Chatbots to humans: Move aside, I got this

While several U.S. banks are developing or piloting virtual assistants based on artificial intelligence, Singapore's largest bank has been using an AI-powered chatbot to run its digital-only bank in India for about a year. The results so far are impressive: Eighty-two percent of all customer support for digibank by DBS is handled through the bot, helping the company run the unit at about a fifth of the cost of running a traditional bank. A look at how this bot is working in other parts of the world gives a sense of how the technology is likely to play out in the U.S., as banks like Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo experiment in the space. Indeed, according to Sandeep Lal, group head of digital bank at DBS, the company's goal in pioneering the chatbot is to shape the future of banking. The bank is using Kasisto's virtual assistant, which started life in 2010 as a project of SRI (the research institute where Siri was developed) and BBVA called Lola, where it was trained to answer questions the way a human customer service representative would.