Context
By mid-2025, Equifax’s leadership team was drowning in AI news but starving for signal. Everyone had seen the ChatGPT announcement. Nobody had a clear view of what mattered for a data-and-decisioning company specifically — model governance, AI in credit risk, synthetic data regulation, agentic systems in financial services.
I built AI Distilled & Decoded to solve that.
What It Was
A monthly intelligence brief — hand-curated and AI-augmented — distributed directly to VP-and-above leadership. Not a link dump. Not a summary bot. A point-of-view document that said: here’s what happened this month, here’s what it means for us specifically, here’s what you need to know to lead informed conversations.
6 editions produced covering:
- AI in financial services and credit decisioning
- Model governance and EU AI Act implications
- Agentic commerce and autonomous financial workflows
- LLM evaluation frameworks for enterprise deployment
- Synthetic data generation and regulatory posture
- GPT-4o, Claude 3, and Gemini comparative analysis for business use cases
The Pipeline
Content Discovery
- 60+ articles reviewed per edition from Substack newsletters, arXiv pre-prints, industry reports, and major tech publications
- Perplexity API for targeted search:
"AI + financial services + [month]"queries with quality filtering
Scoring & Selection
- Python script scores each article on 3 dimensions: Relevance (fintech/credit), Novelty (not already covered), Signal strength (leadership actionability)
- Top 8–12 articles selected for the brief
Production
- Claude drafts the narrative analysis — not summaries, but synthesis with explicit “so what for the business” framing
- ElevenLabs TTS generates an audio version for commute listening
- Distributed via email with both PDF and audio attachment
What I Learned
The hardest problem wasn’t content discovery — it was framing. A 300-word explanation of why the EU AI Act matters to a VP who manages 200 people and has 7 minutes to read is a completely different document than a journalist’s explainer.
The audio version turned out to be unexpectedly high-engagement. Several leaders mentioned they listened on their morning run. ElevenLabs’ quality cleared the bar for professional audio without sounding robotic — which meant the narration got treated as content rather than a gimmick.