AI and the Finance Sector: Innovation or Misdirection?

According to Global Market Insights, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Banking, Financial and Insurance (BFSI) Market is estimated to be worth over USD 2.5 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow at a Global CAGR of more than 30% from now through 2024. Not surprisingly, the Asia Pacific region driven by China is leading the way with an estimated CAGR of over 40%. AI has applications that vary widely in finance - from cost savings to improving customer experience and fraud detection - and right now there are already 2.5 million U.S. financial services workers whose jobs are directly impacted by AI. Finance was one of the first sectors to embrace AI. Sydney Swaine-Simon and Abhishek Gupta write: "The financial sector is one of the first domains to drive interest in using artificial intelligence, even before high computing machines were available. In the 1960s, a lot of research focused on Bayesian statistics, a method used heavily in machine learning. Some of its use cases included stock market prediction and auditing. It wasn't until the 1980s until the majority of commercialization opportunities were explored with expert systems. During that time, over two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies had at least one AI project being developed."