Inside TransUnion's AI Evolution with CIO Munir Hafez

On the 46th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, host Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) talks with Munir Hafez, CIO of TransUnion. TransUnion specializes in credit reporting, fraud detection, and data analytics. With a team of over 19,000 employees and over $3.6 billion in annual revenue the company impacts more than a billion people worldwide. In this conversation, Munir shares his thoughts on AI transforming business operations at TransUnion, balancing the potential of AI against the current hype cycle, and the future impact of AI in the enterprise.

00:00 Intro
00:24 About Munir Hafez
03:32 Balancing Innovation and Safety at TransUnion
09:57 Applying AI to Real Enterprise Use Cases
19:00 How Do You Identify When to Build, Buy, or Partner Around AI Technology?
22:24 Areas of AI Where You're Most Bullish and Bearish
24:58 Where Do You See AI Creating the Most Transformative Impact at TransUnion?
26:11 Lightning Round
29:26 Outro

Quick hits from Munir:

On the importance of grounding data to train AI: “If you're asking it how to make a chocolate chip cookie, you don't really need to ground that in your data. If you're trying to say, ‘What cross-sell opportunities can I have for this customer?’ You have to be able to feed it your product catalog and everything else.”

On prompt engineering driving value in the current AI environment: “Over time, [AI] is going to get smarter where you need less and less prompt engineering teaching it. But certainly in the short term, I think training, custom LLM, and then depending on the tool, teams that are designed and focused on extending the prompt engineering and the capabilities will be the best way to get the value.”

On identifying real use cases for enterprise AI: “My team supports over 500 applications. Everything has AI, including toothbrushes and trash cans. So which tools are actually far enough along that [the AI component] provides value. We were looking for if the triangulation of the technology is advanced enough. The business case makes sense and the business users are engaged and are willing to learn and help support.”

Recent Book Recommendation: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell