Sid Jayakumar

Sid Jayakumar (Finster AI): from DeepMind to AI agents for banks

Finster AI founder and CEO Sid Jayakumar recounts his seven years at DeepMind — joining as its first undergraduate intern after seeing the 2015 Atari demo, working on games, AlphaGo-era research and later making LLMs more efficient — and credits Demis Hassabis with keeping DeepMind, and thus the UK AI ecosystem, in London. He argues Google's consumer play is search rather than the Gemini app, while the enterprise side is vertically integrated through the Gemini API, GCP and TPUs, and says Gemini 3 shows how fast narratives can flip — the same problem he sees with the UK tech scene. He explains why Finster chose the application layer for finance: low margin for error, real-time data, and holding the product to banking standards while moving quickly, which means thorough evaluation before shipping. He also covers six-month-to-two-year enterprise sales cycles, resisting over-customizing for one big client, and his view that AI-driven personalization and proactivity — not prompt engineering or implementation consultants — is where things are heading.

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