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How does investment in AI talent correlate to outcomes from AI use cases?

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

15:00-16:00 BST / 10:00-11:00 EDT

Virtual Roundtable

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Ricardo García Martín

Head GRM Data & Analytics & Analytics Transformation, BBVA

Ricardo serves as both the Global Head of GRM Data & Analytics, as well as the Global Head of Analytics Transformation at BBVA. In this role, he is focused on maximizing business value through advanced analytics, while driving the transition to cloud-based solutions. To that end, BBVA recently established a new organizational construct that integrates the bank’s global network of data scientists and specialists. Ricardo’s 20-year career spans multiple roles at Tier-1 institutions, in roles ranging from risk analytics, model development and validation, as well as risk management.

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Sumee Seetharaman

Vice President, AI/ML Practice & Center of Excellence, TD Bank

Sumee is VP AI Practice & CoE at TD. In the last 10 years, Sumee has held various product leadership roles across Digital and Enterprise Innovation, and established Open Banking, Marketplaces, and Digital Identity mandates for the bank. Prior to TD, Sumee worked at Microsoft and has shipped enterprise, developer, and customer facing software products. She holds an MBA from the Rotman School of Management at the UofT and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.

Alexandra Mousavizadeh

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Evident

Alexandra has spent the last 25 years ranking and quantifying complex societal and political forces. She started her career at Moody’s, then Morgan Stanley, later became CEO of ARC Ratings and then Director of the Prosperity Index. Most recently, Alexandra was a Founding Partner at Tortoise Media, where she ran Tortoise Intelligence, the Index and data business. Here, she was the architect of the groundbreaking Global AI Index, the first benchmark to track the strength of national AI ecosystems. She holds a degree in economics, mathematics and game theory from the University of Copenhagen.

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Colin Gilbert

VP of Intelligence, Evident

Colin leads Evident's Intelligence Team. focused on developing new content offerings and expanding our customer-facing diagnostics. Colin has spent the last 15 years working in Research & Advisory services, specializing in using quantitative benchmarking to measure an organization's digital aptitude vs. performance. Previously, he served as a Managing Vice President at L2 Inc. (acquired by Gartner in 2017), where he worked on the Digital IQ Index® as it expanded to cover nearly 1,500 leading brands across 15x B2C industries.

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Summary

AI transformation efforts require deploying the right configuration of people at the right time to accelerate change, optimize performance, and realize results. Along the way, banks need to balance between several core capability areas.

This Roundtable event showed how leading banks are addressing a challenging talent market.

Drawing on the latest Evident AI Index data and an expert panel from two of the world’s leading banks, we explored the strategic priorities and best practices that banks are deploying to shape their AI workforces and scale their use case efforts.

This event followed the launch of the 2025 Evident AI Talent Report.

Key Discussion Topics

  • Informing talent stack decisions through company AI strategy
  • Coordinating AI expertise with business leaders to scale use cases
  • Hiring, training and organising talent to meet emerging capability needs for Generative and Agentic AI
  • Attracting expert roles from a scarce talent pool

Key Slides & Perspectives

Table showing Top 10 Banks in Talent Pillar from Evident AI Index, October 2024. The table lists the overall rank, followed by sub-pillar ranks for Talent Capability and Talent Development for each bank. Capital One ranks 1st overall, 1st in Talent Capability, and 4th in Talent Development. JPMorganChase ranks 2nd overall and 2nd in both Talent Capability and Talent Development. Royal Bank of Canada ranks 6th overall but 1st in Talent Development.

Data visualization displaying AI talent volume in bank employees, projected from September 2023 to March 2025. The stacked bar chart shows an increase in total employees from approximately 62,000 to over 75,000, with growth rates of +9.1%, +0.7%, and +12.6% between periods. A detailed table defines five key AI capability areas—AI Product Management, AI Model Risk, AI Software Implementation, AI Development, and Data Engineering—listing example job titles for each.

Quote by Sumee Seetharaman, Vice President, AI/ML Practice & Center of Excellence, TD Bank: 'The composition of the talent stack is informed by your AI strategy. And this is where things fall within the spectrum of building a team in-house vs buying in those AI capabilities. And so depending on where you sit on that spectrum, your talent stack changes.'

Horizontal bar chart showing the top 10 banks by AI talent volume and their capability growth over six months, from September 2024 to March 2025. According to the Evident AI Index, these banks collectively grew their AI capability by 12.1% and accounted for 46% of growth across 50 tracked banks. JPMorganChase shows the largest AI talent volume with 14.9% growth, while BBVA has the highest growth rate at 17.6%.

Quote by Ricardo Garcia Martin, Head of GRM Data & Analytics & Analytics Transformation at BBVA: BBVA's main pillar is a differential strategy with Talent and Culture for data scientists and specialists, offering specific career paths that attract talent across markets.

Donut chart showing concentration of AI research staff among banks as of March 2025, based on 963 bank employees. JPMorgan Chase holds 29.9%, TD Bank 9.0%, Royal Bank of Canada 8.4%, Capital One 7.4%, Morgan Stanley 4.2%, and Other Banks 41.1%. This data shows 60% of AI research teams are concentrated within the top five banks.

Quote from Sumee Seetharaman, Vice President, AI/ML Practice & Center of Excellence, TD Bank: 'While the Center of Excellence serves as thought leader to provide guiding principles, education and awareness, we do break new ground in terms of bringing advanced use cases to life through our ‘AI Practice’ Teams – who really drive that alignment between the center and the needs in lines of businesses.'

Scatter plot titled 'There is a strong correlation between AI talent volume vs. Use Case production'. The X-axis represents AI Talent Volume, and the Y-axis represents the Number of AI Use Cases. Blue dots indicate 'Index-50 Banks', while orange dots represent 'Top-10 Banks by Talent Volume', including labels for specific banks like JPMorgan Chase, BBVA, Citigroup, HSBC, and Wells Fargo. The chart shows a positive trend line, indicating that higher AI talent volume corresponds to more AI use cases.

Quote by Ricardo Garcia Martin, Head GRM Data & Analytics & Analytics Transformation, BBVA: 'When it comes to Agentic, and Gen AI, the talent composition is changing, though not dramatically. There are some things in common with Traditional AI, but we see a stronger component in terms of the need for engineering specialists - so we are prioritizing the development and attraction of that talent.'