As I shared earlier here ,vBase and Radar were the result of the technology team’s innovation to leverage AI at PayPal and eBay respectively.
But tech teams alone can not deliver a great product. A Product focuses on solving customer problems end-to-end, and delivers on goals of the business that is funding the efforts for inception, operation and expansion. And a ‘Platform’ product goes further and makes heroes out of it’s users who build powerful applications and solutions leveraging the platform!
To that end we were lucky to have found some amazing business and product leaders who helped us along the way.
At eBay, it was Dinesh Lathi! Dinesh not only took a chance on us, but he also coached us to find the right use case. We could have used AI to compete with existing fraud detection solutions that detected Auction Fraud, Transaction Fraud, Account Take over etc. But he helped us see a possibility that we could think different! We came up with the idea to leverage AI to detect fraudulent signups / registrations! Just leveraging the data entered on signup page along with everything else around the machine, the application, the time and the location of signup. As well as other signups that shared similar characteristics with other signups.This was novel and moved our efforts upstream. Meaning making them more proactive. And as they say it, the rest is history!
A few other key leaders who helped through this journey at eBay, were Mariana Klumpp and John Canfield!
Similarly at PayPal, when we were looking at expanding AI at the internet scale, we needed the right data technology. We bet on Hadoop before it was part of ‘Big Data’ stack. We built a Lambda architecture before it was referred to by that name. Sahib Bal, Charlie Ma and Gurinder Grewal were the key people who enables that journey. But beyond tech, we ran into issues getting AI work with existing processes and adopted by existing people and teams. This was the journey to transition from ‘tech’ to product.
And that is where Arthi Rajan & Tushar Shah came in! Arthi single handedly led all aspects of product making this new tech a reality! She took time to understand the tech details, and spent time learning the analytics and business metrics driving existing processes. That helped her be the conduit between the olde and the new! She was later joined by Tushar who helped us scale the use of AI across all Risk and regulatory Compliance use cases. We got a lot of help from Alyssa Cutright, & Tom Keithley who were our champions and business sponsors through this journey. And then we also were fortunate to have some key Big data experts join us when we scaled AI and Big Data across other functions at PayPal. More on that later.
But key here was the comprehensive focus on transforming the technology prototype into a sustainable platform and appropriate processes that the existing people (with minimal training) can adopt. That made the biggest difference in driving adoption.
