00:00 Introduction
Welcome to Tech Talk, a podcast featuring employees and leaders discussing all things tech at Mutual of Omaha. Join us to learn what tech professionals can gain from a career with us. Let's talk tech.
00:11 Brian Poppe:
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Tech Talk, a podcast hosted by Mutual Omaha, where we talk about all thing’s technology related. I am Brian Poppe, former Chief Data Officer, but I currently manage one of the business units here at Mutual of Omaha, and I'm joined by.
00:29 Maura Ramsey:
Hi, everybody. I'm your co-host, Maura Ramsey, and I am an Agile Project Manager here at Mutual of Omaha. Brian, great to be back. What have you been up to lately?
00:40 Brian Poppe:
Oh boy. I had a real rough week like two weeks ago. So, a storm came through Omaha and knocked out power, which is fine, other than it took a week to restore that power.
During that week that I didn't have power, I ended up getting COVID. And then I think because of the heat, because the air conditioning couldn't run, the fridge line, the water line that feeds the fridge, burst and so I had to deal with a bunch of water, like all over the kitchen and down the sink. So, I've been cleaning up, I guess, from a storm that knocked out power and recovering from COVID.
01:11 Brian Poppe:
And then eventually I’ll get to deal with drywall that is now soggy thanks to the fridge line. It's been pretty great. Hopefully, you've been up to something more fun than that. What have you been up Maura?
01:22 Maura Ramsey:
You know, I haven’t been cleaning up water, thankfully, and no storms have been hitting my area. Busy, busy with work. But from a personal standpoint, this is a little accomplishment that I'm a little happy to hit. I picked up Duolingo after a trip I went on early this spring and I just hit my like 110th day today. So, a little accomplishment, very little to show for it.
01:49 Brian Poppe:
Congratulations! I know that owl is pretty proud of you. I bet unless you're late, in which case he will let you know about it.
01:54 Maura Ramsey:
Oh yes, yep, he’ll do a little dance around and celebrate me. It was a new little reaction today, so it was exciting.
02:01 Brain Poppe:
What language you learning?
02:03 Maura Ramsey:
I'm working on Spanish. It was a Costa Rica trip where I was like, you know, this could be more fun if I was a little bit more conversational. So, it was a motivating trip.
02:15 Brian Poppe:
You know, I don't travel a lot, but I imagine it would have been helpful to know Spanish before you went to Costa Rica. So.
02:21 Maura Ramsey:
Yes. Yeah. You're not wrong. If you were to go, I would recommend picking it up beforehand. But a lot of good people. So, they worked with me and my hand motions.
02:35 Brian Poppe:
Hey, I mean, whatever gets you by and makes sure you can get food and get to where we need to go safely Speaking about somebody that knows multiple languages. We want to introduce today. Nathalie Blume. Nathalie, how are you doing?
02:48 Nathalie Blume:
I'm doing well. Hi, Brian. Yeah, Duolingo doesn't do Python yet, but that's one of the languages I know.
02:56 Brian Poppe:
Perfect. I was hoping you would take it that way. So, Nathalie, why don't you tell us about yourself? Tell us about your career journey that led you here to Mutual of Omaha and then a little bit about what you're up to?
03:06 Nathalie Blume:
I'm happy to. I am a Principal Data Scientist; I have been at the company for close to three years. So, what do I do? I lead a team that builds AI systems and I also provide advice on ways to enable data science across the company from our stack to governance. How I got here? Gosh, I've worked for a lot of different companies as a Data Scientist, I've worked with wellness companies, geospatial data, health insurance. I'm forgetting a bunch, but I've had quite a journey across different types of products.
03:48 Nathalie Blume:
At Mutual. I work primarily in IT, and I have more of an enterprise-wide role, so I've been able to start initiatives that have a bigger impact than I have done before, and that's been especially exciting. Mutual's a company where people say, yes, a lot so it's a good way to get some exciting stuff going.
04:12 Maura Ramsey:
So definitely, like you mentioned, a lot of exciting things you've had your hands in.
What is some of the or what is the main thing or most exciting thing that you're working on right now in your role?
04:24 Nathalie Blume:
Gosh, we're doing a lot of Generative AI work right now. We have, my team, has two projects in flight. And Generative AI work is a big shift for us. We used to build models from data. Now a vendor sells us the model. It's readymade and it can take some input that's really complex and generate some output that's really complex. So, if you played around ChatGPT, you know, a little bit of the experience. So, our focus has moved towards building systems where the large language model is a component. We spend a lot of time thinking what else do we build into that system to keep the large language model on task, honest, and productive! And it turns out you can build a lot around it to do those things. So that’s especially exciting right now.
05:19 Brian Poppe:
Yeah, that's great. And I'm sure most of the folks that are watching Tech Talk, I would assume, have at some point experimented with ChatGPT and so it's exciting to hear that Mutual of Omaha has a few things that are up its sleeve regarding LLMs.
05:34 Brian Poppe:
When you're looking for a new associate, maybe somebody who's either a junior in the data science career or otherwise, what types of qualifications or experiences are you looking for?
05:43 Nathalie Blume:
Sure. I look for somebody who's flexible. I look for somebody who is going to take in a bunch of input and can be able to think out of the box about what to what to do with it within a new problem space. Data Scientists have to be creative so that quality is essential. And you can find that quality, find evidence of that quality in a number of different ways. On the projects we ask some of our candidates to do in their resume, in their path, and how they talk about their work. That's the primary quality I look for that flexibility, that ability to anchor yourself in a lot of different sets of facts and adapt your thinking to a new problem that you're looking to solve.
06:32 Nathalie Blume:
And, in addition to that, certain, you know, kind of table stakes, coding languages and then some experience having deployed a model that's also part of what I look for.
06:50 Maura Ramsey:
It definitely sounds like anyone in your space is someone that would never get bored with all the new work and opportunities and things that you're experimenting with and focusing on and in your area.
07:04 Maura Ramsey:
One of the questions I did have for you before we wrapped up today was, you know, you mentioned Mutual of Omaha's getting into AI and staying up with some of this new technology, which definitely opens up a lot of room for opportunity to really grow and expand in ways we probably didn't know that we could a year ago from now. So, what is something that you're looking forward to in the future with some of this this new tech that we're working with?
07:33 Nathalie Blume:
You are entirely right that the work that we're doing now is more impactful with generative AI. We are really at the core of business processes now. So, we find ourselves a little bit everywhere. Before we would build a tool for a very specific task, and the tool would output a single data point, a prediction, a classification. Now we're building tools that are much more complex, and so we have a bigger footprint in a business process. So, what's exciting about that is that as a profession, we've become more essential, I think, within an enterprise. We have closer collaborations; I think with our business stakeholders. We’re also a bit scary. Yeah, people think a lot about how AI is going to impact their work.
08:32 Nathalie Blume:
My team has exploratory projects going on right now. We've paired our developers with a human factors architect, and that pairing starts at the inception of the project. When we have the idea to automate something and that partnership, that cross-functional team we've built, allows us to ask questions about the changing nature of people's work, not just the AI system that we're building.
09:01 Nathalie Blume:
And I find that since we've started that, that project, that proof of concept, we've come up with some really interesting questions. And I think we're proving value in ways that are going to make this a lasting approach. So that has been especially interesting. What I find also is our business stakeholders are curious about this approach because they see this as a way for them to have the control that they need to have over how the impact that AI is going to have within the business.
09:38 Brian Poppe:
Oh yeah, a lot of exciting stuff going on then. And to your point, if you're getting closer to business processes that have been difficult to automate in the past and using AI to help source through and then execute, that is an incredible win, I think, for Mutual of Omaha and for our customers and stakeholders. So, Nathalie I just want to say thanks for joining us today and thank you all for viewing as always Maura, great to see you.
10:02 Maura Ramsey:
Good to see you, too. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today.
10:05 Nathalie Blume:
Thanks for having me.