Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data and digital officer at Ally Financial, spearheaded a quick response to the advent of generative artificial intelligence.
Two months after ChatGPT made its debut at the end of 2022, Muthukrishnan and other technology leaders from Ally met with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services to discuss ways the bank could use the technology. In June, Muthukrishnan's team at the Detroit bank started building Ally.ai, a proprietary cloud-based platform that developers will use for AI-related projects. It unites Ally data, commercial generative AI models, and an orchestration layer that lets the bank run multiple large language models and choose which is appropriate to the work it is doing.
In September, Ally announced its first use case, which focused on call summarization. Normally, contact center agents take notes when speaking with a customer and summarize the contents of the call when it's over. In this use case, AI transcribes the conversation in real time to the Ally.ai platform and creates a summary of the call. Currently, more than 85% of summaries do not require additional edits from humans. In November, Ally publicized a second use case, this time around marketing and content. There are about 100 more ideas percolating at the Detroit bank.
In the interest of responsibly using the technology, Muthukrishnan formed an AI governance group to oversee how AI would be implemented and monitored at the $193 billion-asset Ally. He also oversaw the composition of an official AI playbook to ensure employees were on the same page about how generative AI and traditional machine learning would be used. Muthukrishnan has pledged that all Ally employees will be formally trained in AI fundamentals by the end of 2024.
Ally has shared its knowledge of this burgeoning technology with outsiders. It made its coding module called PII masking, designed to block personally identifiable information from AI applications and large language models, available for download via the LangChain AI developer community, a platform for developers to build AI-driven apps.
