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Dilip Venkatachari has had a busy year, leading the modernization of U.S. Bank's technology foundation through cloud migration, application simplification, and increased architectural reuse. This has improved system performance, reliability, and release frequency, enabling faster delivery of new products and capabilities.
In parallel, the senior EVP and chief information and technology officer has driven increased automation and AI enablement across technology processes, embedding intelligence into development, operations, and reliability practices. These innovations have increased productivity, reduced operational complexity, and improved customer experience across digital channels.
"The agentic software that we developed underpins all the early AI use cases, both within and outside technology," he said. One result has been the creation of a streamlined, easy-to-use agentic infrastructure capable of quickly launching a variety of business use cases. Critically, he says, this has given the business side "a sense of the art of the possible. What exactly can AI do? What are the implications for mortgages, for credit decisioning, for KYC? Until you touch and use it, you don't really know."
Another specific accomplishment in 2025 was implementing the infrastructure to support U.S. Bank's new Digital Assets and Money Movement organization. Dilip and the technology team are responsible for creating a standalone digital-assets stack enabling the integration of stablecoin and blockchain-based payment rails directly into U.S. Bank's core payment orchestration, accounting, reconciliation, and enterprise risk control frameworks.
Getting engineers to adopt the latest tools quickly is key to these accomplishments. "Within a matter of three months, 70%-75% of all our engineers have done the course training and are actively using new tools. We can actually be tracking the improvements in speed, quality, and in productivity—and learning from one step to the next."
Such high levels of adoption are thanks to a culture of innovation. "When you look at AI, what was the norm seven months ago is not the norm today. To take advantage, you need continuous learning. It is the most important thing to inculcate internally." It's not just about the course work, he said, but the "surrounding mechanisms to draw you in and excite you to learn," such as hackathons and demo days.
Looking forward, he contemplates AI's growing impact on security—both good and bad. "The pace and sophistication of the inbound threats are going to increase at a pace that human beings simply can't keep up with. The solution has to be the same set of shovels, using AI and automation to reduce the threat impact."
