Sean Baseman

About Sean Baseman

The financial services industry is rushing toward agentic AI the same way it rushed toward every previous technology wave: moving fast, breaking structure, and calling it innovation. In a regulated, auditable environment where decisions carry fiduciary and legal weight, that is not a growth strategy. It is a liability that compounds silently until it becomes a regulatory finding or a production failure.I have been designing intelligent agent systems since 1994, starting with defense-grade configuration management for the Department of Defense, and have spent 20+ years at FICO with an uncommon vantage point on this problem. I started as an implementation architect, delivering decision management solutions inside real financial institutions and learning what production reality actually costs when architectural shortcuts get made upstream. I then spent years as a global technical presales architect, sitting across from CIOs, CROs and Chief Architects at the world\'s largest financial institutions across multiple geographies, accumulating a pattern map of how these systems fail, what regulators actually demand at the point of decision, and where the gap between vendor promise and production reality lives. Now I hold accountability for the platform those institutions run on as Chief Architect of FICO\'s Agentic Decision Intelligence Platform, leading its complete modernization from a first-generation system to a next-generation architecture.The belief that drives my work: the AI Development Lifecycle demands the same architectural integrity we have always required of enterprise-grade systems. Auditability, principled patterns, fitness functions, governance that scales. The frameworks that make AI trustworthy in regulated environments do not slow you down. They are what make scale possible without catastrophic failure. I write about what that looks like in production, for practitioners building systems where the decisions have real consequences.

Experience

1. Chief Architect, Agentic Decision Intelligence Platform

   FICO

   Jan 2023 — Present

   Accountable for the technical direction and complete architecture of a production grade agentic decision intelligence platform serving financial institutions at enterprise scale. Leading the full modernization from the legacy platform to the next-generation architecture: not a migration, but a reinvention of how the system is designed, governed, and delivered. The defining architectural challenge is building AI decision infrastructure that satisfies the auditability, explainability, and model risk management obligations of heavily regulated institutions, without sacrificing the delivery velocity that makes the platform competitive. Everything from phases one and two informs every significant decision made here.

Education

• Virginia Commonwealth University - School of Business

  MIS, Information Systems

  1993 — 1998