Personalization and Innovation in a Regulated Industry: Experian’s Kathleen Peters

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Innovating in a regulated environment obviously comes with guardrails. When we introduce generative and agentic AI, the stakes get even higher. How does one financial services institution navigate and successfully innovate with AI? Find out on today's episode.

**Kathleen Peters** (0:19)
I'm Kathleen Peters from Experian, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:25)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 12 seasons of podcast episodes. On each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policy makers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success. Hi, listeners. Thanks for joining us again today. Today, I'm talking with Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian. Kathleen, great to have you with us.

**Kathleen Peters** (1:13)
Thank you. It's great to be here, Sam.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:16)
Experian likely knows a lot about us, but some of our listeners might not know as much about Experian. So let's start. Can you give us a brief overview and in particular, your role?

**Kathleen Peters** (1:26)
Experian is a global data and technology company, and we empower opportunities for people and businesses all around the world. We help define lending practices. We uncover and prevent fraud for our clients and for consumers. We simplify health care and we deliver digital marketing solutions.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:49)
Well, your role is the Chief Innovation Officer. I didn't know about the Experian Innovation Lab. Tell us about the lab and what are some of the projects that have come out of the lab?

**Kathleen Peters** (1:59)
I work very closely with my partner who is Dr. Shanjee Zhang, our Chief Scientist and Technical Leader for our lab, which is comprised of data scientists and software engineers who are really harnessing the power of the data that we have to help create the products that our clients and partners need as well as to help consumers through our direct-to-consumer business. So, Shanjee and the lab have been working with AI for decades, especially when it comes to fraud. Then in 2022, late in the year when we saw the public rollout of generative AI, this wasn't new to our lab. The lab had been working with generative AI techniques in the past. But that real democratization that happened, that made these capabilities available to you and I, and everyone especially through OpenAI, releasing ChatGPT, the lab has really been on the forefront of the productization that we have done of generative AI techniques, and bringing those into our app that consumers can use, as well as products like Experian Assistant. Experian Assistant enables individuals at our clients to be able to derive insights, to have visualizations of analytic models, scores, trends, to be able to do the kinds of things that would have typically required data scientists on both sides to work on for weeks or months, to deploy models in production, and then get the results back. Now we can do this in a matter of minutes. So that's one particular innovation that we have been really excited about that's really on the cutting edge, because it's levering agentic AI as well.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:55)
But I want to come back to, you mentioned democratization, and I think you positioned it as a positive thing, but you also deal with a lot of bad actors who just got access to a lot of amazing technology too. Tell us a little bit about how that's changed the world, when the bad actors also have access to this technology.

**Kathleen Peters** (4:15)
Now this is something that probably keeps me awake at night, if I'm honest. There are so many capabilities that are unleashed by the new capabilities that are here, and made available through the foundational models, through tools like ChatGPT, and CLAWD, and others. And that is very exciting for us as consumers, for us as scientists building capabilities at Experian and other companies. But you're absolutely right. It also empowers fraudsters. And you have very organized, motivated, intelligent people who are looking to commit frauds, especially in an online world.
And we're hearing a lot about the quality of deep fakes that are being produced by fraudsters using these tools. We are also seeing an increase in the quality, as well as the sheer scale of the number of scams that are being perpetrated. Generative AI allows the fraudsters and their organizations to use very natural language. It allows them to get creative about the victim that they are grooming and targeting. And so this is something that we really need to all be aware of, not only as businesses, but as a society, that the quality of these scams is increasing and we need to look out for each other and have our guard up just a little bit more when something may not seem quite right or maybe a little bit too good to be true, perhaps.