Welcome.
I am here at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mo Bende, who is CEO and co-founder of Carrot.
Mo, thank you for joining me.
Lovely to be here.
So tell us a little bit a bit about carrot and what it does.
Yeah, so carrot.
Works with large banks like HSBC and Citi and other fintechs like Mastercard and Amex to help them measure and elevate the quality of their engineering talents.
Uh, the way we do that is we've actually built a service to interview software engineers.
We've now interviewed over 600,000.
Engineers around the world and then we've built data to help our clients benchmark and measure the quality of their talent.
We do that across all their new hires, their contractors, you know, the folks that they will get from a Deloitte or an Accenture and their existing talent.
It's such an important thing.
I mean, it's the most expensive asset that you have, so making the right decisions just crucial.
Is AI making engineering talent more or less important in financial services?
I would say that the right engineers are becoming way more valuable.
We recently did a survey of 300.
CIOs and CTOs around the world where we've been asking them the same question every year, which is how valuable are your top engineers and the percentage of people saying yes, our top engineers produce 3 times more than everyone else has dramatically increased with AI.
So the engineers that really harness and leverage AI are producing so much more.
And so to answer your first question, yes, that is becoming more valuable in terms of every company becoming a tech company.
Yes, but there's more to it, um, you know, I think to do good engineering at a thin serve, you not just need, you don't, you can't just know engineering, you need to understand the regulatory environment, the governance, how the products fit.
And so I do think engineering at a bank or an insurance company, there's more context and domain expertise required than just the pure software.
I mean, absolutely seeing, um, you know, exactly what the activity is, but then harmonizing that with what the activity can be once transformed with technology and just getting the people who are going to understand how to deal with it.
Different stakeholders, create a culture for transformation.
Um, yeah, fascinating.
The differences, uh, between how financial services firms approach AI adoption, uh, as opposed to big tech companies.
You slightly touched on this before, but, um, you know, that it's clearly a changing landscape, um, in terms of the big embedded technology within a company.
Versus outsourcing, and what are you seeing in that trends?
I'd say three things.
One, the software ship cycle is really changing.
So at a lot of big tech companies they've already been used to, you know, maybe shipping daily.
Most banks aren't putting new software out daily, but I do think that with AI, the velocity of net new things that are still.
You know, align with the governance and the regulatory framework, I think that that's going to expedite significantly, um, you know, I think a second big shift is we're just seeing more innovation and experimentation coming out of these organizations.
Many of them have dedicated AI teams, dedicated units.
And I think 3 is the way a lot of companies are defining the engineer of the future is changing.
It is changing from someone who will just code to someone who understands that triumvirate of the customer, the technology, and the governance.
And so a lot of what we work with our clients on is defining what is that engineer of the future.
Um, for their organization, and by the way, I think it'll make a lot of organizations far more compelling places to work, uh, as well for the best talent.
Yeah, and you know, in a, in a landscape where we're seeing a complete change in talent in employment, um, a new generation coming out, this is the, the pandemic generation now who are going into work, and they have.
A completely different idea of of what is what is useful for them and what is useful for a company.
And it's, it's very much a changing landscape to that point and not to provoke you too much, um, but earlier this week, the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, you know, the narrative that AI is going to take all of our jobs is completely overblown.
This is nonsense.
That's interesting.
Put against the fact that, you know, put aside the hype, um, or the, the fear factor.
Um, we've also seen a lot of companies announce huge job cuts, and put AI in there as a, as a reason.
Um, what are your thoughts on this?
You know, it's a, it's a really interesting time, right, because on one hand you see companies doing huge job cuts, especially in big tech, 20%.
10% of the workforce.
But then if you looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, software engineers are going up.
And so it's a conundrum of what does that mean?
You know, I like to think of it as a kind of a great, if you will, redistribution of talent.
Uh, it used to be if you were a software engineer, frankly, even up to a year ago, your dream job or where you were going to situate yourself was the tech industry.
That's where you want it to be, right?
I would say that for many engineers now, um.
That's shifting to go work at a bank, go work in insurance, go work in retail at a Walmart.
They're all, as you said earlier, becoming tech companies.
They already are, and they're, and the problems that they have are so sophisticated and important.
And so I do think the way to think about that conundrum like that mental conundrum of how can it be that companies are laying off but software jobs are growing, it just reflects that where software engineers will be over the next 5 years, you're going to see a pretty big redeployment of that talent capability to all these other industries.
Which I think spells out great news.
I mean it's, it's always been this problem, the disconnect, not only between, um, you know, the business strategy and the tech um focus, but also, you know, within tech, you've had the DevOps, you know, and this, this always, this, um, you know, we've moved that along to kind of bring DevOps together, and this feels like the next evolution of evolution.
Yeah, you are finding it's really interesting the software discipline is shifting from You know, it went 25 years ago.
It used to be like there were two basic roles, and then it became a wide variety of subspecialties.
Now most companies are kind of coming back to where it was 25 years ago, which is just get me a good engineer.
What does that actually mean?
And so I do think that there's this kind of, you know, shift that's happening.
But you know, if I was, I, I speak with a lot of early career students who ask me for advice, and I say two things be open to which industry you're going to be in.
And number 2, network and do the types of things that quite frankly we had to do to go find our first job.
I think that that's coming to software engineering as well that.
You know, the one way to think about it is the jobs are kind of coming back from the stratosphere back, but the other way to look at it maybe positively is there's just a lot of industries, especially FinServe and fintech, that need top quality talent to come in and do important things.
So it's a new frontier.
I agree.
It's maybe a little uncomfortable, but it's a little there.
And what are you most excited about in money 2020?
Um, I've loved going to some of the panels and just hearing what is top of mind for the CIOs and these leaders and given our business connecting it to their talent strategy.
So I was at a panel yesterday where some of the CIOs were talking about everything being so high velocity right now.
People want to move money quickly and do everything at AI speed, and I'm thinking in the background, OK, but how is that organization.
Aligning to that and when I look across this room of, you know, hundreds of companies, you know, they're all powered by people and so I know that's our business, but the way at least I look at this whole conference is, you know, how are the people at these organizations evolving and you know we talk about a world of human plus AI how are the people.
It's not about just disrupting and firing people.
It's actually about getting more out of people and augmenting them.
And so, you know, I think that there's a lot to do in this sector to elevate everybody for the opportunity ahead.
I think it's a great message.
Corporates becoming more human.
Yes, corporates becoming more human.
Thank you so much for joining.
Lovely to be here.
Thank you so much for your time.
