Sloanies Talking with Sloanies Yurui (Rui) Tong, MBAn ’21, on Tackling Hard Problems, AI in Practice, and the Power of Storytelling
In this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, host Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, interviews Yurui (Rui) Tong, MBAn ’21, a graduate of the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics program. Tong, reflects on her educational and professional journey through a personal lens of self-discovery and curiosity. Though passionate about logic and reasoning, she shares her early struggles with math, eventually realizing that her strengths lie in storytelling and narrative-based problem-solving. This realization shaped her approach to data science and analytics, emphasizing clarity and meaning in complex concepts. At MIT, a key lesson came from Professor Dimitris Bertsimas, SM ’87, PhD ’88, who advised her to confront difficult problems head-on—a mindset that continues to guide her career. Tong’s path includes diverse roles, from WHO to Deloitte to Remitly, where she now serves as a senior product manager working on fraud detection powered by AI.
Rui explains that while AI is not new to data science professionals, its current wave of popularity stems from its broadened interaction with the public. At Remitly, she sees AI as a layered system—data, models, and decision-making—where the quality of data is as crucial as the model itself. She highlights the challenge of aligning business goals with probabilistic AI outputs, particularly in fraud detection, where trade-offs between customer experience and risk management are constant. Her podcast, Floating Questions (Spotify and Apple), reflects her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, covering topics from energy policy to personal identity. Rui’s time at Sloan fostered a deep appreciation for principled innovation and collaborative learning—values she continues to carry forward.
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