Using AI for finance is easy to imagine, but hard to do

It has long been a dream of many CFOs to have within arm's reach a crack team of financial analysts who can provide rich insights on trends and possibilities hiding deep in data. Well, the unimaginable might finally be imaginable. Artificial intelligence -- or, at this moment, the foundational layers of AI -- holds the promise of extracting the kind of valuable financial information that will set companies free to confidently take chances and explore new opportunities. That promise has been foreseen by tech industry analysts and executives who believe that, while the first chapters of AI for finance are just now being written, it's nonetheless the right time to start looking at a technology that could revolutionize finance. "The ability of machines to crunch numbers is phenomenal," said Leon Katsnelson, director and CTO of analytic platform emerging technologies at IBM. "But they still try to emulate a gut feel, and it's not really a gut feel. In a way, cognitive learning is a way to build up gut feel. And you don't have to be a math scientist wearing a white lab coat to use this technology."