Nilay Patel

And all of this extremely valuable data weirdly makes Experian a part of our lives.

Lives that become much smoother if the data the company collects about you tells a good story.

So Alex and I spent a lot of time talking about the responsibility Experian feels towards all the people it serves.

Not just on the security and privacy level.

but also a moral one.

In fact, there's one particularly illuminating exchange that Alex and I had.

A lot of people don't like the power Experian has, and by extension, they don't like the company either.

So I asked Alex pretty directly about that, and I found his answer to be pretty surprising.

It's maybe one of the most memorable answers we've ever gotten on Decoder, actually.

You'll see what I mean.

I also asked Alex pretty directly about the other big, messy question taking the room, generative AI, and why exactly we should trust non-deterministic systems when they start interacting with really sensitive data about our financial lives and making decisions about us.

You'll hear Alex talk a lot about AI oversight and how it's being woven into the systems Experian uses for everything from risk assessment to predictive financial modeling.

But as we all know, AI systems are inherently risky.

They get things wrong.

They hallucinate.

They might make incomplete or incorrect conclusions about very real human beings in ways that dramatically affect their lives.

So I really dug into how Experian and Alex see AI technology being used internally and within the broader scope of credit reporting.

And I also pressed Alex on the capability gap between what AI might be able to do today, what we think it can do, or what AI executives tell us it can do.

and the reality of what it can actually do and how well it does it.

As you can tell, this was a really in-depth conversation about a pretty complicated set of ideas, and I really appreciated Alex's willingness to get into that complexity with me.