While PNC Bank prides itself for being “brilliantly boring” when it comes to managing the business, it is still a place of creativity and experimentation. Our sandbox, PNC Labs, is a lively, interesting place to play with artificial intelligence (AI), and we’re always looking for new, inquisitive talent to join.
Senthil Kumar Jeyachandran, a PNC senior software architect, has worked in IT for more than 20 years, starting his career at IBM. In his current role, he leads the solution architecture for Document AI and Conversational AI and uses PNC lab space to explore new ideas. Having the ability to experiment in an environment and test in a safe space enables him and his team to refine their approach and model. With the freedom to play with ideas around products and services before starting to build, the result is a more high-performing, scalable solution for the business.
And it’s not just a matter of experimenting in a conceptual way. PNC software engineers and data scientists get to see those ideas come to fruition. Jeyachandran currently has several AI projects in production, including a chatbot and an application that will enable employees to extract data quickly from millions of forms.
“AI is making significant strides in every arena,” he said. “It has the potential to revolutionize the banking and financial industry by enhancing financial product innovation, personalizing customer experiences, accelerating fraud detection, enhancing risk management, boosting operational efficiency and, thus, enabling entirely new forms of innovation and interaction.”
Jeyachandran was initially hired to lead the robotic process automation Center of Excellence team but has shifted roles as new technologies have taken root. As a former consultant, he now collaborates closely with cross-functional teams to develop offerings and collectively influence which ideas advance to the production line.
Senior Data Scientist Robert Smith is a former business analyst who likes the diversity of projects that comes with working on the client side at PNC.
“One of the things I really enjoy about PNC is the amount of agency you have in working on these problems. My input and my decisions are really valued. I have a lot of control in developing these models and a great team to work with and learn from,” Smith said.
Smith works with AI in PNC’s Intelligent Automation team. Its mission is simple: Apply ingenuity around how we do business. His team acts as internal consultants. The lines of business will come with an idea, and the team will offer up data scientists like Smith to analyze possible solutions. They get to work in a sandbox environment and conduct analytics that help move the needle forward.
“What’s been exciting is often we work with these stakeholders that don’t have a data science group,” Smith said. “They come to you and say, ‘Something is going on, and we want to improve our process.’ You do really get to play around and do exploratory data analysis. There’s a big discovery phase where you try out and decide upon models you want to build to answer those questions. I love the process of taking a business problem and distilling it into a deployed model or lessons learned from a study for our internal clients. Data science requires strong technology skills but also strong interpersonal communication skills, and PNC is a great place to hone both.”
