The market makes us all technologists, in a way, says Raymond James board member Dr. Raj Seshadri.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year through the next decade, later adjusting this to two years.

This prediction, known as Moore’s Law, has driven the development of microprocessors for over 50 years, symbolizing the growing influence of computing technology in our society, economy and daily lives. This evolution is seen by some as a boon and others as a burden.

For Dr. Raj Seshadri, the chief commercial payments officer at Mastercard and a member of the Raymond James Board of Directors, its risk committee, and compensation and talent committee, the world shaped by Moore’s Law represents both opportunity and challenge. From a young age, she was drawn to its possibilities, leading to a multifaceted career at the intersection of technology and commerce.

“We are living amidst exponential growth in technology,” Seshadri said. “Whether storage, transmission, memory or processing – capabilities are increasing. Compare the computing power that landed a man on the moon in the 60s compared to what’s on your smart phone today – it’s astonishing.”

With a doctorate in physics from Harvard University and an MBA from Stanford University, Seshadri began her career in the lab before transitioning to business, drawn by its breadth and opportunity for practical problem solving and impact. She has held several leadership roles of increasing responsibility at AT&T Bell Labs, McKinsey & Company, and U.S. Trust. She spent time at Citigroup in global strategy and Citi business banking, and at Blackrock, where she led the firm’s iShares retail ETF business and served as chief global marketing officer for iShares. She is now the chief commercial payments officer at Mastercard after a tenure as the head of the company’s global data and services organization, which grew from 12% of the company’s revenue to nearly 40% over the past decade.

Though not all her roles were strictly “technology” jobs, technology has been the driver of positive change in each of her positions, Seshadri said. In the Moore’s Law world, we all should be technologists to some extent.

“There are things that were only possible mathematically when I was a student that can now be done computationally,” she added. “We’ve lived through a lot of change, and more things will change in the next 10 years than has changed in the last 10.”

AI goes mainstream

OpenAI kicked off an artificial intelligence land rush in 2022 with a public release of ChatGPT, ostensibly a chatbot, demonstrating a type of machine learning program known as a large language model. ChatGPT was fluid and human-sounding, deriving language patterns from a vast database of publications and social media. Audio and visual AI systems were soon also released to the public. Within a year, AI systems from a variety of makers were finding use in nearly every sector of the economy, from making PowerPoint presentations and fielding customer service queries to assessing medical data and guarding financial accounts.

It is not hyperbolic to say that we are likely experiencing the early days of another technological revolution. Whether you consider yourself a technology person or not, you’ll need to reckon with it one way or another: what it can do, where the pitfalls are and how you can use it to support your business goals.

So how do you stay up to speed?

“You need to approach new things with intellectual curiosity because there is always something more, something new, something different — with technology,”

“It’s easy to fall on either side if you’re not thoughtful about it. Not pursuing opportunity has downside risk. Failing to keep up in the market has downside risk.”

 “Try it and experiment with it. Listen, learn, read, talk to people. Use it to achieve more unique and differentiated outcomes.” Seshadri said.

An AI that can write like a person can help you put down a first draft of a client presentation, for example, or proofread your emails.

“You can use it for cognitive offloading,” Seshadri said, “freeing your time to do the things only a human can do.”

From there, you can get creative.

Every technology has its known purposes and its yet-to-be-discovered applications. Some technologies, like an AI office assistant, arrive on market with clear applications and quickly integrate into our lives and businesses. Other technologies, like the blockchain, are harder to forecast. While best known today for maintaining crypto currency economies, its highest value as a distributed, unalterable keeper of history is likely still untapped and in the future. But for both types of technologies, immediately apparent or yet unclear, there is always something new to discover.

In the early days of a new technology, new uses can emerge rapidly. Image processing AI can create a novel picture of a cartoon dog driving a taxicab. It can also be used to convert programming source code into images and then detect potential malware hidden within.

It’s exciting but also a little concerning when the world seems to shift beneath your feet.

Prudence is wise, but it’s not helpful to approach new technology with just trepidation, Seshadri said. Respect what you know and don’t know, but don’t let fear keep you from experiencing it and benefiting from it.

“When ChatGPT came out, some companies said to batten down the hatches – don’t touch it. There are privacy and regulatory considerations, and it’s unclear if things you say to a public large language model will emerge in an answer it gives someone else later. In contrast, to drive innovation, we encouraged our employees to experiment, but within guardrails.

“We took a proactive, yet nuanced path at Mastercard. We created safety mechanisms but allowed employees to explore and create in a controlled environment, driven by governance principles, oversight and responsibility.”

Neither Prometheus’s fire nor Pandora’s box, but the potential for both.

“There is a middle path,” she said. “It’s easy to fall on either side if you’re not thoughtful about it. Not pursuing opportunity has downside risk. Failing to keep up in the market has downside risk.”

And there are clear upsides, as we’ve seen with other technology that was once revolutionary and is now part of our daily lives.

“In college, we had typewriters,” she said. “Then came Excel, Word. Today you can listen to music in very different ways than in the past. These have done good things for us, made many things more accessible, higher quality, simpler and cheaper. The evolution continues, so don’t be afraid of AI tools and analytics.

“Embrace them.

“Things that can be done by a tool, algorithm, or platform are things you don’t have to do anymore. Use them and save your time to do the things no tool can do. Tend to the emotional side of wealth, spend more time with clients to better understand what they need. Reassure them. These are the things only a human being can do, and now you can do more of it.”

Finding her way

When Raj Seshadri came to the U.S. from her home in India for her post-secondary education, she chose an unexpected path. 

“Unlike a more typical path for an India-born child,” she said, she eschewed an education in engineering or medicine to attend Mount Holyoke College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts – one of New England’s famed Seven Sisters colleges.

“In India, you go to medical school or engineering school. At age 17 and 18, I had a choice of those, but Mount Holyoke ignited a community that fosters intellectual curiosity, excellence and collaboration, and getting in with a full scholarship was a big win. People back home said I studied everything but nothing, but it opened up a lot of new and different doors for me. Frankly, I wouldn’t have had the career I had if I didn’t have that liberal arts college experience,” she said.

After earning a doctorate in physics from Harvard, she went west to earn an MBA from Stanford.

“I love physics, I love math, but I was learning more and more about less and less, and talking to fewer and fewer people.” She realized it wasn’t her. “There are people who want to go deep in areas, others who want to go broad. It’s not just what you’re good at doing, it’s what you’re interested in, and what motivates you to keep learning and growing.

“Part of your life’s journey is understanding yourself.”

As she has worked on problems as diverse as data analytics and security and marketing exchange-traded funds, her science background helps her frame problems and isolate variables. Her commitment to being a lifelong learner has taught her that “there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem, you just don’t know the solution yet.”

AI guardrails

Large language models, a type of AI system, have been quickly adopted across business disciplines. While this generative AI can be incredibly helpful in the office, it is a “black box” technology, meaning it’s not always clear where answers come from or where your inputs will end up. Remember:

• Don’t share privileged information.
• The answers aren’t grounded in truth, but in text predictions based on things other people have written. It can create plausible sounding but completely wrong information.
• Unless created with the benefit of specialized data, it may not be up to the task of producing work about specialized topics.
• Asking it to summarize a long article can give you the gist of it, but what you and it deem important can be very different.
• Stay up to date with your broker/dealer’s technology team.
• Give it a whirl.

Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc. (CFP Board) owns the certification marks CFP®, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, and CFP® (with plaque design) in the United States, which it authorizes use of by individuals who successfully complete CFP Board’s initial and ongoing certification requirements.

This piece was featured in Aspire Magazine, a biannual publication from the Women Financial Advisors Network. View the latest.

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