Overcoming AI Hallucinations: Truist’s Chandra Kapireddy

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:03)
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**Sam Ransbotham** (1:39)
Despite the tendency to elucinate, generative AI solutions have promise. Hear from one banking executive about how his company uses both traditional and generative AI to enhance operations and to engage customers and employees.

**Chandra Kapireddy** (1:55)
I'm Chandra Kapireddy from Truist, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:01)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:19)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT Smr and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017 Interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:46)
Hi, everyone. We're back for another episode. Thanks for joining us. Today, Shervin and I are talking with Chandra Kapireddy. He's the head of Generative AI, Machine Learning and Analytics at Truist Bank. Chandra, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

**Chandra Kapireddy** (3:00)
Hey, Sam. Good to see you here. Happy to be part of the podcast.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:04)
Let's start with Truist and your role. I'm guessing many people will likely know of Truist. It's one of the largest financial services companies in the United States, formed in 2019, I think, by the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. Chandra, can you explain your role at Truist?

**Chandra Kapireddy** (3:19)
Sure. For those who may not be familiar with Truist, I think as you introduced, this is the top 10 financial services company. We operate in 17 states, 15 million customers, 530 billion dollar assets. We offer products and services in consumer banking, wholesale banking that includes wealth management, corporate investment banking, commercial banking. So pretty much all of the different products and services you can think of from a top 10 financial services. I'm the head of AI, Mission Learning and Analytics, as you introduced at the beginning. My group broadly does three things. Number one, we provide the AI strategy and drive AI policy for the company. Just think of that as a first bucket. The second bucket, we build platform and capabilities for data science community. Both from a training the models as well as a serving the models. Also, the model risk management teams. The third bucket is really developing advanced mission learning and gen AI capabilities, including the applications themselves. Think of this as more like AI research and cutting edge and next gen kind of solutions for the company. Those are three areas that my group is accountable for.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:35)
Those three areas are pretty large. We got strategy policy, we got platforms, you've got advanced research. Can you give us some examples of some initiatives within the bank? How is the bank using artificial intelligence?

**Chandra Kapireddy** (4:48)
We broadly classify AI into two buckets, traditional AI and generative AI. Within traditional AI, we have number of AI models that are already in place from fraud detection models. We have some customer segmentation models and so on and so forth. The second bucket is generative AI. We break that into three sub buckets. Number one, there are models that we can actually build, and that's what we do. There are fine-tuned models we can actually build based off the foundation models. And the second is using the services, APIs, Azure OpenAI as a service. For example, the Bedrock as a service, if it's an anthropic behind the scene. And the third one is applications themselves. For example, Microsoft 365 Copilot or an Amazon Connect transcribe application.