People really use what I make. Isn’t that great?

How did it all start?

I started programming at the age of 14. In Romania, we have high schools that offer intensive programming classes. I was lucky enough to attend one of the best in my city. I instantly loved it and knew I wanted to keep doing it. It was a clear road to me. And about three years ago, after I got my master's at KU Leuven, I started my career at ING.

Basically, my team develops chatbots and callbots. It’s like a virtual assistant. When you call ING, the bot will ask you questions and route you to the right person. Or they even guide you on what you can do yourself.

Why do we need bots?

The goal is to guide people to self-assistance as much as possible. Not because we don’t want to talk to them, but because with these bots we can help a lot of people at the same time. So nobody has to wait for telephone lines to free up.

These bots are also very interesting for the people who work here. It decreases their workload because the bots can help several customers at the same time. Which allows our people to dedicate even more time on the more complex situations.

How does it work?

We use AI to teach the bots to understand what the customer is saying. We call what the customer wants to do an “intent”. We then take thousands of sentences said by clients where we know the intent and use them to teach the bot to recognize the intent of a new sentence it has never seen before.

AI is a dynamic field that is changing a lot. I want to keep up with it, so I attend conferences and share my insights with the team. We discuss how we can apply AI to our business and even if we can’t use an AI technology, it’s great to learn about it and share my knowledge.

What are you most proud of?

A few weeks ago I did an AI presentation during ING’s Risk Awareness Day, about how we use AI in ING and what are the risks we are facing. Around 200 people attended, that’s a great turnup. And I got a lot of questions afterwards so that means they were really interested. I was so happy because presenting is me stepping out of my comfort zone. Thanks to my mentor who recommended me.

At ING you get to work in an open and relaxed environment. Where we go very much in-depth on our experiments and debate our points of view. I can’t wait for the offices to open up again, so we can do those sessions face-to-face again.