Artificial intelligence offers "unbelievable opportunities" in banking, according to HSBC's global head of digital, including help to cut costs. "There are unbelievable opportunities for artificial intelligence and machine learning in banks," Josh Bottomley said in a speech on Monday. "One of the reasons is actually a lot of the backends of banks are still about predicting, or preventing, or proscribing behaviour. "Unlike an airline, where you've still physically got to get a person from A to B, or a retailer, where usually there is a good that's there, the backend processes in banking are pretty much all data driven, they're all automatable, and they're very susceptible for machine learning. "There are some obvious use case and we're looking at those."