娇色导航

Maryfran Johnson Hi. Good afternoon, and welcome to CIOLeadership Live. I'm your host, Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media and the former editor in chief of 娇色导航magazine and events.

Since November of 2017 this video and audio podcast has been produced by the editors of cio.com and the digital media division of foundry, which is an IDG company, our growing online library of past interviews all still openly available on both CIO.com and our YouTube channel includes more than 150 chief information technology and digital officers from mid sized to large companies across every industry, joining our esteemed lineup of CIOs, actually, for the second time in our show history, is Sastry Durvasula, who is the Chief Operating information and Digital Officer at TIAA.

This is the Fortune 100 financial services firm that started out more than a century ago as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America. It was founded by Andrew Carnegie to build a sustainable Retirement System for teachers today.

TIA is a $40 billion nonprofit organization with 16,000 employees globally providing retirement and investment products and financial advice, mostly to people working in the academic, research, medical, nonprofit and government sectors.

Sastry joined the organization in February of 2022 in what was then an unusually broad 娇色导航plus role where he combined technology leadership with client services across a company that is managing $1.4 trillion in assets.

And six months ago, in November of 24 he was promoted into yet another unique role, overseeing the four connected pillars of the company globally, that is technology, digital and client services, operations and shared services.

Before he joined TIAA, he was the global chief technology and digital officer and a partner at McKinsey and Company. And before that, served in various digital data and Chief Information Officer roles at insurance broker Marsh McLennan and also at American Express.

Then just last month, when the latest honorees to be inducted into the 娇色导航Hall of Fame were announced. Sastry's name was, not so surprisingly, on that list of seven outstanding business technology leaders who are making a real difference in the world of it. Leadership.

Sastry, welcome and congratulations on your latest honor. Thank you. Thank you so much, Maryfran, It's always pleasure to be on your show and appreciate your very kind introduction. Thank you.

Well, you're absolutely welcome, and there's not that many CIOs that have made two appearances on the show over these years. So it's great to have you back.

Let's talk about let's start out talking about what has changed for you in this unusual compounded role of CEO, COO and 娇色导航and digital chief. Talk about how the role came to be and what your marching orders were from your CEO.

Sastry Durvasula Yeah, you know, as you said, I joined in 2022 in fact, on Valentine's Day of 2022romantic, yes, with lots of love for TIAA.

And you know, this is, you know, as I discussed in our last episode, you know, I've only worked for 100 year old companies most of my career. So, yeah, so I just, I love the culture aspects. I love the power of technology, you know, transforming and reimagining businesses.

So that was the reason why, you know, I was gravitated to TIAA, and obviously working with a very progressive CEO like Shawna Brown Duckett was a big plus for me when I, when I made the decision to join TIAA since, you know, obviously, it's been now three plus years, and the world has changed quite a bit.

Financial services industry changed a lot. Technology changed a lot with the advent of same year, actually the year I joined in 2022 in A4 ChatGPT was born, and the world changed since then. So tech changed a lot. You know, the way we serve our clients changed a lot.

And hence my role change. So, you know, it's a very, I would say, progressive set of opportunities that I took onbeyond technology and client services. You know, we're putting our technology, especially AI, you know, in delighting our clients through, you know, digital and client experience.

Of next generation, you know, driving a level of operational efficiencies, elevating our shared services. So basically, my remit now has what was originally my role, which is technology and client services.

But as you said, we've added the digital and client experience with Jessica Austin Barker, who's our Chief Digital and client experience officer who's on my leadership team now, as well as a lot more focus on, you know, operational excellence and elevating our shared services.

Because fundamentally, I believe that, you know, digital transformation, or AI power transformation, or technology transformation, ultimately, is here to serve the business.

And these four connected pillars, you know, are the pillars that the businesses of TIAA, all three businesses, you know, stand on, whether it's retirement that we started with our wealth management, where we serve, you know, our participants, and then you know, asset management, where we manage, as you said, you know, manage $1.4 trillion of assets out across the globe.

So I think it's a great set of pillars to be responsible for. You know, it's over with over half of the organization from a colleague standpoint.

So it's, that's the other thing that changed from a people, you know, leadership, responsibility and and driving, really, this ai, ai powered world that we are all fast walking into and driving up reskilling and upskilling, I think that's what really changed.

I'm I'm super excited, you know, with the set of responsibilities and the leadership team that we've assembled and the opportunities that we have in front of us, well, I've started when in a lot of my recent recordings with CIOs, I've started kind of watching the clock to see whether it's the first five minutes or the first 10 minutes when we start talking about AI, and we're mostly at the five minute mark now with, you know, all of two minutes.

But yeah, well, it may have, when we go back and look, it may have been up in that because this, and I know we're going to talk about this lot about the transformative effect that this has had, not that this is anything particularly new to CIOs.

I mean, you yourself, and you've got, you've co authored several patents, and you you're quite a techie, actually, in your off hours as well.

But I remember we talked earlier about the importance of transforming a core, the core, one of the cores, of TIAA, is being a record keeping business and as an underpinning of everything you do.

I wanted you to talk about that a little bit more, and how signs that it's changing at TIAA and maybe also at other companies in insurance and finance, in the impact that AI is having, yeah, I mean, I think let's talk about record keeping, right?

I think it is the fundamental core of our entire time in business. And we, for the last three years, we've, we've spent a lot of energy and investments into transforming our core record keeping.

We towards end of last year, also announced a major step in accelerating the transformation, which was a strategic partnership with Accenture.

So we went through a rigorous process and selected Accenture as a strategic partner in transforming, you know, record keeping, because our fundamental premise is that if we transform record keeping, we can re imagine the retirement industry, because it is the core, it's the core pillar of everything that we do, from a business standpoint.

So I'm quite excited about it, you know, it's more about AI powered, you know, operations, you know, digital, next generation of digital and client experience capabilities. You know, driving complaints reduction. You know, at a different level when it comes to you know, our participants.

You know, working with our plan sponsored institutions. You know, hybrid you know, healthcare and nonprofit sector that we serve in creating capabilities. You know, for our plan sponsors, we also work a lot with plant consultants.

You know, these are, like, you know, third party firms that are employed by the plan sponsors to, you know, create, you know, their benefits ecosystem. And we work very closely with them as well, and creating, you know, data and analytics and capabilities.

You know, for our plant consultants, it's, it's quite an exciting journey, and, you know, it's a lot of complex work, because when I think about record keeping, you know, we are solving problems of yesterday. Because, you know, as you said, you know, we're 100 year old company.

We have contracts that were codified with our institutions and participants, like decades ago, many of those.

So we have a lot of operational debt, technical debt, you know, in our processes, as problems of yesterday, we have problems of today where, you know, we're driving business growth, new products, new capabilities, new innovation, new ways of, you know, working with our participants and plan sponsored institutions.

And then we have problems. Have doubled down on codifying this responsible AI policy into agents that would actually enforce it through the workflows of our development and implementation of code.

For instance, we have, we are, in fact, partnering with even like FinTech companies that are specializing in the space through our TIAA ventures. You know, TIAA Ventures is our venture arm, and we've been investing through that.

And I, you know, I work very closely with the, you know, you know, Chief Investment Officer for our ventures.

And in fact, one of the firms that we invested in is called norm.ai that specializes, yeah, in in the whole regulatory and governance and legal landscape, and it's a strategic investment.

So we're exploring how we would kind of put that ship in the chassis of, you know, serving our clients. So I think responsible, AI, ethics and privacy is definitely for us.

It's in the forefront of, you know, how we how we use, you know, our capabilities to protect, to protect. You know, the from biases, from hallucinations, you know, from decisions that could, you know.

But I also feel that, you know, you have the big opportunity, which we do, by the way, we use AI to help people protect from fraudsters.

Maryfran Johnson You know, there's obviously a lot of deep fakes and, you know, fraud that's happening on one side, but we also fundamentally believe that we could use AI to, you know, combat some of those, you know, scams as well.

So there's, it's a very fascinating, you know, landscape to think about all the way from regulations to privacy to ethics to how we deploy and how we use to actually fight all the bad actors in the world.

It's like a very, you know, it's a big it's a big ecosystem that's changing fast arms well, and the more that the people your employees, the more the people outside the company hear about these different ways that AI is boosting productivity, helping with research, doing that sort of thing, that I'm wondering how much that combats the fear factor that a lot of just ordinary folks that work for, you know, like maybe clerical staff and that sort of thing, everybody has this kind of in the general world, there's this almost knee jerk reaction that like, oh, AI is going to Take my job so, and I know that originally, most companies start playing around with AI technologies in the center of excellence model.

But as we talked about this, you explained that TIAA has moved beyond that. I mean, you mentioned being an AI powered organization. Talk about how that's being done internally, about how you have a it's an AI governance. It's more than governance and a committee thing.

You have a whole different approach. Yeah, so we so our ambition is to be an AI first enterprise, okay, which means that all colleagues have some level of AI powered capabilities. And I have this hypothesis, you know, thanks to my consulting background, that I have an 80/20 rule.

Sastry Durvasula My belief is 80% of the jobs in the world will be impacted by AI, at least 20%any jobs, your job, my job, yeah, you know, all jobs in the world, you're good, and that 20% of the jobs will be impacted, as much as 80% so there are definitely roles that will be significantly impacted, you know, with AI, especially with Agent AI, and sure, combination of, you know, generative capabilities and agentic AI.

So I think there's, that. So you could take a very, you know, dystopian view that machines are here, they're taking over. Or you could take a utopian view that, hey, you know, we're going to get better in cancer research.

We're going to get better in eradicating some of the diseases. We are going to get better in making companies faster and cheaper.

We're going to get better in scaling the opportunity for small enterprises that don't have the ability to employ a lot of people, but they do have the ability to employ a lot of digital agents to create a bigger impact in the world?

I think there's like, you know, so, so if I look at our own firm, I fundamentally believe that, you know, there's definitely like every other change that are going to be on the utopians side of the house, yeah, we're going to have a third that are on the inside of the house, and there's a third that are going to be like, you know, that are going to be watching the tennis match saying, hey, you know, where should I put my bet?

Yeah, right. But you know, to become an AI first enterprise, you're gonna have to get all three, you know, to be AI, to be aI powered. So, so the approach we're taking, it's, you know, it's a great, complex cultural transformation challenge, which is what really makes it exciting.

You know, it's like talk about 100 year old company, set of, you know, challenges. This is a beautiful challenge. To work with, right?

So, so we do have the catalysts that are like enrolled into our, what we call internally, the guild network, and we have an AI guild is open for anybody in the company.

So, for instance, my EA Sylvia Santiago is part of the Guild, and she was figuring out how how to use guild, or how to use AI for her own job, right?

So, so there are catalysts that are now part of the Guild, and we have like 3800 guild members across the firm, which is a substantial number, if you think about like 15,000 colleagues, and we have a pretty good size that are actually part of our guild network.

And they are embracing it. They are getting our generative AI technology, and our platform is called TIAA gate, and we have what we call my gate. So this is the digital agent for every colleague. So we're deploying my gate for every colleague as we speak.

So we have been beta testing with close to 350 colleagues that has gone very successfully. So by summer, we'll probably hit 5000 colleagues that will have my games. And by end of this year, my goal is to, you know, increase it at least by two to 3000 more.

So, so now we're going to have, you know, colleagues with access to guild for learning and re Skilling and up skilling sure my gate in their hands. And we also are giving them guild gigs as opportunities.

So you may be doing your primary job, but, you know, we have all these different use cases that people are thinking about. Do you want to play a gig and like, just do some work, you know, just so that your skills can be used.

So so my goal is to definitely use the catalyst to drive some of the adoption, being that they will influence the middle to embrace it. Because for the middle, I feel like it's probably just lack of awareness and knowledge than lack of willingness.

So I think once they see that there is success. I'm sure they will actually be driving it. Because if there's real impact, you know, the third of, let's just say naysayers, I do think that they'll turn it on.

I mean, if you look at the history of technology transformation, we said the same thing. I everything that I just said in the last two minutes on a third and a third and a third.

Yeah, I probably said it in a podcast, or whatever we call them back then.

I'm very optimist, optimistic in this space, but I also understand and respect the challenges and appreciate, actually, the leadership opportunity to lead through the cultural transformation as as, let's just say, the Yoda for AI at TIAA. So I guess my slogan would be AI, okay.

Maryfran Johnson Oh, all right, so you're really being Yoda there, right? Well, it's, it's, I've heard that the law of thirds.

I've heard that described so many times by other CIOs, and especially when Chief Data Officers became a really big thing, I had a lot of conversations like that. I think it's really it's human nature, probably more than anything.

And is there a really great example that you can point to with your among your colleagues, your 15,000 employees, where it is, it is really caught hold. I know you're you're rolling out. Tell us about the beta testing with the TIAA gate. It's a little hard to say.

I feel like we need to rebrand that. Somehow we just caught a gate, and that's why we're calling my gate. Sastry Durvasula Synthesized for our colleagues that are serving the client when the client calls us, especially because this is my operation.

So it's almost like a little bit more, little bit of, you know, self serving of these capabilities to my own. It's that's a big impact use case.

So how do we put, you know, generative AI in the hands of our colleagues that are serving clients, so we're working on it.

And then I think, you know, in the fraud prevention area, we are deploying AI, you know, the Global Head of fraud also reports into our, into my organization, under our information security officer Kendra mardiker. So there is opportunities there, especially with older participants that we have.

And, you know, there's all kinds of scammers out there all the way from like romance scams and like attacking, you know, retired folks. So you know, how do we use AI, and more specifically, our gate capabilities in helping protect the firm and protecting our participant.

There's a range of opportunities there. Of course, you know, in this, in the cyberspace, though, actually, the first use case Mary Fran, that we launched with gate was a phishing campaign to our own colleagues.

So it's like the instead of, like, doing all these, you know, emails that we send out through the cyber wing to our colleagues.

You know, with phishing, this is, like, very personalized, and you would almost be tempted, even if you actually work in the cyber wing, to click the link. It's that sophisticated, because generative AI is generating the phishing email.

The reason why we chose to do that is because we need to train we need to train our colleagues, because that's what the bad actors are going to use on us, right? So I think I feel like, you know, financial services industry, you know, has so many opportunities.

Of course, it's also a lot of as we talked about the privacy and ethics and points and regulations. You know, we have to be really respectful to that space as well.

Because, in fact, you know, Swati Singh, the head of our AI and data on my leadership team, just talked about governance recently, and I was saying to the dark side, speak with our discipline leads, because that's what's going to happen if we have, if we don't have the discipline, and if you're running just speed, because there's so much sizzle in this space, I think we will, we will, you know, as an industry, run into all kinds of problems, so we are very respectful to that aspect of it.

Yeah, well, and one of the things I looked at as I was reading some of your past interviews and quotes you've made before. This is one of those situations where there's a line and I think a Rolling Stones song, I'd stand accused of the things I've said.

This is not an accusation so much as you have said about companies with long histories.

You have a real predilection for working with long, 100 year old companies, and you mentioned that a lot, and the companies with these long histories present complex challenges for technologists especially, but they also provide unique ways to streamline and reinvent businesses.

I guess I wanted you to talk a little bit to the idea that it is, it can be fun and exciting to work for 100 year old what sounds like it might be a boring insurance company versus going and working for, you know, technology startups and leadership, because that's a big part of attracting talent to come and work at TIAA, I would imagine, you know, when I think about TIAA, the biggest factor that attracts talent to come work for us, because we are very robust intern program.

Obviously, we work with our clients are in higher ed, so we have a lot of great pipes that we've built over time. You know, to get talent, to rotate talent early on and give them the opportunities. But the biggest factor is the mission itself, I think.

And, and I know it sounds a little bit cliche to say that, but if you think about the fortune 100 companies, there's not a lot that you could point out and say that are truly, like, Truly, truly, mission driven.

We are so mission driven, that money we make, we are, you know, borrowing expenses to run the business be given back to the participants, yeah. So they tend to mostly be process driven back to the participants, right? So that's big.

That's one, I think it's just, you can, you know, estimate it enough. I would say, you know, from that point, but the from a technologist and AI point of view, there are so many interesting challenges, right?

Like, for instance, just look at the population of participants that we serve. You know, we have like, you know, the millennials and like, Gen Z. Is, you know, coming into workforce that are saving for retirement.

And speaking of the Gen Z speak, I have a couple of boys at home speak on this Gen Z.

Gen Z works, so I'm picking up on that all the way to we have participants that are 100 plus year old and getting the lifetime income paycheck, and every generation in between.

So we're talking about, you know, working on technology solutions, working on AI solutions, working on digital solutions for the entire population, generation spectrum of the United States, if you just think about the magnitude, yeah, and that's a very unique challenge.

So for instance, I may be working on a great AI chat bot that will be used by, you know, the younger participant, just like that, because they don't want to call, they don't want to text, you don't want to talk to somebody Yeah, and you know, if you're retired, and you know you are relying on the lifetime income paycheck, and you have to Make a financial decision, most likely, you know, those participants don't even want to do a device at that point.

They're like, look, I'm done with my devices, you know. Or I don't want to touch the I want to talk to somebody like life like this, and, you know.

So then the question is, how do you empower the advisors, the financial consultants that we have to help these, you know, retired participants with the same digital and AI technology, but, you know, designed and experienced in a very different way, right?

So we have accumulators that are serving, you know, in various institutions, that are accumulating well, then we have the accumulators that are taking the paychecks.

Because, you know, now either they are taking the required minimum distributions or they're just taking the lifetime income paycheck that renewing so very different set of customers that you get to serve with different types of products.

I feel, I feel like, you know, I can the list can go on because I'm so passionate about it. But I'll just say, you know, the variety of customers we serve the variety of businesses that we have and the variety of technologies, by the way.

I mean, if you are a very contemporary tech company, and like, let's say somebody just graduated from a good school, tech school, and goes to this contemporary company, they get to work on contemporary technology. Well, guess what?

In a large, complex, you know, 100 year old company, you still get to experience the mainframe. You get to experience like, technical debt. Yes, you get to experience transformation to the cloud. You get to work with AI and you work, get to work with different types of customers.

I, I feel like that's, that is the magic of, you know, frankly, working for a large, iconic company, and also experience in the culture 100 years, right?

Because it's a very different, you know, rich set of attributes that one would learn even from a leadership perspective, you know, like if somebody has an ambition to be the 娇色导航or, you know, business CEO, or CFO this.

These are the schools that I would highly recommend, you know, for the audience here, they're like, you know, if you're just graduating and you're watching this video, one thing I'll tell you is, come to these schools, because this is the best school to go to from a professional growth point of view, you know.

And I'm speaking a little bit like Yoda, but I'm just like, it's an important attribute. You know, from a leadership perspective, I can't emphasize enough the leadership opportunities that these companies provide.

Maryfran Johnson And so when you're saying come to these schools, you're saying, Be school that these 100 companies that have that have CIOs, probably a lot of them at this point are performing like you, multiple roles, because the role itself has we wrote about that endlessly at so when I was editor in chief at the magazine, at 娇色导航magazine, about the business strategic role of CIOs.

It's now old fashioned to talk about that, because any company that's doing well in the world generally has a 娇色导航who is also very strategically involved in the business.

Yeah, the when we talked back in 22 you had only just started a partnership with Google for call center AI, and that was just launching. Bring us up to date on what's happened with that. Yeah, Sastry Durvasula we've launched a series of AI partnerships.

Obviously, it started with Google Yes, before chat GPT came to limelight. So we have continued that partnership.

And you know, we we saw almost, actually, more than a third of the call volumes decreasing because, you know, our participants are able to use the Google AI services that we've deployed in our call center, but we also built other strategic partnerships, like I talked about the Accenture partnership.

You know, Accenture is investing billions of dollars in the AI space, more broadly for the world, and we do intend to tap into, you know, some of those innovation and capabilities that Accenture will be bringing to bear in our. A record keeping space.

We have ti ventures, where we have done investments now, strategic investments with various companies I just talked about, obviously mom AI. But we have middleware companies that we have invested in that actually open new opportunities for our product now, to travel.

Obviously, anything that we do has an AI powered touch to it, so, you know, and in our sales and distribution, you know, where we have started deploying Salesforce at scale, we definitely have opportunities there to, you know, employ AI.

Obviously, Salesforce is also investing quite a bit in that space. You know, our desktop, you know, work with the work we do with Microsoft.

I think if you think about the companies, and these are like companies that every, obviously, every, everybody works with, I do think that there is a range of opportunity, opportunities, you know, you know, in putting AI in the hands of in the hands of our colleagues.

So I think the short answer is, the Google AI partnership, you know, has been going really good, but we also have a range of other partnerships that we were able to forge, you know, along right?

Maryfran Johnson When you'd also mentioned that applying that call center AI, you were actually able to cut 30% of the operating costs of your call centers. Okay? Those, those are the kind of numbers that CFOs always asked about, right?

Probably the next time I talk to you, you'll also be the Chief Financial Officer,Dave. Now Rich is our CFO, and he's He's exceptional.

So yeah, and I certainly hope not, because I wouldn't know what to ask you about at that point, when you we had mentioned you have a very deep and wide network from other CIOs and other Chief IT leaders that are part of insurance and banking and all of that.

When you talk with some of your network, what are some of the common problems that everybody is trying to tackle and solve today? I'm suspecting it will start with AI, but maybe not. So tell me what you're talking about.

When you get in touch with your network, or you hear from them, or they ask you about something that TI and AA is doing.

Sastry Durvasula I mean, AI is the buzz word for now, obviously, you know, we are still in the early stages of the hype curve, and there's going to be a lot of ai, ai, ai in every conversation, including this conversation.

By the way, I know, I know, when I watch the recording, in the future, I'll be like, Wow, that was a lot of AI in my in my conversation.

But I think the bigger emphasis, to be honest, for the technology leaders that have business hats on, especially to make impact balance.

Number one is really balance, because I do think that, you know, investments, for instance, we have to invest in contemporary opportunities like AI, but we also have to invest it in a way that it's solving not just the sizzle part, but the state part.

So there's a lot of balance that needs to be employed, balance in the way you're approaching the future horizons and past problems. Because we have to.

It's like that Amway example, like, you know, like, no, no, Amtrak example, sorry, it's like the the the trains are brand new, but the tracks are very old, so the trains can go on the tracks. You know, the tracks? Yeah, the trains fail.

So I think it's like, it's that, you know, how do you get to uplift the legacy technology and legacy capabilities while balancing for the future, balancing regulatory pressures, you know that that are out there, balancing the geopolitical risks that we are all dealing with as large global financial services, balancing the cultural aspects of reskilling, upskilling, like we talked about the thirds of colleagues, etc.

So there's a lot of, I would say the biggest opportunity, or, you know, you know that keeps the technology leaders up in the night, is really the balance. I think that's, that's what second definitely cyber security.

You know, the bad actors are getting more powerful with AI and, of course, companies are also getting more powerful in combating the bad actors. But there is, you know, nation stated sponsored attacks. There's new vectors with deep fakes, et cetera.

So customer service area has increased so much all the tools that we use, especially now with generative AI and social media, people are so widely exposed with all these different tools and endpoints. So cybersecurity is definitely the second one.

I think, I do think the third one is really the, just the cultural aspect that I mentioned earlier, like how you bring your entire organization to be ready for this, this new frontier. Yeah, you know one thing I noticed, I my last interview on this.

Do was with the chief AI officer at Emeritus, and he made the point, you know, several times, that their AI is all being used internally and to, you know, streamline operations and various things, and that they're very specifically not doing anything externally with customers.

Is that also the case with TIAA? I think that it is a common approach with insurance companies, especially, or insurers or financial services, because we have such a broad customer base.

So if I'm a customer of TIAA's, I guess I'm asking is how much of this AI transformation are customers seeing, or did they just see the benefits of it? And yeah, did you look?

Yeah, I do think that there's still more benefits that they're experiencing than they're touching it, like directly. But there is definitely use cases that we have employed for our customers.

In fact, some of the early use cases did include, like, graduating from internal to, let's just say external facing use cases. So one of the use cases we have is on our website itself.

If you go to ti.org and search on, let's say tias website, like, you know, what's required, minimum distribution, what's the difference between Traditional and Roth IRA?

And these are the types of questions that we would have served, and we do still serve through our traditional search mechanism, okay, which provides information.

But as you can think about, you know, first of all, nobody wakes up in the morning saying, Today, I'm going to spend most of my day thinking about retirement. Right? Probably why there's a crisis that nobody wants to think about it, yeah.

And the other thing also is the interactions that we have with our participants are very important.

It's not payments, you know, like you swipe your card every day and then you think about at least a little bit about your payments company or banks, or, you know, even insurance, like the traditional insurance companies, like, you know, auto, etc.

This is where I feel that every moment matters when it comes to the customer interaction that we have, because there's only few interactions that we would have with our customers. So how do you enrich that?

Which is why we put we started this with external facing as well, because when customers come to us through our website, for instance, you will see a general search, you know, set of results, but we also have gate powered results, okay?

And that was our first beta launch, because then you could see how this financial jargon we have in our industry could be simplified so that you know, especially younger participants who we want them to start saving for their retirement, probably not thinking about it, but they're just like tinkering with the idea, and then they're like browsing through stuff.

We want them to experience that simplicity, so that they can actually say, Oh, this is what actually this means. This is what R and D means. This is what Ira means. This is what Roth IRA means, and this is what this product makes.

I think that's where the opportunity is.

And we have deployed that use case, and we have a few others, but this is like, let's just say our marquee use case in terms of actual customer or client facing, Maryfran Johnson yes, well, and I imagine if, if we talk again in two or three years, you're right, I think we'll be looking over our shoulders at all the AI stuff, and it will be so involved in, you know, the cyber security cautions that people had to learn about, and then using, you know, protecting your data and that sort of thing, it will become more the usual behavior you engage in when you are online.

Now I want to wrap up with a question I always ask, and the answers are so different, it's really fascinating.

And I asked you this too, to think about what you've learned, or how your own leadership style has changed over these three years with TIAA, and you had a wonderful response to that, that it was not so much style that you think about, but stamina so and is that because you have a multiple C level position, that you just need more stamina?

Or is style something that changes for a leader over time? Sastry Durvasula I think it's a great question, by the way, and you know, it comes up in a lot of my mentoring conversations, both with my mentees and my mentors. You know, definitely leadership style is important.

And I do think that everybody has a very unique set of atomic properties, you know, in their way, in their leadership ways. And I always talk about the three L's, you know, learning, especially in a technology, you know, specific role, or technology powered role.

There's nothing that's more important than learning, in my mind, because you. Just keeps changing on you, and we have to be like ready to learn and continue to learn and unlearn and relearn and all that good stuff. So I think learning is one second is listening.

I do think that it's the most underrated aspect of communication. So I do think there's a lot of cues out there in the world that if you take a pause and listen.

I think there's a lot of good, good, important information that comes from our customers, from our clients, from our colleagues, etc. I think listening and then leading with authenticity. This is my other third leg of my three L's, like, be who you are. Like you, be you.

You know, I think it's an important aspect, having said that, I do think that in large, complex roles, and kind of reflecting on all the conversation we just had and our prior conversations as well, made a friend when you lead these type of large changes, style is not going to cut it along.

I do think that stamina is required for leaders. And I fundamentally believe that, you know, can you exhibit consistently your leadership attributes in good times, in bad times, in tough times, in fragile times, I think that's what it really comes down to.

And I feel like that's where the opportunity, you know, for technology leaders, is there because I feel like this is where we can help big companies transform businesses and but that leadership stamina is required because it's not going to be a great day every day.

So we can just accept that, and then kind of like lead with positivity, but also lead with the level of practicality. And when the going gets tough, you know, the that stamina aspect of leadership kind of kicks in.

So I feel like that's why I'm personally also graduating from, like, beyond style into this whole leadership stamina, you know, philosophy.

Because having seen this multiple times, I feel like stamina there's a lot actually, well, in your your proclivity to work for 100 plus year old companies, there's a certain stamina built in there. You know, it's not just a business model going forward.

And I always, I always love talking to you, because my mother was a teacher, and so she was 32 years before she retired, and I didn't know at the time, but I'll bet TIAA was in there somewhere in her retirement plan, so I'm sure we played a little bit role.

Maryfran Johnson Yeah, I hope so. All right, thank you so much. It is always a pleasure talking with you, and as always, your answers were great to all of my rambling questions. So I thank you for that vital pleasure. Thank you. Mary Fran, thanks for having me.

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