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Shensi Ding

CEO
Merge

Roadblock Title:

Beyond the LLM: Building personalized, secure AI features with the right integration data

Time:

Wednesday - 10:30 AM (Tower C)

Abstract:

Generic LLMs aren’t enough—especially in fintech, where personalization, reliability, and security are non-negotiable. In this technical deep dive, Shensi Ding, co-founder of Merge, breaks down the architecture and implementation patterns behind production-grade AI features powered by integration data. She’ll show how engineering teams can take fragmented, multi-source data and transform it into structured, reliable inputs for LLM-driven workflows.

Shensi will walk through the data pipelines her team built to ingest and normalize data from hundreds of third-party systems, and how they solved common challenges like inconsistent schemas, authentication edge cases, and ensuring data freshness at scale.

The talk covers specific technical decisions, including:

  • When to use customer data to power your RAG pipelines
  • How to build secure data handling for PII in regulated environments
  • Whether and how you should normalize integrated data
  • Patterns for enabling real-time data access in AI copilots and assistants

Shensi will share her experience using Causal’s “AI Wizard”—which generates custom financial models from ERP data—and other real-world examples and lessons learned. Attendees will leave with practical, reusable implementation patterns they can bring back to their own stack, including:

  • A technical blueprint for sourcing, transforming, and operationalizing integration data in AI workflows
  • Strategies for ensuring data security and compliance in AI-powered applications
  • Methods for delivering personalized, reliable AI features at scale

Bio:

Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, a company that offers a unified API to add hundreds of integrations to your product. Thousands of companies trust Merge to power their product integrations, including fintech companies like Ramp, BILL, Navan, Revolut, and Airwallex.

Prior to founding Merge, Shensi served as the Chief of Staff at Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) and worked in investment banking roles at Credit Suisse and Silver Lake.

Shensi Ding