Transforming customer experience with AI in banking

In my last blog, I shared some thoughts on how different forms of AI could help transform financial services, along with some challenges that needed to be overcome to ensure successful enterprise wide adoption. As promised, this blog will focus on how AI can help improve the customer experience in banking; both directly, and more so indirectly behind the scenes. When it comes to thinking about how AI can be applied to improve the customer experience in banking, many people will immediately jump to images of using "robots" to serve customers; these could be actual robots (such as HSBC's employment of "Pepper" in downtown Manhattan), or virtual agents (be it chatbots, robo-advisors etc) to service customer requests either on the phone or via chat tools. Whilst HSBC saw some success with "Pepper", it is safe to say that the more wide spread adoption of AI for customer service is focused on virtual agents. Whilst virtual agents aren't new (I remember helping a bank roll them out at least 10 years ago), their functionality has moved on massively from the heavily scripted solutions of a decade ago, to capabilities that utilise "Conversational AI" which help make the virtual agent interact with humans in a more human like way.