Watson data scientist talks up 'augmented intelligence' for financial services

Speaking at Mobey Day in Toronto, IBM associate partner Pavel Abdur-Rahman moved to cool some of the hype surrounding AI, arguing that it is not going to be seen in a true sense until quantum computing takes off more than a decade down the line. However, the data scientist was keen to show off the capabilities of Big Blue's cognitive computing platform, Watson, and what this means for the financial services industry. Abdur-Rahman ran through seven ways in which Watson can help banks, ranging from the simple, such as a chatbot acting as a virtual assistant answering basic customer queries, to the "quite complex", including looking for patterns in unstructured data to find early signals of opportunities and risks for asset managers building portfolios. Watson caused a stir in 2011 when it beat two human competitors to claim the $1 million prize on the US quiz show Jeopardy. Since then several banks, including Standard Bank, USAA, DBS Bank, ANZ and Royal Bank of Canada have been attempting to take the platform out of the TV studio and into the real world, harnessing its power for a variety of tasks.