You joined First Citizens as chief data and analytics officer in 2024. What was your background and what drew you to First Citizens? 

I jumped at the opportunity to leverage my background and experience gained at other Large Financial Institutions, including Ally Financial, Fannie Mae and Capital One, to establish and scale First Citizens’ data and analytics capabilities.  

At First Citizens, AI is one of the corporate priority initiatives, signaling a clear commitment to utilizing AI capabilities responsibly, at scale, to achieve real business impact. AI is widely viewed as the most important technological advancement of the next couple of decades. We are accelerating our journey with AI, charting the course for using AI safely and securely, and advancing the appropriate use of AI within our business. 

What is First Citizens’ AI philosophy? 

At First Citizens, we believe technology should strengthen the human connections that define great banking relationships. AI is not viewed solely as a technology initiative; it is a new way of working. We are encouraging our associates to rethink their business processes and consider how AI capabilities can be used to reimagine work, improve efficiency, grow revenue, and improve outcomes at the bank, while retaining our human-first approach to working with clients. 

How is First Citizens using AI today? 

Having first established a framework for responsible AI adoption and governance, we set out to find ways to improve. In the broadest categories, we are leveraging tools in support of several key areas of our business: 

• Fraud and Risk Management 
• Customer Experience 
• Operational Efficiency 
• Product Innovation 
• Technology Delivery 

We believe we will find opportunities by reinventing our processes with data and AI-driven capabilities across the enterprise. 

How is it going so far? 

We have an incredibly talented and experienced in-house team, including our Head of AI and Advanced Analytics, Ash Kaduskar. Our AI team is working across the business to collaborate on several process improvements and develop platform building blocks to improve efficiency and growth in areas including: 

• Marketing & Sales Optimization 
• Fraud & Financial Crimes Detection 
• Regulatory Reporting & Compliance Automation 
• Operational Risk & Cyber Threat Intelligence 
• Call Center & Front-Line Assistance 
• Personal Productivity & Process Automation 

What specifically is First Citizens doing with AI? 

A few of our many projects and programs include: 

• “AskFirst,” an FCB-specific, natural language knowledge agent called to support our associates in our large branch network. AskFirst helps branch bankers get the information and answers they need to deliver superior client service and support quickly and easily.  We are keeping our bankers front and center with our clients and leveraging AI in the background. 
• Enabling associate productivity with the enterprise rollout of Microsoft Copilot 
• First Citizens’ AI Academy was developed to accelerate AI fluency through persona-based AI learning experiences. 
• We currently have numerous other AI use cases in the pipeline that accelerate and improve our internal operations across nearly every area of the bank. 

What is First Citizens doing to protect client and company data as it leverages AI? 

As with any technology, we balance the need for safety and soundness and innovation in alignment with our enterprise strategic plan and within our risk appetite.   

Some of our core principles for operating a safe environment with AI include: 

• Internal facing use cases 
• Keeping humans in the loop 
• Masking and filtering sensitive data to prevent data loss 

We also have a cross functional leadership group inclusive of business units, technology, cyber security, data, privacy, resilience, legal, compliance, and risk to help us ensure that as we implement AI solutions, we are taking the appropriate steps to protect our clients and our assets, and to facilitate AI implementations which enhance current processes and solutions, as well as enable new ones in a responsible way.  

Can you speak to the tangible results you have seen with these new AI-based projects? 

We track anticipated and actual benefits for all of our AI use cases, in categories such as revenue generation, cost reduction, speed and service delivery improvements, and risk mitigation.   

Additional Resources: 

Frontier AI Fact Sheet 

First Citizens Bank Appoints Scott Richardson as CDAO 

A Financial CDAO Playbook: Frameworks Behind First Citizens Bank’s Data Maturity, AI Readiness, and Workforce Alignment - CDO Magazine 

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