The View from the Office
I met up with Megan Kelley, who leads research at Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), at Slate Cafe in Midtown Manhattan. I had yogurt and granola. She had lox on a bagel.
We first met almost a decade ago in Colorado, at a tech conference called Big Boulder. It turned out to be one of the best events I’ve ever attended. Years later, Megan saw my posts online, remembered me and hired me for a project.
That was one of my first jobs after I started Principals Media. It taught me something foundational and it’s advice I now repeat to everyone looking to build their career: You should meet people in person and then stay connected by posting online.
Megan is one of my favorite people to catch up with because monitoring the tech landscape and anticipating change is literally her job, especially when it comes to finance and wealth management.
She started her career in natural language processing and knowledge research. She joined Fidelity about two decades ago and has led FCAT’s research team since 2019.
Her current project is a report on what she calls the context layer. Models and agents may become commodities, she said. She believes firms will stand out through the knowledge graphs and collections of information their agents can access.
The hard part is figuring out a company’s “aboutness,” that is to say what it does and why it does things a certain way. Companies have always had to explain that to new employees. Now they need to do the same for every agent working on their behalf.
Megan sees companies building context frameworks for safety and fraud, but not doing as much to explain the why. For now, she said, the common approach is to stuff more information into the context window.
One goal she has is to get everyone on her team to build a personal knowledge base.
We talked about Future Proof and how I regret not going this year. Megan has spoken at the event for the last few years. At this year’s festival in September, she spoke about how a generation raised with AI may change what clients expect from financial advisors.
I told her about how frustrating it can be to see social media being gradually overrun by bots. We agreed that many people are trying to solve that issue by using lowercase when they write to signal that they are a human.
You can connect with Megan on LinkedIn or DM me for a warm introduction.
