Meet Louisa: Where Financial Networking Meets AI Power

[Music] GM New York ceoa aai Rohan was a physicist from Oxford University after that he spent 20 years in Investment Banking 17 of them at Goldman Sachs 10 of them as managing director throughout London Hong Kong and New York thank you and I also actually as a kid from the age of 2 to 10 in the 80s um spent eight amazing years in Abu Dhabi and have fun memories of my childhood there the beach hadi's hamburgers Etc so you know Abu Dhabi is really home for me that's lovely so you went from Investment Banking to artificial intelligence I really fell into this space by accident um Serendipity you could call it basically five six years ago I ended up closing a really large transaction at Goldman Sach and management asked me two questions they said how do you do it and how can you do it again and the honest answer was I met the right person at the right time it was Serendipity um I met someone at water cooler in London and 3 four months later we closed this really large crossborder transaction and when they said how can you do it again again I said well what if you could systematize surrender with data it's crazy that in today's day and age people have to be thirsty at the same time meet at a water cooler and and swap information surely there's a better way and so that was really the conceptualization of Louisa I got some amazing advice from the CIO and the chief strategy officer and they said you know wrot the best video games are built for gamers by Gamers and we've spent Millions ions even billions of dollars on technology buy versus build but imagine if we could create something for the business by a veteran of the business four years later we basically spun out of the firm and now we are an independent company where um Goldman Sachs is a customer we have a hundred billion dollar private equity and VC firm as a customer and we've just signed a very large um Retail Bank globally as well so Ro you had mentioned that you spent a lot of time in the financial industry and there could you share a little bit more about the problem that they're dealing with that kind of originated with why Louisa was built there's an age-old problem which is finding the right expertise at the right time and this leads to a lot of other issues uh missed opportunities disconnected colleagues uh fractured client experiences um you know it's difficult to find the right expertise in the right time having the firm at your fingertips and being able to deliver the full might of your firm which is nothing more than the collective intelligence of your colleagues um that is something that I think large organizations need to get ahead of especially in an age where data and AI are now not just buzzword they are reality you mentioned the word artificial intelligence could you tell us your view on artificial intelligence towards the financial industry at large yeah look um there's OB ly the world changed November 2022 when chat GPT was out um for banks um I think it's going to take a long time because the data like it doesn't matter whether you have Nvidia Super Chips and you have the best llm models on the planet you need data data is the oil that data is for knocked away because you know there's privacy legal compliance conflicts material non-public information so now I guess followup question would be what are your thoughts on a company establishing a chat GPT internally for their content I think it'll take a very long time it will get there but this is not something that's going to happen in the next few years because the data is for privacy and Regulatory reasons Sil it away and actually all the information is is in people's minds and so you almost have to connect the minds of your people we have a very different approach which is ask any question who can help with gdpr issue in Italy who can help settle a loan trade who can help get give us a warm intro to Elon musk's CFO and the answer is always the same it's a person's name it's Bob Susan VI so our view you know you can ask Louisa any question and the answer will always be the same it's Bob Susan VI um Sharia Etc and then you ask that person and then they have the knowledge so what you need to do is map the expertise and relationships of the people at your company and then once you create that map you can do some amazing things very interesting a map for financial institutions could you elaborate on that a bit Uber was built on Google Maps so without a Google map you couldn't get from downtown to the Upper West Side for example and once you have a map of your people like every person at your company's expertise and relationships now forget about it if you're saying hey everyone has to input that no one has time to do anything it has to be automatic but when you have an automatic map you can do some phenomenal things Louisa reads a million articles from 250 newspapers it read in a Singapore newspaper that there was a 10 billion dollar semiconductor plant being built and it figured out that Susan at this very large company used to work at this company she's in compliance she's not a client facing person so Louisa sends an email to Susan it sends an email to Jack who is the semiconductor financing expert in New York who doesn't know Susan doesn't know the company but does this for a living and Louisa basically introduces Susan's relationship Jack's expertise with the article about the10 billion opportunity and months later they ended up closing a 60% loan to value so $6 billion of financing the customer was blown away because to make connections that no one thought were possible so it's impossible for a human to know everyone at a company let alone what and who everyone knows it's also impossible to read all the newspapers in the world every single day this is where AI can do both of those things and then connect people so we are all about connecting human intelligence using artificial intelligence wow I never thought about it that way you know there's a lot of fear we've all watched Terminator 2 um and there's a lot of fear about AI versus humans and AI replacing people and that's probably valid and it needs to be regulated in many fronts but there is a huge opportunity ironically for you know human intelligence to be connected by artificial intelligence if you think about LinkedIn Facebook it's connected people with you know I remember I've got friends from alabar at school in Abu Dhabi who I would never I only I left when I was about 10 years old I would never have reconnected with them but years later I met my Arabic teacher I I met my Arabic teacher's son who was my friend and we reconnected so through technology through data there's an amazing capability for human connections to be made our mission is all about connecting people using AI not replacing them what a great conversation thank you so much for your time so Rohan if there was someone in the audience that did want to reach out to you probably the best way is um our website which is louisa. and again uh looking forward to being live in Abu Dhabi next year um definitely a place that I'm visiting I'm very happy to have my golden Visa um and shukran