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The Saturday Fraud Strategist

データ責任者が不正対策チームに加わるとき ― シャハル・メイアーとともに

眼鏡をかけたひげの男性が笑っている白黒のポートレート。

このエピソードは、データ担当の役員が不正対策チームのところへやって来る場面から始まります。

とてもニッチなジョークの前振りみたいに聞こえるかもしれません。実際、そうかもしれません。でも正直なところ、これは多くの不正対策チームが身に覚えのありすぎる現実の問題でもあります。私たちはほとんどあらゆることにデータを頼っていますが、不正対策チームとデータチームの関係は、多くの人が認めたがらないほど複雑でやっかいなものになりがちです。

今回のエピソードでは、データアドバイザーであり、元Meta社データ部門ディレクターのシャハル・メイア氏を迎え、LLMアナリティクスやセルフサービス型アナリティクス、データ基盤、そしてなぜ不正対策チームは散らかったデータの上にただAIを載せるだけでは戦略にはならないのかについて話します。

そう、LLM を活用したセルフサービス型アナリティクスは本当に魅力的に聞こえます。平易な英語で質問すれば答えが返ってきて、意思決定が速くなり、900もの優先事項を抱えたデータチームに3週間も順番待ちする必要がなくなる。最高ですよね。私もそんな世界を望んでいます。

でもそこで自分に問いかける必要があります。答えはどこから来たのか?どのテーブル同士を結合したのか?どんな定義を使ったのか?ビジネスの文脈を理解していたのか?幻覚のようにでっち上げていないか?そもそもあなたは正しい質問を投げかけていたのか?

小さなことではありません。

この対話の本質は、AIアナリティクスが約束する理想と、不正検知アナリティクスの現場での現実とのギャップについてです。不正対策やリスク管理のチームは、常に敵対的な環境で仕事をしています。問題の姿は絶えず変化し、シグナルとノイズの比率は悪く、判断を誤ったときのコストは、不正を通してしまう場合であれ、正当なユーザーをブロックしてしまう場合であれ、非常に大きくなり得ます。ですから、LLMアナリティクスを本当に役立てたいのであれば、きらびやかなインターフェースだけでは不十分です。必要なのは、データの基盤、ガバナンス、意味の一貫性、そして小さく始めるという謙虚さです。

このエピソードでお届けする内容:

  • なぜ不正対策およびリスク管理チームは、特に複雑なデータの顧客となるのか
  • 不正対策チームが、次々とポイントソリューションを要求するのではなく、データチームとより良く協働する方法
  • なぜセルフサービス型アナリティクスは、LLMが登場する以前にはこれほど頻繁に失敗していたのか
  • LLM 分析がインターフェースになったときに、何が変わり、何が変わらないのか
  • なぜ、素早い答えを得ることよりも「正しいデータの問い」を立てることが重要なのか
  • データガバナンス、セマンティックレイヤー、そしてデータ品質がAI分析の結果をどのように左右するか
  • なぜ不正対策チームは、厳選された1つのテーブル、1つのユースケース、そして1つの測定可能な成果からAI導入を始めるべきなのか
  • データプロジェクトにおける1時間版、1日版、1週間版、1か月版の考え方

このエピソードは次のような方におすすめです:

  • 不正対策業務に携わっており、リスクや不正に関する分析プロジェクトを推進するためにデータチームに依存している
  • 不正対策基盤でのデータ分析に、LLM を用いたアナリティクスや AI エージェントの導入を検討している
  • あまりにも簡単そうに聞こえるAIによるデータクエリを約束されているなら、おそらく本当にそんなに甘くはありません
  • データエンジニアリング、アナリティクス、またはリスクデータインフラのチームと、よりうまく連携できる方法が必要です
  • 実際のユーザーに影響を与えるツールを導入する前に、AIデータガバナンスについて現実的かつ実践的な考え方を身につけたい
エピソードの概要と主なポイント

不正対策チームは、一般的なデータ利用者とは異なります

このエピソードでシャハルが伝えている主なポイントの一つは、詐欺対策チームはほとんどのビジネス上のステークホルダーとは違うということです。愛情を込めて言っていますよ。たぶんね。

マーケティング、営業、財務のチームには、良質なデータが絶対に必要です。しかし、不正対策やリスク管理では、複雑さの質がまったく異なります。何年分もの履歴データに対して巨大なバッチ処理を実行することもありますが、その結果は最終的に、ミリ秒単位での意思決定を支えなければなりません。このアカウントは正当なものか?この取引はリスクが高いか?この行動は通常どおりなのか、それとも攻撃の始まりなのか?

それは非常に奇妙な運用環境です。

通常、信号対雑音比は悪いものです。不正のパターンは常に変化します。正当なユーザーであっても、一見すると奇妙な行動をとることがありますし、不正行為者が一見普通に見える行動をとることもあります。そして、盗まれたアカウントと、国境を越えて移動している本物のユーザーとの違いが、まったく判別できないこともあるのです。

だからこそ、不正対策チームとデータチームの連携は、一般的な「依頼して結果を受け取る」関係よりも、はるかに密接でなければなりません。不正対策チームは、ただタスクを丸投げして、データチームが本番環境で回してくれることを期待するだけではいけません。データチームには文脈が必要です。ミッションを理解する必要があります。なぜその判断が重要なのか、そしてシステムが誤った判断をしたときに何が起こるのかを知る必要があります。

そうでなければ、形式上は全員が自分の仕事をきちんとこなしているのに、なぜかシステムはうまく機能しない。理想的とは言えません。

ポイントソリューションは長期的なデータ問題を引き起こします

シャハルは、不正対策やリスク管理のチームでよく見られる代表的な誤りの一つについて語っています。それは、基盤となるインフラではなく、個別のポイントソリューションばかりを求めてしまうことです。

不正対策チームは、ある問題に気づきます。再び現れる悪質な出品者。繰り返し現れる迷惑な購入者。特定の詐欺パターン。新しいリスクフロー。そこで彼らは、その一つの問題を解決するための対策をデータチームに求めます。その場ではもっともに思えます。しかし、すべての依頼が単発のプロジェクトになってしまうと、システム全体は保守が難しくなり、スケールしづらくなり、再利用もしにくくなってしまいます。

より良い問いは、「これらの多くの解決策をもっと簡単にするには、どのようなインフラが必要か?」ということです。

多くの不正検知・不正分析の課題は、共通する基盤を必要とします。過去の行動履歴からバックエンドのシグナルを算出し、それらをアクセスしやすい場所に保存し、リアルタイムまたはそれに近い形で利用できるようにする必要があります。そのパイプラインを一度きちんと構築しておけば、新しい不正パターンが現れるたびにゼロからやり直す必要はありません。

だからといって、すべての問題に同じ解決策があるわけではありません。当然そうではありません。それが本当なら、不正対策はずっと簡単になるでしょう。しかし、だからこそ不正対策チームは、個別の依頼ベースではなく、再利用可能なインフラを軸にデータチームと足並みをそろえるべきなのです。

そうすることで、次のプロジェクトをより安く、より速く、そしてより負担の少ないものにできます。

不正検知モデルの最後の一歩は、チームが認めている以上に重要だ

会話の中でよくある場面として、シャチャルは、チームが高度なモデルを構築しながら、その後でほとんどランダムに近い形で固定のしきい値を使ってしまう状況を説明しています。

モデルスコアが800を超えたら、その取引を拒否してください。

なぜ800なのですか?

多くの場合、その答えはあまり良くありません。

これは、不正対策の担当者を思わず黙って遠くを見つめさせてしまうような事柄の一つです。チームは数か月をかけて、高性能なモデルを構築し、パフォーマンスを測定し、特徴量を調整し、統計的な出力を評価します。ところが、実際のビジネス上の意思決定レイヤーには、それほど注意が払われません。

しかし、最後の一歩こそがモデルがユーザーと接する部分です。そこで、どれだけ不正を止めるか、どれだけ誤検知を生むか、そして実際にビジネスとしてどのようなトレードオフを選択しているのかが決まります。

AUC(曲線下面積)は有用な指標になり得ます。しかし、それだけではモデルが適切に使われているかどうかは分かりません。また、閾値が地域やセグメント、プロダクト、ユーザータイプごとに妥当かどうかも分かりません。さらに、ビジネス上の成果が本当に改善しているかどうかも教えてくれません。

だからこそ、戦略レイヤーが重要なのです。運用環境でモデルがどのように使われているかを定期的に検証しなければ、モデルに費やした多くの労力が無駄になってしまう可能性があります。

AIが登場する前にセルフサービス分析がうまくいかなかったのには理由がある

セルフサービス型アナリティクスは新しいものではありません。LLM アナリティクスが登場するずっと前から存在していました。フィルター付きのダッシュボード、BI ツール、目的別に作られた社内ツール、あらゆるところにあるドロップダウンメニュー。夢はシンプルでした。ビジネスユーザーが SQL や Python、あるいはアナリストの助けを借りることなく、自分たちのデータに関する疑問に自分で答えられるようにすることです。

それでも、多くの場合うまくいきませんでした。

なぜでしょうか?それは、セルフサービス型のアナリティクスが、現実にはほとんど当てはまらない前提に依存しているからです。

ユーザーは自分が何を求めているか分かっている、とあなたは仮定します。はっきりと説明できる、とも仮定します。社内で使われる言葉には一意で決まった意味がある、とも仮定します。「売上」や「減少」や「アクティブユーザー」といった言葉が、どのチームにとっても同じ意味だと仮定しているのです。悪くない発想ですが、たいてい間違っています。

また、ユーザーがデータの複雑さを理解していると仮定してしまいますが、たいていはそうではありません。これはユーザーを侮辱しているわけではありません。データには、あちこちに部族的な暗黙知が埋もれています。たとえば、あるアナリストは、特定のレポートでは特定の国からのトラフィックを除外しないと結果がノイズだらけになることを知っています。ビジネスユーザーは、その判断が行われたことを知らないかもしれませんが、その誰かの判断があって初めてレポートは意味を持つのです。

セルフサービスは、人々が自分で数字を取りに行き、その結果に責任を負いたいと考えていることも前提にしています。しかし、必ずしもそうとは限りません。もしCEOの前で数字が間違っていたら、多くの人は自分ではなくアナリストが責任を問われる立場であってほしいと思うでしょう。これが人間の行動です。洗練されてはいませんが、現実です。

だから、LLM 分析がセルフサービス分析の問題を解決してくれると言うときには、立ち止まって考えるべきです。インターフェースは変わりましたが、根本的な問題は消えていません。

LLM 分析は、質の悪い質問をより危険なものにしかねない

LLM 分析で怖いのは、平易な英語で質問に答えられること自体ではありません。その点はむしろ驚くべきことです。

怖いのは、間違った質問に対しても自信満々に答えてしまうかもしれないことです。

従来型のダッシュボードでは、指標の定義はたいていハードコードされています。ダッシュボードが気に入らないこともあるかもしれませんが、少なくとも既知のデータソースから取得し、既知のロジックを適用していることは分かっています。AIによるデータクエリでは、どのテーブルを使うか、どう結合するか、リクエストをどう解釈するか、そして答えをどう提示するかを、システム側が判断することになります。

ユーザーがSQLやデータ構造、指標の定義、ビジネス上の文脈を理解していない場合、どのようにしてその回答を検証できるのでしょうか?

そのとおりです。

ここで、分析におけるAIの幻覚が実際のオペレーションリスクになります。回答は洗練されて見えるかもしれません。クエリももっともらしく見えるかもしれません。結果も、感覚的には「正しそう」と思えるところまで近いかもしれません。しかし、もし問いの立て方が不適切だったり、データの文脈が欠けていたりすれば、出力は依然として誤っている可能性があります。

そして不正対策の現場では、誤った回答は単なる理論上の問題ではありません。誤ったルールや誤った審査、誤ったモデル判断や誤ったポリシー変更につながり、ユーザーへの実害や損失という形で現実の影響を及ぼす可能性があります。

だからこそシャハルの指摘はとても重要なのです。アナリストの仕事は、単に質問に答えることではなく、正しい問いを立てる手助けをすることなのです。

正直なところ、その部分こそ最初ではなく最後に自動化すべきです。

AI分析ツールにおいてデータガバナンスは必須であり、任意ではありません

この議論で最も有益な点の一つは、AI分析ツールに対する2つのアプローチの違いを明確にしていることです。

1つのアプローチは、AIエージェントにデータウェアハウスへのアクセス権を与え、人々が自由に質問できるようにすることです。

それが、誰もが不安になるような、少なくともそうなるべきバージョンです。

もう一つのアプローチは、まず堅牢なデータ基盤を構築することです。指標を定義し、セマンティックレイヤーを作成し、メタデータを追加し、各フィールドの意味を明確にします。テーブルを整理・管理し、品質を監視します。そのうえで、統制されたデータ環境の上で LLM 分析を活用します。

その2つ目のアプローチは、デモではあまり派手ではありません。しかし、実際にうまくいく可能性はずっと高いのです。

AI 分析ツールには、人間以上に基本が求められます。人間のアナリストであれば、データの様子がおかしいと気づいたり、組織内で共有されている暗黙知を思い出したり、追加の質問を投げかけたりすることができます。一方で LLM は、もっともらしい答えをそのまま出してしまうことがあります。そして、もとになる前提や文脈が乱れていれば、その答えも同じように乱れたものになりかねません。

そのため、不正対策チームがLLMを活用したセルフサービス型アナリティクスを導入したい場合、最初のプロジェクトは「データウェアハウス全体に接続する」ことではあるべきではありません。まずは信頼できる1つのユースケースと、厳選された1つのデータセットまたはテーブル群、明確な定義、質の高いメタデータ、そしてそのツールが本当に役立っているかを検証する方法を用意すべきです。

とても退屈だが、とても必要なことだ。

すべてのデータではなく、まずは一つのユースケースから始めよう

不正対策チームがAIを導入するにあたってのシャハルのアドバイスは、驚くほど実践的です。「最初から何もかも一度にやろうとしないこと」です。

まずは 1 つのユースケースから始めましょう。1 つの繰り返し出てくる問い。1 つの信頼できるデータセット。チームが本当に理解している定義を備えた 1 つのテーブル、もしくは少数の厳選されたテーブルのセットから始めるのです。

検証レイヤーを構築しましょう。コンテキストレイヤーを構築しましょう。メタデータを追加しましょう。「取引の拒否」とは何を意味するのかを定義してください。それは不正検知システムによって拒否されたのでしょうか?カード発行会社によって拒否されたのでしょうか?残高不足によって拒否されたのでしょうか?これらの違いは重要です。

次に、そのLLM分析ツールが本当に役に立つかを検証しましょう。正しい問いに答えているでしょうか?適切なデータを使っているでしょうか?インサイトを得るまでの時間を短縮できているでしょうか?より安全な意思決定を支援できているでしょうか?不正対策チームを本当に強化しているでしょうか、それとも単に間違った判断をより速く下せるようにしているだけでしょうか?

その最後の問いが重要です。

最初のユースケースがうまくいったら、少しずつ範囲を広げていきましょう。ディメンションを追加し、メトリクスを追加し、さらに多くの問いを増やしていきます。ただし、AIが会社中の散らかったデータベースや環境、テーブル、定義をすべてうまくつなぎ合わせてくれるという幻想から始めてはいけません。

それは戦略ではありません。ただの、非常に高くつく「さあね」という態度にすぎません。

AIは文脈の把握やブレインストーミング、より鋭い思考に役立ちます

このエピソードは反AIではありません。そんなのは怠慢ですし、しかも間違っています。

シャハルは有用な区別を示しています。AI は、外部コンテキストの提供やブレインストーミング、アイデア出し、そしてあなたの考え方に異議を唱えることに非常に長けている場合があります。ビジネス指標のおおよその範囲を知りたいときには、AI は方向性となるコンテキストを得る助けになるかもしれません。自分が見落としている点について考えを深めたいときにも、AI は役立ちます。計画をストレステストしたいときにも、AI は助けになります。

重要なのは、任せきりにするのではなく、自分を補強するために使うことです。

つまり、AIはあなたの思考を磨く手助けはしてくれますが、あなたの思考そのものを置き換えるべきではありません。AIは問いを提案してくれますが、どの問いが重要かを判断するのは依然としてあなたです。AIは選択肢の枠組みづくりを助けてくれますが、最終的な判断を理解する必要があるのもあなたです。AIはクエリの下書きを作成してくれますが、その結果が実際のユーザーに影響するのであれば、論理を検証する責任はあなたにあります。

特に不正対策やリスク管理の分野では、下した判断が取引の拒否や再審査、摩擦の増大、ユーザーへの被害、金銭的損失、あるいはコンプライアンス上のリスクにつながる可能性があるため、このことはいっそう重要になります。

だからこそ、AI は使うべきです。ただし、本番環境の主導権をすべて渡して放置するのはやめたほうがいいでしょう。妥当な話ですよね。

1時間で作ったバージョンのほうが、1か月かけて作ったバージョンより良いことはよくある。

会話の終わり頃に、シャチャールはシンプルだが役に立つフレームワークを共有します。それは「どんなプロジェクトにも、1時間バージョン、1日バージョン、1週間バージョン、そして1か月バージョンがある」という考え方です。

これは盗む価値があります。敬意を込めて。

多くの技術チーム、特に不正対策やリスク管理のチームは、問題を見つけるとすぐに「1か月かかる完璧なバージョン」を思い描いてしまいます。あらゆるイレギュラーケース、あらゆる外部連携、理想的なデータソースのすべて、あらゆる複雑さを盛り込もうとするのです。そうしているうちに、プロジェクトはどんどん巨大になり、停滞し、優先度を下げられ、あるいはロードマップのドキュメントの中でひっそりと消えていきます。

その代わりに、1時間バージョンがどのようなものかを考えてみてください。すぐに方向性のある価値を生み出せますか?その指標をおおよそ見積もれますか?最終形だと装わずに前進できますか?

それから改善していきましょう。1日で作るバージョンは、より洗練されています。1週間で作るバージョンは自動化されています。1か月で作るバージョンは、さらに完成度が高くなります。

これは新しいことではありません。MVP的な考え方であり、アジャイルです。しかしどうやら、私たちは数年おきに名前だけ変えて、同じような単純なことを学び直す必要があるようです。まあ、いいでしょう。

データチームと連携している不正対策チームにとって、この考え方は特に有用です。というのも、データリソースには限りがあるからです。素早く価値を示し、進むべき方向性を検証し、そのうえで段階的に構築していければ、誰も全体像を理解していない2年がかりのプロジェクトを提案するよりも、はるかに支援を得やすくなります。

最終的なまとめ

LLM 分析は不正対策チームに大いに役立ちます。ただし、そのためには基盤がきちんと整っていることが前提です。

データ定義があいまいで、セマンティックレイヤーが存在せず、指標の意味がチームごとにバラバラで、ユーザーも正しい質問の仕方を理解していないのであれば、AIがそれを魔法のように解決してくれることはありません。むしろ混乱を加速させてしまうだけかもしれません。

今回のエピソードから得られる、少し厄介だけれど有益なポイントはこうです。詐欺対策チームは完璧なデータを待つべきではありませんが、同時に、AIがデータガバナンスやデータ品質、そしてデータチームとの賢い連携の必要性をなくしてくれると考えるべきでもありません。

小さく始めましょう。まずは信頼できるひとつのユースケースを作り上げてください。基盤となるインフラを整え、足並みをそろえましょう。より良い問いを立ててください。AIは状況理解や思考を支えるために使い、責任から逃れるための抜け道として使ってはいけません。

ともあれ、LLM アナリティクスの戦略が「とりあえず全部つないで、何が起きるか見てみる」なのであれば、技術的にはそれも一応“戦略”と言えるでしょう。

ただ、壊れたあとで説明したいとは思えないやり方ですね。

リソースとリンク

私の、そしてできればあなたの一番好きなテーマについての話を、まだ終わらせたくありませんか? 登録してください:The Saturday Fraud Strategist ニュースレター。

つながるシャハル・メイアー | LinkedIn
データアドバイザー
元Metaデータ部門ディレクター

つながるなら Chen Zamir | LinkedIn
The Saturday Fraud Strategist のホスト
フィンテック企業の、よりスマートな不正防止対策づくりを支援
The Fraud Fighter’s AI Playbook』共著者

Episode transcript
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
00:09
Welcome everybody to another episode of The Saturday Fraud Strategist. And today I have a special guest. Actually, more than a guest, I have a very dear friend joining us, Shachar Meir. Shachar, I think we've known each other for about 15 years or so. And all of this time you've been working on the other side of the fence, specifically in the data space, data management space. So it's a pleasure having you here.
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Shachar Meir
00:24
Yeah. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
00:40
The pleasure is all mine. So Shachar, I'm guessing that most of my audience isn't really familiar with you, as you're coming from outside of the space. So before we talk about why I invited you and the conversation that we'll have today, maybe you can tell our listeners more about yourself and your career so far, and what have you been up to lately.
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Shachar Meir
01:02
Yeah. So hi everyone. My name is Shachar. I'm a data executive with over 20 years of experience. I've been leading and managing data teams in smaller companies as well as bigger companies such as PayPal and Meta. At Meta, I was London data engineering site lead. I've grown the site from four data engineers when I started to more than 200 at the peak. I managed the data for a portfolio of products in ads with a run rate of $7 billion a year. And in my very last role I was a director of data engineering for all of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger's trust and safety problems. And I left Meta about three years ago because I realized that over the past 20 years, I've seen a lot of companies that had a lot of data. They had good data teams, they had decent data platforms, and nothing was working. No one was happy. It was a complete disaster. So I took a step back. I asked myself, why is it that in 2023 we're still failing as an industry, and why do so many companies struggle to get value from the data? And I investigated that, and I realized two things essentially. One is that I have the playbooks and I know how to think to fix it, because that's what I've been doing my entire career. And secondly, that I can achieve a lot more impact if instead of being chief data officer one company at a time, I would work with multiple companies helping them implement my playbook. So that's what I do today. And the interesting thing is I come from a data background, but throughout my entire career I've actually been working with risk teams and teams that deal with adversarial environments in different places, both at PayPal and WorldRemit, which is another fintech. But interestingly also at Meta with trust and safety, which is a different type of adversarial environment, but it's essentially the same kind of playbooks and methodologies and ideas. And then in my consulting career as well. So I've seen it a lot from the other side.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
03:00
Yeah, I'm sure. You mentioned adversarial environments and it made me laugh because I was thinking, who's the adversary? Is that the risk team or the fraudsters? But we'll get to that in a second. I can only say that I definitely like how you described your career switch. It definitely resonated with me. And I think that one of the things that I truly appreciate in our relationship is that we've met about 15 years ago, and I think we've worked there for probably like two or three years. Then we lost touch for probably nearly a decade, and we had very different careers. You just described your career at Meta. I went and started Frockster as a startup. But we both ended up really in the same place at the same time, basically starting our own consultancy firms. And this is exactly when we got back in touch. I think since then we are probably in touch every week, maybe sometimes, most of the time, daily. And Shachar, by the way, now that I'm thinking about it, he's one of the main sources of memes that I post on LinkedIn. So if you like those memes, know that Shachar is the one to thank for.
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Shachar Meir
04:21
Guilty as charged.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
04:27
Yeah, it's been a journey, man.
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Shachar Meir
04:30
Definitely a journey. And I appreciate that.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
04:33
Yeah. Same here. So Shachar, you mentioned that already, that you yourself, you're not a fraud fighter, but you've been working with fraud fighters for long periods of time in all sorts of different places in your career, both in-house as a manager, but also as an advisor. And actually, that's the main reason why I wanted to have you on the podcast, because I think that data is such a core pillar to the work of every risk manager, and especially fraud managers. And that's also an area where many, many times we have, let's say it nicely, challenges or hurdles to overcome. And I wanted to invite you to the show to basically discuss exactly that, both the relationship, but mainly how can we leverage our peers and how can we leverage our own tools or infrastructure so our lives as fraud fighters are easier. That's the aim. Let's see if we can grab some takeaways out of that.
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Shachar Meir
05:58
Yeah, sure. Actually, maybe I can just start by telling about my journey starting from PayPal, because I think that was the inflection point when it comes to fraud fighting. It was the first time I was actually part of a fraud team. And PayPal, back in the day, acquired a startup company that became the PayPal office in Tel Aviv, and I was essentially part of it. It was a group of brilliant people, absolutely brilliant, who couldn't get anything done. And the reason was that they were really struggling with PayPal's data platforms and infrastructure. They were trying to build things, and they managed to build some solutions, but they couldn't get anything into production. It was a complete mess. And I was hired. I don't think that I was hired for a very specific role in that sense, but I sort of identified that as an opportunity. And I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to become the bridge between the data technologies team and the risk team. And I tried to investigate and understand why it is not working, and why these people are not able to deliver anything, and why are the people in data technology, why do they keep complaining about risk? And they had plenty of complaints because risk was so data-intense and data-heavy, and they were killing the clusters and running processes that the data team could not even understand what these people were trying to do. So it was fascinating to see this relationship. And I thought, okay, if I can bring the data team a little bit closer to risk and the risk team a little bit closer to data, and I can understand the gaps on both sides, I can make the situation better. And I think that specifically, unlike other professions like, let's say marketing, sales, finance, where things are, I don't want to use the word straightforward, but you can get away with not having perfect data, and you can get away with not being super data-intense. In risk, it just doesn't work like that. First of all, a lot of the decisions you have to make are in real time and in the moment, sometimes with very limited history, sometimes with a lot of history, but then you're looking for anomalies that are not always very obvious. I think the signal-to-noise ratio is very, very bad in most cases. And sometimes understanding the difference between a stolen account and somebody who's just traveling the world and happens to be in a different country trying to make a transaction that doesn't look like their normal profile or history, there's a very thin line between these two and it's hard to distinguish. So I think that these people were actually some of the most data-savvy and tech-savvy people that I've seen, but at the same time, I think there was a constant misalignment. And I noticed two very interesting things. One of the mistakes the risk team was doing is they kept asking for very pointed solutions. So they were working on a process to detect returning malicious sellers and then returning offensive buyers, and they kept working on specific pointed solutions for specific risk problems that they've identified. Whereas what they should have really done, or what would have been good, and this is what we did when I came in, is instead of asking for those pointed solutions, we started thinking about what is the infrastructure that we need to enable all of that. And if you think about it, the infrastructure for different risk solutions is often the same. You want to calculate some flags in the back end, using the entire customer's history, keep them in a front-end system, and then be able to access that in real time. It's the same infrastructure. So if you build it once and you model it in the right way and you create yourself a pipeline or a channel that you can send data to your front-end system, you're 80% done from a data perspective. So I think that understanding when is the point that you need to switch from thinking about the individual solutions to the infrastructure that enables all of that is something that really accelerated the fraud team there. And the second thing is that I think people often boil the ocean, in the sense that they were trying to build the most prolific solution that they could to a specific fraud problem. Whereas if they started simple, proved that it works, and then iterated on that, it would also give them something to work with and it would also give them the infrastructure to iterate. And I think people spent months and months building something that they could have shipped the simple version of in a couple of weeks, see if it works, and take it from there.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
11:01
And it probably solved 90% of the problem. I say it all the time. It's hard.
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Shachar Meir
11:04
Most likely. And actually, if I can add one last point, I think it was very interesting to see the risk teams, the way they worked when they were building solutions. There were some things that they really thought through all the way and they came up with very interesting heuristics and ideas, and they managed to create pretty good models. But at the same time, sometimes they would end up writing a rule that says, okay, if the model score is greater than 800, then decline the transaction. And every time I would see a static number somewhere, I would always challenge that in a nice way. I would just ask, hey, by the way, how did you come up with this number? And almost always, it was random. So they spent all this time building this model and coming up with something that was, as far as I could say, state of the art. And then the last mile always seemed a little bit like guesswork. Not always, but sometimes. And then I would say, but 800, is it the same 800 for a customer in Europe and a customer in Vietnam? And I would start challenging that and people would be like, yeah, that's a good point. So it would be like, why did you spend so much time building the model, but then so little thinking about how you're going to use it?
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
12:30
Yeah. I must say you touched a nerve for me here, because what you just described is one of the main things that I've been speaking about for ages now, I feel. And it seems that many times we invest so much, as you said, effort and sophistication in the model, and we measure the model in, for example, AUC, area under the curve, right? Like how curved the model performance is. While in the end, the curve and the AUC doesn't matter and doesn't dictate performance and business performance at all. In the end, you need to ask yourself how much losses did I stop versus, or for the cost of, how many false positives did I create? And around this question, what we call the strategy layer, how you basically implement the model and bring it to production so it touches users and influences business performance, in that area, most teams spend very little sophistication and very little effort. And not only that, but also they very rarely look at that decision periodically and validate that it is still true. And yeah, all of that effort that was invested in the model many times just goes to waste because you didn't really look at the last mile.
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Shachar Meir
14:05
We should actually change the name from AUC to PAUC, right? Potential area under the curve. Which is, if you use the model correctly, then this is how much you can get. But if you just do whatever, then you'll get whatever.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
14:19
Yes, yes. Potential, probable, maybe area under the curve. Yeah. I want to first of all say that both of these things that you've seen very much resonate and feel familiar. I want to take a step back and maybe talk a bit more, because you mentioned that risk teams are different than your usual or your other clients, right? The marketing team, sales team, customer support, and so on. I'm just wondering, as a fraud fighter, how should I think about it? I'm not thinking, why should I care, but how is the fact that I'm different, or what about this relationship is different? How should I transform that into a different way in which I align with a data team or communicate with the data team? So how does this difference matter in reality?
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Shachar Meir
15:50
I would say there are two ways I would like to think about it. One is that from a technical perspective, I think risk teams have extreme technical complexity, because you can run these batch processes offline in the background for hours and hours to crunch years of historical data, but then in the end you do that because you need the data to be available to make a split-second decision, under 200 milliseconds or 100 milliseconds, and make a decision on a specific transaction or specific account. So I think this is a different level of complexity, I would say, from most other use cases and most other teams. And I think the other thing is the cost of mistake. In marketing, if your marketing is inefficient, then your CPMs might be a little bit too high or the cost of acquisition might be a little bit too high, or you might be spending money acquiring the wrong customers and then churning them, not achieving the lifetime value that you could be achieving. So I'm not saying that's not a bad thing. It is, but it's not the end of the world. But if you think about the consequences of a risk team getting it wrong, then you're essentially funding the next, you know, if you're allowing bad transactions to come through, you might be funding the next 9/11, or you might be helping build terrorist groups in Africa. Or on the other hand, the impact of people traveling the world, trying to buy something not in their country, and then getting a transaction declined when they're in the middle of nowhere and they have no other means. It's a terrible experience for the end users. So either way, the implications and repercussions can be pretty bad. And it has implications on everything. If I use PayPal, for example, and my transaction is declined once, maybe I'll try again. But if it keeps getting declined all the time, guess what? I'm going to stop using PayPal. So you have implications on marketing, and you have implications on your company's finances, and you have implications on everything. And while you're supposed to be an enabler for the company and you're supposed to save the company, doing a poor job is actually hurting the company more than people realize. And in most cases it's very difficult to measure that. It's very difficult to measure the false positives. There are some other examples, right? I know you talk mostly about fraud fighters in fintech, but if you think about some of the problems that we dealt with at Meta, like suicide and self-injury, the cost of getting it wrong is somebody committing suicide. Or bullying and harassment or these kinds of problems, the cost is horrendous. So I think that it's a higher level of complexity than any other problem, and the cost of getting it wrong either way is going to be more difficult. And I think that what does that actually mean for the risk teams working with data? I would say a couple of things. First of all, I think that it means that the collaboration must be a lot tighter. And I also think that there's an opportunity here to connect them to the mission and to what you're trying to do. Help them understand. Don't just throw jobs and solutions over the fence and say, hey, can you just run it in production for me or whatever. Try to bring them on the journey. Try to make them a real partner of yours. They really want to understand what are all these things that you're building, and they really want to become enablers for the business. So bring them on the journey. I think that's the most effective way most risk teams can get the support that they need from the data teams they work with.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
19:58
That's super interesting. First, it comes to my mind that, you know, you spoke about the complexity. But as you were describing how data teams work with sales and marketing organizations, for example, if you're measuring CAC or CPM, these are very known definitions and there are no half measures here. Either you know your CAC and you're calculating it properly, or you don't. And with risk, first of all, you're dealing with undefined situations. You know, I want to run a batch that catches all the accounts that made these and these transactions in this and this period, that look like this and that. And it might be that I can do something a bit more simple, as you mentioned before, kind of like a simpler solution, a more basic solution that would be 10x simpler to the data team to achieve. And I think, you talked about bringing the data team into the journey, and I think one big aspect here is that the data team, as any type of engineering resource that you usually deal with, they have a lot of demand, very little supply. I haven't seen a data team that is bored yet, or an engineering team, and AI didn't change it. I don't think it will change it soon. So there are a few things here. Can you actually make sure that the cost or the resources that you need are minimized? And that is something that you need to not negotiate, but align with the data team. How can you create the most, or how can you ship the most efficient solution? And the other thing here is also to have them bought into the result, into the mission. So they are on your side and at least they are interested in this project as well. So I completely see it. I wonder, speaking, you know, I mentioned AI. You know what, before AI, you talk a lot about self-serving, and not in the context of fraud and risk teams in particular, actually very generally speaking about data teams. And I think that is exactly where, in this conversation, this topic can come in.
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Shachar Meir
22:41
Yeah, so I talk a lot about self-service analytics, right? The ability of users or stakeholders to use their own data, like non-technical users, non-savvy users, getting access to data without the need of learning SQL or Python or other languages like that. And I think that self-service analytics is not a new concept. It's been around for over two decades, where BI teams in the past were building dashboards with lots of selectors where you could slice and dice the data in whichever way you wanted. We've always tried to give business users or stakeholders the ability to get their own data. And it always failed, right? So it's not a new concept, but it's making a massive comeback now with AI and LLMs, because now you got to a point that you can ask an LLM a question in plain English and get an answer. It will get translated to SQL or whatever, and then...
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
23:35
Yeah. But before we go into LLMs, because that's another whole thing that I want to discuss, why originally was it the case that it always failed?
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Shachar Meir
23:48
Yeah, it's a good question. I've been pondering on that a lot because in my career I've tried several times to introduce self-service. It didn't work, so I kind of gave up on that idea in a way. Or it worked in very specific cases, but I sort of stepped away from that. And now all of a sudden it's coming back and everybody's asking for it. It made me think, hang on a minute, that's not a new idea. It's always been around. So why did it fail back then, and how do we know it's not going to fail again? I thought about it, and what I realized is if you think about self-service as a concept, for self-service to work, you're making a few assumptions that you assume are true. Number one, that users know what they want. Number two, that they know how to put it into words, and they can explain what they want in words. You assume that words have deterministic meaning, so that revenue always means the same thing and not six different things depending on who in the organization you talk to. You assume that users understand the complexity and nuances and the intricacies of the data, which is very rarely the case. I had a friend who was an analytics manager, I think in Wix or one of the website-building platforms. And he said, Shachar, our analysts, whenever users would ask for reports, in some cases they would just automatically exclude all traffic from China because that created a lot of noise. And as soon as you take it out, it kind of sorts out the report. But they would do it in only some cases, and they knew when they needed to do it. So it was kind of like tribal knowledge. And the users were asking for reports, they didn't explicitly mention anything about China, and they didn't know that this is what they're getting, but this is what the analysts knew. So understanding the nuances and the complexities of the data is not something that most users understand. They might have an idea of what it is that they want, but they cannot put it into words. And the last thing is that you actually assume that users want to be self-served and be held accountable for pulling their own data. And I've seen so many cases where I've built teams dashboards, and I said, hey, here's all your data. You can answer 80% of your questions in this dashboard alone, thinking that it's going to remove a lot of the ad hoc questioning. And actually, it didn't. I was very surprised. People still insisted that they want the analysts to pull the data. But then I realized that if they go and present a number to the CEO and the CEO says, this number is wrong, where did you get that from? If they can throw the analyst under the bus, it makes them look better. But if they are responsible for pulling this number, it makes them look like a bunch of clowns. So obviously they don't want that. And you also assume that people need a high degree of flexibility in the way they consume data, which is not always the case as well. Sometimes you do if you're a fraud analyst and you're now trying to understand a certain modus operandi and trying to investigate something. Fine. But if you're the chief risk officer, you probably want your scorecard or list of metrics that are always there, and it always looks the same so you can manage the business. So I think that if you look at the assumptions behind self-service, many of them just don't work. It is not obvious to me that it's an interface problem and that LLMs and chatbots and free-text, plain-English questioning will make it much different.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
27:35
Okay, so maybe just to step back. So when you're describing a self-service system in the old days, right, three years ago, we're talking about systems that are essentially dashboards that allow, in this case, fraud teams, with a lot of features, sorry, not features, filters, with a lot of filters and a lot of different dropdowns and so on, to ask data questions without needing to either have SQL skills or have SQL permissions even to go into the data and query themselves. And you're saying that you actually never saw that being a successful solution, not in general and not specifically when it comes to risk teams.
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Shachar Meir
28:30
No, so I won't say never. Self-service can work, but I think where people get it wrong is I think unbounded self-service doesn't work. In the sense that people can just ask whatever about any topic, and they just get it. I don't think that's something that's going to work. At the same time, bounded self-service, if you bound it to a very specific domain, to a set of questions, the underlying data sets are highly curated and very specific and purposely created for that mission, I think this is where it can work. And we've seen examples of that. By the way, self-service, when I say self-service in the old days, it doesn't need to be dashboards. It can be purpose-built tools. So at PayPal, for example, you remember we had a review tool that the fraud analysts were using, where they could put in an account ID and they would get all information on the account, and they had a bunch of ways they could explore the data. But it was a very purpose-built tool that gave them specific views, and they had specific workflows around it. But again, you had to invest a lot of time learning how to use it and to use it correctly. They kept enhancing it all the time, where every time you want to support more views and more ways of people looking at fraud, I think that's something that you have to keep building all the time.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
29:52
Yeah. And that's something that because of the adversarial nature and the fact that the problem keeps shifting, a data point that was interesting yesterday would not necessarily be interesting tomorrow. It's very hard to bound these kinds of use cases for fraud teams.
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Shachar Meir
30:13
Exactly. And because of that, the fraud analysts would always know SQL on top of that. But that was their go-to tool and that was always their starting point, if it was good enough and if their data was there. But it was meant to answer very specific questions in specific ways, with specific views and specific information. So I think that somebody did spend a lot of time thinking about what it is that they need and structure the data in a way that would be useful to them. I think that just open-ended self-service for people who are not very technically savvy and not very data-savvy and don't understand these nuances, my view is, it's a little bit delusional. But maybe some people were more successful than I have.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
30:59
I wouldn't bet my money on that. But I want now to speak about the self-service concept as we are hearing about it today. And today self-service means having an LLM be your basically bionic extension and replace your querying knowledge, capabilities, skill, and querying the data directly and not through a dashboard. I want to share my view and see how you see it. So I'm sharing my view as a data and/or a fraud analyst, right? I think it's even worse. Honestly, it scares me. It scares me a lot because in the old days of self-servicing data tools, at least I know there's a single definition to where the tool gets the data from and how it processes it. There are very clear definitions for each data point that I'm seeing on screen. And this doesn't change. Obviously, it's all hard-coded, so there are no hallucinations. And supposedly now in this new age, the major advantage is that as a user, I can ask any question that I want in plain English, and I will always get an answer. And that's seemingly very powerful. But as a data analyst, I'm like, okay, I'm not sure exactly where you took the data, I'm not sure exactly how you joined the data, and I anyway need to go through the SQL myself and the data scale myself and see and validate that you've done it correctly. And what scares me about it is not that, okay, you can write a query faster and better than me, maybe. That's great. But most users, and that's exactly the point, most users don't have SQL skills. So this is what scares me about it. What's your view?
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Shachar Meir
33:13
Yeah. First of all, I'll say that I think that we're observing the biggest revolution of our lifetime right now, technological revolution of our lifetime. What we're seeing is probably unprecedented, and it happens at a scale that is probably too fast for comfort for most people. I think that the ability to have a chat with a bot or whatever in your own language, just explain what it is that you want, and then get a result, is mind-blowing for most people. And if you look at sci-fi movies from five, 10, 20, 30 years ago, that's always how humans wanted to interact with computers, right? And it's finally happening. So in a way, that's amazing. We just describe some sort of an outcome and we get it. But I think when people think about using AI for self-service, there are two camps. There's one that says, I'll just give my AI agent access to my BigQuery or my Databricks or whatever, and then I would be able to ask whatever questions I want. I think that's setting themselves to fail, and big time. And I'll explain why. And the other camp, and if you've seen Anthropic's recent paper on how they do data analytics, and they say they do 95% of their analytics with conversational interfaces and all of that, the basis of that paper is you need to have very, very strong data foundations, good semantic layer, clear definitions, like you need a lot of data governance. So basically what they say is you really need to get the basics right to be able to do that. And that's a company that's presumably already doing it. I think that a lot of the way other people are interpreting the situation is, hey, I have this amazing capability, let's just give it access and see what happens. Now, these models have one very big flaw. They have many flaws, but one of them is they never say, I don't know what the answer is. They just give you the most probabilistic answer, even if this answer is delusional or has no grounds in reality. So I think that we have to be super careful. Now, when can that work? It can work where you define a semantic layer, you define clear metrics, you have very good definitions, you give it a lot of metadata and a lot of context about these are my tables, this is the information that I have, this is what everything means, and all of that. So it can basically do the mapping between your questions to the underlying data. And if you don't have that layer in between, and if you don't have the governance and controls and monitoring and all of that, then you're just leaving yourself to chance, which is not a good way of doing things. Now, the one thing that people also don't realize is that this is all great assuming that you know how to ask the right questions. But actually, if you ask the wrong questions, even if you get the right answers to the wrong questions, that's not helpful. And I think never in the history of mankind was it so easy to ask the wrong questions and get the wrong answers at such a scale. So I think we're getting into a point that every person, and I've seen it a lot managing analysts and data scientists and analytics teams, is often the best service you do for the business or to your stakeholders is not actually running the queries for them, but doing the framing and the ideation and challenging their question. Saying, you're asking for this, why do you need this data? Okay, so this is what you're trying to do. This data is not going to help you. You need something completely different. So that's the kind of detailing conversation. And people can say, yeah, but I can build a skill in Claude and have Claude ask me these questions and whatnot. Possibly. We need to prove that. But people assuming that they will just ask whatever and it will be the right question, and they will get the right answer, and they will know what to do with this information, there are a lot of assumptions going on here.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
37:22
This is great because I always say that, in my mind, the job of an analyst is not to answer questions. It is actually to ask the right questions. When you ask the right questions, you will get the answers that you need. I want to double-click on this for a second because I think it is truly, truly important. When we, data professionals, I would call myself a junior data professional for a second, talk about this, it is very, very clear to us. It's very clear to us that you need to ask the right questions, and it's very clear to us what is the right question. Well, how do you know whether a question is correct or not? Most of our listeners, especially I would assume the ones that would benefit the most from this self-service, LLM-powered oracle, are not necessarily people who were trained and qualified and educated. And this is not something that you are born with. This is something that you need to learn through many, many years, to know how to ask the right questions and how to identify bad questions. And you managed hundreds of data professionals. You mentored hundreds of data professionals. What would be your advice for someone who is not a skilled data person? How to ask the right question?
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Shachar Meir
39:10
It's a good question. I don't know if I have an answer to this, because I think that some people just naturally have that and some people don't. I think that it's something you can learn. I think you can learn that from being in an environment where you get challenged a lot and you get a lot of external feedback on everything that you do, and you're a person that can learn from that feedback and reshape their framing. There are some things that people who ask good questions naturally do, and they keep challenging themselves, right? How do I know this is the right thing? How do I know it's going to work? What am I trying to do here? Is the question I'm asking actually going to help me achieve the goal? I think that a lot of people go into this process being very unclear on what their goals are in the first place. And then they don't actually sense check and say, okay, this is the goal. Is this approach right now going to help me achieve the goal? And we talked about asking the right questions. I think that there are three things here, which is: is the question right? Am I asking the right question? Is the answer correct? Is this answer that I'm getting correct? And then, is the decision correct? Is my interpretation of the answer and what I'm trying to do with it correct? And I think one of the canonical examples for that is the survivorship bias story. I'm sure you know that from the Second World War, where the German Air Force, I think, were losing a lot of fighter airplanes. At some point, they tried to approach it from different angles and engineers tried to fix it, and a lot of people tried to fix it until somebody thought, hang on, maybe it's a statistical problem, right? Some airplanes come back, some don't. There's some statistical angle to it. So they brought a statistician and asked him, hey, can you help us fix it? And he said, yeah, of course. So what used to happen is they would shoot the airplanes and then there would be bullets hitting the airframe and leaving holes in the airframe. So he drew a picture of an airplane and said, just put a dot every place you see a hole, like a bullet. And they did it, and then there were some clusters of areas where there were no bullets at all, and then the rest of the airframe was full of bullets. And their conclusion was, that's great. So now we need to reinforce all these areas where the bullets are and we'll be fine. And he said, no, you need to do the opposite. These are the airplanes that came back despite the fact they had bullets in these places on the airframe. So if you have it in the tip of the wing, that doesn't matter. But if you have it in the root of the wing, then that's a problem for the airplane and it cannot generate lift. So you need to reinforce the areas where you don't see the bullets. I think it's a marvelous example of people asking the right question, getting the right answer, and then reaching the wrong conclusion.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
42:18
Yeah. I think one of the things that, at least how I operate, and this is how I'm trying to mentor analysts around me, is to actually, before you get to the question, work back your different options. What are the possible decisions that you can reach? Which answer would you need to get that would make you choose each of these decisions, each of these options? And then based on that, ask the question that would actually be able to tell you which of these decisions you need to make. And many times I see that people not only ask the wrong questions, they ask the wrong questions in the sense that all of the answers lead them into the same decision, picking the same decision without even thinking about it in advance. Yeah, it's very difficult.
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Shachar Meir
43:18
I love that. And I think an interesting example is that sometimes just reframing your questions and your goals... Let's say on Facebook ads, there are obviously people who use that as a tool, fraudsters who use ads to recruit victims and all of that. So there was an entire business integrity team whose purpose was to find these fraudulent ads and take them down, and fraudulent advertisers and that sort of stuff. It's an amazing channel for fraudsters, by the way. I'm sure you know that. So I think that there are two ways you can think about this problem. One is, okay, they're going to create all these fraudulent ads. How do I find them? How do I identify them at a high accuracy? How do I block them? And that sort of stuff. Which is assuming that they're going to do it. But the other approach could be, how do I prevent them? How do I make it so that they don't want to do it in the first place? And I believe there is actually a very simple solution here, which is not data and has nothing to do with technology. Just changing the policy and saying every advertiser needs to put in $50 in their account before they can start advertising, or $100 or whatever. And then maybe the payment terms are net plus 30 or something. So you basically ruin the economics of being a fraudster on this platform. Make it not worthwhile for most fraudsters. The problem is, yeah, you're also hurting the business, right? Because you're also hurting the economics for a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses in foreign countries, where for them, $100 is, I don't know, 10x their marketing budget or anything they can afford right now. So there's a real tradeoff here. But I think this is a really good way. And if your approach in the first place is, how do I detect that, you're already going down a certain path and you're completely eliminating this path, this branch of how do I make it not worthwhile for them in the first place?
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
45:35
Yeah. Analysts tend to try and solve all of their problems through the data set. And sometimes the solution is outside of the data set. Look, I just want to say that this is not easy. We're both sitting here and trying to come up with maybe some guidance on how to ask the correct, the right questions. And honestly, there is no trick or tip that we can give that would just make you now understand the framework with which you need to approach these AI self-service tools. And I think, in my mind, that's also part of my conclusion, that there isn't a simple way to upskill or train employees, especially in fraud, to work with self-service tools. And for me, that is more of a cautionary red flag than, this is the right way to do that. But we bashed on AI for a bit. That was fun. Still, there are many, many ways, and you said, we're living in exciting times. There are many ways in which fraud and risk teams can leverage LLMs and AI, GenAI in general. And I can share what probably most of our listeners have experienced: that the promise is very enticing. Just run this agent on your data and get everything you've ever imagined or fantasized on. The reality, when you already paid and booked and signed the contract, is that it is not that easy to make it work well, and many times exactly because of data integration issues. And I wonder if you have some words of wisdom and perhaps even tips about how fraud teams should think about preparing for implementing AI and even realizing or testing whether they are ready to adopt AI.
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Shachar Meir
48:17
Yeah. I think I'll go back to what I said earlier. Don't boil the ocean and focus on the basics. I think that humans need good data sets, good data foundations, good consistent metrics, high data quality to operate. AI needs that even more. And the idea that we don't have very good data foundations, so we're going to let AI do that, that's going to make things worse. So if you're a fraud team, and by the way, I appreciate that most fraud teams sit in a very tough spot because they're very data-intense, they're very data-savvy, and they're usually not the owners of their data platforms. So they do need to work with the data teams, the data organizations, to get things done. So I would say, first of all, get the basics right. Get one table or one data set that you can trust 100%, that you feel like is highly curated, high quality, very clear definitions. Make sure you have good metadata around it. Don't try to open the floodgates and ask any questions at any point in time, but choose one use case, questions that are highly repeatable, and you want to try and solve that and do a proof of concept and show that this actually helps you, that this new tool is actually helping you operate better. That's one thing that I would say. The second thing is I think that AI is really great for external context. Just to give an example, I was working with one of my clients. They produce electronic appliances, and they showed me their sales dashboard. Basically, from the top of funnel to the bottom of the funnel, for people who did the checkout, the number was about 1% to 1.5%. And I asked the person that was showing me, is that a good number or a bad number? I don't know what it means. I don't know, from the number of people who visit the website, who click on a specific product, who go to the add to cart and then checkout and complete payment, I don't know if 1.5% is good or bad. And AI is actually very good at giving you a sense of that external context. It's not scientific, but it's actually very, very good. Like, what should I consider? I asked Claude, I gave the context, I explained this is the situation, these are the steps, this is what's happening, these are the type of electrical appliances they sell. And it said the typical range is between this number and that number. Now, do I trust it 100%? I'm not sure. Is it fully accurate? No. But it kind of gives me an idea of the lay of the land. So I think that's pretty good. I also think that AI is very good for brainstorming, for ideation. If you just need somebody to challenge what you're doing, to tell you what are the things you're not thinking of, I think these are really good use cases. To basically detail your plans or help you sharpen your thinking process. That's good. But don't let it do the thinking instead of you. Use it as an augmentation tool.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
51:47
That's super interesting, and I've written all of that down. There's one thing that you said that surprised me. I mean, it didn't surprise me, but I think it might surprise a lot of our listeners. And I think that you glossed over it quite quickly. You said get one view, one table correct. And I think many organizations that I see, in general on an organizational level, think about AI as the duct tape, as the pipelines. We don't need to build a view because we can just give it access to all of these different tables. And usually these are not different tables, these are different databases, different environments, different technologies, and let AI figure it out. But you're saying, if I understand you correctly, no, you want to prepare everything on an infrastructural level. So all the data for one use case is collected in this one table, one data view, and you plug AI on top of that. Did I get it correctly?
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Shachar Meir
53:08
Yeah, that's absolutely how I would do that. Now, it doesn't have to be one table. It can be a set of multiple tables. I don't know if you know about medallion architecture, where the idea is that it's an architecture that's become very prevalent in the last few years, where you build your data in three layers. So the first layer is usually called bronze, silver, gold. The bronze layer is basically all your data coming from all your data sources and goes through very minimal adjustments or permutation. So it's basically what we used to call a data lake. And then the silver layer is your model data. So you clean the data, you model it, you validate it, it goes through quality checks and all of that, and you structure the data in a way that is useful for the business. But this data, which is what most companies have as their data warehouse, still has a lot of variance. There are a lot of different definitions, there are a lot of different ways of interpreting this data. So then on top of that, you build the gold layer, which is what you use to power your dashboards or your AI use cases and machine learning use cases. By the way, when you train machine learning models, you didn't just train it on your dim customer table or fact transactions or whatever. You'd always build a smaller data set that is highly curated, and you spend a lot of time defining the metrics and validating them. And sometimes you apply all sorts of different things on them to remove anomalies and reduce noise and all of that. So I think that using your data for LLMs is no different. You want to give it a data set that you trust, that you know what's in it, to reduce the variance and the errors, because there's going to be a lot of errors. So you want to make sure that at least on the surface, you give it a data set where it's very clear who is the customer, what is their history, how many transactions, how much total payment, how many declined transactions, etcetera. So you give it all the information, you give it context and metadata that says this is a customer, this is how many transactions, this is the definition of declined transactions. It's declined because we decided to decline, not because the card issuer or whatever decided to decline. So you give it all this extra information to reduce the variance, and then when you ask questions, the answer is going to be in a smaller range of error, which makes it more trustworthy than in a massive range where you just don't know what you're getting.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
55:39
Yeah. That is massive. This is so, like when you say it, it sounds so trivial, but I don't think that even I had it in my mind. Of course. If you're not sure that all of your team can ask the right questions, at least make sure that the AI can give you the best answers. And for that you need simplification.
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Shachar Meir
56:08
Yeah. And when you're a fraud team or a risk team that doesn't own their data foundations, then agreeing with the data team, building together a data set or set of tables that are highly curated with the right set of metrics, and working on that, is actually a good project. And you don't need to start with what's the ultimate version. Start with what can I produce in one week. Build a table with them. Build all the validations on top of that. Build the context layer. Build everything. So you have the entire infrastructure end-to-end on just one dimension or just one metric. Show that it can work and then gradually start incrementing from there. I think that's a much more sensible approach than coming up with a two-year project that nobody understands why you're even doing it.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
56:57
That's awesome. So true. I really love it, Shachar. Wow, we went through a lot. So I want to take a moment and gather my thoughts and replay all the takeaways that I've written down. We started a conversation speaking about how fraud teams and risk teams in general are a different client, or a different stakeholder, when you look at it from the perspective of the data teams. And you mentioned two common mistakes that you see in this relationship. The first one is that fraud teams tend to request point solutions, and you say that a better approach would be to actually align on the infrastructure and not necessarily a specific use case. Because when you align on the infrastructure, you have a way better chance to first of all get it right, but also to make other requests much cheaper. The second mistake that you mentioned was boiling the ocean, basically going for a full-fledged, highly sophisticated, highly advanced solution, when you can probably deliver an MVP, basically a pilot, in a fraction of the cost and time, and probably still achieve a significant amount of the value, 80%, 90%, and so on. So that was the first thing that I've captured. We also talked about, in general, that data teams are a coveted resource, like any engineering resource in an organization. And so you want to align not necessarily on the project goals, but at least on the architecture and the proposed solution, because that can really cut down the resources needed and increase the ROI, so increase the chances that you will get your project prioritized. And secondly, also to sell the result, to sell the mission, to get the data team bought into the project so they are on your side as well. Then we talked a lot about self-service. We talked about the fact that in general, this approach fails often, and especially with fraud teams, because of the adversarial, or let's say dynamic, nature of the problem. So there are very few use cases and questions that you can ask that are really repeating themselves in exactly the same way, especially in fraud. And we talked about the fact that this is now getting way worse because of LLMs and the way that a lot of tools nowadays offer self-service data querying in the form of LLMs. And we talked extensively about all of the red flags and the issues that you may encounter here. But we mainly touched upon the point that the core skill that you need here is to ask the right question. And that is not something that you can just understand or learn very, very quickly, despite all of our best efforts. And that this should serve as a warning that a lot of your efforts here can lead to, let's say, not the results that you are expecting. And I would say one thing, you mentioned it later, but I think it's very important here to mention it as well. You need to think very clearly about the impact of the decision that you make. If you're shooting to a range, or if you're brainstorming, as you put it, or if you're doing maybe base research analysis of your population, okay, maybe you can use it and see if it leads you to a ballpark that is within the expected results. But if you're going to deploy a solution that eventually would take action on real users, and you are using LLMs for that without any sort of sanity checks, that can become very, very dangerous. You mentioned all of that as part of speaking about how to get ready to adopt AI, not necessarily in a self-service context, but in general. And other than this point that I just mentioned, you also mentioned two other points. You said start with one simple, clear use case. And for that use case, prepare one table that you can implement your agent or your LLM or whatever you want to run there. And this is so important. I see so many businesses skipping this and basically going, as you mentioned, trying to boil the ocean with their first go, and they get stuck and disappointed with AI. That's basically the cycle that I'm seeing in the last 12 months repeating itself over and over. I hope, dear listeners, that maybe this conversation has helped you gain some sort of glimpse into what goes on on the other side of the fence in the data team, but also how to approach these projects in a way that is more realistic and that has a better chance of success. Shachar, did I miss anything?
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Shachar Meir
63:25
No, I think that's good. And maybe I can just add one small thing, which is I have this framework or idea of four versions of every project that I shared with my friend. He's managing the analytics in a company that's building software for psychotherapists in the U.S. We looked at his dashboards and I said, show me your top-line company dashboard, whatever. And he showed me a dashboard where the top-line metric was number of users. And I said, look, this metric is pretty useless. It's interesting to know, but what I care about is the market penetration rate. You're showing a number with no context. I don't know if this number is 1% of all potential users, or 20%, or 70%. I think that's what matters. And he said, you're actually right, but it's actually very difficult to get this number. And I said, well, it's not very difficult to get this number because there are four versions of every project: the one-hour version, one-day version, one-week version, and one-month version. So in one hour, you can go on Claude and ask how many psychotherapists are there in the U.S. You get a number, and you go to your dashboard, you divide your metric by this static number, and you call this estimated market penetration rate, where the word estimated is the key word here. And you've already made progress in the right direction. It's not going to be highly accurate, but it's probably going to be within the right ballpark, and it gives you an idea of whether you're closer to the 1% or to the 70% penetration rate. And then in one day, you can do a little bit more research and maybe there is a database, because I'm sure all these practitioners need to register somewhere. So there must be some database where you have a list of all of them, and you can say, okay, let's download this list once, tidy it up a little bit, get a more accurate number. And what this one day of work allows you to do is remove the word estimate. So now it's not an estimated market penetration rate, you can just call it market penetration rate. So the one-week version, you can probably build an automated process that will download this list periodically, update the number and all of that, so your dashboard is always correct and it doesn't drift. And then the one-month version, and also some of these practitioners are probably registered but inactive and that sort of stuff, so spend a lot more time cleaning it up and getting to a more finely accurate number. Now the one-month version is a little bit more complicated because maybe some of these practitioners work in multiple clinics and they probably have to pay a license for every clinic that they work. So one person can have multiple licenses, and that changes a little bit your market penetration formula and all of that. So in one month, you can probably scrape and bring external data. You can get other data sources like their websites, their LinkedIn, look at big clinics and get the list of all practitioners and look for duplications, and come up with a factor of how different your number is from the real potential one. That's one month worth of work. Now, the interesting thing is that a lot of technical teams, and I would say a lot of risk teams in that sense also, operate in the mindset that when you put a problem in front of them, what they tend to do is to think of the one-month version. They think of all the edge cases and all the complexities of the problem and everything. Whereas what you can do is really ask yourself, how can I create enough value? How can I create progress or create some value in one hour of work? And I think that people usually start with this version, start working on something, realize that it's even more complicated than they'd thought, and they stop in the middle and the project fails. It's not a new concept. You call it MVP. I think it's the same idea, or just agile. But the same project has multiple versions, and start from the small and then build it from there, rather than starting from the biggest one and fail.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
67:31
Yeah. Or agile. Just agile. Be modest. Just be modest. Go back to basics and be modest. Awesome, Shachar. Thanks a lot for all of these valuable insights. For our listeners that wonder where they can hear more from you, or if they want to work with you, where should they go?
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Shachar Meir
68:07
Yeah. So first of all, I'm on LinkedIn. I post on LinkedIn every day. Check me out. If what I say is merely interesting to you, feel free to follow and connect. I have my YouTube channel where I talk mostly about data career growth, but also some of these concepts that can also be applicable for a lot of risk professionals. And most importantly, if you're struggling with your risk team or with your data team, or something about this connection of risk and data doesn't work for you, I'm always happy to explore and see if there are ways I can help. This is what I do today as an advisor. I help companies get value from the data, and that includes risk teams. So of course, any problem you have, feel free to reach out and let's have a quick chat.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
68:54
Shachar, thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
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Shachar Meir
68:58
Pleasure is all mine.
Chen Zamir
Chen Zamir
69:00
And for the rest of you, I'll see you next Saturday.
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Shachar Meir
69:05
Thank you.