Using Artificial Intelligence to provide personalized customer service

AI is already influencing all areas of business – but should prove especially useful for the finance industry. This will, however, require a significant change in the way lenders approach their customer base, according to Richard Harris, Head of International Operations at Feedzai, which specializes in machine learning services for businesses, speaking at White Clarke Group's Auto Captives Summit in November. Harris argues that - with computing power now a fraction of what it was a decade ago - every lender can integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their business to provide highly personalized services that focus on individuals, not customer groups. He told the Summit: "In the past, what we did was build scorecards or we built rules. We made decisions about people by putting them in a bucket. Such as: where are you from? Where did you go to school? How long have you been in employment? How much is your house worth? All these criteria of stability and probability were used to make decisions about individuals. The time has come to stop putting people in boxes. You've got all this processing power; it's cheap. You've got machine learning algorithms which can look down to a very fine-grained level of detail at hundreds of different factors. You don't need to group people anymore. "Let's treat people as individuals!