The Importance of AI

The Importance of AI

January 9, 2024

Artificial intelligence in Banking

More than half of financial services professionals globally surveyed by NVIDIA strongly agree that AI is important to their company’s success. Critically, this represents a major increase from the 29% who said so a year prior. It is clear that the recent enthusiasm around generative AI, propelled forward by the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, is leading to a massive, increased emphasis on the future of the technology set overall.

The reason that so many people feel AI will be important to their company’s success is likely because of the way it is rapidly proliferating throughout industries. As a result, it is hard to see financial services as any exception. Given this, bankers are probably seeing AI more and more as not only a frontier to drive a competitive edge, but also one that’s shaping up to be table stakes. That means there will be baseline capabilities everyone will need in order to even stay on the field, and others that will push the boundaries forward.

So, which is which? The hard part is we don’t know yet. Are there parts of a financial institution (FI) that will be fully automated in the future? Yes, most likely. Do we know exactly where they are today? No. It will take time, and the latest subsets of AI still have maturing to do. But what we do know is that, in order to take advantage of this opportunity, FIs need to get the right foundations in place. And quickly — because larger competitors have had those foundations in place for years, and they are building on them.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Start with your data. There are solutions on the market that will allow an FI to get started without a data strategy. But you’re still going to have to go through the exercise of looking at what data you have and how you can use it. So whether an organization decides to fully look at its data and infrastructure or is simply exploring how the stores it has might help solve problems, data is the place to begin.
Get educated. This one really needs to be done in tandem with the above. We’ve talked about this before — AI is a portfolio of technologies and understanding how those different technologies work is key to identifying which tools are applicable to your data and your problems. For example, say you’ve identified a slew of spreadsheets that you think could be turned into automated workflows. What kind of toolset would you need? Probably not generative AI, probably a traditional machine-learning-based solution. You need to know the difference.
Get comfortable. Employees are people, and they are going to be wary of anything they don’t know. They will also need time to develop the skills to use these tools. As such, encouraging employees to use AI in their daily lives (and doing so at the executive leadership level) will likely go a long way in driving adoption and results. Additionally, taking a proactive approach to this allows an FI to put early guardrails in place that govern how employees use AI at work.

The AI revolution is here, whether we like it or not. Most FIs are going to want to follow the pack, and that is fine. But the odds are that pack is going to be consistently picking up speed, so it is worthwhile to make sure your institution is ready to run.

The Importance of AI

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