Alice Chambers |
Almost nine in ten organisations (87 per cent) believe generative artificial intelligence will give them a competitive edge, according to Hemanth Sundararaj, global solution sales and go-to-market leader at Microsoft.
Sundararaj hosted a panel on ‘GenAI in action’ at Money20/20 USA to share how generative AI is being used to enhance decision-making and improve customer experiences in the financial services industry. He was joined by Priya Gore, general manager of data and AI solutions for the US financial services industry at Microsoft; Thomas Hughes, senior vice president of technology architecture, AI/analytics and data platforms at Navy Federal Credit Union; and Junta Nakai, global vice president of financial services, cybersecurity, sustainability and the public sector at Databricks.
The session started with a discussion on approaches to implementing generative AI transformation.
“People are laser-focused on revenue-driving use cases”, said Nakai. “But companies need to ask what systems need to be put in place to make the most of generative AI.”
Hughes then outlined the journey Navy Federal Credit Union took to implement generative AI. The firm began by moving on-premises technology to Azure cloud to leverage Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform. It uses Azure Data Lake Storage as its storage layer, Databricks SQL as its analytical query engine and AI models within Microsoft Power BI for data visualisation to support fraud detection and customer service.
“Our journey to the AI platform would not have been possible without all the foundational work with did within our data ecosystem,” said Hughes.
According to Gore, the last two years has been about learning how AI can make a difference to workloads and customer experience. “Now, it’s about how we can scale this AI muscle to bring real value to an organisation,” she said.
Once employees are comfortable with using the technology, Gore recommended bringing it into back office processes like data processing and compliance before integrating it with customer-facing experiences.
Gore also alluded to agentic AI – which can autonomously solve complex problems and perform tasks with limited human supervision – contributing to the future of the financial services industry. “Agentic AI goes beyond copilots supporting humans to do their jobs,” she explained. “It will help you and your team to do things better together with autonomous agents working alongside copilot agents.”
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