Wells Fargo's Tracy Kerrins on AI Virtual Agent & Becoming a Digital-First Company |Technovation 783

Thanks Peter, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Sure. Well, you know, Wells Fargo, I'm the newly named head of Technology at Wells Fargo, so my remit in that role is really leading a dynamic, amazing team of technologists that spans across developers, infrastructure, security, etc. And really, we're delivering technology solutions for the 70-plus million customers that we support, as well as the 200-plus thousand employees across the globe. So it's an exciting time to be here. We're at a major point of transformation, which is one of the reasons I joined almost four years ago, to your point, is to be part of the transformation journey. And I have never looked back, Peter. Never regretted the decision.

So I have CIOs under me on my team that align with each CEO, driving the business. And their job is really to partner with the CEOs and make sure that we're thinking in advance of where the business strategies want to be, so we can deliver technology solutions kind of when they need it, but also before they even think they need it, so we're kind of ready at hand. And also, I mean, we're a huge part of the organization, full stop. So I look at technology as a business that we own and drive together, so we're always looking for ways to be more efficient, to automate as well, and just look at the overall role that we play in the financials of the company and the overall strategy.

Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I actually had two different CIO roles in my time here at Wells. I started off running Enterprise Functions Technology, which is all of the HR, audit, legal, risk, that really runs the core backbone of the company. And I did that for a couple years and loved it. We delivered some great foundational solutions like new HR platforms, ServiceNow that really drives all of our technology change portfolio. And it was great. And then I was given the opportunity to move over and run Consumer Technology, which was actually two legacy teams that we put together: Consumer Lending and the Consumer and Small Business Bank. We put those together to get more familiar with everything we were doing in the consumer space and help drive the consumer strategy at Wells. And then as we mentioned, just recently I was given the great opportunity, privilege, honor I should say, to run Technology overall.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the areas where we're super excited. This week we just got to 100 kind of consumer rollout of our new virtual agent, Fargo, as you mentioned, that runs on our mobile app and it's powered by Google's artificial intelligence, Google Dialogflow solution. And so it's kind of our first biggest foray into artificial intelligence, and it's also our first virtual assistant that's sitting in front of the customer and providing data insights and hopefully helping them improve their banking experience and give them information they may not have even known they needed when they need it. Which is one of the things that we're really looking to drive: help customers bank when they want, how they want, and where they want. And hopefully Fargo can be part of that solution.

How does the organization go about the testing to determine the art of the possible? So a topic like AI or other technologies that you might play around with to validate potential value to the organization and uses and means of driving various facets of the strategies articulated. Who's involved in that? How do they work through that? The extent to which there's sort of a process that you might articulate?

Well, I know we want to serve customers when they want, where they want, how they want. And as we look generationally, I have three teenage daughters. They first look for mobile everything, right? They're looking for advice, information, knowledge. What they get from and are willing to take in information and insight wise is kind of interesting and shocking in some ways, right? Whether it's from TikTok or whoever posted something on YouTube. So I think really looking at mobile-first, digital-first there, but also driving customers to the best. I want them to be able to get what they need when they want, how they want, and where they want it, whether that's mobile, whether that's self-service in an IVR channel, or speaking to an agent and making sure that agent has the information they need to serve them.

Almost everything we're doing is customer-led or employee-led, right? It's really at the heart of what we're doing. If we're not, we really have to ask ourselves why. Even big core technology transformational bodies of work like we're looking at, you know, we have a new payments platform we're building out, or even if it's just core banking modernization which we're doing, which is all the debits and credits of the company. At the heart of that, yes, it's a big technology transformation, but why? Technology is just our means to get where we want to go for the customer. I mean, if the customer wins, we all win. That's how I look at it. I know it seems simple, but usually in the end, if the customer wins, then we all win.

Yeah, well, that's one of the things I'm really proud of in the last three and a half, almost four years as you mentioned that I've been at Wells Fargo, is the change in the role that technology has played, our seat at the table with the business. We're not just creating strategies and then saying, 'Hey Tech, here's what we need.' We're partnering together. So that to me is something I'm super proud of. In addition, we've been really working on our employee culture in technology and the focus on engineering. So we've been skilling up our engineers, we've been really pushing everyone to all the great cloud training that we're doing because we have a big cloud strategy in our future. We're early on in the journey, but it's a really exciting time. So we want to make sure that our engineers really feel this is the best place for engineers to work in the world. That's my goal, that's something we're all working toward, that we're a technology destination for engineers. And to do that, you have to feel like you're able to learn, grow, and then also challenge and question. And that's where that equal seat at the table comes, so you're not just being told what to do.

I love that insight and the extent to which you have the blessing of being in an industry and with a company where you can be the customer of your offering and therefore have customer zero insights as to what's working or what might not be, or enhancements on top of what might be there. That must be a gratifying aspect of what you and the team can deliver as well.

Yeah, makes sense. I wanted to ask you also about a lot of what we've described, artificial intelligence being a prominent example of it, the role that data plays. Yours is an organization that is very data-rich, to say the least, especially given the vast amounts of data, the complexity of...

We do that. And that's part of our cloud strategy as well, that'll give us more flexibility to run models in different ways, have flex capacity to run bigger bodies of data interrogation. And so that's all part of our longer-term journey.

Yeah, well, we're doing a hybrid cloud strategy that we've been vocal out in the media. We've chosen Google and Microsoft as our two partners. We are early in the journey. We have migrated already about 15% of our overall workload, and we'll get to about 20% this year. We're really trying to do this in a transformational way, and so in ways that takes us a little bit more time, but we think it will bring greater advantages long term. So all of our new technology is being built containerized. We want to be able to port it very easily, take advantage of the best cloud offering whether it's Google or Microsoft depending on the need. So again, early, but we are just about to start to really make some significant momentum there in our cloud journey.

I think helping customers achieve their financial goals is a big one. So using data and AI to help them achieve those goals, whether it's looking at net worth and what they need to retire, or what they would need to save to purchase something they want to save up for, whether it's a new home or a car, etc. I think that's really exciting and something that's going to be a differentiator for us. And it's something that we know our customers want, so we're very excited about that. And that's something else around data that you were asking about before, that's very data-driven. Our ability to do that really well will be defined by our ability to look at data and provide true insights that help them with their financial needs. Obviously data, as we talked about, cloud is a big one. We talked about generative AI. Again, I don't want to create solutions looking for problems. I think there's plenty of technology out there. If we can really harness generative AI in a way that serves our customers better, we actually execute on our cloud journey and use all of the data that we have in the right way, I mean that's really going to differentiate us beyond anything you and I could probably imagine.

As we probably all have in our career, I was never afraid to take on a new challenge. I think that's one thing. And also take on a challenge where the stakes were high, so there was a lot to gain but there could be a lot to lose. And there have been some defining moments in my career when I wasn't so sure if I was going to be on the good or the bad side of that. But through that, you learn so much, and hopefully you have a lot of wins that come out of that and that will help propel you. But candidly, even when you have losses or bumps, those are some of the best learnings along the way. So that's one: never be afraid to take on a challenge. I think the next is, I talk about this a lot: don't be afraid to give bad news. One of my managers who became a mentor told me, 'Always give me the bad news first.' Because that's the best way to get in front of it and pull other people in to help you solve problems. So don't be afraid to give bad news. And the other thing I think too is, you can't be afraid, and this is a little more controversial because you have to do this in the right way as you scale in your roles, but don't ever forget that you are responsible and accountable for the details. I think some people, as soon as you think that someone else's job or role, you can find yourself getting into a lot of trouble. So the level and depth of the detail you need to know changes with scale, but you always have to remember you have to know enough, and you got to know when something doesn't smell or look right to go dig a little deeper and poke around, because in the end, that's how you...

Great, thanks Peter. Thanks for having me.