W&F October 2017

www.wealthandfinance-news.com 12 Wealth & Finance International - October 2017 The media discussion about AI has gravitated heavily around the idea that machines will soon replace human labour, leaving them with nothing to do, or at best forcing humankind to become data scientists. If indeed technological development is inflecting the job market by making some jobs obsolete while creating new ones, the truth is that AI is not about to automate most financial professions. Rather, it aims to complement human intelligence. Recently, Google has founded the People + AI Research Initiative (PAIR) to better explore these interactions with the support of researchers from MIT. Similarly, a group of international researchers from different organisations support the idea that AI is more a myth to debunk than a field of study and, therefore, its content should be better disseminated to the wider public. A member of this collective, Barbara J. Grosz from Harvard University, notes that science is increasingly interested in developing systems that work with people instead of machines that replace them, imagining ‘…a future in which computer systems make us feel smarter, not dumber, and work seamlessly with us, like a good human partner.’ Such approaches go almost completely unnoticed in the media debate, although they envisage a business world where machines make our lives easier and businesses more profitable. In the meantime, the financial industry has understood the potential hidden in applications of AI. Of the 5,000 FinTech startups identified by a 2016 report by Ernst & Young, a large number are set to bring intelligence to a banking world that is lacking innovation. Fields where AI is particularly relevant include client servicing, trading, post-trade operations such as reconciliations, transaction reporting, tax operation and enterprise risk management, just to name a few. Similarly, a study released in 2017 by PwC points to a similar trend: ‘AI will gradually replace humans in some functions like personal assistants, digital labor […] But challenges will persist because of bias, privacy, trust, lack of trained staff, and regulatory concerns. Augmented intelligence, in which machines assist humans, could be the near term answer.’ Future decision-making processes in banking, for instance, will be 34% informed by machine algorithms and 66% by human judgment. When in 1950 mathematician Alan Turing asked ‘Can machines think?’ he did not imagine that this question would trigger decades of research and the rise of an entire new market. Yet, in 2014, Google invested US$400 million in artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepMind. Although AI still conserves an aura of otherworldly technology bound to take over pretty much everything, a new trend is emerging which improves interactions between humans and machines – augmented intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is Empowering Financial Experts, Not Replacing Them Company: Drooms Name: Jan Hoffmeister Email: [email protected] Web Address: www.drooms.com “When we started to work at our new virtual data room, Drooms NXG, putting our users at the heart of the software was our goal.”