"You don't want to be lagging behind, because that puts you in the spotlight," said Alma Angotti, a former senior enforcer with the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network who now works as a partner at the consultancy Guidehouse Inc. "It will at some point be a regulatory expectation." The more stringent compliance expectations of President Biden's administration have prompted companies that are lagging to try to catch up, Ms. Angotti said. New AI-focused offerings are designed to reform the laborious approach to compliance that has long prevailed at many financial institutions and other entities. Compliance departments traditionally have used painstaking manual approaches to try to find the proverbial needle of crime amid the mountainous haystack of legitimate transactions and well-behaved clients. AI can do the job better, require less staff and enable continuous check-ups on customers and transactions for money-laundering issues and sanctions violations, proponents say.

Artificial intelligence and automation are now considered to be amongst the biggest threats to job creation and industry voices across the board agree that so-called traditional jobs may soon cease to exist. According to Infosys' chief executive officer, Vishal Sikka, advances in technology removing a lot of mechanical and scripted jobs, besides many related to business process outsourcing, IT and IT infrastructure operations. But automation will also lead to creation of a new set of jobs, Sikka added. Around 20 crore middle class young people would have no jobs by 2025 if our education system doesn't keep pace with the changes in automation and technology, Mohandas Pai, the chairman of Manipal Global Education Services told BloombergQuint in an interview. And the level of automation is only going to get higher. Both ICICI and HDFC Bank say this is only the start, and there's a lot more to come.