Naevin Abeyasekara, MMAI’24

Naevin Abeyasekara started his Smith Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence (MMAI) program during a period of dramatic life change. He’d just been transferred from RBC’s Malaysia arm, where he’d worked for more than five years, to the bank’s Toronto headquarters. As a result, within the span of a few months, he flew nearly 15,000 kilometres to a largely unknown city, found a place to live, and began a new role, on an unfamiliar team, in a different line of business.

Why not throw a demanding advanced degree into the mix? “I accepted the offer for the new job a few days before I accepted the offer from the MMAI program,” he recalls. “To me, it was a no-brainer.” After all, major changes were not a problem for Naevin. Raised in Sri Lanka, he’d chosen to complete his business undergrad in the U.K., picked Kuala Lumpur as a launchpad for his career with RBC, and volunteered for short-term assignments in Luxembourg and Australia. In Malaysia, he had found himself gravitating to roles that incorporated data and AI—partly due to the rapid technological evolution of the banking industry, and partly out of personal passion. “I’ve always had a keen interest in the IT side of business,” Naevin says. “It felt like the right time to formalize my skill set.” With all that in mind, the Toronto opportunity simply made sense. “I thought the degree and the job were a great combination for a new chapter.”

Naevin chose the Smith MMAI for its mix of technical rigour, practical delivery, and prestige—and the program began delivering on all three from day one. The rapid clip of the curriculum felt fitting: “It was very intense,” he admits. “But when you’re dealing with a subject like AI, learning things back-to-back is good, because it keeps you on your toes, and helps you learn to adjust quickly.” He liked the ways in which the more scientific subject matter fired up his brain. “It really was quite technical, and that forced me to push myself.” And for a person working in the heart of Bay Street, the convenience couldn’t be beat. The SmithToronto facility was a two-block walk from his office. “I could leave work and be at my Tuesday classes five minutes later.”

As the program progressed, Naevin experienced a series of wins that deepened his confidence. Two stand out: First, a clarifying moment a few months in, when it registered that he didn’t have to know everything about AI to be a good leader in the space. “At first, I pressured myself to learn every single aspect of each topic,” he says. “But then I realized: I don’t need to have PhD-level knowledge of AI. In fact, I really only need to know enough to make informed decisions, and the course was absolutely technical enough to give me that.”

That revelation put wind in his sails for a second milestone. When he and five teammates delivered their capstone project—which included a machine-learning model to predict money market repo rates, and a chatbot to help analysts query OSFI regulations—to the treasury team at, coincidentally, RBC. “That was the result of three months of hard, nail-biting work,” he explains. “I never would have thought I’d have a chance to sit in front of the CFO at my company, showing a minimum viable product that the bank could potentially implement.” Upon leaving the boardroom, the extent of his progression over the course of the year became startlingly clear. “When you’re in the program, you learn so much in such a short period, you start to wonder: ‘Will I be able to retain all this knowledge?’” he reflects. “But after the capstone, those doubts disappeared. I now know I can confidently speak on this topic in front of any audience.”

That sense of assurance underpins Naevin’s work today. A few months after graduating from the program, he was promoted into a managerial role, a move he credits largely to the depth of his newfound expertise. “I quickly became known as the guy who’d gone to Smith for the MMAI—as someone people can depend on to keep us relevant about AI and its role in the new economy,” he says. As he spends his days leading data intelligence projects and investigating new tools that he and his team might use—a dream gig for someone who’s always loved the intersection of business and technology—he thinks often of how far he’s come: “You never know what you’re truly capable of until you actually put your whole mind and soul into actually doing it.”