Almost every business executive is seeking to understand and integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into business processes for more efficiency. Although players in the financial services (FS) seem to be lagging behind the technology companies in terms of adoption, more and more are beginning to make significant bet in AI.
A recent LinkedIn’s recent financial services Insights Survey, revealed that fintech professionals – with 63 percent, and investment bankers (55 percent) were the most interested in machine learning and AI based investing as key technologies.
AI holds many benefits for businesses including creation of new jobs and skills. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) found that global GDP will be 14 percent higher in 2030 as a specific result of AI.
In view of that, integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems Vice President of Bots at Sage, Kriti Sharma, pinpointed the five core principles businesses that want to develop AI should task their innovation with.
“Building chatbots and AI that helps our customers is the easy part – the wider questions that the rising tide of AI brings are broad and currently very topical,” She said. “Because of this, we developed our AI within a set of guiderails, these are the core principles that we believe help us to ensure our products are safe and ethical.”
The five core principles according to her are:
First, AI should reflect the diversity of users it serves. In essence, companies developing AI must ensure it has effective mechanisms to filter bias as well as negative sentiment in the data that AI learns from – ensuring AI does not perpetuate stereotypes.
Second, Sharma noted companies should always bear in mind that AI has no “cognition” of what it is saying; hence any system learning from bad examples could end up becoming socially inappropriate.
“One of the approaches is to develop a reward mechanism when training AI. Reinforcement learning measures should be built not just based on what AI or robots do to achieve an outcome, but also on how AI and robots align with human values to accomplish that particular result,” said Sharma.
Fourth, People with disadvantages like sight problems, dyslexia and limited mobility can gain some advantage using voice technology and social robots which provide newly accessible solutions. Thus, Sharma believes that the business technology community needs to accelerate the development of new technology to level the playing field and broaden the available talent pool.
Finally, in trying to use AI to replace, developers must ensure they create new jobs and skills for instance. Sharma notes that when business and AI work together it will enable people to focus on what they are good at – building relationships and caring for customers.
