This article was originally published on Built In by Justine Sullivan, based on an interview with Airwallex Head of Strategic Data Science Firdevs Abacioglu. Airwallex provides companies with its global payments and financial platform. One of Airwallex’s AI goals is to build Agentic Finance—a shift beyond traditional SaaS where AI infrastructure actually performs financial work rather than just supporting it.
With rapid advancements in AI, tech teams are moving faster than ever.
Wired found that three in four coders use AI at least once a week and engineers overwhelmingly mentioned the words “time” and “faster” when asked how AI has changed their job.
But rather than leading to chaos, Airwallex is figuring out how to harness this technology across teams to drive collaboration and innovation. We spoke with Head of Strategic Data Science Firdevs Abacioglu, who is scaling her team quickly, adopting new tools and frameworks, and empowering her people to turn big ideas into measurable impact.
Which new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?
We are building specialized AI agents across the research process. Knowledge agents continuously monitor key economic events, industry, policy and academic developments, maintain and update a structured knowledge base and identify emerging signals and relationships worth investigating. Analytics agents perform first-pass data exploration, generate and test hypotheses and present findings that warrant deeper investigation.
That frees data scientists and economists to focus on the judgement like identifying the questions that matter, assessing whether an empirical strategy is credible and deciding which findings are interesting and robust enough to go after.
Quality comes from layered verification throughout the process. Outputs are checked against source data wherever possible, validated at each stage and backed by a complete audit trail. Human judgement remains the final gate before anything is shared externally.
How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?
Experiment fast, evaluate continuously. Internally, we experiment quickly with new data, hypotheses, methodology or models that can be tested in days because we can iterate and course-correct rapidly. Every AI-assisted analysis goes through an evaluation framework that provides continuous feedback throughout the iteration process, which helps us understand where AI is reliable, where expert judgement is essential and how both the technology and our research process should evolve over time.
The bar rises with exposure. Anything carrying Airwallex’s name, whether it’s a report, regulatory analysis, or the Economic Index, must be transparent, reproducible and able to withstand scrutiny from regulators, journalists and academics and customers. Automated evaluation provides scalable quality assurance, while expert review remains the final check on methodology, interpretation and publication decisions. That lets us move quickly without compromising reliability.
What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products?
Cross-functional by design. Her team sits at the intersection of commercial teams, finance, product, communications, government affairs and compliance, with high leadership visibility. Everything we produce, whether it’s an internal strategy analysis, external report, index or dataset, is built with those teams from day one, not handed over after the fact.
AI strengthens that collaboration by synthesizing insights across teams, surfacing unexpected connections and generating alternative hypotheses that broaden the range of ideas the team explores. It accelerates early stage innovation, while people provide the judgement, context and domain expertise that turn promising ideas into credible products.
A concrete example: economic impact publications. We work on publications that combine data scientists and economists’ analysis with communications and government affairs’ knowledge of what matters to regulators, lawmakers and broader audiences. Together, we turn rigorous research into a continuous stream of publications that showcase Airwallex’s economic impact and contribute to industry, data-informed policymaking and scientific knowledge.
Want to turn your big ideas into measurable impact? Join Firdevs and a cross-functional team of data scientists, economists, and engineers at the forefront of AI innovation. View open roles at Airwallex here.
