Every Student Has a Story: John Murphy '25

GE Vernova (formerly GE Power) banked more than $33 billion in revenue last year and boasts approximately 80,000 employees worldwide. The energy behemoth doesn't need an intern to come up with its next great idea... but that's exactly what happened.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build and manage computer bots that can relieve humans of repetitive, tedious tasks. Companies, like GE Vernova, are exploring innovative ways to leverage the AI technology to gain efficiencies and savings. Three months ago, John Murphy '25 knew little about AI and even less about RPAs, but his idea is being fast-tracked at GE.

Murphy was born into a Siena family in Ballston Spa, NY. His dad was a management and marketing major and his sister graduated several years ago with her nursing degree. Several cousins and an uncle are all Saints, and they all made choosing a college easy. Choosing a career though, has been more challenging.

Murphy is a finance major with an economics minor, but the business student isn't sure how he'll apply the degree or where. He attended last year's campus career fair hoping to find some inspiration, and that's where he found GE Vernova. A Siena alumnus was working the table and Murphy was quickly connected with other Saints within the organization. The company reminded him a lot of his own family - there were Siena people everywhere. That's partly why he applied for an internship with GE this summer.

"I'm working on the finance transformation team. Already this summer, I've helped the global team build a central database for our online resources. I also helped revise the content that new hires receive during onboarding, and I was able to lead the training on legal entity fundamentals and international business operations."

And we still haven't gotten to the really impressive stuff...

GE Vernova hired more than two dozen college interns this summer from all over the country spread among locations in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and beyond. Working in teams of two, each intern was expected to compete in a pitch-out competition with these instructions: develop the concept for a generative AI or RPA that could improve any one of our business processes. Murphy, along with his partner who is also based in the Schenectady compound, got to work.

They discovered that one person is responsible for reading through hundreds of contractual service agreements each year and flagging termination clauses that could excuse clients from their contracts. Murphy proposed a RPA bot that would scan the contracts for key words. Murphy and his partner designed a framework for their bot and pitched the idea during a virtual meeting that included AI experts and the global head of GE Vernova's Financial Management Leadership Program. Murphy and his partner won the pitch-out.

"They really liked our idea and want to implement it. We actually each earned an Impact Award from the company. It's an accomplishment that I'm really proud of, and I feel like I made a real difference as an intern. Siena has helped to lay those foundational skills, like critical thinking, and I leaned on that in the competition."

Today is Murphy's final day of the internship, but perhaps not his last day with GE Vernova. He'll graduate in May and he's already indicated a desire to return to the company. There are plenty of employees, in high places, ready to vouch for him.