From financial services to AI leadership: Dilshoda Yergasheva’s pathway to WRITER

The biggest breakthroughs often come from people who refuse to accept “that’s just how things are.” Our guest on this episode of Humans of AI, Dilshoda Yergasheva, has made a career of proving otherwise — from her unlikely path out of Uzbekistan to her current role transforming financial services through AI.

Dilshoda opens up about her unique journey from finance to AI leadership, sharing the pivotal moments that shaped her approach. As someone who’s always felt drawn to the unknown, she reveals how her role at WRITER is helping democratize financial services through AI — and why the biggest transformations happen when technology meets genuine human need.

From Uzbekistan to Harvard to Wall Street

Born and raised in Uzbekistan, Dilshoda’s future was all but mapped out for her — marry young, have children, and prioritize family over career. But that’s not how she envisioned it.

“I always would daydream about going to the top school in the world, and meeting people from all over the world, and just getting out of my comfort zone,” Dilshoda explains. But at the time, she’d never been on a plane, let alone traveled outside the country.

She’d also never met a foreigner until her family hosted Christina, a Peace Corps volunteer. At 16, she confided her impossible dream to Christina — studying abroad at a top school. Christina told her about American boarding schools, and Dilsholda won a full-ride scholarship.

Her father faced harsh criticism from neighbors and relatives who called him “crazy” for letting his teenage daughter travel overseas — something girls from their conservative Central Asian community simply didn’t do. Despite the pressure, her parents supported her dream.

At boarding school, surrounded by classmates from vastly different backgrounds and affluent families, she could have felt intimidated. Instead, she made a crucial decision.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I deserve a seat at this table, like I am here, and I’m going to make the most of it,’” she says. “Maybe others might speak better English than I do, or might have more in terms of like financial ability than like at the time I did, but I’m here. I got this opportunity by luck and by hard work, and I’m going to make the most of it.”

Dilshoda’s academic success led her to Harvard, where she again won a full scholarship. Choosing applied math and economics felt natural — she had always loved STEM subjects like coding, math, and physics. But there was a practical element, too. As someone still mastering English, solving problem sets felt far easier than writing essays — a sentiment shared by WRITER Co-Founder and CTO Waseem AlShikh.

Dilshoda’s quantitative skills caught the attention of Bridgewater, one of the world’s top hedge funds, where she landed an internship. She quickly learned the importance of humility. In the financial world, being right 51% of the time was considered a success — a failing grade in most other professions.

Taking big (but calculated) risks with AI

Most of us might take one big leap in life, but Dilshoda has made it a habit. From Uzbekistan to an American boarding school and from Harvard to Wall Street — each time, she’s thriving in environments where everything is unfamiliar.

For 15 years, she built expertise in the markets she loved — and then AI emerged seemingly from nowhere. The technology fascinated her — how it could scale her abilities as an investor, enhance research, and separate signal from noise in ways previously impossible.

“To me it just felt like this is our electricity moment,” Dilshoda explains. “Like when electricity or the steam engine was invented. It’s this disruptive technology that I was learning about, and I was like, ‘We’re living it. This is our moment. This is the big invention, and nobody has written a playbook.’”

And who better to help write the playbook than Dilshoda? Despite having mastered finance for over 15 years, she felt drawn to this undefined frontier. Her risk-taker mindset recognized the opportunity to be part of building something entirely new. So she took another leap — leaving the familiar world of traditional finance to join the AI revolution at WRITER.

Building trust in high-stakes AI

At WRITER, Dilsholda often addresses the same question from clients — “I really want to adopt this technology, but how do I do it safely?”

Her answer always centers on choosing the right partner. Consumer AI — often used for looking up recipes or booking travel — differs fundamentally from enterprise-grade AI powering 401k call centers or customized portfolio reporting. When AI handles mission-critical financial processes, the margin of error and hallucination rate must be virtually zero.

WRITER’s FailSafeQA benchmark shows that while some advanced models fabricate information in up to 41% of cases, WRITER’s Palmyra-Fin model demonstrated the lowest hallucination rate when handling incomplete or ambiguous financial queries.

This challenge of balancing innovation with safety shapes her entire approach to client relationships, which can be broken down into three core principles.

Meeting clients where they are

Financial institutions vary dramatically in their AI readiness. Some want a risk-aware, measured approach in their early AI journey, while others have leaned in completely, building across as many divisions as possible. Her first principle is to meet each client exactly where they are, offering solutions tailored to their comfort level and ambitions.

Connecting the dots

Often, clients can’t see beyond the basic applications of AI. Her favorite challenge is showing them what’s possible.

“Sometimes it’s about telling them, ‘Hey, you have a number of these dashboards, and you can build a portfolio analyst on top of those dashboards that helps you generate key insights for portfolio managers in the morning before they even come in,’” she says. “And folks are like, ‘We can do that? We didn’t know that we can do that.’”

Reimagining core processes

It can be difficult to convince companies to reimagine business processes that took decades to establish. Dilshoda does this by sitting alongside clients, putting everything on whiteboards, educating teams about the technology, and supporting them through hand-to-hand problem-solving.

“Oftentimes, they’ll also tell me, ‘Wow. This is an awesome opportunity for us to reimagine some of these workflows because some of these business processes exist, but maybe they haven’t been run in the most efficient standard way,’” she says.

How AI can democratize finance

Dilsholda envisions democratizing access to sophisticated financial tools previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy. She sees AI and WRITER’s AI HQ as the way to accomplish this.

“If it’s a complex process that can be broken down into multiple steps and have an agent solve for it, that is what we’ve been doing with our clients,” she says. Complex processes can range from personalization to loan processing.

Personalization at scale

Complex asset classes like hedge funds and alternatives have historically been available only to sovereign wealth funds and large institutions. Meanwhile, ordinary investors trying to retire safely remain stuck with basic 60/40 stock-bond portfolios.

AI can change this by explaining complex investments to individual investors with varying financial literacy levels — from Gen Z to retirees. This makes sophisticated diversification accessible to everyone who needs it for a safe retirement.

Investment research

At WRITER, Dilshoda helps top investment institutions separate signal from noise, processing massive volumes of data to drive outperformance in portfolios that power pension plans, foundations, museums, and universities.

“Those portfolios are in some of the largest pension plans in some of the largest foundations,” she explains. “And that allows museums to do more with their kind of investments, that allows universities to do additional research, that allows you and I to retire more safely.”

Mundane processes

Even mundane processes like mortgage processing can transform lives. When someone needs to close on a house, current manual compliance processes can take weeks. AI agents can break down these complex, multi-step workflows — from marketing to HR to fund operations — solving problems across entire financial organizations and getting people into homes faster.

Where humility meets opportunity

Working at the intersection of complex financial markets and equally complex AI technology, a few aspects of the work continue to energize Dilsholda:

First, she finds the humility of her clients refreshing. They openly admit they don’t know what they don’t know and are eager to explore new possibilities. Which works great because the technology is moving incredibly fast.

“It keeps you on your toes — just like financial markets are always changing — I feel like AI goes through a step function change every few months,” she says. “You need to figure out how to productize on top of it, how to tell your customers a new set of problems that they’re able to solve for.”

But most rewarding is the collaborative nature of the work. Adopting transformative technology requires thinking of yourself as an extension of your clients — their problems become your problems, and their success becomes your success.

In finance, where numbers and algorithms often reign supreme, it’s easy to overlook the human element that truly drives innovation. Dilshoda’s journey from Uzbekistan to the cutting edge of AI in financial services is a powerful reminder that the most transformative changes come from those who dare to challenge the status quo.

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