Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Career Growth & Development

What new skill or role did you want to learn? Explain why this was important to you.
The new skill that my team and I wanted to explore was using artificial intelligence to automate the process of manual issue triaging. The recent advancements in AI technology have led many enterprises to adopt it without clearly identifying the specific problems it can solve. Our team’s approach was to focus on the problem first and then explore if AI could be a safe and viable solution.

As the team responsible for monitoring, logging, alerting and troubleshooting issues related to instant payment transactions on the Federal Reserve’s FedNow® Service, we often found that the end-to-end triaging process was time-consuming and burdensome for our site reliability engineers. They had to sift through various logs, monitoring dashboards, metrics and traces to identify the root cause of customer issues. This repetitive and complex task was taking a toll on the SREs and was also delaying the resolution of customer problems.

Automating the triaging process using AI was important to us because it would boost productivity, offload repetitive analysis tasks, enable real-time problem detection and automate root cause analysis. Autonomous AI agents and models are well-suited for predictive analysis, routine task elimination and continuous learning and adaptation. By implementing such a solution, our operational team could focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in the details of issue sorting.

How did your employer help support this time of learning and/or professional development? Be specific.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston actively encourages its employees to upskill and reskill through structured training programs, bootcamps, courses and certifications. Career development goals are a part of our team objectives, performance reviews and rewards for employees willing to learn and apply their newfound knowledge to their day-to-day work.

During every FedNow Program Increment, the last sprint is dedicated to innovation days, where teams can experiment with different prototypes to address any pain points. In the last couple of Program Increments, we were able to take various AI courses to gain a fundamental understanding and get hands-on experience through problem-first based bootcamps.

What was the outcome of this experience? How did it impact your future growth in your profession?
The learnings we gained through the bootcamps, certifications and courses enabled us to safely and responsibly apply our newfound knowledge during the innovation sprints. We were able to develop a prototype for an autonomous root cause analysis triaging system, leveraging AI-native tools. This co-pilot for SREs reduced the mean time to detect, mean time to resolve/recover, facilitated faster root cause analysis and improved event correlation.

This experience has been invaluable in shaping my professional growth. I have learned how to design, vision and iterate using the latest cutting-edge technologies, such as AI, to solve business problems efficiently. This has expanded my skill set and has given me a deeper understanding of how to leverage emerging technologies to address real-world challenges in the financial technology industry.