Enterprise Tech Behind Digital Banking - James Barney (Director Cloud Platform Eng, Ally Financial)

This episode is a great balance of the high level impact of AI & Cloud on enterprise use cases and detailed tech deep dives behind how they’re powered. Whether you’re a CIO, Founder, or IC, there’s stuff in here for everyone.

James Barney is Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Ally Financial. He previously was a data engineer at Accenture and Lowe’s. In this episode, we cover how Ally as a digital bank builds and utilizes cloud technology to deliver a great experience to customers. We talk about migrating through modern tech transitions, centralizing data for internal teams’ efficiency, and of course the impact of AI. James discusses where he sees the impact of AI on enterprise workflows in the future and how to manage the challenges around using LLMs.

Where to Find James:

·       LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-barney/

Where to Find Shomik:

·       Twitter: https://twitter.com/shomikghosh21

·       LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shomik-ghosh-a5a71319/

·       Podcast: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube.

In this episode, we cover:

(01:50) – Migrating to Hadoop & Centralizing Data at Lowe’s

(07:31) – Ally’s Early Cloud Journey

(10:50) – How Ally Innovates Using Modern Technology

(15:46) – Managing Downtime in Systems

(18:58) – Building a Cloud Workload, Security & FinOps Internal Developer Platform

(26:04) – Utilizing GenAI for Platform Eng Use Cases

(30:02) – How Good Are LLMs at Text to SQL

(34:50) - AI’s Impact of Access to Knowledge Across the Org

(38:08) - What’s Slowing Down Potential Enterprise Adoption of GenAI

(42:27) - Wrap Up

Show Notes:

* PII Masking Module for Langchain

* Early Efforts into Generative AI

* Ally Tech Blog

How to Subscribe:

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shomik.substack.com