When Dave Cunningham announced he was resigning from Google after nearly 11 years last week, he seemed pretty excited about it.
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
“I am moving on from Google to apply LLMs [large language models] in finance,” declared Cunningham, adding that “challenges like these do not come along very often,” and that his time at Google “was quite a ride.” Former Google colleagues questioned who had been lucky enough to hire him.
It transpires that the lucky recipient is, in fact, Fidelity, the asset management firm. Cunningham is joining Fidelity this month as a vice president in data science with a focus on generative AI. He’ll be working hybrid, whereas at Google he was in the London office all the time.
Fidelity produced a whitepaper on GenAI last year in which it said it had created a GenAI tool called “CatchLight” to write personalized emails to prospective clients and to aggregate data on prospective clients so that wealth managers can use their time more efficiently.
Much of Fidelity’s AI work occurs in Fidelity Labs, Fidelity’s self-described “fintech startup environment.” The labs’ global head is Hong Kong-based John Gist, but Ian Hood, Fidelity’s chief innovation and digital officer, is based in the UK. The asset manager has an office in London and another office, 20 miles away, in a large country house in Surrey where much of its data team is based.
Cunningham’s excitement about the move is presumably related to more than just LLMs. After 10 years as an SRE engineer at Google, he should have been earning over £400k in London according to Levelsfyi. Fidelity is likely to be bettering that.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)