t learn those things and put them to good use. But when I discuss these things with them – my default expectation is just that they listen to my words and think about it. I have no expectations that they will follow through. I actually think it’s better that each person collect information and then choose what to do themselves, and not just randomly accept what worked for someone else will work for them too.

With all that said – here are a half dozen things that might have helped me if I realized sooner

1. Make peace with the role of luck in life. There are many people I have worked with who had better skills than I did – but didn’t get the opportunities I got. There are also a few who got much better opportunities than I did who I didn’t think were smarter than me – and they advanced farther than I did. It took me some time to make peace with that – and I learned to not let it affect me.

2. Sucking up is not a sustainable career strategy. It does work from time to time – but eventually you get exposed for your lack of ability and will take the fall. Corollary – don’t assume that someone got their break by sucking up all the time. Most of the time we don’t have enough information to know why they succeeded and just use “they must have sucked up” as an excuse to not think of where we need to improve.

3. I don’t have the time for that is not a real excuse . We will always find time to do things we love. I loved to sleep 8 hours till I realized I enjoyed training my dog. I didn’t feel bad when I slept an hour or two late because I enjoyed spending that extra time with my dog. We also find ways to not do things we don’t find interesting – even if they are important like say working out , or up-skilling at work.

4. If no one heard it – that there didn’t fall in the forest. This was perhaps the hardest lesson for me to learn. I always believed that working hard and delivering results is all it took. People above you are busy and have a lot to think about. They won’t always know what you are good at or what you have accomplished if you don’t tell them. The nuance is that if you over do the “look – I am awesome” thing, it will backfire badly too. Finding that right balance – is key. Personally I still think understating works better than going overboard – but it all depends on the context.

5. There are many roads to success – but not a lot of roadmaps. It’s easier to think linearly and narrowly, and often get upset when we miss a near term milestone we had so carefully planned. I was quite convinced that definition of success for me was to progress in a technical career path. I did that quite well – and then my mentors nudged me to try sales and management and so on. I didn’t have to sacrifice being an engineer to become a good GM. First ten years out of college – I was convinced that all sellers were liars and crooks. I didn’t realize how wrong I was till I took on a sales target and figured out you don’t have to lie to sell something. The problem with multiple roads is that you won’t realize it in time unless you have good mentors who can help you think through your options. One more thing along these lines – your definition of success will change over time given most of us tend to under estimate what we can accomplish in the long term.

6. Qualify, Compromise and replan as needed . Younger me had the complete opposite idea – I just wanted to double down on everything I set my mind to. And I have a very rigid idea of what I wanted to accomplish with specific timelines. I also got hugely frustrated when it didn’t pan out like I wanted. Eventually I learned that it’s a lot easier if I critically qualify everything before I decide to double down. I also learned that decisions are always based on imperfect information available at a point in time – so use some principled compromises (which means decide upfront what will make you give up) and be ready to pivot (or stop) when needed. Picking the right battles to fight is something I still haven’t quite mastered – but I am a lot better at it today than when I started.

The founder of TCS – F.C Kohli – and I were once in an elevator at the Air INDIA building in Mumbai in 1999. It was just the two of us. I was a new trainee and he was the Deputy Chairman. He asked me some question along the lines of “How are you doing son?” and all I can remember is fumbling to answer him and my mind going empty. He smiled, wished me a good day and walked off the elevator and it took me another ten minutes to get my bearings right 🙂

It is not that I was low on confidence generally. Throughout my MBA – just before joining TCS – I used to challenge my professors and could hold my own in fierce debates. I had no difficulties engaging with other TCS leaders that I had met during my training. But when an imposing senior leader greeted me – I didn’t know what to do.

I had a similar fumble a decade later when I made my first ever presentation in front of a CEO – my role being an expert consultant. My boss at the time – John Leffler ( the guy standing with me in the photo above) realised the problem in a second and swiftly intervened and saved the day. Again – I had no issues dealing with the CIO of that company or the assorted VPs in the business till that time. I got a lot of coaching from my boss and other Partners after that incident and I got better.

I have seen this happen first hand when I meet with my junior colleagues – some of them totally freeze. Today morning one of them reached out to me and asked for some tips on how they can do better. I figured it might be helpful to jot down my thoughts here.

1. Know what’s different with senior executives compared to other managers in the hierarchy

They are only human like the rest of us – but they generally have limited time. They generally can zoom in and out of issues – but they might not know the specifics of any given issue like you do. Their job is to make a few highly impactful decisions – not hundreds of less impactful decisions. They are very good at prioritising what they work on – so that they have the time and energy to solve the big problems. When they look impatient – it is usually because they do not share the same context as you do. There is a high chance that they are smart enough to see the problem and the solutions quickly – but you will be doing them a favour if they don’t have to guess and you give them solutions to choose from and can answer their questions.

2. Answer questions directly to win their trust

What do you expect the sales to be this quarter? A great answer is X million dollars plus or minus 5% and waiting for them to ask what will drive the plus or minus. They know a lot of variables are at play and they expect you to abstract it away and give them a net-net answer. A useless – though totally accurate answer – would be “it depends on a lot of factors”. It is totally fine to highlight what could cause a big swing by saying something like “XYZ client might get a new CFO and that could slow down approvals and that could reduce our sales by 40%”.

3. Listen carefully, observe body language and clarify the questions before answering

You don’t need to do most of the talking in most meetings. Listen to understand and take cues from their tone, their facial expression and so on before you answer. Don’t feel compelled to answer quickly if you need thinking time – you can buy time by asking follow on questions, or you can tell them that you need time to find an answer and then give them a commitment on when you will respond and get their concurrence. Thoughtful and high quality answers are what helps the exec. Sometimes they need a good enough answer – if that’s the case, you have to give them an answer and put the minimum caveats in place. Don’t make up an answer – it’s always better to not mislead them.

4. Get to know them and find some common ground

Study their past communications – any speeches, interviews etc . Talk to people who know them more than you do. I have always found it a good practice to get to know their admins and chiefs of staff personally. Once you know a bit about their style and ways of working – you can tailor your conversation much more effectively. This is not always possible – but when it’s possible, not making use of it is inexcusable. Most human beings have something in common with you – those are great conversation starters and help build trust.

5. Appear confident

Remember that on any specific issue you are going to discuss – there is a good chance that you know the details way more than the exec does. In fact the executive expects you to be the expert! So go into the conversation with that confidence. Set the context very briefly and ask if they have different expectations than the one you think. The chance of blanking out your mind is the highest when you start the talk. So it might be a good idea to practice the opening part a few times . A solid start will generally create enough momentum to carry you through successfully

6. Build the relationship naturally

Communication with execs gets a lot easier and more effective once you know them. Don’t think of those meetings as transactions – use them to build a relationship. Such a great relationship with senior leaders is key to your own career success. The key is to let it evolve naturally without forcing it. It’s totally fair game to ask an exec for time to get introduced – most leaders love hearing from their team. You may not get a meeting right away, but there is a high chance you will get it if you stay patient and persistent.