The Upside: Emerging tech: Trends, shifts, and why you should care

[00:01:03] Tamara Radocaj: Welcome to The Upside. I'm your host, Tamara Radocaj. Today we're diving into all things AI and technology. How is AI evolving at Fidelity and in financial services at large? How are job opportunities in this space shifting? What should you be watching for? We're here with John Bradley, Director of Emerging Technologies, to explore all this and more. John, welcome to the show.

[00:01:26] John Bradley: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:28] Tamara Radocaj: Let's start things off by just giving us a little overview of sort of your journey to Fidelity, what you do here now and then kind of how that's evolved since you started.

[00:01:39] John Bradley: It was a long journey to get to Fidelity. I don't know how much time we have. I actually started in agriculture. My background is in genetics and through a succession of going back to school, getting an MBA, then doing a computer science degree and finally getting a master's in law, ended up at Fidelity and working in emerging technologies.

[00:02:00] Tamara Radocaj: I'm sure lots of transferable skills there.

[00:02:03] John Bradley: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:02:05] Tamara Radocaj: What does the emerging technology team do? What exactly are all the different areas and what do opportunities in those areas look like?

[00:02:12] John Bradley: The best way to describe the emerging technologies team is we're an in-house consulting group. We specialize in kind of the newest technology, trying to identify it, understand it, and figure out where it best fits within the organization. How that kind of breaks out in the practical sense is we have three teams. We have an automation team that helps to automate processes. We have an AI team that's looking to implement AI wherever it has the most potential. We do emerging technologies research trying to scan the landscape to see what's new and exciting and how we can use it at Fidelity.

[00:02:46] Tamara Radocaj: Really, really cool. I know that students are a huge, huge part of your department. I know they make up at least 50% of your team. Of those who aren't students they used to be students. With that in mind what do the opportunities for students look like and maybe what are some projects that students have worked on that have been brought to life at the company?

[00:03:10] John Bradley: As you mentioned, students are a big part of the emerging technologies team. Currently we have 10 students and 50% of our full-time hires we are able to transition from current students to full-time employees. An emerging technology student, they have a lot of potential projects that they can work on across those three verticals that I previously mentioned. We have students working on automation projects, helping to automate processes on cool things like making it easier to volunteer within the organization and looking at applying AI to doing things like generating new social media content. We also have students that are helping with research, understanding what quantum computing looks like in the future and how that impacts Fidelity. It really spans a broad spectrum of potential projects and they can get involved in a bunch of different ways.

[00:04:02] Tamara Radocaj: What about AI? Any interesting or specific things that came to life that were AI driven?

[00:04:08] John Bradley: We've had students, a core group of students looking at a lot of different AI applications. Like I mentioned, some really interesting ones are how do we convert long form content into shareable pieces for social media? How do we do things like speech to text in order to help make meetings more efficient? Looking at other cool things like turning audio and video into images and movies in order to help tell the story of the new technologies we're trying to adopt.

[00:04:38] Tamara Radocaj: I know the opportunities for students have been growing as well with the growth of your team. For those who are currently students maybe looking to become part of Fidelity what are some of the core qualities and background that you look at for students in emerging technology?

[00:04:56] John Bradley: It's a great question. I think for us the core qualities we're really looking for are people who are ambitious, they're proactive, they're interested in technology. I think those are really the most important aspects that any student can have in terms of being a great candidate for emerging technologies. In terms of background, there isn't one specific background I think that really stands out in terms of being a good fit for the team. I have a non-traditional background and I've been able to be successful in emerging technologies, like I said, agriculture and science. We've seen a lot of success with students that have business backgrounds, design backgrounds, engineering and math backgrounds. It's really more about the individual being proactive and being engaged and just interested in the subject areas. That's really what's going to help a potential student join the emerging technologies team.

[00:05:53] Tamara Radocaj: Cool. From the time when you've started here, I don't know how long you've been at Fidelity.

[00:05:56] John Bradley: Ten years.

[00:05:57] Tamara Radocaj: Okay, so that's quite a bit, that's way longer in technology world, right?

[00:06:01] John Bradley: Yeah, yeah, it's like dog years.

[00:06:05] Tamara Radocaj: Exactly. How have you seen the opportunities within the department and the space evolve at Fidelity since you started?

[00:06:10] John Bradley: In terms of emerging technologies and how things have evolved over my almost decade here it's been a pretty dramatic change. In the beginning there was a real focus on having to have technical skills in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology out there. You need to have a background in either engineering or computer science to really take advantage of some of the automation tools that we were using way back when. Now with the emergence of AI and generative AI that requirement to be deeply technical has ... I wouldn't say fully gone away but it's definitely lowered the barriers to adoption. Like I was saying, these technologies are a lot easier to implement because instead of having to program something, you can just ask it in plain English and you're able to generate summaries, generate new forms of social media content just by asking something. It's been a pretty dramatic shift from having to be more technically focused to being more creative and just understanding how these technologies work and how you can apply them.

[00:07:16] Tamara Radocaj: That opens up the opportunities then as well for people to come in, right?

[00:07:19] John Bradley: Absolutely. You don't need that technical background as much these days and so that's exactly it. You can come from a creative background, you can from a design background and utilize these AI tools to do all kinds of great things that might not have been possible even a few years ago.

[00:07:36] Tamara Radocaj: Interesting. All that being said, how would you say that you're seeing things evolving at Fidelity as a company and how different departments implement all this different technology? How do you see that shifting in the next few years?

[00:07:52] John Bradley: Kind of related to what we were just talking about, the ability to implement AI in various forms of automation has been more democratized over the last few years because the ease of use and the ease access has gone way up with these tools. It used to be you had mainly your IT department that was managing and implementing these tools and supporting things like automation and AI. Now what you're seeing is from the major vendors that we use across the organization they're rolling out AI features and functionality. If you're sitting in marketing you can tap into an Adobe tool just by clicking a button or entering some text. If you are on the sales team you can go to Salesforce and there's AI at your fingertips. That's been a dramatic shift whereas before it would take years to build an AI product or solution and then you'd have to integrate it into these systems and it was very complex. Now it's just so much easier. It's allowing non-tech people to use these tools across the organization.

[00:08:52] Tamara Radocaj: It's just plugged into all the programs that we're already using, right?

[00:08:54] John Bradley: Absolutely.

[00:08:56] Tamara Radocaj: Amazing. In your role I know you get to go to a lot of really cool industry conferences and stuff like that. Of all the ones you've been to in the last year or so what are some key takeaways that have sort of stood out to you in your mind?

[00:09:12] John Bradley: If I were to summarize it maybe into three high-level takeaways just because there's so much going on, one, I would say AI is here to stay. In emerging technologies we see there's a lot of hype around certain things but they kind of fizzle out. The metaverse was one thing that was here today and gone tomorrow but AI definitely has a strong hold in terms of the workplace and how we're going to use it going forward. The next big takeaway is the rapid pace of change. It seems like things are changing by the minute and it can feel overwhelming to try and stay on top of what's the latest development from Google, from Apple, from Meta. Things are just changing so quickly.

[00:09:55] The final key takeaway is to try and not be overwhelmed by it and that things seem to be moving fast but there's a lot of practical use cases for all of these new technologies. The best way to kind of get involved and start to learn about these things is just pick a use case, a simple use case, and just get started. There's that kind of classic paralysis of choice. It's like going home at night and trying to pick something on Netflix. There's so many options you don't know where to begin. As far as going to these conferences, if you see something that's interesting it's really valuable just to experiment with it, try it out because you're going to get a lot of learnings and you can kind of go from there.

[00:10:33] Tamara Radocaj: Yeah, try it out, get comfortable with it and then take it to the next step, right?

[00:10:36] John Bradley: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:10:39] Tamara Radocaj: You mentioned social media. How are you observing that that's shifting with all these new tech tools in AI?

[00:10:46] John Bradley: In terms of social media I think it's a really interesting use case. I actually use it for my own social media quite frequently. What it's allowed myself to do, as I'm sure others, it really accelerates the rate of content creation. Previously you'd have to kind of write out a post, you'd have to go take some images or take some photographs, record a video. Now you can automate a lot of that with AI. You can use AI to generate the content, you can also use AI to create an image or create a video. Alternatively, you can you use AI to accelerate the editing process if you've recorded something that you actually like. It's really accelerated the rate of content creation and it also allows you to reach a broader audience because once you have that single piece of content you can translate it into multiple languages. You can also use AI to repurpose that into shorter or longer form content so you can extend the stuff that you've already created. It's really accelerated the rate of change as well as the opportunities of leveraging existing content to reach a much broader audience.

[00:11:52] Tamara Radocaj: I'm sure with that scale you see there's better ways and worse ways of doing it and sometimes it's more obvious that it was done by someone who might not necessarily know what the right commands are. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:12:07] John Bradley: You're absolutely right. Using AI tools or automation tools is just like anything else. It's both an art and a science. These tools are available to everybody but it's how you use them, how you create the images that you're going to post on social media, how you prompt your favourite LLM to create that content. Some of it is obvious and some of it is a lot more nuanced. There's a skill there and you can definitely tell when somebody is doing it the right way and the wrong way. You're more likely to engage with the content that looks more organic and looks like somebody's created it than if it's just using chat GPT to kind of spam out something just for the sake of putting it out there.

[00:12:57] Tamara Radocaj: If you had to pick one of these trends that you're seeing right now that really stands out to you that we should all care about more than anything else as far as how we do our jobs and how we live our lives, what would that be?

[00:13:09] John Bradley: I think of the trends that I was seeing at the conferences, I think just testing things out is one of the most important things, testing out AI tools, or any new technology for that matter. AI is here to stay and it's going to impact us both in our personal and professional lives. The more that we get comfortable with these tools the better we'll be able to take advantage of them for our own personal and professional benefit. Experimenting with things that are available to you can pay a lot of dividends.  I would just encourage people to try them out. There's a lot of people who are skeptics or a lot people who might be concerned about what these tools are going to do but in testing them out you get more comfortable with them and you get to see more of the potential and how they can help you.

[00:13:57] Tamara Radocaj: You mentioned earlier that the rate of change is crazy, crazy fast and that can be super daunting and scary for those who are trying to keep up with it. What shouldn't we be afraid of in that sense?

[00:14:10] John Bradley: I think in terms of what we shouldn't be afraid of is the fact that technology is changing because technology has always changed. They say we're in the fourth industrial revolution which implies there were three before this and things have all ultimately worked out. Just because things are changing isn't necessarily a bad thing and that's going to create a lot of opportunities for us in the future. For example, with these AI tools that are now available certain products maybe we didn't have access to before are now going to become in reach. Planning our day-to-day lives is going to become easier. I like to travel a lot and I use these AI tools to maximize my enjoyment of when I go on vacation. I think we shouldn't be afraid of change and as much as we can we should try to embrace it because there's a lot of benefits to adopting these new tools and technologies.

[00:15:05] Tamara Radocaj: To those interested in kind of keeping pace with all of that and staying on top of it what are some tools or resources that you would recommend that they can look to for that?

[00:15:16] John Bradley: I think there's a few good recommendations I can give. One of my favourite tools is just staying up to date on the latest technology is Reddit, actually. Reddit is a great platform because it seems like there is a page dedicated to almost everything and that includes technology and AI. There's a lot of interesting conversations that are going on that are going to give you practical feedback in terms of whether a new AI technology is worthwhile or maybe it's more hype than it is substance. Reddit is a great place to start. I know Fidelity Canada has a great Reddit page that I encourage people to go check out but there's other technology pages on Reddit that are worthwhile.

[00:15:57] Other great resources are things like YouTube. I'm a big YouTube fan, actually had the chance to go to Google a couple days ago and hear all about the latest and greatest YouTube technology. That's a great format for me because I find that there's a lot of great creators out there that are talking about technology and really summarizing the information in a way that's easily digestible for me. Sometimes it's YouTube shorts or other short form content so it really allows me to stay up to date in an easy and engaging way.

[00:16:29] Finally, for those people who are maybe a bit more advanced, you can use AI tools to stay on top of AI tools. You can go to things like ChatGPT and say, hey, what's the latest AI update for the month? What tools or technology are making the news? That can give you kind of a quick summary as complementary to both Reddit and YouTube. I don't think there's any one approach. It's whatever best suits the individual and how they prefer to consume content.

[00:16:57] Tamara Radocaj: There's so many ways to make our lives easier and better and as much as it does maybe sound daunting it's actually just so much more opportunity, right?

[00:17:05] John Bradley: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:17:07] Tamara Radocaj: Well, John, thank you so much for the discussion. This was super insightful and always a pleasure chatting with you.

[00:17:12] John Bradley: Thank you very much for having me.

[00:17:15] Tamara Radocaj: Thank you for joining us on today's episode of The Upside. If you want to explore more of our content you can head to fidelity.ca's investor education section for all things investing, no matter your knowledge level. There you can find articles, sign up for The Upside newsletter  and get information about upcoming live webcasts and on-demand videos. For even more content you can explore Fidelity Canada on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok, as well as our Upside and Fidelity Connects podcast with new episodes dropping daily. Once again, I'm Tamara Radocaj, thanks for watching and we'll see you again on The Upside.