Our team just got back from participating in Banking Automation Summit in Nashville. With a focus on automation, it’s little surprise that artificial intelligence dominated conversations. Here are the highlights:
🏗️ Build a strong foundation: Like most things in tech, AI has a “garbage in, garbage out” challenge. In order to get the most leverage, companies need to first ensure they have their data organized and accessible. Focusing on high-quality training data is one of the reasons our tax chatbot performs significantly better than competitors. Since organizing training data is a massive undertaking, it’s best to start small with one department and use case, such as evaluating loan applications.
🔁 Solve for repeatable processes: Generative AI can hallucinate and cause brand damage, as Air Canada recently learned. That’s significant risk for the financial sector, so AI should first be deployed to optimize tedious operations for which little personal judgement is required. After it performs well there, cross-functional teams can start deploying AI iteratively to customer-facing initiatives.
🤝 Buying is more compelling than building: As has been a theme at other conferences, financial services companies are on the hunt for fintechs to partner with to leverage AI to strengthen their existing products and services. Partnering has numerous benefits over building, including cost-effectiveness, faster time-to-market, and the ability to leverage subject matter experts for niche use cases.