Inside the Royal Bank of Canada's machine-learning labs - Digiday

As consumer banking becomes increasingly virtual, banks are setting the bar high for their non-human ambassadors. Machines will soon be able to carry out many autonomous thinking tasks once performed by humans, including figuring out how to respond to questions on the fly, and analyzing customer data in ways that would have been unheard of just 10 years ago. This is all the result of machine learning, an application of artificial intelligence that lets a computer think and learn on its own. In January, Canada's largest bank, the Royal Bank of Canada, announced that it would be working with Richard Sutton, a noted artificial intelligence expert, to explore how it can better integrate machine learning into its work. RBC isn't alone among major world banks that are relying more heavily on this technology.