Harshini Jayakumar · AI & Analytics Innovation Lead, ANZ · SAS
Harshini Jayakumar leads AI and analytics innovation at SAS across Australia and New Zealand. Her work sits quietly in the background of industries most of us depend on every day, and her advice for getting into a career like hers is probably not what you’d expect.
The next time your bank sends you an alert about a suspicious transaction, or money you didn’t authorise gets flagged before it leaves your account, AI was probably involved. And behind that AI is a team of people who built the systems, trained the models, and understood the data well enough to make it work.
Harshini Jayakumar is one of those people. As AI and Analytics Innovation Lead for SAS across Australia and New Zealand, she spends her days advising some of the country’s biggest financial institutions on how to use AI well. That means better services for customers, smarter fraud detection, and making sure that as AI grows faster, the guardrails keeping it safe grow with it.
We sat down with her to talk through what the job actually involves, how she got there, and what advice she’d give to young people thinking about a career in this space.
What SAS does
More industries than you’d think, more impact than you’d notice
SAS is a global data and analytics company, and its work spans a pretty wide range of sectors. Most people have never heard of it, but they’ve almost certainly benefited from it.
Fraud and scam detection is one of the clearest examples of SAS in action.
“We work in the background to help banks detect whether something is a scam or fraudulent activity, and stop money from leaving your account,” Harshini explains. That kind of real-time decision-making, happening in milliseconds, relies on enormous amounts of data processed through well-trained models.
Government is another big area. SAS works with policing departments, including the Victorian Government, helping them analyse data more effectively so they can detect crime patterns, allocate resources better, and respond faster. On the lighter end, SAS recently signed a partnership with a major soccer club to support sports analytics. Performance tracking, injury prediction, opponent analysis. The same core capability, a very different use case.
“Data is really at the core of everything. Any AI application or model makes decisions and predictions based on the data available.”
Harshini’s specific focus is on financial services institutions, the big banks and lenders, and how they can bring together data from across their entire operation. Customer transactions, loan applications, credit histories, even social media signals. Her job is to help them make sense of all of it, build useful AI models around it, and turn the insights into better decisions and better services for their customers.
How she got here
One subject that changed how she saw everything
At school, Harshini studied a mix of subjects. Computer science, chemistry, physics. She describes herself as someone who took a broad approach. But when she looks back at what actually shaped the direction of her career, one subject stands out.
Computer science was the first time someone explained what was actually happening inside a piece of software. The logic, the structure, the way decisions get made by a machine. “Until then, no one had really explained what happens in the back end or how the logic works behind applications,” she says. That clicked something into place for her.
It opened up a whole new way of thinking about what a career could look like. Software engineering, programming, and eventually the path she actually took: using data and AI to solve real-world problems at scale. She credits that one subject with giving her the foundation and the curiosity to go after it.
For anyone in school right now wondering whether a subject like computer science is worth taking, that’s a pretty compelling case.
What actually gets you hired
Lots of people get good grades. Not everyone has good character.
Harshini works with a lot of students and early-career candidates through her role at SAS, and she’s noticed something consistent. The people who impress most aren’t necessarily the ones with the strongest academic records. They’re the ones who’ve clearly worked on themselves as well as their skills.
The Department of Education flagged something worth noting: employers are sometimes unable to hire young graduates not because of a lack of technical ability, but because they struggle with communication and collaboration in the workplace.
Harshini sees this too. Technical skills get you shortlisted. How you show up as a person is what gets you the job, and what keeps you growing once you’re in it.
In a world where AI can already write code, debug software, and build basic applications, the skills that are harder to replicate are the human ones. Leadership, conflict resolution, resilience, knowing how to listen and how to communicate clearly. These aren’t extras. They’re increasingly the deciding factor.
“What really makes you stand out is who you are and your character as a person,” she says. “We need people who can adapt quickly, learn quickly, handle conflict well and be resilient.” What applies in tech, and honestly, it applies pretty much everywhere.
Her advice for young people
What she’d do differently if she was starting out now
Put yourself in uncomfortable rooms: Go to events, meetups, industry nights. Ask a parent or mentor to take you if you need to. The relationships you build early on are the ones that open doors later, often in ways you can’t predict right now.
Take a close look at your environment: Harshini is direct about this: who is around you shapes who you become. Look at the people influencing you and ask honestly whether their life is one you’d want. If not, find people you actually look up to and learn from them instead.
Build relationships before you need them: In today’s world, it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know. Investing in relationships early, before you’re looking for a job or a favour, is what makes those connections actually mean something when it counts.
Work on your soft skills as seriously as your technical ones: Join leadership programs, take communication seriously, get involved in team environments that challenge you. Your personal brand, meaning how people experience working with you, is something you build over time. Start now.
“You might have the speed, but if you don’t have the right direction, that speed is pointless.”
If a career at the intersection of AI, data, and real-world impact sounds like your kind of thing, SAS operates across banking, government, healthcare, sport, and more. They’re a global company with a strong presence in Australia, and they’re looking for people who bring more than just technical skills to the table.
Find out more about a career with SAS here.
