Interview with Nina Ryabichenko, Executive Director at Sber AI, Who Did Her Undergraduate and Graduate Studies at ICEF and Still Stays Connected to Her Alma Mater
Nina Ryabichenko, a member of the ICEF bachelor’s class of 2009 and the master’s class of 2011, is now a teacher at her alma mater.
Nina, you graduated from ICEF master’s programme thirteen years ago. What memories do you have of your alma mater? What seems to be your most important takeaway when you look back on your college years?
When I look back on my student years, it is an intertwined mixture of moments from my undergraduate studies and graduate years. It is the teachers and my friends that I remember best, how we did projects together and stayed up late together to study for exams, texting one another for help with problem-solving or just to find out about the seating arrangement in the exam hall.
ICEF has evolved into an incredible community of people who share similar values and welcome new members. It has taught me some very useful things – ability to learn and dare to embrace new challenges, to leverage the power of healthy competition, and to always strive for more.
How has your chosen career path unfolded?
Before I answer your question and tell about my path towards a “serious” position, let me mention the importance of internships and part-time summer jobs.
In the best-case scenario, students land internships and part-time jobs with the companies of their choice. But even if it’s not your case, any internship or jobs done elsewhere will surely prove a useful experience.
While a bachelor’s student I worked as a secretary at Troika Dialog, a call center operator at Reuters Russia, even a hostess at the Davis Cup. Back then I was too young to appreciate those jobs for the skills they gave me, not for the money I was earning doing them. I was able to hone my skills early on, at the very start of my career.
For example, my time at Troika Dialog made me a better structurer, time manager and communicator – I learned how to approach people when they are not in the mood. Reuters Russia had taught me the techniques of cold calling and how to deal with negative response.
My professional journey started at JTI (Japan Tobacco International). Where I went all the way from an intern to manager there and had diverse responsibilities spanning brand performance and marketing budgeting, logistics management, internal audit, income tax calculation, and transfer pricing management.
Financial track remained my specialization for about 10 years since then. It was my conscious choice to stay in corporate finance as where I could see my performance produce tangible outcomes.
But somehow my last year on that track turned out to be more challenging than all previous ones: I started to feel I was no longer motivated to grow. Coincidentally, around the same time, there emerged wider access to exploring the different areas of IT – cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics and more. Slowly, I began to inquire about the IT trends by reading dedicated articles, watching interviews with top achievers in the industry, and enquiring from my friends who worked in IT. At long last I realized I wanted a career in AI. I started looking for job openings in AI that I could qualify for without special training.
Luckily, I got hired by the AI Transformation to the position of a project manager. That’s when my skills from ICEF and previous jobs let me literally thrive in that job. I’m still in AI Transformation but in a different capacity now, Executive Director.
THAT SOUNDS AN ARDOUS BUT OVERLY SUCCESSFUL CAREER PATH. WHICH OF THE HARD SKILLS that you learned at ICEF proved most useful?
I cannot pick one really useful course or name any that had proved less useful. My current projects draw on a diversity of skills. AI is rapidly becoming more capable, establishing itself in corporate finance, exchange markets, marketing, offer personalization, sales, etc. So, it would be right to say I benefitted from all courses, especially given their cross-disciplinary links. But when it comes to the core courses, those I definitely benefitted most from include Statistics, Econometrics, Micro, Macro, Corporate Finance, Mathematics and all its subfields.
In your role as Sber AI Executive Director you are responsible for technological advancement and implementation of AI. What do you like most about your job and how does it impact Sber’s overall performance?
The best thing about my job is that it’s never routine. The majority of projects I’m in change of are 1 to 2 weeks long. I am responsible for day-to-day management the AI Transformation programme, and that involves defining sub-tasks, identifying key metrics for measuring progress within our chosen tracks, and figuring out how we are going to attain the targets set and where to source resources for it.
Besides, I have many other job responsibilities that involve AI strategy development for branches, AI Transformation experience exchange with key accounts, and preparation of top managers for public speaking on the topics of AI.
What I do at Sber is meant to facilitate its successive progress toward performance targets, and not last role in this process is played by timely spotting of gaps.
What is your typical day like?
No two days are alike in my workplace. Some are just meetings, others current matters or maneuvering between both. Still, there are some essentials in my daily schedule that are not to be missed.
My day starts at 8:00-8:30 with checking emails and calendar. The tasks and meetings tend to be very dynamic, with shifting times, so it is very rarely that I can plan my next day in advance. It’s important in my job to prioritize workload, which is usually quite high. So I need to know which of my tasks would require the whole of me, which can be just monitored or delegated to team or colleagues, and which would require a professional advice.
Can you tell about your team? What are your common team management problems and how do you tackle them?
We stick to a flat management approach where we avoid role hierarchy. I am fully convinced that outside perspective should be considered in any decision-making, so techniques like idea testing is a common practice in our team. Each of us has their own expertise and experience to offer, allowing a multifaceted vision of the task at hand.
Still, the managerial issues do arise from time to time. Within the organizational structure of Sber, AI Transformation does not have a direct impact on the bank’s commercial performance. It is therefore important that the top-down goals before our team are well aligned with bottom-up commercial targets. This requires the exercise of a diversity of skills from communication to business expertise. The business perspective is essential to consider but is not necessarily final and binding.
Many people on your team are former students of ICEF. How would you describe their level of training and preparedness to enter the workplace in an organization as large as yours?
There are ten people on my team and four of them did their degrees at ICEF. We, indeed, consider ICEF students and grads as preferred candidates for permanent and intern jobs.
What students get in ICEF is the best of academic training and the access to a multitude of activities to boost hard and soft skills. There is one quality all ICEF students who do interviews with us and whom I meet at Open Days share: leadership. They are excellent team workers and can lead a task from scratch knowing they will cope well.
It usually takes new hires time to get used to working in a corporation as large as ours, but the ICEF students cope just fine.
What skills are required most in your department? Can our bachelor's and master's graduates be a good fit for the jobs there? What are you looking for in candidates?
When it comes to Sber AI as a whole, we hire specialists with diverse range of skills from engineering to business management. You can choose to be a data scientist or a manager – it depends on what you chose and where you’d like to grow as a professional. As for the jobs in AI Transformation, we mostly require people with business and management skills.
In a nutshell, our ideal candidate should have good structuring skills and be a good communicator, since we interact with absolutely all departments within the bank (from top to bottom and with all sorts of professionals). We also expect candidates to be experienced with AI and be able to deal with changes on the constantly evolving landscape. And good sense of humor, it’s a must, we’re game for a laugh.
What skills do you think the college graduates should have in order to effectively respond to challenges within financial sector?
I think the basic requirements remain the same – academic expertise and soft skills. But given how dynamically the business performance grows year on year, requiring us to tackle newly arising issues even faster than before and our decision-making to be perfectly balanced with the current macroeconomic context, I would rank number one the ability to employ technologies, for example LLM, for fast decision-making. The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that 80% of outcomes results from 20% of causes. It is as relevant as ever today: you can polish your project until it shines, but by the time it’s perfect no one needs is. It’s far better to employ Space X’s strategy of fail fast, where you test ideas and iterate on the solution until you find the best fit for your project.
Looking back on your student years, what would you advise to your student self? Is there anything you wish you had paid more attention to?
I wish I had paid more attention to my soft skills to be a better negotiator, communicator and teamworker. There are so many ways in ICEF and HSE students can use to boost their soft skills, but somehow I chose to focus more on coursework. Now, with years of experience, I look at coursework as what can be caught upon easily enough if you know your gaps. With soft skills it’s different. They take hours of practice to build.
You have re-joined your alma mater to be its teacher. What prompted the decision? Your plan to train perfect candidates for your department?
I started teaching at ICEF a long time ago, in 2011, right after I completed my master’s study. Teaching was for me a way to stay connected to the textbooks and the notebooks that still remained a huge part of my school and college life. Little did I know that teaching would become more of a hobby. I first taught Banking and Basics of Finance to ICEF’s undergraduate students, then I took a break for a few years to return last year to teach AI for Business to Y1 and Y2 master’s students. I said ‘yes’ the moment I received the offer. It gives me a great pleasure to talk about my work and see students get inspired by knowledge.
It takes as much commitment to be a teacher as to have your job responsibilities. What gives you energy to combine two roles? Is it sports of passions?
Teaching is a very rewarding experience. It uplifts me to see that spark in students’ eyes when they want to learn more and how their questions lead to curious discussions. And teaching is a great way to mentally switch off from work: I enter the cozy environment of ICEF campus and my fatigue from work is gone within just seconds.
Sports, too, can be a huge source of energy. I do swimming. But swimming is different from, say, running on a treadmill when you can turn on your favourite podcast or TV series and go. And because I still can’t bring myself to buy waterproof headphones, it’s me and my thoughts in the swim lane. But, I made some progress recently with using my swim time to clear my head and just enjoy the moment instead of think hard and rush to grab a pen to write down what occurred to me while swimming.
And, of course, walking my dog. It is for me an inexhaustible source of positive emotions, especially in good weather.